Passing: short fiction

[tamaranth]

I don't tend to post my own writing on this journal, but for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day I'm making an exception.


Sleet skittering against the glass, and late winter outside: within all's calm and light and Exaltance, and I lie, eyes closed, imagining that ancient autumn when this music first was heard.

The recording is an old one. The singers seem stood in a single line, left to right: but I know it's not so. I see the vaulted dome above me, the columns and the cloisters. I hear each corner throwing echoes back into the empty air above their heads. I see (and recognise nothing of the pictures I have seen) the way the light slants down, the way the voices rise. That lost cathedral, black and wrack now, is more vivid than anything I know.

That's not my world, but I might have hidden longer, there. That's not my world and nor is this. What world I have is here, within my eyelids.

Exaltance is working: is acting, at least. I've lit candles, at trifling expense. They lived in darkness, then, as we live now in dazzling light. This would have been a fortune in light to him, the owner, the originator, of that alto part: a blaze of luminance fit only for a king, or God. I am neither, but now with this chemical magic asurge in my veins -- I fancy I can feel it, millimetre by millimetre, searching out new parts of my anatomy to glorify -- I am both.

I can't stay still with the music so loud. Loud for me alone, no risk of interruption or complaint: I've excellent soundproofing, and if it muffles my rages it'll smother this Mass. I wander from room to room, velvety carpet under my bare feet, the music following me to each new space as I trip trigger-beams and open doors. In the kitchen, where I've disabled the light, there's a sense of coldness at my right: the window and the winter, the outside.

I know this music. I was there. (Says Exaltance: but for now it's true.)

I'm note-perfect now. I know the music better than Biber himself, scratch-scratch with the quill-pen in the narrow circle of lamplight, redoubled harmonies conveyed from brain to paper. I know it better than any listener there. I know what comes next. I know where I come in.

Vive, call the voices 'cross time's abyss. Gaude. Live, rejoice.

I'm not interested any more in my body. I'm bored of the interest it excites in others. The metamorphosis must be inside: here, me. Everything that can be done, has been done.

The chemicals insinuating themselves into my blood, in regulated flares, are the hoes and hammers of the psychiatric profession. The drug's brand name is Exaltance, because it uplifts and transforms: three months of this, a little more each week, and a programme of sculpting and projecting my self, reading and thinking and reaching out. Any soul may shape itself to something new.

"Must be used under medical supervision, with --"

But Doctor Eastman's known me all my life, and she smiled when I laughed at that.

"Now, Mal, I'll have to see you every Friday, like we did before."

Eyeroll. "Can't I just speak to you? Why do I have to come in?"

"I can't give it to you unsupervised."

"Won't, you mean."

Doctor Eastman (I refuse to call her Vivien) has a calm smile. I have observed its evolution over the years. At this rate, she'll achieve Nirvana by the time I'm thirty. If I get that far. "Won't," she agrees, glancing at her screen. "And I'm afraid there's no question of your taking that scholarship."

"I'd already decided not to," I said. Not quite a lie. Everything about it was interesting -- the chance to walk back in time, amongst the ruins that once were Salzburg, and see where this had all begun -- but there were complications. They would want too much of me. I'd switched off my phone halfway through the application.

"You're perfectly capable of following the programme alone, I know, but I'm interested in seeing how it'll work from week to week."

"Three months," I said. "I'm busy: that Baroque programme's very demanding." And Rooke, who watches me as intently, dear Doctor, as do you: he's demanding too, and curious with it. I had not mentioned Rooke, or what he might (thinking me a simpler creature than I am) demand of me.

Doctor Eastman's long lilac talons tapped on the blond wood, one-two-three. "You have to want to change," she said, and there was a secret smile lurking in the curl of her mouth, waiting for me to laugh again so she could laugh too.

I didn't bite. "I've work to do. I need --"

"You need to change. And last year you needed --"

"I was wrong," I said: easy to say, because I didn't mean it. Last year's experiment had not been a success. I was, at least, no worse for it.

