The Music of Razors (25 page)

“Why are you ditching art school? You’ve been making art all your life. It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

Suni shrugged, popped the last of his burger into his mouth, and cracked open the Coke.

The Esplanade was a strip of greenery that ended in a four-foot drop to brown water, reinforced with century-old bluestone blocks. There were concrete steps that led into the water at regular intervals—narrow, grimy, unsafe-looking things—which made Hope think that maybe people moored boats here before they went and built all those piers just around the curve of the inlet. The ocean was right there in front of them, but no beach to speak of. It was a bay, technically, but so big you didn’t think of it as that. Swamp was out on the fringes. Deep, sucking mud and miles of skinny trees with roots all over the place, just near the airport. Good place for crabs, apparently. A fat rat scuttled across the top of the wall on thin paws, drooping belly held above the ground. There were picnic tables all over the place, and garbage bins. They brought the rats out, but usually at night.

“What happened with Kristian…you didn’t do that to get me back, did you?”

“No. Kristian can have you.”

“So…” Why did it hurt to hear him say that? “I don’t get it.”

“Because I could. And I feel much better.”

Hope busied herself opening her can. She felt something slipping away from her. She couldn’t lose the feeling that somehow she had made a very serious mistake. “You can finish your folio now.”

“Maybe. Maybe I will do college, I don’t know. Kinda figured I’d celebrate first. See how I feel.”

“How?”

“No idea. We could go up the top of that mountain behind my place and get drunk.”

Hope shrugged her lip. “Nah.”

“Stoned?”

Shook her head. “Nah.”

“Anything?”

“Can I ask you a dumb question?”

Suni hesitated. “Sure.” Then smiled. “Sure, shoot.”

“What do you care about? Right now.”

“Right now?”

“Uh-huh.”

Suni took a thoughtful breath. “Fun.” He looked at her, decided. “Fun is what I care about. I want to have fun.”

“And what’s fun? Right now.”

Suni looked around, exasperated. “I dunno. Getting drunk, exposing our souls. Running for a long time just to feel our lungs get hot. Sex.”

Hope looked at him.

“We never really did it,” he said. “I never even asked what your stand on it is, I was so afraid of you thinking badly of me.”

Hope was feeling something building inside. Like small tremors. Like the onset of an earthquake that was about to transfer to her hands. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I know there was that Jeff guy…”

“That only happened once. You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

Suni shook his head. “No, no. I’m just wondering what you think of it.”

“Well, it wasn’t that great.”

“I mean in general.”

“What do you think of it?”

His eyes looked out at the sluggish brown ocean. A massive tanker was out there, looking completely unreal, like a cardboard cutout propped up at sea. “It’s fun. It’s a lot of fun for two people who can handle it. And it should be. People make too big a deal out of it.” He paused. “I thought maybe you felt badly about the whole idea of it. After your dad, I mean…”

“My dad never touched me,” she said. “Not like that.”
But he would have, then. If I hadn’t stopped him. If he hadn’t bled out on the kitchen floor.

She thought about the movie she saw last week, the smell of the ocean air. Got it together. Got on with the conversation.

“And you never felt differently? That it might mean something a little deeper?” she asked.

“Well, I felt that way about you. But not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to dive right back into something like that.”

“But if you did, do you think you’d feel that way again?”

He sucked on his lower lip, then: “I’m having trouble seeing myself getting serious over anyone. For a long time at least.”

Hope was watching her hands tear idly at the grass. She wasn’t getting the answers she was hoping for. “Suni…”

“Yeah?”

“What happens if you never feel anything that powerful ever again?”

Suni leaned back, looked at the brown ocean. “You know.”

She nodded. “Strong feelings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

“Bingo.”

Suni chewed thoughtfully on his bottom lip, hands held loosely around his raised knees. “Maybe I’ll go see my dad,” he thought out loud. “Go camping the way we used to. Haven’t seen him in ages. He’s on the other side of the country now, but I could do it.”

She kept tearing at the grass. “Suni.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I used it on you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Suni went quiet for a moment, and then: “You know, when I was little, someone offered to give me wings? Not make-believe wings, not toy wings, but real ones. I told him no. I told him I wanted to go home. To my
mother.
” He laughed drily. “Should have taken him up on it. Could have flown around the world.” Sluggish brown waves slapped feebly at the corroding bluestone wall. “Hey…”

“Yes?”

“You really kept those old newspaper reports about me?”

She nodded. “They’re in my photo album.”

