by Corey Furman
Finally, the water began to boil. She turned off the gas and took the kettle to the table. Carefully, she poured the water into the mug against the inside, making sure not to splash any. After setting the kettle back on the stove, she waited with hands folded in front of her, covering some of her nakedness.
Breylin stopped tapping and gave her a scathing look as he picked up the cup. With eyes closed, he brought it to his nose and inhaled its aroma. Then he sucked in a tiny sip, rolled it around in his mouth, swallowed. Maré held her breath while he weighed the flavor.
“This is… acceptable, Maré.”
“Thank you, Sir!” she said in a rush of air. She allowed herself to experience a small thrill at the hint of a complement. After a pause she said, “Since Maré did well, may she use the bathroom, Mr. Breylin?”
“I believe I said ‘acceptable’, not well, Maré.” he said, oblivious to her need. “I have changed my mind about breakfast. You may use the toilet after you have heated one of the supplements for me. One only, I will take the other with me when I leave.”
After a brief moment of panic, Maré goaded herself mentally and kicked her actions into gear. She extracted one of the meal packets from the satchel, got a plate from the cupboard, opened the packet and emptied its thick, starchy contents onto the plate. The stew would smell much more palatable when hot, but cold as it was the chunks of congealed fat made it smell a little nauseating. Wasting anything was never acceptable, so she scraped out every morsel with the edge of a knife. She put the plate in the warmer, set the timer to sixty-five seconds and the temperature to medium-warm. Thankfully, the rations came shelf stable and fully cooked – only heating was required.
As Maré waited on the timer, Breylin said, “Let’s go over today’s schedule. It’s nearly 5:45am. You may do as you wish until 6:15 – eat, pee, whatever. After that, do the dishes and clean the kitchen before eight. I want my laundry done and the rest of the place clean before two.”
The timer on the food warmer issued two electronic tones. Careful to avoid touching the stew, Maré picked up the cool-to-the-touch platter by its rim. She turned and set it down in front of him, then got a clean fork from the utensil drawer and set it beside the plate.
“After two I want you to exercise for an hour. Aerobic exercises, I don’t want you getting flabby. Between three and four, disinfect the exerciser, then wash yourself. Clean, Maré. And remove all of your body hair – I want you clean and smooth as glass. Do you understand my wishes?”
“Maré understands, sir,” she said quietly.
“Good, my things must be well in order. Anything else is unacceptable, right?”
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated, but decided to see if suggesting the coffee had paid off. “Do you think Maré might be allowed to keep her hair on top?”
“Okay, Maré, call it a treat.” He held up the mug between them. “For the coffee.”
He picked up his fork, scooped up a bunch of the stew, and shoveled it in to his mouth. He chewed a bit, slowed, and then put the fork down. He swallowed with a wince, as if he was trying to choke down raw sewage. He said, “it’s cold, Maré. The food.” He paused, then continued quietly. “The food you just put down here in front of me, is cold. How am I supposed to eat this?” He pushed the plate away from himself.
Shock shot through her, and a small, terrified portion of her mind gibbered with mindless horror. What just happened? Shit, I was doing so well! She had to say something into the awful silence that followed, offer some explanation, but time thickened and froze around them.
Her heart rate doubled and pounded with the ferocity of the wind storm outside, and she nearly collapsed with the blood rushing through her cardiovascular system, black and silver flecks sparkling at the edges of her vision. She wanted to bolt, run somewhere, anywhere but there was nowhere to go and her feet remained welded in place. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Breylin! I don’t know how —”
From where he was sitting, Breylin backhanded her, hard enough to stagger her into the counter top by the sink, leaving the red imprint of his hand large on the side of her face. The legs of the chair barked along the floor as he stood. Two quick steps, and he was looming over her. Maré nearly reacted by throwing her hands up to protect her face, but doing that always made the beatings worse.
“No, Maré.” His face was close to hers as he leaned in. She could smell the stew on his breath mixed with the antiseptic wash he had used earlier. “Words like that are for people. You’re not people, are you Maré?” he said terribly.
“No, Sir…” she said cringingly. The tears streamed down her face and dripped down onto the tops of her bare breasts.
He took her by the chin and turned her face up to his, their noses centimeters apart, but she kept her eyes averted and down. Direct eye contact could provoke a savage assault.
“You know what I want,” he said as his fingers flexed and tightened on her chin. “Look me in the eyes and tell me, Maré.”
She couldn’t move except to tremble in his too-near presence. The blows would rain down on her any moment now.
“Look at me!”
She flinched at the outburst, but dreadfully she complied.
The level of his voice diminished to a menacing whisper as he let her go. “Now I want to hear you say it.”
Anxiety had a tight grip on her chest, but she had no choice but to obey. Looking at him she timidly said, “I’m not a person, Sir.”
“That’s right, Maré, you’re not a person. Why won’t you listen? You’ve had to learn this lesson a few times, haven’t you?” She started to respond but he laid his index finger over her mouth. “Shhh… There’s nothing more to say.”
