Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Why else had Borne moved out? Why else had he told me he couldn’t stop? Why else had he only spent one or two hours at a time with us the past few weeks? He knew. He knew all too well. And he was a murderer.

  “I won’t ever know another person like you,” Borne said, and I felt that in my bones, in my heart and my head.

  I would never know anyone like Borne ever again, and even if I saw Borne again it would never be the same as when we lived together in the Balcony Cliffs, the way we’d run down the corridors and punched holes in the walls and joked and laughed and I’d taught him new words that he’d held there in his mind like jewels, and repeated over and over until he knew them better than I did.

  “You’ll be better off,” I lied. “It won’t be as bad as you think,” I lied.

  Wick was silent. Wick wasn’t part of this and knew better than to speak.

  “Will I ever see you again, Rachel?” Borne asked.

  “I’m sure we will see each other again, Borne. Of course we will.”

  There came another change in Borne’s aspect, something only I could see and could not communicate to anyone else, but it read like stoicism, it read like acceptance. He came down off the ceiling, he became in shape more like the Borne I knew, the Borne that had lived in my apartment and that I had once thought was a plant.

  Borne came close. Borne stood next to me, and I didn’t flinch. He reached down to touch my face with one thick, soft tentacle. The orbiting circle of eyes. The body so much like a vase or a squid. The colors strobing there now were confident, bold, but I knew he was just trying to reassure me, and that shook my resolve, left me with doubt. Wouldn’t a true monster, a true killer, have absorbed us or given an ultimatum, murdered us and taken over the Balcony Cliffs?

  “I’ll go,” Borne said. “I’ll be better off. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I won’t forget you, Rachel. I won’t ever forget you.”

  Then he was surging past me, out of the cavern, and I dropped to my knees, and wouldn’t let Wick near me, heartbroken and unable to accept what had just happened. The siege from within was over. Everything seemed like it was over.

  Borne was gone.

  WHAT I FOUND IN BORNE’S APARTMENT

  After Borne left, I was a wreck. I was a wreck that couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, that stumbled around smashing into things. Into walls. Into furniture. Everything a blur. I wanted to punish myself for what had happened. I wanted to punish myself and I wanted to go search for Borne and tell him I hadn’t meant it and we could reform him, that we could stop his impulses, that he could fight them, that everything would be all right.

  But I didn’t. Instead, I lay in my bed in my apartment, doubled over and sobbing until I hurt from it, wanted to hurt from it. I didn’t care what happened to me. Mord could have dug me up and swallowed me whole as a morsel and some part of me would have been grateful. And yet there was another part of Rachel, the part that had lasted six years in the city, who waited patiently behind the scenes, saying, Get it out, get it all out now so it doesn’t kill you later.

  When I woke after however many hours, days, or centuries, I checked on Wick. We found only the least number of words to say to each other, we made the least connection, and I couldn’t look at him, because it was as if we were different people who had had different conversations, and I didn’t know who I was talking to, had to begin to inventory all our many meetups the past months, to gauge which had been him and which Borne as Wick. Later we might tally them as requiem, claim those we had no right to claim so as to tell the other person that we wanted whatever supported a story that told of our love, our friendship, and nothing but those things.

  Then, after a time, instinct took me back, the instinct for traps and avoiding them. Instinct took me to Borne’s apartment—both to make sure he had truly left and to search it. I entered soft, slow, so hollowed-out that I felt nothing, but also half expecting to find Borne there, in the apartment.

  But Borne was gone, and Borne had not left much behind. He hadn’t had much to begin with. The three dead astronauts still hung from hooks on the wall, but they had no power over me; they were almost old friends now, so thoroughly had Borne acclimated me to their skeletons.

  I found only what was in the closet—so many clothes, other people’s clothes, in all sizes and styles, most of it ragged, worn, or bloodstained. Some of it I recognized as salvage from other parts of the Balcony Cliffs, and some I did not and of these most must have come from those he had “absorbed.” There were fifty or sixty shirts in the closet. At least.

