A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  “We’re all busy,” said Morgan severely. “Nobody has time to clean up after you.”

  “I’m sorry—” John broke off, blushing. He looked sideways at Blue, but Blue, seemingly indifferent, had stood up and was drifting out toward the doors to the back deck.

  “Well, just do what you are supposed to do, and that will make up for it.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  “One more thing—”

  He paused on his way to the sink. “Mmm?”

  “Quit using other people’s towels. It’s very rude. Wash your own. Pay attention. Only use your own.”

  “Right!”

  Leaving the kitchen, Morgan looked back, to see John regarding her with that hooded, resentful look that reminded her of a time when she worked with teenage petty criminals in a locked unit. Well, it gave me some skills, she thought, and smiled blindingly at him. After a moment he smiled back, weakly, and she gave him a thumb up signal as she left.

  She climbed the stairs, thinking, I did that on autopilot, all of it. There was a time I would have resented being put in that position, just as I pretended to him that I was. Now, it’s just another chore, done and out of the way. We won’t have trouble from him for a while. Too bad, he’s a talented guy. She had called up some of his videos on the house system. Not her cup of tea, but brilliantly done.

  Dream: image of Morgan, shoulder against the rock, struggling up a hill. Image of the rock slipping, not to roll back but to crush against her. She is crying with frustration and anger, but refuses to let go. She struggles to right herself and continues to roll her burden upward slowly, slowly. She is having a furious dialogue with herself about whether it is more sensible to carry on or let go. She lets go. The rock has nested in a slight depression in the hillside and tilts there, mocking her passively. She snarls and pushes mightily. The rock will not move. She stands away from it, swearing. The rock tilts back and is free, rolls slowly away along the hill, neither falling back nor advancing. Morgan runs after it. It goes faster. She leaps and catches hold, clambers on, rides it like a lumberjack rides a birling log down a rushing stream. The wind tugs her hair out behind. The footwork is demanding, no less than was the force of progress uphill. Morgan glances up and sees the crest of the hill approaching. A lifting sense in her heart. The rock hits a bump and she falls off. Pain. She stands, rubs her ass, watches the rock build up speed, roll on, and disappear over the crest of the hill, defying gravity and her. She straightens her back and begins to walk slowly after it, knees aching with the climb.

  If it’s not one goddamn thing it’s another goddamn thing, she thinks, and wakes herself laughing.

  Jakob was giving Morgan a massage, his hard fingers almost unbearably pressing into Morgan’s knotted back. Morgan could feel Jakob’s fingernails snag the folds of her shirt and pull as his hands crossed her back, and she shivered with their slightly-out-of-sync motion. As she shivered a sob erupted and stopped in her throat, and she began to cry, quietly and without ceremony, a new tear crossing her face every time Jakob’s now more tenderly probing fingers hit a particularly tough muscle knot.

  “You are so tense,” said Jakob soothingly. “You are like a person after backpacking. What have you been doing?”

  “Just the usual,” said Morgan, “staying alive.”

  “I feel like the pool of expertise is too small,” she said to Mr. Grey. “Too few of us were ever trained in this. I read as much as I can, and I still feel inadequate to be your expert.”

  “You are familiar with the research stating that stupid people are self-satisfied, and intelligent people doubt themselves?” he replied.

  “Stuff that. I’m serious.”

  “Fine. Let me think. What about having some staff meetings with the people we worked with at the Atrium?” the grey man asked. “They know Blue.”

  “Well, maybe Shelley and Brandy. They were pretty good. But Alice just saw it as a weird zoo, and Howard liked his own reflection in the mirror too much.”

  Mr. Grey laughed. “I’ll set something up.”

  “Not here at the house,” said Morgan hastily.

  “No,” said the grey man. “I want to keep the world away from here as long as I can.”

