The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel Page 2

  Ren knew Jane was a Wiccan, but right now, if Jane told her about creating her own reality, Ren was going to have trouble forgiving her enough to do good meddlework. “Do you believe we can do that?” she asked anyway.

  “You mean do I think there’s anything you can do from here to help Phil in there?”

  Ren didn’t trust her voice; she nodded.

  “No,” Jane said.

  “Me either.”

  “You could pray.”

  Ren untwisted her hands and looked at Jane. “It wouldn’t help.”

  “Not him,” Jane agreed. “Maybe you.”

  “He helps me.”

  “I know.” Jane squeezed Ren’s knee, and didn’t tell her that things work out in the end, or that everything happens for a reason.

  Ren closed her eyes, and let it rain.

  TWO

  Powerfully Reasoned and Passionate

  It’s not like dying would be the end of the world or anything. Phil had died before. How many times? Um. Many. It was hard to think.

  He made a stuffed chair appear in his peristylium, and he sat there, trying to focus, trying to figure out what to do. There was a chair opposite him, and he wasn’t sure how it got there. There was someone in it, and it took him a moment to realize that it was real—as real as things get in the Garden. He knew—though he couldn’t remember exactly how he knew—that Oskar could break into his Garden and actually be there.

  * * *

  Sorry for the intrusion, but it’s a confusing concept, and Phil was confused here, so it has to be hard for you to make sense of it. The short version is this: the Garden is a mental state. We create it collectively—a shared hallucination that brains make, but only minds can access. The Garden’s reality is distributed through all our brains, but each mind navigates it with an individual map—a unique analogy. No brain, no mind, no metaphor. That’s how we had known Celeste wasn’t dead, even after Phil had spiked her stub into Ren—we could still get into her Garden. Now we can’t. Think about it like this: if the Garden were a real house, instead of a collective memory palace, it would be as if we had recently found a way to open each other’s private bedroom doors. So I was on a plane, and I was there, in Phil’s personal section of our shared mental construct, and able to talk to him. But like I said, it was something we’d only recently learned, and Phil’s been around for two thousand years, so I guess his poor, befuddled, dying brain was having trouble grasping it. I hope the explanation helps. It’s important later.

  —Oskar

  * * *

  So, Phil decided, that meant that maybe Oskar was real—using the relatively loose definition of “real” that applied in the Garden. He decided to test it. “Hello, Oskar.”

  “Hey, Phil. I just heard. Other than dying, how are you?”

  “Fair enough. Any idea how things are with my body?”

  “Sorry, no. I’m on a plane on the way to Tucson. You’re almost certainly in surgery. Be grateful you can’t feel it.”

  “How are things going in Milwaukee?”

  “You’ve been reading the boards.”

  “I know. I was just asking to irritate you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about giving up and going back to Munich. Your unions in this country aren’t significantly better than no unions at all.”

  “Wasn’t like that forty years ago.”

  “I know.”

  Oskar was trying to sound casual, and trying to look relaxed in his big stuffed chair, but tension, even fear, radiated from him.

  “Do you know why you were shot? Was it meddlework?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “What were you working on?”

  Phil gestured toward the atrium. “There’s a vase in there, with cattails in it. The seed is there.”

  “Seed of?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Oskar really did look worried. “I’ll check. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Phil chuckled, then forgot what he was chuckling about, then remembered. Dying was really annoying. Maybe not as annoying as having someone hit a two-outer that costs you all the chips you’ve built up for the last six hours, but almost.

  Oskar came back after Phil had forgotten he was there, and Phil wasn’t sure how long he’d been gone in real or subjective time. Oskar sat down.

  “You fucking idiot,” he said kindly.

