Greywaren, page 11
But as the hours passed and the portrait grew even more finished, there was still a difference between Jordan in White and Farooq-Lane, Burning—according to the mouse, only one of them was a sweetmetal. The mouse continued to lay motionless on the worktable beside Hennessy’s sword, which Farooq-Lane had left there while Hennessy was meeting with Jo Fisher.
Hennessy took a different tack, returning to the preliminary sketches. It was easy to lose the life of a piece in the finished brushstrokes. Maybe she needed to return to the raw power of the early line work.
The mouse continued to sleep.
She’d painted Jordan in White in a frenzy, improving the accuracy of her mother’s work; maybe she needed to improve the likeness of Farooq-Lane, Burning. She redid the face. She improved the texture of the blouse. She reworked the background.
The mouse continued to sleep.
Hennessy was amused, first, at how it escaped her.
Then she was puzzled by how she couldn’t figure it out.
Then she was frustrated as she exhausted all her ideas.
And finally, she was just angry.
Why was this something she could do as a kid, when she had almost no skill, and not now, when she knew so much more? Did the art not have enough pain in it? Was it actually her mother’s brushstrokes beneath Hennessy’s work that had made Jordan in White a sweetmetal?
Hennessy began to throw things. First a tube of paint. Then a brush. Then her palette, then papers, then stools.
The tantrum didn’t feel good exactly, but it felt not bad, so she kept at it, until she looked up and realized she was no longer alone in the basement.
Farooq-Lane stood, her arms crossed, managing to look somehow business-meeting-ready in her silk pajamas. Liliana looked disheveled and comforting with a blanket around her shoulders like a robe.
In a hollow voice, Farooq-Lane said, her voice froggy with sleep, “Hennessy, it’s four thirty a.m.”
Was that all? It was longer to dawn than Hennessy had imagined. She said, “Darkness is the time when the innovative work, while the wretched, mundane world is sleeping—”
Farooq-Lane flipped a hand at her to shut up. She stepped over the clutter to rescue a tube that was leaking a small worm of green paint onto the concrete floor. “No. No, you’re not doing a monologue. Shut up.”
In a sweet, sleepy voice, Liliana asked Hennessy, “What’s wrong, dear?”
Farooq-Lane held her hand up again. “No. Do not answer her. Don’t say anything. Do not do anything. Do not move.”
She turned on her heel to climb back upstairs, leaving Liliana and Hennessy together. Liliana sank to the bottom stair, still wrapped in her blanket cape, waiting patiently until Farooq-Lane marched back downstairs with an unopened package of index cards in one hand and a permanent marker in the other. She took her time peeling the plastic off the cards and locating a trash can to throw it away in, an act of rebellion among the trashed basement. Finally, she slapped both cards and marker on the worktable next to Hennessy.
She said, “This is a process I used to do with some of my clients. You’re not allowed to speak. I am going to ask a question and you’re going to write or draw an answer to it on a card. You can think about the answer as long as you like, but you only have ten seconds to write it down.”
Hennessy wasn’t in the mood for a craft project. “Why shou—”
“No,” Farooq-Lane said. “Don’t say anything. Don’t break the rules. This is unacceptable, and you know it. Sit down and shut up, or it’s over, this whole experiment. I’ll turn you in for industrial vandalism and you can deal with the real world’s law. We are trying to establish whether or not the entire world is going to end, and I do not have the patience for any more of this.”
Hennessy sat down. She shut up.
Righting a toppled, grimy lawn chair, Farooq-Lane leaned on the back of it. She would not have liked to hear it, but her pose was identical to her portrait. She asked, “First question: Who are you?”
Hennessy signed her name on a card and then displayed it like an infomercial. Big, goofy smile. Big, goofy body movements.
Liliana laughed gently, encouragingly.
Farooq-Lane did not. “Second question: What is it you’re trying to accomplish down here?”
This puzzle was harder. The concept of painting a sweetmetal to wake up the Moderators in the storage facility was too long to write in ten seconds, so instead, she hastily drew two versions of the dreamt mouse, one asleep, one alert. She couldn’t bear to not show off, so she hurriedly dabbed her finger in her wet paint palette and swiped a broad, thin swath of paint across the card for the mouse’s body before hurriedly suggesting the finer details with the marker.
