Wonders of the Invisible World (16 page)

He caught her arm; sobbing, her hair catching in her eyes, she tried to pull away. “Get on!” the biker hissed, and Maris, stumbling over her hem, tried desperately to see. The voice was a woman’s. “Hurry!”

She had lost her backpack in some alley; but she still clutched her book and pen; even now, trying to hoist herself onto a moving bike, she refused to drop them. The bike picked up speed; hair flicking into Maris’s eyes and mouth was dark. She spat it out, tightening her hold, the book and pen crammed between them. It was a long time before the voices of dragons behind them became the beat of her heart.

Later, under the light of a single bare bulb hanging down from a scruffy ceiling, she wrote, “Dear Book, I don’t know where I am.” She paused, hugging herself, staring down at the book. Her skirt was ripped, her feet blistered and bleeding from running in vintage patent leather shoes; her hair and face were grubby, her hands skinned from where she had slipped on garbage in an alley and skidded on cobblestones. She picked up the pen again, though it hurt to write. “You are all I have left of the other world. I lost everything else. This house is swarming with people. Most of them are my age. They came for so many reasons. Some of them are too scared of what they ran from to talk. Some of them are too angry. The house was an apartment building once, I think. There are stairs running everywhere. But a lot of the walls were torn down. Or maybe they just fell down. You can see plumbing pipes, and water stains all over. They gave me something to eat, and told me never, never go into that part of town again. But how can I not? I asked them where to go to learn magic. They just laughed. He didn’t laugh. Trueblood. That’s what they said he was. Elf. Beautiful and dangerous to humans. But he has something I want.”

She paused again, glimpsing his face among the scattered, terrifying memories of the afternoon. Had he warned her about the bikers? Or had he called them? She wrote again, slowly, “I’ll have to disguise myself somehow to go back there. They know my face.”

The mysterious comings and goings in the house, she learned as days passed, had simple explanations; there was some order to the constant movement, the replacement of faces. Many of the kids had jobs; they played in bands, or made things to sell, like jewelry, or dyed clothes, out of what they found thrown out in the streets, or in cardboard boxes at thrift shops. Things filtered down to them from places that gave Maris a glimpse of a world beyond the bleak, crumbling buildings. Some—odd, bright feathers, dried leaves—hinted of the wood that Maris had guessed must be only a ghost, a memory of oak among the streets. Other things spoke of wealth: rich fabrics, tarnished rings, beads and buttons tossed casually away that bore elaborate carvings, or strange, woven designs, or even faces, sometimes, that seemed not quite human. “Where did you get this?” she asked constantly. “Where did this come from? What is this?” The answers were always vague, unsatisfying, and accompanied by the baffled expression that Maris seemed to inspire in people.

“Nobody understands why you’re here,” a girl who made colorful shirts out of scraps told her one day.

“I came to learn magic,” Maris said; it seemed simple enough, and she had said it a hundred times.

“Why? Because of something that happened to you? Because of someone?” Maris gazed at her, baffled herself, then thought she understood.

“You mean because of the way I look? Because I’m ugly? Things happened to me because of that, and that’s why I ran away to learn magic?”

“You’re not—” the girl stopped, and started again. “No one that just comes here for—” She stopped again. “I mean—”

Maris scratched her head, wondered absently if she had fleas. “Maybe,” she suggested, “I could understand what you mean if you tell me why you’re here.”

The girl’s face, whose beauty she seemed always trying to deny, slammed shut like a door, the way the elven faces had, against Maris. Then, as she studied Maris’s face, with its churning skin and angelfish eyes, Maris saw her open again, slowly, to show Maris things she kept hidden behind her eyes: fear, loathing, hope.

“You’re not afraid,” she said abruptly. “You’re not afraid of—what you left behind. That’s what makes you different.”

Maris peered at her, between strands of untidy hair. “Maybe you could explain,” she said tentatively. “Maybe you could tell me your name.”

