A Paradigm of Earth

by Candas Jane Dorsey

  “Ah, forget it. From each according to his/her ability … doesn’t sound the same, with the pronouns corrected, does it?”

  “Nothing does,” said Delany, and Morgan, staring out the window at the rapt alien, wondered if the pronouns ever could be corrected, or could be corrected in time. As if there’s a deadline, she thought wryly, but there was a deadline, and everyone knew it.

  Rilke saw the statue of Apollo in the museum, and the statue said to him, “There is nothing that does not see you. You have to change your life.” Earth saw the aliens. Morgan saw Blue.

  The next day, the marmalade cats went missing. A search of the neighborhood revealed nothing, but the next afternoon Morgan found them under the lilac bushes, newly dead, the soft bodies still warm. Poisoned, it seemed, by some neighborhood trap, for there was foam and vomit around Seville’s mouth, and he was stiffened as if from convulsions. Beside him, Dundee looked peaceful. Once Blue understood what Morgan was doing, Blue helped dig the three-foot-deep grave.

  Putting the earth back after the slight cat bodies were laid in the hole was surprisingly difficult. Morgan felt the sting in her nose of sudden irrational tears. She shook her head.

  “What is it?” said Blue.

  “Their fur will get dirty.” Morgan sat down at the tiny graveside and began to cry. They were still warm and soft; it didn’t seem right to cover them. More was wrong than that. It didn’t seem right to Morgan that she should cry more for these damned kittens than she had done at her parents’ funeral. Yet the cats seemed too vulnerable to let go without pain.

  “Does crying help the feelings to quiet?” asked Blue, voice sounding troubled.

  “What it does is flush toxins from the body,” said Morgan. “Helps cleanse the emotions. Why?”

  “I feel like I have done a wrong thing. Maybe I should cry.”

  “Tell me.” Morgan was intrigued.

  “I was listening to the cats. You know how I can listen to them?” Morgan nodded, though this was news to her. “I heard Dundee make a great cry, and I felt Seville go somewhere; they were suddenly apart, in two places. You know how they were listening to each other?” Seeing Morgan shake her head in puzzlement, Blue gave a helpless spreading-hand gesture. “It is so hard to remember that I know nothing but I can hear more; you people are full of humanity but you listen so narrowly. So I heard the cats in two places and Dundee was lonely and wanted to be with Seville, and I felt them wanting to be together. Instead of changing Seville to be like Dundee, I changed Dundee to be like Seville, and I realized when they both went out that I had caused Dundee to die. Now I see it was the wrong way. I should have helped Seville.”

  “Changing, help. You mean you could have made Seville alive again?”

  “It was the poison in the body that was wrong. Is that what Jakob has? I never realized before. But with the cats, I could not understand that right away, they have such plain, foolish little minds, I thought it was the lack of something in Dundee, and I put it there.”

  “Could you have taken away the poison?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it was too late. But I would have tried, and if not I would have been wiser. But I did what Dundee wanted, and then they were both dead. It was wrong, and now I feel wrong. I did the wrong helping thing.”

  “Guilty. Guilt is what you feel.” Morgan would not for the moment grapple with the idea that Blue could that easily arbitrate life and death, but to respond to the simple appeal of a troubled soul was easy. “You made a mistake, perhaps, but that’s human, we all do it. All we can do is live and learn. And perhaps forgive ourselves for our humanity, and go on.” She hoped the alien would not challenge her sophistry: this mistake was a killing one, and Blue was lucky it was only cats. Morgan thought of the chessmaster and for a horrible moment wondered, but immediately thought: if Blue had faced this before, I would have heard about it. No, this is a first time.

  “I’ll try to think like that,” said Blue. “But you are being kind to me. What if I had made that mistake with a person?” Morgan shivered at this echo of her thought. “And who says,” Blue continued, “that a cat is not a person? I don’t know.”

  The alien turned to the little grave, took a handful of soil, stood for a moment, then with a ceremonial gesture poured the sandy soil in: something Morgan was sure was learned from the movies. Morgan took the spade and pushed a great heap of dirt onto the little curled bodies. She was still upset with the wrongness of covering their bright fur, but she did not have any powers to reincarnate cats, people, or any other organism, so she and Blue filled the hole as quickly as possible, and they went into the house. Delany had been watching from the window, and her face showed some tears, but she smiled at them both gently and said, “Welcome back from Shadowland.” Morgan touched her shoulder, and Blue’s, and then went away to her room for a while, putting Marbl out into the hall and closing the door, trying to get cats and the power of life and death out of her mind.

  Morgan felt as if she were reaching for something brittle, hard to grab. As if she were a thin deposit of silver on the inside of a photographer’s plate, emulsion, waiting for something to develop.

  For people who sleep through it, night becomes a mythological time, full of symbols, moon, stars, northern lights, all that. For Morgan, who was wakeful through many a long night, going to sleep when the dawn birds sang (in summer; in winter, it was still dark when she retired), night was a healing time full of natural resonances: why else is the moon a symbol for change, the stars for destiny, the northern lights for spirit life? She lived then.

