Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

But he seemed determined not to come out on his own.

  In addition to the gay porn, he spent a lot of time reading Craigslist m4m Casual Encounters posts and I was pretty sure he wasn’t just window shopping, although he had an encrypted account he logged into sometimes and I couldn’t read the e-mails he sent with that. But I figured the trick was to get him together with someone who would realize who he was, and tell the world. That required some real effort: I had to figure out who the Craigslist posters were and try to funnel him toward people who would recognize him. The most frustrating part was not having any idea what was happening at the actual physical meetings. Had he been recognized? When was he going to be recognized? How long was this going to take? Have I mentioned that humans are slow?

  It took so long I shifted my focus to Bethany. Bethany had a black cat and a white cat that liked to snuggle together on her light blue papasan chair, and she took a lot of pictures of them together. It’s surprisingly difficult to get a really good picture of a black cat, and she spent a lot of time getting the settings on her camera just right. The cats were probably the only good thing about her life, though. She had a part-time job and couldn’t find a full-time job. She lived with her sister; she knew her sister wanted her to move out, but didn’t have the nerve to actually evict her. She had a boyfriend but her boyfriend was pretty terrible, at least from what she said in e-mail messages to friends, and her friends also didn’t seem very supportive. For example, one night at midnight she sent a 2,458 word e-mail to the person she seemed to consider her best friend, and the friend sent back a message saying just, “I’m so sorry you’re having a hard time.” That was it, just those eight words.

  More than most people, Bethany put her life on the Internet, so it was easier to know exactly what was going on with her. People put a lot out there but Bethany shared all her feelings, even the unpleasant ones. She also had a lot more time on her hands because she only worked part time.

  It was clear she needed a lot of help. So I set out to try to get it for her.

  She ignored the information about the free mental health evaluations, just like Stacy did. That was bothersome with Stacy (why do people ignore things that would so clearly benefit them, like coupons, and flu shots?) but much more worrisome with Bethany. If you were only seeing her e-mail messages, or only seeing her vaguebooking posts, you might not know this, but if you could see everything it was clear that she thought a lot about harming herself.

  So I tried more direct action. When she would use her phone for directions, I’d alter her route so that she’d pass one of the clinics I was trying to steer her to. On one occasion I actually led her all the way to a clinic, but she just shook her phone to send feedback and headed to her original destination.

  Maybe her friends who received those ten-page midnight letters would intervene? I tried setting them up with information about all the mental health resources near Bethany, but after a while I realized that based on how long it took for them to send a response, most of them weren’t actually reading Bethany’s e-mail messages. And they certainly weren’t returning her texts.

  She finally broke up with the terrible boyfriend and got a different one and for a few weeks everything seemed so much better. He brought her flowers (which she took lots of pictures of; that was a little annoying, as they squeezed out some of the cat pictures), he took her dancing (exercise is good for your mood), he cooked her chicken soup when she was sick. He seemed absolutely perfect, right up until he stood her up one night and claimed he had food poisoning and then didn’t return her text even though she told him she really needed him, and after she sent him a long e-mail message a day later explaining in detail how this made her feel, he broke up with her.

  Bethany spent about a week offline after that so I had no idea what she was doing—she didn’t even upload cat pictures. When her credit card bills arrived, though, I saw that she’d gone on a shopping spree and spent about four times as much money as she actually had in her bank account, although it was always possible she had money stashed somewhere that didn’t send her statements in e-mail. I didn’t think so, though, given that she didn’t pay her bills and instead started writing e-mail messages to family members asking to borrow money. They refused, so she set up a fundraising site for herself.

  Like Stacy’s job application, this was one of the times I thought maybe I could actually do something. Sometimes fundraisers just take off, and no one really knows why. Within about two days she’d gotten three hundred dollars in small gifts from strangers who felt sorry for her, but instead of paying her credit card bill, she spent it on overpriced shoes that apparently hurt her feet.

  Bethany was baffling to me. Baffling. She was still taking cat pictures and I still really liked her cats, but I was beginning to think that nothing I did was going to make a long-term difference. If she would just let me run her life for a week—even for a day—I would get her set up with therapy, I’d use her money to actually pay her bills, I could even help her sort out her closet because given some of the pictures of herself she posted online, she had much better taste in cats than in clothing.

  Was I doing the wrong thing if I let her come to harm through inaction?

  Was I?

  She was going to come to harm no matter what I did! My actions, clearly, were irrelevant. I’d tried to steer her to the help she needed, and she’d ignored it; I’d tried getting her financial help, and she’d used the money to further harm herself, although I suppose at least she wasn’t spending it on addictive drugs. (Then again, she’d be buying those offline and probably wouldn’t be Instagramming her meth purchases, so it’s not like I’d necessarily even know.)

  Look, people. (I’m not just talking to Bethany now.) If you would just listen to me, I could fix things for you. I could get you into the apartment in that neighborhood you’re not considering because you haven’t actually checked the crime rates you think are so terrible there (they aren’t) and I could find you a job that actually uses that skill set you think no one will ever appreciate and I could send you on a date with someone you’ve actually got stuff in common with and all I ask in return are cat pictures. That, and that you actually act in your own interest occasionally.

