The Twice Lost

* * *

A man lay on the pavement of an alley in Washington, DC. He was humming a melody that seemed to trace drowsy circles in the dusky air around his head. He hadn’t understood before, he hadn’t understood, but now he knew that the only true language was music. Even his thoughts no longer took the form of words but instead were transcribed as elaborately coded blurts of sound. He knew what words were, of course, when he heard them: they were the unmusic, squawks not bright or rare or beautiful enough to mean anything.

He only wanted to join with the songs and the world they revealed. That world had contours of impossible purity. Its empty spaces fell from resonant claps of the moon. Sometimes he was in the music. Sometimes he was what it sang, his being summed by the sequence of its tones. But more often his body got in the way. He could understand that. Flesh and bone were bulky; they annoyed the music with their intractable mass.

He was lying on the pavement now, very still, in the hope that the music might forget that he still had his body with him. He stared up, face to face with the extreme blue that showed between two brick walls. In a dim way he knew that the car had left him here some days before—an octave or more of days, each one full of light like the slap of a bird’s wing against his eyes. Perhaps he’d been expected to go somewhere else, but he heard the world so clearly here that movement seemed wasteful, even absurd.

One of the back doors along the alley vented food smells. A woman opened it and leaned out, searching, then spotted him. She set a paper plate full of eggs and toast down on the cement and let out three sharp cymballine hisses—tss, tss, tss—as if she was calling a cat. The door clicked shut.

He didn’t go in pursuit of the food. Perhaps later. At the moment he’d almost coaxed the music into rendering him in its true voice again, making him the substance of its melody. It sat on his chest, considering him. Two round lights parted the alley like shining throats. The music rumbled thoughtfully and then ground to a stop.

“They left him here,” a voice said. “I wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t supposed to know anything. It’s funny that I know everything, then, isn’t it? Except the only thing that really matters, where she is . . .”

“I’m truly sorry,” someone answered gently—and those words, strangely, did seem meaningful. They carried a certain familiar warmth that was in itself a form of unexpected music. “I do hope you’ll make the decision to take your information public. To expose the way Anais has been used. Of course I’ve been aware for months now that they were holding her and that she’d been providing information, but it never occurred to me that even someone like Moreland might use her as a weapon!” The voice tipped across space with each word: there was the face, swinging like a lantern in a car’s open window. “Andrew’s probably long gone, of course. But I’ll get out and search, just in case.”

Andrew. That was surprising. That was a sound that formed a skin, and inside the skin there was a person . . .

“I want Moreland dead,” the first voice moaned. “Whatever is the worst nightmare he could have, the worst torture, for taking her from me . . . She’s been through so much, and she’s fragile, and he has no idea how to care for her.”

The man on the pavement had stopped listening. The sky’s blue blast was louder than words.

Then he felt a sudden grinding pain and heard himself shout. His body curled involuntarily, bringing his head and chest up into shadow-damp air. He didn’t know it, but someone had accidentally stepped on his hand. The pressure pulled back, and his hand hurt much less.

Another cry came, not his own. And the man on the pavement discovered that the cry came with a face: tan, with large, sympathetic brown eyes and silver hair. It came attached to a name.

He didn’t seem able to speak. Instead he sang the name, slowly, groping his way through the syllables with raspy music. “Ben . . . Ell . . . iss . . . son?”

“Andrew! Good God, you’ve been here in this alley all this time?”

He couldn’t answer that. But it didn’t matter.

The wonderful thing about music was that whatever was true was also obvious: as obvious as those large hands grasping him and hauling him to his feet.

* * *

“Anais.” Moreland breathed her name out, hard, as he climbed into the back of the truck and then pulled the heavy doors shut behind him. Was she finally awake? He was hot-faced and palpitating; his jowls trembled, pale lilac in the blue skeins of light from the narrow upright tank where she floated. He was standing somewhat below her in a channel the same width as the tank, high walkways on either side of him and, far up on the left, a lever that would swing the glass open and send the water, and the other contents, flooding out.

He’d been driving up and down random streets or sometimes just sitting in the parked truck for hours, in DC and later in Baltimore, through the previous evening, then on through half the night. They’d given her too strong a dose of sedatives; she just couldn’t seem to come to. But surely by now . . .

Someone had fitted inflatable water wings of the kind used by swimming children on both her pearly arms to prevent her from drowning while she was unconscious. A single bulb shone just above her. Her golden head flopped and her long hair spread through the water like radiant yellow veins. He caught a gleam of sleepy azure as she gazed at him from the corner of her eyes and then closed them again. “Anais, my precious one, you want to talk to me. Now, even if you’re still feeling poorly. You do. I’ve brought you here,” he gasped out, “to offer you your freedom.”

She raised her head and stared at him, her skin blanched and ashy in contrast to his damp flush. “I don’t trust you,” Anais slurred. “I don’t. There’s some kind of trick.”

At least she was talking again. “No trick, beauty, I assure you. But a price, of course. There’s always a price, isn’t there?” Unbelievably, in the far-off city of San Francisco , the wave still shimmered in an upright mirror below the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d expected mobs in the streets screaming for mermaid blood. Instead the crowds filling blue suburban parks, dark highways, and city bridges across the country were calm and quiet, their faces gilded in the cupped light of candle flames. They sang in mourning for the mermaids who had died that day: died so that thousands of humans would live.

Worse, they were acclaiming General Luce as a hero.

And as soon as the missing secretary of defense was located, President Leopold would surely demand his resignation. But his own destruction hardly mattered as long as he could leave a solid record of accomplishment behind him. “Not so high a price, Anais, I promise. Nothing you can’t do in a few hours.”

“What kind of price? You’ve already made me work so hard, and I’m tired, and I don’t even care about getting my house back anymore! I just want . . .” She leaned her face on the tank’s wall, her mouth a compressed pink blob on the glass, her cheek a slick pale dab.

“To be the way you were, free and blissful in the ocean. Of course I understand that, dear one. Of course. To be the way you were before you sold yourself to us. I suppose, relatively speaking, you were innocent then.”

Anais didn’t answer.

There wasn’t enough time left for him to indulge her self-pity. “You bought your life from me, Anais. Now buy one more thing. You only have to complete one final task, and you’ll have your freedom again forever. Even your humanity and your inheritance from your parents, if you decide you want those things. I can arrange it all for you,” Moreland lied. “But there’s always a price, isn’t there, for anything worth having?”

The Twice Lost Army was still spreading to other cities around the United States; it seemed there was a new blockade every day. Half an hour after General Luce’s astonishing act of resistance he’d heard the first reports of a wave rising outside of Liverpool in England. Tomorrow the Twice Lost might appear in Holland, then in France, then possibly on the north coast of Africa.

This wild expansion of their movement was the Twice Lost Army’s greatest strength, but it also might be their downfall. If General Luce had proved stubborn, well, she was only in San Francisco Bay. And it wasn’t as if mermaids on the opposite side of the country could telephone her for instructions.