Rare Birds Rule [rool]: noun 1. a principle or regulation governing conduct, action, procedure, arrangement, etc.: the rules of chess. 2. the code of regulations observed by a religious order or congregation: the Franciscan rule. 3. the customary or normal circumstance, occurrence, manner, practice, quality, etc.: the rule rather than the exception.
John looked at the text he had just copied, the neat order and precise wording of a dictionary definition. None of the aspects, however, seemed quite strong enough – these weren’t his Rules. The rules of chess were smooth, simple, easy to follow. He was not a monk. Customary and normal circumstances were also unimportant. There wasn’t a word.
* * * * * * * *
Julian looked around the rooms John had taken for the semester with no expression, her eyes moving over and cataloguing each object. The sitting room contained a small sofa that seemed to double as a bed, a second chair, and a desk and chair showing signs of heavy use. These last two were crammed awkwardly into a corner between bookcases and beneath images of glaring saints and stylized miracles which formed a neat line beneath a larger crucifix, creating a corner that would have barely screamed less loudly about the sort of seat John found comfortable even had it not all been at the odd angles that let him see both the door and the door to what she assumed was a bathroom. Through an opening too large to be called a door, she could see a claustrophobic kitchenette with one cabinet and no table, just a bar with a couple of taller chairs pushed up against it facing the sitting room. Once she had finished this inspection, Julian looked back at her brother.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said, the words clipped with annoyance.
John frowned slightly, confused. “What?” he asked, looking around too as he sipped his tea. His eyes lit on an inkwell standing in the midst of a crumpled, ink-stained paper towel on his desk. “Oh, that – I over-filled it, so that’s just to keep from spilling until I get it down far enough – ”
“John,” said Julian, cutting him off. “This is a tent.”
John now looked even more puzzled. “What’s your point?” he asked.
“That it’s a tent!” exclaimed Julian. “You cannot live in a tent!”
John looked baffled by this concept. “Why not?” he asked. “What’s wrong with it?”
Julian pinched the bridge of her nose in annoyance. “John,” she said again, forcing herself to sound as calm as possible. “Living in tents is what homeless people do.”
“Obviously it is not,” said John, somewhat snappishly. “As I am currently living in this tent because my home happens to be on the other side of the continent. And it’s nicer than anything I could have gotten anyway. It has an oven and a chimney.” He pointed to each of these to prove their existence to her.
“I don’t care if it has six ovens, a giant’s fireplace, and a self-filling chocolate fountain,” said Julian flatly. “It’s still a tent.”
“On the outside,” countered John.
Julian looked around her again, reluctant to admit that he was right, that on the inside it really did look uncannily like a tiny flat. “Where did you even get this?” she asked.
John shrugged. “Granddad.” Julian folded her arms to signal that he should elaborate because she wasn’t satisfied with this explanation yet. “Some of the field charms were malfunctioning, so he hadn’t used it in years, so I got it from him for a song and fixed it,” said John.
“Does Granddad know this is what you fixed it for?” asked Julian.
“No.”
Julian raised an eyebrow. “Does Mom know this is where you’re living?”
“No, and don’t you tell her.”
“There!” said Julian, pointing an accusing finger at him. “You know perfectly well this isn’t acceptable and you knew it before I ever got here,” she continued triumphantly. “Why do you always forget that I know you’re only about three-quarters as thick as you want everyone else to think you are?”
* * * * * * * *
There were things that were not allowed, and then there was the Bad Thing, and then there was the Worst Thing, which was doing the Bad Thing on purpose when he was upset. Then there was the Girl.
Just after he turned six, John began studying the Girl, who was the most interesting thing he had seen outside of the Books. She could read all by herself, an accomplishment John longed for, and she always had shiny new books with her, but when other children or her mommy came in, the Girl hid them. When another child said that John was a weirdo freak (John was not exactly sure what these words meant, but he had gathered they were used because the other person didn’t like him), the Girl agreed with that child, but when John’s caretaker (in his head he had started to think of her as ‘Mama’, but he wasn’t sure he was supposed to say so) had asked her them to work together in the Sunday School class, the Girl had been different – she had been very nice, and they had agreed on almost everything.
