“He’s kind of handsome,” Cecily said once, when we were all watching TV and his face appeared in a commercial. Jenna said he looked like a child molester. We’d laughed about it then, but now that I’m in a scarlet district, Jenna’s former home, I think she must have been serious. Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide in a person.
Madame shows me her gardens, which are mostly patches of weeds and buds, encased in low wire fences. The strawberries, though, are growing under a weatherproof tarp. “You should see them in the spring sunshine,” she says giddily. “Strawberries and tomatoes and blueberries so fat they explode between your teeth.” I wonder where she gets the seeds. They’re so hard to come by in the city, where all of our fruits and vegetables seem to have taken on the city’s gray tinge.
She shows me the other tents, full of antique furniture, silk pillows piled on the dirt floors. Only the best for her customers, she says. The air in each of them is muggy with sweat. At the last tent, which is all pink, she turns to face me. She takes my hair from either side, in both hands, holding it out and watching the way it falls from her fingers. A strand gets caught on one of her rings, but I don’t flinch as it’s ripped from my scalp. “A girl like you is wasted as a bride.” She says the word like vasted. “A girl like you should have dozens of lovers.”
Her eyes are lost. She’s staring through me suddenly, and wherever she’s gone, it brings out the humanity in her. For the first time I can see her eyes under all that makeup, see that they’re brown and sad. And oddly familiar, though I’m sure I’ve never seen anyone like this woman in my life. I never even dared to peek into the shadows of scarlet districts nestled in alleyways back home.
I was never even curious.
Her lips curl into a smile, and it’s a kind smile. Her lipstick cracks, revealing a bleary pink underneath.
We’re standing by a heap of rusted scrap metal that is humming mechanically and emitting a faint yellow glow. One of Jared’s projects, I assume. Madame raves about his inventions. “Contraptions,” she calls them. “This will be a warming device for the soil. My Jared thinks it will make it easier to plant crops in the winter,” she tells me, patting one of the rusted pieces.
“So, what do you think of my carnival, chérie?” she asks. “The best in South Carolina.”
It amazes me how Madame can speak without the cigarette ever falling from the corner of her mouth. Maybe I’ve been breathing in too much of her smoke secondhand, but I’m in awe of her. Things fill with color as she moves past them. Her gardens grow. She created a strange dreamland with only the ghost of a dead society and some bits of broken machines.
She also never seems to sleep. Her girls are napping now that it’s daytime, and her bodyguards seem to alternate shifts, but she is forever weaving between tents, tilling, primping, barking orders. Even my dreams last night smelled of her.
“It’s not like any other place I’ve seen,” I admit, which is the truth. If Manhattan is reality, and the mansion a luxurious illusion, this place is a dilapidated, blurry line that divides the two places.
“You belong here,” she says. “Not with a husband. Not with a servant.” She wraps her arm around me, leading me through a patch of shriveled, snowy wildflowers. “Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound. That boy of yours,” she says, unaccented, “is a wound.”
“I never said I love him,” I say.
Madame smiles mischievously, her face flourishing with creases. It strikes me how the first generations are aging. Soon they’ll be gone. And no one will be left to know what old age looks like. Twenty-six and beyond will be a mystery.
“I’ve had many lovers,” she tells me. “But only one love. We had a child together. A beautiful little creature with hair that was every shade of yellow. Like yours.”
“What happened to them?” I ask, feeling brave. Madame has prodded and scrutinized me from the moment I arrived, and now, at last, she’s exposing her own weakness.
“Dead,” she says, picking up her accent again. The humanity vanishes from her eyes, leaving them reproachful and cold. “Murdered. Dead.”
She stops walking and tucks my hair behind my ears, tilts my chin, inspects my face. “And I am to blame for the pain. I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.”
I open my mouth, but no words come. What she says is horrible and true.
And then I wonder, does my brother think of me this way? We entered this world together, one after the other, beats in a pulse. But I will be first to leave it. That’s what I’ve been promised. When we were children, did he dare to imagine an empty space beside him where I then stood giggling, blowing soap bubbles through my fingers?
When I die, will he be sorry that he loved me? Sorry that we were twins?
Maybe he already is.
The tip of Madame’s cigarette flares red as she breathes deep. Lilac says the smoke makes her delusional, but I wonder how much of what Madame says is truth. “You are to be loved in moments. Illusions. That’s what I provide to my customers,” she says. “Your boy is greedy.”
