The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  “So it’s okay to just make it up?” I said. “I mean in terms of its power? But what about the whole thing of not being able to lie, even to ourselves?”

  “You’re asking about Fictional Forms?” he said gently. “If you’ll be able to fake it?”

  I cocked my head at him, feeling too warm in the overheated room.

  “You told me,” he said. “On the bridge.”

  I shook my head. Had I?

  He leaned in. “See?” he said. “I see your amnesia and raise it and you have no way of knowing if I’m bluffing or not.”

  He sat back and shrugged. “On the bridge you mentioned how you were rushing to sign up for an elective. Knowing the limited offerings to Mades, and that even most of the places are gone, and seeing that you were heading to Wellsburg instead of staying in the Towers to sign up for Spanish—well, I put two and two together and guessed Fictional Forms.”

  “Great detective work. Annoying but impressive.”

  His laugh came out as a jubilant purr. “Plus you don’t look like the musical type.”

  The extra time he’d been here had not only allowed Marvin to know his way around the system better than anyone should, but also explained his hybrid accent, part Upper Slant but still with some Rim drawl to it. It reminded me a little of the Father’s but less squishy. Marvin’s major was criminal psychology—plenty of opening for that in Upper Slant, he said—he was six months away from completing his program.

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” I said.

  “Honestly, I don’t remember much about . . . before either,” Marvin said. “The shtick just fills in the blanks, or cuts them out and sticks the broken bits together.”

  Starv ing Hills.

  I’d never met a Malemade in the flesh, but had seen the footage on the small TV at the Nag when the pods came in and airlifted them out of the desert, the screen filled with their drugged and blinking faces.

  “We just called our amnesia the Forever Code. It was unbreakable, the Father said.”

  Marvin thought about it. “Coded neural mesh implants laced with memory-suppressing proteins can be tough to override. But one day they’ll hack it, whether we want them to or not.”

  “Who?”

  “The real scheme behind the Redress Scheme,” he said, yawning.

  “Who? What?” My head was spinning, and my feet ached from walking.

  “There’s this database called Skillzone . . . you’re on it. We all are.”

  It was hard to get drunk and process so much information at once. I chose the first option. Once I came back from the bar with another round, I said, “So once all this is over . . .”

  “You ain’t never going home, Dorothy. Not intact. None of us are.”

  Dorothy, like The Wizard of Oz? “I get it. You had your share of Golden Book Therapy too,” I said.

  There was a fetching slyness to his smile. “Pretty much an essential prerequisite for acceptance into the Redress Scheme, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Why do they do it?” I said. “Go to all this trouble to fix us?”

  He explained that the Scheme was less about rehabilitation than a way to beef up enrollments in a failing Liberal Arts College.

  “And ongoing,” he said, “to fatten a dwindling Upper Slant labor force. And keep in mind that the data of every living Blood Temple survivor—the retrievable code on our neocortices—is recorded on numbered and named files for research.”

  “What kind of research?” I asked.

  “Research that doesn’t rely on live test subjects.” One of his suspenders was a little twisted. “Everything from brain labs to the military to the history of witches.”

  “Witches?”

  “Wellsburg having a great deal invested in that old chestnut.”

  I said: “Come on. Why would anyone want to study us, Marvin?” His name dropped easily from my tongue, as if I had said it many times. “We’re just a bunch of broken toys.”

  “It’s the Forever Code they want,” he said, pointing to his head. “If they can hack it, they can cut it out. And if they can cut it out, they can replicate it.”

  The room lurched.

  “Back in the Blood Temple,” I said, “it wasn’t our brains they cut out.”

  In my mind’s blue eye the Father was tall and rangy, going soft in the belly. In my brain’s other eye, the brown one, he was nimble and effete as a spider.

  “Paradise doesn’t come cheap, Dorothy.” Marvin cocked his head to one side—reminding me of Kai. “You honestly think any of us were going to get in?” I could see slow fatherly fingers as they hovered over a bone-white doubling cube. My sister on the other side of the backgammon board deliberating whether or not to take or drop—and damned either way.

  Marvin took out his phone and brought up a video and passed it to me. I watched ants forming a bridge of their bodies for other ants to cross over. I watched as the ants below were crushed by the weight of the bodies they supported to get to the other side.

  I passed it back coldly, my heart pounding. “No one is hacking me. And I’m not an ant.” I got up to leave, but he coaxed me to stay with the promise of one for the road. He didn’t have to coax me very hard.

  “I gather you met the delicious Pagan?”

  I sipped my fake martini. “She was . . . delicious. I guess.”

  “Except for the bad taste she left in your mouth?”

  “She’d thrown a whole piece of cake in the trash.” I slowly spun the glass in my hands, avoiding his eyes, thinking about that treacherous inkblot, the unspeakable broken word. “I think I got in under false pretenses.”

  “I gave FiFo a try last semester,” he said. Inflamed circles below his gray-green eyes that made him look older than he probably was. “It wasn’t for me.”

  I didn’t ask why because I figured by now that he’d tell me if he wanted to.

