Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  Now we were here, and he was staring darkly at his tea.

  I’m sorry you miss your family, I wanted to say. I wished I could help him. Professors at Catherine lived close to us students, but their lives felt so distant.

  M. Owens looked up. He said, “Liszt or Chopin?”

  I scratched my nose. “I think I like Chopin.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I always found Liszt’s compositions quite fussy. But Chopin …” He touched his heart.

  “I like his Nocturnes,” I said.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket.

  Theo and his advisor were standing by the piano. His advisor, a hard, rod-thin woman named M. Donna, was hugging her elbows and pressing her lips together as she listened to Theo ramble on. She didn’t look pleased.

  “I’m going to get us more sandwiches,” I said.

  M. Owens nodded as he blew his nose into his handkerchief.

  At the tea service, I picked up a salmon sandwich, only to set it down again. I drifted over to the curtains where I might overhear Theo.

  “But the ideas do make sense, right?” he whispered urgently. “You reviewed my labs last semester, and the write-ups. The results were solid. They were great. So why couldn’t I just—”

  “Hey,” M. Neptune said, “what’s going on here?”

  At first I thought he was talking to me. But he strode right past, toward Theo and M. Donna, without seeming to notice I was there.

  Theo looked from one of the professors to the other. Then he lifted his chin.

  “I know what I want to do for my tutorial,” Theo said. “I want to study the manipulation of plasm as a network between objects, rather than as a discrete system. And I want to do some lab work as part of my project. But M. Donna has been saying she won’t let me do it—not with lab work, anyway. But—”

  “Theo, I agree with M. Donna,” M. Neptune said.

  Theo’s face fell.

  “Wait,” Theo tried again, “did you see my lab with M. Lee last semester? The one where I used four exchanges per sensor instead of two? It went even better than we thought. All of our experiments have been engaging with plasm in isolate, in these arbitrary little object compartments, when that’s not how plasm works. Right?”

  “Theo.” M. Neptune clasped his hand on Theo’s shoulder. “This road has been traveled before.”

  “Of course,” Theo snapped. “But—”

  “Vague experiments lead to vague conclusions,” M. Neptune said. “Vague, dangerous conclusions. This department is not going to repeat past mistakes. Object-based methods of plasm research are radical enough, and they are not arbitrary. They’re disciplined. You know this, Theo. We’ve discussed it before.”

  “M. Shiner didn’t have half the research we have now,” Theo mumbled. He looked up. “Did you see my lab? The one I did with M. Lee?”

  M. Neptune smiled sadly.

  “You’re a bright kid,” he said. “I’m excited to see what you’ll do for your tutorial. But it’s not going to be this.”

  Theo’s mouth set in a hard line.

  “Jesus,” Anna whispered. I hadn’t realized she had been standing behind me. She took a bite of her salmon sandwich and mumbled, “That was brutal. Thank God my advisor doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  I said, “Are there any more sandwiches left?”

  She nodded toward the tea service.

  *

  I couldn’t focus on my reading. The page blurred as my thoughts circled, again and again, back to M. Neptune’s words. Vague, dangerous conclusions.

  I closed the book and leaned back in my chair. The rain pattered against the parlor windows, reminding me of a song, one I hadn’t heard in a long time. I tried to think of the lyrics, but they drifted somewhere beyond my memory.

  I closed my eyes. I could smell, outside, the soil dampening into spring softness. A warm breeze stirred the budding trees. An animal scuffled in the shrubs.

  I opened my eyes to see Yaya standing in front of me, arms crossed. She wore a pink denim jacket, a pink denim skirt, and her costume pearl necklace. Her hair was long again, twisted into a million tiny braids that fell heavy as beads down to her waist.

  “Ines,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m studying.”

  She glanced down at the books piled in front of me. They were all closed.

  “I am,” I said.

  “Well, if you can manage to take a break,” she said, “how about a little adventure? Remember you said you’d go to that attic with me?”

