The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  “This is the only way we’ll find her,” I said. “You gave me one story. Just a few more. The semester won’t last forever.”

  “Hunter still hunting?” she asked.

  “I think he’s just getting started, don’t you?”

  The ravens answered for her. “Mades always in the wrong place at wrong time. Boss man fixed them that way.”

  “The stories are a way to move beyond those constraints, if there is one. Someone knows I am here—the broken name on the Redress Form proves that. So maybe for once, a Made is at the right place at the right time.”

  “Who?”

  I sighed. “Me,” I said. “Meera.”

  “Takes two,” her voice was both needy and dismissive.

  “Maybe, but one is better than none, witch. Just like three is better, maybe, than two?”

  There. It was said. I didn’t know where it came from. I waited for her wrath—the gnashing of her teeth, the whine and retreat of the thylacine. Had I gone too far?

  “Never want to lose sister. Rule of threes.” Narn’s voice was a monotone, more terrible to me than any of her rages.

  “Depends on the kind of rule, from what I’ve heard. Either way, remember my promise, to find your sister if you saved mine?”

  “But good twin wasn’t saved.” She sounded defeated, suddenly. Old and confused.

  “That was me, Narn. I was the one who wasn’t saved.”

  “All this because crappy twin just wants to save itself? That’s what whole story is about?” Narn said. It was harsh, but I was prepared for her bluff, and came back with a winning move—the truth. Did I have a choice?

  “Kai died for me. And a part of me never came back. The good part. I owe you, Narn. I owe you my life. But mostly, I owe you a sister.”

  It worked. For a moment she seemed to be foundering for an answer, another excuse. I felt bad. “No,” she said wearily. “Sister is too lost now, too old. Too angry.” She’d hang up on me soon if I wasn’t careful. A flock of Mades and Malemades walked past passing a bottle between them. “Truth or dare . . .” began one.

  I peered down at the opposite bank—what had caught my eye? Nothing.

  It began again, that dreaming sound, the song of her hexing. “Double-double.”

  Callers along the bridge were hanging up and heading toward the safety of Tower Village. They moved with a new urgency. Far off I heard, Truth! No, dare! No truth . . .

  “What if Tiff is the key? To everything. If she went to Upper Slant, then this is our chance.” I said gently: “Isn’t that why you let me go, Narn? Isn’t that the real reason why you didn’t throw me in the trash?”

  The two of us living a lie for so long. I heard Eric lap at his bowl—pictured him laying his elongated marsupial face on his paws. I had left him—would I ever see him again? Who could I count on to explain it to him? Between a dead twin, a demented witch and a tormented mute, that didn’t leave many options. But I was beginning to see that you had to suffer into truth, wherever you found it, or it found you. It hurt because you never knew the whole of it. It hurt because the truth was always broken, always missing a piece.

  “Conjure tales’ power is old. Older than sisters’. Older than time. Angrier too. Teller must bend to its will, won’t bend to teller’s,” Narn warned.

  A new silence took shape between us. I knew it was a shape that wouldn’t hold. Was made to break. But it was all we had.

  “I saw Kai bend to it. She didn’t break—”

  But before I could finish, a scream from across the river tore the air and people turned and started running toward the Towers. At the edge of my eye I saw black wings outstretched, the tips so sharp they cut the sky. Someone called my name. It sounded like Kai and my heart leaped. But when I turned and it was not Kai, but just my roommate Lara, I felt so full of rage I could have choked her with my bare hands. Her open mouth a rictus of fear, one hand gripping the arm of the dusky, tearful Trudy, the other extended out to me.

  I didn’t hear what Narn said next because Lara grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard that I felt something pop. Babbling in her high, rasping voice about the Hunter, they dragged me away, half sobbing, half breathlessly laughing back to the Tower, where we belonged.

  CHAPTER 11

  WIN-WIN

  Swinging each of my hands in theirs, Lara and Trudy had told me about a costume party in one of the Tower dorm rooms on the weekend. An anti-Halloween, party, apparently. A chance to get dressed up in costume without being disrespectful to witches, because the real Halloween was still weeks away. I thanked them but said I couldn’t come. That I had homework to catch up on. And besides, I said, three’s a crowd.

