Out of the smoke, nine figures emerge. The Undine, Ming Liu, Wayan, Kadek, and the five other Indonesian brothers.
—Well, says Ming Liu, —that was certainly unproductive.
You shiver, suddenly, uncontrollably.
The Undine puts a hand to your shoulder. —It is fortunate that I have some command over this place. Jurong will regenerate, and I can bring back all the plant and animal life, though it will take some doing.
—What will you do to me? you ask. —Will you erase my memory again?
—No. This clearly did not work last time. And punishment seems to be out of the question. Instead, we will help you.
—How?
—We will teach you to accept, to see beyond the reasoning of events, beyond the supposed fairness of the universe. To understand that things happen, such as our imprisonment, and that it is not for us to obsess over why, or to dwell on it, but to move on. We will teach you to live.
~
—Like this, Kadek says. —In through the nose, filling up your lungs, and out through the mouth. Good. Better.
You sit on the ground at the base of the newly grown Mother Tree, learning to breathe, to meditate. More and more mynahs populate the Mother Tree every day, mocking Kadek with their taunts. But he shows a vast amount of patience, unwilling to accept their provocation, treating them with respect even as he stuns them with his sonic weapon, stores them in a canvas sack, and relocates them to other sections of the Park.
You have noticed a change in yourself as well, a feeling of increasing peace. Your mind relaxes and the memories slowly return, not stolen but buried, hidden away until you were prepared to deal with them. Your past actions shame you, the lies, the pain you caused, the countless lives affected by the machinations of you and your elemental sister. With this gradual recollection, you can appreciate more fully the person you were, and the person you wish to become.
The meditation over, Wayan gently slaps you on the back and smiles. He hands you the bag of groundskeeping tools, and you follow him to a northeastern area of the Park, the home of tens of thousands of pink flamingos. The Park becomes more familiar every day as you reacquaint yourself, the paths no longer quite so labyrinthine, the heat no longer so intolerable.
At Flamingo Lake, you trim away dead foliage, you plant new strains of lily, you dig a new pool for the specialized nursery, where the flamingos can raise their young away from the other birds in the park. You dig, the shovel solid in your hands, each thunk a verification of existence, the moistened soil and plants filling your nostrils with life, you dig and your thoughts of how to escape such a place vanish, and your worries about the nature of your imprisonment evaporate, you dig for the feel of the tool in your hands, for the productivity of it, you dig, you dig, you dig, and you are alive.
Always a Risk
The chair upon which Julian fidgeted was constructed from the spotted purple epidermis of an unknown giant bird, and even through a layer of rough clothing—unremarkable cotton undershirt and trousers, and a wool vest with an interior pocket, inside which were nestled his traveling documents—the leather had caused an almost constant itching sensation for the past three days in which he had taken up his sentry position in it. Although it was entirely possible that the chair was infested with fleas, Julian shivered at the idea that either he was allergic to the birdskin itself—because of its natural oils or whatever chymical process had been utilized in order to treat it—or that a hex had been placed on the chair so that less determined patrons of the hostel would not be tempted, as Julian had, to remain in it for long periods of time.
Were the hostel lobby in which he squirmed and scratched to avail itself of another chair, Julian would have gladly traded places after five minutes on the first day; as it was, his only alternative was the scuffed hardwood floor, which proved useless for watching the lobby’s sole window, which, from the chair’s point of view, afforded a view of the town’s single dusty thoroughfare, and hence of any vehicle that would be stopping for final provisions before traversing the half-mile north to the checkpoint. So, the chair it was; Julian had, through power of concentration alone, succeeded in meditatively ignoring the worst of the sensation, and instead alternated his attention between swiping through the virtual pages of the ætherically-powered volume of Advanced Fluid Dynamics, 37th Edition in his lap and impatiently watching the street just outside.
