“I just want to keep our culture alive.”
“You can’t.” Barney had revived and was wiping tables and checking napkins again. “You can’t keep something alive that’s already dead. You can only preserve the remains, the way that Martindale bullfrog is trying to do. If you want to do something to save our old culture, you should try to help the professor as much as you can. Maybe volunteer as his assistant. He’s absolutely the only hope for the thing you say you want.”
“That’s a horrible thought.”
“I don’t know why you’re so down on him. He’s a pompous oaf, but he wants to do the right thing. He cares about this, bless his heart.”
Now Mouth was the one sitting and clutching a sudden ulcer.
“I barely thought about the Citizens, all that time bouncing between two cities. It was just a funny story to tell people. But after I learned there was something left, the Invention, I couldn’t let go. And I can’t just forget again. Especially not now that I’ve found you.”
Barney sighed. “Let’s say I could bring all of the Citizens back from the dead. All of their shining ghosts, walking through town, singing one of those dirges that you were so determined to rescue from a vault in Xiosphant. The whole crew, including Cynthia and Yolanda. What then? What could they do that would make you happy? What do you actually want?”
Mouth thought about this for a moment. Bottomless swamp. “Well, they could give me a damn name.”
“Bring a book of baby names. We’ll flip to a random page, I’ll put my finger down. Picking a name is not hard.”
“It’s not the name. You know that. It’s the whole story that goes with it. The personal myth. The identity. They had a whole process.”
“Sure, sure. I went through that. I helped others through. It was a nice ceremony. I’m sure they would have gotten to you soon enough, if they hadn’t all died. Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to deal with a thing that you hid from yourself forever and just recently decided was a mortal wound.”
Mouth had her forearms in front of her face and her knees in her chest, against some huge projectile. She decided to throw it back in Barney’s face.
“What about you? How are you honoring our people? What are you doing? What do you want?”
Barney sighed. “Unlike you, I chose to leave the group. If I’d known I was leaving them to die … I don’t know. But I didn’t know that. So I opened this place as a way to create community. To bring people together. Maybe I aimed too low. I felt like my role in the Citizens was to cook for everyone, but also to help make a space for people to talk. And I told myself I could keep doing that. I welcome people who have no place else to go, and I promise a limited amount of safety to student radicals and people who are on the Nine Families’ hit list.”
“I’ve sat in here I don’t know how many times,” Mouth said, “and I haven’t seen you giving sanctuary to anyone.” She leaned her chair backward so it rested on two legs and put her feet against the table.
“It doesn’t happen all the time.” Barney seemed bored with this conversation, yawning and leaning on one hand. “Anyway, I don’t owe you any progress reports. I’m retired and an independent business owner. You are the one who has a problem, and I would like to help you solve it if I can. You can’t go back on the road, and I wouldn’t go back out there even if you paid me in extra life expectancy. You can’t get back the Citizens’ teachings by talking about them inside a building. How are you going to honor the dead?”
“I don’t know.” Mouth wanted to say that the dead had never honored her, that if anything, it was they who had left a debt unpaid. But maybe that would sound dumb.
“What have you ever done to help anybody?” Barney leapt to his feet and jabbed a finger at Mouth, who nearly fell flat on her back because she was leaning backward on two chair legs.
“I watched the other Couriers’ backs, while they still had backs to watch. I helped these scavengers. I kept Alyssa alive, in spite of all her best efforts.”
“A big thing in the Citizens was, we were all responsible for each other,” Barney said, sitting back down on his high stool behind the counter. “Sometimes that meant that anybody who wasn’t us could eat shit. But we tried to be generous, and interdependence was a big part of the teachings.”
“Ugh. So I should go and find some people who are bigger losers than I am, to try and lift them up.”
“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe. Your own community. Everybody in this town is basically out of their mind. They might be safe under their roofs, but they’re more lost in the wilderness than we ever were. You could be doing some good around here.”
“I get it.” Mouth unkinked herself from her chair. “You want me out of your diner. I’ll go bother someone else.”
“Sure. I don’t care. Do whatever you want.”
Afterward, Mouth couldn’t stop wondering who she could be a Citizen to, as she looped around the up-and-down streets under a flat gray sky. She had a feeling it was never going to be that simple, that she couldn’t just serve meatloaf and tell herself she was honoring the dead. The dead were just like the living: they all wanted something they could never have.
* * *
When Mouth got home, Alyssa offered her a hunting knife, holding it by the blade. Mouth took the hilt by instinct, but her fingers lost their strength. The knife stabbed the floor between them.
“Still?” Alyssa said, and cursed.
Lately, whenever Mouth tried to hold a weapon, her fingers turned into cotton strips. She could hold tools, pieces of food, shoes, or whatever, but she couldn’t grip a gun or machete to save her life. Her hands wouldn’t even assume the shape of fists. This had started right after the rain fight, when she had finished occupying the food depository, and Alyssa still wasn’t convinced Mouth wasn’t pulling some weird joke.
“You know I wouldn’t joke about weapons,” Mouth said. “I don’t know what’s going on with me, but it’s probably temporary.”
Alyssa sighed and sank into a rattan chair, which was already flaking apart. “This is all my fault. I should have stuck to my original idea and opened a shop. You would have come around after a while. I feel like I threw away a one-time opportunity to start over, try something different.”
“What kind of shop, though? You never said.” Mouth sat down next to her.
“We could have opened a restaurant, like Ahmad, or that Barney guy.” Alyssa laughed. “Or a brewery. Or an antique store, after how much experience we had moving rare goods. Whatever. Something we could grow old doing. Instead, I decided we needed some excitement, and I wanted to help you reconnect with your long-lost nomads.”
Mouth shrugged. “Everybody made choices. You already know my regrets.”
“I just got blindsided by all my nostalgia for the old times, with the Chancers, once I was actually living here again. I wanted to recapture my glory days as a happy arsonist. And now we’re supposed to keep fighting for the Perfectionists, and you can’t even defend yourself with a toothpick.”
Right on cue, both their pagers went off, with a brand-new symbol that Mouth had never seen before: gnarled in on itself, like a sea-snake. Alyssa had to look this glyph up in the list they’d been given, and then she gasped. “Oh shit. We’re being summoned to the White Mansion.”
She jumped to her feet, and Mouth followed. While Mouth was pulling the door open, Alyssa handed her a small dark shape, so casually that Mouth couldn’t even tell what Alyssa was offering at first. The gun slipped out of Mouth’s hand and thudded to the floor. Alyssa cursed. At least the gun’s safety was on, so nobody got another new bullet wound.
* * *
Mouth had never been to the White Mansion, or even walked near it, because they didn’t appreciate loitering in this part of town. But the barbed spikes of the iron fence, the huge marble courtyard, and the ten garrets, each with a window large enough to drive the Couriers’ sled through, stirred Mouth even more than she’d expected, with a mixture of awe and disgust.
They’d torn down a dozen tenement buildings, with over a thousand people living in them, to make room for just this one pile, which they’d painted bright enough to throw reflected sunlight in your face.
“I just hope there are snacks,” Alyssa said, punching Mouth’s arm. “I was a kid when this place was still under construction, and I can’t wait to see the inside. But there better be fried oysters, or I’m burning the whole thing down.”
“You probably shouldn’t talk about arson here,” Mouth muttered.