  Yaya had spent all of dinner yesterday rambling about the attic. She’d found it that morning as she was wandering back from class, somewhere on the other side of the Ashley tower. She’d had only enough time to peek in and could already tell she’d need my help sorting through everything.

  I followed Yaya into Ashley’s shadowed halls. While we walked, Yaya rambled on about what she might find in the attic’s depths. “I didn’t get a good look, but I think maybe it’s storage from when Catherine used to have a better theater department—you know, costumes and things. I think I saw some coats. What if there are furs? Real fur? Oh, but they would’ve sold those, if they were any good.”

  The dark stairs twisted up onto a landing, which led to a ladder. I followed Yaya up the ladder, hand over hand, to the attic door. She pushed it open and crawled through.

  Up here, the noise of the rain on the low roof was as loud and overwhelming as a hallucination. I felt like I was in the bridge of a ship, looking out onto some colorless alien landscape.

  Yaya flipped a switch and a ceiling light flickered on. Beneath its glow I saw that the attic was filled with dusty boxes, leather chests, piles of clutter, and racks upon racks of clothes.

  Yaya strode over to one of the clothes racks. She plucked up a purple felted cloche and placed it on her head. She turned to me.

  “Don’t you just die?” she said.

  I could see why she wanted my help going through everything. The boxes were crammed full of every kind of junk, from handkerchiefs to plastic swords, chess pieces to crusty bottles of shower gel. Yaya was probably right, that they were props left over from when Catherine used to stage productions. That was years ago, I’d heard. But now here it was: the profuse and random materials of those object-specific daydreams.

  Yaya found a green velvet dress, a lace veil, some summer hats, and four sets of plastic animal masks that she decided she absolutely must keep. The only thing I wanted right away was one of the chess pieces. I chose a white rook, the castle. I liked the weight of it in my hand.

  At the bottom of one box, I found a fake leather jacket. It had a tacky neon Chinese dragon embroidered on its back.

  “I wonder if this would fit Theo,” I said.

  “What?” Yaya mumbled. She was buried in a clothes rack crammed with wool and velvet coats. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I turned the jacket over in my hand. The cuffs were a little frayed. Otherwise it was in good condition. “He’d probably love it. You know how he is.”

  “Yeah, I know how he is,” Yaya said. “Falls in love quick and then quickly falls out.”

  I ran my fingers over the dragon’s lurid body. It twisted and coiled as if in ecstatic agony.

  I put the jacket back in its box.

  In a chest of drawers, we found two dolls with long blond hair. We named them Yaya and Ines. In another drawer were eight packets of blank typewriter paper. Yaya wrinkled her nose.

  “Wait, what’s this?” Yaya said, reaching behind the chest of drawers. She wrenched at something with a clang, then pulled out a bicycle.

  Even through a layer of dust, the bike’s metallic blue sheen was almost supernatural. schwinn was written across the frame in graphic type.

  “God,” Yaya said. “I haven’t ridden a bike in so long. My mama taught me how to ride. She’d take me out to the end of the street and make me practice over and over.” Yaya ran a hand along the seat. “There were men there, at the en
d of the street. While my mama watched me, the men watched her. I hated it, the way they watched her. But she just let them stare.”

  Yaya touched her throat. She’d found a scarf in a pile by the window and wore it now clasped together with a frog-shaped brooch.

  “I don’t know how to ride a bike,” I said.

  “You don’t? How can you not know how to ride a bike?”

  I shrugged.

  Yaya kicked at the wheel, testing its firmness. I couldn’t read her expression. “My mama taught me everything,” she said. “Everything I know.”

  Yaya and I slid the bike back behind the dresser. Then we gathered the dresses, piled hats on our heads, wedged the dolls under our arms, and shuffled our way back down the ladder.

