“You have to change your life”
She took the cup in her hand. The heat was welcome. She held it against her belly, felt the cramping slowly ease. Blue copied her.
“It isn’t necessary,” she said shortly, “unless your belly hurts too. I have menstrual cramps. You can just drink it.” The blue hands raised the cup. “Wait! Wait ’til it cools!”
“I forgot that. What would it do to me?”
“Burn you, I guess. Maybe not. I don’t know your metabolism, your body, well enough to say.”
“You put my body together.”
The cramps returned, redoubled. The cold wind in her neck hairs.
“What?”
“What you teach me defines what I am.”
“
Who
you are.” Absently. “
Who
is a person,
what
is a thing.”
“You will make a good job. Me. Make of me a good job. Better than the others.”
“Call the others back. I’m tired.”
“Tell me this kind of tired. Let me in.”
“In?”
“Let me touch what … let me touch you,
intimately
do you say?”
“What do you mean, make love? Have sex?”
“No, I mean to say, deeply. Inside.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What about when we talk at night?”
“I don’t talk with you then; I’m asleep.”
“You see me.”
“Those are dreams.”
“Dream me, then.”
Jakob was using the front porch rail as a
barre
and doing exercises in the mild air of the long prairie evening, and Morgan and Blue were taking dandelions out of the lawn and flowerbed.
“Why do we cultivate some things that are not too useful, and dig up a plant that is useful and prolific?” asked Blue.
“The city says they’re a noxious weed,” said Morgan.
“And it’s been a while since us citified folks had to rough it in the bush and grow our own food,” contributed Jakob. He came down the porch steps, drying his sweat with a white towel. The late evening sun slanted through the leaves and burnished his skin with red-gold highlights. Morgan sat back on her heels and marveled. She would have thought that dark, dark skin had no reddish pigment, but he looked like a piece of Victorian mahogany fashioned into a beautiful muscular statue. Or, a slight adjustment of the draperies, a torch in one uplifted hand, and he’d be a suitable heroic bronze for a marble pedestal. She smiled.
“Speak for yourself,” she said. “My father insisted on making dandelion wine, and my mother tried the salad-greens route, also roasting the roots for a coffee substitute.”
“And … ?”
“And succeeded in confirming to us that dandelions were noxious.”
“But they are not,” Blue said.
“It’s a joke, honey,” Morgan said to Blue.
“Oh.”
At that moment, Russ came through from the back parking area, singing with a Garnet-or-Stan-Rogers variety of deep definite exuberance. “Hi there!” he interrupted himself to say brightly as he bounded toward the steps. Jakob placed himself in the way, managing, Morgan noticed, to keep himself fully in that ray of golden sunlight with the display instinct of a seasoned performer.
“What brings you home so merrily singing?”
“Got a date,” said Russ. “With a delicious dish-ious delightful … well,” he broke down and laughed. “I can’t think of a D word. A woman from work. She started a couple weeks ago. She called me out of the blue. Surprised the hell out of me.”
“And now you are planning to ravish this ravishing creature?” Jakob said casually, but he stood a little too close to Russ and his posture was wary.
“We’ll see,” said Russ. “She does have a say, after all. But we had lunch a couple of times this week, and it’s intriguing …”
“Well,” said Jakob, moving out of the way, “I hope she’s worth singing about.” He bounced up the stairs on his toes and flounced through the door.
Hmmm,
thought Morgan, and returned to her grass-stained labors.
Russ was out all night, and Jakob was awake all night in the studio. Morgan, asleep, dreamed of blue dancers, dreamed vaguely of sex and edgy jealousy, and laughed when she awoke at the way her dreams were a kind of recombinant DNA of daily life. But she felt also as if the undercurrents she found in dreams ran through the house, as two yawning men lounged at the breakfast table being excessively polite to each other.
“Humanity needs to learn to respect our real ills,” said Delany.
“Mmm,” said Morgan, who was cleaning out the cupboard under the sink, only her rear end and legs sticking out. There’s something comforting about containment, she thought, and to reach the far corner, she pulled herself even farther into the small space.
“Look at you,” Delany continued, her voice coming to Morgan muffled by the wooden frame she was in, and by the competing noise of Morgan’s scrub cloth. “Completely broken up about all the things that happened: your parents, the little boy at work, your break-up with Vik … and what do you have to do? Carry on. Not a moment’s rest.”
“Yeah,” said Morgan from within, “and I inherited a house most people would kill for, metaphorically anyway, and used up a big insurance settlement fixing it up. Not that it ever stays fixed. The damned pipes in the attic bathroom … Anyway,
and
I get to live here with a bunch of cool people and one of the first aliens to visit Earth. I’ve really got it bad.” Wryly, she remembered having this conversation with her grey man—hers? Odd—and realized she was making his arguments. She snorted softly, almost missed Delany’s:
“So what if you’re suicidal, eh?”
Morgan crept backward out of the cupboard and stood, wincing as her back straightened. “I’m not suicidal. I’m just empty. I don’t care enough to be suicidal. And so what? I am a product of the top of the civilized heap. I was never sexually or physically abused, and what’s a little emotional abuse, between family? I have never starved, and I don’t have to walk twenty miles with a jerry can to get water every day. I’m not laboring in an Asian sweatshop so people like us can have nice running shoes cheap. I don’t see my children die with kwashiorkor. I have no cause for complaint.”
She was advancing the same argument the grey man had made to her, and she knew it. This time Delany was defending, as she had done with him, Morgan’s right to be visible and in pain despite all her privilege. “Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean,” said Delany. “You give to all of us, you give to Blue, and you are wearing yourself out. Someone as tiny as you are can’t afford to lose weight.”
