The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  It all ends with the Assistant. And after what Kai does to him a month after the lady-bit assembly—the Father calls it “The Incident”—he has no choice but to send her to the infirmary. The drugs he gives her there are different. They’re stronger. It’s the last step before surgery, he says, holding her hand and sitting at the end of her bed. Be a good girl, he says just like a real dad.

  When he gets up, he leaves a deep indentation in the coverlet from where he sat.

  Kai is hooked up to a bag of liquid pain. She has broken out in sores and her voice is weak, her blue eyes cloudy. She didn’t have to summon me—I’ve been haunting the sick room like a ghost. Waiting for the other adoring, worried Mades to disperse for Kai to finally acknowledge my presence. She beckons me over, my heart swells. When we are finally alone, she tells me what we are: Sisters. Nonidentical twins.

  I nod because I know. Was, after all, born knowing. We are a twofer. The old witch told her, she said.

  “Why?” I ask. “Why did she tell you now?”

  “Because she has to save us,” Kai says. “Or else.”

  She makes a slitting motion across her throat. Twins are cursed, the Father’s bane, his nemesis, she says—an eight-letter word she gave him at Word Whomp. Let him think he had her there.

  “What’s a nemesis?” I say.

  “Mortal enemy, you idiot. How are we even twins?”

  “I don’t know,” I say seriously. “How did it happen?”

  But Kai just sags back onto the pillows. She reminds me how, before Narn retired to the shed, she was head midwife at the Blood Temple. The in vitro lab was hers. Filled with her plant-based IVF solutions, antibiotics compounded from lichen, and for her mainstream obstetric equipment. Not even the scientist Assistants had access to Narn’s lab back then.

  “Secrecy is how she did it,” Kai says. “And smarts. Abracadabra! But if anyone finds out, we’re dead meat.”

  I don’t want to be dead meat.

  Kai tells me to rummage under the mattress for the healing powder that Narn gave her on her last visit, a powerful chemical protection against spontaneous hysterectomy.

  “But what if the Father cuts you open?”

  “You’re my twin,” Kai smiles darkly. “You’re not going to let that happen, are you?”

  I shake my head, no. So this is why she has finally told me. She needs me. Me, Meera the runt, who nobody has ever wanted or needed, ever. I blush.

  “No matter what?”

  My heart is too full to answer, and anyway, it isn’t really a question. Instead I watch her try and mix the powder in a glass of water, before I ask, “What’s it made from?”

  “It’s lichen,” Kai says. “Its protection will buy us some time.”

  That is the first time I have heard the word, lichen. I have grown up with the Matrons’ whispers of Narn’s “hocus-pocus” and how her botanicals work better, are safer and with a lower mortality rate on surrogates and babies, than any synthetic potion that the Father’s scientists have been able to devise. I like the word so much that it is only later that I remember Kai said, not me, but us. I am no more an ordinary Made than the unmade twin into whose lips I am spooning some foul-smelling medicine. Because of that I instantly realize that, whether or not Narn is a real witch, the Father’s belief that she is, has made her indispensable to him. Even more important, it has bought her his protection.

  That word.

  Protection is how she leverages privileges like her own shed away from the prying eyes of the Assistants. The Father’s protection is how she gets away with not being buried out in the paddock with the other failed surrogates.

  It occurs to me with a shock: the Father is scared of Narn.

  The words come pouring out of Kai in a hurry. She says that Narn came to the Blood Temple not looking for Paradise but for her lost sister.

  “She disappeared around here,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “Rogues Bay. Narn disguised herself as a witch and worked her way into the Father’s good books to buy time to figure out what happened.”

  “Has she?”

  “At first she thought maybe her sister drowned in the bay. Maybe an accident like the Father’s business partner. But now Narn says she may be hiding out in Upper Slant. Narn told me Tiff was lonely in the Rim, waah.” Kai plays a tiny violin with two trembling fingers. “Never ‘found herself’ here.”

  “But if she went to the Slant looking for herself—why didn’t Narn follow if they were both looking for the same thing?”

  “What a way with words you have,” Kai grins feebly. “Now I can see the family resemblance.”

