I still see the fingerless girl in my mind as I shake my head. “I can’t. I just can’t. You should just go without me.”
“Sophie.” Bianca takes my shoulders and looks into my face, and she looks like the fearless rebel who stole all my waking thoughts back at the Gymnasium again. “I want to share this with you. I want to dress you up in the most stunning piece of clothing you have ever worn, and then show off your beauty to all of the fancy people here in Argelo. This is going to be the greatest experience of our lives. I promise you, I know what I’m doing, and this is all for a good cause. But for now, just trust me, and come with me to the ball.”
I’m so startled that she called me beautiful I find myself smiling and nodding. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go to the ball together.”
mouth
The tiny diner had three tables and seven chairs, with a wide counter along the back, at the bottom of a small hill where two streets made of stone slabs converged. The name BARNEY’S was etched across the front window in chipped gold letters, and there was a faded menu. Mouth stood outside and studied the proprietor’s round, beard-shadowed face, and didn’t recognize him. But Mouth mostly remembered Barnabas as a loud voice, and the scent of stews cooking.
Barney had owned this restaurant for as long as anyone could remember, not far from the college where Martindale taught, on the light side of town. Martindale hadn’t even realized there was a surviving ex-Citizen selling cheap food to students and some faculty right down the hill from his office until recently.
Mouth wanted to keep standing outside and staring at the old man in the dirty apron, but Martindale was already pulling the glass door open. Barney saw the professor enter and gave a welcoming shout from behind the counter, then came over and put fresh plates and cheap silverware on the innermost table, with a grin that exposed his front teeth.
Barney filled every moment with patter. “Good to see you, Professor. I got some of that meatloaf you like, and I think we’ve got a few bottles of that grape juice, too. It’s always great to see you. We’ve been lucky enough to get a lot of students coming in here lately. I always treat them right. Students always have the most interesting conversations, you know, Professor. Reminds me of when I used to live on the road, and we’d have all sorts of deep introspective talk when we were miles from anywhere, with nothing but sky in all directions. A man starts to feel his true size against the vastness of the universe. You know? What are your friends having?”
“Actually, I’ve got something of a surprise for you, Barney.” The professor was enjoying himself way too much.
“Oh?” Barney was putting meatloaf onto a tray, and the meatloaf looked, or maybe smelled, familiar in a way that Barney’s face hadn’t.
Martindale gestured at Mouth, who fidgeted and backed toward the door. “This here is another surviving member of the Citizens. Barney, meet Mouth.”
“Oh. Oh!” Barney rushed over and looked up into Mouth’s face, searching for something. Barney’s eyes widened. “Mouth. Of course. Little Mouth, I remember you. Such a tiny pain in the ass. You nearly lit my cooking tent on fire one time. I always wondered what name they ended up giving you.”
“They didn’t,” Mouth said. “Never got around to it.”
“Oh. That’s too bad. Well, I’m sure they would be proud if they could…” Barney stopped and looked down, into the glistening slab of meatloaf. “I mean, if they could be here. If they were still around. To see you grown so big, and so self-sufficient. Not that they really valued self-sufficiency, I guess. They were always about interdependence. It drove me nuts. You couldn’t wipe your ass without…” Barney trailed off again.
There was a long silence. Alyssa grabbed Mouth’s arm, as if one or the other of them needed reassurance in this moment.
“I never found out what happened,” Barney said. “All I knew is, we would come through town pretty regular when I was a member. And then I quit the group, and they never came back. I asked around, nobody saw them again.”
“It was ugly,” Mouth said. “You were lucky.”
Barney had half sat down, but raised himself up again. He staggered over to the front door of the deli, suddenly moving like a much older, frailer man, and flipped the placard to indicate the place was closed. Then he went behind the counter and dug out a bottle of swamp vodka so dirty, it could have come straight from the swamp.
“So you were there?” Barney whispered. “You actually saw?”
Professor Martindale chose this moment to try to reassert his control over the reunion that he had facilitated. “Well, this is all very fascinating, and I think it’s important that everything about this first meeting between two former members of the Citizens be documented for posterity. I’m interested to see the two of you compare notes, as it were.” He pulled out a large stenotype machine, the kind that let you write quickly with one hand.
Barney and Mouth looked at each other, and then at the professor, and stayed silent.
The professor tried a couple of times to start the discussion going again, by making an assertion like, “Well, of course, the Citizens are known to have placed a heavy emphasis on direct revelation, via spiritual experiences which would come, for example, as a result of visiting certain dormant volcanoes or other natural formations.” And everyone would nod, and the silence would continue.
At last Alyssa poured herself some swamp vodka and destroyed the lining of her throat in a single gulp. “What I want to know is”—she panted a little—“what the hell were they even thinking? I mean, sorry, Mouth, but I’ve been on the road more than most people, and the only thing that ever made the road tolerable was knowing we would get off it for a long spell once we reached civilization again. What kind of people decide to just go out and lug all their stuff from town to town forever?”
Mouth kicked Alyssa under the table so hard she yelped.
But Barney just laughed and poured more swamp vodka. “That’s a good question. I used to wonder about that all the time. Just like Mouth, I was born into the Citizens, and I lived with them for most of my life. I heard lots of stories of how the Citizens came to be, but they were all contradictory and full of weird holes. But here’s what I think.”
Mouth had switched from kicking Alyssa to trying to kick Barney before he said something he shouldn’t, but Barney was a nimble old shit and kept moving just out of reach of Mouth’s boot.
“The operative word in what you said was ‘civilization.’” Barney swigged vodka, and poured more for Professor Martindale, who hesitated and then took a swig. “A lot of what people call civilization is just neglect. Most people on this planet live in the two major cities, because that’s where we have the infrastructure, right? We have the farms and the factories, the power plants and sewers. Although the Argelan sewage system is breaking down, because none of the Nine Families is responsible for it. And the shortages are getting worse and worse, and prices keep going up and up. But anyway, with that many people on top of each other, you don’t know who the people around you are. You might interact with a hundred people in a row without knowing much about any of them. Versus a smaller community, where you’re surrounded by people you’ve known your whole life.”
“When I used to talk to Yolanda and Daniel, the leaders of the Citizens, they said that walking outdoors for long periods of time was almost like a form of meditation.” Martindale drank a little vodka, to be polite, and gagged. Barney encouraged the professor to wash it down with more vodka. “If you categorize religious activities on a three-dimensional map, with prayer as one fixed origin and meditation as another, you could helpfully classify the Citizens’ travels as a hybrid devotional-transcendental activity.”
“Yeah.” Barney poured more vodka for everybody, making sure Martindale got plenty. “I mean, so you used to travel from one city to the other with your smuggler crew, right?” Alyssa tossed her head. “So you were out on the road for one trip at a time. Probably felt like it lasted forever, until you were back in a city, and then the road was just a dream you’d had. But when you’re living out there, everything is different. You were born on the road, you lost your baby teeth on the road, you grew old on the road. And just moving forward, with the world stretching as far as you can see, your mind starts to empty out. You get in tune with the subtle changes in the wind, the way the landscape changes as you travel, the way that day and night can seem near or far, depending on the terrain. People did feel like they heard the landscape talking to them. Like they were closer to something real.”