I failed to save Claire.
You found your way back to Montreal, your mind ablaze with vindictive malice now that you began to guess something of what you were. You followed her, all thought of courtship past. It was only because she wanted to buy Dolores a present that you were able to catch her alone; Claire slipped out one late morning, still tousled and sleepy, and walked a mile to a department store. You skulked among the displays while Claire selected a pair of emerald leather gloves, long and supple and elegant, clearly hopelessly expensive for a student like her; we could just overhear her voice, saying how the color would become her friend. How the gloves were for her birthday.
You slammed into Claire as she made for the doors. And oh, strangers did move to help the fair girl, as they had not intervened for Viola. Two men and a woman converged to pull you off her, and Claire herself delivered a very fine black eye.
But not before your kiss swallowed her shouting mouth.
The men tried to seize you; you thrashed and burst from their grip, ran madly up the street. So I was spared the sight of Claire’s baffled weakness as her life spilled away, her crumpling knees. I did not witness Lore’s face when she saw Claire’s corpse; her cry did not shiver through me, nor can I say with certainty that Lore cradled one dimpled, cooling hand against her eyes as she sobbed.
Neither of us needs such a proof of Lore’s grief, of course. We’ve witnessed that grief many times since, transmuted into rage.
You darted and ducked like a hounded thing for hours, crouching behind trash cans and eventually resorting to the movies again. Now that Claire was dead, you were purposeless, flailing, your essential emptiness emphatic; I could feel you feeling it, yet denying it in a silent, spiteful howl. At three in the morning, you returned to your room, to my great relief. I was able to fog your thoughts sufficiently that you forgot to lock the door, and soon you dropped into a depleted and whimpering sleep.
Claire was not the first girl I had failed, of course; far from it. It was not the first time I had watched the night drag its scarves across your retinae, nor lain sick with grief and self-loathing over my inadequacy. But Claire’s death hurt in a new way, a spreading ache that seemed to blot out the world, even as I knew that sorrow was properly Lore’s.
It was as if I borrowed her pain for my own ends. The fact was, Lore’s suffering was valuable to me.
I could not cry with your eyes. Events would teach me the trick of it in due course.
At perhaps six in the morning the stairs creaked—you slept then in a dingy room with a private back entrance—and I began to race with mingled eagerness and fear, whirling around the fishbowl of your useless head. I had done my best with the letter, but I had no way to know if it had found its destination, if two small blue hands had caught it, if they had reached to adjust her pince-nez before tearing into the envelope.
The doorknob rattled almost imperceptibly. It turned.
And my dear Anura slipped into the room, wearing her human shape. The pewter dawn cast just enough light to reveal her eyes silvered by tears, her brows peaked and mouth wide in a withheld cry as she saw you.
No. It was not you she saw; never, never. She looked through you to the ghost waiting within, then advanced on light feet and crouched low enough to rest her forehead on yours, on me. Never, living or dead, had I felt such tenderness in anyone’s touch.
“Catherine,” she whispered, raising herself. “Oh, Catherine. It’s been so long, again. Once I learned where he’d sent the beamer only to arrive too late. But I tried so hard, I tried.”
I blinked wildly, and she smiled through her tears and shook herself and drew out a pad of paper and a pen, both quite ordinary unworld items. She held the pad upright for me, and I wrote on it at a slightly awkward angle. But it served well enough.
I tried too. They still die. Claire died. In all this time, I’ve only saved two from him. Anura, I’m so bitterly sorry.
“Each life you saved might have spared another dozen from the blight of grief,” Anura said, with reckless heat. You weren’t drunk on this occasion, only in a deep sleep, and yet her voice spiked incautiously. Then she recalled herself and whispered, “Think of that! Think of the parents, the siblings, the friends who won’t break down in tears because someone in the street looks like the one they lost. Only two, you say! Each mortal life forms a star in a vast constellation, their linkages drawn by love. This is why destroying Gus Farrow must be our entire focus; so many, many lives depend on us.”
This gave me pause. Not only because you switched a little in your slumbers, but also, I realized after a moment, because I was unused to hearing Nautilusers speak of nonmagical persons in such a reverential vein. Her luminous sincerity recalled to mind the trance speaker Nora Downs, whom I’d seen so very, very long ago. If I am brutally honest with myself, I can see that I have been drawn to those whose deep-heartedness contrasts with my own shortcomings. Do I fear to feel too deeply, or do I merely fail?
In retrospect, I recognize another strain that lay concealed in my feelings then. I did not want Anura to be quite so eager to see Gus dead, not when I would vanish with him. I wanted her to say that, if only we could contrive to save most of the girls, or possibly only many of them, then perhaps his death was not so urgent a matter after all.
