The Bread We Eat in Dreams (25 page)
Read The Bread We Eat in Dreams Online
Authors: Catherynne M. Valente
Tags: #magical realism, #Short stories, #Fantasy, #Fairy tales, #Dark Fantasy, #weird west
It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.
On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie.
“This is my last visit,” Clark said.
“School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”
Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.
“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.
On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.
Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.
Fade to black.
And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:
Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!
Aeromaus |
|
A Series of Informal Notes Compiled on Behalf of Visiting Foreigners by Córdoba Jandza, Yellow District, 4
th
Level, Freely, with Delight in Service, and Under No Duress in the Year 19—
First:
Aerograd has always been occupied. In the grottoes, near the propellers rusted over with moss like verdigris, you might hear someone say otherwise. Crowded around an old gasoline barrel boiling up grey shrimp in oil-slicked water. You might hear someone say anything. Any sophisticated soul can sieve out such obvious lies. The shrimp bob up iridescent, green, purple, blue. I would recommend against eating them. They taste sweet, they taste like life and salt, but your system is not prepared for Aerograd yet. Should you have an allergic reaction to that aspic of petroleum and moss spores, your esophagus will very likely perforate and before your bowels have a chance to put an end to you. We would not like to lose you so soon and by accident.
////⁄: This is a cypher. I do not hold with simple word substitution. I have embedded information also in accent marks, punctuation, the angle of my penmanship on letters e, a, æ, o, h, n, l, and s. Whether or not I use the Oxford comma in a given phrase. Whether or not comma splices occur, prepositions positioned at the end of certain sentences. Under my paragraphs other paragraphs lie, levels up and down, like Aerograd itself. This is a cypher, but everything is a cypher. Everything can be substituted for something else. I believe that.
The truth is, it does not matter if Aerograd existed before the occupation. If we were ever other than we are we have forgotten it. Forgetting has been attached inside us like a second spleen. Memory is dispensed through official channels. Go to the market; stand in line; receive your ration of the history of the city. I do not speak in metaphor. Our dialect no longer allows such dissembling. You cannot say a thing is another thing. It is like another thing, perhaps, though even that smacks of a certain effete enervation of thought. But it cannot be another thing. That is an unworthy lie.
This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.
In Aerograd, the words for meat and memory are the same.
Second:
Aerograd was originally designed as an Academy Town, an experiment in isolation. Hundreds of pure, precise minds brought together and removed from the nation as a whole. From distraction, if not from oversight. We descend from the best and brightest of the Old World. On Phalarica Hill, rising greenly through the constant clouds, you will find the University, a wonder of revival design. Each year the University graduates clear-eyed, clear-minded students of the highest caliber. In the mist of Blue District, the Capital reflects the University in both architecture and intent: to govern with clear eyes and clear intellect.
This is the Ossuary. It is where they turn laws into bones.
The mist in the Capital is uniform, curling like fleece. It is opaque, pearlescent, unchanging. It does not part, not at morning nor at night. Even inside the gilded buildings it is so thick and silver and soft you could not see an elephant if she sat down beside you. Water drips from the carved metal columns. This is how virtuous government is performed—good ideas are accepted with joy, without personal prejudice, no matter who’s mouth they emerge from, for it could be anyone’s mouth. Your mouth, mine. Even Our Lady’s.
////⁄: I remember the first time I saw Our Lady. I am allowed to remember that, why not? She processed through Yellow District, walking as I have been told she always does, to show that she is like us, she is one of us, no better or worse. Her tigers went before her, long and bright in the unceasing cloudfog. Where they breathed and snapped their garnet-colored jaws, pools of clear air appeared. They ate the clouds, so that we could see her. I was afraid. My mother pushed me forward, in case Our Lady should glimpse me and bestow some minor favor. So I watched without obstruction. She processed, very tall, very straight, bald, dew pearling on her cheeks. In her silver government dress, with the blue sash indicating her endless duty to Aerograd. Her skin was a fiery opal violence, terrible glittering colors, hard and slick with vapor condensing and rolling down the gem of her skull. Our Lady appeared as though she was crying. I tried not to look at her hands. I knew what they would look like. My primer had an algebraic game based on them. I could not be prepared. At the sopping ends of her buttered lace sleeves, fifty graceful, strong, ringless hands hung like garlands of awful flowers. The hundred hands of Our Lady. Hands in every part of the city, able to seize anything and anyone, hands around every heart, not squeezing yet, but soon. It seemed an unbearable weight for her to carry with those thin arms. When she clasped her fingers together, they became a huge single fist. Our Lady wore no shoes. Her feet clacked hard on the wet pavement, stone striking stone. Behind her black giraffes followed, dancing, winding and unwinding their necks.
