My father’s name was Colgate, a name which, like my own and that of my brother, meant something in the forgotten world before this one but which, now, today, is but a name like any other. I had lost my mother when I was young, so my father had been, in effect, both of my parents in one. It was he who conferenced with my teachers, he who patched me up when I was hurt, he who fed and clothed me, and he, too, who suffered my anger and scorn when things did not go my way. So when he died abruptly soon after my fifteenth birthday, I felt as if my whole world—everything I knew or expected or counted on—had vanished into black empty space. In the days to follow, I simply could not believe that he was gone, still turning toward his absence when I found an interesting snippet of text, an equation worth discussing, a piece of vocabulary from some language he had mastered but I was just learning. But that chair, the chair in which he sat in the evenings, watching the screens and sipping cognac, was empty and would always be empty no matter how many times I turned to its soft, padded surfaces.
My brother Victrola and I were separated by seven years and, as such, lived separate lives, I with my father in our family apartment and my brother across the outpost in the warren of inexpensive housing known simply as “the Quay,” a collection of boxy dwellings stacked one upon the other until they appeared as if toppling rows of tall, thin bookshelves, the tiny apartments there occupied by the outpost’s working class, would-be writers and artists, drug addicts, immigrants, and, like my brother, students living on the cheap. It was, to me, a frantic and beautiful chaos, its colors and textures and sounds and smells a confusion of acrid beauty and florid decay that sent my head spinning to catch hold of it all.
After my father’s death, what I wished for—and indeed what I assumed would occur—was for Victrola to move back home. But alas the apartment had been rented from the housing works and, without regular payments, payments neither I nor my brother could make despite the small cash settlement we had received from my father’s will, the space was offered to a new renter and I, a fifteen-year-old girl with little knowledge of the world outside of school and homework and the various screens I consulted for entertainment and communication, was summarily evicted from the only home I had ever known. What remained were two suitcases carried by my brother and containing all my worldly belongings: my screens, my clothing, a photograph of myself with my brother and father, and a few small odds and ends that I had kept as mementos of my former life.
I did not question my brother’s willingness to take me in and indeed my sadness was slightly lessened by the fact that I was, at least, still among family, still taken care of. I thought I knew him, of course—after all, he was my brother—and yet it was not until I actually arrived at his apartment to stay that I truly understood just how separate Victrola’s life had become from that of myself and our father, separate and, as I was to learn, quite private, for while I knew my brother to have had various girlfriends at one time or another, some of whom he had even brought by the apartment to introduce to our father and, to a lesser extent, to me, the fact that he had a girlfriend now, and the further complication that she lived with him in his apartment—a much smaller, much tighter space than I was accustomed to—had not occurred to me even as a remote possibility. The first indication of my own ignorance came immediately upon arriving at his door, when, instead of opening it, Victrola remained outside for a long, strange moment, his head slightly tilted as if listening for some sound or signal from within.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. “Aren’t we going in?”
He had already straightened, nodding as if nothing were amiss at all, but when the door slid open with its thin, reedy swish, I saw immediately that something significant had, indeed, changed, at least for me. There, in the center of the room, stood, in utter silence, a tall luminous figure wrapped in a pale shift, her skin’s tiny grained channels coursing with slowly pulsing light.
It is a bizarre admission in the wake of all that happened, but Skeery was the first Blue I ever met. Of course I had seen them and, in my sentient biology classes, had studied their physiological differences from humans, but I had never had any meaningful interaction with a member of that species. My only experience with their system of telepathic communication had come in a classroom when a Blue, the guest of the professor, had sent a brief message to the assembled students: phrases and a scattering of related images. The reaction of the students had been, unilaterally, to gasp in alarm, a reaction I was to repeat as my brother’s live-in girlfriend—for that is what she was—brushed her message across my mind.
“Hedge,” my brother said softly, “this is Skeery.”
The feeling—in the classroom and in my brother’s apartment—was like the briefest tickle under the flesh of my forehead and then, a fraction of a second later, a blooming of words and images. You Hedgerow Greeting Happy, Skeery said into my frontal lobe, the individual words popping like bubbles, behind which, in a brief flash, came the image of a purple hill with a blazing white sun hovering just above, its light so bright that it felt, for that briefest flicker, as if I were being blinded from the inside. I must have made some kind of sound, for my brother’s hand was on my shoulder now, my mind still ringing from the flash of light. “It’s a common greeting,” he said. “It’s meant to make you feel at ease.”