But it was not in her to say such a thing. Anura was better by far than I.
In the lull, she located a chair and lifted it silently to your bedside. Once she was seated we resumed our conversation.
I didn’t save Dolores Rojas from such a loss. Her guiding star is gone.
“Why do you blame yourself? Why not blame me? If only I had come sooner, maybe Claire could have been saved.”
I did not like to say, of course, that Anura’s magic was not of a caliber likely to have changed the outcome. She knew that perfectly well without my reminding her, and she sighed.
“I went to see her before I came to you tonight; Dolores, I mean. She was right there in the phone book. I tend to agree with your assessment. There’s a sizzle to her.” Anura smiled. “Not that she knew why I had come. I spun the most outrageous lies, pretended to be with some charity that visits the recently bereaved. She believed it all and doused me with tears until my coat dripped. This humanskin might smell rotten to me, but it comes in handy for such business.”
I could imagine; few indeed would slam their doors in a face whose every lineament proclaimed ministering angel. And if I cringed a little at the picture Anura called up, well. I had a duty that superseded such selfishness.
So will you do it? Take her under your—I could not say wing to a frog—protection, and teach her?
“No one has ever sought me out as a mentor. Cultivating new talents is a game for the powerful, or at the very least for the average. Not for someone whose own production is so feeble that she must supplement it by working as an immigration clerk.” That was not the only way she supplemented her personal magic, of course. We both heard the unspoken allusion to her bribe-taking, and she blushed.
Not all power can be measured in talens. This was a truly heretical statement for any Nautiluser, even an unwilling one like myself. To me, your sorcery is the rarest in all Nautilus.
She read my note and flushed an even deeper crimson. All at once I feared the various implications of my compliment—there were several possible interpretations; after all, I could have meant it merely in praise of her poetry!—and I could not control which reading she chose, nor even know.
“But I’ll try to approach her, Catherine. I can see how a sorceress with a vendetta all her own would make an excellent ally for you. Of course, it will mean telling her the truth. Awkward after my charade.” She was only reverting to the main and quite pressing subject, so why did it feel as if she were avoiding something?
Thank you. I’ve been watching Dolores for months while the beamer watched Claire. There’s something in her that’s waiting for this, I’m nearly certain. She has a secret sense of her own magical potential, and she’s in a state of constant expectation that someone extraordinary will appear and confirm it.
“Claire could do that for her figuratively, and now I’ve come along to bludgeon her with the literal version,” Anura observed wryly. “I lived once in a similar state of nebulous hope, no matter how many times people assured me magic didn’t exist. Conceive of my disappointment when I discovered that I was indeed magical, but also hopelessly third-rate.”
She delivered the words like a joke, which they were not. I was still stinging from the last compliment I’d offered, and dared not risk another reference to how very far from third-rate I thought her.
You may not generate many talens, but you understand the theory, and you can explain it all clearly and vividly, I wrote, changing the subject in my turn. You’ll make an excellent teacher.
“You’ve evidently been doing a fine job of teaching yourself,” she told me, with a slightly forced vivacity. “You know, I recently heard the story of the time Old Darius tried to give you a lesson—he still tells it and others repeat it, one to the next, so I can’t say how accurate the version was that came to me. But I’m told you attacked him with a tangle of roots, absolutely spontaneously and with no guidance at all?”
I thought back to that encounter in the clearing, so very long ago. To the little tongue of magic that had lashed out then. The sensation of magic in me had unraveled with my death. But death had also burst the cork, if I may so term it, that Darius had installed to keep me from defending myself. Magic diffused and escaped, becoming—as I now understand it—all of me.
I did. I hardly knew how I’d done it, though. It felt to me as if the world itself meant to be rid of him.
“Botanical magics, then. Is that still the direction you’re working in?”
What direction was I working in? My explorations were as blind as a cave fish. I could hardly articulate what I was doing, even to myself. But since it was Anura who was interested, I made an effort to track down the words for it.
No. At the time I was very much interested in botany and natural history, but now life and its manifestations feel too remote from me. My concerns now are more with in-between states. Slippages, wavering borders, gaps in reality. Cracks and shadows. I suppose for obvious reasons.
(Oh, does something now occur to you? Are you wondering if you might not be familiar with my work? Fool. You should have wondered long ago.)
Anura read this elucidation and laughed, loudly and unguardedly, then clapped a hand over her mouth as you stirred. If you woke it would be a disaster for me, terminating a visit I’d craved for so long in the best case. Alerting you, perhaps even Gus, in the worst. There were ten days left to your year, ten whole days where Anura knew where to find me, and it would be unbearable to squander them!
