The uninsulated stairway had been cold and exposed, but the air in the basement was stifling. The space was too small for the dozen people seated in ornately shabby armchairs or standing and resting their drinks on massive old tables with carved legs. It took Alice a moment to adjust to so many people talking so freely. The clientele at The Hearth tended toward more subdued conversation.
Here, no longer worried about being overheard, Juan looked directly at her and said, “What do you want?”
“A drink,” she joked. He tilted his head toward one of the tables, where she could see some glasses and a bottle of something clear if she craned her neck to peek through the crowd. She shook her head at his offer. She wanted to be sober for this. “I want to help,” she said. “You know I pick things up fast. I have a good memory, too. I’ll learn to do whatever it is you need.”
“Why now?”
Alice blinked. She should have been expecting the question. “They took something from me.”
“They took something from all of us,” he said. “It’s been six months.”
“I thought I could remember how,” she confessed. “I thought I could teach myself to read again. I can’t. I heard you all could, though.”
“So all you want is to learn to read again?”
“No,” she said, more forcefully than she meant to. “You know I’ve woken up every morning for the last six months wondering if they came in the night and took something else? I can’t live like this. They can’t treat us like this. Even if I could learn to read again, I’d still be living in fear of getting arrested or murdered. I’d rather die for something than for nothing.”
He nodded. After a long moment, he said, “You tried to teach yourself to read again? With what?”
“I found a pen in my apartment. I had some paper napkins left, too. I thought maybe if I drew enough...” Alice made a gesture of writing and then shrugged. She had thought if she let her pen touch paper and her mind wander, maybe she could conjure up the old symbols, as if they had drowned in the depths of her consciousness and she could cause their remains to drift to the surface just by force of the tides. She had thought maybe her hands would remember, even if her brain couldn’t. “If I’d had an example to look at, even just a paragraph, I might have been able to do it. I still feel like I could.”
Juan was giving her a strange look. “You should talk to the librarian.”
She followed his gaze to the other end of the long and narrow room. There was a woman leaning against the wall alone, not caught in conversation with any of the groups around her. Her short black hair was falling into her face and in the long slender fingers of her right hand, she was holding open a bright blue book.
Alice couldn’t tell if it was the sight of the beautiful woman or the book that set her heart racing jackrabbit-fast. She knew that book. The woman was intent on it, her face as still and pale as paper. Her inky eyebrows were drawn together, punctuating her expression.
Across the room, the woman lifted her head. She moved so deliberately, with such careful efficiency. Even leaning against the wall, she looked graceful. Every line of her body was exactly where she wanted it to be. Alice wondered what it would be like to kiss her.
Her gaze settled on Alice, dark-eyed and mesmerizing. Her lips curved into a smile like she could read every last thought in Alice’s head. Alice looked away. Her whole face felt hot. She cast around for anything else to look at or think about, anything at all, and that was when she realized the woman hadn’t been reading. She hadn’t turned a single page while Alice had looked at her.
“That’s Keiko,” Juan said. “Better known as Kei. She managed to save a book.”
Some library, Alice thought but didn’t say. One book was more than she had managed to save.
Juan perceived her skepticism, but he just shrugged one shoulder and gave her a smile. “We’re working on it, alright? Go talk to her.”
Kei watched the whole exchange, and when Alice finally arrived at her side, she simply bent her wrist to offer Alice the book. Alice accepted it with warm hands. It had only been six months, but it was a thrill just to touch it. It was so small but it felt heavy. Handling the outside of the book felt illicit; sliding her fingers into the pages and spreading them apart open felt obscene.
Alice still couldn’t read. It was silly to hope that the mere sight and touch of a familiar book might bring something back to her. She repressed a sigh at her own foolishness. “I know this book,” she said, instead. “Or I used to.”
Kei reached out and put her hand on the book to stop Alice from closing it and handing it back. “What?”
