Amir closes his eyes. He wants to say: I would come back if you asked me to. He wants to say: I wouldn’t have left in the first place. Instead he says, “Mani.”
“I love you,” says Mani. “Even if we never quite figure out what that should look like. You know that, right?”
The breeze is sharpening with night, carrying scents of yeast and toffee from the bakery on street level. The latticework of the metal balcony presses geometry into the soles of Amir’s feet. He can hear the soft hush of Mani’s breath, in and out.
“Yes,” says Amir. “I know.”
• • • •
Over the next seven years, Nantes becomes a garden city. Every green space is verdant with ecoboosted flora from Amir’s program; parks and groves are remade from concrete lots and musky alleys. The skies, as one little girl had once hoped, are full of birds.
Amir spends one of those years working with his team on tweaks to the Crowdgrow flora to ensure the boosted species are hospitable to native ones, and that summer there are small populations of roe deer, and bushes of garden aster, and swallows, and a sighting of a pair of endangered partridges on the steps of the Théâtre Graslin.
Mani stays in Beirut after Wet City launches, takes up a just-formed position as Beirut’s Minister for Enrichment. Amir pieces together through her understatements and Impulse research that this means she oversees almost every program in Beirut that impacts quality of life—standards for natural lighting in modular housing, breeding programs for Mediterranean loggerheads, the national poetry curriculum. He’s immensely proud and touched.
Amir thinks about surprising Mani in Beirut for her thirty-sixth birthday; he’s been back home twice while Mani was away on diplomatic visits, just bad luck. He asks circumspect questions to make sure she’ll be in town, buys a ticket. The day before the flight he gets scary news: one of the Crowdgrow fern populations has been proliferating invasively, has killed off a native garden. Amir gets on a bullet to Nantes-11 and he’s so nervous about the clean-up operation he doesn’t see the inside of his apartment for three days.
They control the fern; he misses his chance to visit Mani.
Time goes so quickly those years. But he spends more evenings sitting on his balcony watching the sunset than not.
It’s Adah who brings Amir the news personally: they’ve received an application to start a Crowdgrow program in Beirut.
It’ll be the seventeenth spin-off of the original Nantes pilot—the first three Amir went to oversee himself, spending months in Bruges, Liverpool, Alexandria. After that, they’d developed a formula, easy for new cities to follow with only a few weeks’ oversight from Amir’s staff.
“It’s below your pay grade,” says Adah. “But I thought you might want to take this one on yourself. Chance to catch up with old friends. But we’ll send someone else if you’re too busy.”
Amir is definitely too busy. “Don’t send anyone else,” he says. “I’d love to go.”
Amir calls Mani that afternoon as he’s walking home from work, feeling like something in him’s unfurling in the late autumn sun. “I hear someone in Beirut ordered some mutant daisies,” he says the moment she picks up.
“Smug,” Mani says. “I was so pleased when the proposal came through.”
“Me too. And, um. Adah asked if I wanted to come do the kickoff myself.”
There’s a pause. “What did you say?”
Amir huffs. “I said yes, obviously! What do you think?” He scruffs his knuckles over the stubble on his jawline, tries to keep his voice casual.
“I’ll clear my calendar,” Mani says.
• • • •
Amir’s Impulse pings with an unread as his plane begins to descend into Beirut. Joud. Meet at the rock wharf by al-Raouché, bring a warm coat.
It’s five AM and Amir’s had no sleep. He’s really getting too old for no sleep. But the trembly adrenaline of night flights and home is a jolt in his chest, so he goes, his luggage tracking him at a polite distance.
The wind is insistent and briny. Amir seals his coat to his chin. There’s a huge crowd at the wharf, and food kiosks, and banners, a bunch of institutional logos he doesn’t recognize, and one he does—Beirut Grid’s.
Joud finds him where he’s paused at a corniche railing trying to work out the reason for the commotion. He hasn’t seen Joud in two years, not since Joud moved into a rundown mountain house in Ehden with three partners and their five little ones to begin hand-renovating the house to ecopositive standards.
