Spirits in the Wires (5 page)

“Saskia,” he repeated with a smile, then glanced at William. “If this isn't proof positive we're living in the modern world, I don't know what is.”

I gave him a puzzled look when his dark gaze returned to me.

“Well, you see,” he said. “I know that machines have always had spirits, but I look at you and see that now they're making babies, too.”

I suppose that was one way of putting it.

“That's why we're here,” William said. “We're looking for some advice on how to turn down her shine.”

Robert pulled his guitar down onto his lap and began to pluck a melody on its strings, playing so soft, you'd have to strain to hear it. But the odd thing was, while I couldn't hear them clearly, I could
feel
those notes, resonating deep down inside me.

“Turn down your shine,” he said.

I nodded. “It makes it hard to fit in.”

“You should try being black,” he said.

He improvised softly around a minor chord, waking an eerie feeling in the nape of my neck.

“I know it's not the same thing,” I started, but his smile stopped me.

“We all know that,” he said. “Don't worry. I'm not about to go all Black Panther on you.”

His fingers did a funny little crab-walk up the neck of the guitar that took away the strange feeling the minor chord had called up.

“So can you help her?” William asked.

Robert smiled. “Turn down a shine? Sure.” He looked at me. “That's an easy one. You've just got to stop being so aware of it yourself, that's all. Have you got any hard questions?”

“But…that's it?”

“Pretty much. Oh, it won't happen overnight, but if you can stop yourself from remembering, or believing, or what it is that you're doing inside that head of yours, soon enough everybody else will be seeing it your way, too. It'll be like you'll all start to agree that this is the way things are. Or should be.”

“Making a consensual reality,” William said. “Like the professor's always talking about.”

Robert nodded. “Of course, you've got to ask yourself,” he said to me, “why would you want to turn down a shine?”

Now it was my turn to smile.

“I've already been through that with William,” I said. “Like I told him, I want the option of fitting in if I want to.”

“Curious, isn't it?” Robert said. “All the magic people want to be normal, and all the normal people want magic. Nobody ever wants what they've already got and that's the story of the world.”

He started a twelve-bar blues, humming a soft accompaniment to the aching music his fingers pulled from the guitar.

William and I sat there for a long time, just listening to him play before we finally left the diner.

I don't know if this happens to you, but it's a funny thing. There's this syn-chronicity with street people. Doesn't matter how unusual they might be, like Tinfoil Annie making her animals with aluminum foil that she then sets free in the gutters, or talented, like Robert Lonnie and the way he can play a guitar. See them once and suddenly you're seeing them all the time and you have to wonder, how was it that you never noticed them before?

After that afternoon in the diner, I started seeing Robert everywhere, playing that old Gibson of his. He was so good that I asked William once why Robert wasn't playing out, doing real gigs instead of sitting in the back of clubs, after-hours, or all the other places you might find him making music: on park benches, in diners, on street corners, in the subway.

“The story is,” William said, “that he traded his soul to the devil to be able to make the kind of music he does. But it wasn't a fair trade. Turned out, Robert had that music in him all along—he just hadn't been patient enough to take the long way of getting it out. Anyway, he's supposed to have figured out a way he can live forever—just to spite the devil, he says— but he likes to keep a low profile anyway. Seems the devil will let you get away with a thing or two, just so long as you don't rub him in the face with it.”

“Do you believe that?”

William shrugged. “I've seen enough things in this world that I'll keep an open mind about anything. And I like the idea of somebody putting one over on old Nick.” Then he smiled. “ ‘Course there's others say Robert just ages well and has a natural talent.”

Not everybody I met on the street actually lived on the street, even when, at first, it seemed as if they did. I guess some people were like I came to be— they just felt more comfortable carrying on their business on the edges of society.

I thought Geordie was homeless when I first met him—busking with his fiddle for people's spare change instead of panhandling. But once I got to know him, I realized that he just liked playing on the street. He played in clubs, too—had an apartment on Lee Street and all—but busking, he said, kept him honest. He was one of the first street musicians you'd hear in the spring—standing on some corner, all bundled up, fingerless gloves on his hands—and one of the last to give it up in the fall.

Geordie and I hit it off right away. I suppose we could have become more than friends, but I could tell he was carrying a torch for someone else and that kind of thing always gets in the way of developing a meaningful relationship. One or the other of you ends up settling for what's in front of you, but you're always remembering the something you couldn't have.