  * * *

  What do you do when there’s nothing you can do? When something agonizingly important to you is entirely beyond your ability to control or even affect? When all your future joy is in someone else’s hands, or fate’s, or floating free on the winds of “shit happens”? Maybe it was always the case, and choice and planning were illusions that only clothed Ren’s helplessness like Eve’s itchy fig leaf. She had no idea. Maybe all her suffering came from not accepting things as they were, from her deluded attempt to force her will on an indifferent universe, to demand that reality be different, better—just a little bit. “Fuck it,” she said.

  “Okay.” Jane was good at acceptance.

  “I know there’s nothing I can do to make things go the way I want them to in there, and I don’t know how to pray without it feeling like a letter to Santa.”

  Jane nodded and didn’t offer to teach her.

  Grateful, Ren went on. “But I do know how to do something else, something that might actually help Phil. It’s kind of like meditating. Or taking a nap.”

  “Do you want to go to the chapel where it’s quiet?” Jane asked. “I can stay here and call you if anyone comes out with news.”

  “No, it’s okay. We can stay here, I just wanted you to know I was going.”

  Ren closed her eyes and felt the air moving over the sensitive skin at the edge of her nostrils. For a minute, she just felt that, concentrating on her body in the moment, in her slightly clammy yoga top on the creaky plastic waiting room chair.

  She tasted brown and fizzy, mostly sweet, but with a little bite on the back of the tongue—root beer—the first of her two body-anchored triggers that opened her Garden. She always came into it from away and above, gliding like a kite—usually at a gradual, slender angle, with the occasional tight spiral. She was sloping gently when a weird blade of fire slashed her trajectory, and she fell.

  The soupy sponge of her Garden mud absorbed the impact, but the plunge frightened Ren. Things didn’t just appear in her Garden—certainly not flaming things—and she lay still, watching the radiating waves diminish in size. When she sat up, mud clung to her hair and dripped from her fingers, but that was how memories worked for her. Ren’s memories weren’t discrete things neatly correlated one-to-one, but a morass she could filter and sieve. But that wasn’t helpful right now. Right now what Ren wanted was a way to reach Phil—not his memories or his Garden—but Phil as the surgeons in the next room knew him, the meat and teeth of him.

  Three years ago, Phil had given Ren a symbolic suitcase. In it, he had packed all his switches—every emotion-associated smell or memory-linked taste, the power to trigger any of a lexicon of emotions in him. If she had kept it, maybe Ren could have cooked up a “stay alive” combo for him now, but she had let it compost into her Garden mud. She never wanted to meddle with him like Celeste had.

  Ren scooped up a handful of Garden, weighed it on her palm. She remembered her glimpse of Phil as a union man, with his wife-made apron and stone-tasting kiss, and knew he would stand and fight if he could. He didn’t need her to stoke his will. He’d come back to her if he could. But what if he couldn’t? What if Phil left?

  Ren squeezed her hand into a goopy fist, and thought about poker, the Civil War, and Celeste. But Phil was a person who chose toward rather than against. Ren thought about Susi, their sweet dog, and the new house they were finally all moved into. She thought about their sex, and Phil’s unshakeable optimism, and the meddlework they were involved in together, but couldn’t think what she might make out of mud that would keep him or return him to life. Not something in his own image
like God or Prometheus.

  Something inevitable.

  Ren imagined a square around her feet with a matching empty one next to it for Phil. Beneath them, she made a new square twice their size, and next to all three, another as big as the one-alone plus the one-alone, plus the two they made together. She added the new square standing on the base of all that had come before it, and she started walking diagonally, one box after the next, in an urgent, infinite, opening logarithmic spiral.

  * * *

  Several things all happened at once, or so close to at once that they seemed simultaneous to Oskar. What looked like a bolt of fire streaked across the length of Phil’s villa, starting in the atrium and continuing through to where Phil sat. Phil reached for it and caught it, two-handed. A look of bewilderment crossed his features and he shook his head. He stared at whatever was in his hands. It blurred, and they were empty, useless. But it changed form again, and Phil tossed it to Oskar.

  “Tell Ren,” Phil said, and his Garden dissolved.