They look great. Sun-hardened, their hair a wiry nest of salt and pepper, clipped a little closer than Amir remembers.
“There’s a team from Beirut Grid here,” Joud says when they hug. “And a couple of my kids. I want you to meet them. Leave the luggage, come.”
Joud leads Amir into the wharf and onto the rocks beyond, where adults and children are queued up to use what look like fishing poles. There’s a din of excitement and an occasional whoop of triumph.
Amir is stunned. “Are they fishing?”
Joud laughs, just as three little humans run into their arms shouting, “We fed one!”
“Show Amir,” Joud says, and a kid with the same shy grin as their parent holds out a glossy pellet cradled in their palm.
“Vitamin feed to correct an imbalance in the ecosystem,” says Joud. “It’s civic engagement, a bit of publicity. There’s a water-soluble version they’ll pump in after.”
“Joud?” asks the smallest child. “Are they going to come live with us?” They glance at Amir. “We have enough water for them to do a mineral soak once a week too.”
“He’s welcome to come live with us,” Joud says, and Amir forces himself not to look away from the softness on Joud’s face.
“Amir Tarabi! Of all the fish-feeding parties in all the towns . . .” says someone behind him. He turns around to see Mesilla carrying a pail, and behind her Hanne and Caveg.
“This is crazy,” Amir says, and gathers them into a hug. “I just got off the plane from France. How . . .”
“Maybe not totally a coincidence.” Joud winks at him. “I thought Mani would be here too. But her assistant told me she’s working a short day today, had to wrap things up at the ministry.”
Hanne cracks a joke about Amir still overthinking everything, except now in French, and it’s one of those moments younger Amir wouldn’t have believed in: like the universe has turned its spotlight on him, for a fleeting instant, and instructed him to rest.
• • • •
Eventually, the trajectory of the future will look like this: some years, Amir in Beirut, guest lecturing at Pan-Humanist Polytechnic, consulting on the new ecoboosted installation in Zahleh, taking a sabbatical to work on a collection of essays about crowdsourcing civic change. Some of those years, Mani in Beirut too, but others, Mani in the Arctic, Mani back in Mogadishu, Mani on the Gulf Coast. Once, eighteen glorious months both in Beirut, a routine of dinner parties at Mani’s girlfriend’s loft apartment, and stargazing every third weekend during Beirut’s Dark Skies nights: picnic blankets and wine, Amir’s head in Mani’s lap, Mani’s fingers in his hair. Once, ten long years where the vagaries of circumstance mean they don’t manage to see each other at all.
Eventually, all the days in a human life, whether or not they feel like enough.
But for now, all the hard, gut-ache hope and all the pragmatics and all the inexorable decades coalesce like this: Amir steps out of a Beirut hotel two streets up from his old al-Manara apartment holding a potted Crowdgrow cutting, and points himself toward Stella Kadri Square.
Mani messages him just as he spots the showcase Wet City wings fanning out in the distance, describing the perimeter of the brand new square. Their bugs-in-amber make them into a museum of petrified art. He saw hundreds of the wings from the air and he’d seen the beachfront ones from a distance on his brief visits home, but now they strike him. It’s like walking toward the foot of a mountain, that same organic rightness of approaching and findi
ng the world continuing up and out beneath his feet.
Mani sends him geo for a bench she’s found. He wants to play that old game of how long has it been, but he draws every minute of personal growth he’s ever done to ground himself—he notes the flinty musk of impending rain, the drawn out ping of the bullet slicing across the city, the tickle in his throat from the boosted pollen of the Crowdgrow cutting. His heart, beating in his neck.
Amir spots the bench from a distance. Mani is a blue-coated speck on one side of it. He’s shy, suddenly, walking into a casual get-together with Beirut’s Minister for Enrichment, walking across the grandeur of a public space he knows she conceived and oversaw to completion, a tribute to the world Mani’s rallied for and railed against so passionately her whole life. Then Mani messages him a biofeedback wave, and Amir viscerally feels her excitement hum in his brain, and he’s not shy anymore. He wants to be near enough to touch her so badly. He almost breaks into a run.
