Trading Rosemary (12 page)

When they propped her on pillows, raising her head, she could see a group of objects that were the same shape as the moon but had a vibrancy she did not recognize—there was nothing in the room that looked the same. When she pointed they made sounds that she learned to associate with them, a long lilt and a short plosive that she repeated to herself over and over again, the sounds from her own throat croaking into life and slowly gaining mastery.

They had a sweet warm smell, and when they painted her lips with slices—and
there
was the moon, inside them—she was surprised, and not a little delighted, to taste sweetness, and how it covered a sharp taste like crisp slippery linen on her tongue.

The first time she could turn her head enough to see them take her blood, the shock of the prick and the pretty running liquid, she watched in fascination. “Apple,” she said, pointing at the blood, but they shook their heads at her. She didn’t understand. The colors were the same. Was that not
apple
? It was a treachery she could not comprehend.

They brought something to her with their hands hidden in wool—she had learned wool, and how it smelt of sheep and oil though she did not yet know those things—an object of strange shapes and insufficient material. To her new-peeled eyes it appeared fragmented, different shades and textures merged into each other, patch-worked into wholeness. The shape seemed familiar to her, pleasing, if too delicate. She couldn’t understand it, but felt it needed to be thicker, the curves rounder, fatter. The way it dripped at the edges disturbed her.

They offered it to her to touch: she, who loved to touch all new things, to learn and collect the sensations beneath unbandaged fingers and add them to her library of knowledge like smooth jewels of light, illuminations that bound the shards of her world together.

She did not want to touch this. Its completeness repelled her, did not invite confidence. Sensation made her sufficient, but this curving plate was sufficient in itself. She did not understand it, but her desire not to touch it was not matched by her eyes—they returned to its familiarity, comforted by its shape. When they touched it to her fingers she wailed, a high shattered sound, and snatched them back—but the pain and horror did not unmake her, and slid from her mind like water off oiled stone. Moments later, she was interested and amused to see the apprehension on their faces—she did not comprehend what it meant, could not translate it to the expression that had been so recently on her own. Their fear interested her; it made their faces funny and flickered.

Wings fluttered at the window, muffled against glass. Turning her head, she could see the soft flash of feathers, the small brown bird, as it righted itself and minced along the ledge, baffled. The glass was a barrier it could not understand, and, still limited to the bed she could not comprehend it either. If she had thought about what it would feel like, she would have said air—the glass was as clear as air, so why not? And cool, except when it was sunny, though she didn’t have much experience of sun. All she could remember was rain, now a gentle trickle that sometimes slowed at night and left patterns on the window and walls and ceiling. When sunshine appeared through the clouds, there were also patterns on her skin from the drops on the windows, small clean shadowed tears that were nothing like the virulent striations that so interested her when they cleaned her wounds, replaced the bandages.

She would have liked to be as free as the bird had been, to touch the glass and to feel it hard against her, to collect
glass
and add it to herself. The word tasted clean in her mouth, and she wanted to know if it felt the same to her fingers.

She would have liked to hop also. And the pillow restricted her from truly mimicking the pert movements of the bird’s head. She wondered if it would let her touch it, feel bird feathers, smell bird wings. It would be nice if it hopped on her hand. Instead it minced before her, untouchable, and made her smile at skipping for they could do that together.

One day she surfaced to see a new moon in orbit around her; surrounded with hair as dark as the sky-socket of the first and earliest moon. She was permitted to touch, and the smooth shining silk of it slid through her fingers like water, warm and faintly scented. When she put her face in it, rubbed it against her cheeks and lips, the moon began to tremble. Rolling sounds came from its mouth, and she was allowed to touch that as well.

One sound was repeated, over and over. She tried to reflect the shape in her own mouth, stared at how the other moved and tried to replicate it. The beginning was easier than the end, for she already knew how to say
moon,
and the sounds were the same. But sticky water came from her mouth before she could make the other.

Eventually: “Mother,” she repeated, and the moon split, gleamed teeth from the cradle of bone. She was pleased with herself, knew she had made the sound right, knew she had a name for the person before her. “Mother,” she said again, pointing at the girl, and smiling. “Mother, mother, mother . . . ”

When Mother’s eyes watered and Mother ran from the room, she could not understand what she had done wrong. But she could see that Mother moved as jerkily as the bird, and that was amusing.

