Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

all looked at me quizzically.

      “The reason,” I said. “You know—the point of being alive. Were you made for a purpose?”

      “Does everything have a purpose, Rachel?”

      His words got to me, sitting in the living room, looking up at the mold-stained ceiling.

      What was my purpose? To scavenge for myself and for Wick, and now for Borne? To just survive … and wait? For what.

      But I was trying to be a good parent, a good friend, to Borne, so I said, “Yes, everything has a purpose. And every person has a purpose, or finds a purpose.” Or a reason.

      “Am I a person?” Borne said, and his eyestalks perked up and took special attention.

      I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Borne, you are a person.”

      He was a person to me, but one already pushing on past to other concepts.

      “Am I a person in my right mind?”

      “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my standard ploy when I wanted time to think. With my right mind.

      “If there’s a right mind, then there’s a wrong mind.”

      “I suppose so. Yes.”

      “How do you get a wrong mind? Is it borned into you?”

      “That’s a tough question,” I said. Usually I would have responded with something like “Do you want a wrong mind?” or told him it could happen either way: borned into you, or through trauma. But I was too tired from repairing traps all day.

      “Is it tough because I already have a wrong mind?”

      “No. Do you like to be silent sometimes?” Borne might be a person, but he was a difficult person, because he probed everything.

      “Is silence because of a wrong mind?” Borne asked.

      “Silence is golden.”

      “You mean because it’s made of light?”

      “How do you even speak with no mouth?” I asked, but not without affection.

      “Because I’m not in my right mind?”

      “Right mind. Wrong mouth.”

      “Is no mouth a wrong mouth?”

      “No mouth is …” But I couldn’t stop from erupting into giggles.

      I saw these conversations as Borne playful. But really it was a youthful, still-forming mind that couldn’t yet communicate complex concepts through language. Part of why Borne couldn’t is that his senses worked differently than mine. He had to learn what that meant, at the same time he had to navigate the human world through me. The confusion of that, of finding unity in that, of basically becoming trilingual while living in the world of human beings, was very difficult. Always, as long as we knew each other, Borne was offering up so many approximations, so many near misses on what he meant that might have meant other things.

      Much later, when I realized this, I went back over our conversations in my memory, to see if I could translate them into some other meaning. But it was too late. They are what they are. They mean what they meant, and I know I misremember some of them anyway—and that pains me.

       ¤

      The last night before I would have to go out scavenging again, Wick came to check on me. It was perfunctory during this phase of our relationship, a duty and an obligation. Borne went into what he would later call, jokingly, “dumb mode” or “sucking in your gut.” He drew in his eyes, got small, waddled to a corner, and sat there, immobile and mute.

      “How are you?” Wick asked from the doorway. The intensity of shadow hollowed out his cheekbones, and I felt as if I were being approached by a concept, an abstraction.

      “Good, thanks,” I said.

      “You’ll be okay tomorrow.”

      “Yes,” I replied although he’d not asked a question.

      Wick lingered there for a moment, eyes glinting like mineral chips, holding himself apart, distant. I didn’t like to see him hurt by me, but I was stuck. He didn’t have to be so adamant about Borne—that was his fault—and I said nothing more. So he receded from me, back into the corridor, perhaps to go shove a memory beetle in his ear.

      Wick receded; Borne blossomed. That was the way of it in those days—and in those days, too, the situation in the city had changed, and strange things were flourishing and familiar ones withering.

      Since I’d last been outside, the Magician had become a major force in the city. She now held an area in the northwest starting roughly in a line extending out from where the Company building’s jurisdiction ended on the city’s southern edge. A growing army of acolytes helped make her drugs and protected her territory against Mord and others; Wick had only his peculiar swimming pool, the bastion of the Balcony Cliffs, a scavenger-woman who could make traps but kept secrets from him, and a creature of unknown potential that he desired to cast out.

      Worse, the rumored Mord proxies had finally made their presence known and seemed more bloodthirsty than their progenitor. They knew no rule of law, not even the natural law of sleep. Upon their appearance, as if there were some collusion between the proxies and the Company, Mord spent several days huffing and puffing in front of the Company building. Under his uncertain aegis, the Company building was becoming more and more unstable and unsafe. Mord would sleep in front of it, and then other times he would forget his seeming role as protector and absentmindedly butt into the walls with his broad head. We could see that people still lived in the top levels, under siege in a way as they were reduced to serving Mord’s whims—while rumors came to us that beneath them, in the Company’s deepest levels, no one ruled at all.

      Despite these dangers, Wick had given me no refuge. We had an agreement and I had to begin to honor my side of it again. I would go forth and scavenge. I didn’t know if that was a mercy or a cruelty, or where that impulse came from in Wick. I didn’t care. It was time to get out of bed.

      When Wick had gone, Borne extended a tendril of an arm, to take one of my hands in his own “hand.” A reasonable facsimile, if a little damp.

      “Rachel?”

      “What, Borne?”

      “Do you remember what I said about the white light?”

      “Yes.”

      “Part of me had a nightmare about it while your friend was here.”

      I checked myself from asking all of the questions I could have asked.

       Part of me?

       Just now you were asleep?

       You have dreams?

      I had learned that when Borne used this tone of voice he was about to trust me, was sharing something important.

      “What kind of nightmare?” I asked. How did he know the word nightmare? I hadn’t taught it to him; he hadn’t used it before.

      “I was in a dark place. Only it was filled with light. I was alone. Only there were others like me. I was dead. We were all … dead.”

      “Not alive?” Sometimes Borne said that something was dead if it didn’t move, like a chair. Or a hat.

      “Not alive.”

      “Like a heaven or a hell?”

      “Rachel.” Said with soft admonishment. “Rachel, I don’t know what those things are.”

      I didn’t know, either. How could I know, talking to a cheery monster, living in a hole in the ground, among too many broken things? I laughed as much to dispel that