A Paradigm of Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

where she had left the desk light burning in her ascetic room, where dusk was coming persistently in at the windows but was kept at bay by the yellow skirt of light. She lay down on the cotton-covered bed and went suddenly to sleep, like a baby.

    She dreams of the six o’clock news, telling her that the aliens have landed, the aliens have her parents’ calm dead faces but she is not afraid. “What do you want?” she asks. “It’s not easy to go away without packing anything,” her father replies. Her mother says, “We’ll be in New Zealand if you need us.” The skyscrapers are impossible icicles of flesh; they fall slowly and silently and never break against the ground. There is an indigo mist around them, and it forms into a clutch of faces. Her parents’ bodies are blowing away, leaving only their smiles, like the Cheshire Cat—

    —and she wakened with Marbl sleeping on her bed, purring a little.
    As Morgan woke the purring faded, the cat went more soundly to sleep. It was full night and despite the room warmth Morgan was shivering. She stumbled up from the bed and into the cone of light where she sat down like a prisoner, tears drying on her face: the interrogation was not a success, where were you on the night of the—
    —and the cat Marbl, wakened too by Morgan’s upheaval from the bed, raised her head and meouwed once, then put her head on her crossed paws and watched with an unblinking stare while Morgan weathered the agony of not weeping.

    Finally the sawdust was all vacuumed away, the varnish smell aired out enough to be background, the last contractor’s bill paid with the last of Morgan’s inheritance, and they had the house to themselves. Morgan walked the corridors at midnight, checking that the windows were latched and the doors locked.
    The house felt empty despite the people working or sleeping behind each door. Morgan realized she missed her dead—but in a distant way: she too was missing, presumed dead. She was a set of behaviors without a person inside. Since her night of self-scourging established a baseline of self-loathing, she had not allowed herself to go searching for the missing self. She did not yet believe she needed anything she had lost that night. But the truth was coming for her, stalking her through the silent corridors of her life as softly as the cat Marbl who followed her on her rounds.
    One night as she passed Delany’s room, Delany opened the door. “Tea time?” she said, wheeling herself out into the corridor and toward the elevator. Marbl ducked into the room behind her, and Delany laughed. “You’ll get paint on your paws again, you silly thing!”
    “Do you want me to get her out of there?”
    “Sure. Last time she left little prints on the new floor. Teal, very fetching and old-fashioned; I’m gonna leave them there—but perhaps best if not continually augmented in other colors. I’m working in tiger yellow today.”
    “That’s the same combination I have in that Simpson watercolor,” said Morgan. “I should leave her to it.” But she was chasing Marbl as she spoke.
    Marbl was a fluid cat, always had been good at getting under the furniture. Morgan hadn’t been in this room since the renos were done and the furniture came, and she saw it from lower than her usual eye level, bent over to look for the cat, which meant perhaps at Delany’s usual eye level. The furniture was wood, and old, and had been ruined with paint. It looked, not like family hand-me-downs, but like some theater set seen up close: spattered and textured with paint and stain; what from the corridor looked like a patina of age seemed from three inches away to have been engineered that way from a standing start. Morgan was uneasy with its falsity.
    “Like the antiquing,” she said to Delany. Delany wheeled back in, startling Marbl out from under the only easy chair in the room—which was stacked with art magazines and painting materials. The walls were still bare, white and