Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Then a thought occurred, and I reached over and tapped Borne on what I assumed was the top of his head.

  “Huh? What? Rachel?”

  “Borne, how did you even get out of the apartment? When you followed me.”

  A sluggish, slow response. I had a sense even in answering my questions he was devoting only a little bit of his self, while parts of his body popped and quaked, and continued to be somewhere else.

  “The door was open. It was all the way open and it seemed like that meant you want me to—”

  Propping myself up to one elbow, I cut him off. “No it wasn’t and no I didn’t.” I had locked the door with several kinds of locks, mostly so that Wick could not get in.

  “The space at the bottom of the door was open.”

  I took a moment to digest that. So Borne had made himself pancake-thin and, boneless, then gotten out under the door. Great.

  I let Borne drift back into whatever boundary between watchfulness and sleep allowed him to dream.

  But I was awake now, and so I went to Wick’s apartment, thinking he might be back from his nocturnal wanderings. I wanted to sleep with Wick. Whether I meant sleep or sleep, I didn’t know. But for an hour or a morning, I wanted some kind of oblivion that didn’t mean anything for a while.

  Raising Borne all by myself was exhausting.

  * * *

  I found Wick next to his beloved swimming pool full of “disgusting” biotech, and I took him right there, on the floor—unexpected and with complete surprise, even stealth, and found him willing. After being outside, after having to be so alert, so in control, I was the opposite of those things—and fully recovered from the attack. I could move in all sorts of ways without pain.

  I’d been outside and nothing bad had happened to me. Or, at least, nothing bad had had a chance to happen to me. And nothing bad was happening to me back inside, either.

  “Not now,” he said, “I’m working!” As per our old rituals, our codes and procedures.

  “Now,” I said.

  “But I’m trying to work,” and the joy in him, to voice the old complaint that meant he’d like nothing better than to be taken from work. To be taken by me, as hadn’t happened for weeks.

  So I took him and kept taking him until he had nothing left and we glistened with each other’s sweat. Our bodies still knew each other, and the Balcony Cliffs still knew that we belonged together. I could still feel those lines of power extending outward, my traps and his surprises intertwined, and here we were at the absolute center of our creation.

  Even if we hadn’t spoken after, whispered those endearments so personal no one else would have known what they meant, it would have been good. It would have felt good, would have let me know that whatever had come between us that was wrong could be put right. But that led to me letting down my guard, perhaps because Wick in those moments after we had sex always seemed more playful than usual.

  Wick got up, put on some ragged shorts and an old T-shirt, and went to the edge of the pool. He leaned on one knee, fishing something scaly and metal-gray out of the pool’s fetid depths while, around one pale, thin, but muscular haunch, he looked back at me with those magnetic eyes.

  “You’re putting us both in danger, Rachel,” he said cheerily. Wick looked naked from that angle, exposed and rangy. There was an almost insect-like humming and buzzing to the way he moved. That’s when I knew for sure he’d taken something to make himself feel calm, or taken one of his own beetles and part of him was now far away from this place.

  “With sex?”

  Wick laughed, a higher-pitched sound than usual given the acoustics of that cavern, and padded around to the other side of the pool, some glint or glimmer driving him to use a stick to stir up the goop.

  “Borne followed you out today,” Wick said. “Because of him, you came back early. Borne continues to grow at a ridiculous rate, Rachel.”

  So there it was, said out loud. I opened my mouth to protest that he’d been spying on me, but what was the point? I’d snuck into his apartment and gone through his things.

  “Shouldn’t you be more concerned about Mord—and the Magician?”

  “Borne is not your friend, Rachel.”

  “I never said that, Wick.” Although he was now.

  “You stood right here and told me that, told me to accept it.”

  I sidestepped that. “I never said that to you. Not that way.”

  “You told me I had to accept Borne.”

  One step more and all we’d be doing is denying, denying, denying. I never said that, I never did that, the way couples do.

  “But why can’t you accept him?”

  “Because you’re wrong. Because I can’t go against the facts. I can only work around them.” He was telling me that belief in Borne was like a religion. “Like the fact nothing ever comes out of Borne.”

  That again, as if it meant anything.

  “Him not shitting or pissing doesn’t seem to be dangerous. Him not shitting or pissing hardly seems a threat to our security.”

  “Maybe he hides it somewhere.”

  “Who cares if he hides his shit or not?” These were the conversations I loathed, the ones that made us sound dumb, distracted, petty.

  “Because if not, then Borne is the most efficient creature I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s too late to break him down into parts, Wick. He’s more valuable to us alive.” There were some facts for him.

  “Yes, it is too late, but not for that reason,” Wick said. “I should’ve been stronger in the beginning. I shouldn’t have listened to you.”

  “If you hadn’t listened to me then, we might not be together now.”

  Wick gave me a quick, darting look. “Are we together now? Are we really together or do we just share a roof?”

  I didn’t answer right away. The ease with which I’d slipped into his bed now struck me as a problem. Not because I was returning to him but because he’d asked no questions first, hadn’t resisted, had saved them for the aftermath despite our difficulties. I knew it meant I had a power over him I’d only guessed at before. Although perhaps I’d known it ever since he’d let me keep Borne.

