Bone Dance

8.0: Where the serpents go to dance

I left Del Corazón on my feet, by the back door. It wasn’t pride; there was no one watching, besides me, and my interest in heroic gestures was at an all-time low. Beano had gone away somewhere, and the building was quiet. No, I would have preferred being taken out on a stretcher, but there was no one to do it. And I really wanted to leave.

It was as if my body were a parcel I was carrying for someone else. It was heavy and hard to hold on to, and worse on both counts with each passing minute. But I was obliged to carry it, I’d get in trouble if I dropped it. I made an honest effort for half the length of the alley, in the dark, holding myself up on the sides of buildings. There was noise from the streets all around — I was close to the Night Fair, after all — but the alley was empty.

I think I tripped over something, but my memory of the evening is blessedly imperfect. I might just have dropped the parcel.

A little later I was lying facedown and having trouble breathing. I don’t think I was in the same place. I turned my head and got more air, laden with the smell of garbage from nearby. I don’t remember any noise; someone must have turned the sound off.

After that — or before that; these are islands of awareness in a foggy voyage, and I’m not sure of the order in which I reached them, or whether they were really there — I remember being terrified that Beano would find me. Then I recalled that I was safe from Beano. He was paid off. It was the other people I owed who were dangerous. Like Cassidy. Of course he was dead; that was the heavy thing on his side of the scale, that I was having such trouble balancing. He didn’t seem angry about it. He looked sad, in fact, and I wondered if I’d told him about the apartment burning. I meant to ask him why he didn’t have a hole in his face, but I don’t know if I did, or if he answered.

Curiously, none of those islands had pain as part of its shoreline. The first one that did involved, again, not getting enough air, and being in darkness. But this time I was on my back on something level and hard, and the smell was of livestock and clean straw. I heard the rise and fall of voices at a distance, and suddenly a thump, something striking wood, very close to my face. Reflex made me flinch. That, in turn, started my nerve endings speaking to my brain. I’m fairly certain that the endpoint of that memory isn’t random, that I passed out.

Sherrea’s voice — Sherrea’s? — shouting, and a bang like a screen door, and a fresh breeze. I opened my eyes on a black satin sky full of stars and the dry-brush streak of the Milky Way. Somewhere under that sky was my body, which was as full of pain as an orange is of juice. But I didn’t have to live in it. I recognized the effect of some painkilling drug, and something else; a distant relative of the healing process, in that it relieved suffering that healing couldn’t handle. I closed my eyes again.

“… broken,” Sherrea was saying not far away. “Can you fix it, Josh?” There was a frantic edge on her casual words.

I was marginally aware of cloth being drawn back, of contact with one of my hands. “Oya Dances,” said a new voice, softly, as if there was a terrible thing described in it. “LeRoy, quick, get Mags out of bed and tell her to prep. I’ll meet her in the surgery. Sher, fingers here — that’s it — and monitor the pulse. Do you know CPR?”

I was glad I wasn’t there. It sounded scary.

For a while my mind kept working while my body was giving notice to quit, which is a sensation I don’t recommend to anyone. Memory, dream, and drugs collaborated to open doors that I wouldn’t have so much as walked past, had they been real doors, and had I been given a choice.

Behind one was a roomful of water, where I swam, badly, looking for an exit. It didn’t help that the water was full of people floating. They were naked and limp; their limbs waved like seaweed. Their eyes were open on nothing. Mick as I’d first met him, tall and athletic, with a bullet hole that went all the way through him. Dana, her pale hair clumped and writhing around her face, more alive than she was. Theo, his glasses on his nose despite the water, his head at a quizzical angle. Cassidy, a little blood trailing behind him like bright red thread and a half smile on his lips.

Another opened on the third room in my apartment, the archives, all the precious contents shelved and tidy. As I stepped in, I saw more clearly: CDs fused to their plastic boxes in strange half-liquid curves; amplifiers and cassette decks blackened and brittle, their chassis warped, their cases leprous; videocassettes oozing together; the books transformed into neatly ranked flaking bricks of charcoal. The smell of burnt things was nauseating. Then, item by item, each piece of hardware powered up by itself. LEDs and digital counters lit like opening eyes on all sides. Fans came on, and stuttered and shrieked, their lubricants cooked away. The color monitor was the last; it burst into life with the refinery gun battle from White Heat, made grotesque and technically impossible by the spiderweb of cracks on the face of the picture tube. Flames licked out of the vent panels of everything.

