An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  Giselle picked up her sock doll, ripped the floral-print skirt off the soft body. “Fine then.” She climbed into her bunk, undid her hair from a thick braid. The loose coils bloomed outward from her face like the petals of a flower. Aster recalled the bigness of it, even now, though Giselle had long since cut her hair into a sensible, feminine bob.

  “Are you angry with me?” Aster had asked.

  “Yes,” said Giselle.

  “Will you forgive me for causing you upset?”

  Giselle sighed. “I don’t forgive. I’m too petty.”

  “But I will see you later, sister?”

  Aster said sister because she knew sisters could not choose to unsister themselves when their lives diverged dramatically. Friends who hated each other were no longer friends. Sisters who hated each other remained sisters, despite long silences, feuds, and deliberate misunderstandings.

  “Aye, I’ll see you later,” said Giselle.

  A decade is not such a long time, Aint Melusine would say. Days disappeared into Concept, Facts/Fictions, Theoreticals, Events That Once Occurred but Might as Well Have Happened to Someone Else for How Unreal and Faraway They Feel.

  It had been 3,611 days since that last time Aster and Giselle played house, pretend games their strange solace, feigning they were family.

  xv

  Aster checked the time. It wasn’t yet 19:00, so she had just over an hour. She hurried down to her botanarium, gathering materials. Giselle had asked her to do something, anything, and she had no choice but to try. They were sisters. What happened to Giselle had been Aster’s fault. Giselle should’ve stayed in the Shuttle Bay, but Aster had made her come down. This new set of traumas would fling Giselle further into her grief-borne madness.

  Aster flipped open cabinets, removing this and that ingredient. The bombs she’d made in her youth had been effective but small. More akin to firecrackers. They had also taken meticulous care to create. She fumbled a bottle of alcohol and it dropped to the ground. She was in no state to be working with explosives. She put down the jars of nitroglycerin she’d planned on using. They were small amounts in tablet form for her heart disease patients, but she figured if she crushed them all up together . . .

  She didn’t have the time and she didn’t have the know-how. Aster paced around her botanarium, looking for something. She didn’t know what, not until she tripped right over it. She didn’t know if it would change anything, but she had to try it.

  Aster got together what she needed and ran as fast as she could updeck. She couldn’t go to E deck alone, but Giselle had already told her how to do it—through Theo.

  A man waited at the centerdeck staircase standing guard. Aster handed him her pass before he asked for it. He examined it carefully and motioned to hand it back, but held onto it for several seconds as she tried to grab it.

  “Sir?” She imagined the second hand on a clock ticking quickly forward. He released his grip and she took the little wax-sealed card. She’d never seen a guard standing watch here, and she knew it was Lieutenant’s doing.

  She went to see Theo in his Goosefoot clinic in the same dirty clothes she’d been in last night. Men and women stared at her as she passed through the corridors. When one lady asked her if she might see about fixing the air cooler in her cabin since it was getting terribly overhot, Aster did not reply.

  G deck was mercantile. There were hardly any personal quarters, and the passageways stretched wide and open, with booths set up for selling sugarcane that Pippi or maybe Giselle had harvested. In addition to the Surgeon, there were other doctors, their names posted over hatches. Still early, there was little chatter, but Aster distinctly overheard the word coronation from a prim-looking man in a very clean suit. The brass buttons on his jacket shined.

  “Excuse me,” someone called to Aster. He appeared ready to ask her something.

  “Excuse you,” she said, and walked past him until she reached Theo’s office, one of several he worked in.

  There was a small bell attached to the frame of the hatch, and she rang it. When no answer came, she rang it again. A third time—again, no response—and she grabbed the latch and pulled. Theo’s office was nothing like his study. Instead of shelves and shelves of books, instead of bright globes of light, there was a pervading dimness. A few chairs lined the wall. There was a door inside the cabin—not metal like a hatch, but made of the same wood as the chairs.

  “Theo,” she called out, and knocked on the door. “Theo, it’s Aster. It’s an emergency.”

  “Wait one moment,” he said. “I’m with a—”

  But now that she knew he was there, she opened the unlocked door.

