Escaping death made me giddy as we snuck back into the Balcony Cliffs, and Borne giddy because he saw me being that word and because I was trying to distract him from his pain. If pain he felt; he wouldn’t tell me if it hurt.
Life took on a bright and shining glow after being so newly almost dead. I was also giddy with a kind of don’t-care anger because I had stumbled upon a secret when we had finally gone down to the factory floor, one I had to bring back to Wick because it belonged to him.
Down those drab corridors we walked tall and then would be bent over with guffaws—which is how I knew I was my father’s daughter, for that was his way, too. To be “doubled over” with his laughter or his grief. For during the trek back, Mord had gone in our estimation from “spectacular” to “buffoonish,” his star-blotting the work of a clumsy, maniacal floating bear.
“Whoever heard of a floating bear?” I told Borne. “That’d be like finding a plant that was actually a talking octopus.”
Borne latched on to a word he hadn’t heard before. “Buffoon!” he said with enthusiasm. “Foon buff! Buffalo balloon!” I knew that word would distract him, that he would be turning it over in his head for a few minutes at least, wouldn’t be thinking about the bears, just mutating “buffoon” until it was unrecognizable.
“Yes,” I said. “Buffoon.” Sobering a bit. Joking around with my friend Borne, who seemed no different after having moved out. Who had saved my life and his own, and suffered in the process.
“Buffaloon.”
It’s not that Borne wasn’t genuine. No, he was always genuine. But he took his cues from me, had been learning how to react from me primary, and the world and books secondary. And I was determined that, for a few hours at least, Borne being hurt wouldn’t mean being defeated.
If I hadn’t been giddy, Borne wouldn’t have expressed a “headlong happiness.” He wouldn’t have danced up to Wick by the swimming pool, danced around Wick on that nimble set of cilia—or taken it into his head to “get shallow,” as he put it, and spread out his body weight before surging up the wall and halfway up the cathedral-like ceiling, there to peer down through star eyes, as he replicated the night sky once more.
“Hello, Wick,” Borne said from the ceiling. “Hello, Wick. I brought you a present. Rachel had me bring you a present. Hello, Wick.”
We had burst in on Wick with such bravado that I hadn’t noticed how drunk Wick was, either on minnows or the more banal rotgut moonshine he traded for. But he was giddier than we were, and though I sensed danger in that, I was also too wired to care. We had made it back to the Balcony Cliffs. We were safe.
“Wick, this is Borne. Borne, this is Wick,” I said.
I had some stupid idea in the back of my head that Wick could look at Borne’s wounds. But what was Wick? A doctor? A veterinarian?
“We’ve met,” Wick said. “We’ve talked. We’re practically brothers now.” A hint of something dark and self-deprecating in his tone.
“Yes, Rachel! I know Wick. Wick knows me. I went over and was neighborly. I went over and said hi to him after I moved into my new apartment.”
That brought me up short, Borne much too pleased about being neighborly.
“In fact, Rachel,” Wick said, “Borne already seemed to know a lot about me before we even talked.”
“Yes, Rachel talks about you all the time, Wick.”
“So I gathered.”
My giddiness was evaporating.
I was just standing there, unable to believe that one of the things I’d covered with my giddiness—the anxiousness of two un-alike chemical compounds coming into contact for the first time—wasn’t the first time.
Wick and Borne knew each other. Wick and Borne had talked. It felt like a betrayal, as if Wick had done something behind my back—even worse, that Borne had, though that was ridiculous. What could I have wanted more than for Wick and Borne to talk to each other, to find a way to get along?
“What’ve you brought me, my friend?” Wick said, staring up at Borne and ignoring my surprise. “Have you brought me a very late lunch? Have you brought me spare parts? Have you brought me something else from the Company?” Wick was wearing mismatched flip-flops too large for him and plaid shorts and a white undershirt with a green smudge on it. He had probably been about to go to sleep.
“Claaaaaaaaaaaw,” Borne said. “I bring claaaaaaaaaaaaaaw.” With a showman’s flourish, a pseudopod sproinged out from his flat body, much to Wick’s discomfort—he started, took a step back—while the stars withdrew and Borne’s normal eyes dotted his surface. The tentacle thus extended did indeed offer up to Wick: claw.
Wick just looked at the proffered claw and I shuddered, seeing the blood-splashed factory floor all over again. Claw was almost as long as someone’s forearm and fearsomely curved and ended in a point both broad and sharp.
“What. Is this?” Wick asked, wobbly. “Something from the holding ponds?”
“You know what it is, Wick,” I said. I didn’t like this version of drunk Wick.
“Claaaaaw! Glorious claaaaaaaw. From a Mordbear,” Borne said, and let the claw fall to the stone floor. Pseudopod retracted. Eyes alight with, brimming with, a kind of amusement, or was he bright with pain? “Now I want to expedition the ceiling.”
“‘Explore,’ not ‘expedition,’ Borne.”
There came a smell from him like the salt edge of a wave: clean, crisp, pure. Borne got even “shallower” until he couldn’t have been more than a quarter-inch thick and covered the ceiling.
“Are you marrying the ceiling, Borne?” I asked.
“I’m not married! I’m never getting married!”
“Sure looks like you’re getting married.”
“No! Just tasting. I’m getting tasted today. A lot.”
“Tested.”
“Toasted.”
I knew he was recovering, that somehow going shallow helped, that tasting helped. I could see the scars, the mark of Mord upon him, realized all over again how traumatic the rooftop had been for him, despite his protests that he “would be fine.”
Wick had picked up the claw, was turning it over in his hands as he stumbled to a chair next to his vat of swampy elixirs. The pool was dark tonight, a kind of mumbled bubbling close to its surface, a subdued green glow. Our light came from the fireflies and the lichen on the ceiling, most of which Borne now covered, although all during his exploration he thoughtfully turned on lights in his “face” to compensate.
I pulled up a chair next to Wick. “We had a run-in today. With Mord proxies. It’s why we’re late.”
“I guessed as much—from the claw.” Said as harsh as it sounded, preoccupied.