Um, yeah. I woke up. I had an idea. It wasn’t my idea. I just happened to have it.
Why did I have it? I guess because it was about drugs. I like drugs.
Well, I usually like drugs. This wasn’t a really good trip though. Bad idea.
Time. I’m not good with time. Also, I forget stuff. Well, I can usually remember if it’s important. Like the names of the underworld bosses we’ve made deals with. I can’t think of them now, but if I saw them, I’d remember. It’s all in my branch. So there’s really no point in remembering it unless I have to.
You know, people remember all of this shit, and it makes them kind of crazy. It’s really a lot better to only remember things when you have to.
Anyway, it was, uh, the day after Driscoll had that breakdown. Geez, I was worried about him. I was gonna tell him to smoke one of his jazz cigarettes. And while he was at it, give one to me. But I couldn’t, because the minute he went back inside, I was outside. Which surprised me a lot. I’m not out a lot unless I have something I have to do. Which is fine by me. Ailann and Patrick and Cillian usually do a pretty good job of handling stuff. And getting laid. If stuff is getting handled, and we’re getting laid, and I can hang around here all day shooting up, where’s the problem?
It’s nice here. It’s not a big place, but it’s nice. Warm. A rug by the fireplace. All the guys hang out, and we talk, and sometimes somebody starts to sing, Jack or Tommy maybe, and then Evan will play the fasharp. And we give each other shit, but we don’t really mean it. Most of the time, anyway.
There’s love.
Anyway, I woke up next to Tara. In her bed. In bed is a good place to wake up. Not one I could always assume. Plenty of times in my life I woke up in an alley, or slumped over a bar, or asleep at the helm of Sweet Blonde Susanna’s star cruiser. Um, I hope she doesn’t read this.
Yeah, I sleep. I’m the only one. It’s connected, I think, to being able to forget. But Tarlach says that humans use sleep to help them remember. Transfer short-term to long-term memory, he says. So maybe when I sleep, I transfer my memories safely into my branch, where I can forget about them.
I wish Mickey would stop being so hyper. It’s not like the story is going away or something. I’ll get to it.
That stuff is connected anyway. You’ll see.
So I told Tara that I had an idea. She looked surprised. I didn’t blame her. Maybe a little disappointed. Like when-am-I-gonna-wake-up-with-Patrick disappointed. It wasn’t any bark off my branch. That is, it doesn’t bother me that she’d rather be with Patrick. I’d rather be with Patrick. I mean, than with me. Of course I’d rather be with Tara than with Patrick. Except when she’s disappointed. That’s why I’d rather that Patrick be with Tara, and I just stay hanging out here and getting high.
Aw fuck, I already said that. Sorry, Mickey.
This was the idea: we should make Gyre from that apple Clive took from Goliath. But not for Tara, for me. Because like Gyre from Atlas lets her see stuff about us, maybe if I took Gyre from Goliath, I’d be able to see stuff about Goliath.
She thought that it was a good idea, so she synthesized the Gyre, and I took some. I offered her some too, but she said no. Which surprised me. Tara likes to trip with the best of them. She’s an alchemist. Like an old school alchemist who makes contraband. I’m an alchemist too. Like an older school alchemist who turns lead into gold. Or other stuff. Not anything as good as a javamelon, though. I guess I’ll never get to be a god. Which is fine by me. Being a god sounds like a pain in the ass. But maybe I could convince Davy to make some new drugs. Anyway, her excuse was that she’d better observe the experiment. But really, I think she thought Ailann would get mad if she took Gyre from Goliath.
She was probably right.
So I opened my mouth, and she put the drop on my tongue. It was blue, not clear, and it tasted different than the Gyre I’d had before. I don’t think an ordinary human would’ve noticed the difference. Well, maybe ordinary humans would’ve noticed the difference, because they would’ve gone into convulsions. Our apples are poison to everyone but Tara, and making Gyre concentrates the effect. So I guess it’s more true to say that Tara wouldn’t have noticed the difference. Except she would, because it’s different. What am I trying to say? Um, I mean, the two kinds of Gyre would’ve tasted the same to her.
Other than the taste, it was just like when I took Gyre before, when I could suddenly talk to everyone, and feel my roots and the sun on my leaves, and remember the stuff in the branches.
Except it wasn’t at all like that. It was awful. The Goliath emanations didn’t have a warm little room. They had a cold enormous cave. It was damp and had a musty smell. Also, the soil on Eden is itchy. My roots itched.
And those guys were there, but – they were like in a coma or something. Like fossils, maybe. Frozen. Stiff. Cold.
The trunks were cold to the touch. Nau’gsh trunks are supposed to be warm. It was gross.
