“I don’t see much of a library in here.” A vaguely hurt comment, because I felt wrong-footed once more. I had already promised myself I wouldn’t ask him where he’d disappeared to, that to do so was somehow dangerous, but I felt a distance between us I associated with the intermittent beacon that was Wick, not me and Borne. Not the me and Borne that had run up and down the hallways of the Balcony Cliffs when I’d been recovering.
“Oh, the stacks and stacks and stacks. No one needs the clutter. So much clutter. So many things to trip over. I have remembered it all. I read it all. I read everything.”
I tried to think like Borne then: A very large invertebrate only getting larger, who needed room to stretch out. With skin that was more intelligent than mine. He wasn’t human, even if he was a person. He didn’t need what we needed. Which is why he had no furniture. Had it caused him mental anguish to be around so much clutter in my apartment?
“But you must have questions.”
I meant “in general,” but Borne merrily launched into specific questions.
“Oh, yes, questions! How long have humans lived on this planet? And what have they accomplished? I can’t tell. You mentioned ghosts before. Do you believe in ghosts? Do you know if there is still a spaceship somewhere on Earth? There must be a spaceship somewhere, or two or three. Do you ever feel haunted? Do you ever find anything ‘spooky’? Who are ‘we’ and who are ‘them’? Did human beings ever colonize any other planets? How many human beings are still alive on Earth?”
“Those are a lot of questions, Borne,” I said. I wasn’t sure which to answer first, or what my answers might be. The books I’d brought him were of little help, not appropriate for what Borne needed—or needed from me.
“I’ve been haunted by them.” Hauntings came up a lot with Borne once he wasn’t a “child” any longer. I would come to realize a haunting meant something different to him. The landscapes he traversed looked nothing like what I saw, might to me seem like a bombardment of senses I couldn’t even imagine.
“Who?”
Borne swiveled his turret toward the dead men on the wall, shone a mist-like magenta light upon them. “Them. But not as ghosts … I see it, I taste it. All the contamination. The low-level radiation, the storage sites, the runoff. Every place is sick—there’s sick everywhere. I estimate I expend eighteen lizards a day keeping it off of me. It makes me be sure of my self every moment and keep track of my self.”
I had looked forward to having adult conversations with Borne, and now I didn’t want them. I didn’t even quite understand what conversation we were having, and I didn’t want to be reminded of the ways my body was being tested every day in the city.
But I tried twice more. First, I shared a schedule I had come up with, a schedule that, day by day, turned from one subject to the next. Basic math, language arts, hard science, soft science. It even included music and philosophy.
Borne examined the piece of paper in his nub of a pseudopod; he hadn’t even done me the courtesy of extending a full tentacle but made me get up and hand it to him.
“Hmmph,” Borne said. “Hmmph.” Outsize, hammy acting. Satirical sounds. He also hadn’t made any effort to appear to be reading the sheet, but I knew he had. This was Borne being rude on purpose.
“What’s wrong?”
“Borne plays the piano. Borne dances. Borne sings. Borne recites poetry. Is that what you want? While I’m doing other, more important things, I guess part of me could do that for you. I guess I could find a way if it’s something you want.” Said in a flat, irritated tone that must have been as much an attempt at learning the inflections of my language as the words themselves.
“But it’s for you! It’s something for you, so you can learn.” Not for me. Never for me. Not even for the memory of a schoolgirl in a far-distant city, in music class, in a fancy restaurant, playing on a real playground and dreaming of being a writer.
“I’m learning every day, Rachel,” Borne said in exasperation, as if I could not see the most obvious things. “I read and sample and observe every day. It is what I do.”
It is what I do.
I pointed to the globe of the world, tried one last time. “Can I at least teach you about that?”
This caught his interest, and he pulled the globe over, held it up in his muscular tentacles, hoisting it like it was a paper mobile. For the first time I thought of him as not just strong but formidable.
“This place looks rocky, and I’d like to climb a mountain someday, and then down here are all of these lakes. Can you imagine it, Rachel? So many lakes. We have no lakes here at all. No lakes. I’d like to see a lake. Even a lake as a lark. I’d like to see a lark, too.”
He began to excitedly ask specific questions about cities, about countries, about regions. But those places, most all of them, didn’t exist anymore with those boundaries, or those countries had been absorbed by other countries and then those larger countries had dissolved into anarchy and lawlessness and become smaller cells once again. Most of the cities had burned, in my recollection—were the kinds of places my parents never taught me about because it cost them too much to do so.
Borne acted as if he’d been trying to solve a problem that had already been solved for us long ago, and I couldn’t help him with that, didn’t want to revisit it.
*
Finally, I stopped. I just stopped. The more I tried, the more Borne was becoming distant, disengaged, and the more I began to be taken aback by his stubborn refusal and on some level insulted by it. I had come here to educate Borne, but if I was honest I wanted to make sure I stayed close to him.
Yet I also wanted Borne to be “normal,” to fit in, to be like a normal “boy.” I wanted this desperately, especially after the events of the past few days. And it struck me, too, that maybe I hadn’t kept up, that maybe it wasn’t just Borne’s physical growth that had accelerated but his mental growth, too. That, with no time to adjust, I still saw him as a child. That giant eye. That silly turret.
Which led to my surrender, which led to my next question: “What can I do for you then, Borne? There must be something.”
No more turret, but once again the upside-down vase design, the Borne Classic. He contracted so that my stool was pulled closer and closer to the ring of eyes, and his skin was like an electric storm at twilight, with shocks of lightning manifesting as silver cracks in his skin and a mottled darkness of deep, deep green sliding into black but also a startling glimpse of blue, as of a boat floating over clear water. The smell of him was sickly sweet then, like brandy mixed with crispy waffles lathered in butter and syrup.
“There is one thing, Rachel,” he said. “One thing you said you’d do. Something you promised you would do.” There was a pleading quality to his tone.
“Yes?” I nudged.
“You could check the places I can’t feel anymore. You could tell me what’s happening there.”
And I was struck dumb by the depths of my thoughtlessness.
*