He let her feel the fear and his breath for thirty seconds. The silence was broken only by her near-silent crying and the wind that ached to shiver the house to synthetic splinters. This is it, her mind told her as she screwed her eyes shut tight. She knotted her hands together so taut her knuckles were as white as bone, but her mind was racing, terrified, whimpering. Any second now – the fists, kicking, pain, humiliation, the whip, something, something, SOMETHING, HE’S GOING TO –
Silence. Sixty seconds.
She used the last tendon of courage to look into his dead lucid eyes, losing sense of everything else but the pressure building between them.
Unexpectedly, he stood up and smiled. Gently patting her cheek he said, “I’m feeling generous, Maré. Let’s forget this happened. After all, your birthday is only a month away. I’ll have to come up with something special for it.”
Terrified at the thought of his special surprises, Maré began to sob, and the pressure finally gave way. Her bladder muscles buckled, she urinated down her legs, and a small pool collected beneath her, warming her toes and arches. The rest of her froze with crushing fear.
Breylin took a step back and whispered, “now look at what you’ve done.”
Part 1 – Counterpoint
One
Joss Breylin Jr. had been born to a relatively poor but well-connected family. His father, Joss Sr., had been a medical doctor on staff at United Nations Headquarters in New New York. Although he hadn’t been able to cure his wife’s debilitating illness, he had nevertheless been quite capable of writing prescriptions of a dubious nature for anything the career politicians wished. The access that was provided by his usefulness had enabled him to secure a commission for his son. Although Joss Jr. had been fairly bright in tech school, he hadn’t had the grades, nor his parents the money to get him into one of the better tech colleges. Since he had no enlistment waiver, he would have to serve in the Marines anyway. Senior had at least been able to use his influence by proxy to secure a spot in one of the middling universities and make sure the boy was an officer while he completed his military commitment. It was considerably more than most people hoped for.
There were dozens of freshmen at college orientation, but almost all of them were bound for the more glamorous sectors of astrophysics and
bioengineering. Only he and Larissa Oralla-Sadler were going into geology, but even if the rest of the students had been going into their field, she still would have caught his eye as she sat smiling to herself and doodling in a small unlined pad through several inane but nevertheless required “alignment” sessions. Though the way her narrow glasses sat up high on the bridge of her nose somehow made her seem intellectual and demure, she was also drop-dead gorgeous with creamy, freckled skin, mischievous, emerald-green eyes and long, fiery red hair in a thick braid. She completely stood out in this crowd full of vaguely asian/spanish/caucasian people. She’s a sunburst of color! he thought, and his mouth ran dry just sitting next to her. Frankly, she intimidated the hell out of him.
Still, there was something melancholy about her, and she seemed strangely focused. The sketch she was working on was abstract, but it was angular, conflicted, and somehow dark – and he couldn’t take his eyes off of it.
“What is that, Larissa?”
“Just Riss,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“My name – I prefer my friends to call me Riss.”
His pulse jumped a few ticks faster as her words swirled around in his head, and he knew he needed to cement a connection to this girl. Feeling foolish at his own hesitancy, he lowered his voice and replied, “Are we friends, then, Riss?”
She showed him some narrow, white teeth with her smile. “I haven’t decided yet.”
He felt slightly flushed at her demeanor, but he smiled back anyway. “Okay… Riss, then. But you didn’t answer my question – what are you drawing?”
“What, this?” She gestured at the drawing with her pencil. “I don’t know… sometimes I just draw what I feel.”
They quickly struck up a friendship and settled into a routine of mutual aid and study. Though he hadn’t told her of the physical attraction he had for her, they’d spent a lot of time together working through the terse material, and their freshman year had flown by. Without trying, they had become good friends.
He didn’t catch it at first, but near the end of that first year, he began to notice little things, kindnesses that she did for him. She would fold his laundry when she came to his room – she didn’t want to be seen with someone wearing wrinkled clothes, she said – or she would bring him a special pastry from the cafeteria. It wasn’t so much what she did, but how she went about it. She wasn’t doing favors for a friend, she was doing things that just seemed to make him happy. Eventually, she made a gift of a small, framed drawing of the two of them as exaggerated characters holding hands amidst a bunch of impossibly huge flowers.
Dumbfounded, he wasn’t really sure what to do. Am I even reading the situation correctly? His previous relationships had been about lonely people adding their loneliness together and hoping the sums came up in the black. It didn’t though, and never could. Ultimately he was afraid to move, so he waited and tried to reciprocate.
As the weeks went by, and weeks turned into months, an unspoken understanding grew up between them. There was something special there in their relationship. Joss found himself doing little kindnesses too, and it wasn’t to get Larissa naked; he did it because he could tell that their dancing around each other made her happy, and that made him happy. Before he knew it, he had quit caring about the shape of her rear end or how she filled out her sweaters with deep, sculpted curves. He could see enough pieces of the puzzle that was his life, and he knew that it would only ever be complete if she were in it.