Alice smiled sheepishly, feeling suddenly childish in front of this woman who was brave enough to have joined the cause long before her. Kei had saved a book. Kei had stood up to the police. Alice had been at home dreaming while Kei had been down here, strategizing. Alice had been living in other worlds and Kei had been living in this one, trying to make it better. “I had this same version, with the blue cover,” Alice said. “I read it all the time as a kid. I wanted to be Lily so badly.”
Lily was a tall white girl with flowing red hair who had tamed a dragon and captured the heart of both a handsome knight and a powerful mage. Alice was short and brown and indifferent to men, but she had always figured that if she could find a dragon to tame, nobody would bother her about the rest.
“Holy shit,” Kei said. “You’re perfect. Where did Juan even find you? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Start with the cover. Show me which one means ‘Lily.’”
“You don’t know?” Alice’s heart halted. She was right: Kei hadn’t been reading earlier. Kei didn’t know how to read. None of them did.
“I’ve never read this before. I’ve been looking for someone who might recognize it for weeks now.”
“Where did you get it?”
“It was my sister’s,” Kei said. She closed her eyes and paused for a long time before saying anything else. “She loved hiding all her toys and stuff around the house. I found it behind the grate of a vent when I was cleaning out her bedroom. She didn’t--she never woke up.”
After Rustication. “I’m sorry.”
Kei nodded, swallowed, and said, “Not quite the heroic act of resistance you were imagining, right?”
Alice touched Kei’s hand over the pages of the book. She didn’t know what to say, so instead she pulled the book away, sat down on the floor with her back against the wall, and gestured for Kei to sit down next to her. When Kei did, Alice showed her the cover. “I don’t know which part is which, but I know it says Lily and the Dragon. That ought to be enough, right?”
Kei nodded. She seemed relieved to switch to a more practical topic of conversation. “The city’s official line is that Rustication permanently ‘purified’ us. Anya over there—,” Kei tilted her head to indicate a woman across the room, a woman who looked vaguely familiar, like maybe Alice had served her dinner at The Hearth, “—is sleeping with a bureaucrat and she says they’re so pleased with themselves for the bots and the book burnings, they’re not even a little bit worried. And why should they be? It’s been six months and we’ve gotten nowhere. We haven’t even found one lowly literate clerk with a grain of sympathy for the revolution who might be willing to teach one of us to read again. They all believe it’s impossible.”
“But you don’t.”
“I don’t. The brain is plastic. People are adaptable.”
“I wish I’d studied neuroscience when I had the chance,” Alice said.
“They probably would have sent you to the fields by now if you had. Besides, you did us one better. Read me a story.”
Alice huffed out a laugh. If only she could. Every time she looked away from the cover, the characters seemed to slip out of her mind. And that was only the cover. The first page was an impossible labyrinth of tiny black lines. Had she ever been able to read them? They were so small and so complicated. They blurred into each other, each letter tangling with the one next to it until all th
at remained was a squiggle across the page.
“Stop trying to read like you used to,” Kei said. “It makes my head hurt just looking at you, squinting and biting your lip.”
“Sorry.”
“It is kind of cute, though.”
Alice pretended to be concentrating very hard. She only barely resisted the urge to bury her face in the book. Kei’s shoulder was touching hers, and their knees kept bumping together, and she pretended not to notice that, either.
She had to focus on something small. The first page was too much. She shut the book and looked at the title again. “Lily,” she said out loud, tracing a finger over the embossed print. She closed her eyes and pictured them, thinking of the sound of her own voice as she did. When she opened the book to the first page again, the text was still painfully small, its thorny little characters all crowded against each other. But if she focused only on finding the word “Lily,” she could cut a path through it. By the time she had found “Lily” for the fourth time, it stood out like a beacon, high above the rest of the lines.
Kei was sitting with her legs stretched out and her back against the wall. It took Alice a moment to realize she was asleep. She was just as eerily and beautifully still as when she was awake, but her head tipped to the side and her hair fanned over her cheek. The room was empty. Alice nudged her awake and she grunted.
