Character Sketches: Nuss Trine Tulip
Plutón eclipse al Sol.
(Pluto eclipses the Sun.)
—Pablo Flores Laymuns
***
Have you ever wanted to run a comb through the strands of your brain? Yes, when it’s tangled but more so when it’s not, just to feel the sensation of thought running together with perception alongside reflex beside knowing.
I can do it by listening to music played on a piano by a musician named Nils Frahm, or staring at a picture of blue and indigo and aqua-colored lines arranged close to one another like a fingerprint, or running through the desert in the morning before school, winding around clumps of prickled and feathered and spiny plants called brush. Also by flapping the wings of my arms and kicking out and shaking my tongue loose from my mouth with no apparent rhythm.
This last one is something we do often on my home planet. We make funny noises that aren’t language but still communicate. We stick out our limbs at weird angles and blob our bodies into atypical shapes and still find one another very delightful to look at. Shaking it out in a public square is as common as drawing a sandwich out of a lunch sack.
Here I can eat the sandwich at a table in the quad but I have to comb my brain in private. Unless it’s with the piano music and I use headphones and lie quietly on the grass and channel my body’s response down into the Earth.
Image description: an abstract oil pastel drawing featuring a series of blue, black, and purple lines running in parallel curves and diagonals.
I like the Earth so much, different as it is from where I come from. Water, coming up through cracks and down through clouds, is glorious. Having weight, in addition to mass, thrills me. The Moon of course, because the Earth cannot be talked about without including the Moon. And the way broken hearts inside of people can heal and continue beating only to break again and over and over: a true marvel.
It’s easier on my home planet but here on Earth I’m learning an enormous amount. I have an exchange sibling. They are brilliant and caring and obsessive and quite mean at times. If I’d never left my home planet and never met Tulip I would never know what I’m knowing now and yesterday and in the periods called future. I would never plunge to the darkest depths of my being and swim through pools of excrement only to dive even deeper, holding my breath and stroking furiously, tearing off my clothes and skins and protections of all types, losing consciousness, losing my will to live, grieving, dying, grieving a longer time. And then, somehow, surfacing in clean waves and tumbling out on a sandy shore: new.
***
Image description: a line of small stones lying on cracked sand. From top to bottom the stones are: pinkish and jagged, a smooth black oval with a vertical white line, purplish with dark specs, marled green, a black disc, textured brown, a white and yellow chunk, and a chip of slate gray.
When my parents told me Nuss would be coming to live with us I didn’t want them. I’m 15 and I put an insane amount of work into my social life, but it remains a delicate and complicated thing. How would it handle the incursion of an intergalactic dork with no clue how to fit in?
The first few days were bad but it only took a few run-ins with high school cruelty for Nuss to realize that making me the boss was the only way. When I said put on these flare leg jeans, they wiggled into them and asked for a pair of clunky-soled boots in their size. When I warned them not to embarrass me by saying something weird at the first party of the school year, they spent the night grinning and acting like they didn’t understand the language and raising their beer cup to cheers exactly like I taught them.
I never imagined that it would be so easy to use Nuss to enhance my ability to get what I want. It sounds bad, but why lie? I am power hungry. Obsessive and controlling? Yes. A perfectionist with deep-seated insecurities? Duh. Does my irresistible attractiveness create a sense of harmony and beauty everywhere I go? One hundred percent.
Despite my profound self-centeredness, most people at school consider me one of their best friends. Like Felisha: when she’s cast as the lead in the annual musical she races up to me and I grab her hands and we jump and squeal in unison. Or Gordy: he keeps it all bottled up until I ask if he’s okay and we walk out along the practice fields and stop under the shade of a giant tree where he cries as he tells me about his parents splitting up.
I don’t do it just for the other person; it obviously does something for me, too. I’m addicted to that feeling when I look into someone’s eyes and they look into mine and we exchange words and nuances and meanings, creating out of nowhere this current of electricity that allows the magical thing called understanding to pass between us.
