Andalon and I were back outside the house. The air was thick with an acrid, herbal stench. Jed’s memories identified the source: Yan was too miserly to purchase a bug-zapper. Instead, he bought these huge, cheap, head-sized scented candles held in shoddy aluminum buckets whose stink supposedly warded off the flies and mosquitos that swarmed in the torrid heat of an early evening at summer’s end. The inland valley we called “the Drylands” were only three-hundred miles to the southeast of the city—a little over an hour by Expressway—but they might as well have been on a different planet. The climate was warm and dry, instead of the Bay Area’s perennial moisture. The bugs liked the heat.
If only the candles repelled bloodsuckers of the bipedal kind, the ones that gossiped venom when they weren’t busy insult-bragging about which one of them had stuffed their eye-holes full with the most ill-gotten lucre.
“These memories are sad, Mr. Genneth,” Andalon said, shuddering—sniffling.
That was an understatement.
The man of the house kicked his children. It set a low bar for the quality of this family’s family life. The family dinner playing out on the patio before me, however, didn’t even make that bar.
“I don’t like it,” Andalon said, weeping gently. “I don’t like it.” And she was absolutely right to feel that way.
Family dinners were surprisingly important. Study after study in the likes of the Journal of Family Psychology or the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology attested to this. There was something primal in talking with family while dining together. The bonding that happened during those regular meals helped strengthen family ties, leading to less dysfunction and a greater sense of shared love than those households who, say, ate dinner with their eyes glued to their wide-screen TV. Had the authors of those papers seen this family dinner, they’d have retracted their papers and wiped their consoles’ hard-drives clean before going door to door to every family therapist in the country begging for their forgiveness.
You knew a group conversation was rotten to the core when its members didn’t know the difference between talking and bullying. “Conversations” were brackish insults and ganging partisanship whose only concerns were finding the weakest links among them and tearing them to shreds.
Ileene’s feelings tinted my thoughts with their spicy aftertaste. I saw and felt and tasted the scene through Ileene’s eyes as well as my own. The events playing out in front of me had happened barely a year ago, but, still, it had managed to wrap itself around the young woman’s soul like chains of burning light.
When the three sisters had been girls, the Peshkas had almost always given Kaythe the biggest allowance to spend, on account of her having the plumpest breasts.
“So,” Yan began, “my friend from work tells me about his brother—big plastic surgeon. Whenever you see a beautiful face on TV or in the movies, yeah? He made them! And they pay him. Ho-ho, how much they pay him!” Yan chuckled, shaking his mug of beer, the ice clinking against the glass. “But then I say, my grandson, Lani—he so smart… he going to work with big bank—DAISHU bank—and make more money than any piss-pot surgeon could ever dream of. And he gasp, and I laugh. ‘Cause that’s how it is. That’s what matters.”
The man was like a grotesque reimagining of my great-grandmother (father’s mother’s mother), accent and all. Gaga Vetta had immigrated from Polovia to Trenton during the Prelatory. The Naters ended up fouling the economy, and cheap immigrant labor basically kept the country on life-support after what remained of the Republic’s gains had been fully squandered. My great-grandmother worked as an underpaid shop-clerk at a department store, which was how she ended up meeting my mother’s father. She was a kind, quirky old woman, devout to the core. During the Prelatory, you generally didn’t get allowed into the country unless you demonstrated deep Lassedile piety, though Vetta had no need to falsify her beliefs for the sake of getting through customs. I only vaguely remembered the ancient woman; I was quite young when she died, though Grandma Liza was more than happy to fill in the blanks about her mother’s life and time.
Thinking about my own family unbalanced the scene, and suddenly, we were thrust into one of my memories: this time with Grandma Liza, an odd little old woman with a big heart and a stern glare and a tendency to double-click her tongue when annoyed. Despite being a second-generation Polovian immigrant, she had been living proof of the old adage that, “there’s no such thing as a diluted Polovian”. Back when we were young and she was still allowed to drive, from time to time, she’d come over to watch us while Dad was away on tour, and if there was ever even the slightest shindig going on down at the Polovian Heritage Club on Brightvine & Moore, you could be certain that we would attend it. The way that woman smiled at the sight of Dana and I dressed up in traditional Polovian dress—bold blue and reds, a shirt and tunic for me, a dirndl for Dana, and high-tied boots for us all—was enough to make you think she was being naughty and getting away with it. My first taste of Greater Polovia stood the test of time as one of the most surreal experiences of my childhood. I was very impressionable as a child, you see, and my sister had gotten it into my head that the strange clothes and charming dances were part of a ritual to awaken our secret wizard powers, and, swear by the Beast, I believed every word of it. And, with shtudtelka (Polovian creamsweet beef) as good as grandma’s—she used Vetta’s recipe—who wouldn’t?
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
But then the memories of bright clothes, bouncy music, and creamsweet beef shattered as Ileene burst out with a cry of, “That’s not fair!”
The scene in Peshka’s patio burst through my memory, swirling back together around the glass-topped table, laden with hand clothes, oils, sardines, lox, and undercooked burgers covered in overcooked mushrooms and onions.
“You got good grandparents,” Ileene said, “I didn’t. I got a fucking asshole. That’s not fair. It’s not right!”
“Ileene!” Babs’ spirit snapped, “don’t say that about your grandfather!”
