Page 54 of Middlegame

He knows the words: balance, equilibrium, parity. He’s always thought they were a pretty dream, something to be pursued but never caught. Now, for the first time in years, he’s starting to feel as if they might describe something possible. All they need to do is figure out what they are, what they mean, and they can begin moving forward.

He’s sunk deeply enough into his own thoughts that he doesn’t notice the person falling into step beside him. Their footsteps are soft, and they’re dressed entirely in gray, blending with the moonlight city streets. It’s not until he catches a glimpse of pale hair out of the corner of his eye that he realizes anyone is there at all, and not until he turns that he realizes it’s Erin.

“Uh,” he says. “Hi?”

“You have an odd sense of direction,” she says. “We should have turned two blocks ago if you were trying to get home in a timely manner.”

“I’m enjoying the walk,” he says, flustered. Dodger’s roommates are both strange in their own ways. He finds Candace’s brusque, often paint-covered strangeness endearing; he finds Erin’s strangeness, which is feline and fluid and cold, off-putting. There’s something about her that doesn’t quite synchronize with the rest of the world, like she’s been spliced in from a different story. She pays the rent on time and is almost never home, so Dodger doesn’t mind her, but since that first encounter on the balcony, he’s been doing his best to keep her at a safe remove. Something about her is wrong.

“You were,” she says, and she’s right, so he doesn’t argue, no matter how polite it would have been to try.

They walk in silence for a short while, Erin pacing soundlessly beside him, Roger choosing the more economical turns, the ones that will get him home and end this game—whatever it is—that much sooner.

Finally, Erin asks, “If I gave you advice, would you take it? Or would you just go ‘oh, that’s Dodger’s weirdo roommate, that’s the one who never shows her face, I can ignore her without worrying about the consequences’?”

“I would consider what you said to me, try to assess it fairly on its own merits, and worry about the consequences endlessly, because I’m me, and that’s the sort of bullshit thing my brain likes to do,” says Roger. His tone is light. His expression is grim. Erin has always seemed off, but here, tonight, the strangeness of her is magnified: here, tonight, she’s a wound in the fabric of the world, and she’s bleeding, oh, how she’s bleeding.

“Don’t come back from Boston.”

Roger stops walking.

Erin continues, momentum carrying her forward another several feet before she stops, and turns, and looks at him. “Stay home,” she says. “There are schools there that would take you. Plead illness. Get your ass off this improbable road before you go too far, because the Impossible City is just ahead, Jackdaw, and it’s waiting for you. It knows you’re coming. Once it sees you round the bend, it’s going to be too late.”

Roger stares at her. “Uh, Erin? It’s none of my business what you do in your spare time, but are you high? I’m not running away from school because you have some sort of weird Up-and-Under thing going on. And if I’m Jack Daw, what does that make you? The Corn Jenny?”

“I should be so lucky,” she says, and there’s such a terrible, painful reasonableness in her tone that he takes a step backward, away from her, away from the future she represents. “I don’t walk the improbable road, Jackdaw; I don’t go to meet the Queen of Wands. I’ve already been to see the King of Cups, and the Page of Frozen Waters made sure I knew I’d crossed the line. Hurt yourself if you want to, but think about Dodger. She’s breakable right now. Her kind always are. Crow Girls and Jack Daws have a lot in common, but where you burn, she’ll soak up all the water in the world and drown under the weight of her own lungs. You’re the control. She’s just the trigger mechanism. Stop this now before it’s too late for both of you.”

“Now you’re talking crazy,” says Roger patiently. “I was willing to tolerate a lot of weird, because you’re Dodger’s roommate and I don’t know what you’ve had to smoke tonight, but you’ve crossed a few lines, and one of them is the line of reason. Go home, Erin. Sleep whatever this is off. I’ll see you after Thanksgiving.”

“I can see the fixed points in your timeline. I can’t alter them or move between them the way you people can, but I can see them, and you’ve just passed one. Don’t you get it? You’re heading through the temperaments and into the center, and once you get there, I can’t save you. Once you get there, no one can save you. The King of Cups will see you now. The King sees all the cuckoos when they come home to roost.”