And there was the door that opened onto Frances — Frances? — sitting beside me, holding a glass to my lips and saying, “Eat your opium, dear; there are children sober in Africa.” That might even have been real.

But the strangest was the flat, white world, like a sheet of paper, with nothing on it but a motionless line of pictographs like the ones from native southwestern cultures, stylized silhouette figures in black. I seemed to see them all from above. I was the one on the left end of the row, I knew, the one that might have been a dog or a rabbit. I couldn’t see the other end; I don’t know why.

The second figure on the left was a woman, her arms and legs at lively angles, wearing a headdress. Or possibly a halo of fire. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” said the dog/rabbit/I.

“It’s a debased age,” she said. She sounded disgusted, and a little like Frances. “You’re not supposed to simply land on the doorstep like an unlucky relative. You’ll have to go back.”

“I don’t know how.”

She clicked her tongue. “I could do it, but we’d better begin as we mean to go on. It’s time you met him-her anyway. You’ll love this.”

She wasn’t the next pictograph in line anymore. Instead there was another, curved and capering, two projections like horns or feathers poking up from its head. It was holding a flute.

“Ah! Ah! Not now!” it said, dismayed and delighted. “Indeed, you are a cub of mine. Sorta. And your timing sucks! You’re welcome anytime, as long as you only come when you’re called. This is your head speaking. Now beat it!”

As the white surface broke up like a bad video signal, I thought, That probably is what my head sounds like.

A decent continuity finally reasserted itself. I became aware of that — the feeling that the things around me were real events, in chronological order — even before I began to receive commentary from my senses. Then I felt the passage of air over my hair and face and shoulders, and smelled, faintly, an unlikely combination of growing things and rubbing alcohol. I heard footsteps and stirring cloth and a clink of metal against glass, and voices far away.

Opening my eyes required deliberate effort. When I did, I knew the room was part of an old farmhouse. I’m not sure why, except that it reminded me powerfully of where Dorothy woke up at the end of The Wizard of Oz. It even had checked curtains, open to the sun.

I was lying in a narrow bed between smooth, thick sheets. I’d been undressed, washed, and bandaged; probably several times by now, I realized. That made me uncomfortable, but I was too exhausted even to twitch.

I turned my head a little, and met the inquiring gaze of another person. He was built like a block of red sandstone, not particularly tall but wonderfully square. His hair was black and white in equal measure, and his broad red-brown face was lined on the forehead, at the corners of his eyes, in two brackets around his wide mouth. He wore a faded cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows and faded trousers. “Are you really awake,” he said in a voice surprisingly light for the shape of him, “or are you still out walking?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“No, you’re back. Probably not for long, which you shouldn’t worry about. I’m Josh Marten, head people doctor around here. Sherrea said I should tell you right away that she’s here, and your friends Theo and Frances as well, and that they’re safe.”

I closed my eyes in relief, because I’d just begun to wonder, and didn’t think I had the strength to make the words.

He crossed the room and laid a hand on my forehead. But it was a cool, dry hand, and I was too tired to mind. He took my pulse at my throat. “I think you’re done making me work so hard. Answers to other questions I’ll bet you have: You’ve been here three days. None of the damage was permanent, thanks to me. And this is about the best you’ll feel for a while, because when your painkillers wear off, I’m going to stop giving them to you during the day. You’re going to hate that, but it’s better than making an opium fiend of you. Now, go back to sleep.”

I closed my eyes and slid out from under the burden of thought.

When I woke again, there was a battered upholstered chair pulled up to the foot of the bed, with Frances in it. Her feet were up on the seat cushion, jammed against one arm, and her knees were propped on the other. Her head tilted sideways against the chair back. She was sleeping. The crescent moons of her eyelashes, under her straight black brows, looked like obscure mathematical symbols. Her mouth was closed and severe even now. One hand was curled around her ankles; the other arm trailed over the side of the chair to brush the floor. I was willing to bet her feet had gone to sleep.

Her eyes opened, as if I’d made a noise. “Good afternoon,” she said, a little hoarse. “As you see, they didn’t throw me overboard and keep the bribe. Though you might be wishing they had.”

I cleared my throat. “No. Why?”

She unfolded her legs with a snap. “Then I take it you haven’t started to hurt yet.”

She was wrong; I’d had long enough to realize that that was what had made me wake up. “Waiting for the note was a formality. He would have done it anyway,” I said.

“Would he? What in the Devil’s name did he think you’d done to deserve it?”

“Behaved like an asshole about three times too many.”