That had made him start studying her, and drawing conclusions. The Girl knew as many answers as John did, and sometimes more. The Girl could build things as well as he could. And yet – the Girl was one of Them, the other people, and that was what didn’t make sense. How could the Girl be like John and yet be like other people, too? John had never met anyone else like himself until he met his caretaker, and other people didn’t like the Mama, either. Even Paul didn’t like her. Joe did, but he was, well, the Baby – he ate, he made a mess, he went to sleep. Joe liked anyone who did what he wanted, or talked to him; Joe even liked John, sometimes. Joe was not smart. Their caretaker said that John was smart. Their caretaker was the most brilliant person ever to live, the owner of a whole room full of books. So what did that make the Girl?
One day, John was sure he had her. She had just said her paragraph about one of the Ten Commandments and why it was still important, like they were all going to have to, and hers had been the order not to kill people. John put his hand in the air, like he had been taught he must do when they were in the Sunday School and he had a question.
“What about Isaac?” he asked.
The Girl was clearly annoyed. “What about him?” she asked.
“God told his dad to kill him. Then God told everyone not to kill anyone. They don’t match.”
His caretaker looked at the Girl. “Do you know the answer to John’s question?” she asked gently. She would, John trusted implicitly, tell them if the Girl could not – his caretaker always knew the answer – but she liked to ask them for answers, too. She said God said that they all had to think about Him for themselves.
“Yes. It was a test, stupid,” said the Girl, and this last part seemed to be directed to John himself. “He wasn’t supposed to do it – just like Cain wasn’t supposed to kill Abel. It’s always been the same rule.”
“That’s not a bad answer,” said his caretaker. “But it’s also against the rules of this class to call people stupid, Joanie.”
* * * * * * * *
John threw his hands up in apparent exasperation. “Oh – drop it! I’m – “ he seemed to fumble for a moment before coming up with the strangest thing he’d said yet. “I’m being like Thoreau!”
Julian looked at him incredulously. Silence reigned for a moment.
“You hate Thoreau,” she pointed out finally. “You threw a book and kicked it one time just because it had Thoreau in it and Mom was forcing you to read that part.”
“Look, the pond couldn’t help it that a complete – that the guy who wrote about it was a complete ass, okay? The pond had nothing to do with it. It was a nice pond and there were lots of interesting specimens around it….” He stopped, looking pleased with himself, when Julian finally dissolved into laughter.
In a way, she supposed, this was almost appropriate. It had been a strange summer all around. First there had been the high drama of getting him home at all, then there had been him deciding to make it even worse by confessing all about Joanie to the remainder of the family, and then before Julian had even caught her breath after all that, John had been off to university – they started earlier than the schools did – a few days after she’d found herself on a boat with a new last name. Now it was September and it was only fitting that she should come back to a situation which was absurd – even if, in this case, it was actually just absurd and not sweeping and dramatic and life-altering and all those other things life had thrown at her lately.
“You know it doesn’t suit me to be with too many people,” mumbled John, being honest now that she was no longer putting him on the defensive. “And it’s cheaper, too.”
That made her stop laughing. “But – now you don’t have to worry about money,” protested Julian. “I have money - we have money. As much as you want. All you have to do is ask me.”
This was said with, she realized with dismay, a bit too late, a hint of a challenge – nothing she had was hers alone, her family was welcome to any of it, but she just wanted them to ask. John, however, was shaking his head.
“You have money,” he said curtly, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment. “There’s plenty of real charity cases you can give it to if you don’t want it.”