I may have said something in reply, but really I could do little more than stare at the creature before me. Skeery was, at least to me, at least then, indistinguishable from any other of her species, close enough to the shape of a human to create within me a central revulsion that embarrassed me and which I could not control. Her head was mostly shaped like a human head, although slightly larger, and of course her skin was the pale, almost luminescent blue that had given the species their common nickname. Her eyes roughly coincided with the location of human eyes, although Skeery’s (like all Blues) were large, without pupils, vaguely larval in appearance, their color the yellow of old teeth. But what disturbed me most was not the expressionless ovoid eyes or the hue of Skeery’s skin but the fact that the area just below her nose slipped, at a fairly regular angle, into her neck, unbroken by mouth, jaw, or chin, so that her entire head, especially in profile, had the oblong shape of a balloon.
“Hello,” I said quietly.
The tickle again. You Hedgerow Greeting, she said to my mind. A flicker of the hill, the blazing sun.
“That’s really bright,” I said absently.
You Hedgerow Smile.
I did not know if she meant that I made her smile or if she was asking or even commanding me to smile, but then an image of Skeery herself came, with a smile drawn upon her mouthless face as if with an ink-soaked brush, the effect so strange, so disconcerting, that I actually burst into a laugh.
Skeery stepped forward now and reached out her hand, and after a moment I took it, the feeling warm and so soft it almost felt as if I held something made entirely of water, as if I could crush it between my fingers.
You Hedgerow Meeting Good.
“It’s . . . uh . . . nice to meet you, too,” I said falteringly.
“She’s your girlfriend? Your girlfriend?”
“She is,” my brother said.
There was no food in the apartment—a fact I could hardly understand at the time—and Victrola and I had gone out for ramen, the bowls hot, the liquid steaming my face as I ate. Had it been a few weeks earlier I might have reveled in the experience—eating from a street cart in the Quay, the flavors and smells in the air all around me—but in the face of what I had learned about my brother and about the living situation in which I had now found myself, I could hardly taste the meal at all.
“How long?”
“Have we been seeing each other? Two quarters, I guess.”
“Two quarters,” I repeated.
“I’m surprised you’re so shocked,” he said then. “I thought you’d be more open-minded.”
“I am open-minded,” I said. And yet I had already come to realize that this statement might not have been quite so true as I thought. From the street outside, through the grimy windows, came the churning motion of the pedestrians and peddlers and hawkers of the Quay, some human, some Blue, some the scattered members of other sentient species.
“Just give her a chance, Hedge,” my brother told me gently. “She’s great. You’ll see.”
We fell silent for a moment, each of us spooning ramen into our mouths, slurping, chewing. What I thought then was just how much I missed my father, how I wanted, more than anything, to return to the familiar apartment in which I had lived all my life. But my home was gone and the only place I had to turn was to my brother’s cramped student quarters which, even now, contained the luminous figure of Skeery, her silent, lidless, insectoid eyes ever-watchful.
“We look pretty weird to them, too, you know,” my brother said then, as if he could hear my thoughts.
“She told you that?”
“Not exactly, but I know the idea of eating is pretty primitive to them. And shitting is positively disgusting.”
“So what do you do?”
“What we’re doing right now,” he said. “Eat out.”
“Really?”
He smiled, that dazzling arc of shining teeth. “Really,” he said. “You can’t control what the heart does, Hedge.”
“Sure you can,” I told him. “You wouldn’t let yourself fall in love with a fork or a toaster oven or a glass of water.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Well, it’s true. You can’t even kiss her.”
My brother looked at me then, his eyes narrowing. “There’s more to a relationship than kissing,” he said.
From my point of view, age fifteen and in the throes of my first relationship, my brother’s statement was demonstrably untrue. My boyfriend Sim was a year older than I and it was clear almost from the start that my body was not the first female shape he had held in his thin, elegant hands. He was emotional, gentle, beautiful to look at, and even now, so many years later, I feel a pang somewhere deep and secret when I think of those days, not just of him but of he and I together, our youthful passion, the way our first kiss flooded through me like a bloodwave filling me from everywhere at once, our lips touching tentatively at first and then the flick of his tongue across my closed mouth, my teeth, and then nothing but the depths of our hunger. It is this experience—the kissing—that I returned to when I thought of my brother and Skeery, this that I return to even now, the realization of the differences in their physiognomy that meant he would never kiss her, that they would never kiss each other. The very idea of it seemed impossible to me. In those few memories I had of my mother, I could see my father kissing her, his hands holding her. It was, I knew, my blueprint for what a healthy relationship was supposed to be, what it was supposed to look like; even now it is not the sexual act that I think of when I ponder the physical manifestations of human love but instead the warmth of kissing and holding and speaking. Sim told me he loved me. I told him the same. This was what mattered.
