We're Here, page 15
Xe nods and says, “Ah. I thought so. Well, where do you think the worlds come from? Someone makes them, just as someone made our world, our universe, once.”
“And people just make worlds?” I’d never heard of that, but the worlds had to come from somewhere...
“Well,” xe says, “you’ll have to learn how, of course. How to make and finish the making. Most world-makers have a talent, but don’t know how to harness it fully. Monet didn’t just slap his hand in a bucket of finger-paint and invent impressionism.”
I think of the cool slime of finger-painting, the thick pressure of it under my fingernails like dirt and the itch of it drying as rust-brown as old blood in the creases of my fingers, and have to swallow twice to keep from throwing up. If I have to stick my bare hand into pools of paint, there’s no way in hell I can do this.
“Your medium probably isn’t paint, though,” xe continues, “judging from the look on your face. What do you like to do?”
I stare at xem. Xe still doesn’t look at me, which is the only reason I can swallow enough to ask, “Why do you care?”
“This is a job interview.”
Oh. Oh.
Holy shit.
“Since I’m the one interviewing you, I need to figure out what, uh...department you’d be best in. What accommodations you need. You’re autistic, aren’t you?” When I nod, xe adds, “Sensory input is an entirely different world to you, isn’t it? A thousand worlds. Sometimes they’re paradise, and other times they’re Hell. Aren’t they?”
I nod, surprised. Most allistic people don’t understand this. Belatedly, I remember to push my eyebrows up to show my surprise where xe can see it.
“Here’s the job: you find your medium, and you find your worlds, and you create the Doors you want to make. Just because you find a world doesn’t mean you have to open the way to it. And you create wonders and hope and stories for the world-walkers.”
Make what I want to make, the way I want to make it...for other people.
“What if I end up finding a world I want to go to? What if I decide I want to be a world-walker?” Can I even do that? If I’m cracking open all these worlds, I could absolutely find one that doesn’t scrape sensory claws across my gray matter or trigger panic-spiders in my skull, so...
Xe shrugs. “Then we fill out the paperwork and you do that. If there’s a world that’s perfect for you, or a dozen worlds you want to visit, you can. You can even continue to make Doors from your new world if you want. That would be HR’s problem, though.”
Huh. “How do I get paid?”
“If you choose to live outside of the House and need currency, we’ll provide a living wage that allows you to exist comfortably, whatever that is depending on what place on what world you decide to settle. It’s small enough thanks for an invaluable service.
“If you choose to live in the House, we provide room, board, work materials, and a stipend for any fun things you might want. We also barter information and skills for goods between ourselves if there’s something one of us wants. For example, Ms. Alice and Ms. Gertrude are excellent bakers and Mr. W in the penthouse suite makes wonderful clothing. You might want to see if they have anything you’d like to try ...should you take the job.”
I turn my face more fully into the rug. The plush blueness caresses my cheek, a sapphire embrace that pushes away some of the biting confusion and lets me think. Wages, a place to live, my cats, food, even clothes.
“What about insurance?” I mumble.
“You mean medical, dental, that sort of thing?” Xe asks. I nod, then remember xe isn’t looking at me, but before I have to figure out how to verbalize something, xe says, “We provide insurance. When something is needed, we simply open a Door to a world with standardized universal healthcare and a charming lack of bigotry. They do exist, though they’re rare.”
Huh.
“What if I want to leave?”
“You mean quit? You’d have to put it in writing and give us a month’s notice, like any decent place. Similarly, we have to give you a month’s notice before termination.”
“Do I have to talk to people?” I can talk to people on good days, usually. But bad days, when I’m overstimmed and feel like every word is a chunk of granite bashing against my skull, I can’t handle conversation, or words, or noises.
Xe shrugs. “Only if you want to. We do need status updates every two weeks on worlds discovered and approximate number of Doors made, but you can submit those in writing or via recording or whatever way works best for you. We try to keep track of the different worlds, their names, what they’re like. Mx. Kathryn and Ms. Susanna in the Archives are in charge of that, you would answer to them. They have a very efficient catalogue system, and they believe in giving fair value for a job well-done.”
