People like me, who come to care very much about you.
He had heard that right, he thought, he had heard that exactly.
My God, he thought as the light turned green. Something was happening.
A few years ago, when Hendricks had finally sat him down to explain how human life was created, he had begun like that: When two people like each other, who come to care very much about each other. .
Her studio: it was the second studio he had seen in the past few weeks, if the Silbertorium could be called a studio, if his work could even be seen as a sort of art. This studio was very different, all the way at the end of the island — though only a sliver of water away from BXS’s — and very small, very simple: one large drawing table, another type of table, two counter stools, one small window. In some ways it looked like a cell, in others like a — dare he say it — cage.
Her words, not his.
“Welcome to my little cage!” she announced as they came in. She caught herself: “See, I did it again! I’m serious, I didn’t say that on purpose. I just think that to myself because of all the birds in here, not because of you!”
Zal nodded glumly. He smelled something that did not smell right. He looked to the small wooden boxes by the open window. “Well, cages have living birds in them anyway.”
“That’s true. . Do you really want to see this stuff, Zal? I suddenly feel weird about bringing you here. I mean, you really do?”
Really: no, Zal did not. But he didn’t want to tell her that, and he thought he could shake the feeling anyway. He wanted the girl to know that he supported what she did — after all, she had taken his story without a qualm, a judgment, without horror, disbelief. She had taken him in just as he was — he owed her the same, he felt.
“My story didn’t upset you, did it, Asiya?”
She shook her head. “Why should it?”
“It’s unusual. People don’t run into a story like mine.”
“That’s true. But it’s an interesting one.” She picked up one of the small boxes, looked inside, and quickly sprayed the contents with something chemical-smelling. “Why, have people judged you badly in the past? Freaked out?”
Zal shook his head. “I really haven’t been close to anyone after it all happened. Just my father, my doctor.”
She tried to smile and failed. She suddenly felt depressed, looking at the bird bones with bits of flesh and feather hanging on. She inspected the other boxes — they were worse, too much meat on their bones, too graphic, one even gathering some insects. “I don’t want to do this, Zal.”
She looked like she was going to cry suddenly.
“Do what?”
She pointed to the boxes. “I don’t want to show you them. I don’t even want to be here.”
He wished he could hold her, as he had done in the basement, but in the light, this next day, after that whirlwind of a day, the supposedly last day on earth, a small distance now revealed itself between them — normalcy, he guessed — and he couldn’t. “I don’t have to see the actual stuff. What about the art?”
“Some of it is the art,” she said. “Installation, sculpture. But I take photos of some. It’s just that they’re all pretty graphic.”
Zal suddenly felt a rush of courage bubble up inside him. The men of old movies were afraid of nothing, particularly when faced with their women’s fear. “I want to see a photo. Is there one you especially like? One you’d like to show me?”
She thought. And she thought. She paced a bit. Finally, after some minutes, she fished out a folder in which lots of oversize prints lay and she flipped through them, Zal only catching blurs of black here and there. She paused at one, looking up at Zal and back down at the photo, in a way that gave him chills. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was comparing him to it.
Self-conscious fallacy, Rhodes would say, faulty thinking rooted in insecurity alone. Vaporize it.
He vaporized it, and so when she finally, very gingerly, brought the print over to him, he really looked at it for what it was. She began immediately to explain it, but Zal didn’t hear her words, so transfixed he was by the image: a black bird, freshly dead, it seemed, suspended by strings in a state of posed flight.
It reminded him immediately of Silber and his faked flight.
It was, he had to admit, just as Silber’s act had been, beautiful. I bring them back to life, she had said. She did, in a way.
“I like it,” he said in a whisper.
“You don’t have to.”
She marched to the door and hit the lights and motioned for him to come along.
“What happened? Leaving so fast?” he asked.
She didn’t say anything until they were outside, back in the bright overcast world.
“It’s nice to know everything’s okay out here. Sometimes you have to check in on the world, Zal. We’re lucky to have this.”
“This what?
“This, like, era.”
Zal had no idea what she was talking about. He shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I told you about these feelings. Sometimes they’re good even! They’re reminders, at the very least.”
They said nothing for a few more steps.
He was still thinking of the photo — how nice it was, in a strange way. He thought of the human version — a corpse made to act like the living, a corpse dressed for tea, a corpse propped by a tree at a park, a corpse in pajamas with a book in bed. Now, that was somehow bad, in a way her photo was not, not at all. It filled him with a feeling of warmth, a honey-like hope. “I liked that bird you did,” he said. She did not answer.
By the evening Zal’s answering machine was cluttered with messages from his father.
He finally called.
“So sorry,” he said. “I saw my friend again—”
“Zal, it occurs to me I haven’t had to tell you this before, but when you suddenly make friends overnight and decide to disappear for a full two days, well, fathers get quite worried. Please don’t do that again.”
“I am sorry.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Who is this friend?”
Zal paused. How to explain this. Even he didn’t fully grasp it. “Well, her name is Asiya.”
“A girl?”
“Yes,” Zal said, and added, just to hear himself say it, really, “I met a girl.”
Rhodes denied it was possible. Hendricks called him that next day to ask again what he had asked several times, and again he heard what Rhodes had always maintained.
“There hasn’t been a single case of a feral child having romantic, erotic, sexual, et cetera impulses towards the opposite sex — you know this, Tony,” Rhodes said, removing and then playing with his clear plastic-framed eyeglasses, watching the world go from outlines to nebulae, utterly bored by the question. “Or the same sex, for that manner. Or toward an animal even. Ferals, it seems — as you know — are apparently asexual.”
“But—”
“But, Anthony, what if a meteor struck my office right now? What if God is a megacomputer in the future? What if life actually is a dream? What if one day you could take a pill to live forever? Sure, sure, sure, anything is possible, right? What did Kafka say about that?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“You know, the thing about possibility and impossibility. My point is, sure, Zal may be the most successfully adaptive feral case in history, but please consider why you’re placing bets on that. Do you think it’s you who is special, not Zal?”