Second Facet
"Avvengers," Teeplee said, "are like buzzers."
The room he had at last led me to, down in the bowels of the ruin, was small and lit by a harsh lamp. On the way here I had glimpsed a human face in a dark doorway, and a human back just retreating into another; and under the table we sat at, a child rummaged silently through things, learning his trade, I suppose, for the room was so full of old stuff that it was like sitting inside a carved chest, except that none of these things seemed to have any order at all.
Teeplee had told me - besides his name-that the others there were his family, and all the children there were his. All! "My gang," he called them. As I said, I had remembered: avvengers were men who, in the days of the League's power, wouldn't submit to the League, and went around taking what they could of the angels' ruin, and using it and swapping it and living as much in the angels' way as they could; and their chiefest treasures were women who could bear in the old way, without intercession, over and over like cats. Naturally, men who thought women of any kind were treasures were the League's enemies, and they were mostly hunted down; so sitting with Teeplee in his den of angel-stuff I felt as though it were hundreds of years ago.
"Buzzers?" I said.
"You know, buzzers. Big, wide-winged, bald-headed birds that live on dead things." He drew himself up grandly in his cloak. "Buzzers are National," he said. "They're the National bird."
"I don't know what National is," I said, "except that it was something about the angels…"
"Well, there it is," Teeplee said, pointing a long finger at me. "Haven't you ever seen angels? All bald-headed, or as near as they could get; just like buzzers."
For a moment I thought he meant he really had seen angels, but of course he meant pictures; and yes, I had seen one, the gray picture of Uncle Plunkett, bald as a buzzer.
He began going through piles of stuff in this room and the next, looking for the glass or plastic I wanted. "What an Avvenger is," he said as he looked - and I began to see that there was a kind of squirrelly order to the place - "is someone, like me, who lives on what the angels made that doesn't spoil. 'Doesn't spoil' means it's not 'throw-away.' See, the angels once thought it would be good to have things you would just use once and then throw away. I forget why they thought so. But after a while they saw if they kept that up they'd soon have thrown away everything in the world, so they changed their minds and made things you would only have one of, that would last forever. By the time they were good at that, it was all over, but the things still don't spoil… Hey, how about these?"
He showed me a box full of bottle bottoms, green and brown.
"I thought something bigger," I said.
He put them away, not disappointed. "Now I said, 'lives on," he said. "That means maybe you dress in it, like this National thing, or you swap it for things to eat, or give it to women for presents and like that, or maybe" - he leaned close to me grinning - "maybe you eat it. Find the angels' food, and eat it yourself."
He was looking so triumphant I had to laugh. "Isn't it a little stale?"
"I said, 'doesn't spoil,'" Teeplee said seriously. "I said, 'Avvengers are like buzzers'; I said, 'Buzzers live on dead things.' You see, boy - say here, look at this."
He had come up with some convex black plastic, warped and scratched. "I thought maybe something clearer," I said. He threw it down with a clatter and went on searching.
"You see," he said, "the idea of making things that don't spoil is to make them dead to start with, so they don't need to ever die. There's dead metal, that's angel silver, that won't rust or pit or tarnish; and dead cloths like this; and plastics like dead wood that won't dry-rot or get wormy or split. And strangest of alclass="underline" the angels could make dead food. Food that never gets stale, never rots, never spoils. I eat it."
"I have food like that. I smoke it."
"No, no! Not that evil pink stuff! I mean food, food you eat. Look here." He stood on tiptoe and took down from a high shelf a closed pot of metal, with a dull plastic glow about it. "Metal," he said, "that won't rust, and a jacket of plastic over that. Now watch and listen." There was a ring attached to the top, and Teeplee worked his finger under it and pulled. I expected the ring to come off, but instead there was a hiss like an indrawn breath and the whole top came off in a graceful spiral. "Look," he said, and showed me what was inside: it looked like sawdust, or small chips of wood. "Potato," he said. "Not now, I mean, not just yet; but mix this with water, and you'd be surprised: a mashed-up potato is just what it is, and as good as new."
"As good as new? What does it taste like?"
"Well. Dead. But like food. Throw it in water and you've got something like a mashed-up potato that the angels made, boy, a potato that's a thousand years old." He looked reverently within the pot and shook the stuff; it made a dry, sandy sound. "Now even a rock," he said, "even a mountain changes in a thousand years. But the angels could make this potato that's dead to begin with, so it couldn't change. They could make a potato that's immortal."
He sat, suddenly lost in thought or wonder. "No glass today. Come back in two, three days, we'll see." He set the child to guide me out. "But remember," he said as I left, "it'll cost you."
I came back; I came back often. That was a long winter, and Teeplee was good to have for company. I talked about a dark house; I talked about forgetting over time. And it's strange: alone in my head, I would sometimes seem on the edge of losing myself altogether, but with old Teeplee I was comfortable - maybe because there's no one so different from everything I had grown up with than an Avvenger.
What I mean about losing myself: when I was alone, still there seemed to be someone there to talk to. I would wake in my cold head (the fire long since out) and lie wrapped in my black and silver, and start a conversation with this other, and he would answer, and we would lie there long and bicker like two gossips trying to tell the same story two different ways.
What we talked about was Boots. At the heart of the story was her letter, but I had forgotten it, had forgotten that her letter was Forget. I would get up at last, and get milk from the cow and sit and smoke, and maybe then clamber back into my cold bed, and all the while chat endlessly with this other about something we couldn't remember to forget.
I really had wanted to be her, I explained; I meant that. I still do. I'm not to blame; no one is accountable, I said, not Boots, not her, not even me; I chose, don't you see, and what is there to say? But he said: then why are you here now and not there? You must not have tried hard enough. I know you're wrong, I replied; I can't remember why, but that's not it, it's just the opposite of that; anyway, I did try, I did… Not hard enough, he said. And we would try to turn our backs on each other; that doesn't work.
What frightened me was that I had failed in the attempt to become her, and that in the attempt I had stopped being me. My earliest selves frightened me when they returned to me in the moments before sleep (have I told you I learned to summon them? Yes) and I felt that rather than learning anything, anything at all, I had instead suffered a grievous, an unhealable wound; that, try as I might, I could no longer really mean what I said, nor say what I really meant. And a hiss of fear would go all through me. I would stare out my eyes and wonder if it wasn't warm enough to go see what Teeplee was about today.