And then I started thinking that maybe that’s what we had all been like for two years. And I was like –whoa! Better forget that fast.
Also, I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t see our room anymore, or hear the voices of the other emanations. I was stuck there, in that crappy place. And I started wondering if I would ever get home. I was freaking out. Like an old school brown acid trip.
I decided to try to wake the Goliath guys up. But the only one that responded was Manasseh. At first, he thought I was one of them. But he couldn’t figure it out. “If you’re new, you should be outside,” he said. “Did I miss something?” And then he saw Ari and Aran, laying there like corpses, and he started to freak out too.
I said I wished I had some Black Opium-27. Opium takes the edge off. Gyre wasn’t taking the edge off. It was more like a rusty sawblade.
Ever wanna see a tree wince? Say “rusty sawblade.” It’s like when you say “put his nuts in a cheese grinder” in front of a human male.
I always thought that was funny. Not the cheese-grinder, or the wincing, I mean “nuts.” Nuts are more like eggs. So why do men have nuts and not women? Evan says it’s a visual metaphor, but I dunno. Testicles are hairy. Maybe more like coconuts? But coconuts are hard. Testicles are soft and warm and kind of squishy. They move, like when it gets cold. The first time I saw mine do that I was like – whoa! Are they supposed to do that? But it didn’t seem to do any harm. Maybe I just don’t get this metaphor thing. Testicles are testicles, not nuts.
I don’t know why Cillian is laughing so hard, but I think Mickey is banging his head against the wall because he thinks I’ve lost the plot again. Well, I’m almost done.
I said I was sorry, I didn’t know why the others wouldn’t wake up. And Manasseh looked me in the eye and said, “You could only wake me because you’re my brother.”
I was confused. Well, more confused than usual. Because ‘brother’ means something in specific to us. In the general way, all the branches are bros. We’ve got each other’s bark. But when we say ‘brother’ we mean two emanations from the same wood, like Whirljack and Blackjack, or Owen and Lugh. I think Atlas is the only tree that even has brothers. I don’t think any of the other Cu’enashti have had such weird things happen to them. A brother happens because something really bad has happened, and Atlas is trying to fix the damage. So how could Manasseh and I be brothers?
But I kinda thought he was right? He did look a lot like me. But more like a half-brother. Well, that’s exactly it, but I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know that Davy made Goliath by cutting and pasting pieces of Atlas. Manasseh is made out of me and Daniel. Me and Daniel! The flower-face and the junk-addled loser. What the fuck were you thinking, Davy?
Davy says that he was avoiding doing the obvious things, that he wanted to make new and exciting combinations, to see what would happen. And he thought Manasseh worked brilliantly – he had Daniel’s sweetness and innocence, but my sense of lostness – which made everyone want to protect and rescue him. But also that I had a hidden strength that was able to get Manasseh through the troubles.
A darkness not illuminated by the second sun, says Dermot, like you yourself faced.
I explained to Manasseh what was going on as best I could, given how fucked up I was. And he started to cry. He said it was because sooner or later the Gyre would wear off, and I’d be gone. And then he’d either go back into stasis, or he’d stay awake and be completely alone. And he didn’t know which was more scary.
I completely lost my shit. Tara told me that I was yelling and clawing at the sheets and she was getting really worried about me. I said, “You and me both, babe.” I didn’t know what to fucking do. He was just a kid, my kid brother, and how could I leave him there alone? But I couldn’t stop it. I promised him we’d think of something. I had no idea what, but something. I said Cuinn would come up with an idea. Cuinn’s so goddamn smart.
The Gyre finally wore off. It seemed like forever, but it wore off. And then I got debriefed. Well, basically, everyone rushed to access my branch because they all wanted to know what the hell happened. And Lugh was putting his arm around me and saying it would be all right, and Davy gave me a beer. It must have looked pretty bad on their end.
Lugh says that they couldn’t talk to me while I was tripping. That they stayed in the room together, but no matter how much they yelled, I couldn’t hear them.
When I calmed down a little, I said I couldn’t figure out what they had done to deserve that, why Ari and Manasseh and Aran were in such a horrible place. And Tarlach said no, they thought they were in a good place. And we all looked at him like he was as scrambled as an egg salad sandwich.
You know where we are? Tarlach asked us. And we looked at him some more. And he said that this is Daniel’s room, his loft back in Merenis Port-of-Call where he’d first made love to Tara. And that he was figuring when Sloane emanated, Daniel retreated to the safest, most comforting place he knew. He made this space in our minds out of his memories. And we’ve just always been here. But that the safest, most comforting place Ari knew on Eden was probably some cave where they could hide from the Terrans.
Fuck all, that’s depressing.