In Which Mackenzie Stares Into The Middle Distance



Of all the hard lessons I had learned since coming to college, I think the hardest one was that no matter what else happened, life would go on until it didn’t.

Having mystery piled on top of mystery concerning my childhood and the state of my mind didn’t exempt me from going to classes, and didn’t preempt the rest of my life.

In a way it was better, given that I was in a holding pattern while other people dug up information and chased down leads. It helped that I wasn’t the only one in the dark for once… Dee had made the decision that it wouldn’t be right to share what she suspected with anyone who hadn’t been in the room, since they couldn’t share it with me. No one else knew what “new line of inquiry” she was pursuing

And since it apparently followed logically from the things she’d uncovered, that meant everyone else knew even less than I did. Amaranth took Dee’s decision more gracefully than I would have expected, especially after Dee made it clear that this was a safety concern.

The closest thing to a bright spot was getting to know Rowan again. He’d wanted to catch up, and I didn’t mind doing so, between classes and time spent with my nearests and/or dearests.

I have to say “closest thing” because my feelings about him weren’t totally unmixed. The whole mystery memory hole thing was way unsettling, and had been before we found out his mind had been savaged.

But he was a connection to the time of my life when I was happiest, not counting fairly recent events. He was a connection to my mother. He’d actually known her right alongside me.

The downside to the upside was that I couldn’t safely question him about the specifics of that time without treading on ground that Dee deemed too dangerous for me to go exploring. I had to settle for the knowledge that he was a part of my childhood as I got to know him now.

He was reluctant to talk about himself, I think because he wasn’t used to people being interested. He seemed to assume that everything about himself was ordinary and thus mundane and thus obvious or not worth mentioning.

“Nothing special” was the summary of how he described most things about himself. It was what he was into, what he had done, what he was doing… who he was and where he was going.

He found me far more interesting than he did himself, so mostly I got to know him as a series of behaviors and tics: the nervous, choked laugh he gave when put on the spot with a question versus the hearty, unshackled guffaw he let out when something was actually funny. The way his eyes moved around the room when there was a sudden sound. The way he scratched at his sideburns or behind his ear when he was thinking.

It was hard to look at him and not think “scarecrow”, despite the thoroughly unpleasant associations that image usually called forth into my head. It wasn’t just that he was beanpole tall and thin, with gangly limbs. It wasn’t just that he was perpetually scruffy about the face and head… though I’d never actually seen a scarecrow with an untidy accidental goatee before, so I couldn’t say why this heightened the impression, only that it did.

I think it had something to do with his clothing, which mostly laid on the delicate intersection between hippie and hipster: mostly earth tones, a lot of stuff that looked woven or knitted, but nothing that didn’t look like it had come from a store, nothing that didn’t look mass-produced.

His winter wardrobe was heavy on scarves and stocking caps. He liked baggy sweaters, though it was probably hard to find anything that wouldn’t be baggy on him without being skin tight. I think it was his tendency to wear multiple layers of artisanally rumpled shirts on the really cold days that really sold it, since it gave him a generally stuffed look.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand the cold,” he said when I mentioned it. “There isn’t enough me between the wind and my bones, you know?”

“Yeah, well, I’m attuned to elemental fire, so…”

“…does that mean the cold doesn’t bother you, or doesn’t?”

“It’s a legitimate weakness,” I said. “I wish I knew what happened to my winter coat from last year… I was going to say that you would have loved it, but I loved it.”

“I bet it was super cool,” he said.

“It was the ugliest coat in existence,” I said. “But it was super warm, is what it was. I’ve never actually cared that much about being cool.”

“That’s probably part of why you are.”

“If I am,” I said. “But honestly… the people in my life who’ve cared the most about being cool have been some of the worst people I’ve known.”

“Yeah, well… I think you probably have to get a certain amount of cool before you can really do enough harm to be awful,” he said.

“Rowan… I’m not saying you’re awful, but… the whole ‘cool’ thing is overrated in every sense of the word,” I said. “You don’t have to be ‘in’ with a certain crowd to have friends and have fun, and you definitely don’t have to be ‘in’ with anyone to have enough power to ruin someone else’s day or make them feel tiny and terrible. I mean, don’t go running yourself down because you don’t think you’re cool… but don’t get so attached to the idea that you’re too much of a loser for anything you say or do to matter.”

