A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  “Nothing wrong with poetry. Hell would look like a lord’s great kitchen without fire in ’t …” He turned off the taps and reached for the linen teatowel.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “So is all this just a game?”

  “Blue interested me. Blue is the first being to interest me in a long time. That was worth something. Then, I felt something more when I opened the door and Blue was there. A twinge. The shadow of guilt to come, maybe. But something.”

  “You are still a fool. Especially if you believe what you just said, you are a fool.”

  “That’s a stupid thing to call anyone, Mr. Grey, if you know anything about Zen. It’s a compliment, now. It’s the sort of thing lovers say to each other, in the circles I move in.”

  To her surprise, he blushed at that.

  “Are you a prude, Mr. Grey? Or are you entertaining lascivious thoughts?”

  “Are those my only two options?” he said, seeming quite serious, and she laughed.

  “No, and I’m sorry. Then, I was playing a game, the old one I find so bizarre. The talk-dirty game that renders some men helpless. The ones who still swear by being men.”

  “I don’t know if I qualify. I stopped thinking about being a man something like three and a half decades ago.”

  “But you were still born when you were born, and went through all the same stages of life and culture. Did you manage to stay more flexible than other men of your age?”

  “You are old, Father William, the young man said, / and your hair has become very white. / And yet you incessantly stand on your head. / Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

  “Yeah, it is condescending, sorry. But it’s also a problem I have with the others the same age as you, or older. They all went drumming in the woods twenty or thirty years ago and it has affected them badly.”

  “I never did that.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I’m younger than I look, anyway.” He reached over and turned off the radio, plunked the clean cups back on the table, pulled the teapot toward himself, filled both their cups again. She felt, for a moment, an absurd tenderness which luckily was gone as soon as she looked at it square-on. If she was going to wake up again, she thought, what a stupid place to start. She watched his tiny hands, his small fingers’ delicate hold of the delicate cup handle. He could use the Donison-Steinbuhler keyboard too, she thought, like my mother. For the first time, she regretted the sale of the piano.

  “Do me a favor, Jakob,” Morgan said wearily. “If you aren’t going to put out, don’t flirt.”

  Jakob looked at her in something between surprise and calculation. “What are you talking about, girlfriend?”

  “I am a woman, Jakob. Not a boy, not someone you want to sleep with. So why flirt with me?”

  “It’s just a … what is the matter with you?”

  “I am tired, Jakob. I am tired.”

  “You must be pissed off with me. Nobody calls somebody their name that many times in one minute unless they’re pissed off.”

  “Think about it, Jakob. I sleep with men and women. I like sex”—I really do, she thought with surprise, on the way by—“and I respond sexually to people. When you flirt with me, there’s a part of me that thinks you’re serious. I respond. Then I feel jerked around. Tonight I am tired and I have been playing games with cops all day and I don’t feel like feeling jerked around.”

  “Usually you flirt right back.”

  “Yes, I admit, I play the game. I even like the game, most of the time. It’s amusing. There was a long time there where I wasn’t amused by much else but games. But tonight I am too tired to untangle all the skeins. Too tired to resist what I know is false.”

  “It isn’t exactly false, honey. I like you. You know you are my free-und.” He was still camping it up.

  Morgan smiled. “Yes, I am your friend, Azalea Trailmaiden.”

  “We-ell then, honeychile, what am I gonna do if not flirt? I don’t know no other way to be a free-und ceptun flirtin’, honeychile.”

  She laughed, but it was a laugh of defeat. “Cut out the phony accent, will you? Okay, okay, never mind. We don’t have to talk about it. It’s too much trouble. Forget it.”

  “Well, don’t dis me, honey, if you’re just gonna say forget it.”

  Jakob’s tone was sharper than repartee would demand, and his passive-aggressive look reminded her of John’s hostile expression when she had the latest housework skirmish with him. She grinned: Jakob would hate to think that he was like John in any way. But they were alike in some ways, she realized. They both had a grudge against sectors of the world.