  “Only if we have no secrets,” I said. Which wasn’t fair. But it was also true. Wick still kept secrets from me.

  Wick stood, stared back at me, still holding the handle to the pole, at the end of which he’d attached a strainer to separate out the smallest inhabitants of the green-orange pool. The water popped and hissed as half-grown fetal things broke the surface and submerged again. In the greenish light, Wick looked a lot stranger than Borne.

  “I know he talks,” Wick said. “Borne talks. I’ve heard him. I heard him once saying he might be a weapon.”

  Anger gathered, and I tried to tamp it down. “You were listening. You were eavesdropping in my apartment.”

  That feeling again, of this one issue rising up to destroy us. I hated the idea that someday we would be like some estranged couple forced to share the same apartment because neither could afford to move out and pay full rent.

  Wick shook his head. “No, I wasn’t. I heard him talking in the corridor. He was talking to a couple of lizards he’d killed. Before he ate them. He didn’t see me.”

  Of course Borne talked to himself a lot. He was alone a lot more now, or alone together with me. Somehow that burned more than anything else. The sense that I might not be enough.

  “He’s not a weapon. You misheard. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  Wick shrugged. “Maybe.”

  I could see the hurt in Wick’s eyes, at the way I hadn’t even acknowledged the betrayal of him finding out Borne could talk that way.

  And so I relented, in a kind of full surrender that covered his hurt with kisses, covered that hurt with sex. Because I still wanted him, but also so I wouldn’t have to talk. Talking was the problem. Talking was the enemy. No more talking.

  * * *

  What drew me to Wick? What kept drawing me to Wi
ck? I don’t want to soften him for you, or give excuses, or hand over to you things that are too personal or ammunition for like or dislike.

  But maybe in the beginning it was similar to what I liked about Borne. In the beginning, I could remember the childlike delight he took in so many simple things that subsumed or put aside his dread, his fear, his stress. The most hackneyed, clichéd, sentimental things. Like a ray of sunlight or a butterfly. Because that was such a contrast to the brittle quality of his suspicion. The wariness he wore like an exoskeleton, to disguise the shy boy underneath.

  Even in those difficult times, stressful and uncertain, this sensibility could return to him. Just a couple of days after our conversation I observed him mirthful, not knowing I watched: running and skipping down a corridor of the Balcony Cliffs, saying over and over to himself, “I can do this. I can do this.”

  I wondered if Wick’s diagnostic worms had eaten into his brain, for him to become so happy. I could remember this mood in Wick early on, but not now, so surely he must be drunk. Then, a little later, I went to his apartment and he was serious again. Could he only show that side of himself when he was alone?

  I’ve brought you in late. I can only recite what were hauntings. He could be kind. He could be thoughtful. He could be idealistic. That’s what I know. But I also know Wick put words in my mouth. I had never flat-out told Wick he had to accept Borne, never told him Borne was my friend.

  HOW BORNE LET ME KNOW HE NEEDED PRIVACY

  A few days after I’d caught Borne following me in the city, he shocked me with a formal announcement: He was moving out of my apartment. To tell me this, Borne had made himself small and “respectable” as he called it, almost human except for too many eyes. But, really, “respectable” meant he looked like a human undergoing some painful and sludgy transformation into a terrestrial octopus with four legs instead of tentacles. This is how he presented himself to ask a favor. Anyone else confronted with Favor Borne would have run screaming.

  “Moving out, huh? That’s something,” I said, inane. My hands were shaking at the thought. My heart was up near my throat, everything in my head like a fluster of wings. Was he serious? He couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t let him do it.

  “Yes, Rachel,” he said, releasing a smell like honeysuckle and sea salt, which was his way of pushing. “It was bound to happen.”

  Really? Bound to happen? Because I truly had never thought it would happen. For all that I could see every branching tunnel of the Balcony Cliffs when I shut my eyes, this future had been dark to me. Borne existed in one particular place, existed at the heart of all the lines I had drawn here. I would raise him in my apartment and we would live here together and that was that.

  But all I said was, “Where are you moving out to?”

  “To another apartment in the Balcony Cliffs.”

  “Why?” Such a naked word, looking at him.

  “I need my space,” he said, and said it so adorably that I melted even in the midst of my panic. “I need privacy. I need to be private.”

  “Do I make you feel like you don’t have enough space?”

  “No,” Borne said. “I just want some of my own. I promise I’ll come visit. You can come over after I get settled, after it’s all better in there.” Which meant he must have chosen a real dump, requiring a lot of work. Or that a Borne-friendly apartment looked very different from mine, which hurt, too.

  I couldn’t help but think he’d read a scene like this in a book and was acting out one of the roles. Perhaps the role I was playing had gone to someone in the book who shouted at him or told him no or led him into a long, circular dead end of an argument about why he was wrong. But I couldn’t be like that to Borne.