So even beyond my own physical reaction to Skeery, I simply wondered what Victrola saw in her. True, there was undeniable beauty in her pale blue skin with its series of finely etched sparkling lines, lines that reminded me of wood grain but which coursed with visible energy like electric wires, and of course there was a certain gracefulness in her motion, an attribute common to the Blue (even watching one of her species walk across a room was like being secret witness to some subtle aquatic ballet), but fundamentally I could not understand looking at that mouthless face with its great yellowish larval eyes and had especial trouble imagining Victrola finding pleasure in that vision. Those of his previous girlfriends I had seen—all human—had been unilaterally beautiful—and quite capable of holding down a reasonably intelligent conversation, one not limited to random flashing words and weird pictures of purple grass and blinding sunlight.
And yet, even then, especially then, it was impossible not to see that my brother was happy during his year with Skeery. Later I would come to wonder if that was the happiest time in his life, since the rest of it—his two marriages, his estranged adult children, the scandals that would periodically rock his personal and public lives—brought to him a depth of sadness that was likely hidden to all but me, his only living family, but in the days of Skeery, when he was but a boy of twenty-two, the whole world before him, he seemed to burn with a bright and luminous fire. Was it Skeery who gave him that? I did not think so at the time but now it seems obvious that it was she who brought out that rare and wondrous quality in my brother, the bright spark of him at twenty-two when he was enthralled by a love that was quite simply beyond my ability to understand.
Of course, there was so much I did not understand then, not only about that relationship but about my brother and about myself, for I had already sowed the seeds that would lead to the end of Skeery’s presence in our lives. That I had done so totally unwittingly only serves to underscore how oblivious I was and, perhaps, how oblivious I still am. That I have spent all of my adult life in the presence of the Blue may be a ready metaphor of penance for my sins, but really my decision to live among them has more to do with the mundane aspects of my physical life than it does with anything else. Suffice to say, some character flaws run deeply enough that they cannot be excavated no matter how many hours we spend in the therapist’s chair, and I can assure you that I have spent a good many hours spilling my secrets in that context, my mouth silent but my mind filled with the images of my own guilty conscience.
I realize now that she was trying to be my friend, in her way. Perhaps the cultural differences made it impossible for me to understand the cues, or perhaps the physical differences, the differences in actual species, were too great a barrier; in any case I did not reciprocate the attempt. In my defense, my father’s sudden death continued to weigh heavy upon my heart. Sometimes at night I wrapped my arms around myself in the darkness of my sleeping mat and imagined that I was a child of six or eight or ten and my father had tucked me into bed and all was right in the world. The arms that encircled me were his arms, as were the little kisses I imagined upon my forehead, my cheeks, my eyes. During such times, I sometimes thought I could feel the faintest tickle somewhere in my forehead, my frontal lobe tingling, but when I focused on that sensation it was just as quickly gone, like something just at the edge of my vision, an illusion, a dream. Was it Skeery listening to my grief? I did not know and could not think of a way to ask. In the mornings, after I had cried myself to sleep, I sometimes thought I could read concern upon her emotionless visage, her great larval eyes seeming to stare at me from across the room. I said nothing. She said the same.
We ate every meal out, of course, my brother and I, and I knew, too, that in our absence from the apartment, Skeery fed upon the light from the sunpanels. Victrola had shown me the panels soon after I had arrived at the apartment.
“Don’t ever come in here without letting us know,” he told me once, gesturing through the open bedroom door.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I don’t want to walk in on anything.”
“It’s not that,” he said seriously. “Those lights can kill you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they can kill you,” he said. “It’s meant to simulate the sun on the Blue homeworld. It’s three times as bright as ours.”
“Why doesn’t she just go out to eat?”
“She could,” he said, “but the closest public sunpanels are across base in Loomtown.”
The panels were matte-black when powered down, so dark, in fact, that it was difficult to imagine them emitting light of any kind. That something like this was here, in my brother’s bedroom, in this tiny apartment, felt like being shown that a bomb was set just a few feet from where, each night, Victrola slept side by side with a female of a different species. The very thought made my heart leap with an agony of fear.
“It’s a lot to take in,” my brother said then. “Just give it some time.”
I wish I could say that I followed my brother’s advice, that I did, indeed, “give it some time,” but the reality was that I dealt with the situation, with the cohabitation, by avoiding her entirely. I tried, during the next two quarters, to spend as much time as possible at school or with Sim, but even beyond such measures of physical separation, I simply avoided interacting with her at all, thinking of her as some vaguely humanoid pet that my brother had somehow trained to follow him around, a creature who sat in total silence, only on rare occasions communicating something to me in passing, the common words and phrases sounding forced and awkward in my thoughts as if I were picking up a hazy broadcast from a language school.
