The coffee left in the cup arced toward me, leaving a dark line of brown across my linen tunic, as sure as Pollock had flung it from his brush. The coffee was already cold and pasted my tunic against my chest. Delphine and I stared at each other, one in surprise and the other in horror, though I could not tell you now which was which.
“Oh goddamn it,” Delphine said, and reached for the towel on the break room counter. “I am so—I am the worst, and of course today would end in me dousing a UN official with the best coffee I’ve ever had the pleasure to drink.”
I didn’t know if I was a UN official or not; technically, I was only a clerk, though I already had high hopes I would one day be a diplomat. I’d wanted to influence opinion and shape perceptions. I’d wanted to champion my country’s goals and values—though even we had lost sight of such things. No country could stand alone, that had been proven; nations had gone their own ways, and the world had crumbled, overrun by conflicting policies and agendas that resulted in neglect, waste, and destruction.
As a species, we had once looked to space to save us, but colonies on the moon or Mars had never come to fruition, pulled apart by different agendas. Shooting expensive cars into space was a charming way to capture a bored public’s attention, but it hadn’t done a damn thing to save the only world we called home. Despite worsening odds, I was fighting for Earth, to keep her home.
“I’m Bréone Hemmerli and only a clerk,” I said to Delphine. I took the towel she meant to use on my tunic and instead blotted the coffee from the floor. “Don’t worry about this—it’s only coffee, after all.” I scooped the cup up and put it into the bin, along with the towel. Everything was plant-based and would be recycled into a new cup, a new towel.
“Delphine Chefridi,” she muttered, throwing another dark glance at the coffee station, and I could see she wanted another cup, but she didn’t want to use another cup, having just thrown one away.
I set my folders down on the table and cracked open the cupboard beneath the coffee station, exposing a wealth of metal drink canisters. They all featured the UN’s global logo, plastered in bright white against a blue background. I took one and offered it to Delphine, who took it with a sigh.
“These are not for visitors,” she said, but neither did she set it aside. She wanted that coffee.
I shrugged and then nodded toward the badge she wore. “Seems like they want you to be more than that.” Her badge was that of a visitor, yes, but it was also branded with a big green S. Lots of people joked that it meant “Superman,” but it really stood for “science.” There had been a steady stream of scientists of late; officials were convinced, yet again, that a new crop of scientists and discussions would yield solutions for the problems plaguing the planet.
“Unless they have a time machine they’re not telling anyone about,” Delphine said, “I’m not sure I’m the person they want to talk to. I’ll just tell them how fucked up this place is.” Here, she reached for the coffee, filling her new UN cup to nearly the brim. “There’s no easy solution, and everyone wants the easy solution. The easy solution...” Delphine took a loud slurp of the awful coffee. “God, that’s terrible, and yet terrific. The easy solution is stop fucking polluting the planet. Get the corporations off their goddamn asses. Hold them accountable. This fucking metal cup isn’t going to save a nearly dead world.”
“Nearly dead,” I said, “but not quite.”
I had ideas about that—so many ideas—and Delphine wanted to hear them all. When her group found us, having lost Delphine on the facility tour, we were deep into a conversation that would last for the next forty years. Every day we worried over it, still not quite able to understand or see how we might fix this greenhouse Earth. My husband had left me, we buried Delphine’s husband, but we two remained. A forty year conversation that had at times turned intimate, words dropped from one mouth and into another, directly. Still, we could not quite grasp how we two could solve the riddle of our world.
“Something got you out of your house,” Delphine said, joining me on the bench with her basket of yellow nasturtiums. “What happened?”
I looked back down the path I’d come, then back to my friend. She no longer worked for the UN, having told them all to fuck themselves when they had once again delayed acting on propositions that would help the world’s climate. Her final words to her boss had been “you have killed us all,” and she probably hadn’t been entirely wrong, but how did a single person save an entire planet? It’s why that green S was called Superman.