“Very pretty,” Liliana murmured.
Farooq-Lane just frowned. “And why do you think you can manage that?”
Because she seemed to have managed it before, when she was a kid. Before she’d spent a decade learning how to paint like any old master in any museum, becoming the greatest forger on the East Coast. Because it felt like if she couldn’t do it now, she truly had given that girl’s promising adulthood to Jordan and kept only her shitty past for herself.
She wasn’t going to tell Farooq-Lane that. She wrote: I did it before.
Farooq-Lane went on, relentlessly. “Do you care about this mouse? Is that why you threw all this stuff, because the mouse itself is important to you?”
Hennessy longed to deliver a flippant response to this, but she just glanced at the little mouse’s sleeping body and shook her head.
“And do you actually care about waking up the Moderators?” Farooq-Lane asked. “Be genuine.”
She was startled to realize she didn’t care why they’d killed her girls. It wouldn’t bring them back. And it wasn’t like they could do anything else to her, trapped in a storage facility, sleeping. Grief extinguished any curiosity.
Hennessy shook her head.
“So why are you actually upset about this?”
Hennessy shook her head again.
“That wasn’t a yes or no question,” Farooq-Lane said. Her mouth was a sharp, unforgiving line.
Now Hennessy longed to bury her in a monologue. This was exactly a place words were called for. A treatise on binaries, perhaps, a prattling, unwinding lecture on the beauty of ambiguities. A drowning pool of meaningful words so tightly packed they became meaningless.
Because she could not deliver a monologue, she had to think about the answer.
Why had she trashed the basement? She had a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman on the easel, so it wasn’t about the quality of her work. It wasn’t about waking Jordan up, because Jordan seemed to have managed that all by herself. It wasn’t about waking up the mouse, it wasn’t about waking up the Moderators. It wasn’t about a hypothetical end of the world.
Her world had already ended.
Jordan had left her. And Jordan had been right. She was like her mother. Just as Jay’s actions were outsized cartoons to keep Bill Dower’s attention, Hennessy had visited caper after caper on Jordan to try to make sure she never, ever left. When pain and anguish were lifted from Jordan’s shoulders, she made a new life. When pain and anguish were lifted from Hennessy’s, there was nothing of her left. She was nothing but the shit other people stepped in.
Jordan was the real Jordan Hennessy.
Jordan was always trying to make herself better, and Hennessy was always trying to keep from being unhappy. Jordan was succeeding at her task and Hennessy was drowning. She’d lost her childhood ability to make art that kept people awake. She’d probably killed Ronan Lynch by shutting down the ley line.
Jordan had escaped her, and Hennessy was glad for her.
“Hennessy,” prompted Farooq-Lane.
As her eyes burned, Hennessy swiped a thin, bleeding splash of red on one of the index cards, and then, with the marker, suggested the lines needed to show that it was an anatomical heart, bleeding paint. Beneath it, she just had time to jot angrily: OF FUCKING COURSE.
Her heart was broken, that was why she was really upset, her heart was broken, broken, broken because Hennessy wanted so badly to be as good at living as Jordan was and she never even got close. She flicked the index card across the table at Farooq-Lane.
The mouse woke up.
Matthew woke up.
He was mad.
He never dreamt, so the space between when he fell asleep in the tunnel and opened his eyes again was blank. Absolutely blank. Just a pause. Time, eaten. Maybe some people might have had a dream, a nice dream, that would have changed their mood. But Matthew just woke up in his bedroom with the still-fresh truth: Declan had stolen the sweetmetal right off his neck.
“Good morning,” Declan said, already leaving the bedroom.
Like nothing had happened! Like it was an ordinary day! Like there was nothing to be ashamed of!
Matthew crashed out of bed to discover an even worse truth: He was still fully dressed. His teeth were furry with unbrushing. Declan had just hauled him up here like a sack of flour and thrown him in bed. Why had he even bothered with that? Matthew wouldn’t know any different if his brother had just left him crumpled in the car. Instead, they were meant to play pretend that Matthew had somehow had a good night’s sleep like a normal person. Ronan had always told Matthew that Declan was a liar, and Matthew had never really listened. What was a fib here and there?
