We Leave Together

by J. M. McDermott

  Djoss frowned. “Does Rachel know?”

  Jona placed his heavy hand upon Djoss’ back. It was like palming a boulder there was still so much knotted muscle there. “She doesn’t know like I do. You’d gnaw your hands off to get one little puff when the urge comes. I have to chain you by the throat like a dog.”

  “I won’t gnaw my hands off.”

  “You would,” said Jona. “And you know you would when the hunger strikes real bad in a day or so.”

  Jona pushed Djoss forward. Djoss frowned and turned back to throw a punch.

  Jona grabbed the fist in the air and placed Djoss’ own blade at Djoss’ throat. “I’m trying to help you,” said Jona. “I don’t have to do this. If you’re here, you’re chained. You know the feeling you get when you can’t get enough of it.”

  Djoss calmed. He stepped back to the wall. Jona’s knife stayed on Djoss’ throat. “Pick up the chains and latch your neck. I’ve got the padlocks in my pocket.”

  Djoss leaned away from the dagger. He picked up the old chains from the mud floor. Each side had half the chain.

  “When Da used this damn thing, he’d wear chains on his arms, too. We buried him in those chains. We didn’t know what his body would do. Wizards steal the bones of demons. I’ve seen things built with bones. Horrible stuff. You have no idea what it’s like to be a monster in your own home, to be used like one. You don’t know anything about us.”

  Jona attached a padlock to each side of the latch. It fit around Djoss’ neck with an inch to spare. Jona’s father was a large man, before he died.

  “What will you do tonight?” said Djoss.

  “I don’t sleep,” Jona said, “I never sleep. I was born with wings, but my Ma cut them off of me before anyone could see them. Tonight, I’ll be finding you a way out of this town, like Rachel wants. If you’re smarter than I think you are, you’ll leave her free and easy and never look back.”

  ***

  Jona left Djoss there, tied up like a monster with the heavy chain around his neck. Djoss watched the light fade in the closing door. He sat down in the mud and the darkness. He reached with his hands against the walls. He felt only darkness. He pressed against the chains around his neck. He reached into the night. He felt nothing. He reached harder and harder until the chains choked him. He sat down, on the ground. He reached through the darkness for the bolts on the stone. He found them. He clutched the bolts with both hands. He listened in the darkness for any sound at all. The house was too large. He couldn’t hear anything. They probably couldn’t hear him on these old chains.

  These chains were strong enough for most pinkers, but they weren’t strong enough for Djoss. Jona wasn’t the first king’s man surprised by this old, hard strength.

  Upstairs, Jona and Rachel sat in the kitchen. Rachel was cooking something. She didn’t really know how to cook what was in this kitchen, but at least if she was moving pots and fire she wasn’t forced to really talk to Jona about the important things. Instead, she could ask him where something was. She could describe it with her hands. “It’s a pot with a shape like this on the bottom, about this wide?”

  “It’s in the third cupboard.”

  “It’s flat and has a crank on it to smash the wheat flat,” she said, holding her palm down and her fingers straight, “Real flat.”

  “It’s in the drawer next to the stove. Do you need matches?”

  Rachel shrugged. She flicked her finger at the kindling, and little drops of fire like drops of water splashed over the bark and coal. The stove sputtered a moment, and then it crackled.

  “When does your mother come home?”

  “Soon,” he said, “She’ll hate that you cooked.”

  “What will you tell her about me?”

  “The truth. She’ll understand. You couldn’t turn to a temple for help, could you? Just because our blood is wicked, we don’t necessarily have to be. She knows that.”

  “Still,” she said, “what about Djoss?”

  “He’s sleeping,” said Jona

  Rachel sighed. “Why is he asleep?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jona, “He got out of the bath and fell asleep in a spare room. I say let him sleep. We’re going to have a long night. I’ll take him to some friends of mine. I’ll stay with him and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid. He saves up enough, with you two sleeping here, and then you hire passage on a ship and sail off into the sun. My mother might have something for you around the house, but we won’t be able to pay you ourselves. If that’s what you want, anyway. If you want to try something else, I’m up for it.”

  “No,” she said. She waved her hands over what she was cooking, “That’s fine, Jona. Thank you.” She opened a drawer, and rummaged through them. “I had a knife. I know I had a knife. It was the only one I had.”

  “It’s out,” said Jona. He pointed right in front of her.

  “Oh.”

  ***

  Djoss had broken the chains. Of course he broke the chains. They were old and rusty and he was still not so far gone that he had lost all his strength.

  Jona imagined, from what he had found afterwards, that Djoss found the stairs. He climbed carefully. The basement door wasn’t locked. He slipped into the lower hallway. This part of the house was full of servant’s rooms. They were all empty, and caked in dust. Old trinkets that no one would buy gathered dust on the shelves. A dusty teddy bear. A broken clock. Lost books. Things that weren’t worth selling. They sat on the floor like dead prisoners.

  Djoss opened doors down the hall until he found the stairs. He climbed up to the next floor. This was the main hall. He knew where he was now, and he knew he couldn’t get out the door without passing too close to Jona and Rachel whom he heard still in the kitchen. He went up another floor, and then another. He climbed all five flights to the roof. He climbed out. The afternoon sun was high and hot. Flecks of humidity licked his skin. On the roof, the house laundry dried in rows of sunlight like limp, wet rags. No wind blew them.

