The Bridge Read online

  I shivered. September in South Rim was spring, a time of new beginnings, of the first fragrant breezes blowing in from the East, swelling bellies of heifers in the paddocks all the way to Norman. I tried not to imagine how, at every moment, Narn would be moving slowly about the little hut I had left behind, folding up into quarters, eighths and then sixteenths the lying Wellsburg brochure with images of castellated ramparts, firelit rooms and moonlit fountains. I could see her holding for a moment in her weirdly unblemished hands, the crisp white release documents from the South Rim Redress Scheme of 2014 (updated in 2019):

  Which fully acknowledges that many young women, and young men, were genetically abused in the cult known as the Blood Temple

  Which unconditionally recognizes the harm caused by this abuse

  Which holds the Blood Temple and other participating institutions accountable for this abuse, including but not limited to participating institutions such as the Upper Slant and Lower Rim military, and various Silicon Alley media consortiums, social media conglomerates and cryptocurrency investors (see below for a full list of participating institutions)

  Which will aid survivors in gaining access to counseling and educational services, a direct personal response and monetary payments

  Would she toss the documents in the fire? Linger over Kai’s botanical sketches, an old snapshot of me—a stunted kinky-haired shadow glancing over her shoulder at a space, an absence that filled the frame with its presence? Would she gather up the bundled muddy clothes I wouldn’t be needing any more, with all the dread and hope of a beloved guardian on the day her grown ward leaves for college?

  The very thought of it brought on a renewed fit of coughing. Because that was in a different time and place. And because I wasn’t really Narn’s ward and she was a shitty guardian. She wasn’t even a real witch any more than her little sister Mag was a tattooed goth or the other sister, Tiff, was a rock chick. These were just disguises to mask their true forms, but once when I asked Kai about what they really looked like she just said, “Pray you never know.”

  Night came slow in the northern hemisphere autumn, an attenuated bridge of time between half-light and full-dark that I wasn’t yet used to. Trudy, Lara and I were on the nineteenth floor. Shelves divided the space into roughly equal thirds. My roommates and I each had a bed, a desk, a narrow closet. Lights winked and refracted across the window from the ancient campus town across the river. The livid glow of the bridge pulsed and faded like the breaths of a giant blue beast, a dinosaur or Golden Book dragon. It seemed foreign, unreal yet familiar—a reminder, or a marker of something hidden in plain sight.

  For a long moment I lay in the electric glow, just another particle of light. It was a kind of ecstasy.

  Or course Lara was right about the missing elective—but I felt so ill. I’d been plagued by a sensitive throat and bad lungs since adolescence—compromised immunity one of many symptoms of the Father’s experimental IVF media. Back in the hut tucked deep into the Starveling Hills on the other side of the world, Narn and I—the blind leading the blind—had poured together over the Wellsburg College Integrated Bachelor’s Degree Diploma. It was a bridging program tailored just for Blood Temple survivors, and it focused on our rehabilitation, reintegration and transition back to the real world. No one said, “dehumanization.” At least not to us.

  So without giving it much thought, I’d chosen Biology, of course, and then just for laughs, Computer Science and Geography. I signed the form and Narn cosigned as my official guardian, then gave it to Mag to run to Norman to make the five o’clock mail. But on arrival in Wellsburg, there had been an email waiting for me saying that Com-Sci was not on offer until second semester and I would need to select something to replace it. The email repeated the stringent conditions of the Redress Scheme—that until we successfully completed our first eighteen months based on a B-plus average, we were only eligible for a limited number of non-core arts electives.

  Now, on a program-issued tablet, I searched the electives available this semester and three came up. Spanish, Music and Technology and one by the strange name of Fictional Forms. Spanish was held in the Tower Village campus, where all my other classes were, but the other two were across the bridge, in Wellsburg. Both offered “limited availability” to Redress students. Both were evening classes. I looked through the window. Two weeks—a minute—since the shuttle had sped through the winding cobbled streets of the old university town with its gargoyled windows and bell tower sleeping in scaffold. Two weeks—a lifetime—since my hopes fell as the electric engine whined across the bridge and through the blue arch toward the deathly Tower Village. The program I’d signed up for was called Made for Tomorrow, but the closer we got to safety, the stronger my conviction that safety was a future free from fear for which I, at least, was never made.

