ASIM_issue_54 (21 page)

“Papa,” Orla said, touching his shoulder gently. He did not look up at her, but that was usual when he was working on something very important. “Did you see Parse today?”

“Parse is fine,” her father soothed.

Orla drew her lips into her mouth, bit down hard. “But what if he isn’t?”

Papa looked up at her and sighed. “Parse is not malfunctioning, my dear. You need not worry over it.”

“But precautions exist to prevent emergencies,” Orla pointed out. “You say that.”

Papa rubbed his side of his head. His hair was all white now and Orla wondered when exactly the last of the brown had gone. “Child, can you think of no better occupation for your time?”

* * *

There was a little room in the deepest part of the laboratory. The walls were thick and freezing cold, the huge door had a spinning lock larger than a man’s hand. If Orla were to shut that door and scream until her throat was dull and raw, no one would hear even the faintest susurration. Papa called it the ‘just in case’ room. It was where Orla’s mother lived, for the time being.

Orla had never known her mother as anything other than what she was now. Her hair was still mostly black and her white face remained unlined. Sometimes, when Orla looked very hard, she could see the ghosts of freckles that might flare into life, had they ever known the sun. She imagined her skin was dry and cold but she did not know. Even Parse had only ever touched her with thick rubber gauntlets on. Papa promised that someday he would fix her and Orla would be able to hug her mother, touch her face and hear her voice.

Orla had not known that this was not the ordinary way of mothers for a very long time. When she was eleven years old, she asked her father about the women she had seen in town who saw to their children and swatted at them and held their hands going into shops. Papa had sighed and sat her down on his lap, though she had mostly outgrown such things. He told her about the terrible illness that had stolen her mother’s eyes and her tongue and stilled all her limbs. It was something in the blood of her, he told her and she could feel rattle and billow of his breath in his chest. Her mother—Orla’s grandmother—had suffered the same way. Died the same way. But he had spared Mother that.

Her chamber was tall, but not very wide. If she could have stretched out her arms, they would have had to bend at the elbows. Wires blue and black and clear plastic tubes extended into her arms and her legs. There was an oval metal plate that covered her back. Orla had seen it when Parse dressed and washed her mother in the mornings. Machines did her breathing, pushed the blood through her veins, allowed her to hear Orla’s disheartened rapping at the clear plastic of the chamber front. She blinked in response.

Short short long, short long long short, short short short—

It was “upset.”

Orla was very good at Morse code. He father had taught her when she was small, just after he had put Mother in the chamber. Sometimes, she thought she might like it better than talking. There was always plenty of time for her to think about exactly what she wanted to say. Orla thought that people in general should choose their words with more care.

“Papa took a job,” she rapped out quickly. Her mother blinked.

“Good.”

“Seems different. House changing,” Orla responded. Mother appeared to consider this for a moment, her white and sightless eyes staring into nothingness as they always did.

“17 now,” she blinked. “World changing.”

* * *

Two months later, Orla found the man in the black coat in her kitchen. He wasn’t wearing his black coat now, but his hair was still sweaty. She had never seen it to be otherwise. He was washing the neat little pile of breakfast dishes that Parse had collected in the sink.

“No,” Orla burst out, anguished. She must have startled him because his whole body gave a hard jolt and the plate in his hand clattered noisily into the sink. Orla rushed over and picked up the plate, inspecting it for cracks and chips. The china was her mother’s. She had hand-painted the little vines around the rim.

“That’s not how the dishes go,” Orla murmured, after satisfying herself that the plate was undamaged.

“I’m … sorry?” the man managed. “I wanted to help.”

“First you rinse and then you scrub and then you soak in the cleaning solution.” Orla looked down and was surprised to see how tight her fingers were around the plate’s edges. She set it down tenderly next to its fellows.

“I didn’t know,” the man told her, sounding subdued. Orla shook her head, like it didn’t matter. But she would have felt better if he were gone from her kitchen. He looked out of place here, contrasted the yellow tiles too vividly. Orla found she could not look at him directly.

