by Brian Turner
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I don’t want to walk in on anything.”
“It’s not that,” he said seriously. “Those lights can kill you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they can kill you,” he said. “It’s meant to simulate the sun on the Blue homeworld. It’s three times as bright as ours.”
“Why doesn’t she just go out to eat?”
“She could,” he said, “but the closest public sunpanels are across base in Loomtown.”
The panels were matte-black when powered down, so dark, in fact, that it was difficult to imagine them emitting light of any kind. That something like this was here, in my brother’s bedroom, in this tiny apartment, felt like being shown that a bomb was set just a few feet from where, each night, Victrola slept side by side with a female of a different species. The very thought made my heart leap with an agony of fear.
“It’s a lot to take in,” my brother said then. “Just give it some time.”
I wish I could say that I followed my brother’s advice, that I did, indeed, “give it some time,” but the reality was that I dealt with the situation, with the cohabitation, by avoiding her entirely. I tried, during the next two quarters, to spend as much time as possible at school or with Sim, but even beyond such measures of physical separation, I simply avoided interacting with her at all, thinking of her as some vaguely humanoid pet that my brother had somehow trained to follow him around, a creature who sat in total silence, only on rare occasions communicating something to me in passing, the common words and phrases sounding forced and awkward in my thoughts as if I were picking up a hazy broadcast from a language school.
You Hedgerow Say Thing Funny Victrola.
You Hedgerow Want Glass Water.
You Hedgerow Tired Eyes Sleep Look.
You Hedgerow Day Bright Sun.
Often the sentences were accompanied by a quick flicker of imagery: the quad at school in the summer sun; a bed, soft pillow awaiting my head; a clear shining glass of cool water; my brother’s face, laughing. This style of communication must have been intriguing to my brother, for I would sometimes surreptitiously watch the two of them as they sat on the sofa in silence, my brother’s face sometimes turning into a bright, beautiful smile that reminded me of my father, a smile sometimes followed (and this also reminded me of my father) by a burst of mirthful laughter. But all the while Skeery’s face was the same inscrutable mask, her photosensitive skin pulsing with light.
I knew, of course, that what I was doing was wrong; after all, I had moved into their living situation—my brother’s and Skeery’s—and yet I could not help but feel as if it were I who had been imposed upon. One might forgive me my youth but there were plenty my own age who might have dealt with the situation with more grace.
“I’d like to meet her,” Sim told me one afternoon as we lazed about upon one of the couches in the study hall. “She sounds fascinating.”
“She’s not fascinating,” I told him in aggravation. “She’s changed my brother’s entire life. He can’t even eat at home. He goes down the street to the café to take a shit because Skeery’s too sensitive to the smell.”
“Is it bad to change your habits for someone you love?” Sim asked me.
“She’s not human,” I said.
“Who is?”
“It’s not a metaphor.”
“It was meant as a joke,” he said.
“Not funny.”
“I’d still like to meet her,” he told me.
“I don’t think I’m ready for that,” I said. “Not yet.”
I wish now, of course, that I had brought Sim to meet Skeery. Perhaps something of his goodness, of his fairness, of his interest in situations and actions and people different from himself might well have taught me something of the grace I clearly lacked at that age. But I did not invite him to meet her, not then and not ever, for our relationship did not last for much longer after that conversation. I was utterly destroyed by the breakup at the time, although now, of course, it is easy enough to understand. I was so filled with anger and loss and loneliness that I must have felt, to Sim, like some black cloud ever-hovering around his head.
I had not even told my brother that I had been seeing Sim, not because I was trying to keep it secret but for reasons more petty. I simply wanted to keep it from him because I was angry at him due to Skeery’s constant presence in our lives and, perhaps most of all, because I was lonely beyond measure, not only after Sim and I had broken up but before, a loneliness which was like a hollow space inside the whole of my body and which I did not think would ever be filled. So I had not told Victrola and yet I was angry when he did not display any real empathy for my renewed despair.
That it was Skeery who responded at last only conflated and complicated my ongoing sense of anger and betrayal and loss. Her communication was so quiet, so faint, that it seemed at first as if that trickle of images and words had come tumbling out of the background sounds of violins from my brother’s screen.
You Hedgerow Quiet Sad Lost.
I looked up from where I sat in the dark corner of the room, staring at my screen. Skeery sat across from my brother at the table, her pale shift glowing blue from the thin tracks of her phosphorescent skin. She did not look at me, nor did my brother. I thought that he always heard her when she spoke to me, that she broadcast to both of us at the same time, but it appeared now that her communication had been directed to me alone.
I puzzled at the words, the flickering image of an ocean, an Earth ocean, and then silence again. And then another: You Hedgerow Alone Negative.
I sat looking at her but still she did not turn in my direction. I did not know what to do or what to say but at some point in the silence, Skeery rose and went to the small kitchen and heated a cup of water. My brother was looking up at her from his seat at the table now. They were clearly communicating and, although I could not hear them, my brother looked over at me, a look of sadness crossing his face.
