Perfect Ruin

14

I THINK ABOUT DAPHNE’S SLASHED WRISTS and Judas in the trees and Pen’s words. We’ve argued before, but I can’t remember the last time she looked so wounded. I can’t remember the last time I felt like such a terrible friend. I’m sneaking out behind her back to meet with an accused murderer and a girl who talks to ghosts.

The floorboards creak above me as my brother moves about his office. Insomniacs, the pair of us.

I get out of bed and climb the staircase to my brother’s and Alice’s apartment. I use my copy of the key to open the front door so my knocking doesn’t wake Alice. She’s a light sleeper, always on high alert in case Lex breaks something or hurts himself or has an episode. My father has bitterly said that Lex is the child she’ll never have. He hasn’t forgiven Lex, and, like my mother, has trouble just looking at him. But he finds excuses to come upstairs because he adores Alice, wants to make sure she’s okay. Even Alice’s parents don’t visit anymore; they’re too embarrassed to be associated with a jumper.

The apartment is dark, but the sparse furniture makes it easy for me to navigate to my brother’s office. Softly I knock on his door.

As he paces about the room, the transcriber’s wheels follow the sound of his voice, spitting out a reel of paper with his words printed onto it. The clattering sound of the transcriber comes to a halt, as do his murmurings.

“Lex?” I whisper.

He opens the door, and it’s a devastating shame that he cannot see the paper lantern moon that shows from the open window. Alice was right; it does seem as though I could reach right out and touch it.

“Morgan? What’s the matter?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” I say. “Sorry to interrupt your writing.”

“I needed to stop anyway,” he says. “None of the pieces are fitting right. Sometimes you have to ignore it until it decides to be agreeable again.”

He sits in his favorite corner, turning the broken clock around and around in his long fingers.

I sit across from him and close my eyes. I pretend his darkness is the same as mine. I do my best to ignore the presence of the moon that eavesdrops at the window.

“What is the story about?” I say.

“Terrible things,” he says.

“Ghosts?” I say.

“Ghosts aren’t terrible,” he says. “They aren’t real. They’re a fantasy we’ve concocted to tell ourselves this life isn’t the only one we get. Even at their worst, ghosts are doing us some good.”

For someone with such a vivid imagination, my brother is prone to fits of logic.

I draw my knees to my chest, and in the darkness of my eyelids I try to find the courage to ask what I’d like to know. I pretend that my brother and I are in the same place, that we’re riding the train in an oval with no set destination, chasing the thoughts we never shared even with each other.

What comes out isn’t a question, and as I’m saying it, I realize it’s because I’ve known this for a while. “You and Dad have seen things the rest of us aren’t supposed to. That’s why you’re so obsessed with terrible things.”

Lex says nothing.

“You’ve seen others like the irrational woman who used to live downstairs, and the infants that aren’t strong enough, and the people who have reached dispatch age.” I pause. “And Alice.”

After a long moment, he says, “Especially Alice.”

I think I’ve made him angry with me, and that he’s going to shut me out, tell me to go back to bed, and then tomorrow carry on as though none of this ever happened.

What he says is, “So?”

“So,” I say, feeling a little bolder now, “is that why you went to the edge?”

When he doesn’t answer right away, I open my eyes and see his cheek in a patch of moonlight. We have the same round face. Right up until his incident, he looked young. Now he’s so much older, like a man who somehow exceeded his dispatch date. I understand why my mother has such trouble looking at him; it’s impossible not to search for traces of that youth.

“You’re full of questions tonight,” he says, pulling at a loose thread coming from his sleeve. He’s forever tugging at his shirts, winding threads around his fingers. I’ve heard Alice complain about all the mending she’s left to do.

“I don’t mean to be,” I say. “I mean to stay out of everyone’s way, but sometimes I can’t stop … asking. I never seem to run out of things I want to know.”

“It’s your way,” he says. “When you were little, you were like a question mark with eyes.”

“Your tone makes it sound like a bad thing,” I say.

“This floating city is all you’ll ever have,” he says. “It’s enough for some, but not for people like you and me. It saddens me that you’ll have to learn that, just like I had to.”

All this time I’ve been unnerved by my fascination with the ground; I’ve wondered and worried and thought about the same things over and over, and just like the train that speeds past us now, my wonder has taken me to no new destination. I know he’s right, but I haven’t given up my search for something more, even if that something is within the train tracks.

“I’ve always been like you in that sense, haven’t I?” I say.

He shakes his head. “No way. You’ve always been you.”

“Lex?”

I don’t know if it’s the moonlight or the stillness as everyone else in our family sleeps. Or it could be that my own restlessness is driving me mad, but I want to tell him about the specialist, and about Judas and Amy. I want to tell him the things I can’t stand to admit to myself—that I miss the way it was before, and that when things are at their worst, I think it’s his fault that our mother sleeps all day and our father is never home. He doesn’t need them anymore, but I do. And I have to pretend that I don’t, because of what he did.

Lex leans back against the wall and I realize he’s not waiting for me to speak. He knows I’m not going to. He reaches out in the darkness and bumps my knee with his fist. “Get some sleep, Little Sister. I’ve got more terrible things to brood about.”

In the morning, there’s a knock at my bedroom door.

“Come in,” I say.

I’m still trying to wake myself up when Pen peeks into the room. “You’re not sleeping naked, are you?” she says.

I push myself upright, blinking away the drowsiness. “I had a dream about you,” I say. “We were climbing a ladder into the clouds.”