But doesn’t. He gets close enough for her to hear him and shouts “Mani!” Her peacoat’s the shade of the ocean, collar drawn up. Her face is open and happy. Amir can’t believe she could possibly wear that expression for him.
“You look like you’re having a pretty good day,” he laughs.
She shakes her head, gets up, and closes the distance and hugs him and her cheek is right over the brutal hammering of his heart. Amir stands as still as he can, clutching the Crowdgrow pot against Mani’s back, waiting for the moment she breaks the embrace, kind of hoping that will be never.
“I brought you a cutting,” Amir says.
“Welcome home,” Mani mumbles. Her voice vibrates in his chest.
“To us both,” he says.
She turns her face up to his and puts fingers on his jaw and kisses him and doesn’t stop, and Amir must really be in a kinder world because it starts to rain, raindrops that splatter open, big and clean and warm.
* * *
Jess Barber grew up in northeastern Tennessee and now lives in Cambridge Massachusetts, where she spends her days (and sometimes nights) building open-source electronics. She is a graduate of the 2015 Clarion Writing Workshop, and her work has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. You can find her online at www.jess-barber.com.
Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She now lives in North London, where she has perfected her Resting London Face. Her current interests are croissants and emojis thereof, amassing poetry collections, and coming up with a plausible reason to live on a sleeper train. Sara’s a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. You can find her on Twitter as @fortnightlysara and at fortnightlysara.com.
A Human Stain
By Kelly Robson
Peter’s little French nursemaid was just the type of rosy young thing Helen liked, but there was something strange about her mouth. She was shy and wouldn’t speak, but that was no matter. Helen could keep the conversation going all by herself.
“Our journey was awful. Paris to Strasbourg clattered along fast enough, but the leg to Munich would have been quicker by cart. And Salzburg! The train was outpaced by a donkey.”
Helen laughed at her own joke. Mimi tied a knot on a neat patch of darning and began working on another stocking.
Helen had first seen the nursemaid’s pretty face that morning, looking down from one of the house’s highest windows as she and Bärchen Lambrecht rowed across the lake with their luggage crammed in a tippy little skiff. Even at a distance, Helen could tell she was a beauty.
Bärchen had retreated to the library as soon as they walked through the front door, no doubt to cry in private over his brother’s death after holding in his grief through the long trip from Paris. Helen had been left with the choice to sit in the kitchen with two dour servants, lurk alone in the moldering front parlor, or carry her coffee cup up the narrow spiral staircase and see that beauty up close.
The climb was only a little higher than the Parisian garret Helen had lived in the past three months, but the stairs were so steep she had been puffing hard by the time she got to the top. The effort was worthwhile, though. If the best cure for a broken heart was a new young love, Helen suspected hers would be soon mended.
“We had a melancholy journey. Herr Lambrecht was deeply saddened to arrive here at his childhood home without his brother to welcome him. He didn’t want to leave Paris.” Helen sipped her cooling coffee. “Have you ever been to Paris?”
Mimi kept her head down. So shy. Couldn’t even bring herself to answer a simple question.
Peter sat on the rug and stacked the gilded letter blocks Bärchen had brought him. For a newly-orphaned child, he seemed content enough, but he was pale, his bloodless skin nearly translucent against the deep blue velvet of his jacket. He seemed far too big for nursery toys—six or seven years old, she thought. Nearly old enough to be sent away to school, but what did Helen know about children? In any case, he seemed a good-natured, quiet boy. Nimble, graceful, even. He took care to keep the blocks on the rug when he toppled the stack.
She ought to ask him to put the blocks in alphabet order, see how much his mother had taught him before she had passed away. But not today, and probably not tomorrow, either. A motherless, fatherless boy deserved a holiday, and she was tired from travel. The servants here were bound to be old-fashioned, but none of them would judge her for relaxing in a sunny window with a cup of coffee after a long journey.
They would judge her, though, if they thought she was Bärchen’s mistress. She would be at Meresee all summer, so she needed to be on good terms with them—and especially with Mimi.
