Borne. Jeff VanderMeer
in his sleep. His moans sounded like gnashed, crushed words, filtered through the dirt, and we could not understand them. I knew only that they felt like anguish.
Some hours later we felt his weight leave us, the Balcony Cliffs almost seeming to spring back up around us with relief. When we examined the spot above in the morning there was a deep depression from Mord’s weight. If he had spent the whole night there, would he have fallen through, smashing down level by level until, still sleeping, his body bulged through our ceiling? The stench remained for a day or two, and whenever I smelled it I felt a pressure pushing down on my head.
I had come to Wick’s place so he wouldn’t come to mine and be reminded of Borne, but Borne is the subject he raised as soon as Mord had left. I almost wished Mord was still there to silence him.
“I could still take him,” Wick said.
“Who?” I asked, although I knew.
“Borne. It’s time. I should just take him and figure him out. While you recover.”
“You don’t need to.”
He hesitated, about to say more, thought better of it, and seemed to accept what I had said. He hugged me close and, as if I were his shield against Mord, soon enough snored quietly against my shoulder. I let him, even though it hurt; the price of peace. Because it was simple. Because it helped us both.
But I could not sleep. I was thinking about the silly conversations Borne and I were having because Borne didn’t seem to know much about the world, had only fragments that didn’t quite fit together.
Borne: “Why is water wet?”
Me: “I don’t know. Because it’s not dry?”
Borne: “If something is dry, does that mean it’s not wit.”
Me: “Wit or wet?”
Borne: “Wit.”
Me: “Wit is in the eye of the beholder.”
Borne: “What?”
I tried to explain wit to him.
Borne: “Like grit in the eye? Is wit like dust?”
Me: “Yes, dry.”
Borne: “I’m thirsty. And I need a snack. I’m hungry. I’m hungry. I’m hungry.”
Conversation would fall away again while I tried to find a snack for Borne, which, again, wasn’t hard. He especially liked what you might call “junk food,” even though that concept had become obsolete long ago.
Maybe, too, I liked Borne so much because Wick by then was almost always serious. For the longest time, Borne didn’t know what serious was.
In the morning, with Mord and the weight of Mord just a bad dream, Wick tried again.
“I can do it in a gentle way,” he said, but that didn’t reassure me. “I can return him the way he is now.”
“No.”
His weight went taut against my back.
“I shouldn’t have to ask. You should know it’s the best thing.”
“It’s not.”
“You know something’s not right, Rachel.” Now he was almost shouting.
Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else. So I said nothing.
But he wouldn’t let up. “Give me Borne,” he said.
I refused to turn to look at him.
“You need to give him to me, so we know what he is. He lives here, among us, and you protect him in a way that’s unnatural. This thing you know nothing about.”
“No.”
“He may be influencing you using biochemicals,” Wick said. “You may not know your own mind.”
I laughed at that, even though it could be true.
“You have no right, Rachel,” he said, and there was a wounded quality to the word right.
“Tell me about your time at the Company.” I was tired of talking, just tired period. “Tell me all about your weird telescope.”
But he had nothing to say about his telescope. He had nothing else to say at all, and neither did I. We both knew that one word more and either I would leave his bed or he would ask me to leave.
Wick. Wick and Rachel. Portrait of us. Wick and I, at opposite ends of the frame, half out of the picture. Oddly wary of each other now, for all that he took care of me, perhaps because he expected more blame from me, to bolster the guilt he had decided to keep. And perhaps I did blame him—for making me weak, for making me rely on his surveillance, his beetles and spiders, rather than my own traps.
Was that fair? No, it wasn’t fair. But I had my own guilt: I now kept an even bigger secret from him.
Borne can talk. Borne killed my attackers and hid their bodies. Borne is intelligent. Borne makes me happy.
WHAT I TAUGHT BORNE AND WHAT HE TAUGHT ME
Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid. During my recovery, I had such trouble remembering what waited for me outside, as if I had to learn it all over again, despite having been taught so many lessons.
All kinds of dangerous ideas entered my head while groggy. It was as if the little foxes and other animals out in the desert ran in circles around my mind, barking and kicking up dust, stopping only to stare at me from afar and encourage me to wander. I kept fantasizing that I lived in a real apartment in one of the stable sanctuaries from my past. Everything would be fine—I just had the flu or a cold and was out sick until I got better. And when I was better, what would I do? When I was better, I would go back to university and to some part-time job. I would complete my studies so I could become a writer. Because the ruined city was just a bad dream and my life as a scavenger was a bad dream, and soon I would wake up, and the visions of almost drowning, of losing my parents and with them all connection with the past, would prove to be an illusion, too.
The longer Wick expended time and energy protecting me, the more ideas like this took hold of me. They had only a vague relationship to my memories of flight, of trying to find refuge, of all the dangers before the city.
But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps. Even as I started to walk around my rooms with Borne, even as I ventured out into the corridors. It was so sad a fantasy that I brushed by without recognition the revenants that told me it was a lie. The chair stuck in the wall. The filing cabinet rusted beyond use, now just a barricade at the mouth of a tunnel. The lack of libraries or other people.
Yet those sequestered weeks also contain some of my best memories because of Borne. Wick was gone a lot, spying on the Magician’s movements, providing beetles to his small band of dealers … and possibly because of our argument.
Which left Borne and me ever more time to explore. He’d gotten tired of being cooped up in the apartment. On days when I knew Wick would be out for hours, I’d take Borne into the hallways, prickly with the fear of discovery and stiff from my slow-healing wounds.
It was all a construct by then, this game of not telling Wick that Borne could talk. He had to know. But because I never admitted it and Wick never brought it up, Borne became an open secret that existed between us like a monster all its own. It made me reckless, as if I wanted Wick to confront me. That somehow our relationship would be a total lie if Wick didn’t confront me.
Ignoring the strain on my own body, Borne and I would race down dim-lit, dust-covered corridors, Borne afraid of colliding/congealing with the wall and tripping over his own pseudopods, wailing as