“My, my. They have the death penalty for assholeism now?”

“I told you he wasn’t going to kill me.”

Frances leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her chin propped on her laced fingers. “No? Then who was it who almost did? Doctor Brick Wall out there spent four hours over your unpromising-looking carcass saying things that will probably damn his soul to hell by whatever faith he subscribes to. Many of them he shouted at you. He seemed to think you weren’t helping.”

“I wish I’d been there. Sounds pretty funny.”

In measured cadence, she said, “It was not funny.”

I didn’t want to disagree with her. She seemed to have temporarily run out of things to say.

After a little while I ventured, “He said I couldn’t have any more dope, didn’t he?”

“He said that. And before you ask, I am not here to smuggle in a pipe of hash. But I’d be delighted to distract you with stories.”

I must have put the question mark on my face.

“What I had in mind,” she said, answering it, “is the tale in one part of The Rescue of the Protagonist from Durance Vile, a tragic omedy. Since I’m here and Sherrea isn’t, I claim dibs on first telling. Don’t you want to know how you were got out?”

I thought about it. I realized with a kind of gentle disappointment that I didn’t, really. I was out, and they had been exercised enough about it to get me out, which was nice. That seemed to be it. But it would be rude, I decided, not to let her tell me.

It may have taken longer than it seemed to work this out. Or some of it may have showed in my face. Whichever it was, it made Frances look at me strangely. “If you’re tired, I’ll go away.”

“It’s all right. Tell me.”

The look didn’t quite disappear, but she began. “So. After sitting quietly for two hours in the dark on the sweet soft throne of a tar barrel and breathing in lungfuls of dead fish smell, I’d figured out my plan. I would have my methanol pirates take me straight to China Black’s safe place, where I would extort an irresistible amount of ransom money from the locals, and send it back in lieu of my note, to Beano. I meant to count out five thousand pounds or make some blood flow — do you know that song? The pirates, unfortunately, refused to accept changes in the script. They would boot me off just past the checkpoints, and they had to have a note to send back. I think they were afraid that if I stuck around, I’d talk them out of the trike.”

She sat a moment, her hands clasped lightly before her. “Do you know how hard it was to write that note?” she said in a new voice.

“It was very good,” I told her. “I knew it really was from you.”

“That’s not what I mean. The arrival of that note would start something I didn’t want started. I knew that. In the end, I couldn’t do anything about it. But I wanted you to know I tried.”

“I told you, he would have—”

“Done it anyway. If true, it still doesn’t change the way it seemed at the time.” She raked her hands through her hair. “So I made the damned cross-country trek here, where I found Sherrea and told her where you were. She coupled your name with a few choice bits of verbiage. She knew better than I did what you’d called down on your head. Then she worked out the Great Escape.

“You ought to try to appreciate it properly,” Frances added with a sigh. “Maybe you will later. I thought it was the stuff that caper movies were made of, but what do I know?”

“I can’t try until you tell me about it.”

“That’s better — it almost sounded like you. The plan was a variant of the plague trick. Sherrea and a fellow named LeRoy put three rather startled calves in a livestock trailer, hitched up the pickup, and headed in on I-94. No particular attention paid to them, since they were going in. They went to Del Corazón, found you, and hid you under the false floor in the trailer. Then they put the shockingly realistic latex sores on the calves and headed for the Cedar Avenue checkpoint.”

At that she stopped and looked expectantly at me.

“Sores?” I asked.

“Anthrax,” she said, savoring the syllables. “Spreads like wildfire, fatal, communicable to humans. Nobody searched the trailer. The only problem was that when LeRoy finally pulled off the latex, all the hair underneath came off, too. The calves are out in the pasture shooting accusing looks at anyone who comes near.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It would have been good in a movie.”

Frances leaned forward again and gave me the strange look; then she stood up. “Go back to sleep,” she said.

This time it didn’t work. For one thing, I hurt almost everywhere. And I was nagged by the feeling that Frances had wanted entirely different responses from the ones she’d gotten. I couldn’t think what they would have been — I’d been polite and attentive and cheerful, if not very emphatic — but that didn’t keep me from trying.

The next week seemed like one long series of disabilities and allowances made for them. I couldn’t remember ever having been bedridden before, or even very sick, so they all came as a surprise. Going to the bathroom was the most unpleasant; I insisted on hobbling across the room to the water closet long before I was really able, even if it meant having to lean on someone as far as the door. The alternative, after all, was much worse.

