The Cursed Body

When something is taken from you, you spend a long while thinking about the thief. It is only much later, if you are lucky, and a little less foolish than you were, that you begin to wonder about the reason.

The Between took touch from the dead. You know this. I have told you so many times that it has worn into the story like a path across a lawn: water is a color, wind is an idea, a hand passed through a cloud comes back unchanged. I have told you that the only way to feel anything at all is to earn a World Fragment, and that a World Fragment is rarer and dearer than anything I have ever seen.

What I have not told you is that I left two things out.

I did not leave them out by accident. I left them out the way you leave a stair unlit in a house where you have lived a long time, because your feet know it and you have stopped noticing that the dark is there. But a stair that is never lit will eventually have someone fall down it, and I have come to think that I owe you a candle.

The first thing is this. Some souls, when they walk the Between, have a shape.

I do not mean the shape of a silhouette; every soul has that. I mean a form, with a face in it, and hands that have fingers, and hair that has a color, and eyes that have a color of their own and look at you from inside it. They are rare. They walk through the crowds of the faceless dead as ordinary as anyone, and nobody sees them, because the form is visible only to the people the soul chooses to be seen by. Everyone else sees the same blank outline they would see in a mirror made of water. To them, that soul is one more candle in a field of candles.

I could tell you why they do it. I could tell you how it began, and who the first of them was, and what became of them. It is a story with a tragedy in the middle of it and a joke at either end, and I think it is both the saddest and the funniest thing that has ever happened in the Between, and I will not tell it today. It would be an insult to the sadness to tell it hastily, and an insult to the joke to tell it solemnly. You will have to wait. I am sorry. It is worth waiting for.

The second thing is that the ones with forms can touch.

Let me be careful here, because this is where people go wrong. It is not that they feel the world. A World Fragment does that; it is a gift, in a small and costly way, and what it gives you is the world. This is the opposite gift. It is not that the world touches you. It is that you touch the world, that your body, when you will it, comes into being with weight and warmth and edge, and does what bodies did in the places we all came from. Pushes. Presses. Holds.

It is a talent, not a purchase. You cannot buy it, and mostly you cannot learn it; it comes to you or it does not, in the way a certain ear for music comes or does not, and there is no justice in the matter at all. It is called a curse, same as a domain, because that is what it is: a small region of the world in which the old rules are still in force, and the region is your own skin. Some souls can raise it over a single hand. Some over an arm, or a mouth. A few, a very few, can raise it over the whole body at once and walk around inside it like a person in a coat.

In the markets they call it the Cursed Body.

They do not mean the body is evil. The people who say it are often rather cheerful about it. They mean that it is the kind of thing about which someone ought to have been warned, and that so few souls ever master it well enough that nobody has bothered. It is a name you say with a roll of the eyes, the way you say that damned cat. It is the name of a thing that has done nothing wrong, and has been an inconvenience to a great many people for a very long time.

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The inconvenience has to do with a rule.

If you have a body, you can touch a soul that has none. This is not complicated. A hand with a curse on it is a hand, and a silhouette is a thing that can be struck by one. But it does not run the other way. The silhouette's fist, swung at the one with the body, goes straight through; there is no curse on the other side to meet it. In the Between, where nobody can die, a quarrel between a bodied soul and an unbodied one has no natural end. It is not a fight. It is a long, slow lesson in what it is to be the only one who can be hit.

There is a story they tell in the markets. I do not know if it is true, and I have never wanted to know. It concerns two quarrelsome souls, one bodied and one not, who settled a disagreement about a debt in the old way, and went on settling it for three days. The bodied one, they say, grew bored around midmorning on the first day, and spent the rest of the time slapping the other lightly across the face, at intervals, while he swung at the air. It ended when the bodiless soul, hoarse, exhausted, and perfectly unhurt, sat down in the road and asked whether they might discuss the debt again. The story is told as a comedy. I have never been able to hear it as one. I have stood in the Between for eons beside people who cannot feel their own hands, and I know what it would be to be struck by someone who has been given the one thing I was denied, in a place where I cannot strike back.

That is the first reason it is cursed. It is not the real reason.

The real reason is that someone, long ago, took touch away from everyone on purpose.

I do not know who. I do not know whether it was a person or a principle or only an accident that hardened into law. But I have come to believe that whatever it was, it did not do it from cruelty. It did it the way a gardener takes a knife to a branch: with a reason, at a cost, in the knowledge that the thing would hurt. There is a physics to the Between, and the physics says no touch, and every body that rises against it rises against something old and enormous, and the old and enormous thing does not take it lightly.

So most souls with the gift do not use it. They have a way of keeping their hands to themselves. And those who do use it learn soon enough that it costs more than it seems to, and that the price is not the kind you can pay in Marks.

And then there is the envy. There is always the envy. You cannot give a gift like that to one soul in a million and expect the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand to have no feelings about it. A faceless, touchless crowd can look at a single bodied soul and see everything it has been denied, walking past, unbothered and warm, and the feeling that grows in them is not one that anyone would call hatred at first. It is only an ache. But an ache shared among enough people stops being an ache and becomes a voice, and the voice of a crowd is a terrible thing. It has no face. It has no name. It says why her in ten thousand throats at once, and it does not stop.

(You may have noticed it, in the way I have described certain people. You may have noticed that I have said, again and again, that someone's hair was more visible than it ought to be. I do not say it idly. A body that is hidden is hidden thoroughly, but the hair is the last thing to go and the first to come back, and it takes a long time for a soul with a curse to learn to hide the whole of themselves from a crowd. I have been telling you for a very long time. I have been pointing at the strands.)

I mention all of this today because of a woman, and a stair, and the first time I was held.

I have never told it to anyone. I do not know how to tell it except from the beginning, which is not the stair, or the woman, but a square full of dead people on an ordinary day, and the color of someone's hair.