“Do you remember what they said?”

She shrugged, tearing at the grass, and smiled. “Just that your mother woke up the next morning and you were in Vancouver.” She laughed. Suni laughed, too, then stopped.

“Do you know how long it takes to get to Vancouver, including stopovers and aircraft changes?”

“No.”

“Eighteen hours fifty minutes,” he said.

A tanker’s horn sounded, distant and displaced. Hope sensed some kind of association forming between her possession of the ’scope and what Suni had just said. It was a horrible feeling.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said.

Hope felt cold. She lay on her bed, eyes to the ceiling, the ’scope by her side, sheathing her downturned right hand. The subtle texturing of the cream-colored ceiling registered on her retinas, but that wasn’t what she was seeing. Hope wasn’t really seeing anything, not in the conventional sense. Hope was sorting through the infections pulled from the very stuff that had made Suni who he was—who he had been.

She saw flashes of memory, identifiable in the wake of what Suni had told her. The ’scope held his fears, and imprinted on those fears were the watermarks of what had formed them: here he was afraid of the future, and she felt claustrophobic in the presence of others; here he was afraid of going on, and she heard his mother’s short, neat laughter; here he was afraid for his life, and she remembered the piles of bodies and the gaunt man at the door; here he was afraid of never returning home, and here, later, he was deeply afraid of telling the truth and losing Hope forever, and she saw the face of her brother as a child. A face he could never have known.

Suni now walked the world minus the one fear that had fired the furnace that cast him, fused him into the person that he was. The thing that pushed him to be who he had been.

Suni’s fear, the thing that colored his nightmares and chose the cast of lovers and authority figures that populated them, was of himself. The fear that he wasn’t good enough. That there was something vitally wrong with him. He had lived afraid of the opinions of others. He sought confirmation of his worth there, and if Suni did not find it in the words of others then it was writ in stone, it was scripture: Suni Was Nothing.

It was a catalog of demons she held in her silver hand—Suni’s bedevilments. She could let them go at any time, set them free and turn them to nothing—watch them die without a host, forever locked outside Suni’s cooling, calming mind.

She had never seen him so diffident, so relaxed, so unburdened. He was a man unshackled. No self-made horrors snapped at his heels. No doubts pushed him forward or held him back. He moved in his own time, ageless and free.

She could have let them go, but she didn’t.

The Anxietoscope hovered before her own forehead, fingers delicately pleading for purchase, silently longing to take a similar weight from her, urging her, ordering her, to allow it. It would be so easy. As easy as anything. Anything she had ever done. And then she would be free, lightened, happy. It wanted her burden as badly as it had wanted Suni’s.

Distantly, somewhere far removed from where she floated, the front door opened and her mother shouted her name.

Her mother.

In that moment the Anxietoscope almost got what it asked for.

SIXTEEN

ENCOUNTERS

I
T HAD BEEN HOT CONFLICT FOLLOWED BY A COLD DINNER,
quickly forgotten in the frenzy of accusation and denial.

It never used to be like this, before her father had died. Hope’s mother had been sane then, or in control at the very least. No screaming at every shadow-of-a-shadow-of-a-problem that surfaced in their lives. Living with her mother now was like wrestling a maniac. You had to keep them calm, pin them down, stop them doing something they’d regret—but you invariably took the blows trying. And sometimes you didn’t pin them down at all, you just made them madder. Sometimes there was simply no point in trying.

Her mother had just grounded her for the rest of the year—six months as a prisoner of this particular nuthouse. Suni and Kristian didn’t know how bad it got, and it was better that way. They had their own problems—everyone does—and Hope didn’t want her family crap to make knowing her a chore.

Of course, there may not even
be
a friendship anymore. For the rest of the year it was to school and back, dinner, homework, and bed. Hope had taken it all with good grace until her mother stated her intention to bar Hope’s windows to prevent any more midnight escapes. Maybe losing Kristian wouldn’t be so bad, but losing Suni was an amputation.

