I know what is happening.
He has found me through dreams. He has found me at last.
I start to cough and cannot stop.
I am standing. I am weak but I am standing. It is as if the illness were only a waiting, and the waiting is over. I start to look down at the floor, to see what is lying there, when I have not been hurt, but a voice—one I can hear even in the deafness—tells me: No. It is the voice from my dreams. His voice. There is indeed something on the floor—a body, two—and he would prefer that I not look at them.
If you do, Chu, the voice tells me, you will be afraid.
I will never be afraid of you, I tell him.
I look at him instead, standing beside me—the way I have always dreamed he would—and as I do, I start to scream.
His head is the color of red wine, old blood in a glass. Things move under its skin, folding against each other.
I look at his face, but it is not a face—and I go on screaming.
The smile is not a smile. It is a wound at the top of the head, a mouth that never closes, never eats. The eyes—all six of them, not shaped like mine at all—are not eyes, but gills like a shark’s at the fish market in Can Tho.
I cannot look anymore. He says: You must. It is time.
My heart moves in my chest like the engine of an old boat. My eyes want to find his face—the one from dreams.
Look at me, he says. I do.
The cape is not a cape. It is even darker than his skin. It moves like an animal, one that lives and eats and will do anything for him—even kill.
He says: Touch it. And I do.
The cape shifts like fog. It makes a sound like teeth on glass. It moves away from me, unsure.
He speaks to it. He tells it to be still, to let me touch it.
I touch it again and see a dog. I see a monkey, because it wishes me to, because he has told it to. I see a man—one with a cape and a smile just like mine, eyes like mine. It will show me whatever I need to see, to stop screaming.
And I would be screaming if it weren’t for the monkey and the smile.
Instead, I am crying.
I thought, I tell him, that you were a man.
The cape moves. I smell the jasmine of My Tho. I see the flame trees of Hue and the sands of Vung Tau, where my mother and father met, and the blue waters of the South China Sea. I see my mother and my father by the hedgerow of our village, my uncles and aunts, my brothers and sisters and cousins. I see myself standing with them, my family. I am with them again.
Without the people you love, you are nothing.
For you, the voice says, I am.
He is taking me away, he tells me now. He is taking me home—not to my parents’ country, no, but to his world, where there are no beaches, though water laps at the roots of trees, where the trees grow down instead of up, toward water, where buildings grow like crystals toward the light, and two suns set like eyes at evening, like flowers, and when these suns have set, the winds begin to roar. Where children that do not look like children laugh and play with their own dark capes, which are not really capes, but living things, until these things learn what the children wish them to do…carrying them into the sky on those winds, hiding them from what might hurt them, playing with them if they are bored.
Why? I ask him.
I killed a creature long ago, he tells me again. I should not have. There was no reason except anger. It wasn’t even my world, so the anger was only vanity. I must save another, if I am to save myself…
That is what his kind believes.
This is what it has been like for them on their world, and on the worlds they have known.
Without forgiveness, we have only our own darkness, he says.
We will go the way I came, he says.
How? I ask. On a boat? A plane?
Yes, he says. On a thing like a boat. But there is no way for you to really understand, he says.
I can take you away, he says, his eyes again like mine, his hand—like my father’s, bony and wrinkled—reaching out as if to touch me. But that is all I can do, Chu.
What does he mean?
I can take you away, the voice says. I can heal your sickness, but I cannot touch you.
I understand.
He cannot hold me. He cannot hold me naked in his arms the way I have dreamed he would.
I understand, I say.
I try to.
I do.
And then he is taking his cape, unwinding it from his back, and putting it on my shoulders. I do not understand why. I do not understand why he would do this, for when it touches me, it enfolds me like someone else’s skin, someone else’s blood, water I cannot breathe in, and I can barely scream. I barely have enough air to scream.
And then it passes.
I breathe again.
I feel what he has always felt. What his kind has always felt:
To be held forever by someone—or something—that will always be yours…
I’ll get another one on the boat, he says brightly.
It is Captain China saying this, grinning, ready for our adventure.
The room begins to spin like another dream, and I go with him where this story, this comic book that is ours and ours alone, wants us to go.
We should not be afraid of anything in life except the absence of love, and in turn, love’s “touch.” Women—it is women—tell me this is a story about love, not “skin” at all; that it is about a child’s need to be held, about a father and a son separated (as they sometimes are) by light-years, by species, by the journeys that take them into the “differences” they are. That it is in the face of such impossible distance (light-years, biology, “difference”) that their need to love and be loved, to hold and be held—even if “skin” will not allow it—becomes the miracle it is. This is true; and so we should not fear this story.
Background: The Dream
LISA TUTTLE
Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in the United States, spent ten years in London, and now lives in a remote part of the Scottish highlands. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories while at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. Her first novel, Windhaven (1981) was cowritten with George R. R. Martin. Her most recent work is the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough (2006). Tuttle has written at least a hundred short stories, as well as essays, reviews, nonfiction, and books for children and young adults.
YOU’VE ASKED ME TO tell you about myself.
I’ll begin with the dream.
First, the precipitating cause: One night I noticed a small excrescence on my inner thigh. It wasn’t painful or disfiguring, but once having noticed it I became increasingly aware and self-conscious whenever dressing or undressing brought it to my attention, and I wondered how long it had been there, and what it was. You know how it is, especially getting older, when every minor bodily change or malfunction makes you think in terms of Early Warning Signs rather than simple mutability. One day, sitting naked on the edge of the bed, I began to prod and then to pinch it until eventually I pressed it between my thumbs and squeezed it like a pimple. And I guess it was a pimple, or something similar, because when I squeezed, out shot a long, thin yellow stream. I was mildly shocked, squeamishly excited, a child again in my response to a bodily emission. The little bump or lump was gone. There was a slight redness at the site for the next day or two, then nothing.