Makes sense. But...
I stroke the silky carpet fibers and chew my lower lip. My toes curl in my shoes, scrunching and unscrunching against the comforting press of worn canvas as I fight to swallow noises. I didn’t even know Doors got made, much less made by regular people. I didn’t know someone who isn’t destined to swing a sword through an Army of Evil Undead or fall down a Rabbit Hole could come to a House of Choosing. I didn’t know people could get plucked off the street and brought to a House at my age.
There’s a metric crap-ton I didn’t know before this...job interview, and a metric crap-ton I still don’t know. Like how to even do what xe is asking me to do. There’s a reason I don’t draw or whittle or embroider anymore, besides being broke; I’ve got jacked up hands that shake at all the worst times. How am I supposed to make an interdimensional portal?
But...everything has been so impossibly good, so accommodating in a way I’d never have imagined before this. So maybe...
If you don’t disclose, you can’t ask for accommodation...
My knuckles pop like Rice Krispy cereal in milk when I dig my fingers hard into the plush sapphire under me and I manage to gasp out, all in a rush, “What if I can’t figure out how to make a Door?”
Xe smiles. “I’m glad you asked. We offer paid training, and there are a thousand and one ways to make a Door. Would you like to try now, to see if you can figure out a way that works best for you?”
I shove my face into the thick fur of the rug to help soothe the sudden spike of my panic, the echoes of can’t do it, can’t do it, can’t do it.
“Okay.” It’s muffled, but xe understands.
“Look up at the ceiling.”
I turn my head enough that if I roll my eyes, I can see the white vault overhead. It’s blank, an empty expanse. It feels like it shouldn’t be, but I’m not sure why. It’s just annoying to me. Like a piece of grit stuck to the bottom of my sock.
“Now, try to find the place you saw before. The place you felt in the rug you’re lying on. Worlds are found in the smallest sensory details. The crack of ice in water, the flicker of silver-painted lashes, the waving tendrils of an anemone. Try to remember what you were feeling before.”
What I was feeling before? It’s not hard. I can still feel the rug under me. It’s still stroking cobalt fronds over my skin in tickling whispers. When I close my eyes I can see the silver-furred leaves and the giant skyscraper trunks, the dusky light as thick as syrup and the malachite sky spangled by aquamarine and indigo stars. The air tastes sweet and crisp and cool, I want to drink it, and the world is so quiet. There’s only the soft sigh of the wind, hollow and fluting and distant.
“Cast it onto the canvas.”
I shouldn’t know what that means. It doesn’t make sense, there is no canvas. But since I’m focusing on the way the leaves feel against my cheek, the glass-slick smoothness of the bark under my fingertips, I don’t even think about it, I just do it so xe will stop talking and let me focus on the perfume of the golden buds just beginning to crack open on one of the boughs. I flick out my hand like I’m tossing something into the garbage.
“Do it again.”
I lean against the smooth tree and feel the faint, fuzzy crackle like television static against my skin, like snuggling a balloon. I used to do that, I remember vaguely. When I was little, before my parents made me stop. I wanted to enjoy the light popping fuzz of it. I flick a hand again, but I’m focused on that velvety buzz and tingle.
“A good beginning, especially for a first attempt,” xe says.
My eyes snap open. The forest is gone. I’m back in the white room with the black floor and the blue rug and I can see, hovering a few inches off the ground against the alabaster backdrop of the ceiling, a ghostly image of a Door. Dark, glossy wood like the ocean on a moonless night, bound and chased in silver, carved with towering trees and many-petaled flowers. What in the absolute hell...?
“It’ll need to be firmed up before it can be opened, but I was right. You’re a world-maker. The sheer force behind your enjoyment of the world you find or create, your need to experience parts of it, allows you to make the Door.”
I don’t say anything. I just stare at the phantom Door. In it, I can see the trees, smell those golden flowers just beginning to open, taste the evening air. It’s beautiful, and...
