Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

Get stuck being real.

I joineda cult in college. That much, I know. Like a story told sketchily over a cup of coffee, but without the context or detail because it’s an embarrassing story and nobody wants to think about it too hard. The person telling it is embarrassed to have been there, and the person hearing it is reflecting embarrassment as well.

I joined a cult in college. I really craved the love-bombing, because I had never in my life felt really loved. I didn’t know how to receive attention in smaller doses, at lower proof. I had so much armor on it took weaponized love to get through.

I joined a cult in college. It was a dumb idea and it was weird while it lasted—it lasted long past college, it lasted eight whole years—and I was in love with one of the guys that ran it.

I joined a cult in college. One of the guys who ran it… I thought he was my boyfriend. He wasn’t, though. He was preying on me. Grooming me.

I did not have a lot of agency in the relationship.

He’s one of the cult’s leaders now.

The penran out of ink, and then I had to figure out how to fill it when I also couldn’t touch most of my ink bottles. My hand just swiped through them, all the gorgeous little art objects full of brilliant colors. I groped back in the shelf, waving blindly…

My fingers brushed something squat and cool. I pulled it out, and the bottles that had been in front of it slid out of the way, clattering. Not of my unreal hand. But of the ink, the thing that was real. The thing that mattered.

One or two fell to the floor. Ink bottles are sturdy, though, and the carpet kept them from breaking.

The bottle I could touch was a bottle of Parker Quink, blue-black. It was two-thirds empty. The label stained.

An old and trusty friend.

I filled my pen.

He threwme down the stairs by my hair one time.

My stepfather, I mean.

Not Joshua.

I’d forgotten that. Erased it. And now I can’t unremember it again.

A funnything happens as I write.

I feel myself getting more real. I figure it out when I realize that I can lean an elbow on the table I am resting the current mostly-finished notebook on. That’s a relief; you have no idea how hard writing is when you can manage to hold a pen but not rest your hand on anything.

When I realize that I could touch things, I stopped writing and ran into the kitchen, terrified of missing my window.

I still can’t lift a glass, but I manage to elbow the faucet on after a few minutes of trying. I bend my head sideways and drink from the thin cold trickle of stale-tasting water. Nothing ever felt better flowing down my throat. I gulp, gulp again. Manage to get it to pool in my hands and drink in that slightly more civilized fashion.

I drink until my stomach hurts, and then go to make sure the toilet seat is up, just in case I turn immaterial again before the stuff works its way through my system. Dehydrated as I had been that might take a while, but I have learned to plan ahead. Such are the important life concerns of the terminally ghostly.

I sit on the bathroom floor and rest the back of my head against the sliding glass door of the shower. At least I am not falling through walls or floors. Yet?

I can stop. I don’t have to do this anymore. I can stop, and it will be miserable… but I will die of thirst in a few days. If I stop clutching at making myself real. If I just accept that I am not important, and let my ridiculous scribblings go.

It sounds so appealing. A final erasure.

And I won’t have to remember…

I won’t have to remember the horrible person I had been. The horrible things I had done. The horrible things that had happened to me. I could forget them all.

Who knows? Maybe if I forget them thoroughly enough—if I encourage myself to forget them thoroughly enough—I won’t even die. I’ll just fade.

Maybe if I fade enough I won’t have material needs like food, water, air anymore. I’ll be a ghost for real.

I’ll be free. Free of myself. Free of pain.

I have these notebooks here.

I’m probably real enough to burn them now. Right now.

It will just cost the lives of some people I have never heard of to get there.

How many people?

I don’t know. One. A hundred. Three thousand.

Too many.

The glass shower door is cool. I relish its solidity.

When I put my hand up onto the sink to help myself stand, sometime later, my hand goes right through.

I don’thave to do this. I don’t have to exist.

I can just let myself be perfect, and be gone.

So much easier.

So much easier.

Except I remember about the fires now. And if I write it all down… I think I might make myself real again.

Then how do I get away from what I did? From what was done?

Oh god, do I have to live with myself now? Do I have to live with being flawed, and do things I’m not very good at?

People will know.

People will see me.

People will punish me.

I writeit all down.

Of coursethe manifesto was familiar.

I was the one who had written it.

What was published wasn’t my words exactly. It had been decades; what I wrote hadn’t survived the intervening twenty-odd years with Joshua unscathed. Unedited. It had passed through other pens than mine along the way.

But somewhere in the ashes of forgotten notebooks had been written a draft of that statement. Its structures, its rhetoric, even its handwriting had once been mine.

I don’tbother calling the local police. I call the local field office of the FBI.

“I know who wrote the manifesto,” I say into the phone. “His name is Joshua Bright. Or it was, he might have changed it. And that probably wasn’t his real name. Because who calls their kid Joshua Bright if they can help it? And he’s got a plan to use incendiary devices to burn down a big chunk of Chicago if you don’t stop him.”

“Ma’am?” the tinny voice at the end of the phone says. “We’ll be sending a couple of agents over right away to talk to you. Please stay where you are until they arrive.”

I makemyself a peanut butter sandwich while I wait.