Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

But those were harder to destroy, eventually. When they needed destruction.

Everything needs destruction in the end. And so I learned to burn.

I thought about burning more than notebooks when I was young. I thought of self-immolation, but I never had the courage. I thought of arson, but I never had the cruelty. I remembered those things, vaguely. Like a story that had happened to someone else.

Maybe that was why that manifesto struck me so hard, I tell myself, as my fingers slip through the handle of the coffee pot again. A major American city , it had said. An inferno of flames. The Judgement of a just and terrible God.

Engulfed.

Soon, soon. Soon.

But no. There is more than that. Some part of me that I can’t access knows. Knows which city. Knows who had written those words. Knows enough to stop this terrible thing from happening.

I just can’t remember .

How doyou learn to erase yourself?

It’s not something that comes naturally to children. Children seek attention because attention means survival. So to get them to erase themselves, you have to teach them that they don’t exist. And because it is an unnatural, self-destructive thing that you are teaching them—a maladaptive response—the only tactic that works is to make the consequences of noncompliance worse than the consequences of nonexistence.

That takes force. Violence, physical or emotional. If you just try to ignore a kid, they’ll act out, and seek attention through misbehavior.

Any port in a storm.

I bet, given half a chance, I could have been a charming child.

But I didn’t learn to be charming. I learned how not to be real.

I learned to have no vulnerabilities and expect no consideration. I learned I had no intrinsic value and was only marginally worthwhile for what I could provide, if what I provided was beyond reproach.

I learned I was not allowed to be angry. To defend myself. To have needs. I learned to be good at being alone, because if you were alone, nobody could betray you.

I thought I had escaped all that when I went away to college. But like the horror movie phone call, the loathing was coming from inside my head.

I didn’thold on to things, because holding on to things hurt. If you didn’t hold on, then when you lost something you lost it easy.

But if you don’t hold on, you lose things all the time.

My notebooks and pens are still solid. I can write all the time. Under any conditions. I can write things down.

If I can just remember them.

I can write them down.

I losta lot of pens.

I couldn’t bear to write in pencil. And it didn’t matter because I was burning the books.

But I couldn’t seem to hang on to the pens.

It’s inthe notebooks, isn’t it? The thing I need.

There’s no way to get the notebooks back, of course. Even if I found similar ones, they’d be empty. All the important words—all of the words that have the memories attached that might keep people from being hurt—set on fire, burned up—were, in a particularly distasteful irony, burned up themselves long ago.

Oh. But the pens.

I startedcollecting pens when I was very young. My mother gave me a fountain pen. Not an expensive one, but she wrote with fountain pens, and she thought I should, too, and I was excited to be like my mother in this way I thought was grownup and cool. One led to two, led to five or six. Student pens.

I loved them.

And the ink! I loved the ink even more. Because you can put the same ink in a cheap pen as in an expensive one, and then you get to write with it.

Finding the right ink, the right pen, is like coming home. Like finding the place you live and that you want to live. The place you want to stay forever. The place where you belong.

On a smaller scale, of course.

But still, it can make you a little bit emotional.

And if you are lucky, you might actually recognize it while it’s right in front of you, while you’re standing there, and not once you walk away, foolishly.

The hardest thing is when you walk away from home knowing that it’s home, because home is changing, or challenging, or making you sad. Or because you screwed up and broke something, and you think you’re too embarrassed to stay, or you’re not welcome there anymore.

So you go someplace else and think you can live there. But it isn’t home. And then you have to try to get home again.

Sometimes it takes a long time to get home again. Some people never make it back at all.

I thought I had to be perfect. I thought I couldn’t live with my errors. I thought it would be better to run away. Start clean. Throw the ruined page away and keep reaching for a clean one. Burn my notebooks.

Erase my history. Erase my screw-ups.

Erase my self.

Erase, erase, erase.

I starton collector’s websites and then on auction sites, looking for the pens. Most of them were not expensive at the time when I bought them—I never had a lot of money. Some of them have gotten more expensive since.

A funny thing happens as I start looking. I search for one pen to see what it would cost to replace it. And in the related items, I find more that looked familiar. That I suddenly remember having had. And when I chase those links, there are more, still more familiar-looking ones.

I am forty-five years old. I think I am forty-five years old.

I get out my birth certificate and check.

I am forty-five years old.

How many pens have I lost?

How many other things have I forgotten about, before now?

I thinkof a pen I’d liked, when I was twenty-five or so. I remember putting it in a jacket pocket. I don’t remember ever finding it there again. It had been a blue marbled plastic fountain pen, a kind of bulbous and silly looking thing. A lot of personality, I guess you’d say. It wrote very well.

I find one like it on an auction site. I lose that auction but win another in a few days. $63 plus shipping. I think the pens in a box set with ink were $30 new back in 1995.

Fortunately my books are doing all right, and my needs in general are few. My chief extravagance is a little indulgence in grocery store sushi, once in a while. I use a grocery delivery service. I can’t drive. What if my foot fell off while I was reaching for the brake?

The pen arrives after three days. I get lucky with the mail that day and it doesn’t fall through my hands. I take the pen out of the box, weigh it in my hand. Light, plastic with gold trim. The blue is so intense it seems violet.

I uncap it and look at the point, squinting my middle-aged eyes. Then I laugh at myself and use the zoom function on my phone camera to get a better look at it. The phone, for once, doesn’t slide through my hand.