She walked out of her bedroom, down the hall, and into Walter’s room. Hope’s mother was asleep, collapsed in on herself, chin on her chest, in the chair by Walter’s bed. A wrinkled magazine was sprawled across her lap, and a plastic tumbler by her bare feet. Hope had learned as a child that vodka combined with her meds usually kept her under till morning. Their mother got a discount on her own meds on account of how much other stuff they bought for Wally: high-caloric mix—stuff he’d be able to digest for maximum nutrition without taxing him too much. Regular food didn’t have enough calories per quantum and produced too much residue—though more often than not money was too tight to afford $250 a week for that, so they had to slip Wally regular food and hope he did okay with it. So far there had been no problems, and Hope thought she was beginning to understand why. He was sticking around deliberately. He was a twenty-one-year-old man, shrunken below the waist until he looked something like a twisted corpse she’d seen on TV—footage from a famine zone. His eyes hadn’t seen anything since he went to bed over seventeen years ago. But, she knew now, he hadn’t been sleeping.

“Hey,” she said, a little self-conscious. “It’s me.” She wondered if he was here.

“Hello,” Walter said, sitting on the window ledge.

Hope walked over and took the body’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. Even if he wasn’t here, it felt right saying it. She stroked his face, grazing a knuckle down one sunken cheek.

“It’s okay,” he said, looking at his hands.

“I never knew.” She wondered how this was all going to play out. Part of her was growing afraid Walter may have moved on, after so many years of going unheard. She supposed if he was here now, he’d find some way of letting her know. Isn’t that what ghosts did?

“Maybe I should have stayed, taken over from him…better me than you.” He got off the sill, looked up at his little sister, and touched her sleeve, fingers slipping and chafing on the diamond-hard fabric. “You know I’m here,” he said. “Just look at me and I’ll tell you everything. Just look…” His sister turned, and the careless movement tossed Walter across the room, slamming him against the wall and onto the rigid fronds of the potted fern. The leaves and stalks stabbed at him as he twisted and rolled off it, clutching himself.

Hope stopped in the doorway, and turned back. She looked at the body. “G’night, Wally.”

“Hope…”

She closed the door on him. Nothing he did was making any difference.

Walter let himself lie down on the prickling, unrelenting carpet that felt like glass dust against his arms and legs, curled into a ball, and cried. It didn’t entirely sound like a little boy.

So tired of being alone.

Someone said his name. He opened his eyes, looked across the room to the shadow by the open window; the window that looked out on fairyland. Someone said his name again, in a soft caramel voice.

“You sound like puppies,” the voice said.

Walter swallowed and sat up.

“I don’t want you to cry.”

Walter blinked. He couldn’t see into the shadow, and that wasn’t right. It wasn’t like a shadow at all. It was like one of the portals the Nabbers used.

He could hear music. Something cheap and tinkling, like a music box. The sound of it filled the room, and a figure emerged from the shadow in shades of black and bronze. “It’s me.”

Years ago, before the doctor had found her, Nimble had been a ballerina.

The weight of the box filled the pack, resting comfortably and flat against Hope’s back as she slipped out the window and onto the architrave of the window below, and dropped down into the flower bed, probably for the last time. She loved this little ritual. Bars on her nighttime doorway were closing off something integral to the person she had become since moving here two years ago. Aside from the fact that her mother’s decision robbed her life of a little mystery and glamour, it took away something that was truly her
own.
Though she was seventeen, living at home and still dependent, in stepping through that window she became her own person, a nation beholden to none. She supposed that that was what she was losing most—her self.

A black figure, easily six feet and rake-thin, stood waiting for her in the middle of the street.

He began walking forward, the bootclick on the blacktop accompanied by an even fainter, more delicate, tinkling. It was a gentle, almost crystalline sound. Beneath that sound chimed a faint harmonic, high notes sounding so very faint, like a distant choir.

“
Missy…,
” the man said, in a voice soft and bass.

She swallowed hard. She didn’t know what he was, but he sure as shit wasn’t a drug dealer. His words whispered to her ear from thirty yards away: “
You have something of mine…
”

She knew who it was immediately. Without a shadow of a doubt she knew exactly who it was. It made sense. It all made sense. Things like that don’t go unpunished.

Running blindly, without thinking, bolting diagonally across the yard and onto the sidewalk, thinking the whole time, I could go inside I could go inside…But what was the point? What if he came in anyway? What if he hurt her mother? What if…

What if she looked under that hat and her father stared back? What if she looked under the coat and the knife was still there, wedged under the sternum in a wound gone black and cold?

She wanted to run and run and not spend her entire life backward-glancing through the bloody window of her diary…

“
Whatever you think you’re gonna do with that thing…,
” he whispered to her.
“It’s gonna go bad on you.”