Gabriel. When I left him, his dry lips were muttering silently. I noticed the stubble growing on his chin; he’d been re-dressed in his attendant’s shirt, which was ripped where the bodyguards had pulled at him. I was worried for the purple skin around his eyes, his raspy breaths.
“He loves you too much,” Madame says. “He loves you even in sleep.”
We walk through the strawberry patch, Madame prattling incessantly about the amazing Jared and his underground device that keeps the soil warm, simulating springtime so that her gardens can grow. “The most magical part,” she says, “is that it keeps the ground warm for the girls and for my customers.”
As she goes on, I think of what she said about Gabriel, about him loving me too much, but mostly about how he is a wound. Vaughn thought the same thing of Jenna; she served him no purpose, bore him no grandchildren, showed his son no real love, and she died for it.
It’s important to be useful in this world. The first generations seem to all agree about that.
“He’s a strong worker,” I say, interrupting her tangent about summer mosquitoes. “He can lift heavy things, and cook, and do just about anything.”
“But I cannot trust him,” Madame says. “What do I know about him? He was dropped at my feet as if from the sky.”
“But you are trusting me,” I say. “You’re telling me all of these things.”
She squeezes my shoulders, giggling like a bizarre and maniacal child. “I trust no one,” she says. “I am not trusting you. I am preparing you.”
“Preparing me?” I say.
As we walk, she rests her head on my shoulder, and her warm breath makes the hair on the back of my neck rise. The smoke from her cigarette is choking, and I suppress coughs.
“I do the best I can for my girls, but they are weary. Used up. You are perfect. I have been thinking, and I will not hand you over to my customers so they can reduce your value.”
Reduce my value. My stomach twists.
“Rather,” Madame says, “I think I could make more money off you if you remain pristine. We shall have to find a place for you. Dancing, maybe.” I can feel her smile without seeing her face. “Letting them have a taste. Letting them be hypnotized.”
I can’t follow the dark path her thoughts have taken, and I blurt out, “What about the boy I came with, then? If I’m doing all of this for your business”—the word gets caught on my tongue—“then I need to know that he’s okay. There needs to be a place for him.”
“Very well,” Madame says, suddenly bored. “It’s a small enough request. If he proves to be a spy, I will have him killed. Be sure to tell him that.”
By evening Madame sends me back to the green tent. I think it might have belonged to Jade and Celadon before the virus overtook them. She says one of her girls will be in to see me soon.
Gabriel is still out of it, and there’s a child holding his head in her lap. One of the blond twins I saw earlier.
“Please don’t be mad; I know I shouldn’t be here,” she says, not looking up. “He was making such awful noises. I didn’t want him to be alone.”
“What noises?” I ask, my voice gentle. I kneel beside him, and his skin is paler than before. There’s a rash of red across his cheeks and throat, and the skin around his bruise is fiery orange.
“Sick-person noises,” she whispers. Her hair is very blond. Her eyelashes are the same color, fluttering up and down like wisps of light. She’s running her small hands through his hair and across his face. “Did he give you that ring?” she asks me, nodding at my hand.
I don’t answer. I dip a towel into the basin, wring it out, and dab at Gabriel’s face with it. This feeling is horrible and familiar—watching someone I care for suffer, and having nothing but water to help them with.
“Someday I’ll have a ring that’s made of real gold too,” the girl says. “Someday I’ll be first wife. I know it. I have birthing hips.”
I’d laugh under less dire circumstances. “I knew a girl who grew up wanting to be a bride too,” I say.
She looks at me, and her green eyes are wide and intense. And for a second I think maybe this girl is right. She will grow up to be passionate and spirited; she will stand out in a line of dreary Gathered girls; a man will choose her, and come to her bed flushed with desire.
“Did she?” the girl asks. “Become a bride, I mean.”
“She was my sister wife,” I say. “And yes, she was given a gold ring too.”
The girl smiles, revealing a missing front tooth. Pale brown freckles dot her nose and spill into her cheeks like a blush.
“I bet she was pretty,” the girl says.
“She was. Is,” I correct myself. Cecily is gone from me, but she’s still alive. I can’t believe I almost forgot. It seems like forever ago that I left her screaming my name in a snowbank. I ran, didn’t look back, angrier with her than I’d ever been with anyone in my life.
The memory is a lifetime away from this smoky, dizzying place. I don’t even feel angry anymore. I don’t feel much of anything at all.
“How’s the patient?” Lilac says from the doorway. The girl whips to attention, and her expression turns sheepish. She’s been officially caught. She eases Gabriel’s head from her lap and hurries off, muttering apologies, calling herself a stupid girl.