They sat for a long time on the bare mattress where Elaine sewed swatches of gaudy fabric into a sleeve while she talked. At supper, an endless parade wandered at will through the kitchen, most of it standing up to eat before parts broke off and disappeared, to be replaced by others, rattling crockery, sucking in stew, grunting to one another while they chewed. Maris, who helped cook, took a closer look at the faces around her. For days, they had seemed indistinguishable, all pale and thin, secretive, giving her strangers’ stares if they looked at her at all. Few of them knew her name, though someone had given her a nickname. She had been called a lot of things, most of them having to do with fast food, or small, burrowing animals. But this one surprised her. Teacher, they called her, because she was always asking unanswerable questions. Teach.

Tonight she separated their faces, picked out things from their expressions, their eyes, put words to them: furtive, belligerent, sick, angry, scared. All of them were scared, she realized slowly. Even the ones who ignited at a skewed look, a word pitched wrong. They hit with their eyes, their fists, their voices. Nothing could come close to them; they were scared the worst.

“Dear Book,” she wrote after supper. “I could not believe the things Elaine told me. She showed me her scars. She said I could not, no, there was no way, but I finally persuaded her: she is going to dye my hair with her cloth dyes, which she says are made of natural things, like nuts and berries. She knows someone who knows someone who finds those things and makes the dyes. She said she’d think about my face, which is easy to forget, but hard not to recognize, especially with all the living constellations on it. She told me not to talk about myself like that. Why shouldn’t I? Everyone else does. Besides, that way I get to laugh first. She didn’t understand that. Anyway, she knows someone else who makes masks out of feathers and painted cloth, but so far she’s balking over that. She thinks it’s too dangerous. But so is magic. I didn’t know that before, but I know it now.”

She woke in the dark, that night, hearing strange music. The house was pitch-black, as if the power had gone out again; a single streetlight, as yet unbroken, gave her an obscure perspective of shadowy stairs and corners as she moved through the house. The music drew her down, down, like a child’s hand, innocent and coaxing, saying: Come look at this flower, come look at this pebble, this nut. She followed it without thinking, barefoot, her eyes barely open, trailing the torn lace of an old, sleeveless flapper’s dress she wore to bed. Before she had gotten up, the moment she had heard the music, she had reached for her book and pen; she carried them without realizing it, without wondering what she would do with them on an empty city street in the middle of the night.

The door squealed when she opened it, but no one in the house called out. The gritty sidewalk was still warm. She saw no one playing anywhere; the music might have come from someone piping on the moon. She yawned, trying to open her eyes, see more clearly. It comes from the streets, she thought, entranced. All the water pipes and cables underground are playing themselves. The electricity is singing. She felt the vibrations through her feet, heard the music find its way into her blood. Then she heard herself humming random, unpredictable notes, like the patter of light rain. The city flowed away from her eyes in a sea-wave, a cluttered gray tumble of buildings and streets, with lamp lights spinning like starfish among them. It paused, and rolled toward her again, green this time and golden-brown, smelling not of stone but of earth.

She stood on the oak hill, surrounded by a vast wood. The trees were huge, old, towering over her, even while she saw through them into the distances they claimed. I am queen of the hill, she thought dreamily. Where is my face? She bent, still humming, and began to gather fallen leaves.

She found the oak leaves, the next morning, inside the pages of her book.

She shook them out slowly, staring. Around her she heard the heavy thump of feet finding the floor, a tea kettle shrieking in the kitchen, somebody running up a scale on an electric guitar, somebody else yelling in protest. She shifted a leaf, fitted one over another, another against them. Her skin prickled suddenly. She picked up the pen, wrote unsteadily on a blank page: “Thank you.”

She borrowed thread from Elaine, to patch a skirt, she said, and spent the morning sewing leaves into a crude mask. The eye holes were tricky; they kept slipping away, no matter how much thread she used. Finally she threatened them with scissors if they did not let her see, and leaves opened under her needle to let the city in.

She tore a ribbon from her skirt to tie it with, and slid it back into her book. Elaine, sewing with feverish concentration on her mattress, scarcely looked up from her own work as Maris dropped the thread beside her. She grunted, and pushed a jar with her dirty, delicate bare foot towards Maris. “That dye I promised you.”