“If you break one, I have to go to the village and get more,” she told him, hoping he would take the hint and leave the dishes to her or to Parse. He did not move again for the sink, but he didn’t move towards the door either.

“You … don’t like the village?” he asked her. Orla gave him a look full of distain and he laughed. “Yes, I suppose that was a stupid question.” He tilted his head to look at her as if a single angle would not do and he required another. “Do you know what your father is building for me?”

“Not my place.” Other than the ‘just in case’ room, Orla was not allowed in her father’s laboratory.

The man smiled at her. It was as jittering as the rest of him. “It’s something the villagers are going to hate.”

“It doesn’t matter what he builds,” Orla said. Her hands felt heavy and strange at her sides, she picked up an abandoned dishtowel and worried it with numb, ineffectual fingers.

“People don’t really like genius,” the man said earnestly. “They like the benefits that genius produces and they like the comfort and safety that it affords them, but no one wants to see the real work done.” He leaned forward, touched Orla’s bare arm. She had expected his skin to be clammy and cold, like that of some creature that made its home deep under rocks and water, but he was warm. So warm, in fact, that she wondered if he would leave a red handprint when he drew back.

“Everyone is always talking about the good of humanity, but Orla, I have never experienced much good in humanity. Individuals, maybe, but altogether … They lack vision.” Orla found herself nodding along, though she didn’t exactly understand what he meant. How was it that she had never noticed the curious gas-flame blue of his eyes?

“I would not like to think of people like that troubling you, Orla,” he said, still with his hand on her arm. His eyes seemed to dampen, as though someone somewhere had turned down the range. “But that can be fixed, you know.” He looked as though he needed something from her, some word of encouragement or agreeable gesture. Orla only looked at him, a little uncomfortable and a little apologetic, though she hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Someday soon,” he told her, “no one will trouble you at all.”

* * *

“Miss!” called the man with gun as Orla made her way towards the door. She slowed but did not stop and she did not turn. Her father had warned her often to be wary of strangers. This one was particularly strange. Big boy, blond-headed, he looked as though he were … more vivid, or more heavily outlined than everyone else. And, of course, he wore a gun on his belt and did not even try to hide it.

Behind her, the boy laughed. It was deep in his chest and warm, like Orla had made a joke. But Orla rarely made jokes and she hadn’t said anything at all to him. “You’re leaking,” he said, crossing the floor to stand behind her. Orla turned, looked down towards her feet where indeed there was a white spill of dust and a trail leading away from the counter.

“The flour,” Orla said, shifting her parcels until she could examine it. One corner of the package was gone, had clearly been sheared off with scissors. Orla cupped her hand over it in an attempt to save the rest of the bag. There was a little more than half left.

“C’mon,” said the boy, “we’ll get you another one.”

Orla shook her head. She had no desire to tangle with Derek today. The boy looked quizzically at her and Orla tilted her hand away from the package. White flour gathered in her palm.

“Look,” she said, in a voice so small it was only marginally audible, “he cut it.”

The boy examined the bag carefully and then looked back at Derek, who was dumping wrapped candies into the barrel beside the long counter. “Why?” he asked. Orla just shrugged. He looked genuinely puzzled, but Papa had told her that sometimes strangers were sneaky and they would try to trick her into talking about him, talking about the work he did.

The boy shook his head. “This must be some sort of mistake. That is not how ladies are treated.” Orla had never thought of herself as a lady before. She clutched the parcels, leaking flour and all, tight against her chest and did not look at the boy.

“Excuse me!” he said. Orla watched as Derek assessed him without speaking. Strangers were only marginally more welcome in the village than Orla and her father.

“Yeah?”

“You wanna replace the gal’s flour?”

Derek folded his arms and smiled his mean little smile that Orla had seen so often. “Not particularly,” he said.

“Did your mother raise you wrong, or are you just a natural asshole?” The boy spoke oddly. Sort of outsized and flourishing, like the rest of him. It was as though … with each word he was carving his name upon the world. Here, here, and here. This is mine.