  I stared at the slouching façades across the river and I saw a story about something that I couldn’t remember, a codified itch impossible to scratch.

  There were no prerequisites for either class, beyond competence in a musical instrument in the one, and basic literacy in English (not necessarily as a first language) in the other. Doubting my language skills and lacking in any musical ability, I chose Fictional Forms. Mainly because the reviews said that it was an easy three credit points. Focusing on storytelling, and open to a quota of Redress Scheme participants, it encouraged people from diverse and marginalized backgrounds to “write their own truth.”

  The line struck me as funny. It reminded me of how Kai, vicious after death, had tried to tell me something. Something that wasn’t funny after all.

  Truth or dead.

  I woozily fumbled the combination to my footlocker and found among the powders and herbs and charms and candle stubs, the packet of starchy Alectoria sarmentosa filaments that would clear my head, and had the extra benefit (at least to her) of keeping Narn and me telepathically bound.

  “We have our phones,” I’d reminded her when I caught her fretfully smuggling the tea into my luggage.

  “Witch-hair shroom works for when words don’t.” By which she meant that, brewed with the proper incantations, the tea worked on my brain in ways that kept us connected—enough of her in me and me in her to belie the fact that we weren’t blood. I muttered what scraps of the hex I could remember—Kai had inscribed it somewhere—as I sprinkled the tea over a mug of microwaved water. Almost as soon as I drank it, I felt a jolt of clarity, my thoughts unmuddied, my vision sharp.

  Sipping on the tea, I submitted my application for the elective, feeling awake for the first time since my arrival, a ripple of life in my veins. A memory surfaced and immediately retreated, but not before I caught it by its tail—an argument with Narn about her Tiff and my Kai. A promise made and broken. Remade from memory, but remade wrong.

  Because memory lies like the devil.

  An automated reply came in from the Office of Writing and Culture. It advised me that applications would remain open until seven o’clock tonight for physical copies, and that there would be an administrator there to process the forms. The Office of Writing and Culture was on the other side of the bridge. On the old campus, the Wellsburg side.

  I stared at the email, balking at the thought of leaving the dorm as I had balked at leaving the Starvelings. It was one thing to want, I knew, another thing to get. The effort of the application had already weakened me close to tears. I had not been out of my pajamas for over a week. My hair was bushy. My head too large, my neck too thin. My eyes puffy from crying and fever and bad dreams. The misery of homesickness had reminded all the other miseries to return—even I couldn’t fail to remember all that I had lost. Narn had lost a sister too, but at least Tiff was somewhere—Kai wasn’t even a ghost anymore. She wasn’t anything.

  I wanted to hear Narn’s voice, and through her, Kai’s. But lack of privacy and bad reception in the dorms made it difficult to talk. I decided now to wait until after I’d
been successful signed up for the elective so that I’d have something to look forward to when I returned from it. Lara and Trudy would be out until late.

  I began precisely, mechanically, to undress. The Father created us to have no more conception of our own nakedness than a dog, or a monkey. How then did we feel shame under the gaze of his Assistants—why did the memory of their touch never wash away? Waves of illumination lapped at the edges of the dormitory room, washed my skin a livid blue.

  I splashed water on my face and rummaged for a pair of jeans. The rough denim grated like sandpaper on my feverish skin. Narn had persuaded me to buy a new college wardrobe—jeans and bright, cheap skirts and cropped jackets—from the carer’s subsidy she received from the Redress Scheme. It was her way of settling the argument, because by then we both knew it was as much for her as for me.

