Scene II: To Begin (Lief)
#2 of Chamber Music
I am about to go way overboard against drugs, but it's what needs to be done. So, just sayin', I do not in any way support the use of recreational drugs or anything that will get you high through external chemical means, including blood doping and oxygen highs. I know the biochemical and neurological reasons that LSD, pot, cocaine, and countless others will permanently and seriously mess you up in the head. Don't mess with them. They will kill you. That said, one of these characters partakes generously of drugs that don't seem to affect him. THIS IS FICTION.
So Fae and all them are developing plot, still. I really hope I finish this one; I like it.
t3h p05t, 4 j00.
_Beasts in their major freedom
Slumber in peace tonight. The gull on his ledge
Dreams in the guts of himself the moon-plucked waves below,
And the sunfish leans on a stone, slept
By the lyric water,_
from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur
Karen Buckshire knew there was even more to Fae than she had first imagined, given his reaction to her discovery. When she got home that evening, she immediately started going over the papers anew. At first, there was nothing she could discern, even concentrating just on the math examinations. The problems missed seemed too random, too arbitrarily chosen to mean anything. Eventually, though, she saw: the eraser marks didn't always make sense. There were places where whole sequences of numbers had been crossed out before an answer was reached. Even those sequences didn't fit into algorithms she knew, though, so she concentrated on the questions with those marks, trying to fit it into some sort of cipher. He was smart, but he was young, so she started with a standard substitution cipher, i.e., A = 1, B = 2, etc. The first problem that he missed in the eleventh grade, he was off by ten, translating to J. Nothing useful. The next was 488. Wrapping around, it became T. The next was 27, so A. Made no sense, but he was smart. There might be further substitution down the line.
Her first day with the new idea in mind was spent this way, tracking down missed problems and recording the numbers by which the problem had been missed, whether by a decimal in which the decimal had to be ignored, or some other mechanism. Two days later, she had a garbled mess of letters and felt like she hadn't advanced in the least. This puzzle was consuming her, she knew, and let it go for the next few days, to let it digest. She would get it eventually, and she was old enough to know that as quick as her mind was, she had plenty of time to figure this out. This young person would not escape her, no matter how hard he tried.
Jeck also had an interesting initial reaction to Fae. The Gates family had always lived well, though not hugely extravagantly, and so had mostly associated with their own class - white, pseudo-generous types with small mansions and no servants save a professional slave here and there. Jeck's family had no slaves of course, being far too magnanimous to consider causing such a demeaning station to be created in their own family and had instead done the opposite by taking in Claire, his adoptive sister, when she was an infant. That had been his first close exposure to the anthro species, who, though respected as a sentient people, only mixed in public high schools, cubicle cities, and factory floors.
Despite his general isolation from the rest of the world, Jeck was a voracious reader, quickly exhausting his father's library of fantasy and science fiction in middle school and avidly seeking out other forms of escape from what he was quickly realizing was a self-entrapping society, closed in by its feeble brains and cowardly tendencies. He remembered well one of his father's arguments with his older brother, who was dating an Asian girl. The girl had invited Geoffritch to China with her and been staunchly refused by both parents. His father argued that the he would get himself killed by "those yellow Chinks" because "they don't understand civilized society." Geoff had stalked off in a rage and ended up breaking up with the girl because they wouldn't be able to keep up communications with one another.
This fictional exposure to such a wide universe abraded Jeck's patience with his parents exceptionally swiftly until friction with them, at least from his end, was like a joint without cartilage. They didn't seem to notice, but he mentally ground his teeth during every interaction with them, feeling damned by their atrocious ignorance and hidebound stasis. He, aware the other hand, excelled in school and sports alike, determined to break free somehow and knowing that a university education was the way to do it, especially one he paid for without their help.
When he hit high school, even as sociophobic as a life in books had made him, he did his best to associate with a variety of people, seeking out primarily humans and furs of his level of intellect or higher. Finding these in short supply, he down-graded and expanded his tiny social circles little by little until finally, he met Fae.
Fae instantly intrigued Jeck as a person. The human boy was no blinded idiot to miss Fae's potential. The first time they talked was in a ninth grade social studies project. The two had been put in a group of four together because the social studies classes weren't segregated by demonstrated ability. By the time the two had had their third conversation independent of the other human boy and sociophilic vixen, Jeck knew that he was associating with someone special. Fae retained tremendous quantities of information, demonstrated by the spark of understanding he always had to quench whenever Jeck brought up a new point.
