“Oh, well, never mind,” said Morgan. She put her feet back up, and turned her gaze into the fire, content to have her family around her, and be at peace.
The flames suddenly begin to burn more and more iridescently, with flashes of purple and blue and white. The fire grows and surrounds Morgan, but she feels cool within it.
The witches burned for feeling too much: can anyone really feel too much?
the voice is dispassionate.
No
, Morgan’s dream voice answers,
but lots
of us try to avoid it
,
anyway.
The flames turn cool, icy cerulean, and begin to scorch her like dry ice.
She woke suddenly. She was still in the chair, and the fire had burned down. The room was cool, and she was shivering.
“You okay?” said John, who’d noticed her start upright.
“Sure,” she said. “Napping. Would you hand me over that afghan there, please?”
“Afghan?”
“Knitted blanket. Thanks.”
Morgan tucked the cover around her legs, and Russ fed the fire. When the flames leapt up, they were the safe results of burning pine—only a reservoir of pitch popped now and again to send an ember into the fire screen. But Morgan wasn’t sleepy any more.
The endorphins lasted a couple of giddy days, helping Morgan weather the annoyance of the grey man and the invasive and predatory media attention. When they receded, however, they swept out like a tidal bore in a catastrophic retreat, and when Morgan picked herself up, she was in the midst of another attack of grief. She hated being ambushed like this.
You don’t get over it, you just get used to it
, Judith had said on that visit where they’d talked, and this unexpected attack of anguish, just when she had felt life reassert itself, was proof.
Impatient, she waited for the police to clear away the morning’s stubborn fringe of videorazzi, then went out to tend the garden, using the ferocity of blade and tine to substitute for catharsis. Struggling with tools scaled for average North Americans and thus too big for her, as well as old and worn so that the shovel blade and rake tines were loose on their splintery handles, she got sweaty and irritated, overwhelmed with the ludicrousness and Lilliputian nature of humanity’s travails. But gradually, as she knew would happen, the persistent necessity of weed and soil took precedence over her fury at entropy.
Blue came out in work clothes. “Can I help you?”
“Put on your gloves,” she said. “So you don’t get blisters.”
Whoever had tended the monastic garden of the previous owners of this tatty mansion had been far from ascetic: native plants mixed eclectic with perennials and self-seeding hardy annuals, crowded into borders around the house and filling the front yard from fence to veranda. It seemed as if the gardener had, after setting out the grand design, fallen prey to age or distraction, for when they’d moved in the caragana hedge was overgrown and untidy, the raspberry canes were invading the lawn, and the lilacs had grown leggy and unhealthy. Nevertheless, in the way that a solidly planned garden will assert a certain planned profusion even after many years of neglect, it had flourished through spring and summer only sporadically tended, spring bulbs and flowers cycling into summer’s peony and poppy, cosmos, lavatera and flax, hollyhock and plume poppy, fireweed and a profusion of native plants hitherto unknown to Morgan, and culminating with a final vivid array of burning bush in September. But now all was withering.
Morgan, like most gardeners, found late fall a distressing yet optimistic time, and she worked in that pleasant melancholy, cutting down the last of the surviving flowers along with all the dead stalks, taking up delicate bulbs, pruning down roses and heaping leaf mulch and peat around their bases. Blue helped her, asking only the most basic of practical questions.
Morgan cut the last frost-nipped heads of the volunteering perennial snapdragons, finally killed by the heavy frost a week ago. Now the cold had been temporarily replaced by a false warmth so that the late-November air was as warm as late September: Morgan knew it wouldn’t last, and as she wrestled with the aged raspberry canes, cutting them to the ground and digging out the worst of their untended spread, she attempted to make the heap of withered greenery into a metaphor for something: life, death, the Universe … But her thoughts were sabotaged by the soothing reek of humus. Finally, as she bundled the last of the prickly canes and heaved them over the back fence into the garbage pickup bin, she was almost smiling. Blue chose this moment to launch again into the eternal Whys.
“Why do humans do this planting and cutting? It’s not for food, and it’s hard work, when we could be reading books or swimming.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, are you on that again? Go read some gardening books!”
Blue ignored her, maintained the questioning pose. Morgan straightened her back, involuntarily groaning as the strained muscles protested, and looked at the strange expanse of terraformed yard for a silent few moments. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t know, sweetie,” she said. “Maybe we do it because we are atavists, looking back to the wilderness, as some say. Me, I think that the strange hybrid of wilderness and structure that makes a city is in some ways as natural as the mounds of a termite species. We built and tend because we want to have our surroundings structured and yet softened. There are as many theories as there are ideologies, I’m sure. In the end, it’s individual, even if many individuals seem to have the same ideas.”
“Do you have them because you imitate each other, or does everybody have them at once?”
Morgan laughed. “Nature versus nurture again! Oh, you are tempting the day, aren’t you? This is an eternal argument!”
“But what do
you
believe? Why did you come out here to do this today, after all these months when you just looked at it and grinned?”
“Grinned? Is that what I did?” she teased Blue.
“Yes, I think so. It was more than just a smile. It seemed to have genuine pleasure, even fun, in it.”
Morgan imagined the taxonomies this alien must have developed for interpreting human expression, and she momentarily compared these to her own, acquired more slowly but perhaps no different. “I like the wordlessness of it,” she said. “It doesn’t need interpretation. It’s real, and it smells—oh, dusty and obvious. The things you have to know to do it are simple.”
“Simple? How come you had to look in that book to figure out what to do with the roses?”
