Goodnight Moon’s brown eyes stared out at me from behind thick glass. It was the closest I’d ever been to a boy who wasn’t my twin. Goodnight Moon didn’t feel like a twin. He felt like the opposite of a twin. We never shared a womb, but on the other end of it all, we might still share a grave. His tie was burgundy with green swirls in it. He hadn’t tied it very well, so I could see the skin of his throat, which was very clean and probably very soft.
“Hey,” he said, “do you want to hear your tape?”
“What do you mean hear it? It’s not for hearing, it’s for luck.”
Goodnight Moon laughed. His laugh burst all over me like butterfly bombs. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a thick black rectangle. I handed him Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 and he hit a button on the side of the rectangle. It popped open; Goodnight Moon slotted in my tape and handed me one end of a long wire.
“Put it in your ear,” he said, and I did.
A man’s voice filled up my head from my jawbone up to the plates of my skull. The most beautiful and saddest voice that ever was. A voice like Candle Hole all lit up at twilight. A voice like the whole old world calling up from the bottom of the sea. The man on Madeline Brix’s tape was saying he was happy, and he hoped I was happy, too.
Goodnight Moon reached out to hold my hand just as the sky went black and starry. I was crying. He was, too. Our tears dripped out of our gas masks onto the rusty road of Electric City.
When the tape ended, I dug in my backpack for a match and a stump of candle: dark red, Holiday Memories scent. I lit it at the same moment that Goodnight Moon pulled a little flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on. We held our glowings between us. We were the same.
Allsorts Sita came to visit me today. Clicked my knocker early in the morning, early enough that I could be sure she’d never slept in the first place. I opened for her, as I am required to do. She looked up at me with eyes like bullet holes, leaning on my waxy hinges, against the T in BRIGHTBITCH, thoughtfully scrawled in what appeared to be human shit across the front of my hut. BRIGHTBITCH smelled, but Allsorts Sita smelled worse. Her breath punched me in the nose before she did. I got a lungful of what Diet Sprite down at the Black Wick optimistically called “cognac”: the thick pinkish booze you could get by extracting the fragrance oil and preservatives out of candles and mixing it with wood alcohol the kids over in Furnitureford boiled out of dining sets and china cabinets. Smells like flowers vomited all over a New Car and then killed a badger in the backseat. Allsorts Sita looked like she’d drunk so much cognac you could light one strand of her hair and she’d burn for eight days.
“You fucking whore,” she slurred.
“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction,” I answered quietly.
I have a place I go to in my mind when I have visitors who aren’t seals or gannet birds or hibiscus flowers. A little house made all of doors and windows, where I wear a greenglitter dress every day and water my gascan garden and read by electric light.
“I hate you. I hate you. How could you do it? We raised you and fed you and this is how you repay it all. You ungrateful bitch.”
“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction.”
In my head I ran my fingers along a cyclone fence and all the barrels on the other side read LIFE and LOVE and FORGIVENESS and UNDERSTANDING.
“You’ve killed us all,” Allsorts Sita moaned. She puked up magenta cognac on my stoop. When she was done puking she hit me over and over with closed fists. It didn’t hurt too much. Allsorts is a small woman. But it hurt when she clawed my face and my breasts with her fingernails. Blood came up like wax spilling and when she finished she passed out cold, halfway in my house, halfway out.
“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction,” I said to her sleeping body. My blood dripped onto her, but in my head I was lying on my roof made of two big church doors in a gas mask listening to a man sing to me that he’s never done bad things and he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy.
Big Bargains moaned mournfully and the lovely roof melted away like words on a door. My elephant seal friend flopped and fretted. When they’ve gone for my face she can’t quite recognize me and it troubles her seal-soul something awful. Grape Crush, my gannet bird, never worries about silly things like facial wounds. He just brings me fish and pretty rocks. When I found him, he had a plastic six-pack round his neck with one can still stuck in the thing, dragging along behind him like a ball and chain. Big Bargains was choking on an ad insert. She’d probably smelled some ancient fish and chips grease lurking in the headlines. They only love me because I saved them. That doesn’t always work. I saved everyone else, too, and all I got back was blood and shit and loneliness.
I went home with my new name fastened on tight. Darkgirls can’t stay in Electric City. Can’t live there unless you’re born there and I was only ten anyway. Goodnight Moon kissed me before I left. He still had his gas mask on so mainly our breathing hoses wound around each other like gentle elephants but I still call it a kiss. He smelled like scorched ozone and metal and paraffin and hope.
A few months later, Electric City put up a fence around the whole place. Hung up an old rusty shop sign that said EXCUSE OUR MESS WHILE WE RENOVATE. No one could go in or out except to trade and that had to get itself done on the dark side of the fence.
My mother and father didn’t start loving me when I got back even though I brought six AA batteries out of the back of Goodnight Moon’s tape player. My brother had got a ramen flavor packet stuck in his hair somewhere outside the Grocery Isle and was every inch of him Maruchan. A few years later I heard Life and Time telling some cousin how their marvelous and industrious and thoughtful boy had gone out in search of a name and brought back six silver batteries, enough to power anything they could dream of. What a child! What a son! So fuck them, I guess.
But Maruchan did bring something back. It just wasn’t for our parents. When we crawled into the Us-Fort that first night back, we lay uncomfortably against each other. We were the same, but we weren’t. We’d had separate adventures for the first time, and Maruchan could never understand why I wanted to sleep with a gas mask on now.
“Tetley, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Maruchan whispered in the dark of our pram-maze.
“Electrified,” I whispered back. “What do you want to be?”
“Safe,” he said. Things had happened to Maruchan, too, and I couldn’t share them anymore than he could hear Madeline Brix’s songs.
My twin pulled something out of his pocket and pushed it into my hand till my fingers closed round it reflexively. It was hard and plastic and warm.
“I love you, Tetley. Happy Birthday.”
I opened my fist. Maruchan had stolen lipstick for me. Revlon Super Lustrous 919: Red Ruin, worn almost all the way down to the nub by some dead woman’s lips.
After that, a lot of years went by but they weren’t anything special.
I was seventeen years old when Brighton Pier came to Garbagetown. I was tall and my hair was the color of an oil spill; I sang pretty good and did figures in my head and I could make a candle out of damn near anything. People wanted to marry me here and there but I didn’t want to marry them back so they thought I was stuck up. Who wouldn’t want to get hitched to handsome Candyland Ocampo and ditch Candle Hole for a clean, fresh life in Soapthorpe where bubbles popped all day long like diamonds in your hair? Well, I didn’t, because he had never kissed me with a gas mask on and he smelled like pine fresh cleaning solutions and not like scorched ozone at all.