"Well, when the French started copying the Industrial Revolution..." Other areas of history.
"If Madame Defarge hadn't gotten that guy..." Bringing in A Tale of Two Cities.
"I think 'let them eat cake' is one of my favorite quotes. I mean, it sounds like a punch line." Juvenile humor, low-quality though it was.
Fae got everything he was talking about, even though after the first few, he stopped responding when Jeck spoke. Eventually, Jeck called him out, cornering him in a small alcove near the art room in the school after lunch. "I know something you know, Fae," he said quietly, leaning against the wall beside the squirrel without looking at him and happily adopting a half-lidded, mysterious smirk.
"And I know a lot of things you think you know," the squirrel answered without skipping a beat. They were alone. "You're right about a lot of them."
Jeck just smiled. "Works for me. So, I'd like to get a good grade on this project without having to do all the work. Only you and I have any clue what's going on, though. So, I'll leave you out of the class presentation of it if you'll put the powerpoint together. I can give you my notes, and I'll do the quiz."
"You're pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?" he said, putting a joint in his mouth. "What if I screw you over? I'm not reliable, I can tell you that much."
"I'm not much for society, but I know that I can put together an A powerpoint in about an hour if you don't get one back to me before the night before this is due, so I'm willing to try to pass it off on you. I'm a lazy person; it's why I pay attention in class."
A genuine laugh left the rodent's mouth at that. "Good point. Want a hit?" he asked in all seriousness, proferring the lit paper good-naturedly.
Jeck turned him down. "Nah. I've never been one for drugs. I don't understand them enough yet."
"Dude, do you know how LSD works? I looked it up a while ago, it's pretty cool."
"No, I don't." Jeck was interested, though. He liked learning things. "How?"
"It mimics, like, three different inhibitors in your brain, so the feedback inhibition process stops working. Dopamine, epinephrin, and norepinephrin hit up their receptors in the synapse and are all like, 'epic fail.' It's why it screws up your brain so bad."
"So you fly with Lucy and Mary Jane? Even when you know what they do to you?"
He chuckled again. "I fly because I know what they do to me. If I understand it, I can control it." He sucked on the joint too hard and choked, glancing up at the smoke detector a few yards away. "So, you sure?" He offered the blunt again.
"Yeah, I've got a class. Don't count me out for later, though."
"Don't count me out either, Lief. And keep me under wraps, if you would."
Jeck pushed himself away, but turned to the other boy at the name. "Sure thing. But Lief? Lief Ericson?"
Faeram just smiled again. "You'll figure it out."
The human furrowed his brow and joked, "You jerk. Now I'll be thinking about that all day. I'll see you later."
"See ya."
They parted ways, but as usual, Jeck didn't give up the word-play. Lief Ericson was a Viking, a race of people known for... raping, pillaging, plundering, discovering Greenland, populating Norway with blond women, and burning villages. They wore horned helmets and could enter a berserker rage on command, making a single man able to kill a dozen, kind of like... someone on LSD. Impervious to pain that would cripple normal men.
Kindelford Jeck Gates. Kindel. Kindling. Fire. So, Fireford. Fjord, a feature in Norway. Ford. A ford can cross a river, because it's a raft, like a boat. Viking burials involved putting the body on a boat and burning it as it sailed out to sea.
Kindelford becomes Lief.
He was brilliant.
The social studies project got a nearly perfect score, and only Jeck noticed how many consecutive minor assignments Faeram came close to failing to balance out that major plus. Jeck had not known, though, how long or with what seriousness Fae had been doing this until Guin mentioned the meeting with Buckshire. Throughout the past few years, he had kept intermittent contact with the squirrel, always observing Fae's placement in varying classes. It was always between bad and good, just like his grades in those classes.
At some point, Fae directly double-checked that Jeck was not spreading word of his hidden talent, and Jeck made his promise, but the boy made a decision when he heard about the paper Fae had written. It had clearly been some sort of cry for help, rather than an honest mistake. Fae was too smart to have let himself be found out that easily. Mrs. Buckshire had taught Jeck during his ninth grade year of English class and Jeck, as a shy, star student, had been a favorite of hers despite the difference in species. He decided to go ask her a favor after school the next day.
