Stories for Chip (33 page)

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It was only one summer and she was nobody special, so what's the point of all this? He's gone, he's gone, he's gone. I'm twenty-three and I'm washing my clothes up at the minimall on Ernston Road. She's here with me—she's folding her shit and smiling and showing me her missing teeth and saying, It's been a long time, hasn't it, Yunior?

Years, I say, loading my whites. Outside the sky is clear of gulls, and down at the apartment my moms is waiting for me with dinner. Six months earlier we were sitting in front of the TV and my mother said, Well, I think I'm finally over this place.

Nilda asks, Did you move or something?

I shake my head. Just been working.

God, it's been a long, long time. She's on her clothes like magic, making everything neat, making everything fit. There are four other people at the counters, broke-ass-looking niggers with knee socks and croupier's hats and scars snaking up their arms, and they all seem like sleepwalkers compared with her. She shakes her head, grinning. Your brother, she says.

Rafa.

She points her finger at me like my brother always did.

I miss him sometimes.

She nods. Me, too. He was a good guy to me.

I must have disbelief on my face because she finishes shaking out her towels and then stares straight through me. He treated me the best.

Nilda.

He used to sleep with my hair over his face. He used to say it made him feel safe.

What else can we say? She finishes her stacking, I hold the door open for her. The locals watch us leave. We walk back through the old neighborhood, slowed down by the bulk of our clothes. London Terrace has changed now that the landfill has shut down. Kicked-up rents and mad South Asian people and white folks living in the apartments, but it's our kids you see in the streets and hanging from the porches.

Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.

Remember the day we met? she asks.

I nod.

You wanted to play baseball.

It was summer, I say. You were wearing a tank top.

You made me put on a shirt before you'd let me be on your team. Do you remember?

I remember, I say.

We never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don't know where the fuck she went.

Benjamin Rosenbaum

Fift was almost five, and it wasn't like her anymore to be asleep in all of her bodies. She wasn't a baby anymore; she was old enough for school, old enough to walk all alone across the habitation, down the spoke to the great and buzzing center of Foo. But she had been wound up with excitement for days, practically dancing around the house (Father Miskisk had laughed, Father Smistria had shooed her out of the supper garden, Father Frill had summoned her to the bathing room and had her swim back and forth, back and forth, “to calm you down!”), and just before supper she'd finally collapsed, twice—in the atrium, and curled up on the tiered balcony—and Father Arevio and Father Squell had carried her, in those two bodies, back to her room. She'd managed to stay awake in her third body through most of supper, blinking hugely and breathing in through her nose and trying to sit up straight, as waves of deep blue slumber from her two sleeping brains washed through her. By supper's end, she couldn't stand up, and Father Squell carried that body, too, to bed.

Muddy dreams: of sitting on a wooden floor in a long hall…of her name being called…of realizing she hadn't worn her gown after all, but was somehow—humiliatingly—dressed in Father Frill's golden bells instead. The other children laughing at her, and dizziness, and suddenly, surreally, the hall being full of flutterbyes, their translucent wings fluttering, their projection surfaces glittering….

Then someone was stroking Fift's eyebrow, gently, and she tried to nestle farther down into the blankets, and the someone started gently pulling on her earlobe. She opened her eyes, and it was Father Squell.

“Good morning, little cubblehedge,” he said. “You have a big day today.”

Father Squell was slim and rosy-skinned and smelled like soap and flowers. Fift crawled into his lap and flung her arms around him and pressed her nose between his bosoms. He was dressed in glittery red fabric, soft and slippery under Fift's fingers.

Squell was bald, with coppery metal spikes extruding from the skin of his scalp. Sometimes Father Miskisk teased about them—the spikes weren't fashionable anymore—and sometimes when he did, Father Squell stormed out of the room, because Father Squell was a little vain. He was never much of a fighter, the other Fathers said. But he had a body in the asteroids, and that was something amazing.

Squell reached over, Fift still in his lap, and started stroking the eyebrow of another of Fift's bodies. Fift sneezed, in that body, and then sneezed in the other two, and that was funny, and she started to giggle. Now she was all awake.