  *

  That spring, Diego and I were taking Introduction to Astronomy together. We both needed a science credit, and Diego thought studying the stars sounded more romantic than some dull environmental biology or organic chemistry course. It wasn’t. The professor, a tough German man with a grim accent, would stand with his back to the class as he scribbled incomprehensible equations on the board and droned on about parsecs, black matter, and radiation theories, and I would be so bored I thought I was dying. Even Diego, who was usually an angel of a student, had trouble staying awake through the class.

  But with Diego, even our suffering took on a kind of extravagance. We sat in the back of the room in our pajamas drinking glasses full of hot ginger tea. We composed songs to help memorize equations and sang them to our friends over dinner. And every Wednesday night we did our problem sets together in the Molina library. The sets shouldn’t have taken us more than a couple of hours to finish, but with all our gossiping and drinking and sneaking off to the kitchen, our study sessions usually became all-night affairs.

  “Why don’t you just fuck Raphael?” I said.

  Diego’s lips twitched into a smile. It was two in the morning, and we’d just realized that we’d misread half the problem set. It would take us hours to recalculate everything.

  “Must you be so vulgar?” Diego said.

  “He’s nice.”

  Diego took a careful, leisurely bite of an almond biscuit. “He’s not very good-looking, is he?” he said after he swallowed.

  “He has pretty hair.” That was true. It was black and silky, strong as a horse’s mane.

  Diego shrugged. “He’s just a silly kid. It’s not worth it.”

  “Not worth what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The whole thing can be quite exhausting.”

  “It’s easier when you don’t have a heart.”

  “You have a heart.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I used to, but not anymore. I cut it out years ago and hid it in a box and buried it in my backyard.”

  Diego yawned, stretching. He bowed his head to the table.

  Our textbook was open to a black-and-white illustration of a galaxy. It whirled like the sea.

  “Diego,” I said, staring at the galaxy.

  “Mmm.”

  “Do you know if Theo’s decided what he’s doing for his tutorial?”

  “No,” Diego mumbled into his arm. “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He … told me that he had almost settled on a project, but then his advisors wouldn’t let him do it. That he should do something less … risky.”

  Diego blinked his eyes open.

  “Don’t you think that’s weird?” I said.

  Diego licked his finger.

  “Don’t hint at what you mean,” he said, dabbing at the biscuit crumbs in that neat way of his. “Just say it.”

  I straightened in my chair.

  “What if the new materials department isn’t as innovative as it seems?” I said. “Anna thinks it is. Especially with M. Neptune in control. She thinks they’re doing wild experiments again, testing on animals and everything. That they’re even planning to do another experiment on us, sometime after forums. But if the department were really innovative, wouldn’t they give Theo’s ideas a chance?”

  Diego licked his finger again.

  “Everyone here believes in Catherine’s research,” I said. “Especially the new materials concentrators. Those kids applied here because despite everything—despite Catherine’s scandals and defamations, despite all logic and evidence against us—they applied because they believed that this school had found something amazing. I don’t know why they believed, but they did. Now they’re in, and they see that they’re right to trust in Catherine. But just because plasm is real doesn’t mean we understand it. What does the department actually know about new materials? We can reproduce M. Shiner’s results, sure, but can we do anything else? I mean, when was the last time you heard of us publishing new research?”

  Diego didn’t meet my eye as he dabbed at the crumbs.

  “Just because the department hasn’t been publishing does not mean it hasn’t been working,” he finally said. He spoke slowly and carefully. “Of course Theo couldn’t do some risky experimental project for his tutorial. Tutorials are public projects. But nothing the department really does is public, not after M. Shiner. We learned our lesson there—we can be as radical as we like in this house, but out there we have to be conservative. We’re not going to share any more of our research before it’s ready. So, who knows what Theo’s actually going to work on? What do any of those kids really do?”

  “But M. Neptune himself told Theo his idea was impossible. ‘Vague and dangerous’—that’s what M. Neptune called the project. I heard him.”

  “Exactly,” Diego said. “You heard him. Which means M. Neptune was talking where you could listen. Which means he probably wasn’t telling the truth.”

