Greywaren, page 18
They were not caught in a hot minute, but the swan pendant hadn’t lasted too much longer than that.
They’d just stepped out of a convenience store after buying a disposable phone, but before Bryde could activate it, the skin around his eyes had gone tight and he’d said, “The whine in this place is unceasing—I wish I was dead. I wish I had never agreed to come.”
Matthew didn’t remember what happened after that.
He’d woken up here, under this display table, which turned out to be right outside the Klimt exhibit at the MFA. A girl named Hannah and a guy named Musa and another girl named Claire had brought them here. Two of them worked here and one of them was an art student, but Matthew couldn’t remember which was which. Bryde had apparently come to them in their dreams, and in return for that, they brought him and Matthew sandwiches until Bryde could “figure something out.”
Bryde had yet to “figure something out.”
Matthew had started to keep a little journal; Bryde had given it to him. He asked Matthew if he would write down what he was thinking instead of saying it out loud if he bought a journal, and when Matthew said yes, Bryde had immediately doled out some of the cash from the pub for Musa to buy it from the gift shop.
Most of what Matthew wrote about was the voice.
The voice was a thing Matthew had heard for ages, especially after the ley line started to get a little funky and Ronan started to nightwash more. It always said the same sorts of things, like Matthew, are you listening and Matthew, there’s a better way and Matthew, come find me and Matthew, don’t you want more?
Here in the museum, the voice started up every night. Matthew listened to it. There wasn’t much else to do. They could not wander the museum, even when it was closed, because of the security cameras and the guards. One could either curl up, as Bryde did, and sleep, or curl up, as Matthew did, and listen.
“What are you writing?” Bryde asked in a low voice.
“What the voice is saying,” Matthew replied. Don’t be afraid, Matthew. It is simpler than you imagine.
“The voice—is that what you call it?” Bryde said. “It doesn’t matter anymore. This world isn’t dead, but it might as well be, dragging its corpse from café to ballroom to alt-rock concerts, unable to do anything but keep itself awake, nothing more.”
“Don’t be bummed you can’t do what you were doing before,” Matthew said encouragingly. He ripped out a blank page of the journal. “Hannah brought an extra pen—would it make you feel better to draw a li’l somethin’?!”
“The world prepares to burn and we entertain ourselves with trinkets and crafts while pissing into bottles in the dark.” But Bryde sat up stiffly and accepted the scratch paper.
“See, this is a perfectly cool time,” Matthew said soothingly.
“I was not made for a perfectly cool time,” Bryde said. He had drawn something that looked either like a tornado or like someone had been trying to take the pen while he wrote. “This place you call the world is only half of one. On the other side of a mirror is the rest of it. It is like loving the night without ever seeing the day. It is a sentence, cut off. A book, abbreviated. It is the first half of anything. Awake, asleep: they are two different things now. But there is a reality where there’s simply one condition, perfectly braided, both things at once. That feeling you have when you hear the voice, don’t you know something is missing?”
“Yeah, totally!” Matthew said. “For a while I thought it just meant I was hungry for a snack, though. Tell me something more about the voice.”
“There is a voice from the other side calling your name. And on the other side, you’re calling to something else, too. Who knows who is listening to you over there. Fools, on both sides, to listen, to draw close, to want …” Bryde closed his eyes. “I don’t know if what I know is true.”
“Let’s pretend it is for now,” Matthew suggested. “Just go with it, say what comes to mind. Spitballing—that’s what Declan calls it.”
Bryde seemed to misunderstand the concept of spitballing. He went on, “Am I old or am I young? I don’t know if my memories are real, what real is anymore. Does it matter if I am not thousands of years old if I have been dreamt to be?”
Matthew had pondered this, too, when he’d first found out he was dreamt, not that long ago. People liked him, they always had. Was that the way he was made? Or was it something he’d earned? In the end, did it matter? He told Bryde all this as Bryde made the tornado larger and larger on the scratch paper and the voice continued talking, and then Matthew finished, “Anyhow, loads of people have things that are just the way they are, like red hair and stuff, does that make sense?”