“Go home, Erin.” Roger starts walking again, faster this time, quickly passing her. She doesn’t move to follow him. He’s grateful for that, but he doesn’t slow down.

“When the time comes for you to see the King, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she calls after him. “Don’t say I didn’t try!”

“Go home, Erin,” he says, and turns the corner, and is gone.

Erin stays where she is, counting down from one hundred, giving him time to come back. He might. It could happen. Some people, when warned about impending doom, come back to ask for more details. Most don’t. Most would rather pretend the warning never came, that they had no idea of what might be coming for them.

Roger doesn’t come back. Somehow, she’s not surprised. She called him a Jackdaw, a Jack Daw, because that’s what he is, according to Baker’s formulae—that old bitch, with her carefully coded instructions for a generation of alchemists to emulate. But really, everyone who walks the improbable road to enlightenment is an Avery, a Zib, and Roger is no different. He and his sister only have one iron shoe apiece. That doesn’t matter. As long as they walk together, they’ll still walk all the way, and then . . .

“We’ll see what we’ll see,” she says quietly, and turns, and disappears into the night.

HOME AGAIN

Timeline: 19:54 EST, November 22, 2008 (two weeks later).

The house smells like Thanksgiving, that complicated mix of turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and mashed potato and pie that shouldn’t work but somehow does. It smells like holiday. It smells like home. When he was a kid, Roger thought Thanksgiving was the best possible holiday. It didn’t involve lies or home invasion like Christmas; it didn’t cram him into an itchy suit and tight shoes like Easter; even Halloween had its issues, with the masks and the monsters. But Thanksgiving . . . Thanksgiving was about food and family and spending time with the people you loved. Thanksgiving was perfect.

Now that he’s grown, Thanksgiving still seems perfect. Sure, Mom cooks a smaller turkey, since he no longer has a teenage boy’s appetite to see them through the leftovers, and sure, Grandma never taught anyone how to make her cranberry cheesecake, so when she died, the recipe died with her, but the feeling around the table is the same. Thanksgiving is the safest holiday, the one that encourages lowering walls and filling stomachs and enjoying the one place in the world that will always, always be safe.

The house seems smaller and bigger than it used to at the same time. Living in a cramped off-campus apartment means a four-bedroom single-family home with a backyard is basically the Promised Land: this is what half the people in his classes dream about at night. Having space. Space to collect things, space for clutter, space to lose yourself in. But the worn patch on the wallpaper where he used to rest his hand is impossibly low. He can’t ever really have been that short. That contrast is everywhere he turns. Doorknobs that should dwarf his hand fit snugly into his palm. Windows that should be too high to reach are situated at eye level. He even got the blender from the top of the fridge for his mother when she was whipping the cream; for the first time ever, he’s the tallest person in the house.

His old room has been redecorated. Still his, but adult-him, not child-him. There are a few shelves of beloved toys and souvenirs from his childhood—the rock he found the first time he went to the beach with his grandparents; the mouse ears from his first trip to Disney World—but the wallpaper is new, untorn, untattered, undefaced by crayons or markers. Looking at it makes him think of Dodger and her white walls covered with numbers; it makes his fingers itch to commit similar graffiti, scrawling verb tenses and lines of classic poetry over that unnerving newness. But he doesn’t. This is his parents’ house. For the first time in his life, he’s a guest here. You really can’t go home again. Not all the way. No matter how hard you try.

“Roger!” His mother’s voice comes up the stairs the way it always has, bouncing off the walls, a distinct echo that calls all the way back to when he was a toddler clinging to the bannisters and wailing at the steepness of the stairs. “Dinner’s about to be on the table!”

“Coming, Ma!” he calls back, and stands, leaving the too-new bed behind. He looks to the open door. Then, on a whim, he walks to the closet, kneels, presses his hands against the floor. It creaks. The loose panel where he used to store his childhood treasures is still here.