It was in their fourth year together that the word Love was first used, but neither one could remember who had said it first. It would have been a milestone in their relationship but for one thing: they had felt the emotions long before the words had been spoken. In any case, once the word was loose in the air it became a frequent visitor, always in the room.
Larissa was content with where life had taken them so far, but Joss had an emotional need to make a plan. He would bring it up again tonight, but this time he would force the issue if he could.
She had made a simple meal of sandwiches in her room, and they had washed it down with cheap local beer. The good stuff was pricey, but this was better than recycled water. When the food was gone they reclined on the sofa and listened to music. As she worked an image of a castle with colorful sticks of charcoal, she could tell he had something on his mind, even in the offhand way he picked up his beer, sipped and set it back on the end table while staring off in the distance. Knowing that he preferred the absence of banter while composing his words, she gave him the space to figure out whatever had him ruminating.
At last he said, “Larissa, we have to talk about the future.”
So, it’s this conversation again, is it? “No, we don’t, Joss,” she replied. “It isn’t yet time.”
He was tempted to be irritated with her, but he decided instead to play it cool. “Can you help me understand why we shouldn’t start laying it out?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Why not?”
She sat up with a huff and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “Because.”
He sighed as he sat up, too. “Okay. Go ahead.”
“We’re still more than two years from graduating.”
“…And?”
“And nothing. It’s as simple as that.”
“It’s as simple as that, huh?”
“It’s as simple as that.”
He smirked, picked up his bottle and sipped his brew. “Well if it’s that simple, I’m glad I didn’t splurge on good beer.” Then he said, “but you’re full of shit, Riss. You’re going to have to do better if you want me to buy it.”
“Aren’t you ever afraid of the future, Joss?”
He knew she was reaching into a part of herself she’d rather not, that he needed to pay attention; if he didn’t he might hurt her. So, he considered her question carefully, looked at it from different angles, weighed the various ways he might answer. “No, I’m not, Riss. I can face what comes as long as I know we’ll be together.”
Exasperated, she got up and started pacing back and forth with her arms still crossed. Why can’t he just let this be until later? We’re so young… What if we can’t make it work?
She sat back down and looked up into his eyes. “After school is done, we will have to figure out careers, let alone a great big Us. I love you, Joss Breylin Jr. I don’t want to think about being without you.” She hesitated. “I… just don’t know if I’m ready for the big questions, let alone the answers. I need time.”
“Okay, Riss. You can have whatever time you need.”
Later the following year, Joss’ mother gave in to her illness. Odessa Breylin had suffered for more than ten years with late onset Tay-Sachs. Its rarity had made diagnosis difficult, but regardless, there was no cure – only treatment. She had needed canes, then walkers and eventually motorized assistance. She had struggled with self-worth and guilt over the pall she had cast over her husband’s image. The final straw for her had been when the feeding tube had become necessary. She and Joss Sr. decided that medically-induced termination would not only be more dignified, but fitting. She had outlived both her usefulness and the mandatory conclusion of life that would have applied to most everyone else with a fatal disease.
“I’ve got to return to Earth, Riss. I want to see her before she passes.”
“Okay. I’m coming, too.”
“What? You don’t need to do that, hon. I can’t really afford it, anyway.”
“I’ve been saving my pennies. I want to do it, to support you, and besides,” she murmured into his ear as she put her arms around him, “this is my last chance to meet her.”
“Okay, I’ll ask my dad to get your name on the official request to the university. You know I love you, right?”
She laid her forehead on his, and he took comfort in feeling the warmth radiate off of her as she spoke. “I know, Joss.”
To Joss’ eyes, Mom looked thin, hunted and more t
han ready for the humiliation to be over. She had tried to make the auto-feeder work, but the affront to her person was too much and she had it removed two weeks earlier. It was no wonder her eyes were sunken and her clothes hung on her. Dad did the brave face thing, but Jr. could tell he too was ready for it to be over. In a private moment he had spoken of the need to move on. Joss did his best not to show it, but he couldn’t believe the temerity of the man; Mom wasn’t even gone and he was moving on.
Pissed about the whole thing, he told Riss about it later that night as they sat in bed and she began to fill in a pencil drawing of his mother that she had started in her hospital room earlier in the day. She was rarely without something of her art, and he might not have taken note of it this time except that this piece was quite realistic; normally she focused more on fantasy settings that were easily digested by children. Even at a trying time like this, he marveled at her ability to remember and capture the nuances of his mother’s profile. Her use of shades, tones and highlights made her look as young and dignified as she had years ago.
“Cut him some slack, Joss. He’s suffered too, and they’re both prepared for an ending that must come.”
“Wait a minute… Are you really agreeing with him, or are you trying to make it go down easy for me?”
“Maybe both. Of course I want to soothe your feelings… but I understand his, too.” She set aside her oversized pad and pencil, then rolled her back towards him. “When you’re watching someone suffer… or it’s you going through it, a release from can be… darkly appealing.”
Wait, what? Is she talking about my parents, or herself? Silence hung in the air for some time before Joss could speak, and when he did it was barely a whisper. “Have you felt that way, Riss?”