Eating was a trial; I had a loose tooth and stitches inside my mouth on the left side. Being bathed by someone else, as it turned out, was simply impossible once I was conscious. I was able to let Josh change dressings at first, while I was still too weak to get all the way through the process by myself. After that, I took care of it. I’d never realized how close to the full range of motion getting dressed required, until I did it when it seemed that none of my muscles would move through their full range of motion without pain. But I did it.

Josh insisted I call him that. He said since the only thing he had to call me was “Sparrow,” he was forced to give up on proper doctor-patient formality, but he would feel better if I would return the insult. He told me he learned his craft by apprenticing himself to a woman who had gone to med school and had a pre-Bang practice as a surgeon. He told me his wife had died two years ago and that he still missed her; that he had three children, ages sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one; that he preferred vegetable gardening to flowers; that the accomplishment he was proudest of was learning to play the guitar at the age of forty-six…

In short, he flung his life open in front of me without even seeming to notice he’d done it. I sat numb, patient, and politely silent under the fall of information, intending to forget it all as soon as the words stopped sounding in the room. I needed to do with his life story what he had done with the names: equalize us, achieve parity, balance debit and credit in the accounts of the Deal.

I couldn’t do it. The ring on his left hand reminded me of the wife I’d never met. Some skill of his in the sickroom made me wonder whether he’d acquired it during his apprenticeship. A row of flowers outside the window reminded me of him in negative. There was a slow corruption of my principles going on, that I could feel, but that I was helpless to stop.

He never mentioned what he knew about me, which I didn’t understand at all. He’d examined me when Sher brought me in, and he knew I was aware of that. That part of the wall of my privacy was already torn down. Yet he never raised the subject, as if it were still private, as if we were on opposite sides of that wall. What value did he think the knowledge had, when both of us possessed it?

Theo came to visit me several times. I found I almost couldn’t talk to him. I remembered sitting in his room in China Black’s house, feeling as if we were the only people in the world who understood the language we were speaking that day. We had traded secrets and painful admissions in that language. Now, looking at him, I felt as if someone had plucked the whole vocabulary out of my brain. I didn’t think it had had any words for explaining what had happened to me, anyway. Theo looked hurt when the conversation faltered. After a while he stopped visiting.

When I could walk that far, I took to sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse. There was enough to see from there to keep my mind busy and out of trouble, and when there wasn’t, I usually dozed off.

The front porch looked out on a makeshift village square with the corners filed off. It had one large tree at the center, and a scattering of smaller ones. There was a pump and a trough, and a few benches, and a charred brick firepit. There were also flowers — less thickly planted than in China Black’s garden, and less disciplined, but with something of the same feel nonetheless. It was pretty, and there was almost always something to watch: someone doing something to a flowerbed, or pumping water, or rocking a baby.

Other houses surrounded the square, in a confusion of styles and sizes. Some had been built there, some moved there from other places. Behind the first ring of houses, partially visible from my chair, was another. These, too, were a confetti of styles and materials, including cloth-and-tubing domes and some complex-looking tents. I put the number of dwellings I could see at about two dozen. If there was anything beyond those, I didn’t think about it.

One afternoon Sherrea came and sat with me. She’d been a regular visitor to the sickroom. More than that, she’d been an irregular volunteer nurse there, since her hands, for no clear reason, were among the few I could tolerate for the relatively impersonal services. But our conversations there had been short, and had brushed lightly over their subject matter.

Now she greeted me and sat on the porch floor at my feet, her arms wrapped around her knees and a half-empty mug in one hand. I could smell the tea, but I wasn’t sure what kind it was. The undisciplined mass of her dark hair dwarfed her sharp-featured little face. She wore a huge, busy-patterned cotton tunic bound with three different sashes around her hips, black leggings with holes in both knees, and sneakers with the toes cut out. It was all a concession to country life; none of it trailed behind her, after all.

I hadn’t realized that we’d been sitting in silence until Sherrea said, “Did you take a vow not to ask questions, or what?”

“Huh?”

“Oh, that’s a question. Don’t you want to know where you are, or who these people are, or why I brought you here, or anything!”

“Sure, if you want to tell me.”

She set her chin on her knees and stared at me. “What happened to your head, Sparrow?” she said. “What’s going on in there, that nothing comes out anymore? Or is there nothing to come out?”

“My head’s fine.” A thought shot to the surface: I know; I’ve met it. But it was gone before I got a good look at it.

“It is not. You never used to tell anybody anything, but at least you had a personality. Now you’re even locked that up. I’m your friend, you idiot! You can be rude to me!”