“That sounds like the voice of experience,” he said.

“The times in my life when I felt the most like a loser are also the times I think I ruined the most people’s days with careless words,” I said. “And it was mostly the people who worried about being a loser, too… which is most people, I’m pretty sure.”

“I feel like most people have things way more figured out than I do?”

“Well… you’re a freshman,” I said. “So, statistically, you might be right? But I promise you, feeling that way is very normal.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I have things more figured out than you do,” I said. “Also, I’m friends with a telepath and a sexual empath, and I spent a lot of time talking to a mental healer.”

The cool thing made it harder than I would have expected to fill Rowan in on what he’d missed in my life, and I hadn’t expected it to be easy. I could barely explain my life of the last year and a half to myself. Even the story of the first few months of my life at Magisterius University seemed like the sort of thing that could fill books, and how could I begin to sort out what parts were important versus the stuff that was just background?

Maybe he wanted the background… I mean, if he wanted to know what my life was like, the day-to-day stuff was probably more important than the power-hungry roommates or just-regular-type-hungry mermaids.

Not that I was ready to get into that particular saga. Even if I did know Rowan in some sense, I didn’t know him well enough to get into that.

As hard as it was to find some semblance of a plot or narrative to explain my life to this near-stranger, though, it was even harder to get past the preconceptions he’d formed based on the scant impressions he got of me when he first saw me in the news.

It seemed like in his head, I must have come to college as a fully-formed radically queer crusader for something or other. I had apparently been the cool older kid he followed around the neighborhood in our early childhood, and once he learned for sure that I did go onto high school, he assumed I must have been on a steadily awesome upward trajectory that led me to the place he assumed I was when he picked up my rail later on.

So I had to tell him that my high school years had been a pretty dismal grind of daily suspicion and teasing that I couldn’t retaliate against. I’d been a nerd by default, because I wasn’t permitted to be anything that required membership in social groups or interaction with others and because I wasn’t allowed much of anything to distract myself with except my school books.

Far from arriving at Magisterius University with a strong sense of self and unshakable sense of purpose, I’d stumbled in to my freshman year with very little idea beyond keeping my head down for four years and getting out with a useful degree. The hope that I might make friends along the way had been there, sure, but it had been so tiny and so fragile that I hadn’t dared to hold it too close for fear of breaking it.

“So you weren’t a cool kid at first?” he asked.

“I don’t think I am a cool kid now,” I said.

“You don’t see how people look at you!”

“You don’t see what I see when people look at me,” I said. “My first year, I had people move seats to get away from me. I had people throwing up holy signs at me as I went past. People treated me like I was a monster who might at any moment snap and kill them all, but also like I was the weakest, most pathetic thing they could imagine. Monster and victim, all at once.”

“But… that got better?”

“I found more people who don’t care,” I said. “And right now, it seems like fewer people know or care who I am, and most of the ones who do, it’s because I’m connected to Glory, and she’s cool… or at least, more people think she is. The really great thing about a college campus is that about a quarter of the population cycles out completely every year, and it’s really only a small percentage of the population that has the time and energy to care about anything that isn’t right in front of their faces.”

“So you’d rather fade into obscurity than be well-known?”

“You knew me,” I said. “Apparently. Was I ever big on being the center of attention?”

“Well, not really,” he said. “I mean, you had my attention, but it seemed like that was enough.”

“Yeah,” I said. “There you go.”

“So how did you go from keeping your head down to being all over the news?”

“Well, the thing is… there are people who think being a half-demon is cool,” I said. “And some of them want to be seen as the cool kids, want to be the center of attention. I think a lot of the drama of my first semester in particular can be summed up as people who cared about being cool trying to control what they saw as my cool factor and punishing me for having it.”

