Brave New Worlds

you. "
    "I know," he said, softly.
    "So OK, you don't like me, I can live with that, fine, no problem, you're under no obligation, so let's just go back. "
    "You come up here because of the forest," he said.
    "Yes! Brilliant!"
    "Even mass murderers need love too, right?"
    "Yes! Brilliant!"
    "And you want me to love you? When you bear the same relation to me, as Lou does to you?"
    "I don't know. I don't care. " I was sitting down now, hugging myself. The bowl of soup was on the ground by my foot, tomato sludge creeping out of it. I kicked it. "Sorry I hassled you. "
    "You didn't hassle me. "
    "All I want is one little part of my life to have a tiny corner of goodness in it. Just one little place. I probably won't, but I feel like if I don't find it soon, I will bust up into a million pieces. Not love. Not necessarily. Just someone nice to talk to, who I really like. Otherwise I think one day I will climb back into one of those trains. " When I said it, I realized it was true. I hadn't known I was that far gone. I thought I had been making a play for sympathy.
    Royce was leaning in front of me, looking me in the face. "Listen, I love you. "
    "Bullshit. " What kind of mind-fuck now?
    He grabbed my chin, and turned my head back round. "No. True. Not maybe in the way you want, but true. You really do look, right now, like one of those people on the train. Like someone I just unloaded. "
    I didn't know quite what he was saying, and I wasn't sure I trusted him, but I did know one thing. "I don't want to go back to that bunkhouse, not this afternoon. "
    "OK. We'll stay up here and talk. "
    I felt like I was stepping out onto ice. "But can we talk nicely? A little bit less heavy duty?"
    "Nicely. Sounds sweet, doesn't mean anything. Like the birds?"
    "Yes," I said. "Like the birds. "
    I reckon that, altogether, we had two weeks. A Lullaby in Birdland. Hum along if you want to. You don't need to know the words.
    Every afternoon after the work, Royce and I went up the mound and talked. I think he liked talking to me, I'll go as far as that. I remember one afternoon he showed me photographs from his wallet. He still had a wallet, full of people.
    He showed me his mother. She was extremely thin, with dark limp flesh under her eyes. She was trying to smile. Her arms were folded across her stomach. She looked extremely kind, but tired.
    There was a photograph of a large red brick house. It had white window sills and a huge white front door, and it sagged in the way that only very old houses do.
    "Whose is that?" I asked.
    "Ours. Well, my family's. Not my mother's. My uncle lives there now. "
    "It's got a Confederate flag over it!"
    Royce grinned and folded up quietly; his laughter was almost always silent. "Well, my great-grandfather didn't want to lose all his slaves, did he?"
    One half of Royce's family were black, one half were white. There were terrible wedding receptions divided in half where no one spoke. "the white people are all so embarrassed, particularly the ones who want to be friendly. There's only one way a black family gets a house like that: Grandfather messed around a whole bunch. He hated his white family, so he left the house to us. My uncle and aunt want to open it up as a Civil War museum and put their picture on the leaflet. "Royce folded up again. "I mean, this is in Georgia. Can you imagine all those rednecks showing up and finding a nice black couple owning it, and all this history about black regiments?"
    "Who's that?"
    "My cousin. She came to live with us for a while. "
    "She's from the white half. "
    "Nope. She's black. " Royce was enjoying himself. The photograph showed a rather plump, very determined teenage girl with orange hair, slightly wavy, and freckles.
    "Oh. " I was getting uncomfortable, all this talk of black and white.
    "It's really terrible. Everything Cyndi likes, I mean everything, is black, but her father married a white woman, and she ended up like that. She wanted to be black so bad. Every time she met anyone, she'd start explaining how she was black, really. She'd go up to black kids and start explaining, and you could see them thinking ‘Who is this white girl and is she out of her mind?' We were both on this program, so we ended up in a white high school and that was worse because no one knew they'd been integrated when she was around. The first day this white girl asked her if she'd seen any of the new black kids. Then her sister went and became a top black fashion model, you know,