I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair. It was a hot day, and a damp one, and inhaling was like breathing soup. “I don’t have anything to be rude to you about. And if I’ve locked anything up, it’s more than I know.”

She sighed. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe you don’t know you’ve done it. In which case, you did it because some part of you had to. In which case, you have an even screwier sense of personal property than I thought you did.”

“That’s a non sequitur,” I said, smiling.

“The hell it is. What do you think you own?”

Sweat trickled under my shirt, cold as ice water. “Nothing.”

After a moment she said, “That’s what I mean. You own exactly what everybody else owns. Your body, for starts. Nobody can make any claims on it but you. You can choose to give control of it to somebody else, temporarily, like you did back in the City. Which, by the way, took more guts than sense. But it took a lot of guts. But when that’s over, your body’s still yours, you haven’t given a bit of it away.

“And you own your mind. Everything you think is your property, and it’s yours whether you build a fence around it or not. Nobody can cross into it, nobody can make you change anything in it, and nobody can hurt you there, unless you let them. Whatever Beano did to your body, he bounced clean off your mind and didn’t even leave a dent. Unless you put him inside the property line yourself.”

I’d opened my eyes, and was looking at the porch ceiling. “You should bring all this up with Frances. A Horseman’s perspective is probably a little different.”

“I did bring it up with Frances,” Sher said caustically. “I thought somebody ought to. Funny thing is, she agrees with me. According to Frances, her victims’ minds are bulletproof. She can replay their memories, but those are just recordings. They’re not the person, they’re just what the person draws on sometimes. She says if she wanted to make someone hate blue, or like rhubarb, or want to shoot the dog, she couldn’t do it. She can kill minds, but she can’t change ’em.”

“But she can steal bodies. That’s hard on the first part of your theory.”

“And I could strangle you dead, right this minute. That would be stealing, too. I’ll give you half an exception for the Horsemen, but after that I’ll say it again: They can kill ya, but they can’t own ya. And until you’re dead, you belong to you and nobody can change that. You don’t have to lock your brain in a box to be sure of it.”

She stopped, and I dropped my gaze from the ceiling to her face. “Okay,” I said.

She threw her mug at the lawn and stomped off the porch.

As my endurance came back, and my flexibility, I began to walk instead of sit. Outside the second ring of houses (my estimate had been low; there were thirty-nine), I found barns and sheds and stables and workshops. Beyond those were pastureland and cultivated fields. Grain did its foot-rooted wind dance there; corn thrashed its jungle leaves; beans waggled long green or purple or yellow fingers; summer squash ripened furiously in a pinwheel of tropical-looking vegetation. Here, too, there were always people, cultivating, hoeing weeds, spreading things, raking things, trimming, harvesting. It all seemed as ritual as a pre-Bang Catholic mass, and as intelligible to outsiders.

One morning, when I’d gone farther than I had before and was feeling the effects, I sat down in the shade of a tree next to a field. Five people were hoeing up and down the rows of something I didn’t recognize. One of them reached the end of the row nearest me, looked up, smiled, and came over.

“Hi,” she said, dropping down onto the grass. “Sparrow, isn’t it? I’m Kris.” She pulled her straw hat off to reveal a brush of hair the color of the hat. She tugged a bandanna out of her pocket and wiped her face with it; then she undipped a flask from her belt and poured some of the contents over the bandanna. She draped that over her head like a veil and jammed the hat back on. “Funny-looking,” she said with a grin, when she saw me watching the process. “But it does the trick. The evaporating water keeps your head cool.”

“Looks like hard work,” I said, nodding back out into the sun.

“Goddess, it is. Especially this part of the year. Harvesting isn’t any easier, but it’s more fun, and you have something to show for it right away. Every year about now I start wishing it was winter.”

This was a reasonable line of conversation, not too personal. “What is that out there?”

“Sugar beets. We voted to do ’em this year instead of tobacco, thank Goddess. Don’t get me wrong — I love to smoke. But I’ll pay for my tobacco and be glad to. It’s a good cash crop, but the hand labor is murder, and no matter how careful we are, we always have trouble with the tomatoes when we grow it. Turns out we’ll make as much on the beets, anyway, so I can afford to buy my smokes.”

“Oh,” I said. Every word of that speech had made perfect sense, but I still wasn’t sure what had gone on.

Her grin broke out again. “That’s right, Sher said you were strictly a City-dweller. And we were supposed to be patient when you walked through the basil and fell in the flowerbeds.”

