Chapter Twenty Two
I walked all night and I didn't get tired. There were fewer and fewer cars and fewer and fewer buildings until eventually there were none and it was only me with the ocean on one side and a sort of forest on the other with the narrow road winding through. The sky was full of stars and as I watched them cycle through their stations I wondered if the patterns I was seeing in them were the same patterns that regular people-people saw, or if I was seeing more as well as different stars, and if I could see further and deeper into space. I didn't know. There were so many things I didn't know. I understood from the things Marta had said that I was deliberately partial, missing pieces on purpose and what those pieces were I couldn't imagine or even guess. I was lacking context. I searched my brain but all I could find inside it were the bits of data they had intentionally put in there. I would later come to comprehend at least a few of the gaps, but what there was of me at that time was more than there had been two days before, or even one day earlier. I was growing and changing all the time.
As the sun began to appear above the trees and the sky grew light I had no idea where I was, what lay before me or even what was going to happen next. I had a sense of infinite possibility, but also a sense of a journey that others must have taken, a voyage from nothing to something, from nowhere to somewhere, from beginning to middle to end. Every living thing is on the same path, I told myself, and every thing alive now is also occupying the same moment. Time and space are are never frozen, never still, but always fluid, always on the way. I was paying attention to the breeze and the noises it made happen in things, and the sunlight and the colors it conjured up all around. I felt like I was floating on my feet, until something bumped up against my knees and I tumbled down to the ground.
“Oomph, woah, big one,” said an unfamiliar scratchy voice beside me.
“You could at least watch where you're going,” said a more familiar one. I sat up and could not believe what I was seeing.
“Midgerette!” I shouted.
“So they were right,” the seagull bobbed his head as he fluttered down beside me. Beside him stood a dark black bird with a very long neck.
“I'm Chumbert,” he introduced himself. “Pleased to meet you.”
“How did you find me?” I said, ignoring the black bird.
“Word gets around,” Midgerette said. “They're all squawking about you, you know. Up and down the coast it's all anybody's talking about. The girl that got away, or is it the boy now?”
“I'm neither,” I told her. “I'm different. You always said I was a girl because I liked to draw, and Mother dressed me up as a girl, but then Marta said I was a boy and cut my hair and put these boy clothes on me, but I'm neither. Or maybe I'm both. I can be whatever I want.”
“Okay, whatever,” Midgerette did not seem to care much about all that. “But what are you planning to do? Everyone says you're just walking. Is that it? Are you going somewhere?”
“She walks a lot,” Chumbert agreed. “Some of us saw her walking last night and look! She's still walking.”
“I don't have a plan,” I had to admit, still sitting on the side of the road as a car came roaring by, the first one in a long time. “But I'm so happy to see you! What else are they saying about me?”
“They say you started out running,” Chumbert volunteered. “Then you stopped running. Then you started walking and then you kept on walking.”
“Don't mind him,” Midgerette said. “He's an idiot. He won't stop following me.”
“I like you,” Chumbert explained. “You remind me of a kern I used to know.”
“Stuff it,” Midgerette snapped, turning on him. “God damn cormorants. All they do is play follow the leader. Any old leader. Anyway. Mother's dead, by the way.”
“Dead? How?”
“Some scrawny guy with stringy hair came driving up after you ran off last night. Brought a crew of muscle-heads with him. They busted in guns blazing. Mother got some shots off, but quick enough they blasted the bitch to bits. Didn't go so well for your box-mates either. Last I saw they were all like hypnotized and he was marching them into a dirty van. Then he burned the whole place down, house and sheds and everything.”
“Stan!” I slapped myself on the forehead for some reason.
“Is that a thing?” Midgerette wondered. “Hitting yourself now?”
“Are you sure about my friends?”
“I'm afraid so,” Midgerette replied. “Once I noticed you weren't with them, I hit the beach, started asking around after you. Finally got word from some gulls in Surf City saying something about rainbows. Couldn't make out a thing, really, but figured I'd poke around and see if somebody else made any sense. Put some things together and here I am.”
“It was me. I told her where you were,” Chumbert put in. “I saw you walking around last night.”
“Is that true?” I asked Midgerette, who nodded.
“He's an idiot,” she said, “but a useful one, I guess. Truth is, he led me right to you.”
“You smell bad,” Chumbert explained. “I like things that smell bad.”
Another car came speeding by, and then a small truck.
“We want to get you out of sight,” Midgerette said. “Come on. We can head over to those dunes over there. I saw a nice creek bed with a bridge we can get below. Too many people-people eyes up here in the open.”
We moved to where she said, and hid beneath the road while we tried to decide what to do next.
“So, is this it?” I asked after a long period when none of us said anything but just sat there staring off at the sea. The creek was narrow and shallow and flowed slowly into the ocean, barely making it the last few feet across the sand. Upstream disappeared into the forest on the other side of the bridge. Above us occasional cars roared past, and there were no other sounds except a few birds off in the distance and the waves pounding on the shore.
“Fresh and clean,” Chumbert announced, stretching his long neck out and shaking his head. “Could use a little more rain, though.”
'Rain's always good,” Midgerette agreed.
“Hey,” Chumbert said, “you know how you can see the fish better when the waves lift them up?”
“Uh-huh,” Midgerette said as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. I have never considered the impact of waves on fish.
“Is it because the waves, being vertical and all, are thinning out the density the sunlight can parse through?”
“Uh-huh,” Midgerette repeated in the same tone of voice.
“So if you could chop the ocean up into slices, you could maybe see all the fish?”
“If,” Midgerette said, “but you can't.”
“I know, but if,” Chumbert considered. I got the impression he would really enjoy seeing all the fish.
“Stan was going to chop me up,” I said, “I don't know about slices, though. I think he said something about bits.”
“That would be even better,” Chumbert said. I was momentarily stunned until I realized he was still talking about the ocean.
“A lot of the fish are too big anyway,” he said. “It'd be awesome to have them chopped into bits.”
“People are always breaking things,” Midgerette said, “when they're not just making so much noise! What is that noise, anyway?”
We had been talking louder and louder without noticing it, so we could hear each other above the din coming from above our heads. It sounded like a hundred airplanes all taking off at once.
“Choppers!” Midgerette announced, fluttering her wings.
“Fish choppers?” Chumbert asked hopefully.
“No, you idiot,” Midgerette snapped. “Motorcycles. They must be stopped on the bridge. I'm going to take a look.”
“Coming with you,” Chumbert announced and flew off after her. They returned moments later and Midgerette did not look happy.
“I don't know how they found you,” she said, “but they're coming down. I was thinking we could make a run for it. My fisherman friend Cade could maybe help take you somewhere, but it's too late now. He's back up in Surf City and we don't have ...”
“Aha!” a loud voice boomed in my ears, interrupting Midgerette who flew off suddenly, with Chumbert close behind.
“Don't worry,” Midgerette called back to me. “I'll find you again, and I'll help when I can.”