Just run…just run…

Walter saw Nimble’s face first. She looked as all little girls imagine a ballerina to look: a dancing princess who never dies. A pale face with dark hair tied neatly back, a delicate countenance twice as beautiful for the openness of it. Deep, dark, honest eyes and a sweet red mouth. The face of naïve childhood love.

The dull bronze of her shoulders came next, as if the shadow that contained her were a dropping veil. The intricate, hollow lattice of her fragile-looking arms were attached to the ornate, skeletal-feminine cage of her torso, atop which rested her pretty head. The tangled wrought bronze of the torso-cage contained her spine and the tumbling, flickering thing from which the music came. Her thin, pseudo-mechanical arms were held delicately from her sides, a picture of poise. The ruffle of her tutu was a single piece of jagged, corrugated bronze—a wrinkled disk—inserted at her waist. Her legs, as hollow and florid as the rest of her, tapered to bronze slipper-feet that moved on perpetual pointe. As long as she remained in shadow, her legs seemed sheathed in darkness and embroidered in brass.

Walter had known what the doctor had done to her, but he had never seen it. He wiped his eye with the back of his hand, and it came away damp. He said, “Tub was asking about you.”

“Tub?” She tilted her head, a portrait of curiosity.

Nimble and Tub had loved each other so massively that Walter sometimes thought they’d die, their bodies unable to contain it. “You’re the only friend I’ve ever had,” she said, and maybe she thought this was true. Henry had changed so much of who she used to be. Perhaps she thought it true of everyone she visited. After all, that’s what she had been remade for: to befriend people. How better to win someone over than for them to be the only friend Nimble ever had?

Walter stood up. “I have to go.”

“Oh, Walter…” She tippy-toed toward him, arms levitating at her sides, head hovering so unnaturally atop that hollow body. “Don’t go…” Her deep brown eyes glistened like a leaving lover’s. “Please don’t go.”

Walter wondered if anything of who she had once been remained inside her perfect head.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.

“I remember,” she said, “your wanting to go home.” And she smiled, pleased with the accuracy of her answer. Her metal arms shushed and clicked delicately as they opened down to him, palms up, seeking his. “I remember your loneliness.”

“You found me that first time I ran away from the doctor, you remember?”

“I remember.” Her fingers moved a little, pleading quietly for his hands.

“Do you remember Dorian?”

“Dorian was a thief,” she said, simply. “Dance with me.”

“But he made you, and Tub, and the others. You loved him.”

“Dorian stole from…people.”

Walter shook his head. “The instruments never belonged to a person. They were the Angel’s, and they used to be an angel themselves.” He looked up at her, searching for that glitter inside. “Dorian made you to be a companion for his daughter, you remember?”

“No.”

“Millicent. You were with her until the end.”

“Until the end.”

There. “You were her best friend, and she’s gone. But he still waits for you.”

“Then dance with me, because Hope does not wait for you.”

“This is different.”

“Then dance with me because I need you.”

Walter shook his head. “You don’t need me. And you won’t stop me from protecting my sister.”

She moved her hands to his face, cradling it. They felt cold and skeletal against his skin. “I already have.”

He didn’t pay attention to the position of her thumbs until it was too late.

“You sound like puppies.”

He let Hope go. Watched the night swallow her. A match flared off his dry-skinned chin with the flick of a gloved hand. Head tilted he leaned his craggy face into the glow, a man leaning into a kiss, and lit the thin cigarillo jutting from the narrow, lipless line of his mouth. Puffed once, blew out. A habit he hadn’t been able to shake off in close to two hundred years. The match died out as he fanned it back and forth. It was a particularly warm night.

He could wait.

He looked up to Wally’s window and, sadly, wondered if Nimble was done.

He was there. Walter was a shuddering shadow in the corner, clutching his face, Nimble advancing on him, reaching for him with bloodied metal hands.

“Let him go,” Henry said, finding himself deviating from the plan.

“But I’m not finished,” she complained.

“Let him go.”

Walter cast his sightless face up at the sound of Henry’s voice, at this turn of events, seized the opportunity, and vanished into the shadows.

“He tried to hurt me,” Nimble said. “Look.”

The bronze embroidery of her torso-cage bore three wide gashes.

“He didn’t try too hard.”

When Hope got to Suni’s, the house was quiet and the windows dark. No light in the whole place. She pressed her face to the glass between cupped hands and all she saw was the unmade bed, a few strewn-about clothes, and Oolric staring back at her from the middle of the room. Suni was gone.

She turned around and walked back home, because she had nowhere else to go, the pack on her back feeling twice as heavy.