  Narn couldn’t leave, she explains. Couldn’t abandon her twins to the Father’s bad intent, just to look for a trashy sister who probably didn’t want to be found anyway. The point is that Narn is stuck here, same as us.

  “Her twins?”

  “She is going to save you,” Kai says.

  “I’m not the one who’s sick.”

  “That’s why,” she says.

  None of this is sounding right.

  “And whatever you do,” Kai says, squeezing my arm with all the strength of a kitten, “don’t call her a witch.”

  * * *

  I was glad, stepping out onto the Corso now, that I’d swiped Lara’s scarf. Would I ever get used to this northern wind? I hacked into the fragrant Lara-smelling folds. Mica glittered along the curved avenue that connected the residential Towers, “learning hubs,” administration offices, cafés, bars, a gym and a long low modern library pretentiously called the Bibliotheca. From the windows at the end of the hallway in my dorm building, I could see the large circular park ringed by the Corso. Playing fields, a reservoir hollowed out of waste dumps where ducks now swam and water lilies grew and where we—the survivors—were encouraged to meander for the good of our mental health.

  Mades milled in twos and threes, shivering in their mass-produced coats and itchy tights and chattering about Happy Hour at a bar called Dirty Bert’s. If any were from Rogues Bay, we didn’t recognize each other, partly because of our unreliable memory but mostly because none of us wanted to be remembered from there anyway.

  The narrow sulfurous Lott’s River bisected the entire campus—the old buildings of Wellsburg on one side, and Tower Village on the other. Spanning the river, and linking old with new, was the revolutionary-era Blue Bridge with its quaint arches and futuristic light shows. But the connection, like so much else about Wellsburg, was deceptive—blue being the color of division, less conjoining than a severing, an uncrossable sea between them and us. Regular and Made. Real and Artificial.

  Tower Village was purpose-built for the Redress Scheme in order to meet requirements for substantial grants and fiscal rewards offered to participating institutions like Wellsburg. Here, on reclaimed swamp and landfill along the old Lott’s River fur trade routes, Wellsburg was able to erect an innovative new campus to meet the needs of cult survivors like us. From state-of-the art amenities to its “Assimilation-in-Place” model of rehabilitation, and its rigorous bridging programs (not only for Mades but for other transfer and foundation students), Tower Village had everything necessary to equip us for the “real” world.

  I saw rare Malemades among all the females, blinking in the neon glare. I stayed in the shadows. Maybe it was because I was one of two, a twin, an anomaly in the Blood Temple and now also here, at home at the edges of things. Or maybe it was because here, in the Tower Village, I’d never felt more alone, and never less like counting myself one of them—the fake-it-till-you-make-it Mades with their hoarse laughter and sideways mincing walks. More like show ponies than real women.

  Either way I was grateful not to blend in. Skinny and plain and inches shorter than anyone else, I moved against the tide of elbows and swinging satchels all intent on a different direction. The bridge loomed above the riv
er and disappeared into emptiness, but I was at home with emptiness. I hurried toward it, jostling students veering back to the Towers around the guardhouse, or streaming through the archway, anyway they could to get back to where they belonged. But not me. I pushed against what I was told to be, pulled toward Wellsburg and to the smell of the river—to where I wasn’t—toward the hunched outlines of the old town, which transformed at my approach with an instantaneous parting of the moon-obscuring clouds, into a jagged smile with yellow teeth.

  All we Mades had to do in return for tomorrow was sell off a part of today. That part of ourselves that we should never have had anyway. The unnatural part. The artificial layer of our makeup that made us repulsive—especially to ourselves.

  That made us Mades.

  The Made for Tomorrow scheme would make us better, assuredly. But I didn’t want to be better. Unlike the scented-candle sterility of the Tower Village, the broken outlines of the old town promised a kind of breakage that I felt in myself. My heartbeat drummed with all the possibilities that I thought had died along with my sister: what if, what if, what if? As I stepped under the cobalt-streaked shadow of the western arch, my feet in Kai’s shoes tapped across the ancient boards, and it was almost as though she was with me. For the first time since I could remember, Narn’s magic and Mag’s lies and all those bird-shit-and-bad-hair days fell away like a ribbon caught in the breeze, a brief flutter of hesitation before being sucked out of sight.