When they brought back the curved mongrel surface their hands were again covered and they would not look her in the eye. Mother was with them, eyes still leaking, and she would have liked to taste the drops to see if they were different than the drops that fell outside and gave her vision such pleasure—they had let her taste those.

They rested the hollow arch on her torso, and she looked at it with interest, not wishing to touch but pleased to see how the hues and textures ran into each other. Her bandages prevented it from touching her skin, but it was too small to fit round her and perched on her chest. Again she could perceive a familiarity to its shape, but did not know the source.

It was taken away, and her bandages stripped carefully from her. It hurt less now, and sharpness in her arm made the pain recede further. It made her sad that they never let her trace the tints and ridges of her chest with her fingers, but held them gently away. She wanted to touch, to see how the different parts of the landscape of her torso were matched together. She smelled sweeter than the apple-covered moons, but darker, and her tongue could not reach to taste.

When they fitted the shield over her chest, snug to her body, Rosemary knew herself. All the memories of her life assaulted her at once, a terrifying, exhilarating mélange that left her as incapable and as lost as she was in their absence.

She could not hear herself screaming; was too focused on the one dominating remembrance that fitted her fragments together—the agony of flame and melting metal, charred wood, curling plastic, singed stone . . . the instinctive clutch of the memory recorder and the rapid draining away of all that made her Rosemary, the final hideous knowledge that her entire life had been a slow prelude to that one experience, a dying by inches before she was burned away in the conflagration of her life. There was no way to separate it from the other memories—only in burning was she Rosemary, and even that Rosemary had been crippled by her own willing loss.

She flung it from her, overpowered her attendants, forced their faces to her sculpted torso and only stopped when their screaming outdistanced her own.

Thereafter they did not bring it back, and she was left with a growing detritus of experience that surrounded her bed, clogged her room. Rocks, paints, leaves, fabrics, paper glass instruments toys twigs pictures leathers fruits powder—

“Mine,” she said, when they tried to take them away. “
Mine.
”

The new room had wallpaper that smelled of paste when she put her nose to it and snuffled, so different from the clean white walls of the hospital, the dry smell of paint interspersed with the sharp stink of antiseptic, the faint tinge of sweat. The faces that came to her in the new papery room wore the same clothes as those of the last, but these carried clipboards and brightly colored books instead of basins and bandages and needles, and they smelled of perfume.

She breathed them in as they sat by her bed, sniffed and sniffed until they brought her things that smelled of themselves. She had lilac and lavender and geraniums, the bright apple shine of the last glowing in the sun as it came through the window, less for the color, although that was pretty, than for the warm clean scent of the leaves in sunlight.

On the table by her bed was an ugly lump of ambergris, brought to her when it was still wet with seawater and a little crusted with sand. They had tried to take it from her as it dried, the cloying, fecal scent making the faces twist and hide behind the orange bottles until it aged into earthiness.

She had carved pieces of sandalwood and bowls of nutmeg, cinnamon sticks, black pepper. There was a whole range of bottles, bottles over every surface, hundreds of them, squat and skinny and strangely shaped and all with glass stoppers . . . dill and jasmine and bergamot, and she liked to roll the oil between her fingers and breathe in the scent of rose and juniper, of mustard and musk and myrrh . . .

The faces were back, shining and damp above her as the moon after a rainstorm, split through a kaleidoscope into a forest of moons, secure on their stalks, bobbing and weaving about her amidst the wonder of her library of
things.

“Moon,” she said, and giggled.

Discomfort surrounded her, bemusement and fear and pity that sent arrows into her body and found their source in the eyes of those who watched her, and the shafts of horror splinting their too-straight backs. But beyond them there was a wider world that glowed and dimmed about her, a swirling mass of fragmented expectation and disconnected impressions, and the contrast between the wonder of her new experiences and the dismay on the countenances of those above her overcame pain and confusion and she could no longer contain, no longer retained enough of Rosemary to
want
to contain, the deep glad laughter that bubbled from the depths of her body and delighted, embraced the endless excitement of her new life . . .