  Hidden at the bottom, under mounds of pants, I found a thick journal with a B written on the front. It looked like nothing at all—tattered and foxed, something he’d rescued for reuse. It was locked, but the tiny key had been placed in the lock. I looked at it for a long time before I opened it. I stared and stared. I couldn’t stop staring until the words blurred into oblivion. I guess that means I didn’t want to read it. But I was Rachel the scavenger, and this was salvage of a particular type, and I was empty and searching for answers.

  Much of the journal was in languages I couldn’t read. But on the first page was his first, stuttering attempt to write.

  My name is Borne.

  —My name is not Borne. That is just something Rachel calls me. It means to carry something you don’t want to carry.

  My name is not-Borne and I came here on Mord’s body, no matter what Rachel says.

  —I did not come here on Mord’s body.

  —I became entangled in Mord’s fur. (Who entangled me?)

  —Where did I come from before that?

  My name is not-Borne. I did not come here on Mord’s body, but I am human.

  —I am not human. I am not human. I am not human.

  —Rachel says I am a “he.” Am I he, she, or both or neither?

  —I am a person.

  Not nice. Not nice.

  Beautiful.

  I came here from a distant star.

  I came here from the moon, like the dead astronauts.

  I was made by the Company.

  I was made by someone.

  I am not actually alive.

  I am a robot.

  I am a person.

  I am a weapon.

  I am not/intelligent.

  I have nine senses and Rachel only has five. I can make eyes anytime I want and Rachel can’t. If she lost her eyes, she’d be blind. If I lost my eyes, I could still see.

  I do not know when I am being what they want me to be and when I am myself. It is better when I am “cute.” It is safer.

  Not nice. NOT NICE.

  Borne traveled from a distant star. Borne traveled from a distant Company. Borne could not stop eating. Borne could not stop killing. Borne doesn’t think of it that way, but it must be. It must be killing.

  BORNE MUST STOP KILLING. BORNE MUST STOP TASTING. BORNE MUST STOP BEING BORNE. BORNE MUST EAT WHAT IS ALREADY DEAD, LIKE NORMAL PERSONS.

  What if I am the only one?

  What if I cannot die?

  What if no one made me?

  Everything was in there. Everything I’d done to help him and everything I’d done that hadn’t. Everything I’d made him into and everything I hadn’t made him into. As he’d said, Borne had snuck into our apartments because he’d seen me sneak into Wick’s apartment. He’d pretended to be me and pretended to be Wick because he didn’t want us to argue, wanted us to be nice. Had seen us playing out roles, with all our baggage, and thought: What’s the harm in doing the same?

  I’d been teaching him the whole time, with every last little thing I did, even when I didn’t realize I was teaching him. With every last little thing I did, not just those things I tried to teach him. Every moment I had been teaching him, and how I wanted now to take back some of those moments. How I wanted now not to have snuck into Wick’s apartment. How I wished I had been a better person.

  Rachel can’t protect me from Mord, and I can’t protect her from me.

  In so man
y ways, Borne had told me, “I can’t stop.” I can’t stop growing. I can’t stop who I am. I can’t stop killing people, and I had shut him out, ignored him, tried to pretend he was something other than what he was, and in doing so I had betrayed him. Because Borne knew what he was.

  I didn’t want to move out of Rachel’s apartment. But I had to. Otherwise, I don’t know what will happen to her. I keep eating lizards, but it isn’t enough. On my own, maybe things will be better. Maybe I can be the one in control.

  Days and moments noted when he’d gone out and “been able to resist” and “not able to resist.” Charting patterns. Trying to understand himself. Experimenting with substitution. But the worst substitution was when he knew it was wrong but couldn’t stop, couldn’t ever stop, would never stop, and killed people so he wouldn’t kill me. Getting desperate, at his wit’s end and unable to talk to anyone about it.

  The number of shirts in his closet multiplying as Borne grew larger.

  Becoming … what? Originating … where?