“That… that sounds like substantially less fun than I imagined you having,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I also think it’s kind of a perfect summary of at least that part of my life,” I said. “I got pushed into a student election by one person who wanted to use me to boost her own profile, pushed into a… frenemy-ship… with my opponent there who also wanted to slot me into the narrative of her life, and everything spiraled from there. Huh… when I actually put it that way, it seems a lot more simple than it did at the time…”

After all, if my first roommate, Puddy, hadn’t pushed me into the election, I would never have been as important to Sooni the fox girl, and probably wouldn’t have got in a fight with her, which would have stopped me from overtaxing myself magically, which would have kept me out of the healing center, which would have kept me from being teleported into the school labyrinth, which would have avoided the first media circus I got enmeshed in, and the fateful encounter with a cursed scarecrow that had led me to come out of the dungeon with an actual literal demonic pitchfork…

Of course, it probably wasn’t that small and simple. It was only time and distance that allowed me to see it like that. But maybe it hadn’t been as big and complex as it had all seemed back in the moment… maybe the truth of a thing was something you had to see from a middle distance.

“Mackenzie?” Rowan said. “Mackenzie?”

“What?”

“You kind of… trailed off and your eyes unfocused,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if that was like a psychic thing, or a demon thing…”

“It’s a me thing,” I said. “Chalk it up to spending nine years either being completely ignored or having to ignore everyone else… sometimes I just get lost in thought.”

“In the middle of a conversation?”

“I know it’s annoying, okay?” I said. “But it’s me. You said you wanted to get to know me.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, throwing up his hands. “We all have our things.”

“Yeah?” I said. “What are your things, Rowan Hartley?”

“Well…”

“Yeah?” I prompted.

“Sometimes…”

“It’s just us, Rowan,” I said. “I’m not going to judge. You don’t know a tenth of the shit that I’ve got up to or had done to me, but you should know I don’t have room to judge.”

“You seem a little judgmental about some things,” he said.

“Okay, yeah, but at least you’ll have the comfort of knowing I’m a hypocrite if I judge you,” I said. “Come on, Rowan. You know way more about me than I know about you already, and I can’t ask you about our childhood, so tell me something about you now. You said we all have our things. What’s yours? Just one of yours.”

“Okay, the thing is… sometimes… my jaw clicks when I eat?”

I stared at him, then burst out laughing.

“What?” he said, a stricken look on his face.

“Sorry, Rowan,” I said. “I’m seriously not meaning to laugh at you… it’s just, that wasn’t exactly the glimpse I was hoping for of the enigmatic Rowan Hartley.”

“Wait… I’m enigmatic?”

“Well, from my point of view,” I said. “You came out of nowhere, I don’t know anything about you and you know everything about me…”

“I know nothing about you,” he said. “I know who you were ten years ago, Mackenzie, and even that I can’t trust, apparently.”

“Okay, you know more about me than I do about you,” I said.

“But that’s only because of the weirdness that’s already going on with you,” he said. “I’m not a mystery that needs to be solved.”

“…okay, I think I can settle this,” I said. “I’m not the enigma and you’re not the enigma, because neither one of us is an enigma. People aren’t mysteries. ‘Enigmatic’ is a matter of perspective. It’s like ‘exotic’, in that it comes with a predetermined point of view, but it hasn’t had time to pick up a lot of racist baggage.”

“…what’s wrong with ‘exotic’?” he said.

“Well, what’s it mean to you?” I asked. “No, hold on. Let’s go with a specific example. Of the four people who were in my room last night… me, you, Two, and Dee… how would you rate us, in order of least exotic to most?”

“…I feel like that’s a trap,” he said.

“I’m not going to be mad,” I said. “Mostly because I think I already know what your answer would be. But I’m proving a point here.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, I mean… I’m just a regular guy from the middle provinces, right? So I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me I’m wrong… because I don’t know why else you’d ask something you know the answer to if not to tell me I’m wrong.”

“I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well, I’m not sure,” he said. “it’s got to be you or Two next. I mean, you come from the same place as I do, and you’re half-human, but… demons and otherworldly stuff, you know? And Two looks human, not sure where she came from but she looks very Mid-Magisteria, you know?”

“I do know,” I said. I had taken it for granted he would have put the oh-so-vanilla Two as second behind himself, but it seemed he was still weirded out by the golem thing and I didn’t want to get bogged down in that. “Okay, let’s say that we’re tied, then. The exact order isn’t that important.”

“So that leaves Dee,” he said. “Again, I’m sure you’re going to tell me I’m wrong and I’ve somehow got this backwards, but… she’s from some place like hundreds of miles underground with a completely different society, and she’s an elf, and she’s, you know… differently colored, and has all these weird powers and worships a goddess no one’s heard of…”

“Okay, you’ve made your case,” I said. “I’m going to stop you there. If no one’s heard of her goddess, then how would she worship it?”