“What color?”

Elaine shrugged. “Something. I’m not sure. It’ll find its color from your hair.”

It found no color at all, apparently, Maris saw when her hair dried. I look like I’ve been frightened to death, she thought, trying to flatten a silvery crackling cloud of spider web. All the mirrors in the house were cracked, warped, distressed. Like all the faces in them, she thought, wandering from one to another, trying to get a clearer image of herself. She gave up finally, and borrowed clothes to go outside: a pair of torn jeans, a black T-shirt that said, “Yosemite National Park. Feed the wildlife in you.” She went barefoot in case she had to run.

She was lost before she turned three corners. The ominous, sagging buildings all looked alike; strangers jostled her without seeing her. The city stank like an unwashed, unfed animal; it wailed and growled incessantly. There seemed no magic anywhere, nor any possibility of magic, ever in mortal time. There were no leaves anywhere, only stone and shadow and light too harsh to see through. Maris opened her book, found the mask quickly. She tied it on and breathed again. In disguise, she thought, you can be anyone. Anything. Then, chilled, she remembered what she was carrying.

But they don’t have to be mine, she thought an instant later. I found them in the street. Someone must have dropped them, someone too much in a hurry to stop. She tangled the pen into the tangle of silver on her head, let the green plume dangle over her shoulder, and tucked the book under her arm. He hadn’t noticed the closed book, probably, only the open book before she began to run.

Her skin prickled as she thought of him, part fear, part anticipation. How can I persuade him? she asked the book. Maybe I should give him something. If I ever find him again. If he even lets me talk before he calls the ferrets. Anyway, I don’t have anything he would want. I don’t even have anything he would want to look at.

Or is he expecting me?

She let the city pull her into itself, drifted with it deeper into its unknown heart.

Gradually she realized that people were staring at her, avoiding her, parting to let her pass, even those who wore fine, scrolled blades like pendants around their necks and masked their eyes with darkness. She was used to hastily averted eyes, even to the sudden silence that she seemed to inspire, at least among humans, before she passed and they thought she couldn’t hear their jokes behind her back. But these were the ferrets, wild, magical creatures who had chased her, barking, through the streets; now they were stepping out of her way, their faces carefully expressionless. Can’t they tell? she wondered. Can’t they see? It’s only me behind a mask of dying leaves and a T-shirt from Yosemite. They couldn’t, apparently. She walked taller, took a longer, sweeping stride through them, refusing to think about what would happen when they did find out that it was only her.

She saw him finally, coming toward her down the sidewalk, and she stopped. He saw her at the same time; his face hardened. But it had masked itself against fear, she saw in wonder, not against her. He stepped around her carefully, hoping, it seemed, that she had not stopped for him. But she turned, looking up at him as he passed, holding his eyes, until he took a futile half-step, trapped in her gaze, and finally stood still.

He whispered, “Who are you?”

She swallowed sudden dryness, decided simply to answer his question. “Maris.”

“Who do you want?”

“You.”

He drew breath slowly. His skin was so pale it could not grow any whiter, but she saw the tension along his jaw. “What do you want from me?”

She swallowed again, feeling the closed book under her elbow pushing hard against her ribs, wondering how much power the mask she wore held over him, wondering if she had the courage to say what she wanted to say. But how else would she know who she was, in that moment, in his eyes? She answered finally, carefully, “I want you to say yes. To anything I ask.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She lifted her hand, pushed the mask up so that he could see her marred, sweaty human face. “Teach me magic.”

He stared at her silently a moment longer. Then a shudder rippled through him, pushed words out. “Who are you?”

She opened her mouth, then stared back at him, suddenly perplexed. Maris, she had started to say, but she did not recognize this Maris, who had stopped a Trueblood in his tracks and made him ask her for her name. “I don’t know,” she said slowly, still astonished that he was not summoning his ferrets furiously out of gutter drains and broken windows. “Who are you afraid of?”