But still, still, I could not help loving her merry imprudence.
Dawn now swept the room with oblique fingers, like someone groping for a dropped object under a sofa. Anura’s golden waves shone pink-tipped, and she bounced a little in her chair, impatient for you to settle again. When at last you did she took the pen, scribbling a message before turning it to me.
I’ll write, too, for a while. The nasty thing is getting fitful. I owe you another apology, I’m sorry to say. Are you tired yet of hearing me say that?
I could never be tired of anything you had to say. But also, you don’t.
Now that we two were communicating in the same medium, I felt freer, as if we had submerged together in some charged and precious fluid and found we breathed more easily therein.
I do. Because I was ready to judge you for letting Gus carry on with his murders, when the truth is that I have the power to stop him myself. I’m guilty of the purest selfishness, putting my own happiness ahead of those girls. Their actual survival is at stake, their whole lives, and I value it lower than my needs. It’s disgraceful.
I guessed what she meant, of course. What do you mean?
At any moment I could expose Gus for bribery and have him exiled; every heartstring carries traces of its transactions no matter how you try to hide them, so I have definite proof. The catch is that I’d have to go too. To me, life in the unworld would mean exile from myself. But how can that outweigh all those deaths? It can’t.
Even in the unworld Gus could take decades to die. He’d keep killing. In fact, I imagined his enterprise would be somewhat hobbled without all the magical resources of Nautilus at his disposal. But I could not tell her that.
True. But he couldn’t kill indefinitely. His death would be set in motion, just as mine would. A pause. Catherine, I’m afraid I’ve come without your thousand talens. I could manage twenty, but—
I won’t take a single lit from you! You should know that. I knew her pride would find this unacceptable. I tried again. Your work tutoring Dolores will more than repay that sum.
It won’t repay it at all! But I’ll find a way. I can’t tell you how ashamed I still am, that I took a bribe extracted by torturing you.
Anura, all is forgiven. Please don’t think of it again.
It’s not your choice to forgive me.
It was her own, she meant. There was no point trying to persuade her otherwise.
Asterion knows, too, you know. He’s blackmailing Gus with his knowledge. I’ve been trying to come up with some way to protect you, in case Asterion turns on him.
Don’t even think of protecting me, Catherine! Don’t you dare, not if it means protecting Gus into the bargain. Just because I’m too cowardly to face the consequences myself, it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. Not at the price of all those girls just—swept away. If you see any opportunity to take Gus down, no matter what form that opportunity takes, you have to seize it! Promise me.
I could not keep such a promise, and I think she understood that was the case. She passed me the pen and, while I held it, a softness rose between us, a pillowing darkness, in which the promise waited, unmade.
So it remained.
Anura? Can I ask you something?
Always and ever and anything.
You’re so different with me than you were with Gus. Both Anuras feel like you, but they also feel contradictory. I’m not sure I understand—
Which self is the truer one? Dear Catherine, I am an amphibian, after all. I didn’t choose my form by accident! I have an air-self and a water-self, if you like. They aren’t so simple to reconcile. Sometimes I feel that no word I can say will ever be whole, able to speak for both aspects at once.
Her air-self, I thought: that must be the Anura of the immigration office, dry, sardonic, laconic, who crouched and groused atop her paperwork. And her water-self, that was the poet, ardent and free-flowing in her emotions, vivacious as a brook. Splashing from rage to gentleness and full of sudden sympathies where no one else could be bothered—
In this way I mentally divvied her up into the selves she described. But I can’t say if she would have agreed with these rough assignments, poet over here and bureaucrat there. Perhaps she meant something much more subtle. Subtlety has never been among my strengths.
I think I understand, I wrote. And here I am, literally divided. But even now that I can write to you, each word sounds in my ears like an endless scream.
You have a lot to scream about.
Not to you. I want, when I speak to you—what? too many things to list, to even know—I want to hear it all in my human voice again. Or rather—I want you to know my voice as something more than a scream.
This impossibility brought us both to a halt. The larynx, lips, tongue, throat which had once supported my voice: all those things were gone, decayed and returned to earth. The hands that might have held hers, the arms that might have wrapped around her, the lips that might have wandered—oh. I could not afford to think of it, but neither could I stop.
For the first time it struck me that, if only I had accepted Darius as my mentor, I might have been a sorceress in Nautilus, contained in a living body rightfully my own, and in that condition met Anura. Nineteen forever, moderately pretty, and alight with power; very possibly intriguing.