Doctor Vivien Eastman -- fiftyish, russet-red, childless since her son fell victim to a new strain of tuberculosis two years since -- likes to think I can be cured; to think that she's somehow my salvation. I am entire of myself. She gives me seven days' Exaltance every Friday. Today is Thursday, and I have been amending my dosage. I know what I want to be, who I want to be. I want to be that voice (a name unknown) whose voice resounds (all time is immanent) in glory, in October, in seventeenth-century Salzburg.

Snow came early that year, I'm sure of it. Like the bright blank white outside my window earlier, the snow blanketed muddy streets and gutters full of rubbish: covered it all up and made it clean and empty. And thinking that, the walls close in on me, and I have to breathe open air, fill my lungs with night, let snow melt through my pale skin and chill my heart a little more.

The music, hurrying after me, builds to its climax -- more elegant, more glorious, than Mahler's muddle or Beethoven's ponderous brilliance -- and falls away into the air. I have it by heart: have that voice by heart, and the singer who I've sketched from call-and-response, fugue, whispers caught in angles of old stonework. Alto 2, a construct of frozen music and chemistry, of archetype and character. Soon to be me: or, maybe, what I'll make myself.

At any rate I'll sing. Nature (not art) gave me the voice for it, and all else follows. That for Doctor Eastman and her research paper; that for Rooke, and the way his eyes rest on me, like a puzzle piece, each time my solo comes around again. I am myself: am no one's creation, but only an accident of birth.

The snow calls, the drug wanes, the music echoes in my head. I turn on the answering service and tell it some lies to pass on. My avatar looks quite like me. Fine straight hair to my shoulders (I have it blond), eyes hazel (but coloured green on-screen), fair skin that looks as though it bruises at a touch. My teeth aren't quite straight. It would have been simple to change them too, if only on the avatar; but I wanted something honest, something real. Something of my own.

Carrying nothing, I walk out into the night.

* * *

There's a veil of snow like a cloth, cleaning away the city and this whole century, making the residence an enclave curtained in blurry white. We're safe here. The noise of road and rail is a dull ground-bass: I can hear the snow squeaking beneath my boots. It's falling so heavily, this snow, that it's not silent. I try to describe the sound to myself. Pianissimo. Fluttery like moths. Unstoppable like time.

I imagine white moths against the blackness; white birds. Like an Escher print, where one thing becomes another so gradually that there's no either/or. Birds and fishes, earth and sky, male and female.

I'm the drawing.

The Exaltance is thinning, threadbare. What I want seems ridiculously far away. "You may construct your persona from elements of other characters, real or mythical," Doctor Eastman had told me. "I hear it's become very popular in Hollywood, and Method acting's quite out of fashion."

She'd laughed at that: I'd laughed at her, not having the heart to reveal my intentions. Not her concern that I aimed to reshape myself, entire and one and whole, from a voice: from, in fact, an imagined voice. (I don't know the name of the singer on my recording. I don't care.) Looking at the quiet clarity of that resolution, as I look back over my shoulder at the small warm square of my window, it seems simple and remote and unattainable. The drug is waning. Coming down gently as snow

I can hear the echoes of my footsteps. The music's still twining 'round my mind, and I draw breath to sing a little of it: but the air's so cold and dry that it hurts, going down.

I can hear the echoes of my footsteps even when I stop walking.

They're on me like crows on a corpse. I think there are five of them. Some of them are silent, save for the racket of their breath. I distinguish three voices: a high, vicious nasal tenor, egging on the rest of them; a gruff throaty voice that sounds older, all agreement; a deeper voice that's half-familiar, that speaks to me by name. "You fucking freak, Mal. Think you're so fucking special, don't you? You wait, mate, you're skin and bone like anyone else."