She hadn’t been removed from the house because they and she knew it could happen at any time. I worried they would cart her away some night and her roses would be left to rot. But Delphine flawlessly maintained the grounds, the house, and kept everything running as it should. Who cared where old women lived? There wasn’t another use for the house or Delphine, and until one presented itself, the two could crumble together.
“There was something in my garden,” I said. Someone, my mind whispered. “Something was eating my frogs. And the goldfish.”
Delphine gasped. “The goldfish came back? Did you find remains? Bones? There was that fox a few years ago—but that was bunnies that were eaten, wasn’t it? Maybe desperate times call for desperate measures.”
I sat up at that idea. The first words out of Tura’s mouth had been about their hunger. Desperate times.
“Delphine, have there ever been accounts of...” I trailed off and went silent for so long Delphine tapped a finger against my temple like she could restart the system. “Stop,” I whispered. “I haven’t forgotten the word, I just have no idea how to tell you there was an alien in my garden.”
Delphine and I stared at each other.
“Just like that, I suppose,” she said and I waited for the tone, for the accusation that I had really lost my faculties, and did I remember my name.
Delphine said nothing, and so I said, “I am Bréone Hemmerli and there was an alien in my garden. I am sixty-three years old, we are in Rouen, France, you are my dearest Delphine Chefridi, and there was an alien in my garden.”
Delphine set her basket of nasturtiums on the ground, but her eyes never left my face. She looked concerned, but not about my mental state. “Do you know,” she said carefully, “I never wondered about aliens. I dated a woman who absolutely believed we had been visited on numerous occasions, said she had proof but could never bring herself to show me. I always thought she was having me on, a private joke. Eating your frogs and goldfish?”
“Mmm.” I nodded, hoping Tura wouldn’t have emptied the entire pond in their hunger. “It’s quite possible that it isn’t an alien, because it—they—spoke English perfectly well. I’m open to the idea that I had a stroke, or hallucinated the entire thing. They ate everything—even the bones.”
At the mention of a stroke, Delphine set to assessing me, watching my eyes, and listening to me talk. There was no slur, and my eyes seemed perfectly fine, so she shook her head, as if saying it was not that. We had each thought about strokes rather a lot lately, given another neighbor had one; they’d taken Lane away and we’d never seen her again. Horrifying, that. Her family hadn’t updated us in the slightest. How very easy it was to vanish from this world. They could cart you right away.
“There is only one thing to be done,” Delphine said, and she took my hand, pulled me from the bench, and marched toward my garden.
“Oh no—what if they’re still there?” Delphine had never doubted me, not once.
“If they speak English, they may tell us what the hell they’re doing in your garden,” Delphine said, never releasing my hand. I skipped once to catch up with her, and we walked in step, toward my garden gate. “And why they’re eating your frogs and fish.”
“Well, they were hungry, Delphine.”
She looked at me as if I had lost another portion of my mind, and after a breath, burst into laughter. It was a sound that set my heart at ease and I hugged her arm against me as we walked, thinking that whatever we f
ound in the garden, all would be well, because I had Delphine at my side.
“Delphine, why would an alien speak English—”
“And not French, really,” Delphine mused, which was not what I had been about to ask her, because—
“Well, they spoke that, too,” I said.
Delphine looked at me askance. “Oh.”
“Surely they have their own language—”
“And do you speak that? If this alien told you they were hungry in their own language, what would you have done with that?”
“Run away screaming, I rather think.”
Delphine clicked her tongue. “You were as calm as a Sunday when you told me there was an alien in your garden. The idea of you running from anything is absurd. You’re the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. She is not someone who runs.”
But she did pause. I paused at my garden gate, which made Delphine look at me with an arched eyebrow. I grasped the gate and it was warm to the touch, but I could not make myself step inside. I thought of the shadow and how it had unfolded, and felt certain that I had imagined the entire thing. When Delphine saw that it was not there... When we walked through the garden and found it empty... What then?
