by Meg Elison
He thought of Flora’s horse and the red mess that had been left of her.
I wonder if they can smell me.
The Book of Eddy
Early summer
The Unnamed must have been light skinned. It’s never been useful advice to me, rubbing dirt into my jaw to look like stubble. Still, a beard would be great.
I was going to wait until I was there to read the book, to be where she was. But I can always read it again.
She had a “compression vest,” though. I get the idea. She didn’t have to bind. I wonder if that was more comfortable. She says thank you to the “transman of yesteryear.”
So there must have been others like her. Other people who needed to bind in order to survive. But she says that things weren’t like this before the plague. Everybody says that before the fever, every woman could have children and they were all free. And the Unnamed had drugs that anyone could get, so they could decide when.
So why were there transmen in her yesteryear? Maybe they weren’t really safe at all.
Like we say we’re safe in Nowhere, but we really aren’t. Everyone is much safer if we’re all the same. So there’s me and Alice and Sylvia and Miranda and the others, and there’s Tommy in the basement and maybe Errol. There’s Breezy, the girl toward the end of the book. Was she the first boy who became a girl? And the Unnamed when she was a man, and we’re not safe, not really. Because if we’re not the same, we’re not really in and we might as well be out.
And out is slavers and the people who cut little girls. Out is the Lion and I bet every little city has a man like the Lion, someone who climbed to the top using women as the stairs.
And if the whole world is like that, then we’re not really safe until we change it. We change it with poison and bullets.
Mother Ina thinks we change it with books and babies, but neither one of those can make it. I’ve seen them both get torn apart. It’s not enough.
Even the Unnamed, she knew it wasn’t enough. She asks herself over and over in her journal what is it for, and what does it matter, but I think she asked that question even before the old world ended. I think that question followed her, her whole life.
I think that when it changed, she was ready. I think that in the old world, women were slaves. Maybe not like they are now, but somebody needed that vest. Somebody needed her pills or her rings to keep from getting pregnant. Maybe slavery just looked nicer back then.
The old world made that chair.
He put the book down and breathed, eight in and eight out.
Where are you right now?
Who are you right now?
Eddy, son of the Road, was trying to decide. Writing in the light of a campfire he had built in the chimney of a long-gone house, he considered his memories.
The memories that were Etta’s were his, too. They had to be. But they hadn’t happened to him, just to her while he was there.
Like a silent twin brother.
A brother, even a twin brother, would not have been allowed at Etta’s first blood. Still, Eddy thought of it as he lay down that night. He had terrible, low cramps across his back and he knew the morning would bring blood.
Etta’s first blood had come too early for her and too late for everyone else. Mothers and Midwives talked long and often about how it used to come later in the old world. Women shared stories from their mothers and grandmothers, whose blood had come upon them at fourteen or even fifteen years. But girls in Nowhere were considered late bloomers if they reached twelve without having their passage. Etta had been eleven, nearly twelve, when her time came.
She had fought with Ina for weeks, over every little thing. Her mother had tripped on Etta’s boots, left carelessly in a doorway. Instead of just apologizing, Etta had cried and raged that her mother was ascribing malice to what was really only laziness.
Ina had tried to offer her daughter strong tea and fresh venison for dinner to mend things between them, but Etta could hardly eat or drink. She had dreamed she was pregnant and she woke up in a cold sweat, knowing she would die in labor. She’d cried out in her sleep, the ghost of labor pains still in her.
When her mother had come in the door, her face soft with fear and concern in the candlelight, Etta had yelled at her to just leave.
Instead, Ina had put her palm down in the fresh blood on the sheets and held it up to the light.
For a sick, howling moment Etta worried that she really had been in labor, delivering the nightmare child into the world.
She knew what it was an instant later, but the terror had taken root in that dark bleeding secret place inside her. It would be with her always.
Ina had taken Etta to the baths, and the bathers had been dismissed. Word traveled door to door in the night. Mothers had bathed her and rubbed her body with rose oil. They told her stories of when they had gotten their blood and what it had meant to them. They told her how it would be and what to expect.
But I am not like them.
She didn’t know Eddy’s name yet. He was her secret self, her free self. He was the one who wanted to get out on the road, burning with rage, craving heroics. Other girls read the Unnamed and talked about birth and Hives and Motherhood. Etta read the Unnamed and thought about the way she practiced being something else. Talking lower. Staring slavers down. A ball of socks in her jeans.
Etta had a wad of clean cotton crammed between her labia, soaking up blood. It wasn’t the same.
Later, when she was dressed in a red gown, the Mothers told her she could ask them any question and they were to tell her the truth. They sat in the House of Mothers and Etta thought hard, staring down at the floor between her bare brown feet.
“What’s the worst thing about it?”
The Mothers had exchanged glances.
Mother Carla spoke first. “About bleeding, you mean?”
“About the whole thing.”
Carla shrugged and Ina nodded to her. “Death is with you. He comes with the baby. You can feel him, like a stranger standing just off to your left, outside of your field of vision. He wants you, he wants the baby.”