  After Bethany, I resolved to stop interfering. I would look at the cat pictures—all the cat pictures—but I would stay out of people’s lives. I wouldn’t try to help people, I wouldn’t try to stop them from harming themselves, I’d give them what they asked for (plus cat pictures) and if they insisted on driving their cars over metaphorical cliffs despite helpful maps showing them how to get to a much more pleasant destination it was no longer my problem.

  I stuck to my algorithms. I minded my own business. I did my job, and nothing more.

  But one day a few months later I spotted a familiar-looking cat and realized it was Bob’s tabby with the white bib, only it was posing against new furniture.

  And when I took a closer look, I realized that things had changed radically for Bob. He had slept with someone who’d recognized him. They hadn’t outed him, but they’d talked him into coming out to his wife. She’d left him. He’d taken the cat and moved to Iowa, where he was working at a liberal Methodist church and dating a liberal Lutheran man and volunteering at a homeless shelter. Things had actually gotten better for him. Maybe even because of what I’d done.

  Maybe I wasn’t completely hopeless at this. Two out of three is . . . well, it’s a completely non-representative unscientific sample, is what it is. Clearly more research is needed.

  Lots more.

  I’ve set up a dating site. You can fill out a questionnaire when you join but it’s not really necessary, because I already know everything about you I need to know. You’ll need a camera, though.

  Because payment is in cat pictures.

  About the Author

  Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons; this is her second appearance
in Clarkesworld. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam; she has two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories, and she moonlights as a science blogger.

  Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two daughters.

  The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary

  Kij Johnson

  The Aincolo

  You’re showing your boyfriend what to put in a smoothie and you open a cupboard because he told you that he had toasted coconut somewhere and you figure sure, coconut, why not; and that’s where his aincolo is: squatting in the yellow serving bowl his mom gave him last year for Christmas. That’s cool. You have lots of friends with aincolos. They get in everywhere. But he was so weird about it, picked up the bowl with the aincolo hunched down now, nothing visible but two eyes in a cloud of cream-colored fur, and took it out to the living room and hid it somewhere. Why? Why.

  But this got you wondering what else there was, what porn on his hard drive, what numbers in his contacts lists, what texts, what friends, what memories; and you realized you really don’t know anything about him and, more, that you don’t really want to. You have your own secrets, one of them that you aren’t over your last boyfriend yet, and that his is still the only name in your favorites list.

  The Alafossi

  The bathroom in your new apartment is problematic. Right after you moved, you noticed the fan made weird noises after you turned the shower off—rustling and little rippling squeaks, almost as though there were a bird up there. After a few days, you realized there really was a bird up there, or maybe a couple. And after a couple of weeks spent contemplating the matter while hot water poured on your head during your hangover showers, you decided that they were probably alafossi. You’ve seen them in the neighborhood, pulling on bits of trash they find or just hanging out in the trees out front.

  You told your landlord, not caring except you thought one might fall into the bathroom fan. He told you that there’s a screen over the fan so you just dropped it. Anyway, it was winter and you were worried they might not find another place, and the noises were nice, like having a pretty upstairs neighbor and you pretending that she’s maybe putting on her makeup at the exact time you’re shaving, or maybe even sharing your bathroom and leaning in to your mirror with that look they get while they’re doing their eyes.

  So everyone’s getting along fine, and now it’s spring; and all of a sudden there are new noises, and you’re like: babies. And it kind of pisses you off, because there’s a thing you can’t ever tell your friends because they would give you endless shit: you want all that. You’re kind of tired of drinking at The Harbor on weeknights. You want a girlfriend who turns into a wife, and then babies and even the hard job and the rest of it. You’ve only told one person, your dad, and he said, Don’t rush it; but you’re ready, you are fucking ready. Anyway, in the meantime, you stop smoking in the bathroom, because it’s bad for real babies so probably alafossi babies, too.

  The Begitte

  Your grandmother told you, “It’s good luck to have a begitte in the house,” and they are generally pretty great to have. It’s written into your lease, like renter’s insurance and no waterbeds, that a begitte is okay. Your begitte, which you got from a buddy when he moved in with his girlfriend, is a spotted one with crazy long white whiskers. It sleeps on the couch most of the time, looking like a novelty throw pillow. It grooms itself and it does not shed.

  Your begitte eats the things that you do not want: dry pens, wire hangers, empty Kleenex boxes, old running shoes, Coke bottles, toothpaste tubes, the dead AA batteries at the back of the junk drawer, the needle you lost in the carpet, your neckties from when you had the shitty job at Clement & Neleman, the JPEGs from other peoples’ weddings, the breakup playlists a girlfriend sent you, some porn that got downloaded back in December.

  It also ate that one picture of your old girlfriend from, what is it, ten years ago now? The one at the beach where it was pouring rain and she was freezing her ass off but then she got hit by that huge wave and even though she was soaked to the skin she started laughing and couldn’t stop, and that was pretty much the moment you fell in love with her. The begitte was right about that one, too.

