I start dropping even pens.
But I never drop the broken one. It feels steady and solid in my hand. As if it were more real than the others.
That gives me an idea.
* * *
They used to say of somebody who made a bad marriage that they threw themselves away. What happens if you never actually got married, because marriage is a tool of the bourgeoisie?
I’m pretty sure you can still throw yourself away. Erase yourself. For somebody else, or because you don’t think you are worth preserving.
* * *
I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgotten.
* * *
My stepfather liked to have excuses to hit. So he could feel good about himself, I guess. One way you get excuses to hit is to expect perfection in every task, and set hard tasks without allowing the person you’re setting them for time to learn how to do them.
Then, when the student isn’t perfect, you have a good reason to punish somebody.
Another thing you can do is change your expectations constantly, so that nobody can predict what is expected and what isn’t. Make them arbitrary and impossibly high. Don’t allow for any human imperfections.
* * *
Since I can touch it, I decide to fix the mystery pen.
I make a new trim ring for it out of polymer clay, to help hold the cap in place. I clean it, and while I handle it, my hands stay solid on the tools. As if it is some kind of talisman to my past reality.
I wish I could say my repair job is some kind of professional affair with a loupe and so on, but I have some epoxy and some rubber cement and honestly, I kind of fake it. You do what you can with what you have, and that’s all right then.
* * *
I take up my broken pen. The nib is still pretty good, though it doesn’t write like a fine point anymore. More like a medium. And even on smooth paper, it scratches a little.
It’s still usable, though. And it makes a nice smooth line.
Except I have faded more, in the interim. I am vanishing. Falling away, like all the memories I hadn’t wanted, and now wish I had been less cavalier with. I can’t manage to open a notebook, let alone write in one. I am able to reread the old ones I’d kept. But the new ones are as ghostly as the cheese sandwiches have become.
Maybe this is better than living with the pain of remembering. Maybe fading away, fading into nothingness, starving to an immaterial and noninteractive death—maybe that is the happiest ending.
Except the one thing I know—know with a drowning urgency, though I still cannot remember the specifics—is that people will come to harm if I cannot remember the things I once knew.
A lot of people.
And not just hurt.
People are going to get killed.
More people. A lot more. Exponentially more than had been harmed by three incendiaries sent to medical schools.
If I can just remember the plan I came up with. Before I helped him write this manifesto. Almost twenty years ago.
If I can only remember the rest of his name.
* * *
Lack of food and water doesn’t help me think any more clearly. I’ve never been good at handling low blood sugar. So half my time seems to be spent figuring out how to write. How to even get words down on the page.
I can put the pen on the paper—the pen stays solid, even if it is in my hand. And I can use the nib to turn the pages. But do you know how hard it is to write legibly and usefully in a notebook you have no way to smooth flat, or to steady? Especially when your temples ache with hunger, and a sour metallic taste seems to sit in your abdomen.
My laptop has long since stopped being something I could touch. I would have given a lot for that laptop right now.
My laptop. And a banana.
* * *
My stepfather would hit me with a belt, and he wouldn’t stop until I managed to keep from crying.
“I’m not hurting you that badly, you little wimp. Quit that squalling, or I’ll give you something real to cry about.”
It’s amazing what you can learn to keep inside.
* * *
A day later, lying more or less in the sofa, my head bleary and aching with hunger and my throat scratchy with dehydration, I realize that those blank notebook pages are the answer. I can’t get the burned notebooks back—that was, after all, why I had burned them—but I can fill these leftover pages with memories of what I might have written in them.
I can construct some kind of a record, though it will be one very filtered by the passage of time.
And the important memory might be in there somewhere. If I am lucky.
And brave.
* * *
It would be so much easier just to fade away.
Erase, erase.
So much easier to stop pretending my existence matters and let go. Then it will be over. Then I won’t have to keep existing after I do this thing. This thing I don’t even want to do. It’s not the idea of drifting into nothingness afterward that bothers me. It’s the terrible fear that instead, I might hook myself back into the universe somehow. Reassert my reality.
Get stuck being real.
* * *
I joined a cult in college. That much, I know. Like a story told sketchily over a cup of coffee, but without the context or detail because it’s an embarrassing story and nobody wants to think about it too hard. The person telling it is embarrassed to have been there, and the person hearing it is reflecting embarrassment as well.
I joined a cult in college. I really craved the love-bombing, because I had never in my life felt really loved. I didn’t know how to receive attention in smaller doses, at lower proof. I had so much armor on, it took weaponized love to get through.
I joined a cult in college. It was a dumb idea and it was weird while it lasted—it lasted long past college, it lasted eight whole years—and I was in love with one of the guys who ran it.
