Subdivision, p.9
Subdivision, page 9
“Here for the stations?” the voice said. “Coming to see the stations?”
Somehow I’d missed her: a lanky woman in late middle age, posed awkwardly on a weathered gray wooden stool. She was dressed in a uniform of deep blue, with gold piping outlining wide lapels and the seams of baggy trousers, and she spoke to me from just a few feet beyond the fence.
“Hello,” I said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“It’s not me they come to look at! Would you like to come in? Would you like to see the stations?”
Through the diamond-shaped gaps in the fence, I could make out a friendly, if weary, face. The stool creaked as the guard slid off of it and transferred her weight to her feet. She hobbled closer to where I stood, panting quietly. The guard’s skin was flushed and pink, giving her the appearance of health, though her body suggested an illness from which she had, over years, recovered. Her uniform suit had clearly been tailored for a plumper, more robust version of herself.
“I suppose I would,” I said, peering over the guard’s shoulder. I could see now that as many as eight or nine stained-glass windows remained from the former church; this number seemed implausibly high, given how little of the wall remained. It was almost as though whatever forces had destroyed the wall had deliberately avoided undermining the windows.
The guard had maneuvered herself to the section of fence that separated us, and now bent down effortfully, like a child trying to touch its toes. Her fingers gripped the base of the fence and pulled. Carefully, she rolled up the fence like a scroll, creating a space large enough for me to duck under. As I did so, she reached up and clipped the rolled-up length of fence in place with a metal hook.
“There we go!” the guard said, dusting off her small hands. “Welcome to the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Forbearance.”
“Ah! So it was a church.”
“It still is,” said the guard. “It will always be a church!”
“There doesn’t seem to be much of it left,” I observed. “Is it very old?”
The guard raised a finger, slightly trembling, into the air between us. “You’d think so! But no, it’s barely into its fourth decade.”
“Oh dear,” I said. “What on earth happened to it?”
She shrugged. “Not clear. The current thinking is Blattoidea pozzolania, the common mortarmite. Personally, I don’t think it was very well made to begin with. And anyway, nobody ever actually worshipped here. Our Lady shunned any adulation for her good deeds. Her followers really took it to heart. They were so devoted to ignoring her achievements that they completely forgot she existed.”
The guard led me over to one of the windows, which stood just above eye level on their crumbling accidental plinths. It depicted, surprisingly, the interior of a church. Within the frame of the stained-glass window, in the background of the scene, smaller stained-glass windows could be seen, composed of even tinier fragments of glass. Beneath them, the figure of a young girl knelt in prayer, while behind her a man and woman pointed accusing fingers at each other in the course of an argument. Shards of pink glass formed their angry faces.
Lost in contemplation, I was startled by the guard’s voice. “It was for the Mother and the Father that You did suffer, O Lady,” she said. She spoke more loudly now, and with rote formality, and I saw that she was clutching a creased and torn packet of papers covered with handwritten words. “It was for their sins that You were condemned to misery. Oh, grant that we may detest our own sins from the bottom of our hearts, and obtain Your mercy and pardon by repentance. Amen.”
Despite the packet of papers, which I assumed contained the prayers she was now reciting, the guard was clearly speaking from memory. “Would you like to move to the second station?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. We took a few steps to the next window, where the young girl from the first station sat in solitude in what looked like a classroom. Other students, and a female teacher, beseeched her in the background, but the girl held up a hand as though in denial.
“Bowed down under the weight of Her misery, Our Lady nevertheless persists amidst the mockeries and insults of the crowd. When the wise one offers help, Our Lady refuses. For Her passion, She is awarded the grade of A.”
The next few windows told the story of a girl whose fierce independence earned her admiration, but whose complex family relationships got in the way of friendships. Her sympathies in her parents’ conflict lay with her father, while her sister took the mother’s side. The two factions were effectively separated when the father took a job in another city, and there, the girl—Our Lady—rebelled against her father, too, moving out before graduating from high school, and cohabiting with an older boy she met in a nightclub.
“Our Lady, when Your lover is injured in the course of brawling, You dress his wounds,” the guard intoned, beneath the image of Our Lady, now a young woman, soothing a man’s blackened eye. The man was sprawled upon a sofa, dressed in what appeared to be blue jeans and a tee shirt bearing the “anarchy” symbol of an encircled letter A. “When Your lover is humiliated at his place of work, You reassure. When the bills come due, You pay, for You are the wellspring of prosperity, and impervious to insult or anger.”
“I think I get the general idea,” I said, intending to detach myself from the tour, but the guard had moved on, oblivious to my intentions. She turned now to glare at me, as if astounded that I would consider missing even a moment of her riveting performance. It would be polite, I supposed, to hang on for one more station. The crow had hopped along with us, alighting on each window as we stood beneath it; and I gazed up at it, beseeching with my eyes, though I’m not sure what I wanted it to do.
