I don’t know where Borne went the day he was missing, or in what disguise. I don’t know if it even matters other than the stress it put on me, a mother’s worry, or if that was the moment—the moment of inattention that caused all of the rest to go off course. All I know is he came back safe, and greeted me like nothing had happened and he had just stepped out for an hour.
But I wanted to make it up to Borne, and I wanted to do it by teaching him things more formally, so that he would know what stars were and what the sun was—the way my parents used to teach me even when there was no school, no dinner, no fancy restaurant. Because I still had what they had given me—rituals, values, knowledge—their way of preparing me for a hopeful future.
I’d lost all my possessions when I came to the city, but in my scavenging I’d found another biology book. It didn’t have foldouts and there were fewer illustrations, but some of the art reminded me of the book I’d loved. I thought I’d give it to Borne, along with books on other topics. But the other books were camouflage, really, for what was personal to me.
*
Borne had locked the door of his new apartment, but why I tried to turn the knob rather than knock first, I don’t know. Maybe because it seemed to have no biotech defending it. When I did knock, Borne didn’t answer right away, and I thought maybe he was out, and I had a startled moment imagining him back out in the city before I heard a muffled “Coming!” and “I’ll be right with you,” and then the door swung open and he hustled me in with a curling tentacle, and him so familiar to me I didn’t mind the strength around my waist, reeling me in.
So there I was in his apartment, a place he’d “made” himself, me clutching my books and trying to fend off images conjured up by Wick’s words two nights ago. It was a single room, very large, though, as if he’d torn out a dividing wall, even if I could see no evidence of such destruction. I smelled fresh paint, though that was nearly impossible, and an underlying scent of lilac that he had no doubt wanted to be the overlying scent.
“Sit down,” he said. “Sit down.”
But he had no furniture, just an empty space, a bare floor, a huge globe of the world in one corner, like you used to find in old libraries, and a closet in the other corner, a cache of little plastic children’s records spilling out from under it. He played them by forming a needle from his cilia and rotating the record. I could never hear anything, but apparently he did.
I sat on a stool made of him and between us was a carpet made of him that felt like the underneath of a bath mat … with a turret of him facing me so I’d feel comfortable. The turret wore a huge smile and had a big, goofy blue eye right in the top of it.
Although I had come to educate him, I also wished I could help him decorate his apartment, because the only things on the walls were the three “dead astronauts” we’d happened across our first time out, hanging from hooks.
The sight got our conversation off on the wrong foot. It made me cold all over, seeing those dead skull faces through the smashed glass. As if Borne had brought something deadly into our home.
“What are those doing there, Borne?” They did loll, they did sag, the faces looking down at the floor. Those were three dead bodies on the wall, three skeleton corpses.
“Oh, the dead astronauts? The fox said I needed to jazz up the place. I needed to give it some pizzazz, some oomph.”
I was rendered speechless by so many parts of what he’d said. Foxes. Dead astronauts. Least of all, jazz, pizzazz, oomph—three words he never should have used outside of the books he found them in. But that wasn’t the point.
“They’re not dead astronauts. The fox told you what?”
“Never mind,” Borne said. “It was a joke. I was joking. Now, what did you come over for? How can I help you.”
How can I help you?
“Those are three dead skeletons on the wall, Borne.”
“Yes, Rachel. I took them from the crossroads. I thought they would look nice in here.”
Gaping, gaunt, one torn suit for each of us. When had he taken them? What traps had he set off and how had he survived them?
“They’re dead people, Borne.”
“I know. They’re definitely not living in there anymore. The dead astronauts have gone away. There’s nothing to read in them.” The big eye in the turret had gotten small, intensely focused, growing out on the end of a delicate tendril to wander and wisp in front of me. I could have reached out and patted Borne on the eyeball if I’d wanted to.
“It’s ghoulish,” I said.
“Ghoulish,” he said, savoring, making it sound like goulash. “You mean like ghosts? Like being haunted?”
“No.”
“I promise you, there’s no one here,” Borne said, touching the suits, making them rock a little in their harnesses. “… Have I done something wrong, Rachel?”
I tried to adjust to the dead astronauts on the wall. Borne would not stop calling them dead astronauts, which means I must have called them that around him, and so their history was set. But the straight-up unimportant truth was that it irritated me that Borne had moved the dead astronauts to decorate his apartment, because that meant the intersection would be so much harder to identify next time.
“No, you haven’t done anything wrong. But I know that some people might be offended by you hanging dead people on the wall.” As if the Balcony Cliffs was full of other tenants.
“They look peaceful to me, Rachel. They seemed lonely. I think someone had put them at the crossroads, Rachel. I think some bad people had put them there. Now I have rescued them. Now they’re safe, I think.”
Safe and still dead.
“Borne, I hate to ask, but can you promise me you’ll put them away at least, in the closet?”
“The closet is full.” But something he read in the expression on my face made him volunteer to get rid of the astronauts, so he added, “I’m sure I can find something better.”
I didn’t inquire as to what “better” meant, and he never did remove the dead astronauts.
*
I could give Borne no semblance of a standard education because we had only what I could find in the Balcony Cliffs because who would risk salvage time to bring back books? So I showed him the biology text. I lied and told him that I had gotten it from my parents, and I wanted him to have it. That maybe we could go through the book together.
The tendril had withdrawn and the big eye floated above the big smile once more. Borne was a kind of sibilant blue-green, seemed almost to reflect the waves of a sea he’d never seen, as if the water and surf were washing over him.
“That’s kind, Rachel,” Borne said. “I do appreciate it—so much. But I’ve already read all of the books in the Balcony Cliffs. I’ve read them all and I think that might be enough for me to have read rather than to have lived.”