فصل 16

16.

In Which There Is Ever So Much Paper

The madwoman in the Tower could not remember her own name.

She could remember no one’s name.

What was a name, anyway? You can’t hold it. You can’t smell it. You can’t rock it to sleep. You can’t whisper your love to it over and over and over again. There once was a name that she treasured above all others. But it had flown away, like a bird. And she could not coax it back.

There were so many things that flew away. Names. Memories. Her own knowledge of herself. There was a time, she knew, that she was smart. Capable. Kind. Loving and loved. There was a time when her feet fit neatly on the curve of the earth and her thoughts stacked evenly—one on top of the other—in the cupboards of her mind. But her feet had not felt the earth in ever so long, and her thoughts had been replaced by whirlwinds and storms that swept all her cupboards bare. Possibly forever.

She could remember only the touch of paper. She was hungry for paper. At night she dreamed of the dry smoothness of the sheaf, the painful bite of the edge. She dreamed of the slip of ink into the deepening white. She dreamed of paper birds and paper stars and paper skies. She dreamed of a paper moon hovering over paper cities and paper forests and paper people. A world of paper. A universe of paper. She dreamed of oceans of ink and forests of quills and an endless bog of words. She dreamed of all of it in abundance.

She didn’t only dream of paper; she had it, too. No one knew how. Every day the Sisters of the Star entered her room and cleared away the maps that she had drawn and the words that she had written without ever bothering to read them. They tutted and scolded and swept it all away. But every day, she found herself once again awash in paper and quills and ink. She had all that she needed.

A map. She drew a map. She could see it as plain as day. She is here, she wrote. She is here, she is here, she is here.

“Who is here?” the young man asked, over and over again. First, his face was young, and fine, and clear. Then, it was red, and angry, and bleeding. Eventually, the cuts from the paper birds healed, and became scars—first purple, then pink, then white. They made a map. The madwoman wondered if he could see it. Or if he understood what it meant. She wondered if anyone could—or if such things were intelligible to her alone. Was she alone mad, or had the world gone mad with her? She was in no position to say. She wanted to pin him down and write “She is here” right where his cheekbone met his earlobe. She wanted to make him understand.

Who is here? she could feel him wondering as he stared at the Tower from the ground.

Don’t you see? she wanted to shout back. But she didn’t. Her words were jumbled. She didn’t know if anything that came out of her mouth made any sense.

Each day, she released paper birds out the window. Sometimes one. Sometimes ten. Each one had a map in its heart.

She is here, in the heart of a robin.

She is here, in the heart of a crane.

She is here, she is here, she is here, in the hearts of a falcon and a kingfisher and a swan.

Her birds didn’t go very far. Not at first. She watched from her window as people reached down and picked them up from the ground nearby. She watched the people gaze up at the Tower. She watched them shake their heads. She heard them sigh, “The poor, poor thing,” and clutch their loved ones a little more closely, as though madness was contagious. And maybe they were right. Maybe it was.

No one looked at the words or the maps. They just crumpled the paper—probably to pulp it and make it new paper. The madwoman couldn’t blame them. Paper was expensive. Or it was for most people. She got it easily enough. She just reached through the gaps of the world, pulling out leaf after leaf. Each leaf was a map. Each leaf was a bird. Each leaf she launched into the sky.

She sat on the floor of her cell. Her fingers found paper. Her fingers found quill and ink. She didn’t ask how. She just drew the map. Sometimes she drew the map as she slept. The young man was coming closer. She could feel his footsteps. Soon he would stop a good ways away and stare up, a question mark curling over his heart. She watched him grow from youth to artisan to business owner to a man in love. Still, the same question.

She folded the paper into the shape of a hawk. She let it rest on her hand for a moment. Watched it begin to shiver and itch. She let it launch itself into the sky.

She stared out the window. The paper bird had been lamed. She had rushed too quickly, and didn’t fold it properly. The poor thing would not survive. It landed on the ground, struggling mightily, right in front of the young man with scars on his face. He paused. He stepped on the bird’s neck with his foot. Compassion or revenge? Sometimes the two were the same.

The madwoman pressed her hand to her mouth, the touch of her fingers as light as paper. She tried to see his face, but he was in shadow. Not that it mattered. She knew his face as well as she knew her own. She could follow the curve of each scar with her fingers in the dark. She watched him pause, unfold the bird, and stare at the drawings she had done. She watched his eyes lift to the Tower, and then arc slowly across the sky and land on the forest. And then look at the map once again.

She pressed her hand to her chest and felt her sorrow—the merciless density of it, like a black hole in her heart, swallowing the light. Perhaps it had always been so. Her life in the Tower felt infinite. Sometimes she felt she had been imprisoned since the beginning of the world.

And in one profound, sudden flash, she felt it transform.

Hope, her heart said.

Hope, the sky said.

Hope, said the bird in the young man’s hand and the look in his eye.

Hope and light and motion, her soul whispered. Hope and formation and fusion. Hope and heat and accretion. The miracle of gravity. The miracle of transformation. Each precious thing is destroyed and each precious thing is saved. Hope, hope, hope.

Her sorrow was gone. Only hope remained. She felt it radiate outward, filling the Tower, the town, the whole world.

And, in that moment, she heard the Head Sister cry out in pain.