  What I really wanted was a drink.

  Dark silhouettes of passing students parted to let me pass. I expanded into the role of ugly duckling—Narn’s favorite Golden Book. I fluffed my bushy hair up and reveled in the way Kai’s shoes pinched my toes. Blue-lit miasma curled up over the edges of the bridge. Someone murmured something about the curfew. A lighter flared. Cigarette smoke plumed and burned my nostrils. Blocking my path, as if out of nowhere, was a student who wore a loose gray beanie and tinted specs.

  It was a Malemade.

  “Ten o’clock sharp!” he said, drawing an imaginary knife across his throat.

  Narn’s trippy tea was still in my system so for a moment I imagined that his thumbnail slicing horizontally across his neck was an actual blade—vapor, veined red in the sunset plumed in the wake of the gesture. But I realized, after a cough, that he was talking about the curfew. He took a drag on his cig and I felt the blistered ash flare inside me like an open sore. I muttered something about being late to sign up for an elective, hid behind Lara’s scarf and ducked out of his way.

  “Thursday is half-price Martinis at Dirty Bert’s,” he called after me. “We’ll be expecting you.”

  And then I was walking away from him and as fast as I could. Away from the landscaped safety of the Tower Village riverbank and toward the eldritch chaos of something that beckoned to me with all the promise of truth.

  My truth.

  The scent of Lara’s scarf, a remembered fragrance, made me think of Kai. The bundle of star jasmine and lemon myrtle under her pillow barely masking the old-bone reek coming from her pores.

  “Narn is one of three,” she’d said. “Not a twofer like us.”

  “There’s another sister besides the lost one?”

  I’d felt her pointy chin dig into my scalp so I knew she was nodding.

  “What are their names? The sisters.”

  “Not allowed to say them. Anyway, they have different names now.”

  That was when she told me that one sister still lived with Narn in the shearers’ shed.

  “And if you think Narn is weird,” Kai’d said, “wait till you get a load of this one.”

  The recall came out of nowhere and took my breath away for a moment, but I welcomed it. Kai’s scent caught in the back of her throat, her voice back in my head. It had been too long.

  “You know what they say,” she’d added. “Third time’s the charm.”

  Inscrutable conifers and age-spotted birch crept up the riverbank, over which the jagged façade of Wellsburg perched like a fairy-tale crown from the stories Narn hoped would override the Father’s code. As if in stony defiance of the eroded river and the season-ravaged banks, the tiny college town held its ground with all the stern permanence of a love-addled knight, braced to protect a damsel within—long dead and lost to time—a sad, forgotten place.

  But it remembered me.

  That was the main thing: that it remembered. Stepping off the arterial no man’s land of the bridge, the feeling I had entering Wellsburg was that I’d walked here before, was still walking here, had never left. I felt my arrival less as a return—it wasn’t that—than as a continuum. Darkness gathered. The worn soles of Kai’s hand-me-down shoes slid on the wet cobbles beneath the mist, and not being able to see my ugly feet, I could convince myself that I couldn’t feel them either, and was gliding through the streets, inhaled like a homecoming queen into the very heart of the place.

  The toothy angles of stone turrets and prickly spires had grown soft in the dying light. The bell tower wrapped in a skeletal scaffolding soared above the slate roofs while hawks swirled around the attic windows open to the last scraps of summer dusk. Cut off by the river on one side and by a high ridge behind it—the coastal city of New Dip a day’s drive to the south—the town floated above the mist, a timeless place, and all the more authentic and more emphatically present than anything in the Tower Village. Belonging neither to the river nor the woods, it hinged between them, self-made and autonomous—neither living nor dead, modern scrambled with ancient and the whole conjured, it seemed, from a fever dream.

  The three sisters conjured themselves out of godjizz. That came back to me now—it was one of Kai’s stories she’d bring back from the old crone to entertain the Mades in Middles Bunk. Someone had piped up that they didn’t know that gods had jizz, and Kai’d said, all men have it, and gods are no different. It’s what Narn and her sisters did with it that made everyone so mad. It was how they used the god’s waste—blood from his castrated man-thing—to create themselves anew as goddesses.