* * * * * * * *
Something wasn’t right. John wasn’t sure what had happened, but for some reason, Mommy had stopped coming home from work and he wasn’t alone with Paul and Baby. Nor were they waiting for Mommy in their own flat. Instead, there was Mrs. Anderson.
John disliked Mrs. Anderson. She never smiled. Mommy didn’t always smile, but sometimes she did, when John somehow did something that made her happy. Mrs. Anderson talked about rules a lot, too, and about how she wasn’t getting paid enough to keep them – they were, she complained, going to eat her out of house and home, though John found this expression nonsensical. For one thing, it implied she had two houses, and if she did, she’d surely stay in the other one and leave them alone, since she didn’t like them any more than they liked her. For another, how could they eat her out of the house? One did not eat people. Biting was Not Nice and one had to bite things in order to eat them. Therefore, they could not eat her, and just as well – John had never seen talking food before, and he wouldn’t want to have to listen to Mrs. Anderson’s voice coming up from inside his belly. It was bad enough having to have her ring in his ears. Sometimes he covered them up to try to block her out, but she said this was Bad and got angry with him, so then he had to listen to her even more.
Now, though, Mrs. Anderson wasn’t the one talking. She was just standing off to one side, looking satisfied, as People In Suits tried to talk to them about something called stealing. Paul was angry, so John had decided to sit behind the chair in the corner until they were all quiet. Baby, to his annoyance, crawled after him and decided to sit in his lap, but since he didn’t smell bad right now, John tolerated this rather than risk making Baby howl and draw attention to them.
“She doesn’t do anything for us,” said Paul. “You’re sending the money to take care of them – “ he pointed toward the corner where John and the Other One were – “and I do that.”
“Paul, you all need an adult to take care of you.”
“I don’t need your damn charity and I don’t want it, either.”
Charity. John didn’t know that word. Char-ity. It sounded funny, but ‘damn’ was not a good word – Paul said that when things made him angry. Char-ity made Paul angry, so it must mean something bad. Maybe it was something to do with the pattern on the chair John and the Baby were behind? It wasn’t a pleasing pattern, and the word sounded more like what a bird would say. Maybe the pattern was what the cheeping looked like.
* * * * * * * *
“It’s not charity,” said Julian sharply, angry with the very suggestion, but cut off whatever further rant she might have wanted to make when John abruptly struck his own forehead with his palm.
“Well, you can’t argue with me about it not suiting me to be around so many people,” he said, quite as though he had done nothing at all and looking determinedly at the floor, or perhaps the umbrella was he leaning on as though it were a walking stick, and she knew not to push it further right now. She had apparently stumbled on some stumbling block she hadn’t realized he had – odd, that. As much of a shock as finding out about Joanie had been, it hadn’t really, after the very first, been a surprise, because she knew how John was most of the time. She’d studied him over the years, she supposed, the way he studied birds, observing behavior so she could figure out how to be near the object she had affection for without startling it; she could usually even tell when John was actually stressed versus when he just wanted someone or something to go away because he couldn’t be bothered to deal with it, which wasn’t a skill she thought many others had; he didn’t surprise her often, really. She had, though, assumed he’d be more than happy to see her money as his own; God knew that at home, each person’s favorite tea mug and prayer books had been about the only things he’d regarded as strictly off-limits to himself. Of course, at home, most things were sort of common property sooner or later, clothes passed down until they weren’t fit to be worn, none of the boys having room for a lot of stuff of their own, so all the books kind of ended up on communal shelves in the living room….
“I guess I can’t argue with you about that,” conceded Julian. “Or say anything about it, considering I’m here.”
John glanced back up at her, now confused. “I don’t follow.”
“I....” Now she wished she hadn’t said that last part. Or rather, wished even more she hadn’t said that last part. One did not, she thought, actually talk to John – not about anything real. Books, ideas, the news – those one could discuss with him, but one could discuss those things with the guy selling apples at the farmer’s market, too. Real conversations that meant anything were next to impossible to have with him, and awful for everyone involved more often than not, too.