“I’ll say it. I’ll say it again. I’ll keep on saying it until the sun burns out and we all freeze in Hell. It’s because of him that I—”
—But I intervened, silencing the raging spirits, letting them sink back into the scene, where I laid their thoughts side by side.
The froth and bite of their memories had given me a feel of the geographies of their psyches. I could see how they related to one another: the callouses, the cankers; the galls and the corms. Ileene was like one of the sea-urchins from her childhood memories, only turned inside out: the soft flesh pointing outward, vulnerable to all, while the vicious spines turned inward and pricked her with feelings of worthlessness.
I had to proceed gently here. Otherwise, they’d just turn into monsters and try to tear each other to shreds all over again.
One of my most striking discoveries was that, between Ileene and her mother, it was Babra who suffered the most dysfunction—and that was saying something, seeing as her daughter had run off to join a bunch of terrorists. Yet, if Ileene knew her mother’s memories like I now did, perhaps she might understand. There was a rock-hard core of cognitive dissonance deep inside Mrs. Plotsky, festering like a half-passed kidney stone. It blinded Babs to much of her daughter’s plight. Ideally, I’d be able to remove it, but that was easier said than done. It would take a strong push to eject that bit of blockage, but—even if I succeeded in doing so—if Ileene’s hostility toward her mother were still going strong when that happened, it could end up making their emotional states even worse than they already were.
I needed to play to Ileene’s sympathies. I needed to get her to open her heart to her mother. Scanning Babra’s memories, a detail of a memory caught my eye, like a striking book cover in the e-reader’s digital library.
Duncan Breszmil?
I previewed the memory.
Beasts’ teeth…
Well, you’d have to be dead inside not to get riled up by that.
I gave the memory the cue, starting up the second movement of the Plotsky’s psychological symphony: a grim scherzo. Yan’s patio blurred away, and we found ourselves thrust into Dressfeldt Court at the heart of the city, in the thick of a crowd gathered on one of Elpeck’s rare, sunny summer days. This latest trip down memory lane had taken us back to the time when I’d been a teenager; right the time Dana’s schizophrenia first started to show itself.
The Summer of ‘93.
It was a time of political unrest and bell-bottom pants—and not the first time, either. Multipurpose high-rises girded the park at Dressfeldt Court. The gathered crowd spilled out of the park’s wheel-spoked walking paths and onto the carefully tended grass, waving their hand-made signs and banners. The neatly ordered palm trees laid out in the park seemed to shiver as the crowd chanted and brayed.
Lassedile Land is Sacred Land!
Bomb the Biyadi!
Down with terrorists!
Far across the sea, the peoples of Araka and Dalus were at war: irregular combat, the kind where a grenade might crash through a window of a measly apartment unit right in the middle of prayer before morning breakfast. The two great powers of the Odasan continent had been mired in lukewarm warfare since before I was born, but 1993 marked a new low; the conflict had been more open than ever before. After Mu, Dalus was one of Trenton’s closest Old World allies, but whereas Mu was allied with us because of economic and cultural ties both past and present, Dalus was allied with us ever since our Second Empire helped the ban Majnoon dynasty rise to power in the mid-1700s and convert the people of Dalus to Angelical Lassedicy at frothing gunpoint. Araka, on the other hand, had been seemingly impervious to missionary work since the Second Empire’s outset in 1626. Meanwhile, in the mountainous highlands between the two nations, you had the Biyadi, a semi-nomadic people who just wanted a country to call their own. To the Dalusians—and all other faithful Lassediles—the Biyadi demands for a separate nation-state was tantamount to abandoning a thriving part of Lassedicy to paganism, and, of course, to someone like Duncan Breszmil, the only people who would be in favor of something like that were hellbound folks like the “pagan Arakan mongrels”, or “traitorous atheists”.
But that was why the crowd was there in the first place: to hear Breszmil speak. The man himself stood at the head of the crowd, dapperly dressed in a suit and tie. His suavely combed black hair was nearly as dark as his shadowed, five-o’clock jaws, roaring invective into his megaphone.
This was another of Babs’ memories. She was Ileene’s age—a year and a half younger—standing in the crowd, holding a banner of hate and death. She was there because her sisters were there, and because her father had seen the potted bonsais she grew in the garden at her Elpeck Polytechnic sorority and thought that they made her a “slant-eyed Munine gentile” instead of a “true blue Lassedile woman”. Babs couldn’t keep her eyes off Kaythe and Mabel, nor their smiling faces, proudly waving their flags and banners, shouting praise at every word coming out of Breszmil’s mouth. Babs wished she could hoist her banner with the kind of zeal her sisters showed, but there was weakness in her that said “no”, and it held her back. Part of that weakness was a desire to talk to Father Ode again, but the man had died several years before, succumbing to fatal prion insomnia, slowly going mad as rogue proteins reshaped the poor man’s brain until the only sleep he would ever know was the long sleep without end. Babs remembered how much it hurt her when Father Ode died, but the priest at her high school chapel agreed with Deddy that Father Ode must have done something to deserve it.
“That’s disgusting,” Ileene’s spirit said. “I know, I’m a hypocrite, and I thought worse, but that…” she was aghast, “how could anyone call for the death of an entire people? That’s not what a good mother does! That’s not what a good anyone does!”
And to this, Babra said nothing. She wanted to say “the Godhead makes no mistakes”, like her mother had, but she couldn’t.