“I got something,” Alice said.
“You can read it?”
“Not yet,” Alice said. “But soon.”
Night was receding when Alice arrived home, leaving a fine ashen film of snow sticking to the asphalt and melting in her hair. Her eyes ached from staring at the book all night, but she was vibrating with emotion. She had read a word. She felt like crying, to be so excited over such a small thing. It had taken her all night to read a single word. But she also felt elated. It was a minor miracle. She wanted to go home and find her pen and write Lily, Lily, Lily on every surface in her apartment. And Kei had asked her to come back after her shift tonight. They would sit together and try again and they would find more words.
Alice had to check all her pockets for her keys, and then she was so tired that her first two tries didn’t unlock the door. She forced her eyes open wider and realized she was using the wrong key.
“Miss. What are you doing out at this hour?”
Alice whipped around and found herself face to face with a police officer. She remembered his face from six months ago, when he had knocked on her door and emptied all her shelves. He had still been wearing a badge on his uniform that day, but she had been unable to read it. None of the police wore badges now.
She had carefully chosen to come home by side streets to avoid coming into contact with the police, but he must have been patrolling and seen her standing at the door.
“I—,” Alice started, too tired and startled to come up with a quick answer.
The front door of the building burst open, and Lani shuffled out more rapidly than Alice had ever seen her move. Her grey hair was in single braid over her shoulder. She was wearing her dressing gown and slippers. It was much too cold to be outside in so little, but Lani stood in the doorway, holding her back straight and staring down the officer.
“Mr. Hodge,” she said, as imperiously as only middle school teachers could.
“Officer Hodge,” he corrected.
“Officer Hodge,” she said, unfazed. “I hope you aren’t bothering Ms. Duras! She’s only out at this hour on my account. I could have sworn I dropped my glasses out here in front of the building last night, and I can’t see a thing without them and I need to get to work this morning but I can’t possibly go without them. Ms. Duras has been kind enough to help me look for them. She’s a very good girl, Ms. Duras, helping a poor old lady like me.”
Alice had been neighbors with Lani for years and had never once seen her wear glasses. “Yes,” she said. “That’s it. I was looking for her glasses.”
Officer Hodge did not look convinced. “Miss Duras was at the door when I saw her.” He turned toward Alice. “Did you find her glasses?”
“No, not yet,” Alice said, and in a moment of inspiration, she pressed her thighs together and squirmed a little. “I was going back in because I really need to pee.”
“Oh dear,” Lani said, apparently scandalized. It took all of Alice’s willpower not to grin at her.
“Well,” Hodge said. “I suppose you should take care of that. I can help Mrs--,”
“Ms.,” Lani said crisply. “Keawe.”
“I can help Mrs. Keawe find her glasses.”
“That won’t be necessary! I was just coming down to tell Ms. Duras that I found them.” Lani produced a pair of spectacles from her dressing gown pocket. “Right at the bottom of my purse, would you believe it.”
Lani looked perhaps a bit too pleased with herself. But the officer looked between the two of them, with Alice still bobbing up and down in discomfort and Lani smiling and holding up her glasses as proof, and grunted. “Fine then. Don’t let me catch you out at this hour again.”
“Of course not, sir!” Alice hustled Lani inside and then shut the door behind them. Officer Hodge stared through the glass at them for another moment, but then he left.
When he was gone and Alice had remembered how to breathe, she helped Lani up the stairs to her apartment and said, “You don’t wear glasses and your last name is Pereira.”
“I do get confused in my old age,” Lani said, putting a little quaver into her voice. Then she looked straight at Alice and said, “Keawe was my mother’s last name. And you weren’t out there looking for the glasses that I don’t wear, so maybe it’s best if we don’t ask each other any questions.”
Alice nodded, impressed with Lani’s authority and her ability to think on her feet. “Thank you,” she said, quietly.