“Up, little cubblehedge,” Squell said. “Up!”

Fift crawled out of bed, careful not to crawl over herself. It always made her a little restless to be all together, all three bodies in the same room. That wasn't really good, it was because her somatic integration wasn't totally successful, and that was why she kept having to see Pedagogical Expert Pnim Moralasic Foundelly of name registry Pneumatic Lance 12. Pedagogical Expert Pnim Moralasic Foundelly had put an awful nag agent in Fift's mind, to tell her to look herself in the eye, and play in a coordinated manner, and do the exercises. It was nagging now, but Fift ignored it.

She looked under the bed for her gowns.

They weren't there. She closed her eyes (because she wasn't so good yet at seeing things over the feed with her eyes open) and used the house feed to look all around the house. Her gowns weren't in the balcony or the atrium or the small mat-room or the breakfast room.

Fathers Arevio and Smistria and Frill, and another of Father Squell's bodies, were in the breakfast room, already eating. Father Miskisk was arguing with the kitchen.

{Where are my gowns?} Fift asked her agents, but perhaps she did it wrong, because they didn't say anything.

“Father Squell,” she said, opening her eyes, “I can't find my gowns, and my agents can't either.”

“I composted your gowns; they were old,” Squell said. “Go down to the bathing room and get washed. I'll make you some new clothes.”

Fift's hearts began to pound. The gowns weren't old; they'd only come out of the oven a week ago. “But I want
those
gowns,” she said.

Squell opened the door. “You can't have those gowns. Those gowns are compost. Bathing!” He snatched Fift up, one of her bodies under his arm, the wrist of another caught in his other hand.

Fift tried to wriggle out of her Father's grasp, yanked on her arm to get free, while she looked desperately under the bed again. “They weren't old,” she said, her voice wavering.

“Fift,” Squell said, exasperated. “That's enough. For Kumru's sake, today of all days!” He dragged her, in two of her bodies, through the door. In another body, this one with silvery spikes on its head, he came hurrying down the hall.

“I want them back,” Fift said. She wouldn't cry. She wasn't a baby any more, she was a big Staidchild, and Staids don't cry. She wouldn't cry. She wouldn't even shout or emphasize. She would stay calm and clear. Today of all days. She was still struggling, a little, and Squell handed her to his other body.

“They are
compost
,” Squell said, reddening, in the body with the silver spikes, while one with the copper spikes came into the room. “They have gone down the sluice and
dissolved
. Your gowns are now part of the nutrient flow and they could be anywhere in Fullbelly and they will probably be part of your
breakfast
next week!”

Fift gasped. Fift didn't want to eat her gowns. There was a cold lump in her stomach. Squell caught her third body.

Father Miskisk came down the corridor doublebodied. He was bigger than Squell, broad-chested, square-jawed, with a mane of blood-red hair, and sunset-orange skin traced all over with white squiggles. He was wearing his dancing pants. His voice was deep and rumbly, and he smelled warm, roasty, and oily. “Fift, little Fift,” he said. “Come on, let's zoom around. I'll zoom you to the bathing room. Come jump up. Give her here, Squell.”

“I want my gowns,” Fift said, in her third body, as Squell dragged her through the doorway.

“Here,” Squell said, trying to hand Fift's other bodies to Miskisk. But Fift clung to Squell. She didn't want to zoom right now. Zooming was fun, but too wild for this day, and too wild for someone who had lost her gowns. The gowns were a pale blue, soft as clouds; they would whisper around Fift's legs when she ran.

“Oh Fift,
please
!” Squell said. “You
must
bathe and you will
not
be late today! Today of all—”

“Is she really ready for this, do you think?” Miskisk said, trying to pry Fift away from Squell, but flinching back from prying hard enough.