You Hedgerow Say Thing Funny Victrola.
You Hedgerow Want Glass Water.
You Hedgerow Tired Eyes Sleep Look.
You Hedgerow Day Bright Sun.
Often the sentences were accompanied by a quick flicker of imagery: the quad at school in the summer sun; a bed, soft pillow awaiting my head; a clear shining glass of cool water; my brother’s face, laughing. This style of communication must have been intriguing to my brother, for I would sometimes surreptitiously watch the two of them as they sat on the sofa in silence, my brother’s face sometimes turning into a bright, beautiful smile that reminded me of my father, a smile sometimes followed (and this also reminded me of my father) by a burst of mirthful laughter. But all the while Skeery’s face was the same inscrutable mask, her photosensitive skin pulsing with light.
I knew, of course, that what I was doing was wrong; after all, I had moved into their living situation—my brother’s and Skeery’s—and yet I could not help but feel as if it were I who had been imposed upon. One might forgive me my youth but there were plenty my own age who might have dealt with the situation with more grace.
“I’d like to meet her,” Sim told me one afternoon as we lazed about upon one of the couches in the study hall. “She sounds fascinating.”
“She’s not fascinating,” I told him in aggravation. “She’s changed my brother’s entire life. He can’t even eat at home. He goes down the street to the café to take a shit because Skeery’s too sensitive to the smell.”
“Is it bad to change your habits for someone you love?” Sim asked me.
“She’s not human,” I said.
“Who is?”
“It’s not a metaphor.”
“It was meant as a joke,” he said.
“Not funny.”
“I’d still like to meet her,” he told me.
“I don’t think I’m ready for that,” I said. “Not yet.”
I wish now, of course, that I had brought Sim to meet Skeery. Perhaps something of his goodness, of his fairness, of his interest in situations and actions and people different from himself might well have taught me something of the grace I clearly lacked at that age. But I did not invite him to meet her, not then and not ever, for our relationship did not last for much longer after that conversation. I was utterly destroyed by the breakup at the time, although now, of course, it is easy enough to understand. I was so filled with anger and loss and loneliness that I must have felt, to Sim, like some black cloud ever-hovering around his head.
I had not even told my brother that I had been seeing Sim, not because I was trying to keep it secret but for reasons more petty. I simply wanted to keep it from him because I was angry at him due to Skeery’s constant presence in our lives and, perhaps most of all, because I was lonely beyond measure, not only after Sim and I had broken up but before, a loneliness which was like a hollow space inside the whole of my body and which I did not think would ever be filled. So I had not told Victrola and yet I was angry when he did not display any real empathy for my renewed despair.
That it was Skeery who responded at last only conflated and complicated my ongoing sense of anger and betrayal and loss. Her communication was so quiet, so faint, that it seemed at first as if that trickle of images and words had come tumbling out of the background sounds of violins from my brother’s screen.
You Hedgerow Quiet Sad Lost.
I looked up from where I sat in the dark corner of the room, staring at my screen. Skeery sat across from my brother at the table, her pale shift glowing blue from the thin tracks of her phosphorescent skin. She did not look at me, nor did my brother. I thought that he always heard her when she spoke to me, that she broadcast to both of us at the same time, but it appeared now that her communication had been directed to me alone.
I puzzled at the words, the flickering image of an ocean, an Earth ocean, and then silence again. And then another: You Hedgerow Alone Negative.
I sat looking at her but still she did not turn in my direction. I did not know what to do or what to say but at some point in the silence, Skeery rose and went to the small kitchen and heated a cup of water. My brother was looking up at her from his seat at the table now. They were clearly communicating and, although I could not hear them, my brother looked over at me, a look of sadness crossing his face.
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” I said, my voice almost a shout.
“We’re not,” he said.
My brother shook his head. “She’s right,” he said. “She’s making you a cup of tea. I asked her why.”
“What did she say?”
“She said you broke up with your boyfriend.”
I looked at him, incredulous, searching.
You Hedgerow Sim Gone Sad Home Place Now. An image first of Sim and then, just after, of a house in a field, chimney puffing with warm smoke, yellow lights in the windows.
I was on my feet now, my screen clattering to the floor. “Why do you know that? I didn’t tell her that,” I yelled into the room. Then I turned to her, to her mouthless, alien face. “I didn’t tell you that!”
You Hedgerow Sad Tea.
Indeed she held a tray in her hand, the old-fashioned China teapot on its platter, the thin, gently cracked cup next to it, the set an heirloom which had been in our family for generation upon generation. My grandmother’s. Her grandmother’s before that. Why my brother had ended up with it I did not know.