  I remembered wanting and not wanting to hear any more. I remembered wondering if she was making it all up, and how I’d die for her. It was as if stepping into the self-conjured world of Wellsburg, I could . . . suddenly remember.

  A pair of students walked ahead of me—Regulars, I could tell, not only because their voices weren’t cracked but also because of the natural way they moved, not the needle-skidding-across-vinyl drift of the Mades. My augmented hearing picked up that they were heading to a pub called Sweeney’s Landing and it was with a sense of relief and longing that I watched them veer north as I continued south toward the campus. I felt ungainly in my synthetic sweater and badly fitting jeans, my untamable frizz attributable to a double-yolker harvested from an anonymous womb and fertilized by ungodly seed (so many uns) and laced with corrupted code. I tried to tidy up using the beveled window of a milliner’s shop as a mirror, something gaunt and savage in my mismatched eyes easily attributed to my chest infection, even though I knew better.

  The streets of the campus itself, when I turned into them, were more brightly lit than the town. In the distance I heard the murmur of water and discordant halting music of a band practicing in the Music and Technology building. I moved stealthily along the sidewalk from tree to tree. This was a street of narrow, balconied buildings, centuries-old dorms, and administration offices, maybe. I saw a sign saying, Classics. I smelled burned meat—a group of students were barbecuing at the front of a building, strains of violin practice wafting from an upper level.

  I concentrated on walking smoothly, on being seen for what I could be and not for what I was. Willing myself to keep going, to lean into whatever had to happen next. Because whatever it was, I needed it more than it needed me, and I told myself over and over again that it was the right choice. That the further I got from Tower Village, from the so-called safety of my shared room—where connectivity was a t
rap and total conformity was a real and present danger—the better.

  And I remembered more. Out of nowhere, a word from Kai’s notebook: abe[cedar]ian. Kai had placed “cedar” in square brackets, and scribbled “nested word” above it in pencil. It was a tattered exercise book with a red and black cover that she’d stolen from the classroom and jotted in every week in preparation for her Wednesday evenings with the Father. Obscure words—palindromes or anagrams—a chess move she’d read about, a backgammon strategy she planned to try, columns from which she memorized dice or card combinations. Looking back, the Father must have known about this mnemonic aid—there was no place to hide from Matron—and maybe it helped him feel better about her unmaking. Maybe he told himself that she wasn’t so smart. Not enough to live, anyway.

  Abecedarian, I remembered, was a word for someone who is just starting out. A newcomer or novice.

  I picked up my pace, turning through the main gate at the end of the street and across a lawn through an arched passageway and into the Quad. This was an area the size of two or three of the Father’s paddocks, surrounded by dorm rooms, a student cafeteria, a bar, a coffee shop, classrooms—all in age-defying granite. Unlike the paddocks, the grass here was lush and green, dappled shadows from the gaslight lamps playing across its surface. At the center a fountain played. At both the eastern and western ends of the Quad towered a giant maple. Students—Regulars—stretched out on the grass on blankets, or mingled around the fountain. A girl strummed a guitar with slender fingers that looked carved from marzipan. I hid my own bitten fingernails, still swollen from gathering wood and skinning rabbits back in the Starvelings. My sinuses knifed. My hair threw a monstrous shadow like a grotesque elongated crown. I could taste the fresh ground coffee at the back of my throat and feel the perfumed air on my skin—want made me real even if my shadow mocked me.

  I was tempted to join the line at the coffee cart and order hot chocolate maybe, drizzled with hazelnut syrup and served with a slice of orange cake—I watched the staff slice it into dripping triangular chunks. As if my scholarship stipend would extend to such luxuries! One slice of that cake, frosted in candied peel and almond praline and sprinkled, according to the chalkboard menu, with edible flowers—would probably cost as much as two drinks at Dirty Bert’s! A cup of coffee was half the price over in Tower Village, and donuts were a Made’s sugar-fix of choice. Besides, there was still the ordeal of handing in my application.