Which would be funny if it didn't hurt so much. I'm stronger than I look, but not as strong as five grown men. I'm down in the snow before I can start running. The snow's lovely soft cold. Everything at night, so far from the lights, is white and dark: but I can see red, and feel it, stinging and hot around me.

No point answering back and I've got my arms over my face, anyway: they'd never hear me. I can feel bones breaking. Doctor Eastman will be disappointed in me. My face doesn't matter, I realise. I hug myself, there curled on the snow, and let myself hang heavy from their hands as they pull me up to hit me again. Taste of blood. Half the world's dark: my eye's hit, hurt, shut. They're being quiet about it now, though I can hear effortful sounds.

I've nothing for them to take, and they haven't tried to take a thing. This is sheer red vivid violence: there are drugs that do that, too.

Is it the Exaltance that makes it hurtless?

"Leave 'im, eh? Leave 'im."

One of them's hanging back: not the voice I think I know, not the vicious tenor or the throaty throttled man. One's hanging back so that leaves four. One's hanging back and bidding them lay off.

I swallow: blood, but my throat works. One arm's all loosely floppy at my side, as if not mine. A booted foot impacts hard between my legs, and I can't help but kick back as I curl tighter 'round myself. I saw an armadillo, stuffed, in the museum last week. I project and shape and will myself to armadilloness.

They're raging at me again, redoubling their attack. I'm freak and fraud now: it takes me a few moments, a kick or two more, to recognise that I've not acted my part. That boot to the groin should've sent me screaming and retching into the snow: but there's nothing there to hurt.

They're calling me "girl".

Blood in my throat when I choke a laugh, and I can feel the scald of it on my mouth. That's more like pain than the other things that are happening in my body.

A heavy hand catches the front of my shirt and shakes, like a dog at its prey, until the buttons come loose and "let's see your tits, then."

There's blood all over my face. They can't see me blush. Flush. Not fight or flight but flinching: I am found out, uncovered, discovered. Shamed.

"Leave it, mate. You've done enough." One's hanging back, and into the red and the white and the black comes a small green noise, an A-minor chirp. "Leave it. I'm calling an ambulance."

I'm lying face down in the snow. The snow's wet and salty. Blood.

I am 'it', that they're to leave.

"Fuck you, man. Just fuck you." But there's little anger in him any more. He's not talking to me. He's talking to the hanger-back, the fifth, the one with the phone.

"'e'll live," says the husking one, turning me over with a boot-toe under my splintery scrapy ribs. I let myself flop. Eyes closed. I can feel each snow-flake on my face.

"Better get gone, eh?" says the fourth one, the one who hasn't spoken 'til now. It's a woman, a girl. Her voice is light and pretty and careless; soubrette. I think of my blood on her hands, and her washing it away.

There's a squeaking rushing swishing noise, a receding noise, of people stumbling through snow. The thought of moving makes my stomach turn.

"Hello?" says the fifth one.

"Hello," I say, or try to say: but he's not speaking to me.

"There's been an accident. Someone's hurt: set on by a gang, I reckon. Down by the woods: where the path forks. No, didn't see their faces. Right."

Accident? Oh, aye, that would be me.

I want to lie still in the snow: to wrap it round myself and let it freeze to armour. I want to lie and be lulled gently to sleep. I want ...

That's the feeble pianissimo of the last few molecules of Exaltance, sparking and going out. That's not me. I'm fucked if I'm staying here to be scraped up from the ground.

Getting upright's fun. Just as I stored up a week's-worth of Exaltance, I'm visited by an evening's-worth of pain. Blood spat onto snow. Very nearly vomit after it.

"Just wait," says my Samaritan. "The ambulance." There's a hand on my good arm. I sway away and forget to sway back: I'm near falling, but he catches me.

I've nothing to say. I say, "No ambulance. Home."

* * *

My Samaritan stands in the hallway. I haven't said, "Come in." I am presently trying not to laugh, because I don't know if it's a boy or a girl.