At first I thought that something was Sam, this old girlfriend of Geordie's who did this mysterious sidestep out of his life, but once I got to know him better, I realized he was really carrying the torch for his friend Jilly. I got the idea that neither of them was aware of it—or at least would admit it to themselves—though everyone else in their crowd seemed to be aware of it.

It's funny, considering how close he and Jilly are, that I must have known Geordie for almost half a year before I ever met Jilly and got pulled into her mad, swirling circle of friends. Geordie often talked about her and Sophie and Wendy and the rest of them, but somehow our paths never crossed. I know it's a big city, but when we finally did meet, it turned out we knew so many people in common, you'd have thought we'd have run into each other a lot sooner than we did.

Something similar happened with Christy, though in his case I'd actually seen him around before. I just hadn't known who he was.

The way we met, I was walking down Lee Street and saw Geordie at a table on the patio of the Rusty Lion with some fellow whose face I couldn't see because his back was to me. By the time I realized who it was, it was too late to retreat because Geordie'd already seen me. I made myself go up to their table to say hello.

You see, I'd already noticed Christy and been attracted to him long before we actually met. The first time was at a poetry reading. I spied him across the room and there was something about him that I liked enough to almost give up my promise of not trying to connect with people at those things. But then I saw that he was with Aaran and a woman—that I didn't get along with either—who worked for another paper. If they were his friends, I didn't want to be one myself.

I noticed him from time to time in the neighbourhood after that, usually on his own, but never put it together that this brother Geordie often talked about was the same person as this attractive stranger with his bad taste in friends.

Turns out I was wrong about the friends. Christy has impeccable taste in them, not least because he dislikes Aaran about as much as I do, though not for all the same reasons.

Once we got that out of the way, one thing led to another and … well, that's how I came to be where I am now, living with Christy.

I've learned to turn down my shine enough to get along in a crowd when I want to, but the price I paid for that is losing the voice in my head. And when I lost it, I lost my connection to whatever that big voodoo spirit in cyberspace might have been. I don't dream about flying over circuit boards anymore. I don't dream about pixels and streaming bands of electricity or any of that. Most of the time all those ideas just seem like some crazy notion I once had.

But I don't trust this flesh I'm wearing, either.

I don't trust the experiences that fill my head because they only date back to when I first appeared in this world. Like I said, I can follow a computer and paper trail tracing my background—where I was born, grew up, went to school—but I still can't recall any of it.

So, sometimes I still think that there used to be something else in my head, some vast world of information—or at least a connection to the spirit that people surfing on the Net can access as the Wordwood. Or perhaps it's still there, but I'm cut off from it.

I guess I'm not really sure of anything, except I know I'm in this world now. And I know I can count on Christy to stand by me.

Most days that's enough.

It was different for me,

The first time I opened my eyes I knew exactly what I was: all the excess baggage that Christy didn't want. How does he put it in his journal?

…
at around the age of six or seven we separate and then hide away the parts of ourselves that don't seem acceptable, that don't fit in the world around us. Those unacceptable parts that we secret away become our shadow.

I know. It sounds desperately grim. But it wasn't all bad. Because the things that people think they don't want aren't necessarily negative. Remember, they're just little kids at the time. Their personalities are still only beginning to form. And all of this is happening on an instinctive, almost cellular level. It's not like they're actually thinking any of it through.

Anyway, in my case …

Even as a little boy, Christy shut people out. That let me be open.

He was often so bloody serious—because he didn't trust people enough to relax around them, I suppose—and that let me be cheerful.

He didn't make friends easily. I could and did.

But I got his dark baggage, too. A quick temper, because he held his in check. A recklessness, because he didn't take chances—

Well, you get the picture. I was the opposite parts of him. Elsewhere in his journals he describes our physical differences:

She's short, where I'm tall. Dark-skinned, where I'm light. Red-haired, where mine's dark. A girl to my boy, and now a woman as I'm a man.

Basically, I opened my eyes to find that I was this seven-year-old girl who knew everything about being a seven-year-old boy, but nothing about being herself.

I suppose it could have been dangerous for me, trying to make my way through the big bad world all on my own at such a tender age, but it didn't quite work out that way. For one thing, when a shadow is created … yes, she's all the unwanted parts of the one who cast her, but she takes an equal amount of … I don't know … spirit, perhaps, or experience … some kind of essence from the borderlands. So right away, I was this unwanted baggage and something more.

What are the borderlands?