“I’m not a frog, nor a goldfish,” Delphine said, “and neither are you, so I don’t think we’re in danger of being eaten. Come on.” She gave my hand a gentle tug and pulled me through the gate.
It was strange—Tura hadn’t threatened me at all, even though I was clearly a larger meal than a frog or a fish. I would have fed them well, for days perhaps, and my bones— I shuddered and didn’t want to think about being cracked open, but of course it was all I could think of right then, and I held harder to Delphine’s hand.
The pond, the lilies, the way they hauled me back by the shoulders—was it my pond? Was that why I—
The garden looked as it had upon my exit, blooming and normal. The sky was still a flat gray, and there were no shadows anywhere, save for the darkness that gathers inside bushes and at their bases. Carnations and lilacs, and the roses I suddenly could not remember the name of—but they were like Delphine weren’t they, perpetual.
“What did it look like?” Delphine asked. Her voice had dropped to a whisper and she hunched by my side, as if trying to make herself appear smaller, less of a threat. Was she also thinking about her bones, about being cracked open? Did old women crack more easily, our bones gone frail and hollow?
“They looked like—”
I couldn’t remember the word and swallowed hard. I hadn’t found a good solution to the forgetting. Read! everyone suggested, and my library was filled to the brim with books of all sorts, but reading didn’t seem to help me hang on to words I should know. I could read a word and know it in the moment, and forget it in the next. It was rather like being a child, only I wasn’t retaining what I’d learned; instead of learning a new word every day, I was losing a word every day.
I exhaled.
“—a shadow.” That was the word. “Then, they unfolded, and had—”
Words, Bréone—use them.
It was often worse when I was trying too hard; the pressure of a moment could be my undoing, and in that, it was not unlike my job at the UN. Pressure though, had once been what I’d excelled at and under—as common coal was turned into a diamond, they said, so too could Bréone Hemmerli perform miracles. That hadn’t been true for a long time.
“Dimension,” I said softly. “A handsome face and wings.” I didn’t know I thought they were handsome until I said it, but in memory they were, black glossed with iridescence.
We stood looking and nothing in the garden moved until a rabbit made itself known, emerging from one of the bushes to gnaw upon the grass. Delphine did not move without me; she gently tugged me deeper into the garden, toward the lily pond where I had first seen the shadow. Now, the pond looked normal, no flat shadows draped across the water. There were no bones on the bank, either, but that didn’t tell me anything. Perhaps they were a tidy eater when an old woman didn’t catch them mid-meal.
“Perhaps I imagined it all,” I said, and relaxed a little.
Delphine looked at me, a little disgusted at the way I tried to brush the entire thing off. “I’ve known you forty years, Bréone, so I think I know when you’ve seen something and when you haven’t. Do you remember—” She took a sharp breath, because that question was always a hard one—“the first time you thought you saw a fox here?”
I did remember. Foxes had been believed extinct in the wild—it had happened when we were children, and I remember that too, of spending an entire weekend distraught because I believed I would never see those cunning little animals. My parents hadn’t been able to console me; they’d pulled up all manner of stories about foxes on the net, but I didn’t want stories about virtual foxes. I wanted the genuine thing—which, my mother told me, meant I would live a life disappointed. Foxes, she said, were no longer a part of the world.
The fox I’d seen here was the first fox I’d seen at all—surely I had imagined it, the flash of copper coat in my garden. That had gotten me to leave the house, too, barefoot of all things. I’d followed after it, around the pond and into the apple orchard where the calvados hung heavy on the branches. Soon, the apples would be pressed into the brandy we’d drink in a couple years, but now I found the fox nibbling on an apple that had fallen from its tree.