  “I’m going to ask you never to do that again,” he said. A clear mask covered his face, two utensils in his hands as he leaned over a man on a table.

  “It’s an emergency.”

  He looked her up and down, taking in her sorry state. “One second,” he said.

  The man on the table mumbled a few words, and the Surgeon removed the metal prongs from his mouth. “What in God’s name is going on?” the man said, sitting up, forcing Theo to push away the light globe hanging on a small crane. Before Theo could interfere, Aster reached into her medicine belt and removed a syringe, stabbed it into the patient’s neck. Almost instantaneously, his eyes fell shut.

  “Brandt?” Theo said, and patted the man’s cheek, then went to feel his pulse. “What did you give him?”

  “He’ll be fine. Tell me, can you take me to E deck?”

  Theo removed the white gloves from his fingers, went over to a pale of water, and dipped his hands in. “The coronation?”

  “Aye.”

  “We need to get you cleaned up. Tell me what happened to you. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  “Stiff. Sore. Not hurt. Please, can we hurry?”

  Theo nodded, directed her to one of the patient rooms. “Wash yourself up in there. I will think of something.”

  She nodded, and began undressing even before he’d fully walked out, her sweaty shirt over her head, her long johns at her knees. She went to the sink and guzzled water directly from the tap, filling her belly until she wanted to puke. It was sweet and cold and she could not get enough. There was no toothbrush or paste, so she washed her mouth out with soap. She preferred the taste of it to the guard’s piss, the acerbic bite of detergent cleaning her out, burning. She rubbed the bar of soap against her teeth, used a cloth napkin to wipe them clean. After her mouth felt fresh, she drank more water.

  She scrubbed herself with the cold water and some liquid hand soap because it smelled of lemon. Thick glops of it ran over her knees and down to her feet, her belly, her chest and shoulders, and she massaged it in with her hands.

  “Are you finished?” Theo called, knocking lightly.

  “Leave me.” She wasn’t finished, or near it. She reached into one of the cabinets and got out an old box filled with amber vials of isopropyl alcohol. Expensive. Hard to find. She emptied them out one by one over herself, even over her shorn hair, until she smelled like medicine. Until she was a sterile thing no more sexual than a pair of sanitized scissors. That sharp too.

  “I have sent someone for clothes,” Theo said through the door. She could tell he was not himself because he didn’t usually keep nagging after she explicitly told him to leave her.

  “I would like a towel.”

  “Of course, Aster, one moment.”

  Theo returned with the towel after several seconds, held it to her through a crack in the door.

  Aster was about to tell him not to bother, that he could come in and see her naked and shaking and wet, because she didn’t care, and she thought of Giselle and that man Warner, and of past times, and thought it might not be such a bad thing to separate body from self—even though self was tied up in body, made of body, made of cells, hormones, chemicals. At the last second she changed her mind. Covered her chilly, wet arms with her hands and jogged to the door to grab the towel. “Thank you,” she said.
<
br />   “Clothes are waiting for you outside. We shall sneak you to E deck as a man. All right? My uncle can’t know you’re there. In general, you’ll stand out less. Understand?”

  “Understand.”

  The alcohol left her skin dry and rough. She scraped her finger through the ashy white of leftover soap flakes. Her medicine belt was strewn over the exam table and she reached for the all-purpose salve inside. Slicked herself up with it. She shined. She was a brand-new coin.

  * * *

  Aster examined her new self in the mirror and said, “I make a very dainty man.”

  She looked nothing, nothing at all, like the man she hoped she’d look like, one of those burly, rough-faced types who walked the passageways of Matilda like a conquistador, each step a flag in the nonexistent soil.

  But Theo’s intervention was not completely unsuccessful. The garments were the fanciest she’d ever worn: dark-green tweed slacks that fit close to her legs, tapering into her ankles, a button-up shirt dyed a rich, lavish purple, a plaid vest, burgundy tie, and a jacket to match the trousers. The clothes fit like they were made for her, wide in the hips and ass and shoulders, but fitted at her waist. Aster didn’t know where Theo acquired them, but she was glad that he had. She looked neither male nor female, but if one were to pick—and people so did like to pick—they would choose male, of that she was certain.