Once we started talking to each other, Christy was always asking, “Where do you go when you're not in this world?”

I wouldn't tell him for the longest time—as much because I like to hang on to the “woman of mystery” image he has of me as for any logical reason. But one night when he was going through one of his periodic bouts of self-questioning, I relented.

“To the fields beyond the fields,” I finally told him, explaining how they lie all around us and inside us.

What I didn't explain is that they're part of the border countries, the fields that lie between this world he knows so well and the otherworld— Fairyland, the spirit world, the dreamlands, call it what you will. That otherworld is what the mystics and poets are always reaching out for, few of them ever realizing that the borderlands in between are a realm all their own and just as magical. They lie thin as gauze in some places—that's where it's the easiest to slip through from one world into the other—and broad as the largest continent elsewhere.

The beings that inhabit this place are sometimes called the Eadar. Most of them were created out of imagination, existing only so long as someone believed in them, though it's also the place where shadows like me usually go. The Eadar call it Meadhon. The Kickaha call it
ÃbitawehÃakÃ,
the halfway world. I just think of it as the middleworid. The borderlands. But I didn't get into any of that with Christy.

What I also didn't explain is what I was just telling you about how a shadow takes as much of her initial substance from something in the borderlands as it does from the one casting her. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just from the air itself. Maybe something in the borderland casts another shadow and people like me are born where the two shadows meet. What I do know is that I had an immediate connection to that place and when I first slipped over, I met my guide.

I say “my guide,” like everybody gets one, but that's not necessarily the case. I just know there was someone waiting for me when I crossed over.

Being new to everything, I simply accepted Mumbo at face value. It was only in the years to follow, as I began to acquire a personal history of experience and values, that I thought, isn't this typical? When other people get spirit guides or totems, they're mysterious power animals, maybe wise old men or women, like the grandparents you maybe never had.

I got Mumbo.

She was basically a mushroom brown sphere the size of a large beach ball with spindly little arms and legs that were folded close to her body when she wasn't using them to roll herself from one place to another. Much like those Balloon Men that Christy wrote about in his first book,
How to Make the Wind Blow,
I suppose. Today I can't imagine anything less mystical or learned, but she had a kind face and I was a newborn seven-year-old when I first met her. No doubt she was an appropriate shape to capture the interest of that child I was, and the immediate affection I had for her carries on to this day, for all that she's just so … so silly-looking.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first time I opened my eyes, I was this scruffy little girl in a raggedy black dress, skin the colour of a frappuccino, eyes the blue of cornflowers, red hair falling in a spill of tangles and snarls to my shoulders. I was in the field behind the Riddell house. I sat up and looked at the window that was Christy and Geordie's bedroom. Paddy, their older brother, was already in juvie.

I knew who they were. I knew everything Christy knew up until the moment he cast me off. After that our lives were separate and we had our own experiences, although I still knew a lot more about him than he did of me.

He didn't even remember casting me out. That came years later, when he was reading about shadows in some book and decided to try to call his own back to him.

But I remembered. And I knew him. I'd follow him around sometimes, until I got bored. But I always came back, fascinated by this boy who once was me. Or I was once him. Whatever.

When he started keeping a journal, I pored over the various volumes, sitting at the shabby little desk beside his bed, reading and rereading what he'd written, trying to understand who he was, and how he was so different from me.

He woke once or twice to see me there. I'd look back at him, not saying a word. Closing the book, I'd return it to its drawer, turn off the desk light, and let myself fade back into the borderlands. I'd read later in his journal how he thought he'd only been dreaming.

But that first night I didn't go into the house. I was too mad at him for casting me out of the life we'd had together.

How dare he? How
dare
he just cast me off. Like he was putting out the trash. Like I was the trash. I'd show him what trash was.

Little fists clenched, I took a step toward the house, planning I don't know what—throw a rock through his window, maybe—but I accidentally stumbled out of this world and into the borderlands.

Where Mumbo was waiting for me.

Remember how easily distracted you could be as a kid? Oh, sorry. I guess you don't. Well, take my word for it. You can be in a high temper one moment, laughing your head off the next.

So I stood there, blinking in this twilit world that I'd suddenly found myself in, too surprised to be angry anymore. I can't tell you how I knew I'd stepped from one world to another, I just did. The air was different. The light was different. The biggest clue, I guess, was how the Riddell house at the far end of the field that I'd been walking toward wasn't there anymore.