  I had mostly worn hand-me-downs my whole life—shorts and T-shirts from older, bigger Mades in the Blood Temple, and in the Starvelings, cast-offs from Kai. As self-conscious as any teenager ashamed of her shabby appearance, I’d ransacked “Aunty” Tiff’s trunk to twirl a soiled G-string in my fingers, wobble in her platform boots—each item shimmered with the missing sister’s terrible failure to win the time war. Unable as I also was to move past the grief and guilt of living with the unlivable, I deeply connected with this failure. Tiff was a hot mess. And I was just a mess. I’d buried my fingers in the folds of the vodka-spattered bikinis and the absinthe-stained ruffles and I called to her, and maybe I prayed a little too. Alone and uncoupled, I hoped that it would be me to find her one day, this fallen sister, and that in return, she’d give me back my life.

  A sister for a sister, we’d finally agreed. Lost and found.

  I smoothed my hair with water, stepped out into the hall and into the elevator. After a swift descent, it lurched to a halt. The doors opened and the lights of the lobby snatched my shadow away. I paused on the threshold and stepped through just in time to avoid the doors closing on me, a stray strand of hair caught and quickly freed. I swung around, taunted by my split reflection. I saw me as they would see me in Writing and Culture—two halves of an impossible whole, from my stunted body (I could pass for fourteen) to my mismatched eyes—to everything else the media said about us. Compliance bled into survivors at the neurological level. Human-digital hybrids, mutants for the New World Order. Would fuck for food. Would fuck for anything.

  That part of course was true.

  CHAPTER 3

  TWISTED SISTER

  When I finally get the guts to ask Kai, she says Narn is not a witch exactly. Not like the witches that the 1880 Apology was talking about, the priestesses and Gnostics and Fairy Queens addressed in order to:

  Honor the ancient rite of witchcraft, the oldest continuing practice in human history.

  Reflect on their past mistreatment, including but not restricted to the centuries-old slandering, shunning, and mistaken association with the demonic or the deranged.

  Reflect in particular on the false trials and institutionalized hangings of innocent women and girls accused of witchcraft, this blemished chapter in our history.

  Turn a new page by righting the wrongs of yesterday and so moving forward with new confidence to tomorrow.

  Apologize for the laws and policies of governments that have inflicted so much suffering, loss and grief on our fellow citizens of the fair sex.

  Apologize especially for the accusations of demonic worship that led to the removal of mothers from their families, daughters from their mothers, and sisters from each other.

  Take this first step based on tolerance, respect and resolve to recognize the peaceful practice of witchcraft, with a stake in shaping the next chapter of the history of humanity.

  Narn is no Fairy Queen, Kai says. But she isn’t a witch, either. Kai would know because she has had the special task of calling on the old crone to collect ingredients for the Father’s ART. We are in the lavatory in Middles Bunk and Kai is sitting on the toilet. She looks unwell and she smells much worse.

  “What is she then?” I ask.

  “Maybe some other kind of sorcerer,” she stands and pulls up her bloomers. “She told me that where she was born it was always night, and the air was, like, filled with blood and screams.”

  I don’t know what gives me the courage finally to approach the charismatic, popular Made, the Father’s favorite. It is some days after the assembly when she angered him with her heckling, and rumor has it that he has begun the chemical unmaking for her sins.

  She stands at the stained mirror. “He said that it will hurt him much more than it will hurt me.”

  So I know that it is true. I drop my head and study my ugly bare toes, slate blue and scrawny as a hatchling’s. Why wasn’t it me who blurted out the line about the plucked ravens? What more punishment for my gutlessness than to witness the unmaking of my goddess? The Father favors Kai, and for all the wrong reasons. Her noncompliance is what he loves about her, but he must cure her of it, or accept that there is something lacking in his ART, which he cannot do. Harder for the Father to accept his own failures than to lose the daughter he never had, who always was, he admits, too smart for her own good. Her “exuviates” will beat his “ejaculate” at Scrabble, but it will be her undoing. I can see it in his small eyes when she doesn’t know he’s looking at her (he never sees me). The way she flings her hair, her swagger, her way with words. He waggles his finger. He tries to fix her. But first, he must break her. In the usual way, with drugs. Pills she must swallow under the supervision of Matron and the eye of the ravens. She pretends to change, but this only convinces him further that she’s rotten to the core. A bad apple. He has made us without the capacity for pretense. We are damned either way.