  He’d been more alone than I could have imagined. More desperate. There was no other way to describe it.

  Worse still were the entries where Borne felt “grateful” to me. How kind I’d been to him, how much I’d taught him, how much he’d learned, how he would “never forget” me, as if he knew already when writing that someday he would be driven out of the Balcony Cliffs.

  Nothing I found in Borne’s apartment gave me comfort. But I did not believe I deserved comfort.

  * * *

  A week or so later I saw Borne again, from afar. It was twilight. We still held the Balcony Cliffs and I’d come out to the balcony to look down on the polluted, beautiful river and all the shadows created by it. I was in a quiet mood. Wick had healed well enough, although not completely.

  Far below, down below, I saw myself running along the river. I was running free, so fluid and lithe, over that rocky terrain. And I was not quite me, and, anyway, I was standing on the balcony, so I knew it was Borne below.

  I hadn’t known I was so fragile, so delicate in motion. I didn’t know Borne had loved me quite so much.

  The sight nearly broke my heart all over again, I can’t lie, and there was an indelible, floating moment when I felt as if I was down there, looking out through Borne’s eyes, and not up on the balcony in my own skin.

  The feeling faded, and Borne, as if he knew I was watching, became himself again, free to be himself again, in that moment, and I saw that strange animals followed in his wake again. The little foxes and the rabbits and the things that looked like foxes and rabbits but were not.

  He was just another part of the city now, I tried to tell myself, but the loss was too raw to think of him as just another obstacle, threat, or opportunity. That I could never do.

  I thought the animals might be chasing after him, but, no, it became clear soon enough: Borne was leading them. Borne was somehow leading them. All the forgotten and outcast creatures, beneath the notice of the city.

  While the river continued on its course, carrying all of us with it.

  PART THREE

  WHAT THEY TOOK FROM MORD AND FROM US

  A few days after we cast Borne out, Mord lost the power to fly. Whoever had taken that away from Mord must have hoped it would happen in mid-glide over the city, and that he would plummet from a great height and die in an ocean of his own blood. But it did not happen that way. He just woke up one morning and could not fly. Was this a relief? It should have been, but somehow it seemed foreboding, a sign along with all the other signs that the things we depended on were changing.

  Mord sat in the apocalyptic splendor of his own fur across the cement of an empty parking lot, surrounded by his huffing, grunting, snorting proxies, and he could not fly. He could not float or soar or hover, though he tried. Such puzzlement in Mord’s snarls, these snarls like hissed-out question marks, and then the titanic bellow to follow, that expressed in heavy breath his rage and his outrage. Mord could not fly and a dozen cults across the city must have collapsed and their followers fled in confusion or disbanded or killed themselves. God was God no longer. God would have to walk the Earth like the rest of us. He had lost something he had come to believe he would always have and relied on to be there, and its absence came as a shock.

  Still, Mord tried to become a god again. He hurled himself at the sky, only to lurch and stumble and catch his balance with his front paws smashing against pavement. Drawing himself up to full height, a tension to his body as if with every muscle tightened he could will himself into the air … he stood there while the Mord proxies milled underfoot in a chorusing “Drrk-drrk” of confusion.

  Mord tried again and again, offering himself to the sky—each time, rejected, no matter the method. A full running start, on all fours, a cautious expedition from the top of a three-story building crumbling beneath him even as he jumped from it. Another run, this time on his hind legs, but to no avail. Half a morning spent by the great bear, launching himself, seeking to recapture the magic, to restore the Company tech that had allowed him to ease his great bulk through the sky. He took to what came instinctual again: bounding on all fours through new wreckage and old, smashing everything in his path, splintering houses, collapsing smokestacks that fell out to the side like paltry straws.

  No matter. Mord was trying to achieve an escape velocity he’d never had, or needed, and came rough-tumbling back down after a handful of breath-catching moments when it appeared he had once more achieved separation from the ground, when there could be seen a space between his belly and the earth, his paws and the earth … only for it to prove an illusion, and he fell, sometimes heavily, to bruise bones and muscles, with an impact that leveled a courtyard or apartment complex.