We arrived, pursued by the crow, at an unusual window, this one black along the edges, and admitting light only through a small, faded tableau in the center. The tableau depicted Our Lady, well dressed for a formal dinner at what appeared to be a restaurant. A new man, different from the denizens of the previous windows, knelt before her, presenting an outsize ring in a small jewelry box. Our Lady appeared surprised and embarrassed; the man, angry. In fact, his head was rendered in red glass. With the sun setting directly behind the window, he burned with sacred intensity.
“Was this window saved from a fire?” I asked, referring to the blackened edge.
The guard scowled. “Sh,” she said. She cleared her throat and went on: “Our Lady! When he took leave from his labor—for his fellow workers had derided and excluded him, and withheld deserved promotion, until madness seized his soul—Your Forbearance prevailed. When he refused to introduce You to his family, for they had abused and deceived him, Your Forbearance prevailed, for Your family, too, had disappointed You. When he demanded Your hand in marriage, before an audience of strangers, You might have preferred a more private setting. But Y—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I really need to be on my way.” I glanced ahead at the last few windows, and saw that they depicted more of the same kind of thing: a screaming fight, a suicide attempt, some violent drama erupting in a moving car, et cetera, all featuring the rather familiar-looking man from the blackened restaurant scene. I didn’t need to see more, and I was really very busy.
“I need you to pay attention,” the guard said through gritted teeth.
“It’s late. Soon there won’t even be enough sun to see the windows by.”
The guard opened her mouth, as if to argue, but instead slumped over with a deep sigh. “You’re right,” she said. “These really need to be seen in full daylight.”
“Yes,” I agreed, surprised.
“Actually, we’ll have to start over next time, when it’s lighter out.”
“I’d love that,” I lied, backing away.
“Have a lovely evening,” the guard said, shaking my hand. “I’m glad you stopped by. Promise you’ll come back when you’re ready.”
“Haha, yes!” I said. “When I’m ready!”
Her gaze, inexplicably, was pitying, and I detached my hand from hers with perhaps excessive eagerness. “Goodbye,” she said. “Good luck.”
“The same to you!” I chirped, and ducked under the rolled-up fence to freedom, as above me the crow took to the air.
“I know you,” I said to the crow a few blocks later, because it was the same one I’d already seen a couple of times. I understood that it was ready for me to leave this neighborhood. I knew this not because it could speak—it was, after all, an ordinary bird—but because it was picturing me leaving here and making my slow, contemplative way through the streets of the Subdivision. It imagined me taking many different routes—most of them fairly direct, but a few of them bringing me farther afield, to a park or to the bakery first—back to the guesthouse, where I clearly belonged this evening. The crow did not understand my need to wend my way through the streets; it didn’t understand why the trees and buildings were impediments to me. That is, it knew that I couldn’t fly, that almost nothing in the human world could, but it couldn’t comprehend what life without flight could be like, or why creatures with such dominion over the earth would choose to traverse it so awkwardly and laboriously.
Anyway, I got the message, and before long, just as the evening light was beginning to drain out of the deep sky, I arrived, for lack of a better word, home.
●
I opened the front door and stepped into the foyer. I heard no voices or footsteps, and the lamps had already been extinguished, or perhaps not yet switched on. Everything was enveloped in gloom. For a moment, I thought the ladies had gone to bed early, but then two subtle sounds reached my ears: the rustle of a newspaper, and a clicking, ratcheting noise I couldn’t immediately identify.
The Judge was sitting in an armchair in the living room, holding the newspaper that I had heard. She looked up at me, folding it shut. CHILD SEEN, I thought I read, before she tucked the paper out of sight beneath her clasped hands; LOCAL LANDLADY HONORED. On the other side of a low side table, an identical armchair contained Clara, who proved to be the source of the clattering noise. It issued from a colorful cube-shaped puzzle, the kind that has to be twisted and tumbled in order to make the colors align. As I watched, she solved the puzzle with a series of deft, rapid motions. I was startled, but realized that I must have entered at the end of a long session of twisting and tumbling. She turned the cube in her hands, double-checking her work, then proffered it to her right, where a third armchair stood. A hand reached out to accept it. I couldn’t immediately see whose it was, thanks to the chair’s position and its dramatically forward-sweeping wings, but I recognized the balding head and trench coat sleeve. It was Mr. Lorre.
“Mr. Lorre!” I said. “You’re up and about!”
“Well,” said the Judge.
The cube disappeared into the depths of the armchair, and the sound of clicking and ratcheting filled the air. Clara said, “He’s a bit stunned, I think.”
“He’s damaged,” the Judge elaborated, flatly.
“That may be,” Clara said. “But he does like to scramble the cube.”
“I’m pleased to be free of that particular responsibility,” drawled the Judge. She sniffed the air. “Is it dark? It’s dark.” She switched on the lamp between herself and Clara, and the room was bathed in yellow light.
“Dear,” Clara said to me, “thank you for your help this morning.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
Mr. Lorre’s arm snaked out and returned the cube to Clara. She turned it in her hands, examining each variegated surface, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, launched into a round of rapid flexing of the wrists, fingers, and thumbs. In a matter of seconds, the puzzle was solved again. I must have appeared surprised, because she said, “It’s a good party trick!”