* * * * * * * *
Joanie shuffled the papers in front of her, looking through the diagrams John had drawn. “So this is your argument for why you think phoenixes are related to chickens,” she stated, and John couldn’t tell what she thought from the way she did it.
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” Joanie sat back, her eyes unfocused and turned somewhere toward the ceiling. “Okay. So a phoenix – logically, if it works anything like I think it would, it – has to do something weird with time, yeah?”
“I’d assume so,” said John. “I don’t really know much about time.”
“I’ve been trying to read Hawking – I know a lot of it’s going over my head,” said Joanie. “Remind me and I’ll let you take what I’ve finished back to school with you next week. But what I’m thinking – okay. They’re a species, yeah?” John nodded. “So that means there’s more than one of them, which means either they’re deliberately made, or they reproduce – which implies they come into existence inside time. Maybe they can regenerate indefinitely, but they have a start point.”
“I’d never thought about it,” admitted John. “But that makes sense. It occurs to me – I’ve never read, in any of my books – they don’t say if they’re actually, as far as anyone knows, immortal, just that they have nests on mountains and their eggs don’t require incubation and that they’re very long-lived and they regenerate as chicks….” He bit his lip, thinking. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any – confirmation, you know, that Flamel is dead,” he said slowly.
“Flamel? The alchemist? He’s real?”
“Of course. So if we could find him…he has to have seen a lot, right? I mean, you’ve lived that long, you have to occupy yourself with something.”
“Yeah. If he hasn’t, uh, hung out with one bird the whole time, though?”
John shrugged. “Nick his stone and go hang out in Nepal for a few centuries.”
Joanie began laughing. “What, you don’t think you could just recreate the stone? Or suck up to him until he took you on as his apprentice or something?”
“Ouch,” said John, taking the blow, and they both laughed until Joanie turned pensive.
“It’s weird to think of living that long,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like. What do you think you’d do with that much time?”
“I’d learn as much as I could and then use that to take over and reorganize everything,” said John, and Joanie looked at him in annoyance.
“I’m going to assume that last part was a joke,” said Joanie. “But still – okay, you spend all your time studying. Can your brain literally retain the amount of knowledge you could acquire in that much time? And what happens if you stay alive so long you’re around when the sun goes nova – at least if you’re in the camp that thinks we only have so long to figure out space travel?” She looked at John warily and then said, “Honestly, the reason I was so surprised you said Flamel is real is that I’d always thought the Philosopher’s Stone couldn’t be real – the way I’ve heard about it, the angels and books and all in Paris, it’s like the one suggestion on how to live forever that doesn’t automatically get you in bad books with the Church.”
John nodded, rapidly following her thought from there – if it took an angel coming to one to explain how to read the book, and one had to go through extensive spiritual transformation to finish the exercise, then one was at least possibly not acting in opposition to God’s will by extending one’s lifespan beyond the norm. “We’ll ask him when we find him,” he said firmly.
“It’ll be just our luck that he dies right before we’re finally old enough,” grumbled Joanie, and John made a face, too, at the irritations that came with being fourteen.
* * * * * * * *
“I just know you’re not very likely to have company, and I’ve been cooped up with people too much,” said Julian, awash with gratitude as a way to evade the question occurred to her in a timely manner. “When you get married, for goodness’ sake don’t go on a boat tour for your honeymoon.”
“Yeah...you’re definitely using words, Julian, but I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to use them in that order,” said John. “’You’ when the ‘you’ is ‘me’ – “ he pointed to himself. “’Married,’ yeah, not good.”
Julian suspected this was supposed to be sarcasm, but her smile faded anyway. “Oh, don’t talk like that,” she said. “I’m sure someday you’ll meet some nice girl genius and – “ but John was shaking his head.
“Possibly not. The homosexual Unitarians said there are some people who are natural celibates – just don’t…care about that kind of thing. Their theology is still Wrong all the way down, but they made some sense about that.”