I do hear a voice in your words, Anura wrote after a moment, not screaming at all. Warm and strong. But of course the tone is only my invention. Could you try to write me something that doesn’t sound like a scream to you? A whisper, a murmur?
I could; those words were clear in my mind. But at the same time I could not.
And here, vile creature that you are, you twitched and thrashed again. I could register a growing pressure in your bladder; the thought that the gross claims of your body would interrupt my conversation with Anura, when I had no body of my own, was nearly maddening. We didn’t have much longer, that I knew.
Tonight is the happiest I’ve been since I was murdered, I wrote at last. Even in deep grief and regret over my failure, my joy is stronger. Anura read the words, then turned a searching look on your face. It was futile; your expressions were your own, not mine. She could not read my feeling in your vacant eyes. Her long fingers reached to slip the pen from your hands.
And with that motion you thrashed like a bagged snake. We both knew you were on the verge of waking.
Anura gave up on writing and leaned close, whispering urgently. “Catherine, listen, there are strange rumors circulating in Nautilus; about Gus and Asterion and you. Especially you. Laudine and I haven’t been able to get at the truth of them yet, but she’s befriended Sky to try to learn more. He’s mixed up in it, too, somehow.”
Rumors about me? My unvarying flash and scream did not seem to lend themselves to narrative. What stories could be adrift on Nautilus’s endless currents?
But before I could ask, you woke.
You could not open your eyes; I already held the lids apart. But from my perch inside you I could feel your mind drawing back its shutters and knocking in confusion against what you saw. You groaned and sat up, cupping your swollen cheek.
Anura stood at once, lightly and soundlessly, and slipped the pad into a pocket. I watched her assume a smile of infinite softness and turn her blue eyes into wells of invitation. I suppose it was the same affect she had put on when she knocked on Dolores’s door.
You gawked at her and rubbed your eyes, preparing to say Who are you? What are you doing here? But she forestalled you.
“Don’t be alarmed, Angus Farrow,” Anura lilted in a voice like distant bells. “I’m here as a friend.”
Complacent and dull-witted creature that you are, you were all too ready to accept that this golden-haired vision was some sort of private fairy, with no purpose beyond soothing your heart and advancing your interests.
“It’s like a nightmare,” you complained directly, as if Anura necessarily knew and cared for all your troubles. “Poor Claire! I think I killed her. But I didn’t mean to! It was just a kiss, there was no way I could know.”
Given my privileged position, if I can call it that, I recognized this for a lie. If you hadn’t precisely known, you had certainly suspected what your kiss would do. I’d preserved enough memories from your previous incarnations to make sure of that much.
“Of course you didn’t know! How could you?” Anura trilled. I thought she was struggling to suppress caustic laughter. “You sweet, unfortunate boy, forced against your will to bear a terrible curse.”
“Is that what it is? A curse? Who cursed me, then?”
In these days, Gus still haunted the unworld to keep an eye on you; it was only much later, when he was too afraid to age any more, that he resorted to his crude tricks, first with candles and smoke, then with telephones and a disembodied mockery of poor Margo. You had glimpsed him several times as he dogged your steps, and you were not as naive as you pretended.
“You cursed yourself. More precisely, you are your own curse.” She offered a beatific smile. “You’ve murdered many others before Claire. Didn’t you know that? But someday the curse will be extinguished for good. And you with it.”
She turned toward the door. You stared after her, too blundering and bewildered to realize that you should leap and seize her and force her to explain herself.
Instead you looked wounded. “How can you be so mean to me? You said you came as a friend!”
“Oh, I did,” Anura shot over her shoulder. “Just not yours.”
You scrambled out of bed, yanked pants over your nakedness, and thudded down the stairs in pursuit. Too late, of course. Anura was gone.
It was petty of me, no doubt. But I took advantage of your extreme distraction and made you piss yourself on the landing.
Amphibiana
—Anura
The lily floats upon the pond,
White grace, pink flush, the placid glow
Of drowsy bruiseless innocence—
But go below.
Where stems stand coarse and wavering,
In murk where all can be denied,
And weaving roots suckle the mud,
Find grace belied.
Dive deep, and watch the bubble swell:
A lucid globe, whose nations rise
Till it becomes a world entire
In liquid skies.
Its brindled lights spill past like seas
Where ships have sailed, where birds have flown,
Until the clap of ravening air
Reclaims its own.
I speak a word, it hovers close,
A promise rapt on speed-blurred wings,
So green with truth, so blue with hope,
Each cadence rings—
And in the water it reflects
Distorted, stirred, curved as an eye
That winks to see what I called truth
Become a lie.