  Djoss looked down at his filthy clothes. He stripped off his shirt, and pulled one of Jona’s uniforms from the line. It was a tight fit, and the seams screamed, but the uniform held together enough.

  Djoss didn’t know where to go from here. He sat in a corner of the roof, behind the doorway. He frowned.

  ***

  “Do you think he’s hungry?” she said, stirring.

  “Him?” said Jona. He reached around Rachel to pull out two bowls. “I think he’s snoring like a baby.”

  Rachel turned. She looked up at Jona, his arms spread around her with the bowls. “Did you tie him down?”

  “The door’s locked and there’s no window,” said Jona, “He’s going nowhere.”

  She leaned into him. “I hate that we do that. I hate it. He’s been good for days. Let me untie him.”

  “We can’t leave him alone if he isn’t tied up.”

  “Then I’ll sit with him. I want to be with him right now. Where is he?”

  “Let him sleep.”

  “Why are you being like this?”

  “Just sit down,” said Jona. He wrapped his arms around her, with the bowls in his hands, “Eat.”

  “He’s my brother, Jona,” she said, “Don’t you understand that?”

  “No,” he said. “I wish I did. Bloody Elishta, I wish I understood this. I don’t know what you think will happen next. We’ll try your way, and get you out of town, okay?”

  ***

  Djoss snatched at the ropes from the laundry. He didn’t bother pulling the laundry loose. He untied them all from the stones. He left them lashed in on the side near an alley. He looked over the edge. He looked at his ropes. He figured it was still going to be a good drop to the ground. He tugged off all the laundry. He put them in a big pile near the edge, where he planned to jump. He dropped them in one big lump over the edge. He grabbed the rope. He spun it around in his hand, so the many threads wrapped all over each other and then around his waist.

&nb
sp; He took a running start. He jumped. The ropes caught at the second story. He slammed into the wall. The wind rushed out of his lungs like his body was on fire. He crumpled to the ground, into the pile of laundry.

  I’m sure he knew that Rachel would come looking for him. When that happened, he wanted to have it all back—all the money he had spent, and all the futures he had lost. He swore to himself he wouldn’t touch the weed again. He was going to be strong, like he had always been. This was his chance to earn it all back.

  ***

  Jona had turned around for a moment. He was scrubbing a dish clean. He pumped the water out from the line to the canal. He scraped the steel pots clean of rice with a pumice stone. He talked to her, she was sitting behind him at the table, and she wasn’t saying a word. “My mother never told me what to do if I ever met anyone like me,” he said. “She never really believed I would meet anyone like me. I think she thought I was the only one in the world. Whenever I asked her what to do if I found another like me, she just said nothing to it. She’d just act like she didn’t hear me ask her that, or something. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what to make of any of this. We make people sick, but they don’t make us sick. They don’t make demons sick, either, I think. If they do, how would we know? Where are we supposed to go to find out how we are the way we are? Maybe Lord Sabachthani knows about us, but if we tell him it’s our death, right? Maybe we stick together and we find more people like us. We find out what they know. Maybe we can make our own way underground and see Elishta’s Nameless for ourselves, or we find people who know about it and find out what they know. Maybe someday we get enough people like us, we split off and make our own place, our own district, our own city. Bloody Elishta, a whole city. Maybe someday we can be together, you and me, and have a family, and nobody cares if the kid has wings or scales or big, sharp teeth like a lizard, because it’s still just a kid, right?” He stopped scrubbing with his stone. He pumped some fresh water into the pot. He rested his arms on the side of the sink. “Rachel, I wish we could be a family…” he turned around to look her in the face.

  She was gone.

  A candle burned on the table. The flame flickered in slight winds from invisible places in the stale room. The clay white wax curved gracefully over the puckered, melting lips.

  ***

  I do not know her path through the Joni house. I do not know whether she found the basement where her brother had broken through the old chains. I do not know if she found the roof where the laundry lines fluttered down the side of the building like banners.

  Ragpickers had snatched the cloth on the lines close to ground. Industrious boys piled crates along the side of the house and climbed up the ropes, jamming feet between bricks, and pulling at the bits of uniform and bedsheets and women’s working dresses. Jona’s appearance scared them all overboard, like sailors jumping ship.

  Jona looked over the edge of the roof. He pulled the laundry lines back to the roof, shaking off the boys that clung too long to the lines.

  He threw the clothes on the roof, and went back inside. He sat alone in a dark room until his mother came home.

  He thought and thought, and nothing made sense, and none of it was going to make sense, but he kept thinking. Pretty soon, he stopped thinking and just felt that feeling that comes to young men, when nothing turned out like they planned, and she’s gone.

  There is a wailing that came next, a gnashing of teeth, and waiting for daylight on the roof of the house, where the stars and the moon occasionally showed themselves past the clouds and lamplight.

