was less than we were used to being. We had once been the number one more than seven, we clots in the earth’s arteries. But the noisy one left and maybe for need of him we were stricken with attention. When we were only seven, there was something wrong.
It was a matter of balance. There is a smug assurance among pairs, a possibility of completion that other creatures lack. We knew enough of the world of beasts and men to see how males burrow and females furrow, but the comfort of pairing isn’t critically dependent on that exercise.
We lived without the caw and twitch of sex, or to date we had. Unaware of parents but for the mothering hills and the smothering sky, we made do with what we knew: each other. We had no names. We couldn’t count until one of us left, and then we learned to count to seven, and to figure out odd from even. With a departed companion, there was a looseness to our group. There was a way in which we were incomplete, and, perhaps, more alert because of that hunger.
The human mind—we have come to observe—tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s mite. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.
Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door.
To say we were pairs is to propose, to the human mind, a system of marriages among brothers, as if 3 and 4 were one unit together in all things, as if 3 and 4 gave to each other something denied to 5 or 2. This isn’t the case. To say we were pairs isn’t to propose an intimacy or a singularity among our pairings. It’s merely to say that we functioned, loosely, as teams of two, and it hardly mattered whether it was 1 or 7 on the other side of the table or the other end of the long saw or the other edge of the pillow. Indeed, until recently, we wouldn’t have known to identify 1 from 7, or 4 from 6, or a pillow from a saw. In our efficiency we were blind.
But one of us left, and we eventually noticed that he was gone.
There wasn’t enough of us to go around. It wasn’t 7 who was abandoned, nor any other one of us. It was the all of us, and then we learned to count to seven, and saw that we ought to have been able to count to the next number up, the seven plus one. But we couldn’t, for that one was gone. In his absence, we remembered once again our incompleteness.
We were shorn, softly and without pain, of our assurance. We noticed what was wrong. We began to notice one another.
The appetite for noticing having been awakened, we were ready to notice the girl who fell, faint from hunger and cold, at our threshold.
She might not have known it for a threshold at first. We have our clandestine ways. It might have looked to her like a log decom-posing in the forest or a ledge of gray granite outcrop. It’s never easy to see through the eyes of humans and guess what they think they are seeing.
But we saw her, in our bumbling unsatisfied way. We took her in. We dragged her over the threshold, aware, some of us for the first time, of the fringed pattern of muscled digits at the ends of our arms that, for lack of a better word, might as well be called hands. We used our hands—hands. Hah—and we carried her into the smokelight, the better to look upon her form.
We didn’t call her Bianca de Nevada, we didn’t say, “Wake up, Bianca de Nevada.” We didn’t know that was what she was called. We hardly knew, I think, that people had names.
But we cast our glances sidelong, to see if she was our missing one.
She seemed not to be, unless he had changed a good deal.
She had hair of graven black lines, fine lines, each distinct but with like inclination; they spread upon the pillow in a soft fan that moved as her head moved. The brows on her face were pale as the underside of a dragon’s gullet. Indeed, there was something of the look of a corpse about her, though we’ve come to realize this is true of all humans. They begin to die with their first infant’s wail. But it was truer of her, because of the tone of her skin.
Her limbs were long enough to have uncoiled from their embryonic spasm. Her lower trunk was clad in a skirt the color of dried moss, and her torso in a tunic of meadowlark brown. Her hands—far more clever than ours, more completely cloven into separate fingers—lay back on the pillow, curled slightly like the legs of a crawfish, and the tenderness of her palms was enough to make us weep, though we couldn’t say why, and I daresay to this day none of us would try to explain.
We didn’t discuss her or touch her, but we drew to her chin a blanket of webweed, for though we’re accustomed to the damp and the dark, we know human beings learn what we know only when they have died and been consigned to the soil.
For her comfort we kept away the mealworms and sliceworms and the dung beetles. One of us—none could say who, for we didn’t yet distinguish ourselves one from the other—sat near her shoulder and brushed decay away.
We had nothing better to do but sit and keep watch over her until she had finished her rest. It was likely that she slept three, perhaps four years, before she stirred.
When her eyelids did flutter, we became shy, as if caught in a common sin, though without the individual soul to save or lose, we were as incapable of sin as a scorpion.
She breathed in and out several times, and sat up. Her hair, we were interested to note, had become longer while she slept, and as she blinked her eyes, she caught her hair in the crook of her arm and shielded her bosom with it. (Her tunic had fallen away into separate threads and couldn’t behave as a tunic any longer.)
“Good Savior,” she said, “preserve me from this dream.”
We blinked; as none of us considered ourselves the Good Savior we didn’t think it proper to reply.
“Who are you?” she asked.
This was a remark more likely dedicated to our family, but the one who was gone—the one that, plus seven, had made us whole—was the one among us who was oldest and most capable of language. We worked our throats to find words within, with little success.
“I’m Bianca de Nevada,” she told us. “I’m the daughter of Vicente and María de Nevada of Montefiore, on the edge of Toscana heading toward Umbria. I’ve never seen your sort before. Who are you?”
The question occasionally invents the answer. We heard her words, and saw her pallor, and perceived that Bianca meant white. So names were characteristics, then, and we chose from among the characteristics of stone to invent ourselves, out of charity.
“Stone can’t see,” said one of us, blinking. “So call me Blindeye.”
“My limbs are like stone, so I’m Lame,” said another. “Or maybe Gimpy.”
“Stone can’t taste, so I’m Tasteless.”
“No more can stone smell, so I might be No-Nose, but if I could smell, I would smell Bitter. So call me Bitter and have done with it.”
“I didn’t quite hear the question; stone is hard of hearing. So you can call me Deaf-to-the-World, thank you for asking.”
“I’m Heartless, for I can’t feel,” said the red-bearded one, with a reluctant sigh.
The seventh didn’t answer for a moment. When we looked at him, he said, “Stone can’t speak, so I’m Mute, Mute; always was Mute, always will be Mute. MuteMuteMute. Why do you even bother to ask? Why do you bother me so?” MuteMuteMute, it seemed, would have liked very much to talk, and was therefore irritable at being reminded of his debility.
But in the naming of ourselves for the first time, we felt the absence of our missing brother more strongly than ever. “And then,” one of us answered, “there is the departed one of us, who has more sense and more senses than the rest.”
“And his name?” asked Bianca.
“Next,” someone said, and we others thought about it, then nodded.
This is how we were born. She sat amidst us, more or less naked as a human baby, looking, but it was we older brothers—older than trees, older than wind, older than choice—who were born in her presence. Blindeye, Heartless, Gimpy, Deaf-to-the-World, MuteMuteMute, Bitter, and Tasteless: incomplete sections of each other, beginning our lumbering life of individuality—
—beginning our lumbering lives.