  “Have you always had women around you, Jakob?”

  “Girl friends? Not really. Couple fag hags, maybe. Didn’t really know any interesting women—until recently,” he added, hoisting his eyebrows in automatic innuendo.

  He always called Blue male. What would it mean to his attraction if Blue were called female? What did it mean that Morgan, nominally female, owned this house? Was it only being queer that gave her immunity?

  Why should she need immunity from Jakob?

  In the grocery store, Morgan read the small print on the labels. Jakob was allergic to corn, Russ couldn’t eat some of the new genemod foods, and she got migraine from red dye. Shopping was not simple. Of course, John just bought fast food, and Russ was inclined to rice and vegetables, but Morgan tried, when it was her turn to shop, to provide for them all. Delany wasn’t always energetic enough to scratch-build a meal, and Morgan had had to force herself to get interested in something.

  She was in frozen foods, feeling the chill bloom from the open door of the cooler, when she heard her old name called by a voice at once unfamiliar and atavistically known.

  “It is Connie Shelby! What are you doing in town, girl?” The speaker had a familiar face, but Morgan couldn’t find a name. College years, must be. She hoped it wasn’t someone she’d once slept with.

  “Hey, it’s Daphne Pearson, remember me? Well, I was Pearson, now I’m Flynn. We were in Gay-Straight Alliance together in first-year university, remember? How are you?”

  “I’ve changed my name too,” said Morgan. “I’m called Morgan now.” Nope, she had never slept with Daphne. She hadn’t been sleeping with women yet when she was in GSA—Morgan herself had thought she was one of the straight ones then.

  “Oh, yeah, that was your second name! Cool.” Daphne reached past her for a frozen pound cake and a tub of frozen whipped topping. “Party tonight.”

  “You remembered that? That was over twenty years ago!”

  “Everybody remembers you. We were just talking about you the other day. Wondering what happened to you. How come you’re back in town? What are you working at these days?”

  “I’m a child care worker,” said Morgan, with a stirring of humor at her own truthful falsehood.

  “Do you have a family?”

  “Well … sort of. I inherited a big house. I run it as a kind of co-op house. Old-fashioned, but I like it.”

  “It’s not that old-fashioned. Some of the young people these days are starting to live in co-ops again. It’s so expensive otherwise.”

  “I meant my house is old. What about you?”

  “Well, I married Lorne Flynn. Remember, he was president of the Young Conservatives. Go figure, eh? Must have been the sex. We had two kids. One’s away at college, the other one has Additive Syndrome and we have her in a group home. She comes home on weekends. We used to take care of her at home—I quit my job—but when she got so big, it was too much. I’m the secretary of the ASPS—you know, parent support group? You know me, always taking minutes! Listen, I have more time since she moved out—you should come for supper sometime. I bet Lorne would love to see you. I’ll invite some of the others. Dave—he’s got this young boyfriend Duane. Sarah. She’s with a man now, you know, Silvio, but I think he’s queer too. And Peter and Pete are still together, can you imagine? And Bertina’s a doctor now. Hey, give me your number an
d I’ll call you. Oh, dang, I don’t have my daybook with me. I’ll look you up on the web. Listen, gotta run. I’ll call!”

  Morgan stood looking after her, bemused. She didn’t expect to hear another word. She remembered Lorne, a heavy-handed social-Darwninist law student with an ambitious family. He’d been possessive and uptight about Daphne, but had a tendency to get drunk at the GSA parties and start twinkling at the men, although he insisted he was straight. She couldn’t imagine he’d love to see her. And Daphne she remembered as full of enthusiasms, but short on follow-through. Either she’d changed her ways, or the ASPS group didn’t know her habits yet, or they were desperate for a secretary. Or, mused Morgan, Daphne had started it herself. Shaking her head, she went on with the shopping. But when she got home after finishing all the errands, Delany said, “Some woman called and summoned you to supper. It couldn’t have been Daffy, could it? That’s who it sounded like.”

