Page 19 of Ringer
“Pinocchio’s made out of wood just like a doll,” Calliope said. She slid fluidly and without warning through different ideas, through fiction and reality, the past and present. “Wayne calls me Pinocchio, and I don’t say how Dr. O’Donnell named me first. Names are like that. You have to be careful—once someone names you, you belong to them for life. Pinocchio wanted to go to the outside and be a real boy.” Once again, she leapt to a new stream of thought: she had no meaning, no system to unwind them, to decide what was important and what wasn’t. “He got ate by a whale but then he made a fire in the whale’s stomach.” She laughed and Gemma flinched. It wasn’t exactly a laugh, more like the sound of a hammer against metal. “He made a fire just like the one at Haven. He lit it right in the whale’s belly, right here.” She pointed to her own stomach. She seemed to find this hilarious. “Wayne told me how he did it. And so the whale had to spit him up. I seen fire at Haven and I wasn’t scared, not like some of thems.”
Untangling Calliope’s speech took almost physical effort. She nearly explained that Pinocchio was only a story, but stopped herself.
“Outside is huge,” she said instead. “Much bigger than you can imagine.”
Calliope hugged her knees, shrugging. “I know. I seen it through the fence and on TV, too. Who cares, anyway? It dies, it dies, it dies.” She turned and pointed casually to three replicas. “It dies.” She pointed to herself. Before Gemma could say anything, before she could deny it, Calliope was talking again.
“Haven is much bigger than where here is. Here is only the size of how A-Wing is at Haven. But there’s more doors at Haven, and more nurses, too. I don’t like the nurses, except for some of them are okay, because they feed us greens and blues for sleeping. One of the guards let me touch her gun.” She spoke quickly, hardly pausing for air, as if the words were a kind of sickness she had one chance to get out. “At Haven we can’t go in with the males because of their penises and how a normal baby gets made. So we have to stay away, except at Christmas for the Choosing.”
Something touched Gemma’s spine and neck, and made the fine blond hair April had always called hergoose downlift on her arms, just like that, like bird feathers ruffled by a bad wind.
“What do you mean, the Choosing?” she asked, but Calliope wasn’t listening. She was pinballing between stories and ideas, feeding Gemma all the words she’d had to carry alone.
“Have you ever used a penis to make a baby?” she asked, and Gemma, stunned, couldn’t answer. “The doctors still don’t know if they can, I mean if we can, the its. Pepper got a baby in her stomach, but then she cut her wrists so afterward they all got more careful.”
Gemma could hardly follow the story—Calliope combined pronouns or used them indiscriminately. She’d heard Lyra and Caelum refer to themselves asitat different times. All the replicas confused phrases likewantandask, makeandown.
I owned it,one of the replicas insisted, when a nurse tried to take away a mold-fuzzed cup of old food remnants she’d been concealing beneath a panel of loose floor tile.I owned it. It’s me.And some of the replicas couldn’t speak at all—they could only growl and keen, like animals.
“So the doctors don’t know.” Calliope was still talking, working a fingernail into a scab on her knee; when the blood flowed she didn’t even wipe it, just watched it make a small path down her shin, as if it was someone else’s blood entirely. “Some of the its are too skinny for the monthly bleeding, but I have mine. Wayne said that means I’m a woman now.”
Nausea came like movement, like the rolling of a boat beneath her. “Who’s Wayne?”
“He’s the one who told me about Pinocchio.” Hereyes weren’t like eyes at all: they were more like fingers, grasping for something. “I always wanted a baby,” she said in a whisper. “Sometimes I used to go to Postnatal and hold them and say nice things to them, like I made them instead of the doctors.”
Blood was rushing so hard in Gemma’s head she could hardly hear. Infants. Babies. She hadn’t seen any since she’d been here. What had happened to all of them?
But she didn’t have to ask. Calliope leaned forward, all big eyes, all hot little breath, allneed. “Postnatal burned fast,” she said. “The roof caved in and all my babies got smashed.” Gemma turned away from her. But there was nowhere to go.
Nobody belongs here, child. Not even the devil himself.
Calliope pulled away again, smiling to show her teeth. “I like Haven better for most things. But here’s better because of the males and how you can talk to them if you want.” She said it so casually that Gemma nearly missed it.
“Wait. Wait a second.” She took a deep breath. “What do you mean, you can talk to them?”
Calliope smiled with only the very corners of her mouth, as if it was something rare she had to hoard. “You can come with me,” she said. “You can see for yourself.”
Calliope came for her in the middle of the night. It could have been midnight, or four a.m.; there were no clocks inthe holding center, and since arriving Gemma had truly been aware of the rubbery nature of time, when there were no watches, phones, or activities to pin it down to.
“Follow me,” she said, and took Gemma’s wrist. Gemma had seen staff members guide the replicas this way, and imagined this was where she’d learned it.
They moved through the maze of sleeping replicas, most of them drugged up on sleeping aids distributed by the nurses before lights-out: pills for the replicas whose pain was greatest, and, when these ran out, simply plastic mouthwash cups full of NyQuil. Gemma had thrown hers out, as she assumed Calliope must have, too.
As they passed through the darkness, Gemma again had a strange doubling feeling, as if she and Calliope were two shadows, two watermarks identically imprinted. Or maybe she was the shadow, and Calliope the real thing.
Only one nurse, nodding to sleep in a swivel desk chair despite the lack of desk, jerked awake to ask where they were going. Calliope whispered, “Bathroom,” and the nurse waved them on.
“Be quick,” she said.
No-man’s-land: the makeshift kitchen, the bathrooms, a plastic card table covered with scattered magazines and phone chargers, what passed for a break room for the staff during the day. A light in the kitchen was on, and as always the coffee machine was burbling and letting off aburned-rubber stink. There was always coffee brewing, at every hour, although so far Gemma hadn’t actually seen anyone drink from the machine.
Only a single soldier was on duty, the same red-haired guy with a pimply jawbone. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen.
“That one never plays,” Calliope whispered to Gemma.
“Plays what?” Gemma whispered.
But Calliope just shook her head. “He thinks it’s bad luck.”