No one else in the city looks like her. I have seen old pictures of tigers and none are that color. She is a dream we all have at the same time. I do not think any meat tells where she came from. She has always been here, like the occupation. But she cannot have been, for nothing in Aerograd is built for fifty hands. She is the occupation. But that is not true. We are all the occupation. We occupy each other and save work for the tigers. We are afraid of her and her animals. We do not even know her real name. We speak of her and God using the same words.
Our Lady did see me. She turned the glitter-black and hot ochre cups of her empty eyes toward me. I felt nothing. On the inside I too was a cloud. Our Lady looked up at my mother and said something. Her voice sounded like a propeller winding up.
What Our Lady said was: “You do not exist.”
And she didn’t.
My mother simply wasn’t there anymore. Her workplace had not heard of her. My father was not married and never had been. Her things no longer cluttered the house. Even her smell winked out. I felt her evaporate from my hands. But these days I have to chew memory to think of her at all.
Third:
A necessary digression on the weather systems here. There are places in Aerograd where the sun can be reliably seen. Some the size of a golden pin; some blanketing half a district. These are holy ground, tended by a congregation of biodomes, herbaria and hydrofarming. You are unlikely to receive a permit to cast shadow there. Everywhere else, we dwell in cloud. Mist, fog, cirrus, gloam, cumulus. We have a complex nepheline vocabulary. The clouds never clear, but with practice you can find your way surely enough, except in the Capital. Move through the world as through a labyrinth; pick your path between clouds like monstrous, ephemeral whales. When you pass by, the crackle of snow like electricity will raise the hairs on your skin. You will feel awake, as we do. On the verge of something forever.
Because you are foreign and do not know any better, you will not be able to see the subtlety of the cloud cover as locals do.
Ugh
, you will exclaim,
it’s thick as hair out here. What a dreary, grey mess.
It is sad for you. Each person has their personal vocabulary of condensation. The Aerograder dialect is malleable and opportunistic. Many times the Ossuary has released an official chart of terms and grammar to be used when discussing the weather. In this small thing and only this, no Aerograder obeys. Clouds are constant, they are personal, they are ours. Should you have an interest in linguistics, you might amass a considerable collection of private cloud-dialects in one trip to the city.
You will be always damp in Aerograd. You will be always half-blind.
////⁄: Today the clouds ooze forward, flowing like suspended oil. Their tops limn with cold bronze; their undersides bruise violet-yellow with unspilt snow. Look—I will share with you my tongue. How intimate, how bare, how pornographic. In cypher is safety. These are Ice Eels Speaking Forbidden Words. I like them but they make me sad. Their feathery fronds reach out to me, chill my hands, even down here.
I had a lover once. We never married; married couples are kept under observation. There is a danger inherent to them. When traveling to other Districts or off-air reconnaissance zones, one half of the two must remain at home. The Ossuary believes this reduces the likelihood of membership in subversive clubs, public assembly, defection, undue attachment and suicides. But those are all suicidal acts, in the end.
My lover’s name was Pyotr Duda. He had a son by another woman. I never found out what happened to her. Pyotr made roast gannet stuffed with plums for me when Melancholy Horseheads rolled in—that was his phrase. I can share it because he is dead now. Horseheads pricked him with energy, made him hopeful. He took the bird out of the oven and said:
“Bya, you’ve lost three buttons on that shirt. Also the radio says Yellow District will have a high concentration of tigers tonight.”
We did. We heard their vast paws slapping the clammy sidewalks. Their wine-bright pelts flashed in the gloom. Sometimes they would stop in front of a house and roar. Someone always let them in.