  CHAPTER 11

  I do not know all that we must know to see inside of Djoss’ mind. Once they left Jona’s house, I lost his memory of them, and the shape of their lives stumbled in his own tumultuous emotions. I do my best to piece together the things I heard from the street, and from what is remembered in Jona’s skull, and what I can taste in the air as a certainty of systems and mud and blood. The rumor and innuendo Jona collected may be inaccurate. I have been unable to locate corroborating evidence among the official records. I asked around with my husband. We bribed the street boys with food and coin. We learned everything we could and sifted at as best as we could.

  They who build the cities—they who work every day and whose children work and have more children—lead lives as silent as shadows. When the sun sets for them, it’s like they never existed at all, and all of these children and grandchildren and buildings and streets appeared out of thin air. There was a sea of warm bodies rising up, lifting kings and merchant lords like ship captains.

  They who live beneath the builders of cities are shadows of shadows.

  There is no sign of the life of death Djoss led hidden in any of the corners inside of Jona’s memories, or the rumors of the street boys that had long forgotten their fallen kings.

  Here is what I think, and probably what you think. He punched and fought his way into a room with hookahs. He did this after passing through all the places he knew with illegal coins, muscling and beating and maiming until he had it all. Full of himself, full of the awesome power of taking all that he wanted from the night, he could not contain his greed. The pipes called to him. The sweet stain of smoke pulled him back to death. At first, he thought he would just steal the weed and sell it somewhere, a symbolic gesture of power over the monster that ruled him. Then, it was in his hands, and he was alone, and no one was going to stop him. Rachel wasn’t there to stop him. The bouncers were bleeding on the ground. The night was empty for him, and it was all for him.

  He was smart enough to take it all somewhere else before he smoked it, or else the night would have found him long before Lady Sabachthani would bother with the hunt.

  Here is also what I think: Lady Sabachthani wanted to kill Djoss because it would drive Rachel away from Dogsland. She was very interested in all the demon stained. Sabachthani wanted Jona to do it, because it would tear Rachel away from his heart forever.

  A message came for Jona.

  Rachel’s story fades from us.

  There are things we know.

  There are things we almost know.

  The words flood the street outside our window. Jona’s memories sweep through the public houses and temples, where all secrets come to light. It is impossible now for my husband and me outside, with the Sabachthani family back on their heels. We stay hidden in our Temple, back in the record rooms, away from the eyes of even our own men and women, waiting for the rage to rise up into a boil.

  We do not have very much to do.

  There is some certainty in her heart from what she told to Jona, and what truth was hidden in the cloth upon her back and her voice’s different way of pronouncing the same words as everyone else.

  My husband doesn’t think it is worth the time to construct this life, but Jona loves her, and he imagined it all from her words. It was a dream of her life, that led her to his lonely, empty, dirty, little room.

  Write it down. Write it all down. If it will get the ghost to settle in your heart while we wait for word from the Anchorite.

  CHAPTER 12

  The more I see into Jona’s memories, the more I see the older fragments of the mind. Are they dreams? Are they real? I don’t know.

  Jona and Rachel spoke of their youth sometimes.

  My husband and I have made a detailed study of everything we could pull from Jona’s brain. We arranged the details of Rachel’s past as best we could.

  All these things that Jona remembered from different conversations merged into clear fragments of Rachel’s youth in my mind like Erin’s form of dreamcasting, with no koans to meditate upon like the Senta, just with our knowledge in the service of Erin, our senses of animal and man. Also, my best imagination, and little else. I write it down to soothe the ghost in me, but I know it cannot be true.

  Also, it gives us, my brothers and sisters, a point of beginning for our hunts into the gap where the doppelgänger crawled out from the crust of the earth, from Elishta.

 
; ***

  Rachel, when she was just a little girl, saw her father at the edge of the dock, sitting on a crate. No ships came or went today. The ducks swam beneath the harbor. The birds sniffed through the filth for the fish that searched for food among the filth. Every little piece of filth rolled from the alleys into the harbor water.

  And the man—what parts of him that were man—held a loaf of bread up to his ear. He leaned against it like he was listening.

  Rachel knew that something was slipping out of the ear and reaching inside of the crusty shell for all the soft bits inside. She hadn’t ever really seen the thing. She knew that she was not allowed to talk about it, even if she was alone with Djoss or her mother.

  When the insides of the bread were all devoured and only the shell remained, the man would eat that as if he were just a normal man.

  Rachel didn’t know, yet, what that meant. She was still too young to understand that her father was not like other fathers.

  Rachel’s mother led Rachel and Djoss to a blackberry bush so they could eat and catch their breath.

  Djoss cut a long branch off with his knife. He held it up in the air like a fisherman’s line. He walked into the shade of a poplar tree. He started eating all of the blackberries. The branch was covered in tiny thorns.

  Rachel reached for a single blackberry like her mother, but Rachel stopped when she saw the tiny thorns.

  “It’ll bite me,” she said.

  Her mother smiled patiently. “Just be careful, Rachel,” she said.

  Rachel put her hands on her hips. “No,” she said, “They bite.”

  Her mother picked a ripe blackberry from the top. She brushed off the seed dust. She held it out for Rachel.

  Rachel crossed her arms. “No,” she said.