“No,” Bryde said morosely.
This was the problem with getting Bryde talking. He either got boring or sad. Matthew didn’t mind being here under the table so much. It was hard to remember there was a real world out there when this one was so small and unchanging. Hard to really believe Declan was out there, mad that Matthew had stolen his car, that Ronan was out there, mysteriously sleeping.
Matthew, do you want to be free? Are you listening?
As Matthew continued to transcribe, humming a little, looping the words in different cursives to interrupt the monotony, Bryde asked, in a sharper tone, “You aren’t afraid of the voice. Of what it’s asking you to do?”
“Is it asking me to do something?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t get that at all.”
Bryde said, “It will change you, if you let it. It will change you for good.”
Matthew asked, “Will it change you?”
“The voice doesn’t ask me.”
“Why not?”
“Probably because it knows I would say no. I am not interested in keeping myself awake. I am interested in keeping the world awake. Not me, but us. Dreams and dreamers. Imagine what this place would be if you did not have to beg at the feet of a painting for your life.”
“Dudifer, you are the saddest dude I have ever met,” Matthew told him. “It’s like you’re always wet. Seems to me that if I had to learn to be sad, you have to learn to be happy. Why don’t you draw a, I dunno, chinchilla or something, instead of that, uh, thing. Not that’s it not good.”
“What’s a chinchilla?”
“You’re sort of a funny person,” Matthew told him. “You know a lot of stuff but you’re also pretty stupid.”
For the first time, Bryde sort of smiled at this. He kind of had Ronan’s smile, which meant that now Bryde was a little happier but Matthew was a little sadder.
You must know you cannot hide forever. Bryde, you know it comes to an end.
Bryde’s expression turned intense.
“It’s talking to you!” Matthew said. “Why is it talking to you now?”
Matthew, are you listening? Bryde, can you hear me? Matthew, there’s a better way. Bryde, this is the only way. Matthew, come find me. Bryde, you know how to do this. Matthew, don’t you want more? Bryde, don’t you want to be free of him anyway?
Matthew couldn’t keep up in the journal. “Why is it talking so much?”
Leaning forward, Bryde swiped his fingers under Matthew’s ear. With a sigh, he studied the nightwash smeared across his skin. It matched the thin black liquid gathering in the corner of Bryde’s eye.
He said, “Because now it knows that we’re listening.”
Farooq-Lane burned and haunted.
She needed an action item, but there was no action item. Last time, after Nathan had killed their parents, she could take up a gun and travel with the Moderators to make it right. Now there were no Moderators. The local law enforcement was not about to make a plan as dramatic as the Moderators, although they were equally intense about apprehending Nathan Farooq-Lane. Yes, Nathan was on their radar; yes, they had seen the memo on how the individual ID’d as him in Ireland was a mistake; yes, let us know if he contacts you and if you think of anything relevant that could help our search; no, you can’t do anything else to help.
Of course she couldn’t help.
Farooq-Lane had only her heart to follow, and that had already been established as an unreliable source.
She knew just two things for sure: Nathan was going to do it again. And all of this was about her.
The Medford bomb had gone off just minutes after she’d left the storage facility, just minutes after they’d heard Lock admit that someone else had been calling the shots. As if Nathan had been invoked by the admission. More likely was that he’d been watching her—for how long?
She couldn’t shake the eerie idea that Nathan had somehow been stored with the other Moderators and she simply hadn’t noticed him lying silently in the dark, waiting for her.
She turned the sequence of events at the storage facility over and over, trying to come up with a clue that would give her a next step. It took her several days to realize—in the middle of the night—she’d completely ignored one other set of eyes there: Hennessy. Of course Hennessy had been there! She could be in on it. Anything was possible. Anything! Deep down, Farooq-Lane knew this was a spindly tree to bark up, but nonetheless, she could not stop moving, stop looking for an action item, stop searching for something to cross off a list or shoot in the face. If she didn’t, something terrible would happen inside her. She could feel it.
