We Leave Together, стр. 38
They who live beneath the builders of cities are shadows of shadows.
There is no sign of the life of death Djoss led hidden in any of the corners inside of Jona’s memories, or the rumors of the street boys that had long forgotten their fallen kings.
Here is what I think, and probably what you think. He punched and fought his way into a room with hookahs. He did this after passing through all the places he knew with illegal coins, muscling and beating and maiming until he had it all. Full of himself, full of the awesome power of taking all that he wanted from the night, he could not contain his greed. The pipes called to him. The sweet stain of smoke pulled him back to death. At first, he thought he would just steal the weed and sell it somewhere, a symbolic gesture of power over the monster that ruled him. Then, it was in his hands, and he was alone, and no one was going to stop him. Rachel wasn’t there to stop him. The bouncers were bleeding on the ground. The night was empty for him, and it was all for him.
He was smart enough to take it all somewhere else before he smoked it, or else the night would have found him long before Lady Sabachthani would bother with the hunt.
Here is also what I think: Lady Sabachthani wanted to kill Djoss because it would drive Rachel away from Dogsland. She was very interested in all the demon stained. Sabachthani wanted Jona to do it, because it would tear Rachel away from his heart forever.
A message came for Jona.
Rachel’s story fades from us.
There are things we know.
There are things we almost know.
The words flood the street outside our window. Jona’s memories sweep through the public houses and temples, where all secrets come to light. It is impossible now for my husband and me outside, with the Sabachthani family back on their heels. We stay hidden in our Temple, back in the record rooms, away from the eyes of even our own men and women, waiting for the rage to rise up into a boil.
We do not have very much to do.
There is some certainty in her heart from what she told to Jona, and what truth was hidden in the cloth upon her back and her voice’s different way of pronouncing the same words as everyone else.
My husband doesn’t think it is worth the time to construct this life, but Jona loves her, and he imagined it all from her words. It was a dream of her life, that led her to his lonely, empty, dirty, little room.
Write it down. Write it all down. If it will get the ghost to settle in your heart while we wait for word from the Anchorite.
CHAPTER 12
The more I see into Jona’s memories, the more I see the older fragments of the mind. Are they dreams? Are they real? I don’t know.
Jona and Rachel spoke of their youth sometimes.
My husband and I have made a detailed study of everything we could pull from Jona’s brain. We arranged the details of Rachel’s past as best we could.
All these things that Jona remembered from different conversations merged into clear fragments of Rachel’s youth in my mind like Erin’s form of dreamcasting, with no koans to meditate upon like the Senta, just with our knowledge in the service of Erin, our senses of animal and man. Also, my best imagination, and little else. I write it down to soothe the ghost in me, but I know it cannot be true.
Also, it gives us, my brothers and sisters, a point of beginning for our hunts into the gap where the doppelgänger crawled out from the crust of the earth, from Elishta.
***
Rachel, when she was just a little girl, saw her father at the edge of the dock, sitting on a crate. No ships came or went today. The ducks swam beneath the harbor. The birds sniffed through the filth for the fish that searched for food among the filth. Every little piece of filth rolled from the alleys into the harbor water.
And the man—what parts of him that were man—held a loaf of bread up to his ear. He leaned against it like he was listening.
Rachel knew that something was slipping out of the ear and reaching inside of the crusty shell for all the soft bits inside. She hadn’t ever really seen the thing. She knew that she was not allowed to talk about it, even if she was alone with Djoss or her mother.
When the insides of the bread were all devoured and only the shell remained, the man would eat that as if he were just a normal man.
Rachel didn’t know, yet, what that meant. She was still too young to understand that her father was not like other fathers.
Rachel’s mother led Rachel and Djoss to a blackberry bush so they could eat and catch their breath.
Djoss cut a long branch off with his knife. He held it up in the air like a fisherman’s line. He walked into the shade of a poplar tree. He started eating all of the blackberries. The branch was covered in tiny thorns.
Rachel reached for a single blackberry like her mother, but Rachel stopped when she saw the tiny thorns.
“It’ll bite me,” she said.
Her mother smiled patiently. “Just be careful, Rachel,” she said.
Rachel put her hands on her hips. “No,” she said, “They bite.”
Her mother picked a ripe blackberry from the top. She brushed off the seed dust. She held it out for Rachel.
Rachel crossed her arms. “No,” she said.
Her mother ate the blackberry. She chewed it. She smiled. “See?” she said, “Tasty. They don’t bite. Look at your brother.”
Rachel looked over at her brother. He started at one end of his thorny vine and worked his way to the other.