  Theo grabbed Aster’s shoulders and turned her toward him. “Not dainty—stately. Well-to-do. You make a fine young gentleman, if I do say so myself.” He pointed to a chair. “Now for the hair.”

  “What for the hair?” Aster slid her fingers into the mass of bends and turns and folds.

  “It’ll need to go.” Theo glanced to the clock on the wall, and Aster did the same.

  “Men can have hair like this,” Aster said. With only thirty minutes to spare before the shift, she didn’t have time for a haircut. As much as she wished to stay here with the Surgeon, being clever.

  “They can, but they don’t.” He gestured again to his chair. “When you argue, you waste time. You asked for my help, did you not?”

  “Unless my internal glossaelia is incorrect, help does not mean haircut,” she said.

  “Don’t snark me. I’ll just take a bit off the top and shave the sides. That will be very handsome.”

  “The amount of enjoyment you are getting out of this seems incongruous with the objective level of fun there is to be had. Is this your secret passion, Theo? Surgeon General by day, barber by night?”

  He rolled his eyes and waved her over. “If I could have my way, you wouldn’t be going to this at all. Since you’re set on it, I’ll do all that I can to help you avoid trouble.”

  Aster finally walked over and sat, removed her watch from her medicine belt, not trusting Theo’s clock. “Do it fast or I’ll become angry.” She bit her lip waiting for the sound of snipping scissors.

  “Not an effective threat considering you spend a great deal of your time with me angry. It’d be no different than the status quo.” Theo set the guard on the buzzer and began to work, first using scissors to shorten the length to something manageable.

  “I don’t want to be one of those bald-headed boys who look like they had no mothers to comb and oil them proper.”

  “I’ll leave you some length,” said Theo. “Now quiet.”

  Knotted, kinked hair fell to Aster’s lap in ugly clumps. She gripped the arms of the chair, refusing to confront the image in the mirror.

  “You think I would hurt you?” he asked.

  She thought about that question, working through the possibilities, and realized the answer was no; she did not believe he would hurt her. There was no one else she felt that way about. Not even Ainy. “No,” she answered.

  “Then breathe. It will look fine. You will be fine, little nervous one,” he said in Low. “I will be there looking after you. You won’t be alone.”

  He ran the buzzer over the sides of her hair, leaving zigzag puffs at the top in a common style.

  “Still not enough,” he said. “Your bones are sharp, womanly. I have to go shorter than normal to offset it.” He clipped the top until there was only an inch. The razor tickled against her scalp, as did the brush against the back of her neck, sweeping little hairs away.

  “Done?”

  He handed her a mirror. “You look very handsome.”

  Aster ventured a peek. “Fine,” she said, then slid out of the chair and headed toward the hatch. “Let’s go.” Before she entered the corridor, however, she remembered she needed shoes.

  “For you.” Theo handed her a pair of wingtips, beautiful but in need of a shine. She emptied the contents of a small box onto the shoes. Using her old shirt, she massaged the ink into the leather, dabbed coconut oil onto the toes, and rubbed until they shined black as throat.

  “Are you quite ready?” asked Theo.

  “Aye.”

  “Don’t look so happy with yourself.”

  “But I am happy with myself,” Aster said. The haircut, contrary to her initial fear, had unlatched and freed her. She ran her fingers over the neatly shorn strands. It was lovely and exquisite. She wanted to barrel headfirst into everyone, to cut them open with her parietal and frontal bones, and let them know there was only the slightest trace of skin and hair separating their soft bodies from her skull. The illusion of cotton was gone. They should be afraid. They would be split in two.

  Aster was obsessed with bifurcation. Wholes were foreign to her. Halves made more sense. A split nucleus could end Matilda’s tiny universe. She wanted to be the knife. She wanted to be knived.

  xvi

  Opulent: adj., extravagant, overdone, rich.1

  As in: second helpings of maize pudding, hot water from the tap, flannel bedding, walnut butter. Vocabulary lessons weren’t a part of every Quarry Wingers upbringing, but Melusine insisted Aster memorize every word in her tattered copy of a thin dictionary. Word, definition, example.

