The Hair in the Crowd

The square was called Stillwater, though there was no water in it and nothing in it had ever been still.

It lay at the meeting of four roads, in the part of the Between where the dead go to be near other dead, and on most days it held more silhouettes than any place I knew. They moved through it in slow cross-currents, in and out of the arcades, around the dry stone basin at its center, with the gentle aimlessness of a people who have no appointments, only habits. I came there often. I came to listen. It was the quickest way I knew to learn what the Between was. None of the dead explain it to the newcomer; they explain it to each other, in small, worn, repeated phrases, and if you stand long enough at the edge of a crowd you hear the whole geography of a world assembled out of other people's complaints.

It was a long time after the cliff. Long enough that I had stopped counting, and had become, I think, a little less afraid of the sound of my own name. I did not yet know hers. I will call her Flora, though it was a long while before she let me, because a narrator has the advantage of hindsight, and because I have never been able to think of her as anything else.

I saw the hair first.

You must understand what it is to see something in a world where nothing has color. I do not mean that the Between is grey. The clouds are pearl, the light is amber at dusk, the sea is a kind of white-gold. But souls are not a color. A soul is an outline, a place where the background has been politely interrupted, and a crowd of them is a crowd of interruptions, soft-edged and uniform. And in the middle of that, a hundred paces from where I stood, there was something green.

It was a pale green, the green of the underside of a leaf, and it was tipped at the ends with white, as if the frost had caught it before it could finish growing. It moved. That is what held me. It was hair, a long fall of it, and it moved the way hair moves in the places the dead remember: with weight, with a slow swing, with a small helpless lag behind the turn of the head. Nothing else in the Square moved that way. Everything else in the Square drifted. This swung. It was the only thing among a thousand souls that obeyed gravity as though it believed in it.

Somewhere beneath it, a silhouette was walking.

I could not see the face. There was no face to see, not for me. But the hair was passing through the crowd the way a lit match passes through a dark room, and I watched the crowd notice it, and that was the second thing I saw.

I have seen a great many things in the Between, and I have never seen a crowd go quiet in quite that way. It was not silence. It was a drop in the register of the whole Square, a lowering, like a hundred people speaking at once and each one deciding independently to say the next word more softly. Heads turned. I use the word loosely. Shoulders angled. A little space opened around the hair as it went by, a hollow in the crowd the width of a person and a half, and the hollow moved with her.

Touched, someone said, near me, not loudly.

Look at it, said someone else.

Is that real?

It's moving.

Hair doesn't move.

It does if you've got a —

Hush, said a third, not kindly. Don't say it. Don't say it where it can hear.

I stood among them with my hands at my sides and watched her come.

I should tell you what I felt, because I have promised myself to name my feelings correctly, and this one confused me for a long time. It was not curiosity. I would like it to have been; curiosity is a clean and dignified thing. It was not envy, which I could see rising around me like the smell of rain, and which I understood and did not share. It was something closer to homesickness. I stood in the middle of the Square and looked at a stranger's hair and felt, quite distinctly, that I was looking at the first thing in the Between that was made of the same material as the place I came from.

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It was her posture.

You will think I am inventing this, and I understand, because I did not believe it either at first. But there is a way a plant stands. It is not a thing you can describe to someone who has never been one. It is a stillness that is not stiffness, a kind of attention that points upward and downward at once, a body that is somehow always listening to the light. The silhouette that walked beneath the green hair stood like that, even when it moved. Each step was a decision made by something that had once known how to be rooted, and had never entirely forgotten, and took a certain care with the ground.

I knew it the way you know a language you have not heard since childhood: not by the words, but by the sound.

She was a plant.

I was moving before I knew it. I do not mean toward her; I mean with her, an inch at a time, the way a man edges along a wall toward a fire. And I think that is why she noticed me. Everyone else in the Square was looking at her hair. I was looking at the rest of her, which, to anyone else, was nothing at all.

She stopped.

She was some twenty paces away, near the dry basin, and she turned her head. The outline inclined toward me with the slight, startled stiffness of an animal that has felt itself observed by something it cannot account for. The hair swung round with it, green and white, and settled.

The air near her was strange. I could not feel it, of course, but I could see it: a faint, shimmering disturbance about her shoulders, the kind of haze that rises off a river in winter when the water is warmer than the air. Her breath, I thought. Except that souls do not breathe. Except that something was.

Then she crossed the twenty paces between us, and the crowd parted to let her.

"You're staring," she said.

Her voice was low and dry and rather brittle at the edges, the voice of a person who has been speaking to herself for a long time and is out of practice at being answered. There was a coldness in it that was not unkind. It was the coldness of a surface, not of a depth.

"I'm sorry."

"Everyone's staring."

"I know."

"Everyone is staring at my hair," said the woman, with an exhausted precision. "They've been staring at it for an hour. They've told one another that I stole it, that I paid for it, that I was born with it, and that I deserved to be born with it for reasons they feel quite strongly about. You, on the other hand, are staring at the rest of me."

"I can't see the rest of you."

"Then why are you looking at it like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you recognize it."

I opened my mouth, and the truth fell out, as it has always fallen out of me, with no more grace than a dropped plate.

"You stand like a plant."

The silhouette did not move.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The way you stand. As if you're listening to the light." I heard myself, and could not stop. "It's only that I'm one too. Or I was. Or it's complicated. I'm sorry. I don't normally say things to strangers. I usually say them to the wrong people at the wrong time. I'm very bad at it."

There was a silence in which a great many things were decided.

Then something happened that I did not expect, and that I would remember for a long time. A sound came out of the silhouette. It was thin and cracked and astonished, a sound like ice giving way on a pond in the first week of spring, and it took me a moment to understand that it was a laugh.

She stopped it almost at once, as if it had embarrassed her. But it had happened. It had been out in the air. I saw her hand come up to where her mouth would be, and press there a moment, as though to check that nothing else had escaped.

"That," she said, "is the second most ridiculous thing anyone has said to me today."

"What was the first?"

"The crowd has been informing me for an hour that I must have stolen my hair." The brittle voice had a rime on it that was not quite amusement. "As though it were a purse."

"I don't think you stole it."

"Thank you."

"I think you probably couldn't have. It looks rooted."

She was quiet again. I thought for a moment that I had gone too far. Then the green hair shifted, very slightly, in a way I would later learn to read as the sign that she was making up her mind.

"Walk with me," she said. "If you're going to stare, you may as well do it from somewhere they can't see."