“You’ve been lucky so far. The state I’ve been in, the flowerbeds could have fought me off.”

“Yeah. What does Josh say, are you doing all right?”

My own fault; I’d introduced the subject. “Fine.” I stood up. “I should be getting back, I think.”

“Me, too — back to swingin’ dat hoe. Ugh. You coming to the whoop tonight?”

“Whoop?”

“We’ve never figured out a better name for it. In the town circle. There’ll be some drumming and dancing and singing and shouting, and food, and a bonfire… what can I say? A whoop.”

“I don’t think I’m quite up to dancing.”

She flashed white teeth. “We’ll pretend you’re an ancestor. Sit by the fire and we’ll feed you and ask which song you want to hear next.”

“I’ll see,” I said.

I didn’t think I’d be there. But when I got back to the farmhouse, I found the kitchen in a state of cheerful uproar, and the inhabitants united on the question of where I was going to spend my evening.

“Better take it easy if you don’t want to wear out before the whoop,” said Mags, who was poking holes in a piecrust. She was a plump, wide-eyed, snub-nosed Latina. I would have thought she was about sixteen, if Josh hadn’t told me that her son was twelve. The son, Paulo, was shelling beans at the table. He was tall for his age, dark and thin, and stared at me solemnly every time I appeared.

“That’s all right. I thought I’d stay here.”

“Don’t be a dink. You can’t stay here, and if you did, you wouldn’t have any peace, anyway. Everybody goes who’s not actually dying. If you stay away, they’ll think you’ve got leprosy. Paulo, put those in to boil, gallito. Oh, and slice those peppers into rings for me, please.”

“She’s right,” Josh called, from somewhere beyond the screen door. “You want them to think I did my best, and failed?” He pulled the screen door open and let it bang behind him. His head and shoulders were wet from the pump, and he carried a tub of butter. “As long as you don’t polka, you’ll be fine.”

Their cheerfulness was oppressive. Their assumption that there was nothing that made me different from anyone else in the place except, possibly, my injuries, was alarming. “Nobody will mind,” I said. “I’m not really part of the community.”

Josh turned his head to one side and looked at me, as if he were trying to read me like a thermometer. Then he set the tub down, pulled a stack of flat-bottomed bowls from a shelf, and began to fill them with butter. “If you say you’re not,” he said, “then you’re not. And no one will insist otherwise. But there’s a difference, you know, between being a member of the community and acknowledging that you’re part of that community’s shared experience.

“I know this will sound crazy to you, but showing up tonight — even for a little while — and eating our food and sharing our fire will be taken as an expression of gratitude. No one insists that you be grateful, either, but it would be a nice gesture.”

“I am grateful,” I said, feeling a stirring of distress. “You saved my life.”

Josh’s hands paused over the butter. He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, closed it again, then said, “No, never mind. The wrong lecture at the wrong time. Will you come tonight?”

I tried to imagine what I was committing myself to. Would it be more like lunch at China Black’s house, or like the Night Fair? Either one seemed, suddenly, equally frightening. “I’ll come,” I said, because I knew I had to.

“Good,” Mags said. “Then put these in the oven for me, will you? Put a tray under them or they’ll dribble all over. Josh, you better bring those clothes in off the line.”

I took Mags’s advice and lay down in the back bedroom that had changed from the sickroom to Sparrow’s room in the household language. I wondered what would happen if another invalid turned up.

The shadows were long and the sunlight deep gold when someone knocked on my door. I opened it to Mags, who pushed a folded pile of clothes into my arms.

“I just remembered, you don’t have much variety in your wardrobe. You can wear these tonight. Actually, you can keep ’em. Large Bob said the only way he was ever gonna fit in those pants again was if he stopped eating entirely.”

“I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. Say thank you and close the door.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Very much.”

I set the stack on the bed and looked at it. I didn’t mean to keep them, but I didn’t see how I could avoid wearing them tonight. It was a pity; the things I had on were Josh’s, which meant they were huge and had been washed and worn until they were soft as flannel. I didn’t look forward to clothes that hurt. I shook out the first thing on the pile.

It was a pair of black trousers with a stretchy drawstring waist and pleats at the top, made of brushed cotton twill. Underneath them was a cotton shirt, in a style I’d seen the interesting Indians wear in movies. It had an open collar and a low yoke, and wide sleeves gathered into cuffs. The shirt was wine-red, and the buttons on the cuffs and down the front were silver. It looked festive but restrained, and the whole business, once I put them on, felt as if I were proposing to go out in pajamas. Mags had understood about clothes that hurt.

