Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

The mysterious internet stranger I’d bought it from hadn’t cleaned it very well. I get a bulb syringe and wash it at the sink, soaking and rinsing. You’re supposed to use distilled water but the water here at my house is soft, from a surface reservoir. The same reservoir H. P. Lovecraft once wrote about, as the towns that now lie under it were drowning.

Anyway, I’ve never had any problems with it. Even if it is saturated in alien space colors, they don’t seem to cause problems with the nibs, so that’s good news overall.

Once it’s clean, I ink it up from a big square bottle in a color that matches the barrel, and sit down at the table with a notebook, ready to write.

With the pen in my hand, I find suddenly I am full of memories. Strange; I can go through a whole day, usually, without remembering things.

I remember the pen.

And now I’m holding it in my hand, and I start to write, in a lovely red-sheened cobalt blue.

I grewup to be a writer. A novelist. That will not surprise you. You are, after all, reading my words right now.

I write, and write, and the pen stays solid and the notebook stays solid and it writes as well as the one I used to have. But my right hand—I’m left-handed—has a tendency to slide through the table if I’m not paying attention. And twice I fall right through my chair, which is a new and revolting development.

I don’t let it stop me, though. I write, and remember, and write some more. About somebody I can sort of remember. A long, long time ago.

An incident that happened at the University of Chicago. After… after I stopped being a student there?

It’s so damned hard to recall.

“There isno point in being so angry.” His words had the echo that used to come from long distance.

But I wasn’t being angry to make a point.

…which was not something the manipulative son of a bitch could have ever understood. I was angry because I was angry. Because he deserved my anger.

I was angry because anger is a defense mechanism. It’s an emotion that serves to goad you to action, to remove the irritant in your turf or the thing that is causing you pain.

“I’m angry because you’re hurting me,” I said. “I’m angry because you’re hurting a lot of people. Stop it, and I won’t need to be angry with you anymore.”

Therapy gives you a pretty good set of tools to be (diplomat B), it turns out. I was still furious with my mother for forcing me to go.

But it was helping.

It might take me a while to get over my anger. But that didn’t seem salient to the argument we were having, so I kept it to myself.

“You can’t just set things on fire because you don’t like the way the world is going.”

“Oh, I can,” he told me. “And you already helped me. You’re just too much of a coward to own that and be really useful, so you’ll let other people do your dirty work and keep your hands clean.”

“You won’t do it,” I said.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “I probably won’t. Don’t call me again.”

I thinkabout calling. An anonymous tip. Or sending an email.

But I don’t have any evidence. And I don’t have a name.

“I know who wrote the manifesto. But I can’t remember his name. And I helped him come up with the plan. The plan to burn down a city. Except I can’t remember what city, either. Or the details of the plan.”

Yeah. No.

Maybe he was right. Maybe I am too much of a coward to take responsibility for something I believe in. For something I had once believed in, until I forgot?

Maybe I forgot because I knew it would feel like my fault if I remembered.

My mothergave me an expensive fountain pen when I graduated high school. It was a burgundy one, small and slim. Wrote beautifully. I didn’t know enough to appreciate it at the time.

I don’t think the new ones are as nice anymore.

I lost that one when I got thrown by a horse one time in college. It was in my pocket, and when I got up, bruised and hip aching, it was gone. And no amount of searching turned it up.

There area lot of them on the internet.

But the damned things ain’t cheap. And how do you tell which ones are counterfeit?

But maybe the pen I was using at the time…

At the time it happened? At the time I learned the thing I can’t remember? At the time I did the thing I don’t want to remember?

But I didn’t have the pen long. Did I?

In any case, maybe that pen would help me remember.

I spendway too much money on it. And it comes.

I hold it in my hand. It feels… itchy. But it doesn’t fill me up with memories the way the other one had.

I rememberthe unused pages at the back of my old notebooks. There were always a few.

I find myself taking the books down off the shelf, thumbing through them. The unburned ones, of course. Thumbing through the burned ones would have been unfeasible, and even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t accomplish much of anything beyond getting my fingers ashy.

I find myself looking at ink colors, organizational choices. How my handwriting has evolved.

We lose all the best things to time.

But time brings a lot of benefits, also. Freedom from old wounds, for example.

Perspective.

Grace.

The wisdom to identify the heads that need to be busted, and the courage of your convictions to go out and bust some heads.

I havea couple of dozen old notebooks. And at the end of almost every one of them is a swath of pristine pages. Somewhere between twenty and fifty, a full signature at least and maybe two or three—just sitting there wordless and ignored.

Even after I stopped burning them, I guess I never really finished a notebook before I moved on. The lure of the next book was already there, like a pressure inside me urging me to set this one aside and pick up the perfect one that would be waiting. Untrammeled. Pure.

Without any mistakes in it.

Yes, I hate using broken things. Dirty things. I hate things that are cracked or warped or seem old and in disrepair.

So I would get to the point where I could conceivably justify getting rid of the old book with its scuffed cover and frayed page edges and all the mistakes inside it. And I would switch to a new one, clean and unscribbled in. And out the old one would go. Into the flames, at first. Later, onto a shelf with its sisters.