  Probably because of how he’d entered, Oskar found himself, instead of back in the real world, in his own Garden, on the Rue Victor near Rue des Noyers. The Seine stank of human waste and dead animals and rotting vegetables, and he made a strong wind come up and blow the stench away.

  * * *

  It’s always the first thing I do, and I do it without thinking about it. It’s harder than I expected not to annotate my own seeds. I’ll try to show more restraint.

  —O

  * * *

  The first thing he saw, right at his feet, was an old-fashioned stylus just lying on the road; he didn’t need to touch it in order to recognize Phil’s stub. So Phil was really dead. Well, all right, then.

  * * *

  Sorry, but this bears explaining. When one of us dies, our memories and personality go into stub, inactive and inert (as far as we know), until a Second is found and recruited. We’re always on the lookout for potential Seconds, but it’s a subtle operation. A person who’d be a great Second for Phil wouldn’t necessarily be a good fit for me, so it usually takes us a few months.

  —O

  * * *

  Oskar took a long, slow breath, and gripped the thing Phil had thrown him too tightly before it occurred to him to look at it.

  He didn’t know what Phil had tossed, but in Oskar’s hand, it manifested as a wicked-looking dagger of the type once called an Arkansas Toothpick in what was then still the New World. It was an awfully violent image for Phil, and not the kind of shape Oskar’s thoughts usually took either. He played with the knife for a bit, wondering what strange combination of their identities had produced it. Then he figured out how to use it.

  “Asshole,” he muttered, convinced that Phil had done it on purpose. Oskar cut his palm. It hurt, and the memories entered him.

  The knife was an index—a pointer to all the memories Phil had seeded related to the same meddlework as the vase in his atrium: an effort to get the Arizona immigration law overturned.

  Idiot, as well as asshole.

  Yeah, let’s appeal to the wolves to be kinder, gentler wolves. That always works out well. But then, Phil must have hit a nerve somewhere, somehow, because someone had killed him for it. Phil’s failure was proof of his success. Phil would have made a sarcastic comment about it being dialectical, as if he had a clue what that meant.

  Oskar let 1790 Paris go back to where it came from and opened his eyes. He checked his watch. They were still forty-five minutes out from Tucson. He’d meddled his way into first class because he didn’t fit in coach, and to be closer to the door. When they landed, he’d meddle his way into the fastest transportation he could find and, with luck, be at the hospital in under ninety minutes. He opened up the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and wondered if World War III would break out in Ukraine before he arrived in Tucson, or if the diplomats would postpone it a little longer. He scowled and thought of all the problems he could be working on if that idiot Phil hadn’t gotten himself shot. Then he tried to put it out of his head. It was time to concentrate on what he needed to do, not what he couldn’t do.

  Ninety minutes. It was going to be a long, long ninety minutes for Ren whether or not she knew Phil was already in stub.

  * * *

  Ren followed Mike from the trauma center through a tiled labyrinth to a tidy consultation room where she waited again, politely. It seemed important to behave, as if by doing so she could earn good news.

  “Renee Mathers?” There were two of them—the surgeon and another woman.

  Ren stood. They sat. For a second Ren thought maybe, if she didn’t sit back down, they’d be afraid she might faint and not tell her, and it wouldn’t be true.

  “I’m Renee,” she said and sat. Eye-level with her, Ren thought the surgeon’s elegant, sloped, kohl-lined eyes seemed caught between the traces of gold shimmer above, and the purple shadow of exhaustion below.

  “I’m Doctor Henedi.”

  She was the pivot Ren’s life would turn on, and Ren knew she’d never see her again.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “We did everything we could.”

  But her “sorry” had turned a vacuum cleaner on that roared in Ren’s ears, and set an icy suction under her scalp and against the soles of her feet.

  “The damage was too severe. We couldn’t control the bleeding. He went into cardiac arrest and we couldn’t revive him.”

  The empty, strategically placed trash can was for Ren to vomit in, but she was scoured out.

  “We did everything we could.”