Julian frowned. “Why are you talking to gay Unitarians?” she asked. “Or, uh, more precisely – why are gay Unitarians talking to you instead of calling campus security to have the weird argumentative Catholic dude removed from their approximation of a church?” She was careful not to actually say ‘church,’ as John could get testy about the inherent illegitimacy of Protestants. Considering their beliefs, it would not have surprised Julian if she’d learned that he thought Unitarians were actual demons. Regular Protestants were just, according to John-logic when he was not in one of those moods where their existence stirred him up into a real passion, incapable of reading, but Unitarians were Nontrinitarians and therefore all beyond blasphemous in his book, or at least the state his book had been in the last time she’d read a leaf from it….
“One reason could be that we weren’t on campus,” said John dryly. “I was, uh, I kind of ended up on their turf, actually.” Julian raised both eyebrows in surprise this time. “You remember when I went to visit this friend I had last year?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Julian. “I was planning how to kill you if you didn’t come home.”
“That makes no logical sense,” objected John, but then he shook his head slightly and waved the matter aside. “Anyway. She has mothers. Oh, did I tell you I met a Fox-Reynolds? He worked in the library. He was nice. So were these women – they have nothing to do with Charlie, they’re Sammy’s mothers.” Julian stared at him, wondering how her brother had been chosen to be swapped out with the best actor in Changelingland at the rather late age of nineteen minus one week. “And they were nice to me. Except Sammy didn’t mention we were going to the gay people festival.”
Julian stared more. “You went to a Pride event?” she asked, teetering on the edge of falling over into laughter at the mere idea.
“Apparently. And they…some of them were very strange. But I see these Unitarians and I didn’t think I should be – “ he grimaced. “I was doing it all Wrong,” he grumbled. “I didn’t want to do what was Right because they were nice to me, everybody’s gay parents. So I didn’t argue so much, and they – “ John sat down on his couch and now was pinching his entire forehead in agitation. “For God’s sake, it’s not as though they actually said that much I didn’t know,” he said. “It’s perfectly normal behavior – it’s seen throughout the animal kingdom, there are several possible evolutionary advantages – “
“John,” said Julian slowly. “Um….”
“Oh, no, nothing like that!” said John, looking alarmed and, from how he continued from there, apparently spectacularly missing the point Julian had been trying to figure out a delicate way to inquire about, “I know – it’s no different from gluttony. Just because it has evolutionary advantages doesn’t mean it’s not against the Rules.” His tone was one step away from the singsong of recitation. “No – but that’s not the point. The point is that these people – some of them, the thing they’re proud of is not being anything. Apparently that’s a thing.”
* * * * * * * *
“Hello, John,” said Lenore, not looking up from her book.
John silently cursed. He had hoped that he could retreat before she looked up.
“Lenore,” he said, wondering when - or, since he actually knew when, more precisely, why - they had become people who were on first-name terms.
“My feelings were hurt when you failed to pay your respects this winter,” said Lenore, still not looking up. “Or answer my letters. I know they call it the gentleman’s way out, but it’s not actually very polite to sleep with a girl and then pretend she doesn’t exist.”
John could not think of a sensible response to that, so he gave an honest one instead. “Manners aren’t really something I think apply to our situation.”
Lenore finally closed her book. “Of course they are,” she said. “Etiquette is all that separates us from the anarchy of the beasts.”
“No, self-control is what separates us from the anarchy of the beasts.”
“You don’t consider etiquette a form of self-control?”
It was so easy to fall into sparring with her - as easy as it was to fall into it with Joanie, but with Joanie, it wasn’t like this. There wasn’t this indefinable edge to the bickering, this desire to win not for the sake of winning, because he thought he was right, but for the sake of winning against her….“You’re demonstrating very clearly that it isn’t,” said John, trying to ignore that. “You’re defining etiquette as the thing you use to tell yourself it’s all right to lose control as long as you only talk about it in the right places and say the right things afterward.”