  Morgan went to the meeting hoping to be able to spread responsibility, but what she learned was that she was on her own. Though she liked her co-workers as much on rediscovery as she did when she’d worked with them, they were not so much Blue’s friends as hers. Shelley had another job, far less troublesome, and had kept her Atrium secrets even from her husband. “He thinks I’m at the library,” she explained. “I can only stay half an hour.” And indeed, in twenty minutes, she began to pack up, thanked the grey man for the double espresso, and scurried away with relief.

  “Never mind her,” said Brandy. “You know how she is.”

  “I didn’t, really,” said Morgan. “I was hoping to find that the two of you had some, well, different perspectives on Blue’s learning. Something I could add to what I’m doing.”

  “Well, honey, I’m not gonna be much more help. Sorry, but you had the point at the Atrium too, you know. All I ever did with Blue was carry out the daily orders you left me, and she pretty much did what I said.”

  “She? Blue?”

  “Yeah. Look, you wanna have tea, I’d love to talk to you. Listen to you vent. Hug you, whatever. But I never really hit it off with Blue. I like the kids I’m working with now a lot better.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at an AS group home over on the south side.”

  “Oh!” said Morgan. “Do you have a Briannon Flynn there?”

  “Yeah, cute kid. She’s one of our older ones. Seventeen. You know, they weren’t expected to live that long. Her mom started that ASPS thing. Her husband’s a bit of an asshole, but she’s great. She’s quite the organizer. They did a big fund-raiser, fancy dinner thing, you know, made a shitload of money and bought a bunch of equipment for the house. A hoist for the bathroom. You know them?”

  “Yes, I knew her in college. We just got connected again.”

  “Small world!”

  After Brandy left, the grey man moved his chair closer. “As it was my idea, I guess I should say I’m sorry,” he said. “But you know, she’s right. You were on the point there. We all mostly followed you too. Maybe you just have to face that you know how to raise this kid. You seem to have an instinct about what Blue needs.”

  “It’s just common sense.”

  “That’s what people say who have it. People who don’t have a clue trip over their own feet. From the reports we get, nobody else’s Visitor has developed this well. You’re a good parent. Accept it.”

  “She said it was a small world,” said Morgan. “How come it feels like more than I can chew?”

  The grey man smiled gently. “Have another one of these Vietnamese iced coffees. You’ll be able to deal with anything.”

  “Okay,” said Morgan, then, as he raised his hand to the server, “No, not the coffee. Okay to the small world. I’ll quit whinging and do the best I can.”

  “That sounds like something a parent would say.”

  “It’s my father’s voice. Or my mom’s. They used to quote some saying, ‘Do your work as well as you can, and be kind.’”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” said Mr. Grey.

  “I wasn’t proposing it as a plan!”

  “I know. But it is your plan, know it or not. So just do it.”

  “Easy for you to say,” said Morgan. “Better get me that coffee after all. I probably won’t sleep tonight anyway.”

  She was surprised to notice that the coffee was delicious.

  “I don’t believe he’s an alien at all,” said Jakob. “I think he’s just an experiment in gene therapy or something.”

  “Blue’s not the only one,” said Delany.

  “And that first one brought greetings and everything,” said Russ.

  “Anything can be faked. Look at the F/X in the flicks. Look at my d
ance videos.”

  “True: look at my happy-pap for the government,” says Russ. “F/X über alles.”

  “Yeah, I agree,” said John. “It could just as easily be a hoax. I could doctor a home video of anyone here to do everything Blue or any of the others did, look just like him, and look better than some of the footage.”

  “That explains why they’re letting him stay here,” said Jakob. “A real alien would never be handed off to a freak show like us.”

  “Speak for yourself,” John said, reverting to his usual attitude toward Jakob.

  Stepping in yet again to defuse the tension, Morgan chuckled. “Leaving aside your universal and shocking misuse of pronouns, and your unflattering designation of our merry little band, there’s the question of why they would bother. Occam’s Razor: the simplest answer is still likely to be the right one.”

  “And Blue’s simpler as an alien?” Jakob said, staring at her.

  He had her there.