Nuss, somehow, makes that electricity more possible. Between the two of us it’s moving back and forth constantly. When I dress them up and take them out and they’re standing at my shoulder, I can sense how they draw other people in, in a way that’s different from me. It’s like they turn my ability into a superpower and I realize I can rule the world. That’s why I can’t let them go back home.
***
On my home planet it feels good to be noticed. I make a new blob-and-twist with my body and people nod and move. I do a sweet and sour sound with my mouth and they laugh. My cheeks blush a rainbow of colors and they come close to my heart.
Here on Earth being noticed is stressful because I never know what will come of it. There’s a chance that people will nod and slap my hand with all five fingers splayed. They may offer me a slice of pizza or ask what I’m always writing in my notebook. There’s also a good probability that they will point and laugh in a way that sends me away, down into a dark and lonely place with no touch and no modes of communication. In the weeks after my arrival people’s laughter sent me to this place and it felt worse than any other state I’ve experienced.
I like to read fictional accounts of teenagers on Earth. Tulip, mandated by their parents, took me to the library the first day I arrived. They showed me how to find books called novels and receive permission to borrow them by scanning a new plastic card with my name. From these novels I’ve learned to match certain of my experiences with the words popular and freak and rejection and normal. I struggle to describe these in intellectual terms. We don’t even have them on my home planet.
Tulip, of their own volition, began to teach me to be normal on my fifth day on Earth. They were approaching when the circle of kids tightened around me. By the time Tulip loosened the circle I was so far down in the away place that I ceased to be for a time. In the darkness I pictured my home planet and put my flagging energy into returning there. When I opened my eyes I was still on Earth but I was looking into the eyes of a goddex.
After learning the nature of Tulip’s heart in this way, and having them see into the depths of mine, I let myself go soft as putty when, after tending my wounds, they propped me up in front of a mirror to remake me from head to toe. I leaned in to the soft pressure of the pencil outlining my eyelids. I arched for the addition of hair here, its removal there. I voice recorded Tulip’s long and complicated explanations of what could and could not be said in social situations and listened to them later that night, and every night after, as I lay in bed.
Under Tulip’s guidance I started to act normal and people started to think I was that. Now I can slip through the spaces between people and there’s usually nothing about me to call their attention. My pants are as tight as everyone else’s. I am safe.
Sometimes though I start to daydream about what it’s like back home and I want to squawk and bubble and roll. I think I’ll explode into nothing if I don’t. I comb my brain with a run through the desert and once I’m untangled I comb my calmness.
Image description: a close-up of the oil pastel from above. Five paler lines cut from upper left to lower right, blending with the saturated lines of blue, green, purple, and black crossing from lower left to upper right.
I go to the library. I read about teens and their heartaches. I lie on the grass with earbuds in and imagine the Earth will swallow me and digest me and excrete me out on my home planet. I go to a football game with Tulip and their friends. Sometimes one of them will smile at me and I feel my brain lighting up. I go to a party and mix with people who seem to like the way I’ve learned to say the things that Tulip has taught me. I long to say the things I knew before.
In my dreams at night I see myself from behind, moving in sync with a big crowd. When I try to see my face I keep turning away and away and away in an ever-darkening spiral. I see myself standing at the center of a group, raising a plastic cup high in the air, and when I open my mouth, the sound of a piano comes out, booming and clanging. I fight to wake up before the group’s reaction descends.
If I could be happy to be like Tulip I think I wouldn’t dream so much at night. I think I would be able to remember which version of me to like and which one to hate. My heart has never hurt so much as now. I miss having an untangled brain. Something is off but I have to keep trying.
***
Nuss is in trouble and this time I don’t know how to help them. I have a horrible feeling that my help has done them harm. By now Nuss means the world to me. They’re like a fifth limb. I need them. I have to do something to fix this. It’s going to hurt, but I have to make it right.