This might have been the moment when I redeemed myself, when I sat and quieted my mind and listened to whatever it was Skeery had to say. That she was trying to help me was clear, but that she had taken from my mind a piece of information that I had not offered acted as a confirmation of all I had secretly suspected, all I had secretly feared.
And so, instead, I ran to the door and slipped outside into the dull cool of the air-conditioned night, my brother’s receding voice calling my name until it was subsumed by the tangled and clangorous sounds of the Quay.
I stayed at a friend’s apartment that night and for the next three nights to follow, but of course I could not stay there forever. My brother had messaged me and I had told him where I was staying—back in our old neighborhood not far from our family apartment—and his response had been a brief OK and nothing more. I did not know what I wanted him to do, but this response seemed utterly insufficient, and for many hours I secretly railed against him in my mind, against him, against Skeery, against my dead parents, against my lost home, against everything. My classes were tedium and my grades were slipping. I saw Sim sometimes at school, briefly, and he would smile and say hello and I would do the same and we would go our own ways, but the public mask was thin and my chest held a heart-shaped cup filled with ash.
I skipped school the following day and messaged my brother and asked if he would have a late breakfast with me at the waffle house near my campus. He agreed within seconds. I did not know if my brother had skipped his graduate seminar and I did not care to ask. I was angry with him still, but I also knew that my anger was petty and mean and under that pettiness was the fact that he was my only family and that I missed him terribly. If I was honest with myself, I knew I wanted the impossible: for the clock to draw backward over the cycles of day and night and day and night until my father was alive again and I was back in the old apartment and all was as it had been before.
I arrived at the waffle house before he did and was already seated when he slipped into the booth across from me. He looked, even at a glance, utterly exhausted, as if he had not slept for many nights. And yet it was he who asked me if I was okay.
I nodded. “She reads minds,” I said.
His shoulders slumped. “She doesn’t mean to,” he told me. “But I hear you. I mean, I understand. It’s a lot to get used to.”
“I didn’t tell her anything,” I said. “Not one word. And she knew his name, Vic. His actual name. I didn’t even tell you that.”
“Why didn’t you?” Victrola said. Our waffles had arrived and he was busily cutting his into bite-sized squares.
“I just hadn’t gotten around to it,” I told him. “That’s all.”
“All right,” he said. “I’d like to know these things, though.”
“That’s just it. We can tell each other things if we want to. But she doesn’t even ask. She just . . . it’s just not right.”
“It’s hard for her, too,” he said.
This last statement made me laugh, perhaps a bit too loudly, too dramatically.
“I don’t mean it like that,” my brother said. “I mean, it’s hard for her not to listen. Human emotions are really loud for her. It would be like you or I trying not to listen to someone shouting at us over and over again.”
“Boo-hoo,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m making things difficult for her.”
“Look,” my brother said then. “I’m trying to be patient here.”
“Are you?”
“Will you please shut the hell up for one second?” My brother’s voice was loud now, louder than I had heard it in a very long time, loud enough, in fact, that the room around us quieted as if in response to his question. “It’s not always about you, Hedge,” he told me now. “You moved into our lives. Not the other way around.”
“Believe me,” I spat back, tears already streaming down my cheeks, “if I could live anywhere else I would.”
“But you can’t,” he said. “So we have to make the best of it.”
“I’m trying.”
“Are you? Because it doesn’t seem like you’re trying at all.”
I did not respond to this, although of course I knew it was the truth. I had been horrible and there was nothing I could do to change that fact. I felt as if some other me, some terrible demonic version of myself, had taken hold of the person I had once been, the person Sim had, I hoped, fallen in love with. But I had driven Sim away. What remained of me was a burning shell. A destroyer.
My brother may have called my friend’s parents, because later that afternoon I received word that I would be staying with them for the remainder of that week. This gave me some sense of relief, although, as with everything during that period of my life, I was also conflicted about its meaning, interpreting it in ways that were likely far-flung from the reality. If it had been at my brother’s request—and I did not ask him, nor my friend’s parents, if this was true—I wondered what it might have meant. Did Victrola not want me in his apartment or was he simply offering me some time away from the presence of Skeery? Either way, I indeed took my friend up on her offer and returned to their much larger apartment with its familiar sounds of human voices running across the familiar smells of the cooking of human foodstuffs. I remember that I could not help but watch their mouths as they talked, as they ate, as they went about their evening routines. Once more I remembered Sim’s mouth on my own, how our lips met, our tongues: an image that had come to me unbidden and which, even as I sat in that noisy apartment, filled me with longing and with loneliness.
