“Do it anyway. You have a lot of catch-up to do, by now.”
“What else?”
“Whatever you see that needs doing. You’re a grown-up. I shouldn’t have to assign tasks to you.”
“Yeah. Sure. Okay.”
“Okay, like, I’ll do it? Or just, okay, get off my back?”
“Okay, I’ll do it. I really do want to stay here, Morgan.” His look was halfway between whipped puppy and door-to-door evangelist.
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “I know you do.”
She pushed herself up from the chair and walked out past him. She noticed that he carefully moved away from her.
Don’t worry,
she thought,
you can’t catch it
.
She was not sure if it was queerness, femaleness, or alien taint that she thought he was afraid of catching from her.
Alien taint. Now that was an interesting thought to think about someone who was Blue’s greatest fan, to hear him talk. Something had made Morgan wonder about that. What was he doing that had made her uneasy?
“Jakob hasn’t been to the clinic for ten days,” the grey man asked her one morning later in the week. “Is he all right?”
“I’ll ask him,” said Morgan.
She went up to Jakob’s studio that afternoon. Jakob and Blue were practicing together at the
barre
. A bootleg of some dissonant dissident music was playing loudly enough to start an immediate ringing in her ears.
It’s a bloody good thing this place is soundproofed
, Morgan thought.
Someone at that school did something right, whatever my mother thought of her parents.
“Look, Morgan,” shouted Blue, and did a series of
grandes jêtes
across the studio. Then, returning, the alien went up on point and executed a series of precise toework the names of which Morgan couldn’t even guess. The alien was wearing earplugs. Morgan put her hands over her ears.
Waving at the music console to lower the levels to merely stentorian, Jakob pulled out his own earplugs and walked gracefully over to Morgan, wiping the sweat from his gleaming dark skin with a white towel: Morgan wondered whether it should have been Aziz or Russ who should have been there to fully appreciate the moment.
“Why do you wear earplugs and then turn it up until it’s deafening?”
“Usually I have it at more bearable levels, but today I want Blue to feel it in the body. Like deaf people do.”
“That was a cute little demo Blue gave me there.”
“It’s the classics this week,” said Jakob, “Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Fonteyn, Kain. Last week we did Balanchine and Graham and Ailey and Edouard Lock.
La La La Human Steps
, on point in sneakers way back in 1984. That led us to
Les Grandes Ballets Canadiennes
doing ballet in drag, and that’s how we got where we are today. Astonishing, isn’t it?”
“Blue must be physically—”
“—strong? Adept? A fast learner? Versatile? Honeychile, you have no
idea!
”
“And how is
your
strength holding out?”
“Fine. Why?”
“I heard you haven’t been to the clinic lately. My grey man wonders if you’re all right.”
“Never better,” said Jakob, smiling like a cat with cream.
“Come on. You told me that withdrawal was hell. You look better than you ever have. I swear you’re even putting on muscle mass.”
“Blue and I made a little deal,” said Jakob. “I’d help him with the dancing, and he’d help me with the drugs. So far we’re both satisfied.”
“Help you how?”
“Call it sleepteaching,” said Jakob, and, nudging her arm, he leaned over and said confidentially into her ear. “Blue does some amazing things in dreams. Detox like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Are you watching?” called the alien, who was now doing something improbable on the climbing wall at the end of the studio.
“Everyone’s
watching,
”
said Morgan. Blue dropped from the top of the twelve-foot wall and, grinning, pulled out the earplugs.
Deeply disturbed, Morgan went back downstairs and telephoned the grey man.
“He’s fine,” she said. “He decided to withdraw, and he’s been doing a lot of exercise to counteract it.”
“Must produce a whole lot of endorphins,” said Mr. Grey.
“I guess it works for him,” said Morgan.
She dreams of the alien as a skeleton, glowing in darkness. She is helping put on internal organs, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, skin; like a theater dresser she is holding the layers like coats for the naked one to put on. The alien glows like—boron?—blue, more and more substantial. When the dressing-up is complete, the alien turns to her, smiling.
“How do you want to be taken apart?” says Blue’s voice in the darkness.
When she woke, sitting up, her body was vibrating. With fear, with frustration, with knowledge of the past. With anticipation of that dangerous future.
So she lay in the night room, her belly tight, unable to relieve the longing. To be somewhere else, not to be lonely, to be alone. To be safe.
Finally she shut her mind to it, and slept.
A birthday present
Morgan cleaned the second-floor hallway, her portable stereo tucked into a pocket.
Diaspora I
was playing: complicated layered texts, which seemed to match her mood, chanted by a variety of voices.
Blue came out of Delany’s room, upset and with brow furrowed in a way Morgan knew Blue had copied from her or Russ.
“What’s the matter?”
“Delany is angry with me. I was only trying to help …”
“Sometimes what seems like help isn’t really,” she said automatically. “What did you offer?”
“I offered to correct the mistakes in the helices. It would be simple enough. There is only a tweak. The difficult part would be the repetition. Or replication.”
“Helices?”
“The DNA. Hers is damaged.”