I joined a cult in college. One of the guys who ran it . . . I thought he was my boyfriend. He wasn’t, though. He was preying on me. Grooming me.
I did not have a lot of agency in the relationship.
He’s one of the cult’s leaders now.
* * *
The pen ran out of ink, and then I had to figure out how to fill it when I also couldn’t touch most of my ink bottles. My hand just swiped through them, all the gorgeous little art objects full of brilliant colors. I groped back in the shelf, waving blindly . . .
My fingers brushed something squat and cool. I pulled it out, and the bottles that had been in front of it slid out of the way, clattering. Not of my unreal hand. But of the ink, the thing that was real. The thing that mattered.
One or two fell to the floor. Ink bottles are sturdy, though, and the carpet kept them from breaking.
The bottle I could touch was a bottle of Parker Quink, blue-black. It was two-thirds empty. The label stained.
An old and trusty friend.
I filled my pen.
* * *
He threw me down the stairs by my hair one time.
My stepfather, I mean.
Not Joshua.
I’d forgotten that. Erased it. And now I can’t unremember it again.
* * *
A funny thing happens as I write.
I feel myself getting more real. I figure it out when I realize that I can lean an elbow on the table I am resting the current mostly finished notebook on. That’s a relief; you have no idea how hard writing is when you can manage to hold a pen but not rest your hand on anything.
When I realize that I can touch things, I stop writing and run into the kitchen, terrified of missing my window.
I still can’t lift a glass, but I manage to elbow the faucet on after a few minutes of trying. I bend my head sideways and drink from the thin, cold trickle of stale-tasting water. Nothing ever felt better flowing down my throat. I gulp, gulp again. Manage to get
it to pool in my hands and drink that in a slightly more civilized fashion.
I drink until my stomach hurts, and then go to make sure the toilet lid is up, just in case I turn immaterial again before the stuff works its way through my system. Dehydrated as I had been, that might take a while, but I have learned to plan ahead. Such are the important life concerns of the terminally ghostly.
I sit on the bathroom floor and rest the back of my head against the sliding glass door of the shower. At least I am not falling through walls or floors. Yet?
I can stop. I don’t have to do this anymore. I can stop, and it will be miserable . . . but I will die of thirst in a few days. If I stop clutching at making myself real. If I just accept that I am not important, and let my ridiculous scribblings go.
It sounds so appealing. A final erasure.
And I won’t have to remember . . .
I won’t have to remember the horrible person I had been. The horrible things I had done. The horrible things that had happened to me. I could forget them all.
Who knows? Maybe if I forget them thoroughly enough—if I encourage myself to forget them thoroughly enough—I won’t even die. I’ll just fade.
Maybe if I fade enough, I won’t have material needs like food, water, air anymore. I’ll be a ghost for real.
I’ll be free. Free of myself. Free of pain.
I have these notebooks here.
I’m probably real enough to burn them now. Right now.
It will just cost the lives of some people I have never heard of to get there.
How many people?
I don’t know. One. A hundred. Three thousand.
Too many.
The glass shower door is cool. I relish its solidity.
When I put my hand up onto the sink to help myself stand, sometime later, my hand goes right through.
* * *
I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to exist.
I can just let myself be perfect, and be gone.
So much easier.
So much easier.
Except I remember about the fires now. And if I write it all down . . . I think I might make myself real again.
Then how do I get away from what I did? From what was done?
Oh God, do I have to live with myself now? Do I have to live with being flawed, and do things I’m not very good at?
People will know.
People will see me.
People will punish me.
* * *
I write it all down.
* * *
Of course the manifesto was familiar.
I was the one who had written it.
What was published wasn’t my words exactly. It had been decades; what I wrote hadn’t survived the intervening twenty-odd years with Joshua unscathed. Unedited. It had passed through other pens than mine along the way.
But somewhere in the ashes of forgotten notebooks had been written a draft of that statement. Its structures, its rhetoric, even its handwriting had once been mine.
* * *
I don’t bother calling the local police. I call the local field office of the FBI.
“I know who wrote the manifesto,” I say into the phone. “His name is Joshua Bright. Or it was, he might have changed it. And that probably wasn’t his real name. Because who calls their kid Joshua Bright if they can help it? And he’s got a plan to use incendiary devices to burn down a big chunk of Chicago if you don’t stop him.”
“Ma’am?” the tinny voice at the end of the phone says. “We’ll be sending a couple of agents over right away to talk to you. Please stay where you are until they arrive.”
* * *
I make myself a peanut butter sandwich while I wait.
* * *
That story about the airport and the aftermath. I don’t think it really happened that way.