  He invites her to his library room for poker and she raises him with a pair of sixes. She’s too smart. What has gone wrong? The Father blames her lady-bits—not his poor poker skills—for the easy bluff. Although he’s engineered us all without devil horns, there is another factor that he calls “whore-moans” which are a little more difficult to control. Unable to be sure, the best bet is chemical hysterectomy. He increases the pharmaceuticals.

  I pray that the chemical cure works, and fast, and that her body will expel her lady-bits and keep the Father happy, without him resorting to surgery. Those who survive the chemical removal have every hope of living a full and productive life, Matron says. Those who don’t, were never meant to be.

  “What’s Narn’s hut like?” I ask, to change the subject. “Is there, like a boiling cauldron and a broom?”

  She turns around, pale as chalk. “Nah, but there’s a black cat and a dead janitor, the one who shot himself in the head after he got caught perving on the netball team in their dressing room when this dump was still a regular school.”

  She crosses her arms and legs, and her socks bunch over her scuffed school shoes.

  We are twelve. Lately I’ve been feeling strange. There is something wrong with me. And not just because of the pictures in my head that shouldn’t be there, but also because beneath one of my nipples is a hard sore swelling, and I’m ashamed of how I try and get the seam of my shorts to rub between my legs, imagining it is . . . imagining that I am not alone. We are not meant to see with our mind’s eye. That eye was gouged out when the Father genetically engineered us from our wombs to our brains. We barely even dream. It is the kind of thing I would have liked to ask Kai, but one of the other girls calls for her and she is gone, leaving me alone with her stink.

  Over the next few weeks, things return to normal, almost. Kai’s condition improves. I listen everywhere for the tap-tap of her brown shoes. She appears in the playground at exactly the right moment to deter some prowling bully, dumps her share of bread pudding onto my tray. Plays one of her practical jokes—some green dye in the shower, a cicada shell on my pillow. Plants a dry kiss on my cheek. I collect Kai’s kisses like abandoned bug shells,
a chalice for my love. Even before I know she is mine and I hers, I move in her shadow, and her grace. Her justice, her belief in all that is fair in love feeds her indignation at all that isn’t. Even before the realization of our shared DNA, and before the suspicion that our genetic connection is a worm in the Father’s apple, I feel it burrowing in my heart. My exaggerated sense of shame feels like the sentence that her overdeveloped sense of injustice tries to finish and vice versa. She is tall while I am short. Her skin is porcelain while mine is sallow. Her neck that of a swan, mine a heron. What’s opposite about us feels, at least to me, more like mimicry than mockery.

  Why should the Father suspect that what’s wrong with Kai is that she’s a twin? Even in the unlikelihood of a twofer slipping through the protocol—or Narn’s miscarriage potions—the chances of a multiple’s survival are almost non-existent. The Assistants see to that.

  “No twofers on my watch,” the Father says and by his watch, he means the ravens and we know why. Twins are the Father’s nightmare. Multiple births are a bitch—the only thing that can uncouple themselves from the Father’s code, twist it and recreate it anew. Into what? That is what keeps him awake at night, pacing his rooftop aerie alone except for the ravens.

  Even before I know this, I see myself in Kai’s speech and in her actions. In her shadow I see my own being flung against the wall. Kai flutters her hands, and I grow wings. I love her, even if I don’t know yet why, and she loves me, even if she does.

  Because Narn tells Kai first.

  She has to. The old witch in the janitor’s shed gives, has been giving, Kai potions, spells and charms to fight the Father’s drugs. And it works for a while. Until it doesn’t.