In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  At the highway underpass, she hesitates, letting Santiago go ahead. The shadow of the arch looms high before her, and the whip of traffic above is a rumble that’s tangible on her skin. She feels the threat of it, phantom gravel rattling hard enough to bruise. She shakes her head. There’s saffron on her tongue.

  She hears the whispered brush of lilac and coal, but holds herself still and takes a moment to sort through the city in her head before she says, “Say that again? Sorry.”

  “I said, okay? What’s the holdup?”

  “I just needed a minute.” The magician is a carbon blur behind the streaks that mar Verity’s vision, but she pegs his general direction and then walks forward carefully, the weight of passing traffic groaning above her head. It’s a short passage; she’s done it before, and she knows the bus station is just on the other side. When the underpass lifts itself from her shoulders—when she is free of it—she waits for her vision to clear and then crosses at the light, heading for the large, squat brown building just off the main road.

  The bus station has never won any awards for architecture. It is a large ochre block striped with a line of narrow windows that are slightly sour in Verity’s mouth. She keeps from making a face, only glances at Santiago and gestures for him to take the lead again. She trails his liquid darkness along the sidewalk. “Okay,” she says slowly, “so what do we do?”

  “Well, first,” says the magician, “we look for the obvious.” When he extends a finger, Verity follows the line of it toward the side wall of the station. She sees a young woman with curling red hair and a faded brown jacket, sitting cross-legged next to a rolled sleeping bag in front of a paper cup.

  The woman is looking back, her lips pulled into a frown that rustles down Verity’s legs.

  Santiago says, “You look for the ones who are looking for you. Here.”

  He then sets off across the parking lot toward the red-haired girl. When he reaches her, he stops, conjuring a folded five-dollar bill with a practised swagger before dropping it into the cup. “There’s a lot more foot traffic on Bank.”

  “Yeah.” The redhead has a voice like smoke and rattling sand. “I’ll move as soon as I quit wanting to blow chunks. Also, thanks.” She is wearing a familiar band t-shirt, faded and torn at the collar. Her green eyes are hard, but she takes in Santiago’s shirt and the pin on Verity’s jacket, and the set of her spine relents a little.

  “You a fan?” Santiago gestures to the logo on his chest.

  “Sort of,” the girl replies. Her answer is casual, perfunctory; she has already let herself relax against the wall. “Second album’s a lot better than the third.”

  It’s not a lie, thinks Verity, so much as a fiction. Still, it tingles on the side of her jaw.

  The magician says, “Yeah. You know where to go?”

  “Saw the posters. What’s this about a real show? Like, not cancelled? And where’s Lansdowne?”

  “Got me. Never mind about Lansdowne—look for McLuhan’s. Bank Street’s right there, head down a few blocks that way. Old theatre on your left. Can’t miss it. Band’s on the marquee out front. If it’s locked, hang on. I won’t be long after you.”

  The girl plucks the money from the cup and rises, hooking her fingers through the shoe lace that ties the old sleeping bag. “People are coming in,” she says. “Heard about this in Chicago. Hope you’re ready for a crowd.” She glances at Verity. “Thanks for the directions.”

  When Verity doesn’t speak, Santiago cuts in, “You wouldn’t need directions if someone hadn’t been replacing our posters. You see anyone else today?”

  “Old guy and a kid wandering around. He’s, like, weirdly old. But I was thinking about talking to them. They have the look.” The girl waves toward the doors of the bus station and shifts her feet, the loose untidiness of her sleeping roll bouncing at her hip. “You guys have food?”

  “There are supplies at the theatre. Not a lot, but we’re doing okay. Come here and I’ll show you. Verity, hang on.” Santiago leads the girl back toward the main street and gestures southward. Beneath the scraggly branches of an urban tree, he conjures a fan of cards, makes them vanish, and extends his other hand to the girl, who takes it. He says something Verity can’t make out. She thinks he is being kind. The girl’s smile lingers on the hollows of his face.

