Faint but powerful evidence of the Magician’s rebirth came to us much closer to home. With a regretful look, Wick told me to go to the northernmost Balcony Cliffs exit and see what now lay beyond it. I knew Wick wanted to distract me, to relieve the ache of Borne’s absence, and to force me out of the emptiness in my head, or otherwise he would have just told me. But I went anyway.
Outside the northern exit, the Magician, or someone, had gathered the three dead astronauts Wick had discarded there, dug them open graves, put one body in each, and put a name on a piece of wood by each: Wick, Rachel, Borne.
Along with a word scraped out in the dirt with a stick: LEAVE.
The Magician’s intel was out-of-date, if she was back and this wasn’t the doing of her underlings or some third party. There were only two of us now in the Balcony Cliffs, and it seemed far emptier than that. But mostly when I saw the graves, I decided the Magician was not a serious person. Until then, even though we were enemies, I think I had at times given her too much credit—taken comfort in the idea that she represented some kind of hope for the future of the city and that after bloodshed and despicable acts might come peace or stability.
As I stood there, a familiar fox appeared from behind a pile of cinder blocks nesting in the moss nearby. But she wasn’t really a fox. In that clear light, she looked like clever abandoned biotech. I thought I could see tiny vestigial arms beneath the fur of her chest. The darting of her gaze was too human.
“Tell the Magician she can fuck off,” I told the fox, although I did not believe the fox came from the Magician. If anything, the fox came from Borne. Or I hoped the fox came from Borne.
The fox gave me a look I suppose I was meant to interpret, but signs and symbols did not interest me.
“Go away,” I said.
The fox cocked her head, appraised me, let out a yip.
“Go away,” I said again.
The fox did something with fur that clearly wasn’t fur but some trick of bioluminescence to resemble fur … and slowly faded, bit by bit, until she had indeed gone away. But only by disappearing in front of me. I thought I heard the pitter-patter of paws receding.
Had she always known how to do that or had Borne taught her?
*
Something in me was tired of how the dead astronauts kept switching their allegiance, of the way these bodies kept being disrespected, had no fixed address or location. In truth, I didn’t want to ever see them again.
So I took the time. I went back inside, found a rusty shovel, came back out, and buried them in those graves, tossed the placards away, rubbed out with my boot the word LEAVE, and said a few words over the ground, which I tried, with moss and pine needles, to make as anonymous as possible so no one would know anyone had been buried there.
“Be at peace,” I told them. “Be at peace now and let no one recruit you for their stupid games.”
When I had first heard the story of the Magician and the strange bird, it had struck me as somehow impressive or important—that it meant something. But it meant nothing.
Especially to a ghost, and that’s what I was then. I was a ghost. I was a ghost. The lines had begun to fray and snap. The fireflies went out in my apartment. The toilet wouldn’t work. We were down to two meals a day. I moved into Wick’s apartment to conserve resources, but eventually his fireflies would go out, too.
Wrote Borne in his journal: “I met a kind fox today. She was following me and I meant to eat her, but she wouldn’t let me, although she apologized nicely. After we had talked for a while, I decided I didn’t want to eat her anyway.”
Wrote Borne in his journal: “My earliest memory is of a lizard pooping on me and ever since I have hated lizards for ruining my first memory. But I also love them because they are delicious.”
Wrote Borne in his journal: “The river isn’t beautiful. It’s toxic. It’s full of poison. I sampled it, tested it. I’ll never swim there, although I think I would like to swim. This entire city seems made to not let me swim anywhere. The river is poison, the wells are mostly dry, the Company ponds are also toxic, no matter what the fox says, and the sea underneath us all dried up hundreds of years ago. I should like a real bath, like children get in books. In an old bathtub with the feet like creatures. What I need is a big bath. A long bath. Bath. Born to bathe. Borne to bath.”
Wrote Borne in his journal: “I know that Rachel says killing is bad. And I know that means I must be bad because what I do sometimes is ‘killing.’ But I cannot stop it, and it feels right, like breathing, and not like killing must feel, and I still can see them inside of me, and talk to them, and they are still who or what they were before, even the lizards, so how can that really be ‘killing’?”
Wrote Borne in his journal: “It is hard to feel as if I am two or three places at once and have to concentrate on talking. It makes me sound like I don’t know the meaning of my words.”
Wrote Borne in his journal: “The world is broken and I don’t know how to fix it.”
*
When I could not find Borne’s journal after a time, I knew Wick had hidden it from me, and I did not mind—was almost grateful. I had memorized everything I could understand, everything in a language I knew. The journal itself did not matter. It could be taken away from me at any time, by anyone. What mattered is what I chose to remember.
Borne’s absence had simplified something in the Balcony Cliffs. It simplified me and Wick, and this made everyday life duller or leeched of some essential, stormy spectrum of color, made me think of myself as not quite alive. I often felt chastened and small and useless. But there was also the moment-to-moment relief of life being closer to what it actually was, with less pretense. Even this might have been an illusion, but everything is a kind of illusion in the end.
We had to create passwords for our identities, because of Borne, that we changed every day, every time we woke up or met each other in the corridor—any time we were parted by sleep or the demands of work. We lived in fear for a while of Borne returning and taking up a disguise once more.
They were silly things, the passwords, the only bright words amongst all the dull words, most of them suggested by Wick—who made it like an extension of the games we played when I brought biotech to him. That I sometimes laughed because of these passwords only made the rest of my days duller.
“Cheese please,” I would say to Wick.
“Goddamn oyster,” he would reply.
“Roosterhead.”
“Mudskipper.”
“Bear-crap bear-print bear-bear.”
“Magician fester cloak.”
Silly, very silly, but by these words we knew we were real—that who we spoke to was real. Even if I didn’t feel real.
Maybe I laughed because the passwords sounded like things Borne would have said.
*