The fox hadn’t noticed me at first, or perhaps had and simply didn’t have a care in the world for me. I crept as close as I felt I might, and kneeled on the wet ground to watch it eat that apple. Even now, I can feel the wetness of the ground beneath my skirts, the mud between my toes. I don’t know how long I watched the fox, but eventually I realized it was watching me in return. Its coat was damp, its paws streaked with mud, for the morning had been a rainy one. The fox didn’t look troubled by me at all, resting a paw upon its snack so I would not take it away. I leaned into the nearest tree and held my breath while the fox bent back to its task. When it had finished the apple, it trotted away. I longed to follow, but could not make myself get up.
By the time I’d told Delphine, it all seemed like a dream, but the following day, I’d seen the fox yet again, and did dare follow it at a good distance. The fox allowed me to watch as it hunted a rabbit, and then led me to its burrow, where it brought the rabbit to its kits.
“When you told me about the alien,” Delphine said, “it was like you telling me about the fox. I knew you hadn’t imagined it.”
“What happens when I don’t know the difference—between what’s real and what’s imagined?” The question came out of me before I could censor myself. I hadn’t meant to ask it at all, especially standing there as we were, looking for an alien of all things.
Delphine didn’t answer me right away, but when she did, it was with the same honesty I’d come to expect from her. “I don’t know. I’ve never been down that path—but I don’t think this is the start of it. I think you saw what you saw. And perhaps, like the fox, you won’t see the alien again until tomorrow. Every thing has its schedule—though you strayed from yours to find me, didn’t you?”
She stepped closer and slid her arm around me. Delphine smelled peppery, like wild nasturtiums, and I allowed myself to be coddled, to be held close to that soft and warm body for as long as it would possibly hold me.
Bodies, no matter how old, still want, still need. I still, even now, in the dark quiet of the nights, took myself in hand when I needed to. When I wanted to. The idea that this aging body could still create such pleasure was a distinct marvel for me. We never talked of such things, me and Delphine. For a long while, I believed I loved her only in my dreams and not in the waking world, but the care and regard she displayed told me otherwise every day. Humans are often foolish, when it comes to squandering a heart, or a planet.
“Bréone, look.”
Delphine gave me a little shake and I followed her gaze toward the far side of the garden where a fox sat. It was star
tling and I shivered. It looked like no fox I had seen before, its coat black and only edged in copper—like it had walked through the soot of hell and come out the other side. It was perfectly still but for its eyes, tracking a rabbit through the—
“Lilacs,” I whispered, because I could not remember the word by only thinking it.
We did not move, but the fox eventually did, a black and copper blur across the green. I did not look away when it claimed the rabbit. The claim was swift and hard; I wonder if the rabbit even understood whose ivory teeth closed around its throat, what maw it was pulled into before everything else went black. Was it worse to know—or to not know? Delphine had looked away, and I pulled her toward the house.
“It’s the way of the world,” I reminded her as we stepped into my kitchen, the daylight painting gloomy stripes of light across the stone floor. “The way the world should be. It makes me wonder, even now—places like this—when the rest of the world is so ravaged, how...”
The aliens were the trees. I wanted to tell Delphine that, but I lost the words. I lost myself in thinking about the dance of the darkness, the way Tura had knit themselves back into a solid form. The same way the trees had knit themself back together above me in the pond—the darkness watching me from the trees.
I picked up the teapot instead, filling it with fresh water. Delphine got down the tea canister, and said nothing, letting me ponder my words as she always did. She never rushed me. Sometimes the idea came back, sometimes it didn’t. Sugden wanted me to travel somewhere; wanted me to solve a problem, and I desperately feared that I could not do any such thing with this failing mind.
“These places shouldn’t exist,” I said, trying again. “But they do. I mean—they should exist, had we taken the proper course against climate change. But we didn’t—and yet, there are places in the world that are whole and thriving, even as others falter.”
Delphine leaned a hip against the counter, watching me as I carried the kettle to the stove. “Urban areas have taken a harder hit, certainly...”
The Necessity of Stars Page 4