I wish these people would stop understanding everything, I thought irritably. Something in my throat hurt, but I swallowed, and it went away.

The village square — excuse, the circle — was illuminated with lanterns hanging from all the lower tree branches, clusters of torch candles around the plank tables, and the bonfire. It sent almost enough light through the front windows to read by. I went to the kitchen and out the back door, and stood leaning on a porch pillar in the dark half of the night.

“Scared?” said Josh. I hadn’t seen him sitting on the steps.

“I… Yes, actually.”

“Sher said you weren’t a social animal.”

My hands opened and closed on nothing. Words pushed their way out of my mouth, unbidden and unwelcome. “Maybe I am, and there just aren’t any other animals like me.”

“What kind of animal do you think you are?” Josh asked, sounding mildly surprised.

I inhaled with my teeth closed. It made a hiss. “You know,” I whispered.

“What you think you are? Nope. I know what I think you are.”

“And what’s that?”

“A customized human being.”

“Well,” I said. “That was easy.”

Josh stood. I was on the porch and he was on the ground; he had to look up to meet my eyes. “It is easy,” he said. “Identity magic is the oldest and easiest kind there is. It’s what language is for.”

“Anybody gonna help carry this stuff?” Mags yelled from the kitchen, with volume enough to be heard inside and out.

“Damn,” said Josh; then, loudly, “You betcha!” He thumped up the porch stairs, past me, and into the kitchen.

Paulo and I each had charge of a pie. Josh got the beanpot, swathed in toweling. We tramped across the lawn to the sawhorse tables, and put our contributions down next to everything else.

People smiled at me, and waved, and introduced themselves. It was like China Black’s and the Night Fair both. I couldn’t decide if it was the worst of both or not. The people who introduced themselves often told me how long they’d known Sherrea, or how they came to know her, or asked me how I had. Sher, it seemed, was universally acquainted around here. It was the first time I’d thought to wonder how she came to know about this place, and what it was to her. I was very polite to everyone.

I wandered toward the bonfire, wishing I knew how long I ought to stay. Then a flash of light on a face at the corner of my vision startled me, and I turned to look.

Theo was walking next to me, and the light had been glancing off his glasses. “Hey,” he said.

I stopped walking. I’d been talking to strangers all evening; I could do this. I had only to gather my much-tried manners and put them to work again. “Hello. How are they treating you?”

“Great. I think. Only there’s nothing to do. I keep thinking about whether Robby’s surviving without us.”

Ignore the strange feeling in the stomach; rely on the manners. “I expect so. And you’ll be able to go back soon, won’t you?”

“To what?” Theo asked. “Occupation under Tom Worecski?”

I frowned. “But that’s what it was before you came here.”

“It’s not — never mind. Look, I’m gonna ask somebody tomorrow if there’s anything electronic they want done around here. D’you want me to volunteer you, too?”

“No.” I almost turned and left, but I remembered: manners. “No, thank you. I’m not doing that anymore.” Then I left.

Tom Worecski had had the archives burned. That had damaged that part of me, but it hadn’t killed it. Something else had done that, something I couldn’t name, that had seared away the connection between who I was and what I knew. I still knew electronics, I still had languages and language, all the things I’d woken with out of that parody of birth fifteen years ago. But they didn’t belong to me. Nothing, I’d said to Sher. I owned nothing. My body was on lease from the past, a machine I’d rented and lost the paperwork for, and I had no idea where my mind had come from. All the things I knew might have been stolen from someone else.

I managed to stay in motion, and so avoid having to talk to anyone else. I saw Frances for a moment, at the opposite end of a table. What, I wondered, did all these nice people make of her? So well spoken; lovely person, actually, for a mass murderer. She returned my look with a grave, piercing one, and I moved on again.

I didn’t see Sher until much later. There was music at the edge of the bonfire: guitarists, singers, a fiddle player, a mandolin, someone with a clarinet, and a shoal of drummers who sounded as if they’d played together in the womb. Someone offered me finger cymbals, but I declined. At the edge of the light, people were dancing.

On the opposite side of the hodgepodge circle of musicians and audience, I saw Kris, the woman from the beet field. She sat on the grass with her arm around another woman. They were both smiling, alternately at the musicians and at each other; they whispered in each other’s ears; they laid their heads on each other’s shoulders. The other woman kissed Kris on the cheek, halfway between her cheekbone and her jaw. Josh had removed the stitches from the inside of my mouth just a few days ago, in about that spot.