  From the dust clouds of such destruction, Mord would rise, staring toward the horizon as if it held some answer. But mostly, as he came to accept this new limitation on his powers, Mord sat. Mord sat and pondered. Mord sat and pondered and swiveled his great head from side to side, surveying his domain, curious as to who would be the first to challenge him in his reduced condition. Mord looked as if his brain was full of murder, because he recognized what was to come—and he was ready. But he also looked like a bear cub, left to fend for himself amid the huge pile of bones that was the city.

  I had seen Mord hungry and thirsty. I had seen him possessed of a secret anguish. I had seen him injured, favoring a paw or a muscled shoulder, but I had not seen him with his back to the wall or desperate or mortal. No one had, and yet we were about to, a fear and opportunity both. The perverse question in that city, for all of us, was what would bind us together were Mord ever to die.

  “The Magician’s back,” Wick told me. “The Magician must be back.”

  “Is that it?” I replied, although I had little interest.

  Wick still had a nose for information, even as his contacts thinned. Among the rumors that came to us in the days after: that some of the Magician’s people had infiltrated the Company building, had gotten through the gauntlet of proxies, had flipped a switch or destroyed a mechanism, and this was the source of Mord’s diminishment. Others believed Mord’s earthbound status was a time-delayed effect of his mauling of the Company building, which had damaged a mechanism that had finally given out—or a sign that his cult within the Company had lost faith in him.

  Whatever the truth, what did I care now whether Mord did or did not fly? I had suffered a terrible shock and an absence that could never be made right. This was the city, and we had to go on like it didn’t matter, could not show weakness or we were lost. All that mattered, like Mord on a smaller scale, was making the effort to look around me to see what might next come at me in my new weakness, my time without Borne.

  * * *

  As the days passed and it became clear that Mord would never fly again, a sound we did not know we had been hearing removed itself from the city. A sound like a secret manipulation of the air, something that left so little trace I find it hard to describe. Because it had been
a sound so invisible, so smooth, so without texture or taste or smell that all we knew was that we missed it now, even if we could not recall its nature. But this I knew in my gut: It had been the sound, the underlying subliminal hum, that meant Mord could fly.

  I thought of Borne and his extra senses. I thought of the Company and Mord, and I wondered what else in this city we could not hear, would only hear when it was taken from us.

  * * *

  Faint but powerful evidence of the Magician’s rebirth came to us much closer to home. With a regretful look, Wick told me to go to the northernmost Balcony Cliffs exit and see what now lay beyond it. I knew Wick wanted to distract me, to relieve the ache of Borne’s absence, and to force me out of the emptiness in my head, or otherwise he would have just told me. But I went anyway.

  Outside the northern exit, the Magician, or someone, had gathered the three dead astronauts Wick had discarded there, dug them open graves, put one body in each, and put a name on a piece of wood by each: Wick, Rachel, Borne.

  Along with a word scraped out in the dirt with a stick: LEAVE.

  The Magician’s intel was out-of-date, if she was back and this wasn’t the doing of her underlings or some third party. There were only two of us now in the Balcony Cliffs, and it seemed far emptier than that. But mostly when I saw the graves, I decided the Magician was not a serious person. Until then, even though we were enemies, I think I had at times given her too much credit—taken comfort in the idea that she represented some kind of hope for the future of the city and that after bloodshed and despicable acts might come peace or stability.

  As I stood there, a familiar fox appeared from behind a pile of cinder blocks nesting in the moss nearby. But she wasn’t really a fox. In that clear light, she looked like clever abandoned biotech. I thought I could see tiny vestigial arms beneath the fur of her chest. The darting of her gaze was too human.

  “Tell the Magician she can fuck off,” I told the fox, although I did not believe the fox came from the Magician. If anything, the fox came from Borne. Or I hoped the fox came from Borne.