I know the word for a group of tigers was once a streak. But that isn’t right at all. It’s a concentration of tigers. It can only be that.
In Aerograd, when we mean
sin
, we say
tiger
.
Fourth:
The following words have been excised from the official dialect and may not be used within city limits. Kindly make a note—our lives must seem strange, but there are reasons for everything in Aerograd.
Land, union, summer, counterinsurgent, before, below, beyond, else, desire, revolution, Rose District.
There are others. But we have forgotten them since their outlaw. Guard your talk—old words spring up like weeds and must be cut down.
////⁄: I have had the feeling for some time that the dialect is changing. I cannot speak about things that happened to me as a child. The words have dropped away or changed completely.
I will give you an example.
When I think of my father, I want to call him by his name, which I know was András Jandza. I want to talk about his collection of extremely antique altimeters, that hung on the wall in green and brass and punctured glass, as though they meant still to give some arcane reading, some sense of yaw and pitch. I want to say my father smoked, and enjoyed blowing the smoke into the clouds outside our window, watching the smoke enter the vapor and push it aside, just for a moment, before the cloud swallowed it up as though it never were. (Clouds That Smoke Back).
But I find I cannot say the word altimeter. I cannot say smoke. I cannot even say my father’s name. In the cypher I can indicate them, spell them intricately, in the diameters of my angstroms. I still know those words, and what they speak of. But I cannot make myself say them. I know that those sad mechanical faces hanging on my father’s wall like game-trophies are called
liars
now. Smoke is
gas
. My father should be referred to only as
redacted
.
Meat is memory. Tiger is sin.
I wrote just before (oh the sweetest and most nearly eradicated of all the exiles!) of tigers. Of concentrations. But only after that night with Pyotr Duda and the roast gannet stuffed with plums did we start calling them tigers. They were something else before. That dark red and black wildness, that sleekness, the teeth. Something else. Not tigers. But the word is gone. Scooped away as cleanly as a mother. Everyone I knew started calling them tigers at the same time. The cafes were suddenly full of feline phrasing. The giraffes, too—oh, we’ve called them giraffes forever. Since before I was born. And they are giraffes as I understand giraffes: black and spindly and tall, four legs, hungry forever. But they were something else, too. Substituted, truth for giraffes.
Someday we’ll call clouds sunlight.
Do you know what the Ossuary calls us? The people of Aerograd. Our Lady says it too, we have heard it in her addresses. They call us Aeromaus. Singular. All our thousands are to them but one small, scurrying mouse in the works of the city. A creature other than them. An annoyance, leaving dirt and disease behind it. And as they say it, it grows toward truth. As they become tigers and giraffes. We huddle close together, a hundred men and women into a single humpbacked shape. You can see them on any street, clusters trailing away like tails. Their dark shapes move like mountains behind the clouds. One day, perhaps, there will be only one of us and one of her.
When they speak, the tigers and the giraffes and the Ossuary and Our Lady, I am almost certain their whole speech is made up of words that mean something other than they are. Even Aerograd. Their tongues are tigers that are not tigers. What is it they are saying that we cannot hear? What did we call the occupation before occupation? What did we call Our Lady?
Fifth:
Why do they call it an occupation? Is not the point of an occupation to convert the occupied population into the occupiers’ image? Surely, surely by now we are what we are: Aerograders, Our Lady’s children. Aeromaus, united, Our Lady’s child. We speak her language, we understand ourselves only according to Aerograd, only in how we intersect with this place where we live together along with the tigers and giraffes and propellers and luminous shrimp and clouds and gannets stuffed with plums.
Tradition, maybe. A joke, maybe.
Where we say occupation there is a line through the twenty-five Districts and six levels of Aerograd. On one side of the line stands Our Lady with her beauty and her colors, flanked by her animals, silent, ageless, all those hands, all those mouths. On the other side we sit. No matter how quiet we become, no matter how still, no matter how we change so that the language emerging from us as natural as being born is not our own but hers, but theirs, it cannot be avoided that Our Lady is other than we. She puts out her hands and we disappear into them. She is something unmovable inside us, living there, going about her business in our bones.