Not a Normal Adolescence

This became something to say to friends at the pub when trying to explain why I'd (we'd) never had a boyfriend (not even one we didn't like). Cain was marked by God for slaying his brother (not a normal adolescence!). Sara and Elizabeth did not wear the mark of their difference, they slept in it: sharing a bedroom for 21 years. And we didn't get out much, except to work, and to the shops, and to the movies to collect plots and locations to fuel the drama of the Sequences. We did not make friends, except in the broadest, most creative sense. We made lasting friends of Carlin and Starfire.

Dear Elizabeth,

I've just thought how typical (and yet unfair) it is that Carlin is the only person on Acturus waiting for Starfire. He's waiting, with inexhaustible patience (because its invention can never be revised) for somebody who pretends amnesia, who won't come home because home is a picture poorly drawn from a failing memory.

I, who am 28, have a failing memory. I no longer remember the names of Acturan countries, the state of religious and political conflict in Maryo, the names of the houses in which they lived, the shape of Veavane Bay. But the act of remembering was always already tenuous. I never knew what Carlin looked like—yes, I could give a description, iterate attributes; yet not conjure his face to mind. But that never reduced their presence, and the inability to remember facts, detail, only makes the absence of essence more apparent.

Carlin always did tend to get the last word. But it's Vlad I still listen for.

You said that Vlad wrote to Starfire: 'I feel like an empty theatre, or a broken movie projector, packed with the ghosts of images and words, the faces of long dead actors and actresses. Right now, here, I feel like a lost part of a child's puzzle put away after the holiday.'

The thing is, I do not know which of us wrote this. It could have been any of us. It could have been me, it could have been you. It might have been Starfire, inventing the object of his grieving. It might have been Vlad (the attribution, regardless, makes it his).

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Elizabeth, when was 'right now'? where was 'here'?

*

'1976. Sara begins to create other characters in the no-longer-secret game (though she has always contributed her fair share of incidental innocent bystanders, crowd scenes, accidents, geography and weather conditions) . . .'