  8

  “You have to change your life”

  She took the cup in her hand. The heat was welcome. She held it against her belly, felt the cramping slowly ease. Blue copied her.

  “It isn’t necessary,” she said shortly, “unless your belly hurts too. I have menstrual cramps. You can just drink it.” The blue hands raised the cup. “Wait! Wait ’til it cools!”

  “I forgot that. What would it do to me?”

  “Burn you, I guess. Maybe not. I don’t know your metabolism, your body, well enough to say.”

  “You put my body together.”

  The cramps returned, redoubled. The cold wind in her neck hairs.

  “What?”

  “What you teach me defines what I am.”

  “Who you are.” Absently. “Who is a person, what is a thing.”

  “You will make a good job. Me. Make of me a good job. Better than the others.”

  “Call the others back. I’m tired.”

  “Tell me this kind of tired. Let me in.”

  “In?”

  “Let me touch what … let me touch you, intimately do you say?”

  “What do you mean, make love? Have sex?”

  “No, I mean to say, deeply. Inside.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What about when we talk at night?”

  “I don’t talk with you then; I’m asleep.”

  “You see me.”

  “Those are dreams.”

  “Dream me, then.”

  Jakob was using the front porch rail as a barre and doing exercises in the mild air of the long prairie evening, and Morgan and Blue were taking dandelions out of the lawn and flowerbed.

  “Why do we cultivate some things that are not too useful, and dig up a plant that is useful and prolific?” asked Blue.

  “The city says they’re a noxious weed,” said Morgan.

  “And it’s been a while since us citified folks had to rough it in the bush and grow our own food,” contributed Jakob. He came down the porch steps, drying his sweat with a white towel. The late evening sun slanted through the leaves and burnished his skin with red-gold highlights. Morgan sat back on her heels and marveled. She would have thought that dark, dark skin had no reddish pigment, but he looked like a piece of Victorian mahogany fashioned into a beautiful muscular statue. Or, a slight adjustment of the draperies, a torch in one uplifted hand, and he’d be a suitable heroic bronze for a marble pedestal. She smiled.

  “Speak for yourself,” she said. “My father insisted on making dandelion wine, and my mother tried the salad-greens route, also roasting the roots for a coffee substitute.”

  “And … ?”

  “And succeeded in confirming to us that dandelions were noxious.”

  “But they are not,” Blue said.

  “It’s a joke, honey,” Morgan said to Blue.

  “Oh.”

  At that moment, Russ came through from the back parking area, singing with a Garnet-or-Stan-Rogers variety of deep definite exuberance. “Hi there!” he interrupted himself to say brightly as he bounded toward the steps. Jakob placed himself in the way, managing, Morgan noticed, to keep himself fully in that ray of golden sunlight with the display instinct of a seasoned performer.

  “What brings you home so merrily singing?”

  “Got a date,” said Russ. “With a delicious dish-ious delightful … well,” he broke down and laughed. “I can’t think of a D word. A woman from work. She started a couple weeks ago. She called me out of the blue. Surprised the hell out of me.”

  “And now you are planning to ravish this ravishing creature?” Jakob said casually, but he stood a little too close to Russ and his posture was wary.

  “We’ll see,” said Russ. “She does have a say, after all. But we had lunch a couple of times this week, and it’s intriguing …”

  “Well,” said Jakob, moving out of the way, “I hope she’s worth singing about.” He bounced up the stairs on his toes and flounced through the door.

  Hmmm, thought Morgan, and returned to her grass-stained labors.

  Russ was out all night, and Jakob was awake all night in the studio. Morgan, asleep, dreamed of blue dancers, dreamed vaguely of sex and edgy jealousy, and laughed when she awoke at the way her dreams were a kind of recombinant DNA of daily life. But she felt also as if the undercurrents she found in dreams ran through the house, as two yawning men lounged at the breakfast table being excessively polite to each other.

  “Humanity needs to learn to respect our real ills,” said Delany.

