Spirits in the Wires

by Charles de Lint

  “You’ll know it when you hear it,” Geordie tells me when I ask him to describe it. “Trust me.”

  And he’s right.

  I’m on Palm Street late one night, walking past this run-down bar, when I hear a bluesy guitar playing a familiar twelve-bar like I’ve never heard it played before. I know exactly who this must be and stop dead in my tracks. The place has been closed for hours. It’s dark inside and the door is locked—like that has ever stopped me. Drawn by the music, I step into the borderlands, then back into this world, but take a few steps so that when I reappear, it’s inside the bar.

  The guitar playing stops immediately.

  I see this handsome black man sitting in a booth at the back of the bar, a guitar in his lap, a big revolver in his hand, the muzzle pointed straight at me. We stare at each other for a long moment before he finally lowers his hand and lays the weapon on the table.

  “Either they’re making hellhounds too pretty to resist,” he says as he starts to play again, “or you’ve got some other good reason to come creeping around at this time of night.”

  “Can I sit?” I ask.

  He smiles. “I don’t know. Can you?”

  I don’t rephrase my questions into a “may I.” I just take his smile as a yes and pull a chair from a nearby table and sit near his booth.

  “I’m a friend of Christy and Geordie’s,” I tell him. “Kind of like a sister, really.”

  He cocks an eyebrow and his index finger does a hammer-on up around the seventh fret, bass string, that sounds like a question.

  “Kind of how?” he asks.

  “I’m Christy’s shadow.”

  “You look pretty substantial to me.”

  I shrug. “He cast me off a long time ago—when he was only seven.”

  “How’s that make you feel?”

  “I don’t know. Most of the time I never really thought about it, but lately …” I give him another shrug. “I just don’t know.”

  Robert gives a slow nod.

  “I’ve known a shadow or two,” he says. “The one who usually comes to mind was cast off by this brother who ended up on death row for killing I don’t know how many people. Back in my time they’d have just lynched him.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Meanest mother I’ve ever had the misfortune to run across.”

  “I meant the shadow,” I say.

  “That’s who I was talking about.”

  “But…”

  “You don’t really believe you’re locked into whatever personality you were born into when you were cast off, now do you? That you’ve got to stay the opposite of the one that cast you off?”

  It’s the same argument I gave Christy. Somehow it seems to have more weight coming from someone else.

  “Not really.”

  He nods. “In my limited experience, shadows have as much control in how they turn out as do the people who cast them off—and that’s more than anyone thinks. Especially the people who like to use genetics as an excuse when they mess up.”

  “I’d like to think it’s not all been laid out for me.”

  “Everybody makes their own way in this world,” he says.

  He falls silent then. Or at least he stops talking. His fingers make magic happen from that beat-up old guitar of his, and I just sit there and listen to him until the morning comes banging up against the windows of the bar.

  Here’s the one thing I can’t seem to let go: Aaran in the Wordwood.

  What’s he doing in there?

  I know it’s partly morbid curiosity centering around the fact that it could have been me. That maybe it should have been me. But there’s also a huge helping of worry in the mix because the Aaran I met doesn’t jibe with the one Saskia and everybody else knew.

  Christy said that Aaran appeared to undergo a genuine change of heart. He thought it had to do with Suzi, that somehow she got inside where no one else could. That just the example of her was enough—for whatever reason—for him to want to make amends for the way he’d been living, the way he treated people. That her coming into his life was an epiphany,though we shouldn’t belittle his own efforts to change and make a difference either.

  Suzi’s in Christy’s camp, though she thinks the changes in Aaran were all his own. That all he’d ever needed was for someone to accept him at face value. To look past the bullshit face he offered the world and just believe in him.

  Saskia doesn’t agree. She wants to be more generous, but I guess the wound he dealt her way back when cut too deep.

  Me, I can’t make up my mind. I need to talk to him some more first. So I keep e-mailing him in care of the Wordwood. I go on-line on Christy’s computer when he and Saskia are out, or asleep. I become a regular at the Cyberbean Cafe, stopping in every other day for a cappuccino and to use their Internet resources. I slip into the Crowsea Public Library and use their machines, usually at night when everybody’s gone home, but sometimes during the day, too.

  Maxie says I should just get a machine of my own. Apparently there are ways to get them to work in the borderlands, the same way my cell phone does. But I don’t really want one. Except for this one little cyber quest of mine, I’ve about as much interest in owning a computer as I do staring at the way little bugs scurry away when you lift a rock. No, that’s not true. I actually like looking at little bugs.

  So I keep borrowing other people’s machines, and one day when I’m in the Cyberbean, there’s finally a response waiting for me in my in-box:

  To: MsTree@yahoo.com

  Date: Tue, 26 Sept 2000 15:04:21 -0400

  From: Webmaster@TheWordwood.com

  Subject: Re: Are you there?

  Hello Christiana,

  I’ve been wanting to write for ages. And I would have gotten back to you much sooner, but … well, it’s complicated. I’ve spent the last month or so completely caught up with the need to assimilate myself with this strange new reality I find myself in.

  I guess the thing I really need to tell you … no, it’s more that I need to share it with someone and, except for Suzi, you’re the only one who keeps making an effort to contact me. I’d tell Suzi, but I don’t know how to put it in the right words. And I know what she’d say, anyway: You make your own destiny, or some other positive thing like that. But I’m not sure she would actually understand. I’m not sure you will either, but it won’t hurt as much if you don’t. And maybe you will. You were inside the leviathan. Not just like the others, but like me. We were deeper inside him, I think. The others couldn’t have been or they’d have put up a bigger argument to stay and do what I’m doing.