Without any sort of personal conveyance, he was at the mercy of whomever might show him enough kindness in order to allow him to ride with them to the border, and beyond, to Bamboo Duo, and thence to the university at the heart of its capitol, cityCityCITY. And impatient because the checkpoint would only remain open another three days, and then slam shut for another septade. Julian was not surprised that more people weren’t queueing up for the chance to enter the interstitial realm, the buffer zone between the dominions of man and demon; most of the people he knew considered demons as creatures of pure malevolent evil, unworthy to live, let alone to work with in an academic environment in order to solve the worldswide drought affecting all three realms. If he could put aside his own unconscious revulsion of the demons with whom he expected to conduct his studies in cityCityCITY, he optimistically imagined nothing but success and prosperity.
But he had to get to cityCityCITY first, and his nerves jumped at any movement from the window, although all he had detected so far were drunken perambulators weaving home from the town’s only pub down the road and the occasional slavering pariah dog. He shifted in his seat, a motion having less to do with the constant itching than with the carved jade elephant safely tucked in a pouch on the inside of his underpants, a priceless object that had been passed down through his mother’s side of the family for hundreds of years, and the only payment he could offer to a driver bound for the Southeast Asian selvage to the north. It pressed uncomfortably into his genitals and so, after furtively glancing about to ensure that the hostel’s manager was not in sight, he leaned back and shoved his right hand down into his trousers to manually shift the carving to a better location. Task accomplished, he retracted his hand and exhaled.
“Feel better?”
Julian jumped at the voice, nearly dropping his æ-reader onto the floor. Standing next to the front door, although he had not heard her enter, was a beautiful woman, ethnically Chinese like Julian—a rare sight among the stragglers and passersthrough of the border town—and dressed in finery that seemed to come directly out of cityCityCITY itself: a high-necked blouse that resembled the top half of a cheongsam, a long-sleeved bolero jacket with tails that draped nearly all the way to the floor like a Malkoha bird, and fitted trousers that flared out slightly at the cuffs, all of it exquisitely tailored in silk brocade, each piece a slightly different complementary shade of blue. With such an ostentatious showing of upper-class clothing, Julian would have been unsurprised had she affected an attitude of hauteur or arrogance, but instead she leaned against the wall, arms crossed loosely, and smirked at him.
“I ... um ... that is ...”
“Oh, no need to explain,” the lady said. Was she royalty? “Sometimes one must just scratch that itch, eh?” Her accent was nasally brash, as if she had spent a great deal of time in Amerika, and unexpectedly throaty. Julian felt a blush rushing up his neck to color his cheeks.
“It, erhm, it was not like that. You see—”
“Never mind, never mind. You’re Julian, is it?”
“Yes,” Julian said, sitting up straighter in the chair, resisting the strong urge to leap to his feet and bow deeply at the waist. “I am Julian Xue Zhe of Tumasik Town.”
“And you’re bound for cityCityCITY, correct?”
“Yes, Lady— Yes.”
“You have all the proper visas and sigils?”
“I do.”
The lady laughed once at the expression on Julian’s face, a brief exhalation that might have escaped notice if he hadn’t been paying such close attention to her. “You’re wondering how I know all this?”
“I, um, yes.”
The woman’s smirk changed very subtly into a genuine smile. “Everyone in town knows who you are and where you’re going.” A notion that Julian, who had attempted to keep his head down and avoid any unwanted attention, found deeply discomfiting. “And that you need a ride.”
At this, Julian did stand, the motion dispelling the continuous itching sensation on his skin almost immediately. Just as he opened his mouth to reply in the affirmative, he noticed that as he and the high-class lady had been talking, a gentle rain shower had begun to fall outside; yet he knew without close examination that it was an unnatural rain, fizzling to vapor half a meter above the ground and therefore denying the cracked and parched earth of its much-needed moisture, a cruel tease that had plagued Julian’s town and all surrounding lands for almost a year. Attempts to capture the rain from roof-mounted rain barrels proved equally fruitless; the rain stopped just shy of any surface, no matter its elevation, including buildings, people, and pariah dogs.
