Dispatch from a Colored Room Page 3

for me to live elsewhere.

  It is out of love for you that I do this. Irregularities in my behavior caused by the chancre have led the superintendent to request my resignation, and it is best that I leave before they affect my relationship with you. I know this can only seem like a paltry explanation, whether you read it at two or twenty-two. If I am lucky, you will not even remember my absence before it is ended (I will be cursed with its memory until the end of my days). I have entrusted your care and that of your mother to my old friend Elias. You may find his manners rough, daughter, and his preoccupations odd, and I apologize in advance for any discomfort that follows from his attentions. But he is loyal to his own and full of determination. Whatever storms life (or the sky) sends, he will see you through them; the wind itself will not separate him from his goals.

  (In the course of my parting conversations with my colleagues, I learned that Mme Brisbois recently had a poem published in a little journal called The Giant's Chair. She showed me the contributor's copy that they had sent, and mentioned a rate that struck me as quite generous in light of the quality of the work. I have had the germ of a poem in my head for some weeks now, thanks to an image that my old friend Elias has created; perhaps I will let it sprout and send it to The Giant's Chair, if we can spare the funds to post it.)

  In small recompense for my separation from my family, I now room with my friend Jesson Desrosiers, another brother-in-arms from the 7th Ashview. For the nonce we occupy ourselves with day-labor, loading the trucks that bring food and botanicals to the higher terraces, unloading those that bring books, jewelry, weapons, spirits, electronics. I have never been insensitive to the differences between us peripherals, daughter, and those no better than us who live richer lives in the thinner air. But I have always seen fortune as the carcass of some roc or simurg, dead on the wing, and fate as the wind that brings it to the earth; and it has always seemed a noble thing to concentrate on extracting the marrow from one's own portion, rather than wring hands over whom the wind has favored. Yet I now pass many hours where my body is occupied and my mind free, and the most salient feature of those hours is how many of them are spent loading, and how few unloading. Perhaps what I have mistaken for the impartial wind is, in fact, the breath of some great giant, which moves birds where it likes, and takes credit for mercy when some bony songbird falls into a poor man's lap.

  Your mother writes that you have learned to sit and crawl. She has promised me a heliotype when she can spare the fee. I should have sent a letter back, declining; the pain in her hands keeps her awake as it is, and I remember nights after she had done an extra hour of piecework to make the rent, when she could not sleep for weeping. But I could not refuse the offer. I only hope you can sit still enough to make it worth the cost.

  But then, however blurred the image, what could I thrill more to see than the daughter of my flesh, in motion?

  I know you're all just itching to hear how I, a little errand-girl at a bank, managed a drug-addled mother and her hyperactive three-year-old through five hours on or in between little bus, big bus, and rail, and I would love to tell you, but for the sake of getting to the point I'll skip it—except to note that the main branch of Dawnroad Bank is in the opposite fucking octant from the Ironweed Line, which doesn't sound like much unless you're the little errand-girl, the three-year-old is asleep, and the mother's lungs and nerves are too wrecked to carry the guy for any distance. What I didn't realize about someone who'd lived on the sixth all her life is that she's got two problems on the higher terraces—first, she's too warm, and second, the air's too thin. Not too thin for her to live, but too thin for her to be comfortable. She gets distractible, fatigued. Third problem: The viascutes. The sixth is wide open, and the ways are only managed where there are a lot of people, the Old Port and Ashview and near Mauleneault. So I've got Sim on my shoulder, which would have been like lugging a sack of nails if a sack of nails kicked in its sleep, and meanwhile Aimée is fading in and out of consciousness and periodically decides that she knows where she's going and it's not where I'm going, and I can't count the number of times I nearly lose her down some new alleyway or maze because I can't chase her and she doesn't listen.

  We all stink by this point, bear in mind. It's well past business hours and we've spent all our time in stations or communal seats; there is no cleanliness possible in this scenario, even if your favorite three-year-old hasn't gotten sweet and sour sauce all over everybody after a massacre of a dinner that years of drink has still failed to redact from my nightmares.