  “Fictional Forms is one of the electives that agreed to the quota. Tokenism with intent. So some survivors attend. We’re the new ground zero. Below zero, actually.”

  His arms were ropy. His Adam’s apple fascinated me. His imagination—his way with words—these were some of the things that drew me to him.

  “Yeah but why tokenism with intent?” The more I drank, the more it tasted like Narn’s Islandia brew. And Marvin’s voice, mannish and purring, helped the medicine of memory go down.

  “There’s always an agenda behind tokenism—exemplification if nothing else. The singular as a demonstration of the multiple. Did you know that the word demonstrate comes from the Latin verb, monere, which means to warn, the noun form of which, monstrum, means ‘an evil omen’? Monstrum eventually became monstre in Middle English and then monster in modern English.”

  “Fun fact.”

  And for the first time since arriving in Upper Slant, I was having fun. “What does that have to do with . . . us?”

  “I guess I just didn’t want to be the token monster.”

  I wanted to tell him the rest, about the inkblot, the half-lie on the form, but something stopped me. I think I wanted, even then, to protect him from me. “Seems like the Regulars want to get off . . . on our pain?”

  “Cult porn is the new fakelore, and we’re the new fakes.” He spoke quickly but annunciated carefully. I had the impression that he’d thought none of this through.

  “They can’t get enough of it. AIs gone wrong and atrophied uteri, boy sacs fed to the pigs, lab technicians with their fingers up nonconsenting orifi. It makes Regulars wet and it makes them wild in a bland new century where a good skeevy is hard to find.”

  “What’s a bad skeevy?” I said.

  “This.” He waved around the room.

  And he was gone, looking off to one side like someone had stepped up beside him and distracted his attention away from me. Away from now and from here. An
d then he was back. Shaking out his silver hair, he reached in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a joint.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  According to Redress Scheme literature, drugs were so contraindicated for our augmented brain that to be in possession could mean instant expulsion.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  We walked down to the landscaped track above the riverbank, sat down on a bench that looked into fog. The bridge arced above us.

  “My problem in FiFo was that I couldn’t remember what was real and what wasn’t,” he said. “They wanted stories of damnation that made the lucky feel double-happiness blessed, their exceptional worthiness confirmed by being spared, or even better, having daringly defended themselves against the inevitable, clever clogs. Proof in the pudding and whatnot. My stories weren’t convincing enough I guess, because they were too real.” He held a match to the joint, drew it in, and said: “No one can believe us, Dorothy. That we went through what we did and survived. The suspension of disbelief is just too much to ask, is my two cents.”

  “So we have to conjure a suspension that doesn’t ask as much. Something abyssal and sexy. I get it.”

  “And maybe slip a mickey in, you know. Beware Mades bearing gifts.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A seed of truth in the fiction, the poison in the potion and vice versa.”

  I swallowed my drink the wrong way. Took a few minutes to cough into my elbow, Mades glancing around in disgust. Finally I managed to say, “There was an old woman who lived at the edge of the Rogues Bay camp. She told stories. Not to me, exactly but—”

  He smiled at me quizzically, one corner of his mouth lifting beneath his stubble. “But you’d eavesdrop, Nellie No-Friends, from your sad little spy hole of boogers and voodoo dolls?” He passed the joint, leaned back and draped an arm across the back of the bench.

  I laughed uneasily. “I thought you said you had no imagination.”

  “I don’t. But I was a Nellie-No-Friends, too.”

  I tried to explain how the stories the witch told had a life of their own. “There was something between the lines, I guess—an image, or sound, or thoughtform—that tangled with the Forever Code. Imparted some kind of neural protection.”

  “Or psychic maybe.” He played with his suspender, and that ghost of a sly smile played at his lips. “Sorcery either way.”

  “I never quite figured it out, to be honest.”

  “You will, Meera.” He raised an eyebrow as I expertly held the smoke in my infected lungs with all the finesse of a Five-Legged Nag regular. “If anyone can.”

  I was glad the light was too dim for him to see me blush at the compliment. At the sound of my name on his lips.

  “Problem is I can’t remember them,” I said behind the swirling smoke.

  “Can you get more stories from her? Who was she?”

  I couldn’t tell the whole truth—I wanted to, but it was buried too deep—that unscratchable itch. And yet I couldn’t lie.

  “She rescued me—got me out and raised me. She had been a midwife for the Father. Well, more than that. A scientist, really. She knew how to compound lichen and fungi to stimulate ovulation and make the IVF media work better and faster. The natural antibiotics and coagulants helped keep the surrogates safe. And reduced the chances of birth abnormalities.”

  If the Assistants let them live, it was only as specimens. Or worse.

  “Well,” Marvin said. “I guess a little conjure goes a long way, especially in the belly of the beast.”

  Kai had been an insufferable know-it-all. Marvin—so present, so completely in himself—reminded me of her, but it was painful. Because Marvin wasn’t Kai.

  “How do you know about conjure?” I asked slowly.

  “Everybody knows about the witches in the Rim. Even, well especially, the Regulars. No wonder Pagan wanted you if she clocked that was in your background.”

  I remembered the altered word on my Redress Form.