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” I said, my voice almost a shout.
“We’re not,” he said.
You Love Not Truth.
My brother shook his head. “She’s right,” he said. “She’s making you a cup of tea. I asked her why.”
“What did she say?”
“She said you broke up with your boyfriend.”
I looked at him, incredulous, searching.
You Hedgerow Sim Gone Sad Home Place Now. An image first of Sim and then, just after, of a house in a field, chimney puffing with warm smoke, yellow lights in the windows.
I was on my feet now, my screen clattering to the floor. “Why do you know that? I didn’t tell her that,” I yelled into the room. Then I turned to her, to her mouthless, alien face. “I didn’t tell you that!”
You Hedgerow Sad Tea.
Indeed she held a tray in her hand, the old-fashioned China teapot on its platter, the thin, gently cracked cup next to it, the set an heirloom which had been in our family for generation upon generation. My grandmother’s. Her grandmother’s before that. Why my brother had ended up with it I did not know.
This might have been the moment when I redeemed myself, when I sat and quieted my mind and listened to whatever it was Skeery had to say. That she was trying to help me was clear, but that she had taken from my mind a piece of information that I had not offered acted as a confirmation of all I had secretly suspected, all I had secretly feared.
And so, instead, I ran to the door and slipped outside into the dull cool of the air-conditioned night, my brother’s receding voice calling my name until it was subsumed by the tangled and clangorous sounds of the Quay.
I stayed at a friend’s apartment that night and for the next three nights to follow, but of course I could not stay there forever. My brother had messaged me and I had told him where I was staying—back in our old neighborhood not far from our family apartment—and his response had been a brief OK and nothing more. I did not know wh
at I wanted him to do, but this response seemed utterly insufficient, and for many hours I secretly railed against him in my mind, against him, against Skeery, against my dead parents, against my lost home, against everything. My classes were tedium and my grades were slipping. I saw Sim sometimes at school, briefly, and he would smile and say hello and I would do the same and we would go our own ways, but the public mask was thin and my chest held a heart-shaped cup filled with ash.
I skipped school the following day and messaged my brother and asked if he would have a late breakfast with me at the waffle house near my campus. He agreed within seconds. I did not know if my brother had skipped his graduate seminar and I did not care to ask. I was angry with him still, but I also knew that my anger was petty and mean and under that pettiness was the fact that he was my only family and that I missed him terribly. If I was honest with myself, I knew I wanted the impossible: for the clock to draw backward over the cycles of day and night and day and night until my father was alive again and I was back in the old apartment and all was as it had been before.
I arrived at the waffle house before he did and was already seated when he slipped into the booth across from me. He looked, even at a glance, utterly exhausted, as if he had not slept for many nights. And yet it was he who asked me if I was okay.
I nodded. “She reads minds,” I said.
His shoulders slumped. “She doesn’t mean to,” he told me. “But I hear you. I mean, I understand. It’s a lot to get used to.”
“I didn’t tell her anything,” I said. “Not one word. And she knew his name, Vic. His actual name. I didn’t even tell you that.”
“Why didn’t you?” Victrola said. Our waffles had arrived and he was busily cutting his into bite-sized squares.
“I just hadn’t gotten around to it,” I told him. “That’s all.”
“All right,” he said. “I’d like to know these things, though.”
“That’s just it. We can tell each other things if we want to. But she doesn’t even ask. She just . . . it’s just not right.”
“It’s hard for her, too,” he said.
This last statement made me laugh, perhaps a bit too loudly, too dramatically.
“I don’t mean it like that,” my brother said. “I mean, it’s hard for her not to listen. Human emotions are really loud for her. It would be like you or I trying not to listen to someone shouting at us over and over again.”
“Boo-hoo,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m making things difficult for her.”
“Look,” my brother said then. “I’m trying to be patient here.”
“Are you?”
“Will you please shut the hell up for one second?” My brother’s voice was loud now, louder than I had heard it in a very long time, loud enough, in fact, that the room around us quieted as if in response to his question. “It’s not always about you, Hedge,” he told me now. “You moved into our lives. Not the other way around.”
“Believe me,” I spat back, tears already streaming down my cheeks, “if I could live anywhere else I would.”
“But you can’t,” he said. “So we have to make the best of it.”
“I’m trying.”
“Are you? Because it doesn’t seem like you’re trying at all.”
I did not respond to this, although of course I knew it was the truth. I had been horrible and there was nothing I could do to change that fact. I felt as if some other me, some terrible demonic version of myself, had taken hold of the person I had once been, the person Sim had, I hoped, fallen in love with. But I had driven Sim away. What remained of me was a burning shell. A destroyer.
