Nekropolis by Maureen F. McHugh Page A

token,” I repeat, not understanding.
    “The flower. I tried to watch every day. I thought you’d come and I missed you.” He disappears for a moment, and then he is sitting on the windowsill, legs and feet outside, and he jumps lightly to the ground.
    I take him to a tea shop. People look at us, wondering what a young woman is doing unescorted with a young man. Let them look. “Order what you want,” I say, “I have some money.”
    “Are you happier?” he asks. “You don’t look happier, you look tired.”
    And he looks perfect, as he always does. Have I fallen in love with him precisely because he isn’t human? I don’t care, I feel love, no matter what the reason. Does a reason for a feeling matter? The feeling I have for my mistress may be there only because I’m impressed, but the feeling is real enough.
    “My mistress is kind, praise God,” I say, looking at the table. His perfect hand, beautiful nails and long fingers, lies there.
    “Are you happy?” he asks again.
    “Are you?” I ask.
    He shrugs. “A harni doesn’t have the right to be happy or sad.”
    “Neither do I,” I say.
    “That’s your fault. Why did you do it?” he asks. “Why did you choose to be jessed if it makes you unhappy?”
    “It’s hard to find work in the Nekropolis, and I didn’t think I would ever get married.”
    He shakes his head. “Someone would marry you. And if they didn’t, is it awful not to get married?”
    “Is it awful to be jessed?” I ask.
    “Is it?”
    “I thought,” I say, and then I don’t know what to say. “I thought if I was jessed, I wouldn’t care. I thought it would be easy if I was jessed. I thought I would be owned . I mean, my heart would be owned. You know, I wouldn’t need to make choices. I didn’t understand it. I thought I would be happy. But it isn’t like that. Jessing doesn’t make me like it, it just makes it really awful if I leave.”
    How can he understand how our choices are taken from us? He doesn’t even understand freedom and what an illusion it really is.
    “Run away,” he says.
    Leave the mistress? I’m horrified. “She needs me; she can’t run that house by herself and I cost her a great deal of money. She made sacrifices to buy me.”
    “You could live in the Nekropolis and make funeral wreaths,” he points out. “You could talk to whomever you wished and no one would order you around.”
    “I don’t want to live in the Nekropolis,” I say.
    “Why not?”
    “There is nothing there for me!”
    “You have friends there.”
    “I wouldn’t if I ran away.”
    “Make new ones,” he says.
    “Would you go?” I ask.
    He shakes his head. “I can’t.”
    “What if you could make a living, would you run away?”
    “No,” he says, “no.”
    Our tea comes. My face is aflame with color, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think.
    “I’m jessed,” I say. “If I run away, do you know what will happen to me? I’ll be sick. I might die. My own body will turn against me. Maybe, eventually I’ll get well. I’m afraid. I don’t want to be sick. I don’t want it to happen.”
    “Oh, Hariba,” he says softly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say these things to you.”
    “I didn’t think you could have these feelings,” I whisper.
    He shrugs again. “I can have any feelings,” he says. “ Harni aren’t jessed.”
    “You told me to think of you as a dog,” I remind him. “Loyal.”
    “I’m loyal,” he says. “You didn’t ask who I was loyal to.”
    “You’re supposed to be loyal to the mistress.”
    He drums the table with his fingers, taptaptaptap taptaptaptap . “ Harni aren’t like geese,” he says, not looking at me. His earring is golden, he is rich and fine-looking. I had not realized at my new place how starved I had become for fine things. “We don’t impress on the first person we see.” Then he shakes his head. “I shouldn’t talk about all this nonsense. You have to go. I have to go back before they