Unfortunately, she wasn't there because she didn't have a class at the end of the day, so he checked the day after during lunch. As the class emptied out, he stepped in, sucking air nervously. He had always had trouble stepping out of line. Simply approaching Fae had been a tremendous effort for him, though he had managed to hide it, as sure as he was. It was a result of the arguing and its uselessness, imprinting upon him a strong unwillingness to cause any sort of chaos. So when he first approached her desk, his lips were dry and his face was somewhat pale.
"Mrs. Buckshire?"
"Hm?" She looked up from her papers. Wearing a gaudy necklace and matching, garnet, dangling earrings above a jet shirt and ox-blood skirt, she cut an imposing figure without even trying. But when she smiled at him, the grandmother in her came out and he felt a rush of warmth. "Oh, Jeck! How are you?"
As he returned the smile, some of his fear dissipated. It was that fear that endeared him to woman after woman, and much as he knew it, he hated that he couldn't seem to quell it on his own. "I'm getting along," he answered with valiant nonchalance.
"Mrs. Davinsk hasn't convinced you to be an English major, has she?"
He laughed lightly at the recurring joke. "No, definitely not. I feel more comfortable around numbers."
"That's good," she smiled indulgently. He had struggled through the Polish human's class, but the strain on him hadn't shown except when she tore his first paper to pieces with her pen. All of the BS he had always gotten by on in middle school didn't work with that woman and it was why she and Buckshire were such good friends. "So now that I know it's not an emergency, what brings you here?"
"I have an odd request, Mrs. Buckshire."
"Do you, indeed?" She was intrigued as they went through the motions of the royal court, pretending over-wraught civility. He felt comfortable that way, able to adopt his submissive pose without fear of retribution.
"I do. I was talking to Guin Leary the other day, and he said that he overheard you say something interesting to Faeram Marshall."
She raised her eyebrows. What did Jeck have to do with those two jokers? "He said he overheard, did he?"
"Well... not quite."
She gave the boy a look. What was he up to? The only classes he could possibly share with either one of them were social studies and arts. "Well, what did you want to ask?"
He looked down nervously. "Guin said that you said Fae is a lot smarter than he seems, and I've known that about Fae for a year or two now."
Buckshire blinked at him, suddenly concerned. "And you haven't said anything?" As abruptly as that, the atmosphere in the room changed. Now, they were discussing something clandestine. "Close the door, please."
He shrugged as he complied and turned back, but he felt the change as surely as she must have. "Fae tells me he knows what he's doing and he's never slacked, so I trust him. Guin said there was a..."
"Never slacked? Jeck, he slacks on purpose. That's what I was saying. That boy is probably as smart as you are, but he won't show it."
The boy caught the momentum and ran with it. "See, I think he's smarter than I am. By a lot. Guin talked about a paper you went over with Fae, from a year or two ago." His voice gained confidence and a little of his practiced command slipped accidentally into it, but he also spoke more quietly. "I don't think Fae would make mistakes as blatant as the ones in the paper."
She shook her head quickly. "What I told Guin was that he had made small mistakes."
"I know, I'm sorry. I'm bad at communicating sometimes." He shook his head, clearing his mind. "He shouldn't have made it that obvious that he was being intentionally... less talented. I know him."
"You're sure?" She stopped him as he opened his mouth again, putting a hand up. "I believe you, Jeck. What I saw in those papers is not something I can just ignore."
He nodded with a swallow. "I... was wondering if I could borrow that English essay you talked to him about, to see if I could find something else in it. I've always been pretty good at word games."
She didn't hesitate. "You know this is unethical, right, Jeck?" she said, sifting through papers.
"Yes, ma'am."
"And I know you know this, but this cannot leave this room, is that clear?"
"Yes, ma'am." She was totally serious, and so was he.
Her wrinkled paws found the right paper and held it out to him. He took it tentatively. "I want to help that boy. I just don't understand why someone that smart would take the path he's chosen. Now, as long as you're here..." She searched for a few more seconds and found another sheet of paper, this one covered in numbers that were clearly her handwriting. Jeck would know it anywhere. "One thing I've learned is that especially at puzzles, two minds are better than one. Do you see any sort of pattern in these numbers?"
He moved around beside her so he could see better and started, barely audible, to read over the numbers. "Twenty-one... nine thousand and eight... four hundred forty-eight... Well, for those three, the digits add to three, seventeen, and twenty. I don't see how that works, though. I guess..." She looked at him, suddenly excited by something he said but unwilling to interrupt his train of thought. "Maybe they stand for letters, but that would be C, um... Q, and T. I dunno."