  Aster continued the exercise into adulthood, the boundaries of words ever-shifting, the need to understand their confines paramount. Blood meant/could mean: cell-dense plasma, life, kinship, disease. Medicine meant/could mean: healing serums, both literal and metaphorical, soup, pills, cure. Family meant: to be determined. There were some words that meant everything and others that meant nothing: love baby god dark.

  As Aster now entered E deck for the first time at the Surgeon’s side, word-meanings evolved once more, her previous definitions not surviving to the age of reproduction, their genes obsoleting themselves out of existence, suited no longer to Matilda’s particular ecology. Opulent was not a second helping of supper at all, but bronze statues of weeping angels, dresses so grand and full of fabric they quite easily could be sewed into five or even six dresses.

  She’d been to the updecks before, of course, but never to E. It was the deck reserved for occasions.

  “Stop dawdling,” Theo said. “When you gawk, you draw attention to yourself.”

  Aster ascended the large, carpeted steps, so clean she wanted to undress and lie in the dark blue fibers. She dragged her hand along the bannister, surprised that when she examined her fingers, there was no dust, only the faint smell of lemon and orange. “Opulent,” she said. “Opulent means no lint. Opulent, no lint.”

  Theo grabbed her gently by the elbow and pulled her along. “Please do not leave my side. Is that understood?”

  “It is understood,” she said.

  “You agree to obey while we are up here? It’s the only way I’ll carry on with this.”

  She wanted to put her face against his cheek, calm him. That was what her Aint Melusine did for her when she worked herself into a state. “I agree,” she said.

  They walked together through Egret Wing, Eastern, and Emerald, on a somewhat tangled course, hopefully toward Evening Star, but who could really say? The Surgeon only had a vague sense of the layout, and it showed. She knew he’d been here before, forced to attend functions, but Theo’s reputation for hermitry wa
s well-founded, and he was rarely required to appear at gatherings and events.

  A passerby stopped them. “Can I help you?” he asked, but his attitude conveyed skepticism rather than an earnest desire to aid. It surprised Aster how few people knew the Surgeon’s face. His name, they recognized. Even his voice from occasional announcements on the loudspeakers. His likeness appeared regularly in the Matilda Morning Herald, but it was the same one over and over and over, from when he was a boy, twelve or thirteen. Black-and-white. Cloudy.

  “You can help us, yes,” said Theo. “My assistant and I have been called to the coronation. Might you lead us to it?”

  Aster wished Theo would give the man his name and title. That would speed things along. His modesty did not allow for it, though, even in these desperate moments. Aster thought to blurt it out, to speak it: This is him! The Surgeon! The man you all worship, more than the Sovereign himself! Your precious Hands of the Heavens! He cures disease! He had visions as a child! And look at him, isn’t he beautiful?

  “You’ve got a pass, I assume?” the man said. “For you and your boy?”

  “I do not require a pass,” he replied. It was the most prideful thing she’d ever heard him say. He must’ve seen Aster reach for her medicine belt, because he grabbed her arm and squeezed hard. He would not have her syringing this man as well. “Here is my identification card.” He handed the man a thin sheet of two-by-four-inch metal, his color picture emblazoned on the right, his details on the left atop the emblem of the Sovereignty.

  Name: Theophilus Isaac Smith

  Prof: Surgeon General of the Sovereignty

  Rank: General, Sovereignty’s Guard

  Residence: G Deck, Grass Wing, G-01

  DOB: Precise Day Unknown, Harvest Year 300

  “If you could please direct us quickly,” said Theo.

  “You’re—you’re the Surgeon?” said the man. “I imagined you to be—grander.” He squinted, looked Theo up and down. Next, he examined the ID, waved the paper-thin metal into the light until the holographic seal shimmered brilliantly, a ringed planet surrounded by what appeared to be seven suns, but was actually the same sun, moved, then moved again, then moved again.