I think it’s a pretty story I’m telling myself. I don’t know if I ever stood up for that girl, really. If I ever stood up for myself.
I remember doing it. I wrote it down. Does that mean it happened?
Or did I just figure out that Joshua was cheating on me and split not too much later? I tried to forget. I was, needless to say, pretty successful.
The plan to put incendiaries in basements and start a huge firestorm in Chicago had been mine to begin with. I came up with it. I gave it to Joshua as if it were just the plot for one of my thrillers. The ones I make my living writing now.
I wonder if he’ll try to blame it on me. Or if he’ll want to take credit.
He’ll want to take credit.
I never really thought he would do it. It was a thought experiment, that was all.
Just a thought experiment.
I joined a cult in college. It turned out about as bad as you’d expect.
If you join a cult in college, I hope you get well soon.
* * *
You don’t have to be perfect.
Sometimes it’s okay for a thing to be a little bit broken.
Sometimes it’s okay to make do with what you have, and what you are.
I imagine meeting him in court. Of course I will have to testify. I’d better make sure of my solidity before then. I’d better commit.
My fingers leave peanut butter stains on the paper. I hope the food delivery comes soon. I’d like some milk.
I can’t know what it will be like, but I rehearse it in my head anyway. I write it down to make it real, so I can act on it when the time comes.
The FBI are on their way.
* * *
Me, strong, implacable. Joshua saying, “I didn’t think you had the balls to turn me in.”
Me meeting his gaze. “You never did know me.”
* * *
I wait for the doorbell. For the food. For the authorities.
I get to the bottom of the last page. I reach blindly for the next book, find the blanks at the end, and keep writing.
You don’t have to be perfect.
This story isn’t done yet with me.
REBECCA ROANHORSE
A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy
from The Mythic Dream
We were gonna be stars. That’s what you got to understand. Big fucking stars. Like Jack and Rose or Mr. and Mrs. Carter, like our faces on every screen, dominating every media feed. Everyone already loved us, wanted to be us, wanted to fuck us. And people like that, people like us? Young, rich, famous? We don’t just get sick and die. They’ve got med docs and implants and LongLife™ tech that keeps people alive for 150 years now if you can afford it, and we could afford it. So how could they let her die? How could I lose my perfect girl? How could they do that to me?
* * *
I keep the room dark. My agent’s been calling, but fuck him, you know? He says I’m missing important appearances, that if I’m not careful people will forget about me. Maybe it’s time I move on, he says. Find a new girlfriend. Someone hot. Be seen with this new hot chick at a big premiere or something. They’re launching a new luxury liner at the end of the week, he says, something that takes you to the edge of the atmosphere and projects your digital image into outer space before hurling you back to the Earth. A billion people will see your face, shining like an honest-to-God star. You should go, he says. Go to almost-space and smile a big almost-smile with a new almost-girlfriend and make people remember who you are. But who the fuck would want to ride that? You can’t breathe up there. Who wants to go where you can’t breathe?
My agent convinces the boss lady of DigImagine to come talk to me. She bangs on my door until I think she’s gonna shatter the glass. That door cost me half my pay on that damn Japanese shampoo commercial where I had to wear that breechcloth and pose in front of a stuffed bison. Sure, it was humiliating, but I do have really stellar Indian hair—long, black, and it moves like it’s got its own built-in wind machine. And the shampoo company was paying big for a few hours of easy work—flip, smolder, flip, smolder. It’s what I do anyway most of the time, so why not?
Can’t remember last time I smiled for the camera. They want stoic, so I give them stoic. Cherie always thought it was funny. We’d laugh about stuff like that all the time.
Whatever.
Anyway, I don’t want some motherfucker breaking my glass door, even if she is a studio head. I let her in because she’s holding a little white envelope. I know that envelope. What it holds. That’s the only reason that I open the door. It’s like I can already feel the wet burn on the back of my eyes. Only question is whose memories she’s holding.
“I’m Carol Elder,” she says, her bone-white pumps click-clacking on the hardwoods as she strides through the door. “Sorry to hear about Charlene.” She turns toward me and thrusts two things into my hands. The white envelope and an old-fashioned business card, her name printed in neat black ink on a white linen card. Our fingers touch briefly, accidentally, and hers are cold.
“Cherie.” I tuck the card in the pocket of the bathrobe I’m wearing and take that envelope over to the kitchen island.
“What?”
“Her name was Cherie. Like the kind you eat. She was sweet.” I don’t know why I say that, but it feels important, like she should get her name right and know that she was a decent person. Despite all the other stuff, the rumors, the thing with the biowear executive. None of that mattered. She was good and didn’t deserve to die.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 43