  I’m not making much sense, I guess. It’s funny, I can multitask like you wouldn’t believe now. But it’s all Wordwood business. Dealing with e-mail and downloads and running _serious_ scans for viruses on uploads. But when it comes to something personal … well, there’s not a whole lot of personal left.

  But what I need to tell you is this: Librarius lied to you. He didn’t come from outside the Wordwood when the virus struck to take advantage of the situation. Oh, he was trying to take advantage, all right, but not like he let on.

  He was trying to separate himself from the all-pervading spirit of the leviathan. He was in here all along, just like I am now. He was the Webmaster.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m afraid that I’ll give in just like he did.

  I know it’s different. I have foreknowledge. And I’ll try to do this right like I’ve never tried to do right before. But I’ve only been here a month or so and I already know _exactly_ what Librarius was feeling. You don’t get a moment’s break. Not a moment to be yourself.

  I don’t feel real anymore. Hell, I’m __not_ real, am I? I’m no more than interactive software creating a conduit between the leviathan and the world outside.

  So I guess what I’m really trying to say is, it could happen to me. Some new crisis like the virus Jackson sent could show up and, even though I know better, already I can see myself takin
g advantage of it and trying to figure out how to separate myself from the leviathan.

  Not today. Or tomorrow. Or even in a year. Don’t forget, Librarius was here for years before he broke.

  I’m just scared that I’ll break, too.

  I don’t know if I’m strong enough not to. I don’t know if anybody is.

  Aaran

  http://www.the wordwood.com/

  I realize as I’m reading his e-mail that he’s not the only one having a crisis. I’m having one, too. An identity crisis, which is kind of funny when you think of how all of this started. Or at least how all of it started for Saskia and me: she was having the crisis and I convinced her to contact the Word-wood because it seemed the best way she could answer the question once and for all: Is she real or not?

  But I’m the one who’s been circling around that question ever since we got back.

  No, that’s not true. I’ve never stopped wondering about it from the moment I got pushed out of Christy. It’s just that meeting Saskia—carrying her around inside me and with what I’ve been through with the leviathan and all—has brought it to a head and I don’t know how to deal with it.

  I’m still looking at the screen when someone sits down beside me. I look up and there she is. Saskia with her golden hair and sea-blue eyes, so effortlessly beautiful.

  I get her to read Aaran’s e-mail.

  “You have to let this go,” she says when she reaches the end and turns to me. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “I know. It’s just… worrisome.”

  She cocks her head and gives me a considering look.

  “And what’s bothering you more?” she asks. “That it’s a worrisome situation, or that you’re actually worrying about it?”

  How can she know me so well? Like Christy said, I’m the original free spirit. No cares, no worries. Something bad’s happening? Tra-la-la. I’ll go somewhere else where it’s not.

  “How much did you get out of me when you were inside my head?” I ask.

  “Only what your physical senses told you,” she says. “I couldn’t read your mind or know what you were feeling about something unless you shared it with me.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “And you’re avoiding the question. Which of the two worries you more?”

  “Both,” I have to admit.

  “Well, it’s good that you can worry about it,” she says, “but you still have to let this go.”

  “But…”

  “What are you going to do? Figure out a way to get back into the Wordwood and take his place?”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

  She shakes her head. “And you wouldn’t be affected by the same thing that’s happening to Aaran because … ?”

  “I’m a shadow?”

  “Oh, please. What happened to that independent streak of yours?”

  She reaches past me and pushes the delete button. Another e-mail pops up in place of Aaran’s, some spam telling us that we really do want men’s penises to be bigger. It’s exactly what I need to put everything into perspective. There’s always going to be someone or something that thinks it knows you better that you can know yourself.

  We grin at each other. I exit my account and we leave the computer free for another customer. Saskia gets us each another cappuccino and we sit at a table by the window.

  “With all our adventuring,” I say. “We didn’t really find anything out, did we?”

  Saskia smiles. “You noticed?”

  “So, are you okay with it? Not knowing for sure what coming from where you did means?”

  “In terms of who I am now?”

  I nod.

  “I think so,” she says. “I’ve decided that it doesn’t really matter. That it shouldn’t matter for anyone. Maybe this is sour grapes—you know, because I don’t know what I really am any more than you do. Or maybe it’s like a poor person saying money can’t buy happiness because they don’t have any themselves, but if we take it down to basics, it doesn’t matter where we come from, or even what we look like. The only thing that matters is who we are now.”

  I smile. “That’s almost word-for-word what Suzi told me.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “Mmhmm. And I still do. I see all kinds of people in the consensual world now.”

  “You’re becoming a regular little social butterfly.”

  “I always was.”

  “Only not here. Not in this world.”

  “Christy’s world,” I say.

  “Why does it have to be his world?” she asks. “Why can’t there be room for both of you in it?”

  “No reason, I guess.”

  I feel a little lighter as I say it. Like actually using the words can make them true. Maybe that’s the change I felt coming over me when the leviathan left his physical body. Maybe I’m finally accepting that I can have a place in this world, that I can make lasting relationships here, instead of always being the traveller, passing through.

  I smile at her and repeat the words again, enjoying the taste of them as they leave my tongue.

  “No reason at all.”