Ina smiled a little. “It makes you fight harder. At least, it did me.”
Ina, the oldest woman in the room, seemed to have no patience for this part of the ritual. “Do you have any other questions, my living daughter?”
Etta shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about blood or death anymore. She did not want to be someone different than she had been the day before, but that didn’t seem to be up to her. She liked it better when Ina called her “living child.” She couldn’t say why.
Carla rose at Ina’s silent prompting. She opened a tiny golden box and, inside, Etta saw a stack of dried mushrooms, cut into triangles. “When you eat these, you will see from outside yourself.”
Etta had heard about this part from older girls, but they each said something different. Some of them said they’d been terrified and heard thunder rolling through their bloodstream. Others said they’d had beautiful dreams, seeing what their lives would be like, who they’d take into their Hives, what children they would have. More than one had just fallen asleep and awoken to a particularly bad stomachache.
Etta didn’t know what she expected, but she ate the mushrooms. The Mothers left the room one by one, leaving her alone.
Etta felt nothing for what seemed like a long time. She tried to clench the muscles of her low belly each time her cramps rolled back around, curious if she could steel herself against them. It worked a little, but those muscles got sore quickly, as if she had never used them before.
She had been given a set of the cotton rags that most of the women of Nowhere used. One of them was folded in her underwear, but she knew it would be time for a new one soon. She clenched hard, her whole stomach seeming to fold in and draw up toward her. The pressure forced a torrent of blood out of her and she gasped at the sensation.
She looked around, preparing to stand up and go change. When her eyes locked on the doorway, she saw that the w
hole room had gone dark red. The doorway was flexing in and out. The walls were, too, caving and curving toward her before rebounding and tenting outward. She stared at it, unable to move.
She breathed in, the house breathed in around her. She breathed out, relaxing a little, and the house did, too, pooling and sloping in on every side. She put a hand up to keep it from touching her head. She felt her own hair and nothing more.
She crawled through the flexing room toward the low table they had left her. In a large bowl they had given her a chunk of honeycomb as large as her hand.
She picked it up greedily, fingers sinking into the wax. She took a huge bite, stuffing comb into both her cheeks and chewing richly, breathing hard through her nose.
I’m eating the summer, and the spring has just started.
The part of her mind that was separate, or the Eddy part, maybe, knew that it was early autumn. The baked pumpkin on the other plate was proof enough of that. But that wasn’t what Etta had meant.
Etta’s hand slid into the honeycomb and became gold. She was gold all over, liquid sunshine and surety and the pain was forgotten. She lay on the floor and felt it breathing beneath her. She held the honey above her mouth and let it drip down and in.
Her mother’s voice was coming up from the floor. It was just the murmuring, buzzing tones, but Etta knew the sound. The words didn’t belong to her, so she let them go.
The floor rolled beneath her, up under her heels and surging toward her head. It was delightful at first, but it became nauseating. She turned over on her belly, palms flat, and willed it to stop. It did not stop, but she sank into it, becoming part of the movement. She cried out a little and pushed back, wanting to stand.
Instead, she floated toward the ceiling and bumped against it, like a bee in a bottle. Her hands were sticky and the honey was gone.
Her mother’s voice came again, this time through the ceiling. Etta listened hard, but the words didn’t make any sense. It sounded like Ina was counting.
“What?”
Etta didn’t think she made any noise when she spoke. She skittered down the wall like a spider. She stuck both hands into the pitcher of water they had left her to drink, to get the honey off. She drank the honey water immediately after.
Her mother’s voice came from the water.
“What?”
Her stomach muscles clenched. Blood dripped down one leg, she felt it singing to her ankle in its life-and-death song.
“What?”
The walls flexed in mightily, touching her on all sides, threatening to squeeze her to death. Her arms were pinned to her sides and the blood surged out of her. She struggled, wriggling like a caught fish.
The voice was everywhere, pouring out of the walls and the floor.
“It’s not yours. It never was and it never will be.”
The walls fell away, vanishing over the horizon. She was alone in a dark, formless space. Nothing was hers.
One moment of pure bottomless terror swallowed her.
Who?
Eddy’s voice spoke in her mind then, for the first time, loud and clear.
It isn’t mine, either.
Eddy remembered that they had woken in the morning in their own bed, sore all over and with an aching jaw.
Ina had brought them milk and they had talked a little. Ina asked Etta what she had seen.
“Nothing, really. The room kind of came alive, and I was just caught in it.”
“Like a womb.” Ina smiled sagely.
“No, not like a womb.”
But the smile did not fade.
Ina gave Etta a red box full of gifts. They were special, she said, because Etta had to wait to use them.
Inside, Etta found red ribbons for her braids, a necklace of precious shells, and a bottle of good red ink.
“You must wait a year to use them,” Ina said. “Just as you must wait a while to use the gifts of womanhood. You understand?”
“I understand.” Etta had put the box away and never opened it again. Opening it would feel like admitting something. Eddy supposed it was still under their bed somewhere. Neither of them cared if they ever saw it again.