“Ah, you noticed, did you. Shit. I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
“Smart-ass. You need to take care of yourself!”
Morgan gave her a neutral look, or at least, it felt blank from within. Delany, however, said, “Oh, honey, don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry.”
“You know the ills we should attend to, before we attend to my self-indulgent little angsts? The ills that something can be done about. Death and disaster are immutable, though we can clean up after. But the children who are being hurt, the women being battered, the old and sick trapped in boxes, the people starving, the homeless in our own streets and the people all over the world in need: these can all be changed, and they aren’t being changed. I can’t bear it. So many good people have been working at it for such a long time, and it’s just a drop in the bucket. Evil has so many faces.”
“If you are trying to save the world, then you shouldn’t complain at your privilege,” said Delany. “It’s the only thing that gives you the slightest chance of succeeding.”
Morgan’s laughter surprised even her. “You are so right. Thanks, sweetheart,” and she hugged Delany quickly, enveloping them both in a flurry of cleanser smell and dust. Delany sneezed, then laughed. “My, that was salutary, wasn’t it?”
“You should see what I found under there, if you think our conversation was improving. On the other hand, perhaps not. It’s one of those experiences that shouldn’t be shared.”
“Have you ever noticed,” said Delany, “that when people taste something icky, they say, ‘Oh, gross! Here, taste this!’?”
“Yeah, we love to share, humans do.”
Morgan turned back to start cleaning the counter, and saw out the kitchen window Blue walking through the garden, stooping to look at a last stubborn pansy in bloom.
“Look,” she said, and Delany wheeled up beside her. “Blue communing with nature.”
As they watched, Blue flopped down on the ground to lie face-to-face with the flower, face propped on hands, staring and sniffing.
“Wow,” said Delany. “I wish I could do that.”
“Lie on the crunchy autumn grass? Want me to go out and get some leaves to rub in your hair?”
“Oh, I think not right now, thanks. Can I help with that?”
“You feeling like saving your soul through honest toil?”
“Nah, just roommate guilt. After the dressing-down you gave John …”
“Ah, forget it. From each according to his/her ability … doesn’t sound the same, with the pronouns corrected, does it?”
“Nothing does,” said Delany, and Morgan, staring out the window at the rapt alien, wondered if the pronouns ever could be corrected, or could be corrected in time. As if there’s a deadline, she thought wryly, but there was a deadline, and everyone knew it.
Rilke saw the statue of Apollo in the museum, and the statue said to him, “There is nothing that does not see you. You have to change your life.” Earth saw the aliens. Morgan saw Blue.
The next day, the marmalade cats went missing. A search of the neighborhood revealed nothing, but the next afternoon Morgan found them under the lilac bushes, newly dead, the soft bodies still warm. Poisoned, it seemed, by some neighborhood trap, for there was foam and vomit around Seville’s mouth, and he was stiffened as if from convulsions. Beside him, Dundee looked peaceful. Once Blue understood what Morgan was doing, Blue helped dig the three-foot-deep grave.
Putting the earth back after the slight cat bodies were laid in the hole was surprisingly difficult. Morgan felt the sting in her nose of sudden irrational tears. She shook her head.
“What is it?” said Blue.
“Their fur will get dirty.” Morgan sat down at the tiny graveside and began to cry. They were still warm and soft; it didn’t seem right to cover them. More was wrong than that. It didn’t seem right to Morgan that she should cry more for these damned kittens than she had done at her parents’ funeral. Yet the cats seemed too vulnerable to let go without pain.
“Does crying help the feelings to quiet?” asked Blue, voice sounding troubled.
“What it does is flush toxins from the body,” said Morgan. “Helps cleanse the emotions. Why?”
“I feel like I have done a wrong thing. Maybe I should cry.”
“Tell me.” Morgan was intrigued.
“I was listening to the cats. You know how I can listen to them?” Morgan nodded, though this was news to her. “I heard Dundee make a great cry, and I felt Seville go somewhere; they were suddenly apart, in two places. You know how they were listening to each other?” Seeing Morgan shake her head in puzzlement, Blue gave a helpless spreading-hand gesture. “It is so hard to remember that I know nothing but I can hear more; you people are full of humanity but you listen so narrowly. So I heard the cats in two places and Dundee was lonely and wanted to be with Seville, and I felt them wanting to be together. Instead of changing Seville to be like Dundee, I changed Dundee to be like Seville, and I realized when they both went out that I had caused Dundee to die. Now I see it was the wrong way. I should have helped Seville.”
“Changing, help. You mean you could have made Seville
alive
again?”
“It was the poison in the body that was wrong. Is that what Jakob has? I never realized before. But with the cats, I could not understand that right away, they have such plain, foolish little minds, I thought it was the lack of something in Dundee, and I put it there.”
“Could you have taken away the poison?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it was too late. But I would have tried, and if not I would have been wiser. But I did what Dundee wanted, and then they were both dead. It was wrong, and now I feel wrong. I did the wrong helping thing.”
“Guilty. Guilt is what you feel.” Morgan would not for the moment grapple with the idea that Blue could that easily arbitrate life and death, but to respond to the simple appeal of a troubled soul was easy. “You made a mistake, perhaps, but that’s human, we all do it. All we can do is live and learn. And perhaps forgive ourselves for our humanity, and go on.” She hoped the alien would not challenge her sophistry: this mistake was a killing one, and Blue was lucky it was only cats. Morgan thought of the chessmaster and for a horrible moment wondered, but immediately thought:
if Blue had faced this before, I would have heard about it. No, this is a first time.