I suppose I might have gotten scared, though I've never scared easily, except that was when Mumbo showed up.

I watched this brown ball come bouncing across the meadow toward me. When she stopped herself with her little spindly limbs and I saw her face, the big kind eyes twinkling, the easy smile so welcoming, I clapped my hands and grinned back.

“Hello, little girl,” the brown bail said.

“You can talk.”

“Of course I can talk.”

“I've never heard a ball talk before.”

“There are a thousand things and more that you have yet to experience,” she said. “If you spend less time being surprised by them, you'll have more time to appreciate them.”

“Are you going to be my friend?” I asked.

“I hope so. And your teacher, too, if you'd like. My name's Mumbo.”

“I'm Christy,” I said, then realized that wasn't true anymore, so I quickly amended it to “Anna,” taking the first name that popped into my head.

Anna was a girl in Christy's class at school that he was sweet on at the time. Actually, Christy was always sweet on some girl or another—a serial romantic, that boy of ours. Or at least he was until he met you. But he'd never do much. Just give them moony looks and write poems that he never gave to them.

“It's nice to meet you, Christiana,” Mumbo said.

I almost corrected her, but then I decided I liked the way it sounded. It was a new name, but it still had history.

“What kind of things are you going to teach me?” I asked.

I was a little nervous. Seven years of being part of Christy had taught me not to trust grown-ups. I knew Mumbo was a ball, and all of this was like out of some storybook, but she still had a bit of the sound of a grownup about her when she spoke.

“Whatever you want to learn,” she said. “We could start with my showing you how to move back and forth between the worlds. That's a very handy trick for a shadow.”

“What's a shadow?” I asked.

I could tell from the way she said the word that she meant something different from what a light casts. But as soon as she started to explain, I realized I already knew. It was me. Cast out of Christy.

Not everybody has a shadow the way Christy describes it in his journal.

Wait. That's not right. What I meant to say was that while everybody has a shadow, not everyone has access to the person that shadow might be become.

First you have to call the shadow to you.

Some children do this naturally and never recognize these invisible companions and friends as ever having been a part of them. And most of those children put aside their shadows once they grow up so the poor creatures are rejected twice. Those that do remember, or learn about us somehow, are often surprised at who they find. I know Christy was.

At first he thought he might be going mad because I only came to him as a voice. I'm not sure why I did that. I think it was probably nervousness on my part. I wanted him to like me—I was a sort of twin, after all, and I'd long since gotten over being mad at him for casting me out of him—but I wasn't sure he would since, after all, I
was
all those parts of himself that he'd put aside.

Being born from the cast-off bits of someone else's personality isn't necessarily a bad thing. Because just like the people we echo, we go on after the split. We have the same capacity for growth and change as they do. We may begin life as evil, or clumsy, or outgoing, but we can learn to become good, or agile, or shy.

And I shouldn't have worried about Christy's reaction to me when we finally met in the flesh. He proved to be quite taken with me, half in love at first, though I've learned that isn't so surprising in situations such as this. It's also why shadows are drawn to those who cast them off, no matter what the difference is between them: You're meeting your other half, your missing half. In many cases, the changes you go through make you more alike, rather than less. Perhaps we teach each other the best parts of ourselves.

After his initial infatuation, Christy and I settled into more of a sibling relationship. He treats me as the older and wiser of the two of us, the one who understands Mystery because I live in it, because my very origins are so extraordinary. I don't feel that way. I learn as much from him, but I let him keep his misconceptions. Let's face it, a girl likes to be mysterious, doesn't matter if she's human or a shadow.

What's life like for a shadow? I don't need to eat or drink, but I love good food and a fine wine. I don't need to sleep either, but I still enjoy luxuriating under the sheets or spending the whole morning just lying in bed when the rest of the world is up and about its business.

And sometimes when I close my eyes and pretend to sleep, I actually dream.

I'm not doing such a good job of this. I should be explaining things in a more linear fashion—the way you did—but my brain doesn't work that way. Another difference between Christy and me, I guess. He's so logical, working everything through from start to expected finish, while I flit about like a moth attracted to any light with a strong enough flicker.

So where was I?

Right. Growing up as a shadow.

I grew more quickly than Christy. It wasn't just a matter of girls maturing sooner. Shadows can choose their age. We can't change our specific looks—I mean, I can't suddenly appear in front of you as a cat or a dog— but we can appear to be whatever age we want to be and that's a handy thing.