The Service

ANOTION OF CHARACTER, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line offkey, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions ofhot andlake andI converge into a consciousness of consciousness-in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.

That was what was once believed. Now, it seems hardly to matter when and how we become ourselves-or even what we become. Theory chases theory about how we are composed. The only constant: the abjuration of personal responsibility.

We are the next thing the Time Dragon is dreaming, and nothing to be done about it.

We are the fanciful sketch of wry Lurline, we are droll and ornamental, and no more culpable than a sprig of lavender or a sprig of lightning, and nothing to be done about it.

We are an experiment in situation ethics set by the Unnamed God, which in keeping its identity secret also cloaks the scope of the experiment and our chances of success or failure at it-and nothing to be done about it.

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it.

IN SOME MORE HUMBLE QUARTERS of Oz, gossip had long held that Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West, had been born a wise soul, already formed, somehow conscious. Why else the mouthful of sharp choppers, not so much baby pearls as python’s teeth, which some folk insisted she’d sported at birth? She came into the world with advance knowledge of its corruption, and in the womb she had prepared for it as best she could, by growing those teeth.

That was what was said, anyway.

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we’re lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.

The governesses of the monied classes often held that a child ought to be kept from witnessing cruelty and ugliness, the better to preserve some ounce of innocence. Rural grannies and spinster aunts-like the Nanny who had helped raise Elphaba-neither mollied nor coddled. They believed it was better for a child to know what befalls a chicken when the feast of Lurlinemas rolls around. Better to learn-from a distance-the tricks perpetrated on the weak, the distractible, the unlucky.

Both pedagogical stances, however, relied on a common assumption. Growth and change were viewed as a reaction to conditions met. One might as easily argue, however, that it is the world’s obligation to respond to children. By force of personality, by dint of their vicious beauty and untamed ways, children tromp into the world ready to disfigure it. Children surrender nothing when faced with the world: it is the world that gives up, over and over again. By so giving up, of course, it renews itself-that is the secret. Dying in order to live, that sort of thing.

You could catalog the thousand ways people shrink from life, as if chance and change are by their nature toxic, disfiguring. Elphaba, with her sympathies far more substantial than her luck, had at least wrestled with the questions. She’d shoved, and barked, and made herself a right nuisance.

By contrast, the Quadling girl, Candle, was an interpreter savant, translating the text of a world whose fundamental nature she hadn’t yet grasped, and maybe never would. Did the difference between an Elphaba and a Candle come down merely to a question of focal depth: the big picture versus the little picture?

For his part, Liir had not been a bright child. Even on the edge of puberty he had given little thought to the paradoxes of his existence. He had imagined himself to be more like Chistery, the chief Snow Monkey, than like Nor and her brothers, Irji and Manek. Chistery had a slipsy-doodle sense of language, but he tended toward steadiness. He did his chores without complaining or forgetting, and asked for nothing beyond his basic needs. Even at fourteen, Liir hadn’t been much more demanding than Chistery.

But Liir remembered that Nor had addressed the stars, had sung harmony with mountain streams, had loved all creatures whether their initial letters were written Great or small-Animal or animal. She was nuts as a nut tree in a nut forest, of course: that was what he had thought without realizing he was thinking anything at all. That silly Nor was a creature apart. Not just as a girl-though that, too, of course-but as a fragment of human possibility. She had had a sympathetic imagination, and Liir?-he could barely count.

Children often define themselves in relation to their parents: emulating them or working hard as possible to avoid resembling them in any way. Since the identity of both his parents was in doubt, Liir couldn’t see himself as taking after anyone for sure. Certainly not Elphaba. In her final months, stooped, crabbed, scrabbling from desk to podium to window ledge, she was more like a quivering scorpion than a woman. At rest her fingers tended to curl up like a claw, or like the petals of a flower gone a bit blowsy: her hand was always out, always open, ready to take what found its way there and seize it. Not at all like Liir, who cowered.

Among the human kind, thought even the most jaded and bitter of Animals, there are many ways to be wrong, but there are only a relatively few ways to be young. In their generous apprehension of the world, for their insatiable appetite for the world, the young are to be forgiven.

SOMEWHERE IN THE SULFUROUS UPDRAFTabove the great maw of Southstairs, Liir was born out of a dark vile womb and thrown into the night. He came into himself perched on a broomstick dozens of yards above the highest watchtower. Here was a cushion of wind, billowing him almost onto his side, causing his shins to tighten automatically against each other, his arms instinctively to wrap the broomstick harder. It was Liir and wind and height and stars, it was alone and alone and alone; the understandings were distinct and differentiated, and then suddenly annealed by a process he couldn’t name. Maybe fear of heights! HisLiirness applied, suddenly, applied to himself and no one else.

He didn’t know what Liirness might mean, and he was sorry Elphaba wasn’t around to raise a mocking eyebrow and sling a caustic remark. He might have been hurt by her sly digs, but he could have relished that hurt, too-he saw now. Survived it? Transformed it.

A hurting Liir was a real Liir.

However he’d come to be here-settling on an unstable bolster of thermal, learning to slide up the banister of the night-there was no else doing it but Liir.

The Emerald City gaped at him, but it didn’t understand what it saw. He was just a touch of ash from a hearty fire, a scrap of tinder tossed in the winds. Winds that were damned strong; they snatched at the hem of his cape and unrolled it off his shoulders until it trailed behind him, a stain.

For his part, he saw the City the way few others had. Well, Elphaba must have! And anyone lucky enough to harness a Pfenix, that rare creature. The view was like a model of a city made with an impossibly deft hand-hundreds and hundreds of buildings, grand and humble, glazed with tile and black with soot. A city built on a gentle rise, he could now see: long slicing boulevards and curving promenades, a honeycomb of streets and canals, parks and squares, a thousand mews, ten thousand alleys, a hundred thousand windows blinking bronzely. A glowing organ, like the illuminated heart of Oz itself pushed through the flesh of the land, pulsing with its own life, tricked out with monuments, defaced with the graffiti of broken trees, the Palace of the Wizard a cancer upon the landscape, the dead center of it all.