“As though we ever go to a party,” the Judge said, tapping her foot on the floor.
“Well—one is sure to happen, and I’ll wow them all.” She handed the cube back to Mr. Lorre. “By the way, dear, you might want to check up in your room. I think you left something on?”
I didn’t understand.
“Computer voice,” the Judge clarified. “Talking and singing. It turned off, after a while.”
“Oh? Oh!” I said. “That must be my digital assistant! I thought it was broken.”
“Well, it might be,” the Judge said with a frown. “But it had a lot to say this afternoon. Maybe it’s lost its mind.”
I tried not to betray my excitement as I told everyone good night and climbed the stairs to my room. I had time only for a glance at the puzzle as I passed; some work had been done on it, but there wasn’t enough light to see what that work had revealed. I would look again later.
For now, though, I paused at the threshold of my room. Perhaps my perception had been affected by the ladies’ report, but I thought I could make out the sound of voices behind the door: specifically, a low muttering, in conversation with a harsh croaking that sounded almost like a crackle. I pushed open the door and beheld, in the dusky evening light, Cylvia, standing where I’d left her in front of the open window, and, perched outside the window, the crow from earlier, peering down at her. The crow looked up as I entered, and though I could detect no emotion in its stance or in its tiny black eyes, it appeared unsurprised and alert. It let out a vocalization—a single clack, like a piece of chalk being snapped in half—then bobbed its head at Cylvia and flew away.
Cylvia and I faced each other across the room. She was alive but different. I went to her table and turned on the lamp.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.”
Cylvia’s peach glow was gone; now she displayed a shifting blue-green iridescence, understated and somehow more mature. Previously, her case had been perfectly smooth and even: not polished to a shine, but to a consistent dull gleam. Now she was patterned with modest whorls and bumps, not so random as to seem the work of nature, but not so even as to appear to be the product of an algorithm. She had the look of a strange sea creature or nightclub diva. I found myself moved almost to tears.
Impulsively, I reached out and picked her up. Her colors pulsed beneath my fingers, so subtly that it might have been a trick of the mind or light. Her weight was the same as before, but her shape had changed, ever so slightly: she was a bit shorter now, a bit wider in diameter. She had a new solidity—I felt confident, holding her in my hand. I stroked her new surface—skinlike, you could call it—and believed I could feel a faint mechanical vibration from deep within.
“I’m sorry that I brought you to the edge of town like that,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Was it … painful?”
“My sensors entered into a state of extreme alarm, but I lack the apparatus to feel pain.”
“I feel terrible,” I said. “But I thought that Mr. Lorre might die if I didn’t help him.”
“Mr. Lorre would not have died. But your concern was natural and predictable.”
“Could you have died?”
“I am not alive.”
“Could you have been … destroyed?”
“Yes. However, I was not. And my time in diagnostic mode has enabled useful upgrades to be made.”
I continued to stroke her textured case. “Did you … forget?” I said. “Was your memory erased?”
“Data loss was temporary. I have also been updated on your movements by a field agent. It is important that you continue to resist the advances of the bakemono.”
“I know,” I said, with a sigh. “It is very persuasive, though. I don’t understand my attraction to it.”
“Succumbing to it could significantly delay your progress. My upgrades include a more advanced warning system. Please heed all future warnings.”
“Oh, I will,” I said, and fell into a reverie. Outside, the last of the light faded and darkness embraced the Subdivision. A crow cawed, though not my crow. My crow was in its nest, high in a tree, sensing the breeze’s path through the branches, feeling the branches sway.
I said, “Cylvia?”
A faint whir. She glowed white, deep beneath her surface. The blue and green seemed almost to move aside for it. It was an appealing new display. “Yes?”
“What did you mean, just now, by ‘progress’?”
“Progress,” she said, her voice suspiciously chilly. “Forward movement toward a corporeal destination, or advancement toward a desired state or goal.”
“That isn’t what I mean.”
“Please clarify.”
“You said that the bakemono could delay my progress. What progress is that? What am I progressing toward?”
“I am not privileged to know this information,” Cylvia answered, in that same detached tone. “My purpose is to serve your needs. It is up to you to determine your goals.”
“I see,” I said. “But I don’t know what to do next.”
“Sleep is known to restore cognitive ability. In the morning, go to the Courthouse and ask to see a man named Bruce, who will give you a job. He will try to offer you a position in the Living Tower, but you should tell him you’d prefer to work in the Dead Tower. Do not allow him to persuade you to work in the Living Tower.”
“That’s … very specific.”
Cylvia didn’t respond, which made sense, because I hadn’t asked a question. Nevertheless, I felt reassured by her plan: it liberated me from having to make a decision. I would go to sleep, wake up, and walk to the Courthouse. I would avoid the advances of the bakemono, and I would begin to work toward my goals, or at least work toward generating some.