  Morgan dreams she is Marbl. She is thinking Marbl’s thoughts. Marbl misses the marmalade cats too, but in an odd way: not because they were her kittens but because they were there and now they are not. This annoys her. She likes things to be where they belong. Marbl looks at her kitten Morgan, is pleased that she is in bed asleep, where she belongs at this time of day, and decides to groom her.

  Morgan woke to Marbl licking the hair at her forehead, a firm paw holding her still by pressure on the third eye. Marbl leapt away at Morgan’s gust of laughter and stalked from the room, affronted. Morgan, wakeful, followed her down the stairs.

  Blue sat awake also, and when Morgan walked through the living room Blue sat there, shadowed, with Marbl already lying alongside Blue’s leg with belly turned up to the stroking warm hand.

  “Marbl likes you.”

  “Marbl forgives me for the other two. For murder.”

  “No. A killer, perhaps, but a murderer usually kills humans, and knows what is being done, and is often glad. Accidents, mistakes, that sort of thing, are killings, or even deaths, which has no blaming connotation.” Morgan was precise in her little language lesson, determined.

  Blue wasn’t stupid. “You don’t want me to be called a murderer, even if I am the one who calls it.”

  “Someone might hear you and misunderstand. After all, there was a death back at the Atrium, and you are not responsible for that.”

  “I think I could have stopped it while it was going on, if I had known what it was. I didn’t know until afterward what the dream meant. I didn’t even know then it was a dream. Something happening in another room.”

  “You dreamed it?”

  “I dream everything.”

  And would say no more, but sat silent with a little frown creasing the wide forehead, until Morgan said, “Go to bed. You should get some sleep.”

  “Is that it? Am I tired? It doesn’t feel like tired.”

  “Tired is part of it. Look, the sky is getting lighter. Go to sleep.”

  “Morgan, what are dreams for you?”

  She thought of the vivid voices in the night, the blue presence, the cat’s leap at a voice Morgan thought she had dreamed, and said, “I don’t know any more. I don’t know.”

  She looked after Blue’s departing form, then at the empty air that was left. “But someday, my blue friend,” she said finally, “someday we will find out. Give me time.”

  She
sat for a while with Marbl, who complained at Blue’s absence and had to be placated with affection. The stroking motion calmed them both. Finally the sky was suffused with sun’s first light, and Morgan felt sleep looking for her and went back upstairs to meet it.

  After the others came home, the household seemed to gravitate to the living room where Russ had taken his guitar to strum. It seemed to Morgan a long time since she had heard a song made by the hands and voices of real people; she took her dulcimer from the trunk and tuned it in her room, still undecided about whether she would play. She sat with the instrument on her lap for a long time, listening to the distant chords and voices.

  The alien came to see her.

  “What is this thing?”

  “It’s a musical instrument called a dulcimer. It originated far from here. A friend made it for me. It is made from sweet woods, like cherry and pine, I think; it was originally associated with courtship and betrothal and love. That’s why the holes here are heart-shaped. Modern dulcimers are made with many different shapes of holes and even different shapes of bodies, but this one was made for me by a lover, so it was kept very traditional.”

  She had not thought of Vik in a long time; she got lost for a minute in reverie. “You should go down and listen to the music,” she said finally. “Russ is good. He used to play professionally.”

  “And you will come to the music also?”

  “Maybe in a few minutes.”

  Her mother had taught her to play this instrument after Vik gave it to a bemused and charmed new lover. Why did her mother know how? She’d always wondered, another question she’d never have answered. She remembered the conversation with her mother:

  “How much did she charge you?”

  “Nothing. She gave it to me.”

  “What for?”

  “She’s my friend.”

  Morgan never came out to her parents, but she wondered if her mother had known what was implicit in that blush and labeling of a “friend.” They had always treated Vik well, in all the years she and Morgan lived together.

  After years of experiments, flirtations, and friendly brief companionships, Morgan’s first long-term lover had been a man, an older man who was tender with a fresh-faced near-child, and Morgan remembered him with fondness of a sort, but also with the memory of bitterness; his choice after years of vacillation was to stay with a wife with whom he was unhappy, though somehow happier in the end than with the woman he had sought out to reclaim the free feeling of his youth. Vik had been her friend and confidante through the happiness and the pain; the change in their relationship had surprised them both: Vik because she’d given up thinking Morgan was anything but straight as she romped through the discovery of sex and then suffered through the years with Scott, Morgan because she had never even paused to speculate on making love with a woman, hardly even knew it was possible for her, despite her social awareness of its centrality to others.

  Until the night. Morgan smiled at the memory of their sudden sensuality, the backrubs that transformed without planning into body rubs, and the bodies waking up, and the awakened young women clinging to each others’ hands, shocked at the joyous intensity of the most minute physical contact. Afraid to go any further, and clumsy, always clumsy, when they did.

  We were always clumsy, Morgan thought, at first hardly knowing enough about our own bodies to touch the right places, let alone touch them right. And did we get better at all in those years? Or did we just find out how little we really knew? She was swept with a wave of sadness. People are so clumsy, she thought, nothing changes that. We learn so slowly. Look at us in this house, the sum of experience that should mean that we have all progressed and are happy. Yet we are caught in the traps we make for ourselves, the blind spots where we don’t learn, the mysteries we’re afraid to touch, the secrets we keep even from ourselves. If we could only open to the soft flow of music through space, listen to that mysterious song, and loose our hold on the need to control our understanding, we’d be so free, and so wise.