So she leapt out of bed and went down to the basement for a confrontation.
To her surprise, Hennessy had picked up the mess her tantrum had left and replaced that disaster with a new one: a disaster of canvases, sketches, paint palettes with plastic wrap on them, sofa cushions brought down to make a nest to sleep the day away. But unlike the results of her tantrum, this clutter clearly had a system to it. It covered every available space, but it was also a place of work.
Hennessy herself currently stood under glowing lights, working away at a self-portrait. It was a wonky, mirthful piece of art, the lines were long and tangled together, everything elongated and wry, intentionally misshapen. It was not the ghoul Hennessy could be but rather the laugh-out-loud-funny Hennessy she sometimes was instead.
One the worktable next to her, in a hamster cage, the dreamt mouse ran on a wheel, its golden tail clinking rhythmically against the plastic. Something in the basement was humming with enough sweetmetal energy to keep it awake, for now.
Without introduction, Farooq-Lane demanded, “How did Nathan know that we were at the storage facility? No one was there but you and me.”
Hennessy, her back to Farooq-Lane, didn’t bother turning from her portrait as she added, “And all the Moderators.”
“They were asleep. Lock was talking to us. That leaves you and me.”
Scratch, scratch, scratch. Hennessy scumbled shadow under her eyes. “It certainly does.”
“We would have heard someone else come in, surely.”
“So you’ve come round to the idea that it’s got to be me, then?” Hennessy said. She sounded unworried. She continued painting. “Do what you gotta do, I guess.”
Farooq-Lane knew she was being unreasonable, and she knew that Hennessy knew, and that made her feel more unreasonable. This was usually when opera began to play.
Just then, she noticed a familiar paint-stained rag tossed over the edge of one of the tables. “Is that my blouse?”
Scratch, scratch, scratch. Hennessy carved tattoos into her portrait’s neck. “It was on the floor.”
“It must have fallen out of the dryer!”
“Stuff that falls on the floor is only good for ten seconds, that’s what I heard. Still smelled like you, though.”
The blouse looked beyond repair, but Farooq-Lane strode over to snatch it up anyway, on principle. On her way back, her steps flagged. The massive portrait of Farooq-Lane looked back at her from the shadows of the opposite wall. Hennessy had finished it.
Farooq-Lane couldn’t resist looking at it closer. It was better since the last time she’d seen it, which she wouldn’t have imagined possible. The eyes were stunning, liquid-real perfect, watering, glistening, watching from inside the canvas. The hair was touchable and shiny.
And the expression. It was Farooq-Lane, but better. Now the portrait version of her didn’t just burn callously. Now she burned with purpose, with confidence, with loyalty, with justice, relentless, powerful. Powerful. Farooq-Lane had not been powerful, ever.
Conversationally, still scratching away at her paper, Hennessy said, “That Zed you guys shot in Pennsylvania, Rhiannon Martin? She dreamt mirrors. That was all she dreamt. Never anything else. Never anything that was gonna end the world, not that that mattered to the Mods, as you know now. She didn’t dream a lot of them; they took her a long time. The thing about these mirrors, they were just nice. Can you imagine? They liked you. You know how they say that mirrors never lie, well, these didn’t, either, but they were just fucking nice. Only way to say it. They showed you all the things you liked about yourself bigger than all the things you don’t.”
Farooq-Lane knew Hennessy was actually talking about the portrait, and it was true that she wanted to be the woman in the portrait. This was how she longed to be seen. She wasn’t there yet, but this beautiful portrait of this beautiful woman seemed aspirational.
It was more than that, though. This painting wasn’t just nice. It wasn’t fond. It was full of dynamic desire. The redone brushstrokes on the face quivered. The skin seemed like it should be warm to the touch.
Farooq-Lane hovered her fingers over the surface, just millimeters away. She badly wanted to actually touch it. The temple, the cheek, the chin, the throat.
Hennessy grabbed her wrist.