  “Daphne. Yes, it was.”

  “Yeah. We called her Daffy, remember? She said you told her you’d be glad to come any day you were free. So I looked in your daybook. You’re free. Next Friday night.”

  “Damn,” said Morgan. “Really?” But she couldn’t stay in the house all the time.

  “Can I come too?” asked Blue plaintively, as she got ready on the following Friday.

  “Maybe soon, but I don’t think these people are ready for you yet.” Morgan grinned, imagining bringing this more-than-exotic date. “But tomorrow, we’ll go back to our swimming lessons, if you like.”

  “Back to the Atrium? Will they lock me up again?”

  “I’m assured that if we want to swim, they’ll pick us up and bring us home any time we want. I’m prepared to trust Mr. Grey’s word, I think. How about you?”

  “I liked swimming,” said Blue.

  This time the dream is of drowning. Although in the dream Morgan has become an amphibian through some unclear magic, and admires her gills and magpie-iridescent scales in the shiny surface of the water before she dives, when she is underwater and tries to use them, instead her mouth is invaded with blue water she is not ready to breathe. She doesn’t know how. She woke choking. The air was cool and the cat was purring. Magpies with gills are not logical, she heard herself think, relaxed, and fell back to sleep.

  In the Atrium, she had had the resources of a gigantic curriculum committee to contribute to Blue’s education. Until his premature death the chessmaster had been only one of a legion of experts brought to teach the alien all that was paradigmatic of Earth. Since Blue’s days were so much longer, there had been shifts of workers, with Morgan, initially the only one Blue had any interest in approaching, the doyenne of them all.

  Here, in the house, it was all Morgan’s terrifying responsibility.

  The grey man’s twice-weekly visits quickly became comforting—too quickly, thought the part of Morgan that did not just question but actively mistrusted authority—and on the visit falling six weeks after Blue’s arrival at her house, she walked with Mr. Grey to the park and sat with him on a bench overlooking the city.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “It’s like Blue was brought up in such a structured environment for most of a year, and then suddenly—pouf! —no structure at all, just me well-meaningly muddling around and the others doing whatever occurs to them that day.”

  “What do kids do when they get into their teens?” he asked rhetorically. “They leave home.”

  “But Blue wasn’t …” It was her own metaphor again, and she saw him smiling as she tried to deny it. “All right. All right! I surrender. But it was too soon—Blue wasn’t nearly …”

  “Finished? Some of them run away early. They do all right. Blue has taken control of that education process, just as everyone must do sometime in adolescence. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  “I wasn’t worrying about me.”

  “Well, Blue will be fine too. You want to know a secret? You don’t have to do anything. Blue is an information sponge, but it doesn’t matter what goes in. There are twelve other Blues around the world. That we know of, that is. Do you think they are all getting the same story? And if they’re all like Blue, they synthesize as easily as they breathe. I think the mothership types will have a lot to work with. I’m not in the slightest bit worried, myself.”

  If he didn’t say that others were, she could infer it, and said so, and he nodded. “But those are the ones I promised to keep off your back, and I’m doing that. The rest is up to Blue, isn’t it? Frankly, as long as Blue chooses to stay here, there’s nothing any of them can do.”

  Morgan asked Blue later, “Why do you stay here?”

  “You are here,” said Blue simply. “I chose you. You named me. I was glad. I was young, I had no words for names, I couldn’t find one for myself. Someone had to help. I wanted it to be you.”

  “Why?”

  “You are the one I most like to touch.”

  “You do, eh? Why is that?”

  “You are empty, like me.”

  Morgan asked for no more meanings; she went away into her room.