I stood up abruptly and walked into the dark. I ended up on the other side of the big central tree, leaning against it, staring up into the branches. The candle lanterns hanging there had almost all gone out. I concentrated on my breathing, on letting my chest rise and fall, on seeing if I could take in exactly the same volume of air each time. The day and everything in it seemed to have conspired against my composure. But it had survived, and with a little attention would continue to do so. This had been a bit of testing for real life, that was all.

“It’s all right,” said Sher, beside me, in a wrung voice I’d never heard from her before. “Nobody wants you to hurt. It just seemed so strange — you were so different. But if you have to shut us all out or break… then shut us out.”

I put my hands over my face for a moment. Then I let them drop. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

I heard her breath run unevenly into her lungs. “It doesn’t matter. Never mind.”

The farmhouse was close, but I would have found it anyway. This body I was leasing had always had good night vision. I closed the door of my room behind me, folded the borrowed clothes, and went, eventually, to sleep.

The next day I hunted through the fields until I found Kris, and asked her to put me to work. She was in one of the smaller garden plots this time, a long straight stretch between the dairy barn and the horse paddock.

She got up off her knees and banged her hands together to get the dirt off her gloves. “Sure. What are you good at?”

“Nothing,” I said. It was a useful word lately. “I’ll have to be trained.”

Kris grinned and waved at the rows. “Then you’re doomed to learn to weed. C’mere.” She pointed. “That’s an onion. Don’t pull it out. Anything that doesn’t look like that — see here, and here — is a weed. In this row, anyway. You’re trained. Off you go.”

In half an hour the cramped, unfamiliar position met my healing injuries and joined forces against me. I was sweaty, too, even though the work wasn’t strenuous. But it was just what I wanted. It slowed down thought, and channeled it into unfamiliar paths, ones my life to date hadn’t sown with mines. I was surprised when I reached past the last onion sprout and found that it was the last.

“Good work,” Kris said. “The next row is lettuce. It looks like this.”

A minute into that row, and Kris pointed to the thing in my hand. “That’s also lettuce.”

“Oh,” I said. After that, I did better.

Eventually I could figure out for myself which were the weeds. At that point, Kris moved on to the next garden plot, and I had the first one to myself. It was hypnotic work, with its own loose rhythm and a set of physical techniques both precise and trivial. The way a slow, smooth pull would bring a weed up by the roots and a jerk would snap it off at the surface. The way dandelions had to be pulled by all their leaves at once. The machinery of my arm moving out and back, reach, pull, toss. I could do this. I knew where this skill came from, and whose it was. Mine, mine. Wherever the rest of me was stolen from, this was mine.

Via Kris, who had taught it to me. Then was it Kris’s skill, after all?

And someone must have weeded China Black’s garden. Whoever it was, I shared this knowledge with her or him.

I’d stopped in midmotion, still crouched and kneeling, the latest thing I’d pulled still in my hand. It was a thin-stemmed little plant with short oval leaves climbing in pairs up the stalk. At the end was a cluster of star-shaped flowers in an aching, vibrating magenta.

I had pulled one of these before — in China Black’s garden. “Sparrow?” Sher’s voice came to me, from the end of the row.

I couldn’t breathe, except in little bursts that seemed to catch halfway down my throat. I had pulled one of these when, angry with Sherrea for something I’d done, I hadn’t listened while she told me again: You don’t belong to them. You don’t now, and you never did.

The origin of my body and my mind didn’t matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I’d pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.

I couldn’t breathe. I’d dropped the plant; I closed my dirty hands over my face as if I could find and tear away whatever was keeping the air out. My whole curled body shook with gasping, with the high, thin sound it made.

“Oh,” said Sherrea, very close now. “Oh, hell.” I felt her arms close around me, lightly for a moment, then very tight.

I was crying. Once I realized it, it got worse, until I couldn’t stop it, until I wondered if a person could die of it. I was catching up for all the things I hadn’t cried for: for Cassidy; for Dana; for my own pain; for the archives with their sweet glowing window on the past; for the lost, desperate look on Frances’s face when she thought she was at the end of her life; for Theo, cut off from his father and his home. I cried because Josh still missed his wife, and because Sher was crying. I cried because all the things I’d never felt before had come and settled in, and since the surface there was new and delicate, they were all painful.

“Sparrow,” Sher said damply. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

She was right, actually. I turned my face into the cloth on her shoulder and went on crying.