FIFTY-NINE: Mori

Drip. Tap, tap, drip. Drip. Drip. Tap, tap, drip. Drip. Drip. Tap, tap . . .

James had taken Arous up a greasy, stairway. Various sized crawling things muttered about ceiling cobwebs, in corners and along the floor. Arous didn’t look; she didn’t want empirical evidence of monsters.

James stopped in front of a door.  He stood looking at it a minute.  He walked up to it and put both hands flat on it and his ear to it. He stood there for a minute listening. Above them, Arous could hear the flapping of the door to the roof and the drip, drip, dripping of water somewhere.  Behind this door, lurked a hushed, breezy silence.

“I think it’s okay,” he said.

“We’re going to wait for the welcoming committee?”

James pushed open the door letting it slam against the wall and walked in.   To her immediate right there was a tattered, dirty kitchen and water tap, tap, tapping dishes in the sink. To her left a cracked door to another room.  Columns lined the right of the hall. Beyond the hall and to the right blankets and pillows and a few odd pieces of clothing and paper rustled across a large open space. She walked in: to her left was a nook with a bench.  The bench recessed into the wall a few feet.  A boy reclined on the bench as if in the process of raising himself; a statue, he had been at that stage for quite some time. He stared at Arous with an empty expression.

“Hurry,” James said. He stood twenty feet from her.

 “What is this place?” she asked.

“This is where I live.”  He smiled up at her.

James turned the corner and Arous wasted no time following him. She rounded the corner. In front of her was a long corridor. At the end of it was a window with an intact glass pane. The glass was tinted pink from the residual light from LywhoLood sign on top of the building that she’d seen crack to life while standing outside.  A dozen doors lined both sides of the hall.

There was no James. Arous’ eyes widened and she stood frozen.

“Arous, come in here,” he said.

James had ducked into the first door on the right.  Arous could see him through the crack he’d left.

The room was small, like a child’s bedroom, with a closet.  The walls were red, a bit lighter and cleaner than outside. In the far corner a curled figure lay on a mattress. James whispered for her to close the door.  James motioned and Arous sat on a small wire chair on the wall. Along the opposite wall was a Bunsen burner and hotplate.  Out of the closet James took a jug of water, he mouthed at her, “We have plenty of this.”  The girl on the mattress lifted her head.

“James,” said his sister.

“Hey, I brought a visitor.  She bought us groceries.”

“James,” she said.

“I didn’t ask. She offered. It’s the same girl that bought me the jaw breakers, the same one with the hybrid cat she shouldn’t have that I saw at the temple, the one that looks like the woman you have the pictures of,” James took a breath. “Arous this is my sister Moristia. Mori, this is Arous.”

She looked up at Arous and tried to smile.

One wall was pinned with pictures of beautiful people.  Mori and James both looked to a picture pinned to the wall that looked like Arous. It was her mother.

Arous reached for it and pulled her hand back.

“That’s my mother,” said Arous.

“She’s gone now,” said Mori.

“I think she’s still alive. I think she’s at the HaleSpa that’s near the Park,” said Arous.

“That’s HaleSpa North. All the rich go there,” he said.

 “There’s no way to know,” said James.  “Without going there.”

“I did, the day after I saw you at the temple.  I went there.”

“And they didn’t kick you out?”

“No, I Skin-danced,” said Arous. She explained what that meant by grabbing Mori’s hand and skin-dancing into Mori and back into herself.

“Except that I danced as an Amalgamese.  There’s lots of Amalgamese in Alippiana.”

James boiled tea using a crude stove made of Bunsen burners and tiles.  

James told their story while he made tea. His sister was about Arous’ age when they had come to the City.  On the walls of their living room, Mori had watched all the beautiful Idelles from the City playing out their lives out on the walls of DE-rooms across the nation.  Mori came to LywhoLood, just like they did, to pledge a house to sponsor them as an Idelle or Idon. 

All four members of James’ and Moristia’s family had their own DE-room. Each member of their family could put their headphones on and watch a different wall in their DE-room and never know or care or experience the other. They could watch, touch, be in their own story and never turn and invite another. They spent nights and weekends like that.