By the time I returned to my brother’s apartment at last I had made some decisions about Skeery. If we were to cohabitate, then we would need to get along, and I knew the main source of friction had come from me. In fact, were I truthful, I knew that Skeery had little to do with my discomfort. She was, in the end, only living her life and had, in fact, made room for me without any perceptible fuss whatsoever, this despite my sudden and unasked-for appearance in the cramped apartment she shared with my brother.
And yet, when I finally returned I knew immediately that something had changed. The very air inside was different and there was a sound, too, a kind of high humming that came from the wall where the little stove was located and which I realized, after a moment, was the refrigeration unit.
“Hey, Hedge,” my brother said, coming out of the bedroom. He had apparently been sleeping, for his face and eyes were puffy.
“What’s happening?” I said to him. And then, because the changes in the room were already dawning on me: “Where’s Skeery?”
“She . . . uh . . . she moved out,” he said, slowly, his voice stumbling over the syllables.
“Why?”
He shrugged, but his mouth was taut and he would not look at me.
“I’m sorry, Vic,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “There’s some food in the kitchen if you’re hungry.” Then he turned and disappeared into his room again. I wondered, as the door slid closed, if the banks of sunpanels remained within, their faces so black that it seemed a person could fall through them into whatever universe lay beyond.
Of course, my brother was right: I was not terribly sorry that Skeery was gone. I tried to maintain a sense of decorum around my brother, for he was clearly still wounded by her departure and still angry for my role in driving her away, but it was admittedly difficult. I felt free in the apartment now, free to talk and to watch whatever I wanted on my screens, and to generally lounge about as if I lived there, which, of course, I did. Victrola, on the other hand, seemed mired in shadow and even though a week and then another and yet another passed, that darkness did not depart, instead hovering about him from morning until night and, perversely, I felt my own moods lift as his descended, as if we were on opposite ends of a great seesaw.
He was quiet during those weeks, not silent but speaking only when necessary, doing his homework with great attention at the little table and occasionally retreating to the bedroom if I presented too much of a distraction with my constant chatter, my voice filling the emptiness that Skeery’s absence and my brother’s quietude had made suddenly apparent.
I knew he had cared for Skeery, of course, but I do not think I truly understood just how much her absence might affect him. Indeed, it had never occurred to me at all that she might leave him on my account, assuming that this was why she had moved out. (Again, I was young, and could hardly understand anything beyond myself, so I could only assume that her absence was directly related to me; the idea that she and my brother might have had a full emotional relationship with problems of its own did not occur to me at all.)
“You were right about one thing,” he said to me one night, apropos of nothing at all.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Kissing,” he said.
“What about it?”
“I missed it.”
I said nothing now, the heat of my shame flooding into my face.
“I couldn’t even kiss her,” he said. “I mean, how would that ever work? Long-term, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You said there was more to a relationship than kissing.”
“Sure,” he said, “but it’s kind of fundamental, isn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“You know, she could really feel,” he said then. “The Blue can, I mean. It’s how they are with humans. They can feel our emotions like waves. They don’t feel each other like that, so for them, just feeling some human emotion—something positive, I mean—is like eating the best piece of chocolate cake ever.”
“Chocolate cake?”
“Or whatever,” he said, smiling a bit now at his own simile. “Love, for them—I mean, feeling human love—is the most amazing thing. It’s like a drug.”
There was a catch in his voice and I realized that my brother was on the verge of tears. “I didn’t know emotions were so great for them,” I said, hoping to steer him into some other, more clinical discussion.
“Only positive ones,” he said quickly. “You know, like joy, love, happiness. Humor, even.”
“Other stuff they don’t sense?”
“Oh, I wish,” he said. “Anger. Sadness. Frustration. Even something like irritation—all terrible. Skeery described it like smelling something dead or rotten. And they can’t help but feel them, viscerally. Human emotions, I mean. The Blue can’t turn that off. So, you know, she was like a sponge.” For a long while he simply sat there at the table, staring at the darkened rectangle of the window, the sounds of the Quay muffled through the glass and the wall and the door.
I was crying then, crying as quietly as possible, but my brother, in his new raw grief, did not even seem to notice.
“I just missed kissing,” he said absently, as if this explained anything at all. Then he took his screen from the table and disappeared once more into the bedroom he had once shared with his Blue.