“Oh please, Misk,” Squell said, “let us not start that. Or not with
me
. Pip says—”

Father Smistria stuck his head out of the door of his studio. He was tall and haggard looking and had brilliant blue skin, and a white beard braided into hundreds of tiny braids woven with little glittering mirrors and jewels, and was wearing a slick swirling combat suit that clung to his skinny flat chest. His voice was higher than Father Miskisk's, squeaky and gravelly at the same time. “Why are you two winding the child up?” he barked. “This is going to be a
disaster
, if you give her the impression that this is a day for racing about! Fift, you will stop this
now
!”

“Come on, Fift,” Miskisk said coaxingly.

“Put her
down
,” Smistria said. “I cannot believe you are wrestling and flying about with a Staidchild who in less than three hours—”

“Oh give it a rest, Smi,” Miskisk said, sort of threateny, and turned away from Fift and Squell, toward Smistria. Smistria stepped fully out into the corridor, putting his face next to Miskisk's. It got like thunder in between them, but Fift knew they wouldn't hit each other; grownup Bails only hit each other on the mats. Still, she hugged Squell closer—one body squished against his soft chest, one body hugging his leg, one body pulling back through the doorway—and squeezed all her eyes shut, and dimmed the house feed so she couldn't see that way either.

Behind her eyes she could only see the pale blue gowns. It was just like in her dream! She'd lost her gowns and she would have to wear only bells like Father Frill! She shuddered. “I don't want my gowns to be in the compost,” she said, as reasonably as she could manage.

“Oh, will you shut up about the gowns!” Squell said. “No one cares about your gowns!”

“That's not true,” Miskisk boomed, shocked.

“It
is
true,” Smistria said, “and—”

Fift could feel a sob ballooning inside her. She tried to hold it in, but it grew and grew and—

“Beloveds,” said Father Grobbard.

Fift opened her eyes. Father Grobbard had come silently, singlebodied, up the corridor. She stood behind Squell. She was shorter than Miskisk and Smistria, the same height as Squell, but more solid: broad and flat like a stone. When Father Grobbard stood still, it looked like she would never move again. Her shift was plain and simple and white. Her skin was a mottled creamy brown, with the same fine golden fuzz of hair everywhere, even the top of her head.

“Grobby!” Squell said. “We are
trying
to get her ready, but it's quite—”

“Well it's Grobbard's show,” Smistria said. “It's up to you and Pip today, Grobbard, isn't it? So why don't
you
get her ready!?”

Grobbard held out her hand. Fift swallowed, and then she slid down from Squell's arms, and went and took it.

“Grobbard,” Miskisk said, “are you sure Fift is ready for this? Is it really—”

“Yes,” Grobbard said. Then she looked at Miskisk, her face as calm as ever. She raised one eyebrow, just a little. Then she looked back at Fift's other bodies, and held out her other hand. Squell let go of the arms of Fift's he was holding, and Fift gathered; she took Father Grobbard's other hand, and caught a fold of Father Grobbard's shift, and that way, they went down to the bathing room.

“My gowns weren't old,” Fift said, on the stairs. “They came out of the oven a week ago.”

“No, they weren't old,” Grobbard said. “But they were blue. Blue is a Bail color, the color of the crashing, restless sea. You are a Staid, and today you will enter the First Gate of Logic. You couldn't do that wearing blue gowns.”

“Oh,” Fift said.

Grobbard sat by the side of the bathing pool, her hands in her lap, her legs in the water, while Fift scrubbed herself soapy.

“Father Grobbard,” Fift said, “why are you a Father?”

“What do you mean?” Father Grobbard asked. “I am your Father, Fift. You are my child.”

“But why aren't you a Mother? Mother Pip is a Mother, and she's—um, you're—”

Grobbard's forehead wrinkled briefly, and then it smoothed, and her lips quirked in a tiny suggestion of a smile. “Aha, I see. Because you have only one Staid Father, and the rest are Bails, you think that being a Father is a Bailish thing to be? You think Fathers should be ‘he's and Mothers should be ‘she's?”

Fift frowned, and stopped mid-scrub.

“What about your friends? Are all of your friends' Mothers ‘she'? Or are some of them ‘he'?” Grobbard paused a moment; then, gently: “What about Umlish Mnemu of Mnathis cohort? Her Mother is a Bail, isn't he?”