Lani patted Alice on the shoulder. “Whatever you were doing, girl, I hope it was important.”
“It was,” Alice promised, and that was the end of their conversation.
She went back to the antique store basement the next night after work, and the next. She varied her route and the hour that she came home as much as possible, and she didn’t run into Officer Hodge again. Reading was slow work. Sometimes she arrived to find that exhaustion from her shift had wiped away all her progress, and that she couldn’t remember at all what she had learned the night before. But she kept at it, even though she had to speak the words aloud to get anywhere. She shaped them sound by sound, feeling them against her lips and tongue. Sometimes when she turned the page, she felt as if the wall of text was a cliff face that she had to climb, and the form of each word offered a certain set of handholds: a vertical line here, a curve there. It was easier to hold onto the sounds than the images.
Two weeks in, Kei said, “So should it be the mage or the knight?”
“What?”
“In the story. Should Lily end up with the mage or the knight? I think they’re both jerks, but I guess the knight has his moments.”
“Oh,” Alice said. Kei had been sitting with her faithfully every night, and Alice had tried to share her rediscovery of the alphabet. She hadn’t realized that Kei had been listening--through her strained, syllable-by-syllable pronunciation--to the story. “She ends up with--,”
“Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know the end yet. Which one do you want her to end up with?”
Alice hesitated, looking down at the text. Kei nudged their shoulders together, and Alice took a breath and said, almost as slowly as if she were reading, said, “I always wanted her to end up with the witch.”
When she risked a glance at Kei, she saw that a smile was lifting the corners of her eyes, even though her lips were pressed together like she was holding back what she wanted to say.
“Percy’s a dolt and Tristan is insufferable,” Alice explained. Kei’s silence made her anxious, even if she was smiling instead of edging away. Alice had said too much, but the only solution she could think of was to say more. Her opinion was entirely j
ustifiable, after all. “The witch always seems to know so much more about the world than everyone else, and she listens to Lily when no one else will, and she always knows exactly what to say--,”
“And she’s beautiful.”
“Well,” Alice said, and then she didn’t have to think of the rest because Kei kissed her. It seemed sudden, but only because Alice’s pulse was thrumming under her skin. The kiss had not been sudden. Kei had accomplished it with her usual grace, reaching across to cup Alice’s cheek and turn her head so that she could bring their lips together. Kei kissed deliberately, with certainty, the same way she did everything else. She brushed the pad of her thumb across Alice’s cheek and drew her fingertips over the shell of Alice’s ear. The soft press of her lips formed the shape of some unknowable word. Alice answered in kind, discovering a whole new language at the tip of her tongue.
When they finally broke apart, Alice reached over to brush Kei’s hair away from her face. “She’s very beautiful,” she said, and Kei laughed.
Weeks passed, and deciphering chapters became easier and easier, so Alice made Kei read instead. She showed Kei her pen, that secret treasure, and she spent one evening practicing writing on her hands and arms while Kei read out loud. It was not as difficult to relearn as reading. Her hands remembered. Kei told her to stop wasting ink. They would need that pen later. They would need a thousand more. They would need paper, too, but most of all they would need a way to teach people to read and write in secret.
It felt insurmountable. Alice was already going home in the middle of the night, only to trudge through her shift the next day half-dead with exhaustion.
One night, while they were sitting on the basement floor in their usual spot, she said to Kei: “You ever think about leaving?”
“Of course,” Kei said. “But where would we go? How would we even get there?” Alice stared at her, stuck on the word ‘we.’ But Kei didn’t notice. “They don’t give permits to cross the border to illiterates like us. So we’d have to sneak across at night between patrols. The wall is fifteen feet high and there’s electrified wire across the top, so we’d have to take that into consideration. And then it’s a week’s walk through the plains to anywhere. We’d never survive if we went now. We might have a chance in the summer, but it would be blazing hot. And once we got wherever we were going, at best we’d be refugees. At worst, we’d be caught as criminals and get sent back immediately.”
Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Page 31