Shocked, Morgan turned up the music. The voices were running perfect interference, she hoped. “You offered to
cure
her?”
“I just said if she wanted I could change it. I learned what needed to be done by reading all the scientific research. She yelled at me. I don’t understand. I’m sorry, I am too sad, I cannot talk now. Maybe we can talk later?”
“Sure.” Morgan watched Blue walk down the corridor, wondering if it could be true. She knocked on Delany’s door. “It’s me. Can I come in?”
“If you must.” Yep, she
was
mad. Morgan picked up the stereo and slipped in quietly. Delany was transferring from her wheelchair to bed. Her movements were erratic and furious. When she thumped down on the bed, she shoved the wheelchair hard enough that it collided with the desk, scratching the newly refinished wood. Morgan turned the stereo down only slightly. She was still sweating from the flash of fear she had felt for Blue when she heard those naïvely-spoken words.
“Your damned alien thinks it can fix me,” said Delany quietly and furiously. “Make it stop.”
“
My
alien again?”
“Fix me. As if I’m broken!”
Morgan had only a second to decide, and chose honesty. “Honey … you
are
broken.”
“I don’t want
deus ex machinal”
“Blue is no god. There is no machine.”
“There is no cure either. If Blue could fix my genetic code, my DNA, could it fix my muscles? My skeleton? Put back all the development that was lost? Let me look like other people, which I never will, because all the bones are already twisted and decalcified? Give me back a normal life, after all these years? Take away the memory of all the humiliations, all the pratfalls, all the insults, all the condescension? There is no fucking cure and I don’t want some fucking carrot dangled before me that makes me hope, even for a second, that my life could change that way. Why the fuck would Blue do that to me?”
“Maybe because of love? Maybe to help? Maybe to make the rest of your life easier?”
“I don’t want its fucking help.” Delany pulled her thin legs into bed, one by one.
“Yes you do,” said Morgan. “You want it so bad you can taste it. You just don’t believe it.”
“You gonna put me through this too?”
“Only because I love you.”
“Love,” said Delany dismissively. “The things people do with that excuse. It’s the easiest word to say.”
“Loving isn’t easy,” said Morgan furiously. “You want it to be easy?” Delany was angry too, she propped herself up in bed, tweaked the covers viciously across her legs.
“You think anything gets learned in one lesson?”
“I’m tired of living with not being perfect,” Delany said slowly. “I’m tired of settling for whatever my body will allow me to have. Live with it. Live with it. Try harder. Make an effort. Don’t you think I make an effort? Every fucking minute. But it’s never enough to make it really work for me. You think that would change with a DNA transfusion?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Morgan said, sudden tears starting behind her nose, eyes.
“I want to go home,” said Delany forlornly, uselessly, and started to cry. Morgan turned off the music, and in the relief of silence sat down on the bed, rubbed Delany’s tense neck, then pulled the slight body back to lean on her, stroked the thick fair hair.
“How do you ask for anything,” said Delany, muffled, “without sounding like a martyr?”
“You don’t,” said Morgan. “You just resign yourself to sounding like something. Then you decide you don’t care what that is. Then you just ask.”
“I really am tired of living,” said Delany in a calm, resigned voice.
“Too bad,” said Morgan. “You don’t get to cop out that way. ‘Alive and stuck with it’, as the poet said.”
“You love that line, don’t you? Never mind me,” said Delany, trying to sit up, but the angle was wrong, she couldn’t get the leverage, she was like a moth trapped against a car window, pushing, pushing.
“Help me, Morgan,” she finally said, tears at last rolling across her face. Morgan pulled her upright, didn’t take her hands away.
“Now that you can ask, how much help do you need?”
“Everything, everything. I’m afraid of the dark, you know that? I am. I hate the darkness.”
Morgan thought darkness was all that kept her sane, but she showed none of that in her smile. “See us both leaking like sieves,” she said. “God is a crybaby. We know ’cause we’re made in the same image, they say.”
“Do you believe in God?” Delany said, surprised.
“No, I don’t think so,” Morgan said. “You never know. I suppose I’ll find out after.”
“After what, you die?”
“Sure. But ’til then, so what? How about you?”
“I don’t think I can any more,” Delany said. “It’s such hard work trying to feel blessed.”
“But you are,” Morgan said, “blessed by sentience, sapience. You can think and feel.”
So what?
she thought, but this was a rescue and the rescuer doesn’t jump out of the lifeboat.
But Delany was better than Morgan gave her credit for. “So can you, Morgan.” Morgan drew back and looked. “You think I don’t know you? I know you. You have to turn the intentions back on sooner or later. If not for me, for someone. I don’t matter, I’ll live. But you should try, too.”
“Change of roles all of a sudden,” said Morgan.
“Don’t get defensive.”
“Who, me?”
“Do you love me?”
“Sure. I said so.”
“But …”
“But it’s strange to me now. Okay, I admit it, I’m … not sure.”
“But you want me.”
“How do you know that?”
“Sticks out a mile,” Delany said. “You’re too careful when you comb my hair not to touch me.”
“I do. So?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why ask?”
“To make you honest.”