Needled, Derek snapped back, “don’t see the need to extend courtesy to the feeb daughter of a grave-robbing freak.” This information did not seem to register with the boy at all; he retained his jovial, sunny expression.

“Well, then, I see no need to further patronize your establishment.” He turned to Orla, who was watching the exchange with no small amount of trepidation. The boy looped his arm through the crook of Orla’s elbow. He was much taller than her, she had to lift her arm up and it rendered her unsteady. “Miss?” he said, “are you ready to go?” Orla felt smooth, loose and totable as a child’s soft doll.

As they passed by a large display of china plates, factory made and impressed with images of smiling children, long-haired dogs; the boy stretched out a foot and smoothly pulled the entire thing down behind them. The crash came upon them in waves of brittle shattering; Orla flinched. The boy only smiled.

* * *

Orla told the boy that he could not walk her to her door and they stopped at the end of the long, winding footpath that led up to the house on the hill. “I’m sorry,” she said, “Routine is … important. To Papa. Visitors upset him.”

The boy nodded thoughtfully and for a moment, the two of them just fidgeted. He was still holding some of her parcels. Orla wondered if she was allowed to ask for them back, or if that was rude.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” asked the boy, “what he said about your father.”

Orla bit down on the insides of her lips. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. That’s not my job.”

“I’ve upset you,” said the boy.

“Yes,” Orla shifted her packages onto one arm and reached out her empty hand for the remaining purchases. The boy looked at her grasping hand but just held on to her packages, out of her reach.

“Come with me,” he said, “just for a few moments. Just to talk.”

Orla’s father would not have approved. But he was holding her rye bread and the baking powder and how would she make cookies for tea without baking powder?

He took her around the hill, into the low belly of the valley where the grass grew tall and wildflowers pushed through the unfriendly earth in blue, in red, in yellow spikes. The boy sat down on the ground, still holding Orla’s packages against him. Orla sat down beside him, smoothing her skirt again and again with nervy restlessness.

“Orla,” he said, “I realize you don’t trust me.”

When Orla was small, she used to play in the valley. It was too isolated, too close to the house on the hill for people to come around. In the spring, it flooded and got swampy; no good for building. The house was Papa’s, but this place had belonged to her. She used to pretend that she was princess like in the books that Parse showed her. She laid very still in the tall grass and pretended to sleep for a hundred years. “I did not tell you my name,” she pointed out. The boy nodded.

“I came here for you, Orla,” he told her, “because I think you can help me. Like I helped you.”

Orla thought about how next week this boy and his gun would be gone but Derek would be there, now with wounded pride and a shelf full of ruined merchandise. But Orla did not say anything about that.

“I know that a man has been here, a bad man, and he’s got your father all twisted around. Convinced him to do … a bad thing.”

He talked to her as though she were a child. Orla knew she was not the same as the young women in the village, probably not the same as the women he had known, but she was not a little girl either.

“My father is a genius,” Orla told him. “No one twists him, no one convinces him.”

“You think your father would willingly do evil, then?” The boy’s voice had changed. He looked directly at Orla now. She did not like to meet people’s eyes under normal circumstances and the boy had remarkably sharp eyes.

“It’s … it’s not evil,” Orla stammered. “You don’t understand. They don’t understand. It’s like art. The people are backwards, it’s not evil. Parse isn’t evil. He takes care of me.”

The boy’s forehead went creasy, as though confused by the unfamiliar reference. “Orla,” he said, “what if you were wrong?”

Orla reached out, grasped tall grass in her fists, in between her fingers. Almost dead here on the end of the summer, it pulled easy from the dirt. “He’s not a bad man,” she said. “I promise he is not.”

The boy nodded. “I don’t think he’s a bad man. And I don’t think you’re a bad girl. But that other man, I know him. I know him well. And, Orla, he is bad. He’d destroy everything, burn every single thing. If we let him.”

It was not hard for Orla to imagine the man in the black coat burning lands and seas and skies. There was something on fire inside of him, of course he would long to bring it out, to visit it upon the earth.