  “Mmm,” said Morgan, who was cleaning out the cupboard under the sink, only her rear end and legs sticking out. There’s something comforting about containment, she thought, and to reach the far corner, she pulled herself even farther into the small space.

  “Look at you,” Delany continued, her voice coming to Morgan muffled by the wooden frame she was in, and by the competing noise of Morgan’s scrub cloth. “Completely broken up about all the things that happened: your parents, the little boy at work, your break-up with Vik … and what do you have to do? Carry on. Not a moment’s rest.”

  “Yeah,” said Morgan from within, “and I inherited a house most people would kill for, metaphorically anyway, and used up a big insurance settlement fixing it up. Not that it ever stays fixed. The damned pipes in the attic bathroom … Anyway, and I get to live here with a bunch of cool people and one of the first aliens to visit Earth. I’ve really got it bad.” Wryly, she remembered having this conversation with her grey man—hers? Odd—and realized she was making his arguments. She snorted softly, almost missed Delany’s:

  “So what if you’re suicidal, eh?”

  Morgan crept backward out of the cupboard and stood, wincing as her back straightened. “I’m not suicidal. I’m just empty. I don’t care enough to be suicidal. And so what? I am a product of the top of the civilized heap. I was never sexually or physically abused, and what’s a little emotional abuse, between family? I have never starved, and I don’t have to walk twenty miles with a jerry can to get water every day. I’m not laboring in an Asian sweatshop so people like us can have nice running shoes cheap. I don’t see my children die with kwashiorkor. I have no cause for complaint.”

  She was advancing the same argument the grey man had made to her, and she knew it. This time Delany was defending, as she had done with him, Morgan’s right to be visible and in pain despite all her privilege. “Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean,” said Delany. “You give to all of us, you give to Blue, and you are wearing yourself out. Someone as tiny as you are can’t afford to lose weight.”

  “Ah, you noticed, did you. Shit. I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

  “Smart-ass. You need to take care of yourself!”

  Morgan gave her a neutral look, or at least, it felt blank from within. Delany, however, said, “Oh, honey, don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry.”

  “You know the ills we should attend to, before we attend to my self-indulgent little angsts? The ills that something can be d
one about. Death and disaster are immutable, though we can clean up after. But the children who are being hurt, the women being battered, the old and sick trapped in boxes, the people starving, the homeless in our own streets and the people all over the world in need: these can all be changed, and they aren’t being changed. I can’t bear it. So many good people have been working at it for such a long time, and it’s just a drop in the bucket. Evil has so many faces.”

  “If you are trying to save the world, then you shouldn’t complain at your privilege,” said Delany. “It’s the only thing that gives you the slightest chance of succeeding.”

  Morgan’s laughter surprised even her. “You are so right. Thanks, sweetheart,” and she hugged Delany quickly, enveloping them both in a flurry of cleanser smell and dust. Delany sneezed, then laughed. “My, that was salutary, wasn’t it?”

  “You should see what I found under there, if you think our conversation was improving. On the other hand, perhaps not. It’s one of those experiences that shouldn’t be shared.”

  “Have you ever noticed,” said Delany, “that when people taste something icky, they say, ‘Oh, gross! Here, taste this!’?”

  “Yeah, we love to share, humans do.”

  Morgan turned back to start cleaning the counter, and saw out the kitchen window Blue walking through the garden, stooping to look at a last stubborn pansy in bloom.

  “Look,” she said, and Delany wheeled up beside her. “Blue communing with nature.”

  As they watched, Blue flopped down on the ground to lie face-to-face with the flower, face propped on hands, staring and sniffing.

  “Wow,” said Delany. “I wish I could do that.”

  “Lie on the crunchy autumn grass? Want me to go out and get some leaves to rub in your hair?”

  “Oh, I think not right now, thanks. Can I help with that?”

  “You feeling like saving your soul through honest toil?”

  “Nah, just roommate guilt. After the dressing-down you gave John …”