“You know what I mean, Mackenzie!”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “You mean no one you know, no one who looks like you, no one who grew up in the town you grew up in… but there are two things going on here. One, you’re saying ‘no one’ and meaning all those qualifiers, and two… it’s not even true. I don’t think Dee’s mentioned her goddess in front of you. You know about the goddess she worships, at least in the broad terms, but you’re invested in the idea that she’s foreign and obscure.”

“Well… isn’t she?”

“To you,” I said. “This is what I’m saying, Rowan. She’s obscure to you. She’s foreign to you. She… and the people who worship her… are exotic to you. Exotic is a word that means nothing, except when it’s attached to a particular point of view.”

“Okay, so it would be just as fair for her to say I’m exotic, or for Two to say that anyone who wasn’t made in a factory is exotic…”

“She wasn’t made in a factory,” I said.

“But still, what’s so bad about it as a word? How does that make it racist?”

“Because it has a long history of being used with a single implied point of view,” I said. “Just like you did. Just like both of us did, when we thought of each other as ‘enigmatic’. It’s a way of reducing people to things… Steff and Amaranth call it ‘othering’, though I can never tell if Steff is serious when she talks about stuff like that. I’m not sure she knows.”

“So it’s ‘othering’ but ‘enigmatic’ isn’t?”

“Maybe on an interpersonal level,” I said. “But it’s not systemic. There’s not anything bigger happening behind it.”

“There wouldn’t be anything bigger behind me calling Dee ‘exotic’,” Rowan said. “I’m just… me, okay? I’m not the Imperium. I’m not… there’s nothing systemic about me.”

“One time when I was talking about this with Amaranth, she asked me if I thought each raindrop realized it was part of a storm,” I said. “This turned into an argument about whether raindrops have thoughts and feelings, which kind of ended up being a toss-up because we determined they do, but they’re not nuanced or precise enough to answer the question…”

“Mackenzie… don’t take this the wrong way, but for someone who likes metaphors as much as you do… do you really understand what they are?”

“If you spend enough time with me, Rowan, I think you’ll find the answer is I clearly don’t,” I said. “Usually it’s Ian I get into that kind of thing with, but Amaranth really doesn’t like being wrong about something she considers to be her area of expertise, and… okay, we got sidetracked. I mean, she and I did back then, and you and I have now. The point is that you can carry on a tradition without knowing it’s a tradition either because you were taught it’s normal, or because no one ever taught you it was harmful, but either way… when the whole dominant message across stories and conversations and just the way we treat each other tends to carry the same message about what’s ‘normal’ and what’s, you know, ‘other’… it affects people. It affects the way we think. It affects the way we feel.”

“Wow… okay, that’s seriously freaking deep,” Rowan said. “See, I knew you had things figured out.”

“Yeah… well, I’m not a freshman,” I said, blushing. Most of what I’d said was stuff I’d picked up, mostly from Amaranth and Steff and others over the course of the months. A lot of it I’d argued with at the time, and only kind of put together in my head long after the fact. I felt like more than a bit of a phony having Rowan look at me like I was an expert for having repeated what I’d learned in spite of myself. “If we didn’t have a lot to learn, we wouldn’t have to go to school.”

“Speaking of learning… it’s not exactly solid, but I do have some leads on the demon stuff,” he said. “If you want to know.”

“Fuck, yes!” I said. “How long have you been sitting on that, exactly?”

“Well, I just… it might not be anything,” he said. “I mean, you told me to be kind of circumspect-like, so I’ve had to be careful… I’ve more been finding in-roads, you know, getting to know people, figuring out my approach? And getting to know people isn’t exactly my strong suit… a diplomancer I am not.”

“You should try working for elves,” I said. “It makes for a great crash course. So what did you learn?”

“Like I said, maybe nothing,” he said. “But I got lucky when a T.A. remembered me.”

“Remembered you?” I said. My eyes narrowed. “From where?”

“Well, I couldn’t take a lot of diabolism courses yet because they have harsh prerequisites, but I was in intro to demonology last semester and…”

“YOU SON OF A BITCH!”