And I did that. I made that. Me. And it didn’t even hurt.
“For me, it’s when I do makeup. Once I start painting my own face, I find a place in the colors, beyond the edges of the world,” xe says. “And I want to see more of it, touch all of it. So I do. And while I paint it on my face in swirls of powder and cream, I paint the Door, too.”
I smooth my fingers over the silky tufts of blue. The seed of an entire, brand new world, and I opened the way to it.
“For some of us, it’s color. For some, it’s food, or perfumes, or flowers, or music. We see the world in a grain of sand, a tuft of swan’s down, a blade of grass. I think for you...I think it can be anything you want, as long as it thrills your senses.”
I’ve gotten lost in sensation before. For minutes, even hours sometimes. I’ve lost hours just watching a fire dance, or feeling hot water rolling in glorious spills down my back in the shower, or listening to rain tinkling like silver chimes against the windows, or flapping my hands through mountains of snow-white sweet-scented foaming soap, or pressing my nose into the velvet petals of a rose in full scarlet bloom. I’ve found worlds in there before, places of safety and beauty and rest.
Places of rest. I am so tired all the time, and so sick of having to worry. I want to escape, to sink into a place of safety and beauty and rest. I want to give that to other people and help them escape, too.
I want to rest, and to create, and to be happy.
I look at xem.
“When can I start?”
A TECHNICAL TERM, LIKE PRIVILEGE
Bogi Takács
I get home and the rental needs to drink my blood. Again, always, the fourth time this week and it’s only Wednesday. I strip off my top, undershirt. I’m not going to take off my pants, I don’t care what the rental thinks. Does it think?
I think it only feels, feels a deep resentment of humans living inside its caverns, its air bubbles. Housebeasts have sensory nerve endings on the inside, feel us tickling them as we live our petty lives, squeeze us for blood.
The life of flesh is in the blood, the preachers say. The housebeast doesn’t need my blood, type O, good for transfusions. It needs the magic. But most people, their magic is sparse, less heavily invested in their body. The housebeast needs the blood, to squeeze out every drip of sustenance—not from the blood itself but from what it carries.
While tentacles slither around on my skin, while the wall glues itself to me, I wonder for the fifth time what I can do to get out of this. I feel my bone marrow straining to produce more red blood cells. I need a break. The wall grabs a lock of hair, and I know it’s a total loss—I’ll have to cut that one off too. Should’ve just worn a cap, should’ve cut it all short—should, should. I need to call the rental office.
Twelve apartments in this beast, or was it fourteen? The third beast on the block, a student neighborhood. It was all right before the semester started. I don’t know what the new students are doing, but the beast needs so much more magic now. Are people puking in the disposal-holes? Trying to squeeze out broadband from the beast-nerves?
The worst part of it is, it feels good while the beast drinks. It needs me, yes, but I can feel that it loves me. It wants to keep me close.
I stagger away from the wall, rubbing my bruised skin, crashing onto the sofa, staining the cover. Too tired to take a shower, but at least we’ll have enough water pressure now. My hand is searching for the receiver, and it helpfully pops out, shakes drips—of what, synovial fluid?—off of itself. I groan into the receiver, ask for the rental office.
“Yes, I understand it needs the magic. Yes, I understand these were the terms when I signed. I was”—I take a heavy breath—“just wondering if it needs to be so... direct. I mean, I can give it magic without the blood. I can do that.”
I scratch the side of the receiver with a stubby fingernail. It squirms. I’m too faint to understand the explanation from the chirpy person on the other end of the line in an office somewhere nearer the head. But it’s a no—it’s always a no. “The contracts aren’t written with someone like you in mind, you have to understand,” but heck, they need me if they want to keep the beast going. Maybe they should recruit from the Department of Applied Magic and not from, I don’t know, engineering students.
Then again, I didn’t go into magic either. That shit is for the highborn.