“Oh, I’m honest. That’s something I can’t escape. Never mind honesty.”
“Don’t be self-indulgent either. You have responsibilities around here.”
“Yeah, I keep it all together, all right. Open all our lives like paper crackers, pop! and they’re broken. By bringing in Blue. Now what?”
“Love. What was missing for all of us before.”
“That’s not up to us to force,” Morgan said.
“Not forced,” said Delany. “Just what you always do. Offer it freely.”
“What
I
do?”
“Don’t you know yourself yet?”
Morgan stood and paced to the window. Outside in the alley the streetlights shattered the darkness. Sharp, angry.
“How much do you think I can do?” she said finally.
“Everything you have to,” said Delany. “Everything. Everything but save my life.”
Morgan looked at her, surprised.
“That’s my own chore. I work at it every day. If I keep trying I might get it right. With or without Blue’s ‘tweaking.’” Delany’s voice twisted like her fingers.
“Sorry,” said Morgan.
“For what?”
“Death. Life. Whatever else I can’t fix. I’m sorry.”
“I’m tired,” said Delany, in a different tone. “I need to sleep. Go to bed, Morgan.”
“Will you talk to Blue in the morning? You really did a job there, you know. Blue had no idea why you were angry.”
“I’ll talk to Blue.”
“And will you see if what Blue can do might help?”
“Maybe.”
“Will you promise me?”
“Don’t push me, Morgan. I’ll do what I do. Go to bed.”
After Morgan had gone down the long hall, Delany lay back and the tears rolled again down her cheeks. “Oh, you can save my life all right,” she whispered, “but what does it do for you?” And what would Blue do, if she were to allow it? Could it really make a difference now, after thirty-some years of crippling influence? Damn the blue thing for a troublemaker! For an hour she watched the clock, the numbers changing, then put out the light and was almost sleepy.
“Never mind any of that,” she said of her racing thoughts as she dozed off.
In her dream she knows how to fly. This is so derivative that even in the dream she laughs at her own conceit. Morgan lies below her as she floats away. Morgan is dreaming blue thoughts; they cloud around her head like fruit flies.
Delany has not been able to fly like this since she was a child. Now Morgan’s bright restless mind has called her.
She flies over Blue, and sees that the alien’s eyes are open, watching her.
“It’s a dream,” she says.
“Sure,” says the alien. “It’s a dream.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
“Get out of my head, Blue,” says Morgan’s voice, and Delany discovers she was a thought of Morgan’s, an echo in her dreaming mind. Then Delany’s dream becomes the black sleep that so resembles night but banishes it, and Morgan is able to shake away her unfair knowledge of Delany’s thoughts, and Blue’s dreaming, and sleep herself.
“She calls me
the grey man
or
our Mr. Grey
,” he complained to Salomé.
“I like it!” She grinned.
“Hey! Grey? Colorless? The color of bureaucracy? Of old filing cabinets in the basements of government buildings?”
“Silver hair, grey eyes, and snappy silver-grey suits: same color, different affect. I think it’s a great name for a dapper guy who’s all the same color.”
“After looking at pictures of Blue all day, ‘all the same color’ means something else. Like the people in the Le Guin book. Grey all over. Low affect. Boring.”
“Well, daddy-o, you’re not grey all over,” she said, and hugged him.
“Daddy-o?”
“We’re studying the fifties in film class. I have to be one step ahead of my students, you know, know all the old slang …”
“I’m relying on you to tell me when this job turns me grey all over,” he said despondently.
“Oh, lighten up, Mr. Grey. It’s a compliment. You are
distingué
. Dig it.”
“When do you get to the seventies in film? That’s when I started learning the language.”
“Next semester. Shall I consult you?”
“I don’t know, I might grey-down your class too much.”
“Quit brooding. It’s boring.”
“See? She’s right. I
am
boring.”
“Go see her, then,” said Salomé. “Ask her. Talk with her. Show her.” And, done with the topic, she strode out of the room.
“Out of the mouths of babes and striplings,” he said, and she leaned back around the doorframe to say, “Yeah, lots of people tell me I’m a babe.”
“Someone’s putting biohazard into the recycling. The garbageroute kid has entered processing charges three months running. Whoever masturbates into condoms, bag ’em properly, will you?” Morgan said irritably one day at supper when all of them happened to be there at once.
“That lets me out,” said Delany, then laughed when Morgan glared at her.
“I know who it is,” Morgan said, “I’m just trying to be delicate. The recycling’s been a problem for a while. Not just the biohazard, but extra sorting charges and penalties for mixing non-recyclables and organic matter. Like, dammit, no corn plastic and no pizza flats. Can you guys please get your chops together?”
“It’s not such a big thing,” said Russ. “It’s just a detail.” He stacked his plate on John’s and handed the stack to John, who took it with a slight air of surprise and walked it in to the sink.
“It’s just a
budget
. We aren’t exactly rolling in wealth here. I’ve had to pay three fines for violation.”
“We’ve got a cushion,” said John from the doorway, rolling his eyes toward the back of the house where the surveillance shed was.