  Verity tries to watch them, but the wind sends a battered newspaper page skittering across her vision, and she swallows back rancid soap as the world slides away from her. She thinks she sees the flutter of small wings overhead. Then the girl is gone, leaving nothing but the magician on the sidewalk with the slow crawl of afternoon traffic filling the street behind him.

  As Santiago walks back, Verity watches the silhouette of his tall form splay across the pavement, as though he were anyone. She finds it strange that he seems lessened now with his shadow back where it belongs. When he reaches her, the darkness at his feet opens two golden eyes and winks. It’s a twinkle of light. An instant later, the magician’s shadow mirrors only curling hair and the exact shape of his ears.

  “Leave Ouro alone,” says Santiago, but he sounds amused. “Okay, let’s go in. Keep an eye out for an old guy and a kid. You go first—I hate those doors.”

  Verity shifts three inches to the side to keep her sneaker clear of Ouroboros. There is, she is interested to note, no lie to the shadow. The shape of the man etched on the pavement is as easy as the shapes of the dog and the snake. She glances at the doors of the bus station, then approaches, Santiago two feet behind her. The glass panes hiss and stutter as they begin to open automatically, then hesitate before pulling back with a sudden jerk.

  The magician eyes the panes warily, then sighs and steps through. “I always try to forget how this place smells.”

  To Verity it is burning plastic and rosemary, but when she tilts her head, she suspects the ringing in her ears has a subtext of fading vinyl and despondence.

  “It’s like this,” says Santiago, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He scans the rows of plastic seating laid out before them. “I don’t know your deal, but we need any help we can get. The kid’s already getting worn to shreds, and Ouro and I can’t be everywhere. We just want you to stop by the train station every so often, see if you spot someone wearing a shirt or a pin. If you’re not sure, just leave them alone.”

  “Sometimes you’re not sure?”

  “The band thing’s a good signifier for anyone who knows what’s going on, but honestly, it’s less useful the more well known it gets—and most of us are just schmucks who don’t ever know what’s wrong with our lives or why our televisions keep fritzing. The ones like that might be pulled here by ... whatever seems to be doing that ... but they wouldn’t have a clue about the theatre or how to get in. If you spot any of those, let me know. I’ll do the explaining.”

  “Are you—” Verity begins, but then a small figure skips past the windows at the far wall of the station waiting room, outlined against the encroaching brightness of the day. “There,” says Verity instead. It isn’t hard. The child’s bouncing form tastes like moonlight on snow.

  Sure enough, coming around the corner by a wall of lockers, a taller man follows slowly after the girl. He is bundled sturdily against a cold that seems unlikely in the vaguely damp warmth of the station. His movements are marked with dogged patience, a loyal follower to the child’s silver-quick brightness. A pom-pom perches saucily atop his knitted cap, and the light from the windows glimmers at the wild white bush of his beard.

  “Excuse us.” Santiago is surprisingly polite. He approaches the man with care, Verity trailing behind him.

  The old man stops, turning by a row of vending machines. His eyes are a washed-out cerulean, the whites gone yellow, streaked with small red veins. A rip on the left sleeve of his stained winter coat releases a puff of cotton. He is as tall as Santiago, but has the stooped stature of a man shrinking with time. His wan smile marks itself in curving creases on his face; his skin has the quality of an old letter, folde
d too often and easily torn.

  “Sweetheart,” he says, “here’s someone, now.”

  In the corner, the little girl has halted but is still prancing. When she turns, the tail of her shining black hair whips behind her. She is perhaps three years old, burnished where the old man is faded, and her gaze is brightly polished slate. Her attention lights on Santiago’s shadow. Abandoning all pretence of high stepping, she toddles forward past the old man and past Verity, both hands reaching downward to pat at the man-shape of Ouroboros-in-disguise spilled on the floor. She ignores the magician entirely. The shadow falls across her skin.

  “My Sanna,” says the old man, proudly. He muffles a cough. “Sweetheart, come hold Grandpa’s hand.” The little girl pays him no attention; she is rubbing her fingertips along the filthy floor as though she is burying her fingers in Ouroboros’s fur. She presses her cheek to the rubber mat, her inky hair mingling with the shade that now spills across her. Ouroboros continues to hold the shape of the magician, the overhead lighting casting Santiago’s form squat and ill-proportioned on the ground and the little girl. Santiago regards the girl gravely.