"I didn't mean for that to happen," he says. "Didn't mean it to go so far."

"Right," I say.

There's a small silence, a one-bar rest.

"Can I --"

"No," I say. "I'll be fine." Then, and saying it brings back the hurt, "Thank you."

The light on my phone's blinking. I fix my gaze on it and let it take me away from all this. When I look up again the hallway's empty, and I can shut the door.

There's blood everywhere. I strip. Bet they'd pay money to watch that: not that there's anything at all to see. Which I suppose is the point. I pile my clothes in the bathroom and step under the shower. Hot hot water, hot enough to make my skin red underneath, but it washes the blood away.

The drug's all gone now, and anyway I don't think I should mix it with analgesics. Pain is hardly a novelty, but it's a distraction, and I don't want to be distracted: I have a great deal to do tonight.

"I wondered if you were busy tomorrow?" said Rooke, diffidently, to my avatar at five past eight. (Outside, I was bleeding in the snow. My avatar was flawless and boy-pretty.) "If not, maybe we could meet: lunch, perhaps?"

Perhaps the drugs have not worn off after all: I press 'callback'. But I'm awake, aware, myself enough to keep the avatar on.

"I'm afraid I'm going away tomorrow," I say to Rooke, when he answers the call.

"Away?" He doesn't even look surprised. He looks utterly blank.

"I have to leave," I say. "Come round and see me, and find out why."

Exaltance, no doubt, for I never invite anyone into my home. But Rooke is different, and I want someone to understand.

By the time he arrives, I'm dry and dressed and in front of the screen. I've taken a copy of my avatar, and for a moment thought of replicating on its ivory face each blow, each mark that shows on mine. The damage is not irreparable: the pain is not past bearing. But their transience does not make them less.

The apartment's very quiet. What would I play? Into the silence falls the sound of the bell. I rise and let Rooke in.

He's taller than I am. His skin's darker, and scarred (I shall have scars, for a little while), and there's stubble where he hasn't shaved. He looks at me in horror.

"Who did this?"

I shrug. It hurts.

"Doesn't matter," I say. "It's like animals, you know: they can tell."

"Tell what? Is this because you're --"

I wait for him to say the wrong word, but he's clever. He lets it lie.

"You haven't got the faintest idea of what I am."

"No," says Rooke. "But have you?"

I have no answer for him. I turn back to the screen. I'm tweaking the avatar: subtle curve of brow, bow of lips, arch of brows, tilt of nose. Rooke stands there behind me, watching as I tint and shape and colour. I can feel the warmth of him, breath and blood and bone. I keep the snow in my mind, like armour.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to take that scholarship in ancient music," I say. "I'm going to Europe."

"Like this?"

His cruelty is like fresh air at night. I brace myself against it. "I'm reinventing myself," I say, with a smile that I've copied from movie stars of old.

"As a woman, you mean?"

In this moment, in the quiet apartment I'm leaving, I could love Rooke. There is no pity in his voice, and the wry to his mouth is not humour but rue.

"As a singer," I say. "As something beautiful, and delicate, and fragile, and precious."

Rooke takes a breath, and looks down. "You might be that here," he says to the carpet.

"You don't like girls," I say, all of a sudden sure of what he's offering.

"I might like you."

The way he's looking at me tells me that I have another option now, one I'd not considered; but I'm out of time. I shake my head.

"It'll be like going back fifty years," he complains. All composure now. "Europe. Full of ruins and wreckage."

"I'll like that," I say.

"What about Biber? What about Alto 2?"

"He's waited four centuries," I say. "Vive, gaude. I can't sing if I'm dead."

"I'll tell them --"

But he knows I won't believe his threat. And anyway, what's to tell?

"Nothing can come of nothing," I tell Rooke, and I point to where my heart might be -- my smooth, flat, sexless chest -- to make him understand.

"Mal, you're not nothing," Rooke says softly.

But, for now - until I've wrought myself anew - he's wrong.
-end-