But the Museum had brought the National Guard. And the poachers were dealt with, though perhaps not with such finality as Orm the Beautiful might have wished.

  Each and each, his Chord were brought back to the Museum.

  Katherine, stumping on her walking cast, spent long hours in the exhibit hall. She hovered and guarded and warded, and stroked and petted and adjusted Orm the Beautiful’s hoard like a nesting falcon turning her eggs. His song sustained her, his warm bones worn against her skin, his voice half-heard in her ear.

  He was broken and scattered. He was not a part of his Chord. He was lost to them, as other dragons had been lost before, and as those others his song would eventually fail, and flicker, and go unremembered.

  After a few months, she stopped weeping.

  She also stopped eating, sleeping, dreaming.

  Going home.

  They came as stragglers, footsore and rain-draggled, noses peeled by the sun. They came alone, in party dresses, in business suits, in outrageously costly T-shirts and jeans. They came draped in opals and platinum, opals and gold. They came with the song of Orm the Beautiful warm against their skin.

  They came to see the dragons, to hear their threaded music. When the Museum closed at night, they waited patiently by the steps until morning. They did not freeze. They did not starve.

  Eventually, through the sheer wearing force of attrition, the passage of decades, the Museum accepted them. And there they worked, and lived, for all time.

  And Orm the Beautiful?

  He had been shattered. He died alone.

  The Chord could not reclaim him. He was lost in the mortal warders, the warders who had been men.

  But as he sang in their ears, so they recalled him, like a seashell remembers the sea.

  Erase, Erase, Erase

  I shouldn’t have let it get so far. It seemed so inconsequential at first. Almost a relief to find yourself getting a little misty around the edges. Bits dropping off. Stuff you don’t need anymore.

  Erase, erase, erase.

  Sorry, historians. I know some of this stuff would be useful to you, but it’s all gone now. All gone.

  I burned most of it.

  Only I am still here.

  And I am falling apart, and I can’t remember who I used to be or how I got here.

  Irresponsible of me, I know.

  It’s not just the memories, either. There’s bits of me gone that I swear were there before. Fingertips. Some hair. The eyelashes on my right eye.

  I’m almost certain I used to have those.

  Sometimes I reach for something—coffee mug, keyboard—and realize I can’t seem to find my own hand. I have to go look around the house for it, because I never remember where I had it last. Feet, at least, limbs—I don’t tend to get far when those have gone missing. It’s hard not to notice as soon as you try to stand up.

  But I’ve found hands in the bed, under the bed, halfway up the stairs. Once in the fridge, which worried me a lot but actually it went right back on. Just felt a little weird and numb for a few minutes. Found my ear still stuck on an earbud once, and that was pretty awful. When the nose comes off the glasses usually go with it.

  I miss cats, but I don’t have a cat anymore. I couldn’t be sure of taking care of one. I’d probably forget to feed her, or not be able to work the can opener, and she’d resort to eating a mislaid finger.

  None of it hurts. None of it seems to harm me in any way. Except that I’m falling apart, and a lot of my time is taken up with finding bits of me that have broken away somehow, and sticking them back on again in more or less the spot they came from.

  I don’t leave the house the way I used to. I’m glad I live in a time when nearly everything can be delivered.

  And sometimes I get misty and confused. I’ll be in the middle of some task and realize three hours later, in another part of the house, that I’ve left it undone. I’ll find my spectacles in the fridge, or my socks on the bookshelf. I’m sure putting them there seemed like a logical idea at the time.

  Sometimes also, I’ll find my clothes in a puddle under me on the sofa, and realize that they just kind of drained through me while I was working. I’ll be chopping vegetables and the knife will hit the chopping block and just lie there, and it will be a while before I can manage to pick it up again. My hand will pass through my coffee cup for a while before it solidifies again, and I won’t get to drink it until it’s cold.

  At least the pens and notebooks are always solid. Always real. My laptop, too, and I guess that’s logical, because it’s not that different from a notebook in intention. Heck, some people call them notebooks.

  Oh, but now. But this time.

  I think I did more than get a little misty. I think I forgot something.

  I think I forgot something very important. I think I forgot it on purpose, and because I forgot it, something terrible is going to happen. To a lot of people. Not just me.

  So I’m falling apart. And I’m losing my mind.

  I used to burn my notebooks.

  I didn’t want to be connected to the past they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the person they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the me that was.

  I wanted to reinvent myself. Each time I made a terrible mistake, I wanted to put everything aside, walk away, move on. I wanted to erase my errors. I wanted to change the past so the bad things had not happened. So I could not be punished for them. So I would not have to feel, all the time, so wrong.

  I erased my thoughts, my feelings. My failed loves. The classes where my grades were only average. The abusive family background. The jobs that didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped for, that had toxic office politics, or abusive bosses. I erased the pain, the pain, the pain.