My brother may have called my friend’s parents, because later that afternoon I received word that I would be staying with them for the remainder of that week. This gave me some sense of relief, although, as with everything during that period of my life, I was also conflicted about its meaning, interpreting it in ways that were likely far-flung from the reality. If it had been at my brother’s request—and I did not ask him, nor my friend’s parents, if this was true—I wondered what it might have meant. Did Victrola not want me in his apartment or was he simply offering me some time away from the presence of Skeery? Either way, I indeed took my friend up on her offer and returned to their much larger apartment with its familiar sounds of human voices running across the familiar smells of the cooking of human foodstuffs. I remember that I could not help but watch their mouths as they talked, as they ate, as they went about their evening routines. Once more I remembered Sim’s mouth on my own, how our lips met, our tongues: an image that had come to me unbidden and which, even as I sat in that noisy apartment, filled me with longing and with loneliness.
By the time I returned to my brother’s apartment at last I had made some decisions about Skeery. If we were to cohabitate, then we would need to get along, and I knew the main source of friction had come from me. In fact, were I truthful, I knew that Skeery had little to do with my discomfort. She was, in the end, only living her life and had, in fact, made room for me without any perceptible fuss whatsoever, this despite my sudden and unasked-for appearance in the cramped apartment she shared with my brother.
And yet, when I finally returned I knew immediately that something had changed. The very air inside was different and there was a sound, too, a kind of high humming that came from the wall where the little stove was located and which I realized, after a moment, was the refrigeration unit.
“Hey, Hedge,” my brother said, coming out of the bedroom. He had apparently been sleeping, for his face and eyes were puffy.
“What’s happening?” I said to him. And then, because the changes in the room were already dawning on me: “Where’s Skeery?”
“She . . . uh . . . she moved out,” he said, slowly, his voice stumbling over the syllables.
“Why?”
He shrugged, but his mouth was taut and he would not look at me.
“I’m sorry, Vic,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “There’s some food in the kitchen if you’re hungry.” Then he turned and disappeared into his room again. I wondered, as the door slid closed, if the banks of sunpanels remained within, their faces so black that it seemed a person could fall through them into whatever universe lay beyond.
Of course, my brother was right: I was not terribly sorry that Skeery was gone. I tried to maintain a sense of decorum around my brother, for he was clearly still wounded by her departure and still angry for my role in driving her away, but it was admittedly difficult. I felt free in the apartment now, free to talk and to watch whatever I wanted on my screens, and to generally lounge about as if I lived there, which, of course, I did. Victrola, on the other hand, seemed mired in shadow and even though a week and then another and yet another passed, that darkness did not depart, instead hovering about him from morning until night and, perversely, I felt my own moods lift as his descended, as if we were on opposite ends of a great seesaw.
He was quiet during those weeks, not silent but speaking only when necessary, doing his homework with great attention at the little table and occasionally retreating to the bedroom if I presented too much of a distraction with my constant chatter, my voice filling the emptiness that Skeery’s absence and my brother’s quietude had made suddenly apparent.
I knew he had cared for Skeery, of course, but I do not think I truly understood just how much her absence might affect him. Indeed, it had never occurred to me at all that she might leave him on my account, assuming that this was why she had moved out. (Again, I was young, and could hardly understand anything beyond myself, so I could only assume that her absence was directly related to me; the idea that she and my brother might have had a full emotional relationship with problems of its own did not occur to me at all.)
“You were right about one thing,” he said to me one night, apropos of nothing at all.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Kissing,” he said.
“What about it?”
“I missed it.”
I said nothing now, the heat of my shame flooding into my face.
“I couldn’t even kiss her,” he said. “I mean, how would that ever work? Long-term, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You said there was more to a relationship than kissing.”
“Sure,” he said, “but it’s kind of fundamental, isn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“You know, she could really feel,” he said then. “The Blue can, I mean. It’s how they are with humans. They can feel our emotions like waves. They don’t feel each other like that, so for them, just feeling some human emotion—something positive, I mean—is like eating the best piece of chocolate cake ever.”
“Chocolate cake?”
“Or whatever,” he said, smiling a bit now at his own simile. “Love, for them—I mean, feeling human love—is the most amazing thing. It’s like a drug.”
There was a catch in his voice and I realized that my brother was on the verge of tears. “I didn’t know emotions were so great for them,” I said, hoping to steer him into some other, more clinical discussion.
“Only positive ones,” he said quickly. “You know, like joy, love, happiness. Humor, even.”
“Other stuff they don’t sense?”
“Oh, I wish,” he said. “Anger. Sadness. Frustration. Even something like irritation—all terrible. Skeery described it like smelling something dead or rotten. And they can’t help but feel them, viscerally. Human emotions, I mean. The Blue can’t turn that off. So, you know, she was like a sponge.” For a long while he simply sat there at the table, staring at the darkened rectangle of the window, the sounds of the Quay muffled through the glass and the wall and the door.
I was crying then, crying as quietly as possible, but my brother, in his new raw grief, did not even seem to notice.
“I just missed kissing,” he said absently, as if this explained anything at all. Then he took his screen from the table and disappeared once more into the bedroom he had once shared with his Blue.