  “Just for one drink,” Lara had said, the rose-gold feather trembling on her bracelet. “How can it hurt?”

  “You’ll meet people—our people,” Trudy had added, like it was a good thing. “It’s not called a village for nothing.”

  Her creaky voice braked sharply to avoid making it sound like a question. It made me wonder if maybe Marvin and I weren’t the only ones who felt endangered in Tower Village—caught in a war between those who wanted to make more of us, and those who wanted to make less.

  I said I’d think about it.

  Survival of the fittest, the Father said, that’s why I’ve made so many of you. It takes a village to make Paradise. The protocol by which he inserted his coded commands onto our fetal limbic system, in order to remake us in the image of a Lilith for the New World Order was literally ART, he joked. Think of ART, haha, as a chance to press “rewind” on the Fall.

  Think of your digital layer, he said, as mankind’s augmented action potential.

  Think of yourselves as the bridge between heaven and earth.

  Think of the female imagination, he said, as a vestigial tail.

  You will never sin again, he said, simply because you won’t want to.

  I alone have found a way to make men without the aid of women, he said.

  I will always be with you. You are the bird in my hand and in the bush—there is no end to my protection. Not even death can separate us.

  You’ll thank me later, he said.

  But we already did.

  “It takes a village,” Lara fluffed her hair, “to make a future.”

  It wasn’t that she meant to parrot the Father. She just couldn’t help it. “Or an aviary,” I said. But no one laughed.

  “If you come to the party, we’ll help you catch up on your homework,” Trudy said. “You probably need it.”

  She had me there.

  The party was boisterous and boring. There was a cauldron of some apple liquor and cheap wine made into a punch. Candy bugs floated in it. A Malemade wandered around with a plastic axe sunk into his head. Mades moved stiffly against the wall in nurse makeup and white suspenders. Someone came dressed as the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz and with her was a half-naked Malemade painted silver from head to toe, his modesty protected by silver Speedos. It was the Tin Man, who turned out to be Marvin. I was surprised. He hadn’t mentioned a girlfriend. I felt the old rage, that old unchanging sense of being sidelined. Was that how Tiff felt when her sisters left her out of the deal they cut with the goddess? When they signed up for it anyway, assuming it was all for one and one for all? Maybe it was that which turned her against them. Not the deal itself, not even how they accepted their repurposing as demigods in return for a place in the modern world. But how they went ahead without her. As if she wasn’t there.

  Narn always hated how I took the lost sister’s side.

  I drank a lot of punch and kept seeing the silver flash at the edge of my eye but Marvin and I avoided each other until well after midnight.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here,” he said. “Thought you’d be beavering away at your overdue homework.”

  One night in Middles Bunk, soon bef
ore the Father began her chemical unmaking, Kai had bemoaned how the Father refused the beaver and dismissed her from the backgammon table in a sulk. I remember being frightened for her and asking what a beaver was, and how the whole Middle’s bunkroom erupted in laughter, hers the loudest of all, and how my face burned from my chin to my hairline, and how I hated her at that moment even more than I hated myself.

  “As it happens,” I said, “Pagan’s invited me to read at a series called Fearsome Gatherum.”

  His silvered brow knitted in a frown. His nose-cone had begun to slip.

  “Didn’t the Dean outlaw the Gatherums? There were complaints, if I recall.”

  “Just jealous ’cos they weren’t invited,” I slurred. “There’s someone called Slasher Younger behind it.”

  He laughed. “Seriously? Don’t you remember? Queen Bee if ever there was one. And Pagan is hand to the Queen if ever—”

  “Blah blah.” I ladled some more punch into our cups, accidentally on purpose slopped it over the bulge in his Speedos.

  Marvin swayed, and I could smell his body paint. “You’re not worried about risking your scholarship? Might be a challenge keeping your grades up with the extra pressure. Not to mention your soul.”