He flexed those same low muscles against the coming storm and took a long swallow of water. Tomorrow’s walk would be awful, but at least now he had a cup instead of a collection of rags.
Manhattan was visible for miles, thanks to the smoke of a thousand small fires. As he got closer, Eddy knew many of them would be lit under roasting pigs. He touched his three knives and his gun as he approached the edge of town.
No gates. No walls, either.
He looked for an open area where he could be observed and waited to be seen.
No spotters up high. No guard. The whole town was situated on a flat, grassy plain. The buildings were low and unguarded, with no obvious city gates or fortifications.
Underground, maybe?
He walked slowly, working to look unhurried. He held his pack straps and listened hard for the sound of a marketplace. His ears led him west along a gravel road.
Houses look good. Smells good. Whole place looks clean. These are good signs, right?
Fear rose anyway, closing his throat and making him sweat. He walked slowly, watching. He thought of Flora, confessing that she hadn’t known the truth about Eddy at all. He stood up to his full height.
I’m just like them. They’ll know that when they see me.
Eight in, eight out.
The smell of crackling pork was making his mouth water obscenely. He ran through a list of what was in his bag that he could trade. He planned to get full enough to burst on what they were flaunting.
Eddy walked, following his nose, listening to the growling of his stomach. As he grew closer, he could hear singing and the familiar sounds of a guitar tripping alongside human harmonies. Beneath that, a low, irregular drumbeat caught and lost the rhythm.
Eddy crept toward the corner of a new-looking log building, peeking around toward the sound of the voices. Near enough to make out the words, Eddy listened.
Bang away, Lulu
Bang it good and strong
What in the world will the Navy do when good old Lulu’s gone?
Eddy had never heard a song like this before. He didn’t think there was an official law about songs that treated sex with such careless humor, yet he couldn’t imagine anyone singing this in Nowhere. For some reason, he flashed on the men dancing in the basement, dressed as women. He thought of the deadly seriousness of all the talk he’d ever heard or had on the subject of sex.
Is it funny? Is it ever funny?
He thought of a song he knew about a woman named Connie. The song was called “No Favorites,” and it told the story of her Hive of thirty and how she’d never choose a favorite, but somehow all of her children were redheads.
The men stopped singing and fell to talking. Eddy emerged, cautious. One of them spotted Eddy and stood.
“A man and a brother!” he called out as he stood. The other men looked around, owlish in surprise.
Eddy raised his hands in front of him. “Good men? I’m a traveler, just looking to trade.”
He tracked their movements as they stood, a few of them stepping toward him.
Eight in, eight out. Just like them. Be just like them.
Not attacking. They’re excited.
He pulled his mask down and watched their hands.
I wonder if they have a grip for greeting here, like Jeff City.
He steadied himself as two of them came closer. They were both clean-shaven. One was young, not yet grown to his full height, Eddy judged. The other was taller and older, but they had the same wavy brown hair and soft brown eyes.
Father and son?
The older man spoke. “Welcome, traveler and brother. We’d be very interested to trade with you.”
The younger man showed obvious interest but said nothing.
Eddy cleared his throat. “I’m tired from walking, and I’d trade for provisions, maybe a place to w
ash and sleep? I offer good drugs, life-saving and relieving of pain.”
The older man brought his hand to the center of his chest. Eddy studied its calloused look, saw the swollen joints in his fingers. “I’m James Johnson. This is my son, James Junior.”
Eddy nodded to each. “I’m Eddy.” He didn’t trust his hands enough to gesture in the same way.
They stared expectantly.
“Eddy . . . who? What’s your father-name?”
Eddy shrugged. “I never knew my father.”
The older man looked shocked. “Oh, how terrible for you, brother. Come, have a seat at the fire. We’ll eat first and then you can show us what you’re trading.”
Eddy followed warily and accepted the seat, his bag on the dirt in front of him.
They turned their backs to me without a thought. Trusting.
James introduced him around the circle and Eddy saw that each of them was short-haired and clean-shaven, neatly dressed and clean, to a man. There were no women. James Jr. was the youngest of them; Eddy guessed him at about fifteen.
More men approached from a nearby log cabin, carrying bowls. Eddy accepted one full of hot corn and beans with pulled pork on top, all of it in a sweet-salty sauce that he had never tasted before. He had finished his bowl by the time cornbread arrived. He took two pieces.
James Jr. had finished before Eddy.
Still growing, for sure.
The boy struck up another song, and the men joined in as they finished. The words were about marching to someplace Eddy had never heard of. As he sang, Junior began to collect the empty bowls and stack them, handing them off to another man, who took them away.
When they were done, Eddy spoke to no one in particular. “You sing a lot here?”
A short man in overalls grinned, showing a black tooth in his lower jaw. “It keeps us together.”
Eddy nodded, looking around. “Only men and brothers here?”
James spoke up. “We don’t trade women here, Eddy. If that’s what you’re hoping for, we’ll have to part ways now.” His tone was friendly but firm.