But now he understood. Declan’s lies were big, elaborate, three-dimensional stage plays, featuring Matthew debuting with a bit part.
Good morning! As a form of rebellion, Matthew didn’t bother to change his clothes, only added a heavily patterned bomber jacket he knew Declan didn’t like, and then thumped through Old Man Eyebrows (Matthew’s name for the building) to the living room (Bashful Sloth)(he’d also named the rooms) to see how Ronan was doing, post-tunnel. The couch was empty. Matthew couldn’t think of where else he might be—Old Man Eyebrows only had two bedrooms.
His heart squirreled faster with something that was either gladness (Ronan had woken up! Things would be okay!) or distress (Ronan had woken up and left during the night! Things would never be okay!). He poked his head into Doc Greed, the office, but there was no sign of him there, either.
In Happy Gluttony, he found Declan pouring himself coffee with one hand while rapidly scrolling through an email on his phone with the other. On his laptop, two separate windows displayed two separate inboxes.
“Where’s Ronan?” Matthew asked.
“I took him to a place closer to what he needs,” Declan replied, not looking up.
“What does that mean? Where? You could have brought me.”
Already Matthew was preparing various volleys to whatever excuse Declan might give to this, but Declan wasn’t even paying attention to the conversation. Instead, he had put down the coffee mug and swept up the phone to furiously tap away a response. Then he placed a call and put it to his ear.
“We talked about this,” Matthew said. “You were going to treat me differently! Like—”
“Declan Lynch here. I wanted to follow up immediately on our email chain so we’re on the same page about the priority of the situation. That container should not have my client’s name anywhere on the paperwork. Everything that is associated with that container needs to go through C. Longwood Holdings. I’m sure you understand how you’d feel if your personal home address and children’s names were printed on all of your manifests. It would be unsettling in the least to have perfect strangers know that you have a”—Declan glanced at his laptop where a chat window had popped up—“sister that you haven’t claimed in an assistance center.” He paused. Listened. “I’m glad we could resolve this misunderstanding so quickly. Can I have a tracking number with the new information sent to me so I can update the file? Thank you.”
He hung up, sucked down some coffee, and immediately swiveled to the laptop, all in one smooth motion. He seemed to have completely forgotten Matthew’s interjection. He said, “Get something to eat, get your laptop, and I’ll show you what you’re going to be doing for school.”
Matthew didn’t get breakfast or get his laptop. He squinted out the window, trying to discern what time it was. “Aren’t we late?”
Declan mouthed some words to himself as he typed them into his laptop, and then he said, “I worked out a better solution. I managed to get you enrolled in an online school, which, I know what you’re thinking, it’s accredited, and I got the paperwork in to make sure you can get a diploma from the state.”
This was not what Matthew had been thinking.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,” Declan said, “but of course it’s ideal. You can get the work done in convenient chunks, right here at the apartment, in far fewer hours a week than in-person school. Less drain on your sweetmetal, and you still graduate on time like you wanted.”
Slowly, Matthew was working out what Declan meant. Being awake for just enough time to do the week’s schoolwork, then sleeping through the rest of it.
Even more slowly, he was working out that this must have taken longer than a day to line up. He asked, “How … long has it been since I’ve been awake?”
He felt sick.
Declan’s phone buzzed a text; he tapped a reply with thumb and forefinger.
“Declan,” Matthew repeated. “How long has it been?”
Only then did his brother seem to hear something amiss in his tone, because he blinked up at him. “What? Don’t look at me like that. It’s not forever. I’m working my absolute hardest on negotiating another sweetmetal. Have you eaten anything? I need to get you up to speed on the school interface so we can maximize your time awake today.”
That was when Matthew punched him.
It amazed him, the punch. Not the shape of the blow. Niall had taught all the boys to box when they were much younger, and although Matthew hadn’t used this knowledge since then, it turned out his hands and arms and shoulders still remembered it in some deep, subconscious way.