  “Your granddaughter?”

  The word hums to Verity, slightly sharp; it lingers in the air, leaving a trail of butterfly vibrations.

  The old man looks down at the child; she is nothing like him. Her toddling brown alertness contrasts with his wasted pallor. He smiles at her uncaring shoulders. “Close enough,” he says. “She’s with me. We have no one else. I’m Alan.” He coughs. “Kids these days all go on about music. I see your shirt. You’re the welcome wagon, are you?”

  “Such as it is. We were looking for strays. You need a hand?”

  “Be all right in a minute. That bus left me a little off.” Alan’s attention lights on Verity and lingers, sharp with sudden interest. She ducks her chin, a long-accustomed gesture, sending mousy hair in front of her face. A moment later, the man has moved on to address Santiago again: “We came in a few hours ago. You’re the ones with the posters?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Rock groups. In my time, one just wore a suitable flower on one’s coat.” The man sniffs, but the inhalation seems to send him off balance; he teeters momentarily backward before Santiago steps in to grasp his sleeve. “I’m all right, young man.”

  It isn’t entirely true. Verity shakes her head against the buzzing and sees the girl doing the same; Sanna pushes herself off the floor and toddles in the direction of the door, which lets in a breeze as it hisses to let a man in a blue coat walk in, his eyes on the phone in his hands.

  “We’re leaving now,” says the old man to the little girl. “Honey?” She doesn’t look at him. She is pawing at the floor as though she expects it to give way like sand. The man’s bushy eyebrows wriggle as he grimaces apologetically. “My Sanna—she’s, ah, special. Your spaces will be all right for her?”

  His concern is real enough; Verity can see it, wafting across the vinyl flooring in a ribbon of soft colours.

  She is surprised when the little girl turns her head and laughs, light and brilliant as birdsong. Pushing away from Santiago’s spilling shadow, Sanna skips toward the exit, hands outstretched to catch the floating rainbow of her grandfather’s care. When the doors hiss open for her, the shreds of colour drift and separate between her fingers, and she smiles.

  She sees truth, Verity wants to say, and doesn’t. The shock of it is electric on her skin.

  The old man and Santiago watch the girl with varying degrees of benign puzzlement.

  “As I said,” murmurs the grandfather, apologetically. “She’s special.”

  “Huh.” Santiago keeps his hand on the other man’s elbow and helps him walk after Sanna, who twirls now between the open panes of the doors. “Well, we’ve got kids she can play with, and a resident angel. Maybe he can do something for her.”

  They emerge from the station into the crisp air outside, the breeze tugging at Verity’s hair. Below her, Santiago’s words spread like slow ripples on a pond. The girl Sanna jumps over one, then frowns when there’s no splash.

  The old man watches his granddaughter, but a sudden enthusiasm flares in the set of his shoulders when Santiago speaks. “Well then,” he says, and bows—first to the magician, then to Verity. Verity wonders that he doesn’t topple like a dried birch. “I look forward to meeting this ... angel. I’m old, but not so old I can’t heed a call.”

  His words are a chime—the little girl smiles—but Santiago only gestures gracefully back toward the main street and the steady river of traffic. “Please.” His eyebrows shoot up when Sanna twirls forward and reaches for his fingers; her gaze is on the dancing leaves of a tree, but she latches onto his hand and walks with him when he steps experimentally toward the sidewalk. She is careful not to tread on his shadow.

  “I’m fairly certain,” Alan confides to Verity, in a half-whisper, “that angels aren’t real.”

  “His name is Colin. He might be an angel,” Verity allows, thoughtfully, “if heaven is made of rag and bone.”

  Still, something brightens in the old man’s eyes, and Verity thinks, this is what Colin does.

  “Shall we?” Alan offers his arm. Verity blinks, but when she hears Santiago snort, she shakes her head and touches the old man’s sleeve lightly with her fingertips.

  She says, “This way.”

  They are perhaps a strange picture, Santiago and the girl ahead, the old man and Verity trailing. Santiago flips a quarter along the backs of his knuckles as he walks.