  Sorry, I think I just lost my place. Give me a second—

  Right, so this is the condition in which we tromp into the main branch of Dawnroad Bank, which I'm sure I need not tell you is a luminous edifice, just a forest of columns, drawn up from the ground as though the earth itself had condescended to move its most beautiful cavern up where everyone could see. It's pre-Disjunction architecture, the lintel over the main door says "GALDRES LEAGUE," G-A-L-D-R-E-S whatever that means, as if, again, the stone itself had decided that this was what all passersby needed to read when they entered—and who argues with stone? At any rate, here we tromp, into the main vestibule that's clearly been kept half-lit just for us, and a trim little gentleman in an impeccable grey suit, I almost murdered him for his suit then and there, is waiting there with a shit-eating little smile, like a genie who knows you're on your last wish and you really need a favor.

  "Mlle Leblanc," he says to Aimée, who would look less like she were drooling if she were actually drooling. "And your son, I presume." I apparently don't rate a greeting in this scenario, and I'm not sure if that should worry me. "President Salmant is most anxious to see you."

  I wasn't drinking anything, of course, but I was so thirsty that I was thinking about drinking, and so in my head I spat it out.

  I, bear in mind, had never laid eyes on anyone high-ranked enough to inhale in the presence of President Salmant. And—look, here we all are, I'm obviously not invested in whatever cults of personality do or don't govern the brotherhood of financiers—but, vagabonds and vavasours, you and I all know that this is not the sort of person who would get in trouble, should someone like me happen to disappear quietly in the middle of the night.

  And the genie in his beautiful suit gives me a smile that says he knows it. And Aimée nods agreeably and says "Me too." And the genie goes, and we follow.

  There are stairs. We'll leave it at that. I learn that Sim's a bedwetter. Luckily I'm in back, so at least I'm the only one who almost breaks her neck when her bootheel slips in Sim's bedwet. Aimée has the genie's arm, or vice versa, and he supports her reeling form effortlessly, probably because she doesn't weigh anydamnthing.

  Where was I? Stairs, that was it. I was on stairs for a long time.

  After stairs, we walk a ways in a stone womb, up to a funny sphincterlike aperture that's obviously had doors affixed to it at some relatively recent date—it's the most out-of-place detail in the place, honestly, a round door that would be perfectly charming and graceful in any other context sitting in this amazing building like a turd in fine whisky. This is, of course, a big signifier, because there are no other doors in this place, and in every other part of the building they seem to have rolled with it, prizing beauty over privacy. But if President Salmant wants a door, President Salmant gets a door.

  At least I assume that's what's being said here. One problem with telling stories all the time: You start reading into things.

  The genie detains us in an anteroom with a tray of canapés and a glass of water. At this point in my relationship with the genie, I know not to touch them. I try to salve my thirst and hate by letting myself go a little insane in my lust for the genie's incredibly beautiful suit; Aimée shoves fake organ meat on toast down her throat with both hands. She's picking up crumbs from the tray with a moistened forefinger by the time the genie summons us into Salmant's office, and manages to trip over her feet twice on the way to the door. Her lips are starting to look blue, actually, but it
's the middle of the night and we're on the President's doorstep, so there's no quitting now.

  So here we are, in this palace of an office, a toddler, a junkie, and a dogsbody standing before President Salmant of Dawnroad Bank, king among financiers, and the first thing I notice is that the lamp on his desk isn't burning.

  I know, this is awful scene-setting—finally the man himself, right, and all I can talk about is whether the microbes in the flask on his desk are or aren't shitting plutonium, or whatever it is they do that makes them glow. But it's stark night out and there is no other light source near the desk—which itself, by the way, is integral with the floor, a smoothly rising marble lip forming a pocket that's clearly far too tall for Salmant's knees—and so, coming to my point, with the soft shadows from the far-away lamps, you can barely make out this guy's face.

  So naturally I look hard at his face.

  You've all seen hasty skinjobs, I don't doubt, and you know what it's like. You might not notice if you passed one in the street, but look for more than a second and every millimeter holds a tell. The features don't sit right in the face; the motion of the muscles doesn't