  Ren didn’t know where the sound came from. Voids don’t sob.

  “Tina is here to help you, but I can answer any questions about the surgery for you before I go.”

  Or maybe the universe was full of howling, with no air to carry the sound—like Phil now—a wave without water.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “No,” Ren told the doctor. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  Jimmy calculated that if British Airways flight 333 left Paris at 9:00 A.M., and he changed planes in London, and again in Dallas, that by the time he landed in Tucson, nearly a full day would have elapsed—and he’d arrive exhausted. He considered it for less than half a minute before having his personal assistant, Etienne, call his travel agent to arrange a charter.

  Financially, with the amount of travel he did, he knew he should long ago have just bought shares in a damned jet, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d grown accustomed to indulging himself up to a point, now that he could afford it, but there were some boundaries he just couldn’t cross. He bought a new BMW every year, but wouldn’t buy a Bentley. He treated himself to vacations in Marseille when he could get away, staying at Le Petit Nice Passedat, but he wouldn’t buy a home there. He ate in the best restaurants in Paris, but wouldn’t hire a private cook. He had a comfortable house in Samois-sur-Seine, but not a mansion. He also knew that these distinctions made no sense, but he didn’t care.

  Etienne, le joli garçon qui ne doit pas être touché, confirmed when the limousine would arrive, hung up, and began helping Jimmy pack. Etienne knew when Jimmy didn’t feel like talking.

  Phil was in stub.

  Phil was always uncomfortable around Jimmy’s wealth—a reflection of Jimmy’s own discomfort. Oddly, the only one in Salt who wasn’t uncomfortable, was Oskar.

  * * *

  Accidental wealth is merely an asset for the group’s work, which I feel not the least qualm in calling upon. It’s also a massive inconvenience if you’re going to be responsible about it. If Jimmy uses some of it to indulge his pleasures, that’s just compensation for the time and energy it demands. Better him than me.

  —O

  * * *

  Phil always seemed a little hesitant, a little uncertain, as if he were imposing; which made Jimmy uncomfortable too. On reflection, though, Phil spent much of his time unsure, hesitant, second-guessing himself. Which made it all the more surprising when he would suddenly commit him
self to something, throw himself into it without looking back, push in all his chips, as he would say. As he had, most recently, thrown himself into life with Ren.

  Poor Ren. Jimmy had a pretty good idea how much this was tearing her up. Even if she were as certain as he was that Phil’s personality would emerge dominant in his next Second, it had to be brutal for her. She’d told Jimmy once before that she needed Phil to stay, not just come back. There were some occasions where Jimmy knew he could help, and this was one. His presence would not ease Ren’s pain or fear; he wouldn’t presume to try. But he would weep and wait with her.

  A limousine to Charles De Gaulle Airport, a chartered flight: Etienne was arranging the details.

  Jimmy remembered Violette, his first great love, and how much it had hurt when she’d been taken from him. He had vowed never to love again outside of the group—a vow that had lasted almost thirty years, until he’d met Jacque.

  But Jimmy could no more control his love than any of his other passions.

  No more than Ren could help feeling her pain.

  Jimmy had a long flight ahead of him, and he didn’t know what he would find when he got there, but it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  “IT STARTS IN ILLINOIS … IN 1856”

  * * *

  These memories of Phil’s—or, as he was then known, Carter—from the nineteenth century are seeds within seeds (that will make more sense later). I’d omit them entirely, but they’re part of the story, and without them you might miss my point. I can’t seem to get them out of first person though, leaving me no choice but to let Carter speak for himself.

  —Oskar

  * * *

  We had agreed to meet in the library of Northwestern University at Chicago, where she was doing some research. Outside it was bitter cold, and wet, and refuse from the New Year’s celebration still mixed with the mud and the snow, but inside it was warm and pleasant. She was easy enough to identify from Oskar’s description, and because she was the only woman there. I took off my hat and approached her. She stood and said, “Mr. Carter?”