"That's it, Jeck, that's the missing link," she whispered in a fervor. "I looked at it a different way; I tried to wrap every number around to the alphabet. Most of it made sense, but if you take just the ones that wrap to the same number and the digits add up, maybe it makes more sense!"
Jeck looked at her with new respect. "So... four hundred forty-eight wraps to twenty, too? He's been encoding his wrong answers... I'll bet he did the same thing with the English paper."
She nodded gleefully. "Oh, thank you! If you find anything in that essay, you let me know, and even if you don't, I'll keep the others with me if you want to borrow them!" She sobered quickly and shot him a warning glance. "Keep them safe, though."
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, this'll be interesting." He grinned joyfully as he tucked the essay away.
"Oh, I hope it's more than that," she called after him as he rushed to lunch. The old teacher sighed and regretfully turned back to grading papers that, at the moment, were more important than the stack she had acquired detailing this squirrel's journey through the education system. She was ecstatic that Jeck had come to talk about it; especially Jeck. If any of the students had the brains to figure this one out, it was him. Sure, put the boy in a social context and he lost all confidence, but she used to enjoy watching him take her tests. He would look at a word problem, write the basic information, then write absolutely nothing for a full minute or more if that was what it took. Ten seconds later, he had finished the problem and moved on. Given infinite time, he could solve anything. Well, as long as his incessant daydreaming didn't get in his way. She smiled nostalgically into the tests as she slashed through a number with her pen. He was the only student besides Sarabi she had ever let go through an entire class period without looking up from his book.
The next day, a Friday, Mrs. Buckshire announced that there would be a quiz on the following Monday, and that it would be an excellent buffer before the test that would be coming up in the two weeks after that. Guin glanced at Fae, who was keeping his bleary eyes at the very least pointed in the woman's direction. Should he honestly ask the boy if he wanted to meet up and study? Surely it would end in failure.
He decided against it. It would make much more sense to just ask Jeck, if he wanted help. Jeck was a generous person, professing to hate people but at the same time infinitely willing to teach when given the opportunity. It was just... why should he? It was the same argument he had gone through with himself a dozen times before. His parents were rich. He was beautiful. He knew enough to get by, and high school didn't matter, anyway. College was what mattered, in the end, and even that didn't seem to have much to do with how much money one made.
All the same, he decided it couldn't hurt, just to see if he really was capable. All through that science course, as though bound by some invisible chain, Guin had found himself unable to escape Jeck's encouraging influence. They sat next to one another, and after Guin struck up a conversation about Final Fantasy, Jeck started paying attention to how the fox did in class, occasionally giving him strange looks, as though measuring him. Guin quickly learned exactly how vast the stores of knowledge and the mental capacity hidden inside Jeck's skull were.
After every test Jeck would look over at Guin's paper and see what he had missed, forcing himself to do so. And after the third or fourth time he said, "Oh, come on Guin, we talked about that one." For example: "Of course the Mariana Trench supports life. You'll do better on the next one," Guin finally responded with, "All right, all right. Maybe before the next one, could you come over and we could study a little?" Jeck had given him another one of those looks and complemented it with a grin. "Sure. No problem."
Guin flicked his earring uncertainly. Would Guin think the fox was just using him? Surely not. They were better friends than that, and besides, as joking as he had been at the lunch table, Jeck did use Guin fairly extensively, for getting hastily-written papers in before school was out if he had forgotten one was due, or for repelling one of the shy, awkward girls who followed him around despite his obvious interest in Sarabi. He made his decision.
"Jeck, this may surprise you, but I need help."
The human looked down at the blunt in his hands and wished he had the nerve to smoke it. He was all too aware of the effects the chemicals and ash would have on his body, though. "What kind of help? I know you're in trouble with Mrs. Buckshire, but there isn't anything she can do to you."
Fae took a long pull on his cannabis. He was the only stoner Jeck had ever heard of who didn't cough when he smoked. Most of the time, anyway. He just breathed out the oddly-scented smoke as though it had come through a hookah. "I haven't been paying attention."
"How has that ever hurt you?" The corner of Jeck's mouth tugged up in a smile. "You and I are the kings of bullshit. You could take a test on anything and keep making C's." He glanced around. They were out by the janitors' entrance to the school. Fae had only had to make eye contact and start walking that way to get Jeck to meet him there.
"Hah! True enough. It's more than making the grade, though, man. You know me. I don't think I've made a legitimate C in my life. Everything I do is bullshit."