Julian cleared his throat, aware of the awkwardness of the moment, and a harrumph of reply sounded from just behind him: the hostel manager, who had emerged from his tiny office in response to the darkening of the early evening light thanks to the ab-rain. Although Julian appeared to be the hostel’s sole lodger at the moment, he had been given the distinct impression that the manager only reluctantly allowed his presence, despite the scrip Julian paid each morning. The manager, a crusty old man of olive skin and indeterminate ethnicity, whose cratered nose boasted the most pockmarks Julian had ever seen, quietly shuffled around the lobby, lighting the room’s gas lamps with a fwoomph of methane ignition, then returned to his station behind the front counter. He fixed the woman at the door with an expression that might have indicated scorn, suspicion, or constipation.
“Lady?” the manager grumbled. Julian’s hunch had been correct. “What you doing here?”
“I require a room for the night,” she said, her smile unchanging but the positivity leaving her eyes, so that the expression more accurately resembled a grimace. “Anything else is beyond your concern.”
“That right?”
“That’s right.”
The manager harrumphed again, as though he and the Lady had engaged in this exchange dozens of times before. “You got the scrip?”
The Lady unfolded her arms and placed her hands on her slender hips. “Do I look as if I can’t pay?”
The manager chuckled under his breath, reached under the desk and produced a room key. “Just the one night?”
“That’s correct,” she said. “My friend Julian and I will be traveling into Bamboo Duo tomorrow.”
Julian, aware once again of his presence in the room, swallowed hard. “We are?”
“I assume you have something to barter for your passage?”
Julian blushed again, exercising all of his willpower to avoid patting the jade elephant nestled next to his groin. “I do.”
“Then we set off tomorrow morning at nine.”
Julian exhaled, the tension melting from his shoulder muscles. At last.
“Excuse me, Lady, but what I shall I call you?”
She stepped forward, the tails of her jacket swishing behind her audibly, and presented her right hand. Julian shook it and her grip was firm. “You may call me Blue,” she said, and the smile once again stretched up into her eyes.
~
Blue’s vehicle was a beast of a hybrid automobile. Even switched off, it exuded the sharp sizzle of technomancy from several paces away, and Julian curiously wondered if its engine had been inscribed with runes of protection and propulsion. Hard-topped sloping fastback and black as the deepest midnight, the vehicle was a marvel of curved surfaces and polished chrome, its tall grille as daring a display as a tiger baring its fangs. The body of the car hugged the ground, allowing only an inch of clearance so as to prevent tampering with the undercarriage, its steel body a throwback to earlier days, before the invention of plastics and phlogiston engines had led to the innovation of lighter and more fuel-efficient vehicles. It looked as if it could withstand cannonfire, or whatever thaumaturgical attacks might await them on the road to cityCityCITY. Etched into lid of the car’s boot in swooping arabesques: “Fleetline Coupe.”
Julian stood by the passenger door—what should have been, to his mind, the driver’s side door, which would make this an imported Amerikan car—shifting his stuffed duffel from one hand to the other, bringing his pocketwatch to his ear to make sure it was ticking. She had said nine o’clock. Yet, as the minute hand made its careful way from 9:40 to 9:45 and Blue still failed to emerge from the hostel, Julian revisited the strange conversation from the previous evening. Definitely, nine o’clock. The morning sun oppressively beat down as though a giant hand were pressing him into the ground; his armpits and the back of his shirt were already stained with the sweat of delay, and he briefly considered stepping back inside the relative cool of the hostel’s lobby, but then wondered if such a move would be considered an insult.
Finally, at 10:07, Lady Blue burst from the hostel’s front door, clad in the same clothes as the day before, yet at the same time appearing completely unrumpled. She wore large filmi-star sunglasses with obfuscatory lenses, and strode toward the Fleetline with a broad smile that caused Julian to forget completely about his discomfort and irritation, and to quicken his heartbeat against his ribcage. After taking a simple supper at the pub three doors down the night before, he had lain awake in his bunk at the hostel as the hours slowly progressed into the early morning, the image of Blue’s beauty forcing itself again and again into his mind’s eye, leading him to wonder at his karma and what he had accomplished in a previous life to gain the reward of such an elegant woman’s company. As she approached, he kept his gaze deferential; smarter men than him had allowed themselves to devolve into lustful idiots in the presence of such a woman as this, and he could not afford to offend her.
“Morning!” she said brightly. “Sleep well?”