“Just because I don’t know a thing doesn’t mean it isn’t simple,” said Morgan with dignity, and they dissolved into laughter. Morgan remembered the essence of a saying from some bumper sticker or motivational lecture: “It is a poor day if one hasn’t laughed.” Surprised that she
had
laughed on this particular day, she turned to her work.
“Here,” she said to Blue. “Make yourself useful. Put these gloves on and bundle these twigs up.”
Even with the gloves and jacket, both of them had scratches on their wrists when the job was done. Morgan secretly imagined getting in trouble for damaging the precious alien, but it was an internal joke. It had been some time now since she had seriously questioned Blue’s autonomy.
“So, who tipped off the media Saturday night?” After only a small amount of thought, Morgan had telephoned Mr. Grey.
“One of yours,” he said.
“Which one?”
“I don’t think I should … oh, fuck it. John Lee.”
“John?” She shouldn’t have felt so surprised, she realized.
“What did I just say?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? Was he there too?”
“I didn’t see him, but that means nothing. A lot without press permits just faded away.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Morgan said, and sighed.
“No, I’m not supposed to have told you.
I’ll
talk to him. The jerk.”
“Ach, he’s just being stupid.”
“Duh.”
“My goodness. I haven’t heard that in years.”
“It’s been a slice,” said Mr. Grey, and hung up.
What he didn’t tell Morgan was that John had said: “That’ll give the dyke bitch a hard time.” John was turning out to be a bit of a problem.
As if anyone in that house wasn’t.
That night, the first snow of the year began to fall.
Morgan leaned on the wide windowsill in the stairwell, forearms on the ledge and weight on her arms, looking out at the slowly falling snow melting on the cement. Somewhere out there, behind a tree or a railing, there were security guards watching this house because somewhere in here there was an alien. She found the
idea
alien. She couldn’t think what to think about it, so, like all the months she had threaded this wynd, she had just accepted that it was.
Behind her the soft voice said, “What is this now?”
The blue body was beside her, wrapped in a long robe, Jakob’s silk kimono which was the only thing in the house that fit. Heat radiated out from the arm settled beside hers on the sill. The alien leaned forward in the same attitude as hers.
“This?”
“That which falls. White.” Blue was playing at being the baby alien again. Morgan laughed.
“Snow. Frozen water. A manifestation of weather. There’s a book about it in the living room. I’m sure with a week or so of concentrated study you could learn to identify it.”
Blue grinned. “It looks different than in the movies, or onscreen.”
“Well, they make it with snow machines in the movies. Here, it’s the real thing.”
“What
means
snow?” It was Blue’s latest question: the alien wanted connotation now, was tired of facts, was reading poetry, was pumping everyone for feelings, sensations, intuitions.
“What does snow suggest to me? Winter, the dark time, the cold time, heavy with coats and scarves and gloves to keep in body heat.”
“I am warmer than you. It is a faster rate of life. Would I live a longer time in the snow?”
“Let’s not test it, okay? It looks pretty, but it’s cold out there. Cold is bad for unprotected mammals.”
Morgan realized with a start that it had been one year since her parents died. One year ago, she was sitting in intensive care holding her father’s hand; one year ago, her mother drove the car into oblivion. Morgan was surprised to find she no longer blamed them for leaving her.
Could it really be that sometime in the year, she had come to truly believe the useful knowledge she had always been so good at telling others?
’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’t
, Morgan thought wryly,
even though I didn’t know I wished it at the time
.
At first it had appeared to Grey as if this Morgan creature saw everything as sexual. For all his conversation with Salomé, Grey did not see everything as sexual. He saw less of the world as sexual as time went on, unless the lascivious eagerness with which his colleagues played power games counted as sexual.
He sat at his desk, trying to imagine the world as Morgan saw it. He watched the men and women walk by and tried to imagine all of them with sexual potential for him. But that, aside from being ludicrous, given that he was in senior management and also that most of the others were even more unprepossessing than Kowalski or himself, wasn’t quite right either. He tried instead to imagine himself with the potential to love them all.
That
frightened him as his other fantasy had not.
If that was what Morgan was trying to do, she was doomed to fail.
But it was a grand experiment.
If
that was her intention.
“I have no intention,” Morgan said to Grey, and her steady fingers squeezing the wedge of lemon above the cup did not belie her. The swirl of juice cleared the tea into a rich clear dark-amber. She picked up the cup and tipped it slightly in her hand, making a tiny tide.
“People read a great deal into silence,” she said. “I learned that a long time ago. Do you know that proverb, ‘Sit on the bank of the river and wait. Your enemy’s corpse will soon float by’? Well, it could just as well say, sit on the bank of the river in silence, and soon you will be surrounded by volunteer disciples, sycophants, and admirers. You will learn that you have motives and understandings that you never dreamed possible. You can become a hero or a saint, or you can be reviled and vilified—if that’s not the same thing—the point being that an empty slate is a Rorschach blob waiting to happen.”
“Or a mixed metaphor.”
“Yes, or that. Of all these people, you are the only one I can trust to understand that I am simply who I am.”
“Like Popeye the Sailorman.”
“Who? Oh, yes, like him.
I yam what I yam
… Poor old crusader.”
“No, that was Don Quixote. I always liked him.”
“So I am Popeye, and you are Quixote. A mixed marriage, indeed.”
She had warmed her hands on the teacup and now she began to drink the tea.
“I will be forty years old soon,” she said. “Who will celebrate?”