  Alan leans down toward Verity’s ear. “Did your friend’s shadow just wink at us?”

  Verity only shrugs. The old man chuckles and seems content to walk with her. The city is not silent—cars go by, pedestrians, a man on a whizzing bike—and Verity hears also the razored sound of rising buildings and the whisper of drifting clouds. She notices, ahead of her, the little girl turning to watch the spreading oil slick at the feet of a man in a tattered suit preaching on the corner. He quotes the Bible and his words drip with slow viscosity down to his worn leather shoes.

  Alan says, “Thank you. It’s nice to see young people taking an interest.”

  Verity doesn’t know what to say. She touches her free hand lightly to the pin on her lapel and braces herself for the underpass.

  10

  what happened to the pictures

  Did you like them? Were they worth a thousand words?

  thats very

  What?

  Vee?

  I will leave this whole thing hanging until you type something.

  arbitrary

  What would you like a picture of?

  sometimes when santiago smiled it had an edge like lemon, the way lemon stings on an open cut

  Yeah, see, this is why I stopped.

  [IMAGE: Privya leaning against a streetlight. She looks about sixteen, short and compact. She has a bouquet of flowers in one hand. She’s wearing a winter vest over a t-shirt, a long loose skirt, and high chunky boots. Her hair is in a bun and her face is friendly. She is about to laugh.]

  PRIVYA

  Once upon a time, at the very centre of a lush jungle, flowers bloomed at the base of a great dead tree. No one knew how long ago the tree had died, or how many years it had spent growing. Its branches spread grey and twisted through the green canopies, and the monkeys and parrots left it bare. No butterflies sprang from the knots in its gnarled bark. Its trunk was so massive that three large men could not have encircled it with their arms. People spoke of it in curious whispers, but few knew how to find it, and fewer still knew the precise secret of locating the exact crack along its southern side. It was a tall crack, far too narrow for even the smallest child, but despite this, anyone who mastered the trick of it might be able to slip between. In the heart of this spreading husk, the right person might stand on a broad plain of sand spreading beneath a cloudless sky.

  In the impossible desert at the heart of the tree at the centre of the jungle, a young girl named Privya lived with her f
ather in a tall stone tower.

  The desert has long since passed into legend, and the stone tower with it, because the world came to know that such things were not really possible after all. The desert was real to Privya, though. She knew where the lichen flowered at sunset, and how to suck the water from a cactus, and where the spiders dug tiny holes in the dust.

  She had a gift; her father told her so. Every morning, she would rise and throw a plain cloak over her shoulders, then take the curve of sharp stone that hung by the door and slice it in a line along the inside of her elbow. She would stretch out her arm and walk the circumference of the tower’s base, letting her blood drip in red splatters that would vanish in the golden grains of the thirsty sand. It hurt every morning, slicing her own muscle like ripe fruit, but she would smile a little and sing under her breath to the shifting sands and the worn stone. “Here,” she whispered to the desert beneath her feet. “Take it and be strong.”

  When she was finished, her arm tingling and her skin sticky and hot, she would fetch the water bucket from the cactus bed and carry it up and up and up the winding stairs to the top of the tower. She would make tea in the cracked clay teapot, the old repair of its seal rough beneath her fingers. She would pour it into two cups, then take one to her father and set it on the desk just to the right of his hand. He would ask her, “Have you driven the jungle back today?” and she would nod, and he would smile proudly. He knew six uses for gold, and one of them was to mend her flesh anew. He pressed glittering dust into the gashes of her arm and made her whole.

  The second cup of tea was hers; she would drink from it as she sat cross-legged on the floor and listened to the dusty scratch of his voice.

  Most of her father’s conversation was meant to teach her things. He taught her how to balance wood against iron, what symbols contained a fire, how to coax the form of one stone into another, and how to capture the starlight caught in drifts of desert sand. When he asked, Privya would echo his words back to him, or draw a quick sketch against the floor with her fingertip. When the pattern she mastered was exceptionally complex, he would smile. Sometimes her tea would get cold.