Squinting through my pirate telescope, I’d laugh and reply, “Storage room, ladders, barrels, paper supplies, coffee machine.”
But two rooms later, what would we find but the sculpture of a giant bird. Again, I began to believe that Borne had some kind of radar or sensing organ that went beyond our five senses.
Once, we spied on a room full of useless dead cell phones. Lizards crawled over the heaps of phones, having gotten in from a crack above. But it didn’t hold lizards for long.
Another time, I had a moment of dislocation when I put my eye to a hole Borne had made and was looking at an entire house … a dollhouse, which dominated the room. Nothing in that room but the dollhouse, the disrepair of its five levels mimicking the neglect of the Balcony Cliffs. In that moment we peered in on an entirely different world, one that belonged to a far-distant time and place. I scoured that dollhouse for longer than I should have, given it had no value to us whatsoever.
Bodies were everywhere, but you found those out in the city, too, and these weren’t even dead astronauts, so far gone it was easy to ignore the few husks of bones, the disintegrating skulls, a strand of hair resting atop a rusted-out toy car.
Through our efforts, we gained food packets, a couple of axes for defense, fuel to burn, and even, once, a box in shrink-wrap of a dozen emerald Company-made beetles in crisp metallic rows. Wick cackled when he saw that prize, and maybe for a moment he relented in his disapproval.
A floor, when I spilled water on it accidentally, turned out to be full of writhing alcohol minnows under the surface—much to Borne’s delight, although I had to stop him from gobbling them all up. After that, I would bring along a tiny canteen of water just to moisten surfaces and coax out what lay hidden. Warn Borne to hang back a bit, first, because of his mighty appetite.
Borne liked this “game,” but it was still slow work, because Borne wouldn’t do it continuously for more than a couple of hours at a time, made excuses why he couldn’t work longer—why he had to retreat to his apartment. None of his excuses seemed genuine, but I was too distracted by the chaos beyond our walls. It was like a constant dark spiral in my thoughts, pulling me away from the moment, from whatever I was doing.
Sometimes we talked as we worked, and that made me forget the pressure in my head.
“The first people I saw when I went out yesterday I said hello to and then they threw rocks at me and ran,” Borne told me once. “The next person, a little girl, tried to stab me with a rusty knife and started screaming. After that, I adjusted my disguise again.”
“They might have done the same to me or anyone.” I said it calm, but was trying to push aside my worry for him. I could not mind that Borne now ventured out by himself. I had so very little control over him. Except I could still get him to bore a hole in a wall.
“They’re all afraid of everything,” Borne said. “Especially Mord. But Mord is just a very big bear and the Mord proxies are just bears that are smaller than Mord.” He said this with disdain.
“That’s a dangerous way to think about it,” I said.
“Would they be afraid of me?”
“They’re already afraid of you,” I said. I meant it as a joke, but it came out wrong.
“I know,” Borne said, sad. “That’s the first thing I have to take away—and Wick, he doesn’t say it, but he thinks I’m a freak. A monster. I pass him in the hall and say hello and he says nothing back. He’s no better than the people in the city. Didn’t you give him my salvage?”
I had, dutiful, and said, “These are from Borne,” and it would always be something precious from beyond the walls, something that made flare up within me a momentary gratitude that Borne was foraging in the city. And Wick might say, “Thank Borne for me,” but he wouldn’t be smiling. There were limits to him with Borne, and he’d become paranoid again.
“He knows all our traps, all the passageways,” Wick had said to me. “I had him show me yesterday. He knows everything, Rachel.” Of course he did—that way Borne couldn’t betray us entering or leaving the Balcony Cliffs, but Wick didn’t see it that way.
He didn’t remind me again, but it was in my head: Borne had stripped the Balcony Cliffs of every lizard, every spider, every cockroach, and thus now every extra source of protein that didn’t require foraging outside. So what if his gifts made up for that—they didn’t put us in his debt, by Wick’s reasoning.
“I had an argument with Wick,” Borne said. “He was probably in a bad mood. Then I went back later and tried to tell him I wasn’t what he thought I was.”
“An argument?” I never liked the idea of Wick talking to Borne, or Borne talking to Wick.
“Yes, it’s when two people—”
“I know what an argument is. About what?”
“Oh—things. Lots of things. It’s okay, Rachel. It’s really okay now. I’m making it okay.”
A moment later, he was telling me about nightmares he’d had and asking what they meant. A moment after that, he had become a pair of eyes floating in midair, but that was just him sidling up the wall while changing his skin to the color and texture of the ceiling, to perch there and ask, “Can you see me? Or am I invisible?”
At least I had found something new for Borne and me to do together, something useful, and I rejoiced in that, felt forgiven for trying earlier to educate him with my books.
*
Wick admired my ingenuity, but not the means. He didn’t like Borne’s involvement, didn’t like how our excavations messed up his floor plan, because inevitably this meant the Balcony Cliffs changed, with some corridors we’d left buried now exposed. Any deviation from the floor plan in his mind caused a kind of trauma I didn’t understand.
Yet other times, late at night, Wick would reverse himself, come by my apartment and when we talked show weakness, express admiration for Borne. He seemed in flux, truly conflicted, unwilling to resolve, and he lost focus for me. I found I hated his weakness more than I resented his former resolve, and during these times it was as if he recognized the fact, because he would leave before we could have sex.
He could die, he’d said, without his nautilus pills. But I still didn’t know what the broken telescope meant, or the woman’s face drawn across the head of a giant fish.
Would I ever know?
HOW WE LOST EACH OTHER