I fall asleep, wake a few hours later. I am late with my homework in Entirely Useless Studies, but I can’t muster the enthusiasm. A graduate degree, yes. Your fellowship will pay your tuition, yes. But all the money I get from teaching on the side goes into renting this room that I couldn’t even call a cavern. And the food, the iron supplements lately, those cheap industrial hotdogs pushed out by a factorybeast. I hear some of the highborn mages are vegetarian, and I wonder how they swing it. I need to get another twelve-pack of eggs, low-cost protein. I wonder if I could raise chickens without the rental office noticing. Is chicken feed cheaper than eggs? Chickens smell though. I wonder how long I’d last before I roasted them on a spit—live for today, don’t mind tomorrow.
By the heavens, I’m hungry. I rub my face, but that doesn’t summon food. I find my last hotdog in the cooling pouch. I eat it cold, can’t wait out the minute to warm it up. I need to shower. I need to go. I saw this flyer on campus, and maybe it can be just the thing.
I run my fingers along the words. I feel scrubbed. The hot water was great in the shower—never mind it took my blood and sweat to boil it.
ONWARD TO ARMS! FOR THE REVOLUTION!
The Communards of Szederkei County invite YOU to our Campus Meetings...
The address is off campus but close by. Some university official probably ousted them. No one wants to deal with a bunch of rabble-rousers, well, except the rabble-rousers like me. I crunch the leaflet back into the pocket of my robe.
Two tall, pale dudes are by the door, and I feel acutely scrawny. Possibly also insufficiently cis. But that’s not what they complain about. At least, I think it’s not that, though one never knows really.
One of them fingers my pendant, and I flinch from the touch. I had too much touch today already, even if not the human kind.
They say something about no mages—and I can’t quite make it out, I’m worse off than I’d thought—and I get into a debate with them. One of them just keeps on repeating that mages are a privileged class. As if that was some technical term, and for all I know, it is.
“You can do something other people can’t. That’s a privilege.”
I can’t even muster a glare. I feel like I can’t do anything because I’d been sucked dry of every last drop of blood. And I can’t argue well either because what, I mean, he’s technically right. I can do things other people can’t.
I walk away wordless, but a debate rages in my head. All the highborn mages, that’s privilege. But why can’t I. I mean I can. Maybe it’s just that I’m a failure. I wanted to pick myself up by my bootstraps, get a fellowship, study Useless Studies—I mean mathematics. (I actually love it. When I can keep my eyes straight to stare at a page.) Get into fights with engineering students, grow up, get into grad school, stop getting into fights. Moan about engineering students and how they vomit into every available receptacle after a night of drinking and more fights. All while I need to make sure the housebeast has enough energy to digest all that crap. I’m sure I did the same as a first-year, but that was before the rental hikes, before grad students got pushed out of on-campus housing.
I was better at fights, to be honest. Still not late for a career as a cage fighter maybe, but I value my brain cells, and I can’t afford the protective enchantments.
Rika stares at me over their bagged lunch: a sandwich of what, bread and cheese probably. They’re looking tired today, colorful hair hidden in a hastily wrapped scarf, their skin patchy pink. “Stop thinking about witty repartee,” they say.
I shake my head. I’ve been thinking of so many rejoinders. I could’ve yelled at those people that I was trans, but if they didn’t guess, wasn’t that also privilege? What if they did guess? It wasn’t like I could quiz them. “How did you know?” I ask Rika.
“It’s all over your face,” they chuckle, their voice dry. “Staircase wit, it’s called. You come up with it when you’re already walking down the stairs.”
“Well yeah, other buildings have staircases. Mine has an esophagus.”
“You could unionize.” They just toss that out there as if that was so easy.
“What, a renters’ union?” I’m laughing.
“Exactly that.” They’re frustrated with me, I can feel. Their mind vibrates. They put down the sandwich and lean forward. “I’m not studying sociology because it’s so good. I’m studying it because I want to beat them at their game.”
A blanket them that can cover everyone. From greedy landlords to Revolutionary Communards.