She sits on the end of my bed and folds her legs. “Was I on top or on the bottom?”

“Next to me. It was a peculiarly wide ladder.”

She looks thoughtful.

“You were mad at me the whole way up,” I say.

“About that,” she says, dropping her hands into her lap. “Morgan, I’m sorry. I was being a child. I shouldn’t have been so vicious.”

“I shouldn’t have left without telling you,” I say.

“No, I understand. You didn’t want the competition when you met up with your secret Prince Wonderful.”

I throw my pillow at her and we burst into giggles.

Pen glances at my opened door, as though to be certain my mother isn’t nearby listening. Very quietly, she says, “What’s he like? Judas.”

“He’s …” I fall back against the mattress, considering. “Untrusting. And he seems sad.”

“Can’t imagine what about,” she says, caustic.

“I don’t believe he killed her,” I say. “I just don’t.”

“Well, you were alone with him in the cavern and you didn’t return hacked into bits, so there’s something to that,” Pen says. “Does Basil know?”

“Of course not. He’d never allow it.”

At the mention of my betrothed, I feel guilty. He proved trustworthy with my secrets the other day, and it’s wrong to keep things from him. I know this. But Judas isn’t my secret to keep. Telling Basil could hurt Judas more than it would hurt me.

“Maybe I’ll tell Basil once it’s safe,” I say. “When Judas is proven innocent.”

Pen laughs. “When will that be? According to what we’re supposed to know, he’s locked up in the courthouse right now while the jury selection begins. The king obviously has men searching for him. He’s going to be found and then he’s going to be found guilty.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe the real murderer will be caught.”

Pen crawls onto the bed and lies beside me, knocking her head gently against mine.

“Just be safe. You’re the only friend I’ve got.”

“You could make replacement friends,” I say. “Lots of people like you.”

“Awful beasts, the whole lot of them.” She wraps her arm around mine and squeezes.

“I’ll have to be careful, then,” I say.

“If anything happens to you,” she says, “I’ll kill him.”

I’m struck by the edge in her tone.

“Anyway,” she says, “I’m glad we’re not angry with each other anymore. In lieu of a festival of stars present, Thomas just wants to drag me around the city today. I was hoping you’d share in my misery. We can wear shell hats like the princess.” The king’s daughter is known for her sense of fashion.

“If we’re playing princess, we have to act as though we’re better than everyone,” I say.

“We are better than everyone,” she says. “Unlike the princess.” She shoulders me toward the edge of the bed. “Come on, get dressed. I’ll help you pick out an outfit. How you dress is a reflection on me.”

I end up borrowing her purple shell hat with synthetic fibers pinned to one side that are meant to mimic bird plumage. Basil stares at them while we’re pressed together on the train.

“You don’t like it?” I say.

“It’s just, I didn’t know birds could have pink feathers.”

“Birds are white, silly,” Pen says. “It’s just a decoration.”

“The birds we’ve seen through the scope are white,” Thomas says. “But I’ve read stories in which there were all sorts of species. Maybe there are pink birds in a different region. The ground has all sorts of climates.”

Pen huffs a pale blond curl away from her face. The train stops with a jolt and she breezes ahead of him, tugging me along. “Such an insufferable know-it-all,” she mutters. But I swear there’s a hint of a smile to go with the words.

The boys catch up to us and take our arms in tandem. Thomas kisses Pen’s cheek as she pertly raises her chin to accept. “It’s your day,” she tells him. “Where are we going?”

“The library first,” he says. “They’re having a sale.”

Most books on Internment aren’t for sale; we can borrow them from the library, and as the years go on and the spines begin to crack and the pages yellow, new editions are printed and the old ones are sold. When I was little, I was the first to borrow a newly printed library book and I hid it under my mattress. I wanted to know what it was like to own a new book for myself. One that hadn’t been worn down by someone else’s hands, with pages that hadn’t absorbed someone else’s spills.

After a week, guilt made me return it. I never borrowed that book again; I couldn’t bear to see it the victim of a stranger’s hands.

As we walk, Thomas and Pen gradually move a few paces ahead of Basil and me. Thomas whispers something to her, and she throws her head back and laughs. The shadows of clouds pass over them, and whatever Thomas was going to say to her next has been forgotten as he watches her. She’s a revelation in the sun, dazzling everywhere the light touches her. And not just today. Even when she’s sad, even when she sings off-key.

Basil touches one of the feathers. “Careful,” I say. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

“I didn’t think so. It’s not very you.”

I try to smile, but I’m still thinking about last night. I’m still thinking about the ground and if there are different kinds of birds. If things down there are mostly good or mostly bad. If they ever wonder about us.

Basil steals a kiss to my jaw, and I smile at my feet.

“There you are,” he says.

“I don’t mean to be distant,” I say, hooking my arm around his.

He stops our walking, and I realize that Pen and Thomas have stopped too. We’ve just passed the theater, and at the end of the block we can see what used to be the flower shop. It’s gray and splintered. The roof has caved in, and there’s a makeshift wire fence surrounding it now, with signs cautioning us not to approach.

Other passersby are staring at it, too.

“It’s depressing,” Basil says.

“Alice used to bring me here on the weekends when I was little,” I say. “It was one of her favorite places.”

Things aren’t the same. The patrolmen and this ruined building are proof of that.

After a few seconds, Thomas and Pen start walking again and we follow them. We go to the library and then to a tea shop. The day is full of light breezes and sweet aromas, but I cannot rid my hair of the smell of ash.