Farooq-Lane hadn’t even heard her cross the room.
“I wasn’t going to touch—” she started, but then Hennessy used her wrist to pull her close. Hennessy kissed her.
It was not Liliana’s sweet kisses.
This was a whole-body situation, a whole-day situation. Hennessy gripped her close and, the moment Farooq-Lane’s lips opened, she bit one of them. There was not a single part of the kiss that did not firmly underline that Hennessy the person felt exactly the same way about Farooq-Lane as Hennessy the artist.
Opera burst through every speaker in the house. Strings coursing. Harpsichord galloping. Voice clean and high as a cloudless day.
There wasn’t a part of Farooq-Lane that wasn’t on fire, as living and vivid as the brushstrokes of the portrait.
Farooq-Lane, Burning.
She staggered back. “Don’t you— There’s such a thing as— Why are you like this?”
“You dropped your blouse,” Hennessy said.
Farooq-Lane couldn’t think of a reply. She finally managed, “Liliana.”
Hennessy shrugged.
With a strangled noise, Farooq-Lane backed away, her lips still hot. All of her still hot. Turning, she headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, pursued by a blushing aria. This was awful. She burned with fury—but not at Hennessy, at herself. Hennessy was just being Hennessy. But Farooq-Lane was supposed to be someone of principle, of character, of poise.
Who was she becoming?
Farooq-Lane, Burning.
The problem was, she thought she might like that person. But what did that mean for the rest of her world?
At the top of the steps, she ran right into Liliana.
Liliana gently took her by the same wrist Hennessy had just held. She gazed at Farooq-Lane’s disheveled appearance.
“Liliana,” Farooq-Lane said. “I—”
Liliana interrupted, “We have to talk.”
They drove just a few minutes away to Red Rock Park, a small preserve that jutted out into the ocean. During the day, it was pleasant to look at, even in cold weather, the grass green even when the leaves on the small decorative trees were bare. At night, however, the park felt barren and exposed, with the winds coming in straight and pure off the waves. It was not a place most people would choose to stroll at this time, in this weather.
But Liliana led them all the way down the sidewalk to the point and then stood there with her hands in the pockets of the big ugly coat a trucker had given her earlier that year, looking over the water. It was not quite black; Boston was too bright to ever let the ocean near it truly sleep.
Farooq-Lane fidgeted and shivered, her arms wrapped around herself. She tested her words. She anticipated Liliana’s. Hennessy did it!
But Farooq-Lane knew that. She didn’t feel guilty about Hennessy kissing her. She felt guilty about how it had made her feel.
“It started with a voice,” Liliana said eventually. “I could tell it was different. It was not a human voice. It was something different. Something that spoke to me directly, in a language I did not otherwise hear. I do not know if anyone else could have heard while I was there, because it always spoke to me when I was alone, but I am sure that if they could, they would not have been able to understand it. It was a language for dreams.”
Farooq-Lane frowned at her, taken off guard.
But Liliana continued, still gazing out into that endless ocean. “I was afraid when the voice came to me. He—the dreamer I told you about—was getting sick and I thought probably he would soon die. Everyone else was getting sick in the same way, and they were all dying, so I knew how it would go. I had wished for him to die for a long time, but not in a genuine way. I knew I would fall asleep without him. But the voice told me something different. It told me there was another way. It would keep me awake, it said, in exchange for just one thing.”
“Liliana—”
Liliana shook her head and went on. “If I would hold its nightmares, it said, I could stay awake forever.”
The visions. She was talking about the visions. Nightmares? But—
“I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that nightmares are imaginary, and it is true, that they are usually not real, but they are not entirely unreal. They show you people you know. Places you’ve been. Situations you’ve lived through. Perhaps the details around them are untrue, but there is always at least one true part, or they would not be frightening.” She took a heavy sigh. “That is why the visions are true more often than not. The visions are imaginings, uncolored by human nature, and informed by inhuman senses, of the worst-case scenario, which, more often than not, is the real scenario.”