  I chewed at my tongue. According to the scrapbooks in the library, M. Neptune’s whole world was plasm. He’d come to Catherine for plasm research, studied nothing but plasm for three years, and now spent his days, weeks, and years testing and analyzing and theorizing plasm. When I saw him wandering through the house’s halls or laughing chummily with professors and students, he seemed like a completely normal man. But really, he was like Baby; plasm was his life. So if his lab’s work was so groundbreaking, wouldn’t he want to share it with the world?

  Diego was dabbing at the biscuit crumbs again.

  “You agree with Anna, then,” I said. “You think they’re still doing big experiments. Testing on animals and everything.”

  “Do you really think they’re not?” Diego gestured around the library. “Ines, look around. This house, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not playing by any real rules. Have you ever seen a health inspector here? Do you think we pay the kind of taxes we should?” He shook his head. “M. Neptune is going to do whatever he can get away with. More, even. Viktória knows that—that’s why she hired him. We know it, too. Who cares?”

  He dropped his hand.

  “I didn’t come to Catherine to be practical or to play by the rules,” he said. “You didn’t, either. We came here to be something else.”

  “What?” I said. “What did we come here to be?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Just … something else. Something better.”

  I was getting a headache. I closed the textbook.

  He rubbed my back. “Ines,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Can we go get more almond biscuits?”

  I sighed. I nodded.

  *

  Nick lived on the other side of the Molina courtyard from me and Theo, in a suite of four. His roommates were three rich, tall, athletic boys who all took the same classes, played the same games, and slept with the same girls. Their parlor was always loud and sticky and dank with sweat. Whenever Theo and I stopped by, one of them would be in the bathroom peeing, shitting, or brushing his teeth with the door open, and the others would be splayed over the sofas, boasting and laughing, loud as kings. They wrestled and farted in each other’s faces. They spat into teacups that they then lined up on the windowsill like trophies. I didn’t a
sk why.

  If a nice girl visited their suite—an usher, maybe, or a pretty first-year asking to borrow a book—the boys performed with perfect grace. They offered her tea, warmed her slippers by the radiator, and told elegant jokes about the weather. I never received such genteel behavior.

  “Come on!” the boys were shouting. “To Ashley!”

  Theo laughed, hugging his belly. It was the day after midterms, and the two of us were hanging out in Nick’s suite. I was delirious with sleep deprivation after staying up all night to study for my Monuments and Memorials test. The boys were making me feel human again. They taught me a game involving sipping wine, clapping and stomping, and hooting and screeching like various jungle animals. It was a good game. I couldn’t keep track of the rules, but I knew I was losing. The boys laughed with me. Their mouths were stained wine-black.

  Then they were shouting and gathering up their things. There were some girls in Ashley they were hoping to get to know better. Theo couldn’t go. His stomach hurt. He didn’t want to move. So the boys disappeared to the party, and I stayed with Theo.

  I shuffled the cards. I dealt for gin rummy.

  Theo’s eyes swam over the cards. He tried to sit up straight.

  “Fuck,” I said as he laid down a run of clubs.

  “Four points,” he counted. “Five points. Plus three—that’s twenty-four. Oh my God. I’m already winning. I feel amazing. How do you feel?”

  “Amazing,” I said. “I feel amazing.”

  Theo gathered his cards and shuffled them together. Each of his fingers had a little bit of hair below the knuckle. Sometimes I forgot he was fully grown—that he was a man, not a boy.

  “It’s going to be so wonderful when I win,” I said. “It’s going to be the comeback of the century.”

  “You’re never going to win. At gin. Win at gin.” His face was flushed.

  “I can win other things.”

  “What can you win?”

  “Cooking. I make good scrambled eggs.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I really do.”

  “Man, my eggs are better. Cream, that’s the trick. Add a little cream. I bet you don’t do that.”

  “I guess we’ll never know.”