“Isn’t that what you do when you go to your confessions?”
“No,” said John. Lenore looked as though she were waiting for something more, and John shrugged irritably. “What?”
“Elaborate, please,” said Lenore. “Educate me, Umland. Explain to me why your way is the only right way.”
She had known he was here. She was taunting him. She was taunting him here...John’s eyes narrowed again. “Stop it,” he said warningly.
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to - to distract me,” said John.
“You’re the one who started this conversation,” said Lenore.
John glared at her. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Now, what would be the fun in telling you that?”
* * * * * * * *
John did loathe Thoreau and Emerson and their ilk, because they despised the very things he loved. They had sneered at learning, at books, at tradition, at the church. John had been disgusted with the self-righteous smugness and hypocrisy which leeched from the pages of Thoreau in particular like filth from the feet of an inferius for some time before he’d reached the page where Thoreau referred to practicing good acts as a means of indebting Heaven itself to himself, at which point John had been driven to the book-tossing incident Julian had reminded him of. One thing the old blasphemer had had right, though – it was more peaceful here, away from everyone. After his sister left, John took a folding chair outside and sat down with one of his journals to watch his friends in the nearest tree for a bit.
Everything was perfect. He had his family back, but also a way to get away from it when he needed to. He had friends, plural. He was where he’d wanted to be since he was ten years old and had good work to do, and time enough besides to pursue his own interests. He wasn’t lying anymore. It should have been perfect, and yet, he still couldn’t help but think, over and over again, that it still would have been better if he had died.
Well, for some values of ‘better,’ anyway. ‘Easier,’ perhaps – that was a more precise word, but one that also threw his cowardice in his face.
Whatever we’ve done, we’ve paid enough. That was what Julian had said, and John knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t think Julian had purposefully said the Wrong thing, but she’d been Wrong nevertheless. At least by the Rules. The Rules said he hadn’t really atoned enough yet. One had to render to Caesar what was Caesar’s, and one had to burn away all the ideas which had led one into sin – the very things which made it all so good now, those were the things he should have been casting off because they had tempted him once and could do so again. Could he join the Trappists – would that be enough? To live in a closed order under a rule of silence? Sworn not just to chastity – which would be little sacrifice; he hated feeling helpless, and sensory overload had a tendency to bring about that state even if the stimulus was a social equal or even just an environment, not something touching him – but to poverty and obedience and silence, without books, without agency, without even his own name? Easier to go to prison, he thought, and let pain do him and Julian both good – and yet, here he was, not doing a thing except waiting to see if the Rules held true and it all fell apart again.
He should, he thought, have known. It should have been readily apparent, easy to accept, however unpleasant. Everything that had happened to his family had happened because he had done it Wrong, so logically, it followed that everything would continue to go wrong for him now – that this might just be a small window for him to do the right thing in, and that if he waited too long, he’d lose the chance altogether. And yet, here he was.
He was worried about Julian. Whatever he had done had only minimal relation to what she did – she was doing it Wrong, and she was telling him to do it Wrong, and he was listening to her. She had let him come home. He didn’t want to die now, even if he still thought it might have been better for everyone if Joanie had let him get on with it when he’d had the chance. That would have been doing something Right – without him, she could have gone on with her life and his family would have done the same never knowing about her, rather than all of them going through the past miserable year. It hadn’t happened, though, and now Julian was telling him what he wanted to hear and she was Good – Julian wasn’t like him. Julian wasn’t – but he wanted to believe her, and that meant she had to be Wrong, which meant he was Wrong. If the Rules, as he had always defined them, were true, which it followed logically that they were, then there was no exit but the hard one. But belief in his own Rightness had created much of the situation, and he still remembered, vividly, that moment, whilst on a lot of drugs, he had realized that he’d been Wrong all along. So what was he supposed to believe now?