“Yes, Lady,” Julian said, stifling an inopportune yawn with his back teeth.
“Oh, come now, we’re going to be traveling companions for the next two days. None of that ‘Lady’ stuff, all right? I’m Blue.”
“Blue. Yes, sorry.”
Blue extracted a long copper key from a pocket inside her bolero and unlocked the driver’s side door, producing a corresponding thunk from Julian’s side of the car. He reached forward to grab the handle and a sudden sharp ætheric spark caused him to yank back and yelp in surprise. He hopped up and down and shook his left hand, stopping only when he noticed that his palm had turned completely purple, from fingertips to wrist. Blue laughed, the sound of water gently plashing over mountain stones, and stepped over to his side.
“Sorry about that. I rarely carry passengers, so I forget to remove the defenses. Move over a moment.” Blue stood directly in front of the passenger door, closed her eyes, then performed a complicated mudra with her right hand and whispered something that resembled, “Da ba dee da ba dye.” She opened her eyes again. “There. All set. Shall we go?”
Julian opened the door, wincing in reaction to the second shock that didn’t come, then placed his duffel gently on the back bench and sat himself in the front bucket seat. The door closed of its own accord, hissing shut with hydraulic quiet. In front of him, the dashboard gleamed in metal and woodgrain, the dials and gauges primed for activation. The interior exuded cool, despite the intensifying heat outside, and Julian sank against the material of the bucket, which gave comfortably under his weight.
The boot slammed shut with a thunk of pressured air, and then Blue dropped into the driver’s seat, sans the bolero, the door closing noiselessly. On her left arm, the skin from her wrist up to her elbow was inscribed with dozens of runed gravings, worn as if a forearm brace, the thaumaturgical symbols forming patterns and tribal shapes and they moved, sliding like tar or lava in slow epidermal rivers. Julian had to avert his gaze, as the movement of the runes imposed an abrupt slugg
ish pain behind his eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Blue said, starting the engine, which growled to life like a living thing. “I’ll glamour them again once we pass through the border so that you won’t have to see them.”
“What—” Julian breathed hard through his nose, “what are they?”
“You have your travel documents,” she said, shifting into first gear and launching the vehicle forward, “and I have mine.”
The Fleetline surged up the border town’s solitary dirt road, spraying a cloud of pebbles and reddish dust in its wake. Julian was pressed even further into the plushness of the bucket through the rapid acceleration, and then, before he had a chance to get accustomed to the sensation, was thrown forward against the seatbelt as Blue braked suddenly. They were already at the border checkpoint, which consisted of a single tollbooth with a wooden gate striped in yellow and black; Julian knew that at midnight two days hence, the tollbooth would disappear along with the border entrance itself.
From out of the tiny rectilinear building stepped the border guard, a skeletally thin man, if a man he could be called, clothed from head to toe in deep military red body armor, his arms impossibly long, stretching down below his knees, his posture slightly hunched. A polished silver helmet covered his entire head, including the face, leaving only openings for the eyes, which, as he peered into the open driver’s window, revealed irises as red as his armor. His right hand unfurled slowly, extending long tapered fingers, and he made a series of high-pitched clicking noises underneath the helmet. Julian reached into his vest pocket and quickly extracted his tri-folded travel documents, passing them over to Blue, who handed them to the border guard with one of her blinding smiles. The guard then slouched back to the interior of his booth and slammed the door shut.
“Should I be worried?” Julian asked.
“Not if everything is in order,” Blue said, tapping absent-mindedly on the steering wheel. Julian briefly wondered if there were some sort of punishment for incorrectly attempting to broach the border, if his baccalaureate mentor in the Department of Engineering and Hydromancy at Tumasik College had neglected to sign one form, or if the sigils on his visa had been inscribed in a shaky hand, or if Form Y were required and he had only brought Form X? What might happen then? The guard was clearly not human, which would make him a demon or a strange mix of the two; what unholy terrors could he commit upon Julian’s body and soul for his crimes, for trusting in the abilities of others to see his way through? Infinite detention in the hell realms, epochs of torture and agony?
The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay Page 5