  I wrote it all down in hope, and when it didn’t work out, I burned it in despair.

  I was trying to erase my mistakes, I suppose. It was a kind of perfectionism. If something has a flaw, throw it out and get something perfect next time. I was trying to move forward, in the hope that the next adventure would end better.

  But not learning from the failures.

  And so, little by little, I erased myself.

  I threw myself away.

  I would have been free and clear if I just hadn’t read the newspaper that day. The day they printed the manifesto. I could have gone on about my life and my business in ignorance.

  I could have spared myself a lot of grief. And work. And worry.

  Grief and work and worry that would have been transferred to other people in my stead. That might still be served up to them if I can’t prevent it.

  And if it happens, I will know that it is my fault, because I failed.

  The manifesto was in the paper. All the papers, I imagine, not just my specific one. It purported to be written by the group that had been mailing incendiary bombs to universities. Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago. To their medical colleges.

  That niggled at me, and I didn’t think it was just because the University of Chicago was my alma mater. There was something.

  Something back there.

  Something I had worked very hard to forget.

  Not violence, no. But the promise of violence. The expectation of violence.

  Is that what people mean when they talk about menace? Something being menacing? That awareness that there is not just the potential for violence, in the abstract, a kind of background radiation that is always there—but that somebody, somewhere, is planning to cause someone harm.

  Any long-term relationship is served by a little amnesia. A marriage—and I’m using the term loosely here, but we were together, if you can call it together, for almost eight years—is a country in flux. A series of negotiations and edges and considered silences. And some unconsidered ones, depending on how self-aware the diplomats in question are. Sometimes all the negotiations are carried out by reflex and instinct. Sometimes this results in war. A covert war, or an open one.

  But sometimes, there’s a plan.

  When a diplomat who’s acting on reflex, instinct, and conditioned response (diplomat A) meets a diplomat who is acting with self-awareness, caution, and a considered agenda of compromises (diplomat B), (diplomat B) is usually going to win the exchange.

  I was (diplomat A) in this example.

  I was seventeen years old.

  I went in without a theory.

  A broken heart is like a cracked bath tub. Nobody’s going to make a full-price offer on a property with annoying repair problems like that hanging around. So either you fix it yourself, or you try to hide the cracks and cover up the damage. At least until the mark has signed enough paperwork that it’s inconvenient to back out.

  Plastic-covered notebooks give off a terrible smell as they burn.

  I wasted a lot of paper.

  I was not good at finishing the notebooks. I would reach a point where I was damned sick of who I was, how I had been feeling, how I had been acting. And then I needed to be done with the stained pages I had been writing, because I had written down everything. Everything about my internal landscape, anyway.

  I didn’t have friends.

  I just had secrets.

  And so I wrote them down.

  It was actually easier—well, cheaper, anyway—and more efficient—when I was younger. In the three-ring and spiral-bound notebooks, I just ripped out the offending pages and tore them up. Got rid of them. Shredded them and gave them a shove.

  But then I graduated to bound books. The cheap fabric-covered ones at first. Then better ones, professional-quality ones, with paper that ink pens did not feather on or bleed through. I liked the hard-covered ones in pretty colors, with ribbon markers and pockets in the back. Graph paper or dot grids. I did not like wide-ruled.

  But those were harder to destroy, eventually. When they needed destruction.

  Everything needs destruction in the end. And so I learned to burn.

  I thought about burning more than notebooks when I was young. I thought of self-immolation, but I never had the courage. I thought of arson, but I never had the cruelty. I remembered those things, vaguely. Like a story that had happened to someone else.

  Maybe that was why that manifesto struck me so hard, I tell myself, as my fingers slip through the handle of the coffee pot again. A major American city, it had said. An inferno of flames. The Judgement of a just and terrible God.

  Engulfed.

  Soon, soon. Soon.

  But no. There is more than that. Some part of me that I can’t access knows. Knows which city. Knows who had written those words. Knows enough to stop this terrible thing from happening.

  I just can’t remember.

  How do you learn to erase yourself?

  It’s not something that comes naturally to children. Children seek attention because attention means survival. So to get them to erase themselves, you have to teach them that they don’t exist. And because it is an unnatural, self-destructive thing that you are teaching them—a maladaptive response—the only tactic that works is to make the consequences of noncompliance worse than the consequences of nonexistence.

  That takes force. Violence, physical or emotional. If you just try to ignore a kid, they’ll act out, and seek attention through misbehavior.

  Any port in a storm.

  I bet, given half a chance, I could have been a charming child.

  But I didn’t learn to be charming. I learned how not to be real.

  I learned to have no vulnerabilities and expect no consideration. I learned I had no intrinsic value and was only marginally worthwhile for what I could provide, if what I provided was beyond reproach.

  I learned I was not allowed to be angry. To defend myself. To have needs. I learned to be good at being alone, because if you were alone, nobody could betray you.