The accident occurred a week later. I had taken a transport back from my school and had been peering at one of my screens with such intensity that I actually missed my stop—the first time I had ever done so—and when the transport stopped again I leapt off onto the platform without much consideration as to which station I had arrived at, noticing the sign for Loomtown only after the transport had whisked away. That I had never been in the Blue quadrant only speaks further of my own sheltered upbringing, so for a long while I simply stood upon the platform, watching the Blue pass in relative silence below me, the fluid motion hypnotic and beautiful, wondering if Skeery was somewhere down below and even hoping against all hope that I might find her figure amid the moving flow of pedestrians upon the sidewalk. And then, as if in response to my thought, I did indeed see one figure who reminded me strongly of Skeery, so strongly, in fact, that I nearly shouted her name. Of course, it was impossible that out of the population of the whole outpost I just happened to see the one person I had been thinking of, and yet the figure moved like Skeery moved and she was wearing the familiar pale white shift that she had worn each time I had seen her.
The decision I made was a split-second one, sprinting down the stairs and entering the flow of various pedestrians, mostly Blue with occasional humans threading through their more sylphlike forms, following, as best I could, in the general direction in which Skeery—if it was even her—had gone. Maybe I could reach her. Maybe I could apologize, tell her that she could come home—back to the apartment—that my brother still loved her, that he wanted her back, that I could still fix what I had broken, this one thing, this one beautiful thing I had, in my own grief, burned to the ground.
Such were my thoughts as I passed down a sidewalk eerily quiet, the various Blue around me not, of course, speaking aloud, so that the only sounds were passing transports, my own clomping shoes against the tarmac, the swish of clothing, and the occasional audible click of a light turning on or off. It was into this quietude that I wanted to shout Skeery’s name, but I still did not know if it was really her, not until the figure I pursued turned into an alley and I followed her, catching full sight of her face just as she passed into an open doorway there, realizing in that moment that it was actually her, that it was, indeed, actually Skeery. This time I did call out, my voice a kind of echoing boom against the now-closed door. I felt for the tickle of her consciousness against my own, but there was nothing. Quiet figures behind me on the street. Larval-eyed.
On the door were characters in the language of the Blue. I did not bother to look them up on my screen, instead pressing the sensor strip to find the door unlocked and uncoded. The room I entered was a dark cube striped with ribbons of glowing blue light that mimicked the skin of the Blue, the gentle pulses moving in a direction that led me to a narrow hall where the lights turned in rectangles around closed doorways. I listened for Skeery, my heart tight in my chest, not yet understanding where I was, or what the rooms and doors and the pulsing light might indicate. Later I would wonder why I had failed to enter the entry door’s sign into my screen. I might have waited outside then, might have seen Skeery upon her exit, but instead had blundered into a place I should not have, this realization also coming much later, since, in the moment of my opening the door at the end of that hallway, all I could comprehend was the agony of my mistake.
It was much later, in the darkness of the many days and nights to come, that I reconstructed what I had seen and what had happened: The briefest sense of a large room. A dozen or more Blue both seated and standing in apparent communication. But already I was staggering back from the cold blazing sun of that alien world, my eyes stabbed through with an agony of immolation even through their clamped-closed lids, my arms up at my face. So bright, so unconscionably, interminably bright it could not be believed. And then a kind of wail which I understood, even in that moment, was coming from my own throat as I fell from the open door, fell backward, even as I could feel the press of alien consciousnesses entering my own, a garble of questions and images of sizzling flesh and flashes of light: You Stranger Human Not Here; You Stranger Pain Pain Pain; You Stranger Help Danger Help Danger. And then, from amid this cacophony of voices and images and my own agony and confusion, a familiar voice, shouting silently in my head: You Hedgerow You Hedgerow Negative Negative Pain Help Help, and then someone’s hands on my arms, my body, lifting me from the tiles as if I were but a feather upon the air, my eyes still closed, red, streaming with pain, my voice rising in a kind of howl met, after a moment, by a faint shushing and the warmth of arms cradling my body, arms that had seemed like warm liquid enveloping me but now felt solid and strong and human. And then the voice: It’s all right now, Hedge. It was a voice I recognized but did not recognize and I thought at first that it was somehow my brother’s voice, but that was not quite right, for it was the voice of someone older, and as it continued to speak I felt myself melt into its softness even as the pain lessened and fell away. You’ll be all right, little Hedge. My little Hedgerow. Shhh. Shhh. I could feel his lips against my eyes, my forehead, my cheeks, the warm scratch of his beard against my skin. And then I knew who it was, my father, my dear lost father, and even as I slipped into quiet unconsciousness the feeling that came over me in that moment was that I was safe and all would be well.
Of course, I never regained my sight. For a long while I did not understand what had happened when I had opened that door, what the light was, why it had blinded me, although this was, in the end, easy enough to explain. What confused me was the vision of my father that had come to me there as my optic nerves were burned to charcoal, for even in my memory it felt like he had been there with me not as a vision but in physical form, for I had felt his arms around me, felt his lips upon my boiling eyes, upon my forehead, upon my streaming cheeks. It had been him there, it must have been, it had to be, and yet the conscious part of my mind knew he had been dead for months.