  “Honestly,” I bristled, “my guardian may have a trick or two up her sleeve, but her real stock in trade is an encyclopedic knowledge of plants and their healing properties—analgesic, antibiotic, sedative, even hallucinogenic. She’s kind of famous in what passes for a survivor underground where I grew up.” I heard the brag in my voice, and felt that I had said too much, not as cheap a drunk as other Mades, but cheap nonetheless.

  “She passed this on to you?”

  “Let’s just say that I know the difference between wolfbane and witch’s hair.”

  He blew the joint back to life, cradled it between sensitive fingers. The round green orbs of his eyes swimming with light from the bridge. “Is it true what they say about the power of botanicals to corrupt the cult’s memory blockers?”

  “That and Golden Books,” I smiled. “And you know, smudge sticks and candles and a necromanced thylacine. The usual.”

  “She’s a witch then?”

  I studied my hands. “Not a fairy-tale witch though.”

  Marvin shifted on the bench, which caused one suspender to slide down his shoulders like some kind of strip tease. I felt a heat between my legs. Our fingers touched, and the heat intensified. I was starving.

  “Fairy tales have left the building,” Marvin said, looking at me closely.

  I froze with the joint halfway to my lips and the smoke bringing tears to my eyes. I felt his seeking mind. I tried to power mine down. But I was too stoned to really care if he’d started to read my thoughts, too buzzed to care that this may have been his intent.

  “You never know,” he said. “You might be quite good at it.”

  “What?”

  “Conjuring. Maybe you remember more than you think.”

  Later, standing in line on the Corso for pizza, he told me how after the helicopters came in and lifted the inmates out of both the mainland and Rogues Bay properties, he went to the city for a few years and lived with a foster family—“cue Golden Book Therapy,” he said—until he took up the Redress Scheme. He asked about me, and I told him about the Starvelings, even though I did not say the name.

  “Look,” he said. “FiFo is intense. If you’re going to survive it you’ll have to remember this: our pain is their breakfast of champions. You’ll need to figure out a way to fake them out.”

  “Mades can’t lie,” I reminded him.

  “No,” he said. “But witches can.”

  A good beginning is hard to find.

  “The bridge has the best reception.” He grew serious. “Near the middle. But be careful. The bridge has eyes. And ears.”

  I smiled up at him. “Of course it does.”

  “Wait. Tell me something: it was just the two of you? Back in those hills?”

  I knew he was probing, gently. And that he wouldn’t be doing it if it was unwanted. But still I hesitated. “Narn has . . . two sisters. One of them ran off. The other one wears black from head to toe and has tattoos all over their face. Oh, and the one with tattoos, they’re mute. Something went wrong with their tongue.”

  “Something went wrong with all of us.”

  I blundered on. “And there are lots of ravens. And Eric . . .”

  He waited.

  “My thylacine.”

  “Your thylacine. And?”

  He really had the saddest smile. And the kindest eyes.

  And it was too late to lie, even if I could. “And Kai. For a while . . .”

  “Until?” He pointed to his eyes.

  I shook my head, no.

  He nudged a lean shoulder against mine. The unfamiliar physical contact made the Corso spin around me, all fake neon and cheese whizz.

  “I guessed there was a twin. The mismatched eyes are the giveaway.” He paused as if considering what to say next. “I ate mine.”

  I put one hand over my
sister’s blue eye. “No.”

  “In utero,” he continued. “Or what passed for utero in the Blood Temple. Absorbed her.” He paused. Gathered himself. “It’s called vanishing-twin syndrome. Like you with your different colored eyes, one from her, one from you. I have a man-thing, F.Y.I., but also the same kind of cute little atrophied uterus like most Mades have. They discovered it through imaging and so on after I moved to the city. Not all Malemades are like that. But the good thing is that, unlike the other Males, I didn’t have to be made sterile once my sperm was banked—Meera, I was born this way.”

  He pulled my hand gently away and held it in his, and a current jumped between us. “But they’re never really vanished, right? More like, our twins are just in hiding. Inside us. Waiting for a chance to come out.”

  I lurched on the mica. Managed to push him away just in time to throw up onto my twin sister’s old brown shoes.

  CHAPTER 5

  KILL ZONE

  I woke up sometime the next afternoon to a text from Marvin.

  It was the first text that I’d ever received that wasn’t from the university or the Redress Scheme. I read it wound in rumpled sheets and through blurry eyes. It asked how I was, and said that after I’d thrown up, he had managed to locate my roommates who were at a film screening nearby and they got me to the dorm, where I’d passed out.

  I remembered none of it.

  I should have felt something. Gratitude. Maybe even love. I know now that it’s too late, but back then, all I could do was burn with shame. I didn’t want to need anyone here. Was “needful” the only thing a Made could ever be?

  I checked the time. It was after four o’clock. A headache needled at my right temple, but apart from that I felt miraculously lighter in my chest than I’d felt for days. I was hungry too. I found some peanut butter and crackers that belonged to the roommates, and I washed them down with Coke from the vending machine, thinking as I sunk back into sleep about Marvin eating his twin and if he ever regretted it. If he ever wished it had been the other way around.