  It isn’t good to hate, and so Morgan refused to hate: to hate her mother’s unexpected cowardice, her father’s desertion into death, or even her brother’s apt tears; the hospital’s slide into social Darwinism she had always considered beneath her notice, and with her new self-hatred she had considered Vik’s defection only her due. So she was left with nothing to feel except absence.

  Far away, and in another country, and the wench is dead from the ass both ways, Morgan thought wryly. She remembered Jung’s words: neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. Just as the shoemaker’s children have bare feet, her neuroses were visible to her trained perceptions, but unassailable.

  It is far easier to help others than to undo one’s own lies.

  Morgan was unprepared to remember she had history. Still, when her friend Judith, passing through on the way to Vancouver, took time to look her up, Morgan found herself putting weight on the old connection, trying to explain to Judith the sweet burden of her recent thoughts.

  Looked at one way, Morgan mused, her mother also refused to suffer: she preferred to die violently in the crash rather than face the ruin of her dreams. Morgan, who felt holier than that, had to admit she hadn’t even had dreams, only illusions.

  “Don’cha hate that?” said Judith lazily, throwing stones into the shallow water for her dog to retrieve. “Makes you seem petty and her seem right.”

  “But she wasn’t,” said Morgan.

  “No?” Judith grinned at her. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. I just have to figure out why.”

  Judith laughed and called the tiny dog, who came bouncing back to them, wet, tongue lolling, to shake water over them. “Look at that thing,” said Morgan fondly. “It’s a real dog!”

  “What did you think?”

  “That it was a toy. It’s so damn cute, it takes a while to realize it’s a dog like any other dog, except tiny.”

  “No drooling, though.”

  “Maybe it’s like the line in the Jane Siberry song: Then you’d miss the beauty of the light upon this earth, and the sweetness of the leaving …”

  “Why my dog doesn’t drool?”

  “You goof. No, why she was wrong. The light upon this earth.”

  “But she didn’t leave sweetly, did she?” asked Judith.

  “Whole point.”

  “Good for you!”

  But Judith was not complimenting Morgan on her tiny insight, but the tiny dog on a tiny perfect “sit.”

  John had only been in the house a few months and already Morgan had received complaints from the others about, and had herself become irritated with, his slovenly habits. Especially since the coming of Blue, she had no time nor patience for such nonsense, and she called John into the kitchen in the evening. Blue, as usual after dinner, was sitting in the breakfast nook by the window, watching the yard. The dishes were heaped in the sink.

  “What do you
see?” she said to John.

  He looked around in puzzlement. “Nothing. What’s the matter?”

  “The sink is full of dishes.”

  John looked blank, waited.

  “It’s your turn to wash the dishes,” Morgan snapped.

  “Oh! Gee, sorry. I’ll get right at them,” and he turned to the sink.

  “Sorry’s not enough,” Morgan said sharply, and he turned back, bewildered.

  “What?”

  “Sorry’s not enough. It has been your turn for a week. First Russ did your dishes. Then I did. Today Delany did—”

  “Then I did,” said Blue quietly.

  Morgan carried on: “These are just today’s supper dishes. In addition, there is the vacuuming. It’s your turn. Has been for ten days. No-one feels like rescuing you there. The trash needs taking out and the trashcan needs cleaning. It’s your turn. The household laundry needs running through—you know, placemats and dishtowels and napkins. Everybody else has done it twice. You haven’t done it at all. It’s your turn.”

  She was almost enjoying seeing him wilt.

  “See this chart on the fridge? It tells us all what needs doing. There should be an equal number of initials beside the tasks. Do you see your initials there? I don’t. That means you haven’t been doing the household work.

  “I explained all this to you when you moved in. I also explained that no one will make you do it. You are an adult. There are no parents here. Personally, I resent being put in this position where I have to give you a lecture, but there have been too many complaints. I also explained when you moved in that there will only be three warnings. This is warning number one. After number three, you move out.”

  “Okay,” said John. “I’m sorry. I’ve been busy on this video project …”