  So many bad and not-so-bad thoughts, unworthy of either of us. Castigating myself already, cursing how I didn’t know how to be a good mother. How of course if I forbid him to go outside, if I offered up slights, I might not even recognize that he’d leave me. And also: Wasn’t this the natural progress of a child growing up so fast? To become an adult. To move out. To be on their own. But it wasn’t the way in the city, where to hold fast, to be as one, was safer, even if I’d been filling him with the idea of a normal life, with commonplace ideas.

  “I have conditions,” I said, after a pause. “There are rules. Break them and you’ll be living back with me again.” As if that was such a bad thing, such a horrible thing, and me still not quite sure where this impulse, this urge for separation, had originated. Had it come from some outside source? I kept seeing the little fox as if the fox were a question mark behind everything.

  “What are the rules?” Borne asked.

  “You come visit me every day.”

  “Of course I will!” He seemed sad I’d thought he might not, or maybe I projected that onto him.

  “You don’t go outside, into the city, unless I’m along with you. For now, that means you don’t go outside. You can sneak out of your own apartment under the door all you want, but you do not leave the Balcony Cliffs.”

  “That’s fine, Rachel,” Borne said. “I will be busy decorating my apartment anyway.”

  “And you still help me around here whenever I need you. And Wick, too, now.”

  It was inevitable that Wick and Borne would exchange more than suspicious glances soon enough. Each knew the other existed. Each acted a role around the other. Someday soon they’d be formally introduced. I’d taken pains to only talk about Wick in positive ways while around Borne, although I’d slipped up a couple of times.

  “I can do that,” Borne said. “Do we have an agreement?”

  “Yes, we have an agreement,” I said, bending to Borne’s wording, as if we had signed a treaty.

  A treaty that hurt my heart, but the great lurch within me, the thought I was losing him, had receded. He would be close by. He would still be with us.

  “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

  Borne became huge, spreading almost manta ray–like wings, and bore down on me to give me an enormous, all-enrapturing hug—and I withstood it, standing there buffeted and wondered why I was so sad. He was so strong now even this well-meaning gesture would leave bruises.

  “You need to get off me.” But I clung to him a little longer.

  * * *

  Borne’s new apartment was only a corridor and a corner away, and the first night it didn’t even feel permanent, as Borne dropped by to talk, mostly about the tragic lack of lizards in the Balcony Cliffs. Then we played a game from when he was younger, scant weeks ago. He was too old for it, but it served as a happy memory, something we shared now to show affection.

  “Rachel, Rachel—what am I?” The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief.

  “That’s a tough one, Borne. I don’t know what you are.”

  “Am I a squirrel?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Am I a fish?”

  “Definitely not!”

  “Am I a … fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind.”

  I shook my head. “No, not a fox.” Again, Borne was telling tales out of a children’s book. I resolved to give Borne some tomes on economics and politics in the morning. If I could find any. Maybe an airport thriller, except then I’d have to explain “airport” to him. Perhaps that was my subconscious revenge: If he wanted to be an adult, I’d make him become an adult all the way.

  “Then … am I a … Borne?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You are a … Borne!”

  “Oh, good,” Borne said, “because that’s the name you gave me.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  “And I’m a Rachel.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a human being.”

  “Maybe I’m a ham bone connected to a finger bone.” Something my mother used to say.

  “Does a ham bone have a finger bone? I can see all your bones but I don’t know what they mean.”

/>   Biting my lip to suppress a kind of nervous giggle, I said, “Stop thinking for a while, Borne. All that thinking can hurt your brain. Do you want to hurt your brain?”

  “I don’t know,” Borne said. “If I hurt my brain, will I get a bigger one? One that isn’t in my fingertips?”

  Too silly for me, so I quit on him, which meant it was time to move on to the part where Borne used a newly formed arm to create the silhouette of an animal and I tried to guess what it was. Then I would do the same with my human hands, so slablike next to his adroit tentacles.

  For a long time, even though he didn’t yet invite me over, I guess I thought he was still just playacting, figuring out what it meant to be a person. And I still had the consolation that I was Borne’s confidante—that Wick was still the intruder who had to sneak up on Borne and listen to him talk to imaginary lizards.

  That Wick might know more than me about Borne was laughable.

  WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I TOOK BORNE OUTSIDE ON PURPOSE

  Soon enough, Wick would find out Borne occupied another apartment, and find in that fact further proof of threat. But a more immediate problem was that around Borne I had to be careful not to mention the outside, because the concept of the city, of anything beyond the Balcony Cliffs, now captivated him to a worrying extent. In time, whether we lived apart or together, I would have no control—no matter how he might want to keep his word, Borne would be tempted to go out.

  “What rhymes with crappy?” Borne would ask.

  “Happy?”

  “No, shitty.”

  “No, that word doesn’t rhyme with crappy.”

  “But it rhymes with city, and that rhymes with happy.”

  “None of that is true.”

  “True rhymes with fact.”

  “In a way, I guess.”

  “Fact rhymes with city and happy.”

  “No, in this case city and happy put together rhyme with opinion.”

  “You don’t share my opinion?”

  “Borne…” His asymmetrical rhymes were like bad puns in three dimensions—tiring, often scatological, or, as he put it “only natural, which rhymes with cultural”—but always coming to a point. And the point he would generally arrive at was that he wanted me to take him out into the city.