My brother visited me often in the hospital. He was angry about Skeery, about the Blue in general, threatening all kinds of legal action, but that faded with time. After that, we mostly made small talk, although that quickly dwindled to long silences. There was, as it turned out, not much to talk about between us now. At some point during the long period of life skills training that followed my hospitalization, he brought some new woman, a human woman, to visit me. His new girlfriend. Now I cannot even recall her name.
As for Skeery and what happened to me, I had, by then, already figured out most of the story. I had happened upon the equivalent of a Blue restaurant, a social gathering under the simulated light of the Blue homeworld, a light brighter even than that which had been installed in the bedroom Skeery and my brother had once shared. It had blinded me and had burned my face, neck, and hands with enough severity to require skin grafts. It is perhaps a blessing that I cannot gaze at my own face, but the skin there is smooth and waxy to the touch, so I know it must not be a pleasant sight.
Given what happened to me, it may surprise you to learn that I have chosen to live with the Blue for most of the years since, not on the outpost upon which I had lived with my family but at a more distant base—much closer to the Blue’s own homeworld—the designation of which will be meaningless to you, for its name is in the Blue’s own language and consists of images rather than words. I can tell you that it is roughly equivalent to a cheetah leaping through a forest of bright green trees, although of course the animal in the Blue’s language is no cheetah and the things that I call trees are hardly trees at all. Theirs is a poetic language and one which I have finally become adept at, although it has taken me all my life to reach mastery.
A few days ago, I was practicing that language with my tutor, Cern, much of which involved her teaching me how to listen to Blue conversation. I had reached a point where I could sense that someone in the area was communicating, but it always felt like a dull whispering from far away. I had been listening—or trying to listen—for a long while when something in the room’s energy changed, a kind of musical wailing rising out of the darkness and then, from out of that wailing, something else, a familiar image: bright warmth, a great sun shimmering over a gently sloping hill covered in purple grass, the wailing slowing, fading, and the image holding for a long trembling moment before drifting away again.
You Hedgerow Hear Child, Cern said, the words matched by the image of a diminutive Blue.
You Cern Positive, I told him.
You Hedgerow Brightmemory, Cern said, the image of the purple hill returning in scattered outline, its vagueness meant to indicate, in Blue language, the general rather than the specific.
I had studied the Blue long enough to understand what Cern meant. What I had heard in that moment was a kind of lullaby, a common image meant to indicate that everything was still as it should be, that the world was warm and safe and kind. This was why the image had been of the Blue homeworld: that familiar purple hill and, to me, blindingly bright sun. Adults, too, sometimes used Brightmemory; in that context the use was unique to the recipient, a kind of living memory that the Blue could wrap around someone in distress or pain. For a child this might be a collective memory—the lullaby of security that was the Blue’s homeworld—but for an adult, Brightmemory was often the gift of the recipient’s very own best, safest memory, handed back to them in their time of need, filling their mind with security and pushing away pain and sadness and loneliness.
It was this thought, this overheard communication between a mother and child, that has brought Skeery back to my thoughts these years later and with it her own gift of Brightmemory in my time of greatest need, for of course it had been her lips against my eyes, against my forehead, against my cheeks, for although I did not know her at all, had never even tried, she had listened, unwillingly, to my own grief night after night in that tiny apartment and, when I needed it most, had clothed herself in that shape for my mind to find. Brightmemory. I can picture her outside the door in the pale shift that she always wore, luminous with her feeding as she lifted me and carried me away from that light and back into the shade of the human world. And then, through my shrieking, my blistering skin, my burned eyes, pushing away the pain with the brush of her impossible lips upon my face. And in that moment, sitting across from my tutor so many years later, the person I missed most of all was not my father or my brother but Skeery. I had never seen her again and learned much later that she had moved away from the outpost, much as I had, pushing farther into space, to the very edge of the frontier, for what purpose or reason I did not know, and while I had thought of her often in the years since the accident, there was something in the purple hill, the bright sun, the mother comforting a child in pain, that brought me back to those days after my father’s death, when I lived in that little apartment in the Quay with my brother and Skeery. How I wanted to tell her that what she did for me had changed me as a person, not the blindness, although that had changed me as well, but understanding how it felt to be safe again, and right in that moment, at the age of fifteen, at the edge of adulthood when I could feel the whole of the world tipping into some unknown orbit, Skeery’s kiss upon my burning eyes, Skeery’s mouthless comfort upon my heart.