Jeck smiled a private smile that it was okay for Fae to see, because he couldn't possibly know what it meant. Not so, Fae. It just looks like it. "So what, you want to meet up, or is it something easy?"
"There's a coffee shop out by the strip mall a lot of people go to to write papers and jazz. Let's hit that up around eight or so tomorrow."
"Works for me." The human's hair swung low over his eyes as he watched the joint burn in his fingers. "Man, why'd you even light this for me? I'm wasting your money." He handed it back. The smoke was making his eyes itch and he felt a little light-headed.
The squirrel pinched the lit end and rubbed, putting out before slipping it in a pocket with a sigh. "I thought I could get you high off the smoke. Damn, I'm hungry. You got any munchies?"
Jeck threw him a snack bar. "Jackass."
"Pussy." They grinned and walked in opposite directions.
That was usually as far as conversations with Fae went, and it was what Jeck liked about the boy. He felt... relaxed around Fae. He could curse without hurting his reputation, he could hold a home-rolled sample of the evil weed, and he was in the company of one of the brightest people he knew. It had taken some time to get accustomed to speaking with him, but once he realized how free he was, of everything, it had become an unremittingly positive aspect of his life. Sure, the constant drugs were a problem for his conscience, but he never partook. He only watched as Faeram kept himself buzzed and happy but in control and tried not to think about the state of the rodent's lungs.
"Jeck," the boy heard a voice say quietly on his way to the parking lot. He looked up quickly, nervously, and saw Guin not two feet away. The fox was uncharacteristically anxious. "I... think I've decided to do well on this next quiz in Buckshire's class. Would you mind... helping me study for it? I could do it on my own, but I know I won't if I'm alone." He toyed with his earring.
Jeck looked him in the eyes with the barest hint of incredulity and then averted his own in thought. He knew he was to be an arbiter, somehow, to the world. Growing up the way he did, being born under the signs he had been, being associated with the people he knew, he felt he was being gently guided by a sort of make-your-own destiny. He looked back at Guin, at the fingers twiddling with the jewelry. "Well of course. That's awesome."
Guin looked at him oddly. "Have you been..." He sniffed the other boy's shirt, putting his face uncomfortably close to Jeck's. "You've been smoking marijauna."
"Or hanging out with Fae," he returned with a grin.
The fox shrugged and rolled his eyes. "Or hanging out with Fae. Sorry."
"No biggie. Yeah, I can help out. Did you have a time you were thinking of? I'm mostly free this weekend."
"Sometime tomorrow or Sunday." His beautiful eyes were incredibly hopeful.
Jeck wished he had something to play with in his hands. He had nervous fingers. To put the two of them together, or not to? He couldn't possibly refuse Guin, that was for certain. Jeck's mind had been opened to the beauty of all things without regard to classification because of a series of movies and TV shows and books - "Ergo Proxy," "Fight Club," "The Boondocks," etc. So he felt privileged whenever in Guin's fantastic company.
"Umm, lemme think when would be best." His priority was not hanging out with Guin, though. His priority was whether or not to put the two of them in close proximity with one another. Buckshire had thought it was a good idea, but old people had a tendency to not see things as clearly as they believed and people in general tended to act without thinking. He made his own decision.
"Actually, Guin, Fae asked me to help with the same quiz, tomorrow." Something, some sphere of protection, some circle of prayer, shattered as he said those words. Pathways once closed off were open. Deaths and births, marriages and divorces, vaccines and biological warfare, everything had suddenly become a possibility. Jeck wanted to gasp for air. He felt like he was drowning, choking on a vacuum, breathing helium as everything around him exploded. Instead, he studied the fox's face, fighting the sweat that forced to break out on his own. "Would it bother you if we all just met up at Gorlo's Coffee at around five tomorrow?"
The vulpine features were absolutely frozen as thoughts made their way through his head. He hadn't noticed what Jeck had felt. "Yeah, sure." His eyes were wide and he nodded quickly. Jeck checked his pupils. They were dilated. Guin was either lying or scared.
"You sure?" he asked, even though he knew the answer.
"Yeah. I mean, Buckshire put us together, so why not just do this? I thought he was a super-genius, though."
"No one has perfect knowledge."
"Except you," Guin joked.
"Heh. Except me, right."
_In which the spotless feet
Of deer make dulcet splashes, and to which
The ripped mouse, safe in the owl's talon, cries
Concordance. Here there is no such harm
And no such darkness_
from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur