Welcome to Bordertown (5 page)

“Anush Gupta,” said the beautiful lady, placing her long white hand on his, “can you arrange cold beer for me at this table?”

Anush started to rise, then paused, his head turned toward the door, where some kind of commotion was erupting. The music fell silent.

The Wheat Sheaf was supposed to be neutral territory, but everyone tensed, looking around the room to see who was elf, who was human, in case they needed to take sides.

A girl burst into the center of the room.

“Oh my
god
!” she shrieked. “Oh my fucking god! It’s The
Wheat Sheaf.
It really, really is, just like the Wiki said!”

She had arrow-straight hair and a short straight dress. The guy with her was wearing thick black glasses and huge baggy pants. They looked like something out of a cartoon, which in Bordertown was saying a lot. Everyone stared.

“Dude! We made it!” shouted the guy. “We’re in fucking Bordertown! Get out your iPhone, quick, see if you can still tweet—”

“It’s back!” the girl yelled. “Bordertown’s really back! We made it!”

*   *   *

The day that my sister’s postcard comes, I make the decision to go and find her; the day after that my bag is packed and I’m ready to head for the Border.

I know what people say: that Bordertown doesn’t exist, that it’s just a myth, a hoax, a mass delusion. Or else, if it does exist, then
the road from
here
to
there
has long been closed. Or else, if the Way is open, then it’s a road not meant for a guy like me, with dirt under my fingernails and a duffel bag full of tools, not fairy-tale books.

But the Border is real, and I know I’m going to find it. Why? Because I know
how
to find it. You would, too, if you’d been thinking about it every damn day for thirteen years. My parents never talked about Bordertown—the entire subject of Trish was pretty much off-limits—but that didn’t stop me from searching for every tiny scrap of information I could find: a newspaper mention of the elfin trade here, a radio reference to Border music there; the Bordertown websites that flicker on and off the Internet, semivisible, like ghosts; the Borderland Wikipedia page, which keeps writing and rewriting itself—sensible one moment, gibberish the next, the information constantly changing.

I’m not smart like Trish. I never finished high school, and although I’ve read all of the books she left behind, I read them mostly to keep her spirit close—I’ve never been a dreamer like my sister. I fix things. Cars, appliances, electronics. I can make just about any damn thing run. I’m the kind of guy who needs to take things apart just to figure out how they work, and I tend to think most things in life can be fixed if you have time enough, and patience.

I wanted to know how the Borderlands worked, this place that had swallowed my sister up … so, bit by bit, I gathered information. Bit by bit, I figured out a thing or two. That’s how I know about the semisecret website where
The Tough Guide to Bordertown
can be downloaded. That’s how I know to prepare my truck by knotting red ribbons on the door handles and scattering the floor with leaves of oak and ash. That’s how I know to burn cedar and sage, fill my pockets with salt, stick a feather behind my ear. Now that
the moon is up, I must start the journey before the owl cries twice. (You think I’m making this up? I’m not. It’s a kind of science, just not the kind we’re used to.) Once I get out on the interstate, I’ll head north (or south, it doesn’t matter) and crank up the radio and just keep driving. Eventually the truck will fail, and after that I’ll hitch a ride or walk that last stretch through the Nevernever.…

An owl cries once. I open the truck and Rosco, our creaky old mutt, jumps in. I have to move fast before the owl calls again, and that fool of a dog will not be moved. I guess he’s coming along with me.

So hold on tight, boy.

We’re on our way.

*   *   *

It was all over Bordertown—a town flooded suddenly with “noobs,” as they called themselves. New kids with new toys, new stories, new music, new books, new hopes.

“I thought
we
were supposed to be the new kids,” Anisette Wolfsdottir grumbled as she washed out her socks in the sink at Carterhaugh. Trish waited for her turn at the tap. The tap water was running pale green today, and everything they washed smelled faintly of cantaloupe.

“I’ve only been here a month,” Anisette went on, scrubbing vigorously. “I’m not exactly old. And know what? I’ll be fifteen next Tuesday.”

“No, you won’t,” said Thelma Louise. “You’ll be twenty-eight.”

Anisette sat down hard.

“We figured it out.”

Anisette started crying in long gulping sobs, still clutching her wet socks as green water trickled down her legs.

“Shut up, Thelma,” Trish said. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“Do the math,” Thelma Louise said. “Thirteen days ago here—about the time you moved in to Carterhaugh, Tara—it was thirteen years ago in the World. So fifteen plus thirteen equals …”

“I’m still a
ki-i-i-d
,” Anisette wailed.

Trish handed her a dirty T-shirt; there was no Kleenex here, and toilet paper was precious. But Anisette just wailed on. “Don’t listen to her,” Trish said. “It isn’t like that at all.” Anisette was beginning to take great whooping gasps. It was getting scary. “Listen to me!” Trish squeezed her hand, sock and all. She had to do something. “Anisette, listen. We’re right on the border of the land of Faerie, the land of Eternal Youth.…” Anisette’s hand gripped hers like a vise. Trish tried to remember what she’d read. “Some call it Tir-nan-Og, the Country of the Young, for age and death have not found it.… So while the World ages, we’ve stayed here, young and beautiful. See? Isn’t that good?”

Anisette leaned her head against her, dripping snot onto Trish’s blouse, but at least she was quieter now. Trish stroked her hair. Anisette
was
just a kid, like her own little Jimbo.

“But if we go back,” Anisette sniffled, “will we get old all of a sudden?”

“I hope so,” said Thelma Louise. “I want to be able to buy booze and cigarettes without anyone giving me shit. I want those smart-ass pimply little guys at the filling station to call me
ma’am.
”

Trish held Anisette harder. Because if she really had lost thirteen years in her thirteen days in Bordertown, then Jimbo was all grown up by now. Maybe he was in college. He was such a smart little boy. Maybe
he’d
gone to Harvard. He’d probably forgotten her. He probably thought she was dead.

*   *   *

We’re here, in Bordertown, Rosco and me. The hike through the
Nevernever was hard, but we made it before our water ran out, reaching the city outskirts at last on a cracked and weedy road beside the river.

I found my way from Riverside to Soho by following the
Tough Guide
’s blurry map, got lost looking for Carnival Street (it wasn’t anywhere near where the
Guide
said it would be), then stopped at a club called The Dancing Ferret and ordered my first Border beer. The waitress there had grass-green hair, alabaster skin, and ears with points. “Toto,” I whispered in Rosco’s ear, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I’m staying at the Diggers’ House on Plum, which is kind of a hostel and kind of a safe house. It’s not the Ritz. My bed’s on the floor of a dusty little storage space off the kitchen. That’s partly because the House is crowded and partly because my “scary” black dog makes people nervous. Elfin people, I mean, and I don’t get it, since he’s old and arthritic and wouldn’t hurt a fly; but Berlin, the girl who runs the House, made me promise I’d keep Rosco out of sight whenever the elf kids are around. So we sleep in the closet, which is better than sleeping out on the street, so I’m not complaining.

We don’t spend much time at the House, anyway; it’s just a free place to crash at night. By day we’re out walking the streets as I figure out how this crazy town works, and then figure out how I’m going to find Trish. It’s a much bigger place than I thought it would be; the words “needle” and “haystack” keep coming to mind. I’ve put up signs at The Ferret, the Poop, the Free Clinic, and lots of other locations:

Totally useless. An hour later my signs are covered up by brand-new signs: for bands, for squats, for other missing people who do and do not resemble my sister. An hour after that, the new signs are covered. Does anyone ever read these things?

I ask about Trish everywhere I go and show everyone the picture that I carry in my wallet: Trish and me on the day we brought little Rosco home from the pound. Now, here’s the weird thing (I mean really weird, a magic-leaking-over-the-Border kind of weird): The puppy in that picture is thirteen years old now. The boy in that picture is almost nineteen. But Trish? She’s still the girl in the photo. What I mean is, she’s
still seventeen.
I found this out on my first day in the city: that the thirteen years that have passed for us back home have only been thirteen
days
on the Border. The whole damn city did a Rip van Winkle when the Way to the Border closed down.

That means, for Trish, it’s been only a few short weeks since she ran away from home. And I guess that’s good, since it means that she didn’t intend to leave us for all this time. But it’s freaking me out a bit all the same. I’d been thinking of her as all grown up—but she hasn’t aged; she hasn’t changed. She’s still the Trish that I remember: that same dreamy girl who filled her room with books and art and unicorns; that hardworking girl who was supposed to be the first Milltown kid to go to Harvard; that heartbroken girl who cried in her bed at night, where nobody but me could hear her—while Mom and Dad kept saying that really, community college would be just as good, and she could live at home and keep working at Denny’s, and Harvard wasn’t for people like us.

She’s still
that
Trish, just like I remember.

But I’m not the same Jimmy, and we’re not the same family. Thirteen years is a long, long time.

*   *   *

Should I stay or should I go?

Goddammit, if Trish heard that song one more time, she was going to curl up on the cracked pavement with her backpack over her head and howl like a dog. Since the news of the Lost Years had hit like an atom bomb, it seemed like every street singer in Bordertown suddenly wanted to be Joe Strummer, singing or shouting their raucous: “
If I go there will be trouble, And if I stay it will be double
.”

She couldn’t stand it. She had to go; she knew that. She had to get home to her family and see if they were all right. And let them know that she was okay, too. Had they even gotten her postcard? She’d sent it over a week ago. But was that before or after the terrible split? She couldn’t count right. It made her giddy: “As bad as ants crawling around in your head,” as Princess Eilonwy would say in the Prydain books. What would Eilonwy do? She was impetuous and followed her heart. So she’d go back to Milltown, wouldn’t she? But what if … what if they weren’t all right? What if something had happened, something awful? What if they hated her for staying away so long? What if she got there, and they’d moved and left no address?

And what if she went back home to Milltown, just to see them, and then she never managed to leave again?

But of course she had to go back now … didn’t she?
Should I stay or should I go?

*   *   *

There was a simple solution to Anush’s problem.

The trouble was, it would utterly destroy his life.

But wasn’t his life pretty well destroyed already?

“Stop sulking,” his lover said. “Or is it brooding? The distinction evades me.”

The elfin woman paced across the floor of her loft, her white robes swirling around her, dappling with dusty sunlight as she passed between the high, paned windows. All the room’s pipes were exposed, showing the raw industrial space it had once been—but the pipes changed color, humming musically with each shifting hue.

“What am I to do with you?” the woman asked the air. “It is hours till sunset, yet. Come.” She patted a velvet hassock. “Come sit at my feet, and ask me more of your questions.”

“What’s the point?” Anush said. He’d given up not speaking. Either way, it was just too painful.

“What was the point before? You were eager enough with your rude questions then.”

“You don’t understand!” Anush exploded. “There’s no point to any of this now! My research grant ran out twelve—no, almost thirteen years ago! No wonder the university never answered my letters asking for an extension. I’ve got no funding! No scholarship! I’ve probably been kicked out of my department for truancy, vagrancy, playing hooky—”

“But …,” said the woman, “you attain all the information you were seeking.”

“Beginning to,” he muttered.

She swept across the floor again. “Look! I’ve an invitation.” She opened her fingers, and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor, turning to silver powder just as it touched the wood. “Death apples,” she swore. “It wasn’t supposed to do that. These Border magics are so unreliable. Never mind, I know what it said. We’re invited to a garden party on the Hill at my cousin Windreed’s. We must go.”

“I don’t want to go to any party. Not like this.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s at night. You’ll be beautiful. Again.”

*   *   *

I’m starting to know my way around Soho. I walk and walk as I search for Trish, which is harder on Rosco than it is on me, but he trots along gamely, wheezing as he goes but refusing to stay back at the House. At night I rub Ms. Wu’s Special Magic Healing Salve into his aching old joints. The stuff makes him sneeze, and he smells like cherry candy, but it seems to be helping.

We go to the places I think Trish might go to: the music clubs and the galleries, the free concerts in Fare-You-Well Park. Yeats Night at the Changeling Theater and the poetry slams at Café Tremolo. I’ve tracked down every bookstore and library this side of Water Street, describing my sister to the clerks: brown hair, blue eyes, and about this tall; a lover of myths, medieval ballads, Celtic harp music, and fantasy trilogies. It finally dawns on me that it’s not exactly a unique description in this town.