No, what amazed Matthew about the punch was the fact that it appeared at all. The fact that his hand made a fist and the fist took a journey and the journey ended on Declan’s face. The punch knocked Declan right off his stool and onto his back on the tile floor, fancy brogues pointing at the ceiling light. It knocked the breath right out of him (Matthew heard it) and it knocked the car keys right out of his pocket (Matthew saw it). A second later, his spilled coffee cup rolled off the counter and joined him on the floor with a clatter.
It amazed Matthew that his hand, right after punching Declan, snatched the car keys off the floor. It was like he was a whole different person. It was like he was Ronan.
“How do you like it?!” Matthew shouted daringly.
Sock feet sliding on the floor, he galloped to the door, stopping only long enough to shove his feet into the pair of rubber mud boots Declan kept there to protect his pant legs from dirtier jobs. He heard Declan say, “Matthew, I—”
And then Matthew was out in the biting cold of the morning.
The air was scraping his lungs. His heart was thumping so hard it hurt. He felt as if he were being chased by something far more fearsome than Declan.
What did he think he was going to do? Run away from home? The leash that tied him to Declan was only as long as his sweetmetal’s strength. At the end of the day, Declan was right. Matthew couldn’t do anything without—
Suddenly, Matthew knew where he was going.
With a last glance at the door to make sure Declan wasn’t yet emerging, he got into the car, fumbled until he figured out how to start it (There was no keyhole! Oh, right, a button. That still wasn’t working! Oh, right, foot on brake!). Then he lurched out of the parking lot and down the road.
His phone buzzed. At a stop sign, he risked a glance at it. There was a text from Declan: Do not curb those wheels.
Matthew didn’t answer. Instead, he plugged an address into the map app on his phone and then tried to convince the directions to play over the car’s speakers. He couldn’t figure it out before the cars behind him started honking, so he just rested the phone in his lap and crept along, following its directions.
Another text from Declan: I assume you’re not going far since the car needs gas and you didn’t take my wallet, too.
Matthew didn’t answer this one, either. He just kept winding through Boston traffic. It was easy to tell that the car was Declan’s, because it was clearly still on his side. It kept trying to surprise Matthew so it could run back to its master. It lunged at green lights, hopped over curbs, shuddered to an uneasy, panting stop in difficult intersections. Matthew was quite certain it shifted round the gas and brake pedal at a few points. It certainly played hanky-panky with the gearshift, in his opinion, at one point coasting in neutral into the middle of an intersection and then screaming loudly at all the other vehicles that tried to approach it. It did not seem to like bicycles. It was always plunging at them with a barely heard growl, then rearing back when they gave it the finger.
Matthew was sweating a little.
All the honking was unpleasant, until Matthew realized that if he rolled his window down and smiled apologetically, the drivers would roll down their windows and smile back at him. The bicyclists even forgave him if he shouted, “I don’t know what this car has against bicycles!” at them. As conflicted as Matthew felt about likability being dreamt into him, it came in handy.
Another text from Declan: If you get pulled over without a license you’ll never be able to get one.
For the past several years, Matthew had always felt like the bridge between two buildings—one burning, one standing tall.
After their father had died (been murdered), Ronan had gone a little wild. Before, he used to get sad sometimes, but after Niall died, weirdly, that seemed to go away. Matthew never saw him sad anymore, only ferociously angry or ferociously smiling. Every word now sprang razors. Declan, who had previously seemed quiet, was now gratefully still, an unmoving body for Matthew to sob into, a calm voice to take calls from the school or funeral home or government. Matthew spent more and more time with Declan, especially after Ronan moved out of the Aglionby dorm and into his friend Gansey’s warehouse. The whole time, Declan had quietly explained that Ronan wasn’t a bad person, he was just messed up by Niall dying, so now he was doing his best to ruin his life and also theirs because he thought it would make him feel better. He told Matthew about how Niall had actually been the one to cause all this, with negligence, with lies, with careless behavior, with abandonment. Ronan, on the other hand, told Matthew how Declan was a huge liar and how wonderful Niall had been.