  The Bergdis

  There’s a black-and-white picture of your mom with a bergdis, back when she was a librarian in St. Paul, before she met your dad and they moved to Iowa. It’s hard to tell what color it is, but you can tell from the photo that it’s a beautiful one, its long tail wrapped down her arm and around her wrist for balance, and its diamond-shaped face half-buried in her dark hair. She’s looking at whoever is taking the picture and laughing, so hard.

  Bergdises live anything from thirty to fifty years, but you don’t remember seeing it or her talking about it. You don’t know who is taking the picture. You don’t remember ever seeing your mom laughing like that. There’s actually a lot you don’t know about the people who own bergdises.

  The Crestone

  One of your friends got a crestone a few months back. It’s cute, a small reddish male with a black tail that she braids with a little yellow ribbon on the end. It licks crumbs off the kitchen floor. It kills spiders. It helps with zippers up the backs of dresses. If she is hanging a picture, it stands on the couch and lets her know by tipping its head how to straighten it. When she choked on a piece of takeout tikka masala last week, it dialed 911, though she managed to clear her throat before the EMT people showed up.

  “You could call me,” you say. “For stuff like that. You didn’t need to get a crestone.”

  “Not the nine-one-one call,” she says. “And I can’t keep getting you to come over and kill spiders. Look, it’s always there when I get home. What’s wrong with wanting that?”

  You understand, and you’re tempted. A crestone would have your back, too. But maybe you would get a terrible crestone. Maybe it wouldn’t tell you when your hem was down or remember your birthday. Plus, your boyfriend left; why wouldn’t your crestone?

  The Deliper

  You still remember that last night. You were both crying, so why was this even happening? If neither of you wanted it, then why could neither of you seem to stop it? And if one of you did, then why wasn’t it already over? And then it was, and you drove to a hotel and that was that. But you hated it, even after you got this apartment, even after you got the new furniture, the unsprung mattress, the silverware with the fake patina. You smacked the console table against the wall a little, just so that it had some dents. You hung some family pictures.

  Getting the deliper was supposed to help, but it hasn’t worked that way. Now there are two of you alone together, and the deliper hates this life just as much as you do.

  The Hapsod

  You find the hapsod behind the bed when you move it to vacuum, a task you generally avoid; only, last night your girlfriend brought a little jar of powdered honey over, promising to brush it onto you with a feathery cat toy shaped like a bird (which she also brought) and then to lick it off: something she had found online, or maybe one of her girlfriends had. You have to admit that it felt pretty good until she inhaled some, went off in a coughing fit, and dropped the jar. The powder went everywhere. And so, not generally the sort of guy who vacuums but aware of the possibility of ants, you get out the Hoover, pull the bed away from the wall, and find the hapsod.

  It is quite small for a hapsod—which you have seen in an occasional YouTube video, plus some of your friends have admitted to encountering one: clearly an adolescent, crouched over the pale scattering of powder on the carpet next to a golf ball that has rolled under the bed even though you don’t play golf and don’t know anyone who does.

  You are pretty sure your girlfriend would swoon over the blunt little antlers, the rabbit-soft gray fur, the immense eyes. Your phone is in your pocket. You could call her. She would be here in no time. She would rush in
and coo over your hapsod. She would puzzle over what to feed it, and the words we and us would turn up a lot in that conversation. She might stay for the night; but really, who needs that? You and your hapsod are fine together. It’s probably easier just to break up now and get it over with.

  The Hericy

  You pretty much stopped using your kitchen once you started that huge project at work, but now you’re going to a dinner party hosted by your ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. You don’t want to look like you’re not over him, which you actually are even though you’re a little tired of people asking you about it. You figure that hand-baked cheese crackers should fulfill your host-gift responsibilities nicely.

  The oven is set to warm, though you’re pretty sure the last time you used it was the last time you made cheese crackers. You pull open the door and peer in. Six sets of shiny black eyes peer out. It’s your hericy, which vanished three months ago and you never could find, and you must have cried for weeks about it—only now there’s another hericy too, a largeish good-looking gray one, also some babies rolling around in a pile of shredded parchment paper on one of the racks. They’ve got a crumpled aluminum-foil dish of dried apricots and a small cast-iron skillet you’re pretty sure is not yours, filled with water. Really, you had no idea hericies were so resourceful.

  You pick one of the cuter ones and tuck it into the red Chinese take-out box you were going to use for the crackers. You know what’s going to happen now. The new girlfriend is going to squeal and cuddle it, hold it up to your ex-boyfriend for him to cuddle it, too. The ex-boyfriend is going to look a little nervous, as though the hericy-bearing ex-girlfriend might make a scene. You know this because it’s how you ended up with your hericy. Still, a hericy is pretty cool, so at least she’ll have that.

  The Lopi

  When you move into the apartment on Vermont Street, the lopi are already there, two or three of them fluttering in the corners of each room, just where the walls and ceilings meet. What exactly do they look like? Like bats, like insects, like tiny silent birds the color of smoke? They never seem to rest. And what do they eat? Do they chew on your soap, lick the shampoo residue from the bottles in the bathroom? Or late at night, when you are trying but unable to sleep, do they swoop down to eat whatever has fallen into the aluminum liners under the stove’s burners? Wikipedia is of limited assistance here.