  “Is that crotch on your punch, or are you just sleazed to be me?”

  “Come on. You really want to throw it in with a bunch of women’s college narcissists, Meera? Maybe just put a neon rinse through your hair, start an exfoliating blog and be done with it.”

  I decided I one hundred percent loved anti-Halloween.

  “Everyone who gets mixed up with the Gatherum crowd comes off worse for wear.” His irises looked like mirrors—his pupils dilated as a cat’s in which I saw myself times two.

  “I’m already worse for wear.” I looked around for someone drunker than he was, but not as drunk as me. There were rosy stains of punch on Kai’s brown shoes. “Who’s your date?”

  We both looked to where the Cowardly Lion and a black-wigged Dracula were sucking each other’s faces off. I was leaning against a window which looked north over the brightly lit parklands and the rest of Tower Village. In the very far distance a vaporous blur indicated a large city. The stars hung bleached and indifferent above all this light. I asked him how he was going with his term papers, and he told me that he was working on a really difficult assignment about criminal profiling.

  “It’s called mind-hunting,” he said.

  The room began to spin.

  “Really what it comes down to is learning, through imitation, to empathize with the criminal’s motives, to understand how they think by putting yourself in their place.”

  “So in order to find the criminal, you have to see yourself as guilty?”

  Glass smashed from the kitchen.

  “Pretty much. My face is up here, by the way.”

  Reluctantly I lifted my eyes from his Speedos to his sad silver face.

  “Did you hear those screams across the river a few days ago?” I said.

  He put his punch glass down. “Just partiers at Sweeney’s. The usual midsession hijinks.”

  “Hijinks sound good,” I said. “You look amazing, Marvin.”

  “I’m the Tin Man. Steadfast and true.”

  I touched his arm. My fingers came away slick with silver paint. I smeared it across my mouth.

  “We’re not going to have sex,” he said.

  * * *

  There is a wooden boat with a high curved prow, and a covered cabin on the deck where Kai and I lie curled in a nest of blankets. A rope coils in one corner. Blankets. Fresh water in squat steel canteens. The bony hooded being pilots the craft. We are crossing the black straits of Rogues Bay for the first time, heading for the mainland to the sisters’ home in the Starvelings, where Narn is waiting for us.

  I tend to Kai. I won’t let the hooded creature near her.

  When they came for her, I’d tried to scratch them, and opened my mouth to scream when they tried to pull me away. I refused to leave without her. I hissed like a lizard. I spat and kicked the bony tattooed sister. Kai would not be a name on a jar. She would not be a caption for one those horny devils in Father’s womb room.

  “Both of us,” I snarled, “or neither.”

  And because in the end they took us both, I knew that one was better than none—and that we were both important to Narn in ways that I had yet to understand. But back then all I knew is that I may not have been the twin she wanted, but I was the one she would get.

  I hold Kai’s head in my lap. I brush her black hair and keep the flies off. Her nightgown is filthy. I try to close her eyes but they spring open as soon as I take my fingers away. Her face still contorted from the agony of the unmaking drugs, her body growing colder by the minute but safe from the Father’s knife. And from his jar.

  “I got the lady-blood too,” I tell her. “It hurts.”

  I show her the feather I pocketed from Dani’s wing. I trace my finger along the rosy iridescence, a faint blush at the edge of the oily black.

  “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

  I believe she can still hear me. I have to believe in something. I try not to cry. I do cry. Sometimes I have the sense that the hooded sister steering the boat up and down the swells is listening. Their painfully angular form makes them lean into the wind like a collapsing tent. They wear baggy leggings and black high-top sneakers. I wonder what they are trying to cover up. I remember what Kai said about how Mag and Narn were born as monsters from spilled man-thing blood and how in order to keep going they must remake themselves in the image of their own truth. I wonder about this bony, sneakered body tattooed over every inch of visible flesh—what about its suffering rang so true to Mag that they literally became it? They never let me see their face, but sometimes look back over a humped shoulder and scribble seethes deep within the folds of their hood.