  I thought I had escaped all that when I went away to college. But like the horror movie phone call, the loathing was coming from inside my head.

  I didn’t hold on to things, because holding on to things hurt. If you didn’t hold on, then when you lost something you lost it easy.

  But if you don’t hold on, you lose things all the time.

  My notebooks and pens are still solid. I can write all the time. Under any conditions. I can write things down.

  If I can just remember them.

  I can write them down.

  I lost a lot of pens.

  I couldn’t bear to write in pencil. And it didn’t matter because I was burning the books.

  But I couldn’t seem to hang on to the pens.

  It’s in the notebooks, isn’t it? The thing I need.

  There’s no way to get the notebooks back, of course. Even if I found similar ones, they’d be empty. All the important words—all of the words that have the memories attached that might keep people from being hurt—set on fire, burned up—were, in a particularly distasteful irony, burned up themselves long ago.

  Oh. But the pens.

  I started collecting pens when I was very young. My mother gave me a fountain pen. Not an expensive one, but she wrote with fountain pens, and she thought I should, too, and I was excited to be like my mother in this way I thought was grownup and cool. One led to two, led to five or six. Student pens.

  I loved them.

  And the ink! I loved the ink even more. Because you can put the same ink in a cheap pen as in an expensive one, and then you get to write with it.

  Finding the right ink, the right pen, is like coming home. Like finding the place you live and that you want to live. The place you want to stay forever. The place where you belong.

  On a smaller scale, of course.

  But still, it can make you a little bit emotional.

  And if you are lucky, you might actually recognize it while it’s right in front of you, while you’re standing there, and not once you walk away, foolishly.

  The hardest thing is when you walk away from home knowing that it’s home, because home is changing, or challenging, or making you sad. Or because you screwed up and broke something, and you think you’re too embarrassed to stay, or you’re not welcome there anymore.

  So you go someplace else and think you can live there. But it isn’t home. And then you have to try to get home again.

  Sometimes it takes a long time to get home again. Some people never make it back at all.

  I thought I had to be perfect. I thought I couldn’t live with my errors. I thought it would be better to run away. Start clean. Throw the ruined page away and keep reaching for a clean one. Burn my notebooks.

  Erase my history. Erase my screw-ups.

  Erase my self.

  Erase, erase, erase.

  I start on collector’s websites and then on auction sites, looking for the pens. Most of them were not expensive at the time when I bought them—I never had a lot of money. Some of them have gotten more expensive since.

  A funny thing happens as I start looking. I search for one pen to see what it would cost to replace it. And in the related items, I find more that looked familiar. That I suddenly remember having had. And when I chase those links, there are more, still more familiar-looking ones.

  I am forty-five years old. I think I am forty-five years old.

  I get out my birth certificate and check.

  I am forty-five years old.

  How many pens have I lost?

  How many other things have I forgotten about, before now?

  I think of a pen I’d liked, when I was twenty-five or so. I remember putting it in a jacket pocket. I don’t remember ever finding it there again. It had been a blue marbled plastic fountain pen, a kind of bulbous and silly looking thing. A lot of personality, I guess you’d say. It wrote very well.

  I find one like it on an auction site. I lose that auction but win another in a few days. $63 plus shipping. I think the pens in a box set with ink were $30 new back in 1995.

  Fortunately my books are doing all right, and my needs in general are few. My chief extravagance is a little indulgence in grocery store sushi, once in a while. I use a grocery delivery service. I can’t drive. What if my foot fell off while I was reaching for the brake?

  The pen arrives after three days. I get lucky with the mail that day and it doesn’t fall through my hands. I take the pen out of the box, weigh it in my hand. Light, plastic with gold trim. The blue is so intense it seems violet.

  I uncap it and look at the point, squinting my middle-aged eyes. Then I laugh at myself and use the zoom function on my phone camera to get a better look at it. The phone, for once, doesn’t slide through my hand.

  The mysterious internet stranger I’d bought it from hadn’t cleaned it very well. I get a bulb syringe and wash it at the sink, soaking and rinsing. You’re supposed to use distilled water but the water here at my house is soft, from a surface reservoir. The same reservoir H. P. Lovecraft once wrote about, as the towns that now lie under it were drowning.

  Anyway, I’ve never had any problems with it. Even if it is saturated in alien space colors, they don’t seem to cause problems with the nibs, so that’s good news overall.

  Once it’s clean, I ink it up from a big square bottle in a color that matches the barrel, and sit down at the table with a notebook, ready to write.

  With the pen in my hand, I find suddenly I am full of memories. Strange; I can go through a whole day, usually, without remembering things.

  I remember the pen.

  And now I’m holding it in my hand, and I start to write, in a lovely red-sheened cobalt blue.

  I grew up to be a writer. A novelist. That will not surprise you. You are, after all, reading my words right now.

 

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