Free Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber

fana . As physical bodies are to the m’fa, so is fana to the m’doli, the unseen world. I was sick for two days, which amused and encouraged Uluné, since by this he knew the compound was efficacious. Thereafter, to my immense surprise, I could actually pick up dulfana, which is the characteristic effect of sorcery upon the fana . Back then, I interpreted these sensations as the aftereffects of the compounds Uluné made me consume. I can no longer entertain this theory, as it’s been well over four years, and I sense dulfana often in the streets of Miami. It is nearly as common in certain quarters as the scent of Cuban coffee.
    I feel a vague shame and suppress it. I could have helped that woman, who surely won’t receive what she needs from the exhausted intern who will shortly examine her, but countersorcery generates something like a tornado in the m’doli, and the narrow end of that tornado would point directly at me. Sex strengthens the fana, as does happiness and contentment, and joy and anger, which is why I’m careful not to indulge in those things now. There is the child, and my love for her, of course, which must be generating a hot little blip in the old m’doli, if anyone’s looking, but I can’t do anything about that. Everyone’s fana is slightly different, like everyone’s smell. I never learned to distinguish at a grain that fine, but Uluné could, and I expect that nowadays my husband can too. Is he actively looking for me? My constant thought. I know he’d like to find me. He wanted us to be together, or so he said, the night before I sailed away. He wants me to watch him do his stuff.
    I make my escape, find I’m trembling, and pause at the elevator to lean my forehead against the cool stainless steel of its door. Oh, the physical body, full of meat and juice, in this place regarded as merely a soup, requiring only a balancing of the ingredients and the stoppage of leaks to restore it to good order. The m’fon, as the Olo call this body, is the only one officially recognized by Jackson Memorial and the Western World, of which it is an atom. I want to believe in that pleasant notion: it’s just a soup of proteins and water and metallic compounds, and each of these is merely a soup of electrons and other subatomics, and those in turn, merely a soup of quarks. Oh, merely ! How I wish, wish, wish, I could get back to merely ! The Olo have no word for merely. They never learned the trick of dividing the world into the significant and the insignificant, which is one reason why there are only about twelve hundred of them left in the world and what they know will shortly vanish from the memory of mankind.
    So nobody will ever go up to the intern who is perhaps now puzzling over that old Cuban lady’s symptoms and tell him his EKGs, and EEGs, and chem-sevens, and cancer panels, and sphygmomanometer readings, and tox screens are mere objectivity. In fact, the m’fon of the Cuban lady is more or less fine, except where it is destroying itself at the subtle urgings of her fana, which is not at all well.
    I have to stop at the ladies’ room because of the Cuban woman. I have a sensitive digestion nowadays, another thing that keeps me cadaverous. When I was a kid, I ate like a wolverine; it was my sister who was the delicate eater. She used to pass me stuff she didn’t like at the dinner table, and sometimes we would switch plates when the parents weren’t watching, and I would get to eat her dinner too. I believe Mary was an anorexic in fact, rather than in fancy, as I am. A willowy beauty, often so described, often by my mother, also thin, who I believe was disappointed in me. I was more like my father, inheriting the long heavy bones, broad shoulders, and big hands and feet of the Doe family, a reversion to the original doughty fisherfolk stock. I had at one time photos of the two of us on our boat, dressed in slickers, grinning like fools as green water comes over the gunwales. Aside from our