  Instead wisdom eludes us more the more desperately we pursue it. And we live our clumsy well-meaning lives, pretending with bravado that we’d rather not be wise anyway, it’s much more fun to be willful.

  But she took up the feather, the plectrum nature provided, and strummed the dulcimer softly. The resonant notes vibrated behind her forehead. When she was young she had been afraid to sing, afraid her hard voice would not be perfect. But like the search for wisdom, her search for perfection had been abandoned; now she concerned herself only with remembering the words to the songs and rendering their tunes accurately, and left the judgment up to others. She took the dulcimer with its soft curves like a human body’s, lifted it in her tired hands, went downstairs, and joined the circle of singers.

  journal:

  I saw the sky was orange above the white-rimed trees tonight, before I turned on the light and the room folded around me. Simple then to think I hadn’t seen the world burning. What is it that fire against the black sky? And the trees standing solid up against it like iron, tracing their determination against the Hallowe’en sky

  Snow

  The alien one sits at the window and watches, and is silent

  What’s left for me in the ghost of the night? I miss my mother, she always knew my heart. Came walking to me in my dream last night with tears in her eyes, said, are you lonely? I said, what do you think? What about you? She said, it’s nothing, it’s just the blues. The alien was there, took my mother in pale arms, rocked her like a kitten, said, don’t cry, you’re over the barrier now. And she smiled at me and said, yes, that’s true, dear. Take care of the traveler. I don’t have to travel anymore. And I woke up crying and I’m crying now, because it wasn’t her, it wasn’t me, and she doesn’t talk to me anymore, but I make a simulacrum of her to prove me foolish in my sleep

  Darlin’ mother, we are in such a story. If only you were with me to hear the end

  But I’ll hear the end, she says as clear as the night sky, in my mind, right now. You’re the one who’s gonna miss the good-byes

  And the alien unfolds from the window seat and the cat jumps down from beside, Marbl, she’s the one who takes to that one, and me? I’m in the middle weeping for my dead. And my dead heart

  There’s a heart in the sky, burning. Like the sacred heart the Catholics wear, post above their beds to bleed on their sleep. O mother, I’m tired, I can’t see the night without thinking of you, it turns to fire and bleeds on my dreams

  Who’s this cool one who floats thru the house? Nothing is mine but my sleep. Who’s making a memory for me? And who is the woman who floats in my mind? I don’t know her; she’s me

  She and I together. We never get a good night’s sleep. If only it was passion drove me, but not even that. Can’t give it to myself, can’t take it anywhere. Too far from all those secret and not so secret loves. Whose hand was it made me come and go so far out in space I never saw a way to go, and only came back like a particle pulled slowly by my gravity, reluctant to fall, leaping back up and sinking, flying and sinking, until my feet were on the ground and my hand on her heart?

  I can remember with my head, but my soul can’t remember any more. There’s no distance longer than death, except this one

  “Blue’s not seeing enough of the world,” said Kowalski.

  “Most people don’t see much of the world,” said the grey man, but he regretted his automatic contradiction almost immediately. It was just that he was used to having to disagree with Ko, and not used to Ko saying anything brilliant. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Why don’t we teach them to use the F/X latex?”

  “The Mission: Impossible stuff?” said Lemieux, who was the oldest of them, and whose media references were often decades out of date. McKenzie was surprised.

  “Yeah,” said Kowalski. “That stuff. All they need to do is face and hands. The eyes are blue, that’s okay, and people DNA their hair all the time, or do dye jobs. Then they can invite friend
s home without us worrying as much about security.”

  Grey had to admit it was a good idea. “Sure, good call, Ko. We’ll send the make-up guys over there tomorrow to show ’em how.”

  9

  Through slow glass

  Jakob’s new friend was a dance student who, according to the netlog, had watched Night Through Slow Glass (the final elongated title of the VesperslSlow Glass vid) more times than any other audience member. He had then sought Jakob out at the university building where Jakob taught an advanced course, and had clung to him like cat hair. Jakob invited him to join the household for supper, but coming into the house, he had to run a gauntlet of security personnel.

  “Are we prisoners here?” Jakob demanded to the guards and to Morgan, who had been attracted by the shouting. Blue had come along with her, and watched with interest, quietly imitating the body postures of the various actors in the drama.

  “No, we are not,” said Morgan. “Come in, Aziz, and we’ll sort this out. Blue, cut it out, that’s rude.”

  Aziz was staring at Blue. “The pictures, they, the pictures just don’t give it,” he said. “Gramercy.”

  “For what?” said Blue, and the youth looked at him blankly.

  “It means ‘thank you for grandes mercies’,” said Blue helpfully.

  “Not in street slang,” said Jakob. “There it’s a fancy version of ‘Mercy!’”

  “But that’s wrong,” fretted Blue.

  “Words transform, languages transmute,” said Morgan.