“We traveled in separate cars, of course. Herr Lambrecht is a proper, old-fashioned sort of gentleman.” Helen stifled a laugh. Bärchen was nothing of the sort, but certainly no danger to any woman. “The ladies’ coach was comfortable and elegant, but just as slow as the rest of the train.”
Still no reaction. It was a feeble joke, but Helen doubted the nursemaid ever heard better. Perhaps the girl was simple. But so lovely. Roses and snow and dark, dark hair. Eighteen or twenty, no more. What a shame about her mouth. Bad teeth perhaps.
Helen twisted in her seat and looked out the window. The Meresee was a narrow blade of lake hemmed in tight by the Bavarian Alps. Their peaks tore into the summer sky like teeth on a ragged jaw, doubled in the mirror surface of the lake below. It was just the sort of alpine vista that sent English tourists skittering across the Alps with their easels and folding chairs, pencils and watercolors.
The view of the house itself was unmatched. Helen had been expecting something grand, but as they had rowed up the lake, she was surprised she hadn’t seen Bärchen’s family home reproduced in every print shop from London to Berlin, alongside famous views of Schloss Neuschwanstein and Schloss Hohenschwangau. Schloss Meresee was a miniature version of those grand castles—tall and narrow, as if someone had carved off a piece of Neuschwanstein’s oldest wing and set it down on the edge of the lake. Only four storeys, but with no other structure for scale it towered above the shore, the rake of its rooflines echoing the peaks above, gray stone walls picked out in relief against the steep, forested mountainside. Not a true castle—no keep or tower. But add a turret or two, and that’s what the tourists would call it.
No tourists here to admire it, though. Too remote. No roads, no neighbors, no inns or hotels. From what Helen could see as she sat high in the fourth floor nursery window, the valley was deserted. Not even a hut or cabin on the lakeshore.
She’d never been to a place so isolated. Winter would make it even more lonely, but by then she would be long gone. Back in London, at worst, unless her luck changed.
When she turned from the window, Peter had disappeared. The door swung on its hinges.
“Where did Peter go?” Helen asked.
Mimi didn’t answer.
“To fetch a toy, perhaps?”
Mimi bent closer to her needle. Helen carried her coffee cup to the door and called out softly in German. “Peter, c
ome back to the nursery this instant.” When there was no answer, she repeated it in French.
“I suppose Peter does this often,” Helen said. “He thinks it’s fun to hide from you.”
Mimi’s lips quivered. “Oui,” she said.
“Come along then, show me his hiding places.”
The nursemaid ignored her. Helen resisted the urge to pluck the darning from Mimi’s hands.
“If I were newly orphaned, I might hide too, just to see if anyone cared enough to search for me. Won’t you help me look?” Helen smiled, pouring all her charm into the request. A not inconsiderable amount, to judge by the effect she had on Parisian women, but it was no use. Mimi might be made of stone.
“To hell with you,” she said in English under her breath, and slammed the nursery door behind her.
It was barely even an oath. She knew much filthier curses in a variety of languages. Her last lover had liked to hear her swear. But no more. That life had cast Helen off. All she had left in Paris were her debts.
The clock chimed noon. When it stopped, the house was silent. Not a squeak or creak. No sign of Bärchen or the servants, no sound from the attics above or the floors below. She padded over to the staircase and gazed down the dizzying stone spiral that formed the house’s hollow spine. Steps fanned out from the spiral, each one polished and worn down in the center from centuries of use.
“Peter,” she called. “Come back to the nursery, please.”
No reply.
“All right,” she sang out. “I’m coming to find you.”
Who could blame the child for wanting to play a game? Peter had no playmates. She could indulge him, just this once. And it gave her a good excuse to snoop through the house.
• • • •
By the time Helen had worked her way through the top two floors, it was obvious that the servants were outmatched by the housekeeping. The heavy old furniture was scarred and peeling, the blankets and drapes threadbare and musty, the carpets veiled with a fine layer of cobwebs that separated and curled around her every footstep. The surfaces were furred with a fine white dust that coated the back of her throat and lay salty on her tongue. After a half hour of wiggling under beds and rifling through closets and wardrobes, she was thirsty as if she’d been wandering the desert.
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 33