  The passage is rough. The boat climbs up a mountain of slop and falls down with a sickening lurch that makes me reach for the bucket that the sister-creature empties for me. They bring me fresh water—warm and rank but I am grateful for it. Seabirds alight on the rails and huge bat-like wings chase them away.

  “Bats,” I say. “A long way from the mainland.”

  But I know better. I know that bat-like and bats are not the same thing.

  Outside on the deck the first night, when it’s calm, a hot blue Crux wheels across the sky, and the bright scattered Jewel Box hovers like withheld tears. Dolphins play beside the boat. I see their humped backs and fins on the inside of my eyes when I close them to sleep. On the second night there are Right Whales, their flippers dipped in moonlight as they breach. The whales breach the surface of my dreams and I wake up tasting salt. Transport pods move like beetles through shreds of clouds. On the third night there are lights to starboard, distant ships carrying endangered timber to the mainland.

  What wakes me on the morning after the third night, is birdsong. Not gulls or terns but a magpie’s warble and the whistle of a shrike. Yellow light ripples against the rough-hewn wood of our cabin. It’s warm and I am dry. I can even hear a small waterfall and I tell myself none of this has happened. That it’s all been a dream. My sister is awake, and is already playing in the waterfall, cleaning off the stink.

  A heart-stopping dread gets me to my feet. The boat is anchored ten meters from a messy bank thick with waterlogged willows and mosquitos in its depths. Naked corymbia branches brush the dome of sky. Beneath one stands the sister-creature clutching the end of a rope. They do not know I watch. Their hood is dropped back from a skeletal face, the bones of their nostrils upturned and foreshortened. Inky tears flow from their eye sockets. Mouth hole moving in soundless refrain. From a fleshy tree limb, my dead sister swings stiffly in the morning breeze. A makeshift noose tightens around her neck. Her nightgown looks freshly scrubbed and dried, the hem brushes ankles mottled with yell
ow bruises. Her hair, banded in the blue ribbon, has been washed and brushed so it gleams like black ink. Her dead eyes stare.

  Narn’s ravens flap around her face. They ruffle tainted wings with an air of penance, of great resignation.

  I am splashing through the water and up the bank at a dead run. I am running out of my body and out of my mind. I ram the cloaked abomination with both fists, knock them down like a pile of sticks, and I am up the tree and unwinding the looped rope, ravens exploding from my sister’s eyes.

  I cut her down. Find a dry place on the bank. One eye is a bloody hole. The other is hanging by a rosy strand of muscle. Finally I become hysterical.

  “She died intact!” I foam at the mouth. “And now look what you’ve done!”

  I scream blue murder. I cry for death, for bloody vengeance. I am thirteen years old today.

  * * *

  Marvin and I didn’t have actual sex. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t wake up covered in silver paint, either.

  I’d be lying if I said that we couldn’t help ourselves.

  Guests were not allowed to stay over in the dorms. Lara and Trudy had gone to Sunday breakfast, leaving behind a fragrant cloud of hair spray and judgment. Someone had put a bottle of aspirin on my bedtable on top of a Post-it note with a winky-face drawn with a Sharpie. I made instant coffee and looked over my timetable and the syllabus for each class, and I figured out that with help catching up, I could still get minimum grades to pass the program even with juggling FiFo and the reading series.

  I just had to get Narn to agree. There was something about Fearsome Gatherum that I wanted as much as (Pagan said) it wanted me, and maybe that was why. What or who’d ever wanted me, who wasn’t already dead? The coffee burned. The truth hurt. I had to make Narn understand that I wanted to find her sister not despite the fact that she lost mine, but because of it.

  But Marvin was right. I had to keep up my classes, at least the eighty percent required to meet the demands of the scholarship. Biology had gone from basic to bewildering. The last lecture I’d attended was on the nature of science compared to nonscience. After that was a lab in which we were meant to learn the care and use of the microscope, various cell sizes and their properties, including osmosis and diffusion, and the difference between plant and animal cells, tissues and organs.