by Lydia Netzer
“I want publication, too,” said George. “You see, we’re not so different.”
“I want something from you,” she went on, her breath coming fast.
“You told me,” he said, smiling. “I mean—”
“I think I just want you to be real,” said Irene. Whether it was the bubbly drink or the music thudding in her sternum or the proximity of George and the skin she wanted to touch, kiss, press against, she felt herself telling him something serious.
“I am real,” said George. They were leaning against a column, George ducking down to hear her and speak into her ear, Irene clutching her drink, wanting to inhabit the space between his arms.
“But this is—” she began, “This can’t be real. It’s too silly.”
“It’s not silly! We are meant to be together. We’re twin souls! I swear it on Compton and Batteau and Yeats and Toledo General.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not.”
“But George, you’re a cosmetologist! You of all people should know.”
“It’s cosmologist, actually.” George rolled his eyes, and smiled, all too familiar with this intentional jibe on his branch of astronomy.
“You’re a cosmetologist! The first axiom of cosmetology—”
“Cosmology!” George corrected her gently.
“Is that there are no special places. The universe is heterogeneous. This place”—here Irene pointed to her heart—“cannot be special. See?”
George shook his head.
“The second axiom of cosmology,” she went on, “is that there are no special directions. So no special places, no special directions. No soulmates. No twin souls. Random intersection of lives, sexual attraction, mating. Just like lizards.”
“Lizards don’t have sexual attraction for each other.”
“You don’t know.”
“So you admit you have sexual attraction for me.”
“Do you need me to say it again?” said Irene.
“Come with me,” shouted George into Irene’s ear. “I need to take you in a special direction and show you a special place.”
She followed him across the dance floor, where it was possible to feel the house music thumping through her feet.
“What is this music?” she shrieked up at him.
“Chaldean house music,” he answered. “Base six or something. The DJ is a Ph.D. in anwa. You know what anwa is, right?”
Irene nodded but didn’t.
“If you listen close, there’s a sample of frequency in this song,” George told her, “that comes from a black hole. You know, like the black hole is singing.”
“Black holes don’t sing,” Irene shouted, over the buzz of the music. “It’s periodic oscillation. That’s not song!”
“You don’t know,” George grinned at her, pulling her by the hand. “You don’t know everything.”
She knew that every girl in the place was giving her a once-over and lots of people were calling out to George. People recognized them, maybe wondered why they were here together. Sometimes he shouted back random things like, “Hey!” or “Yeah!” Other times he appeared to be staring up into the rafters and then shaking his head. Irene followed him closely, and then the stairs opened up and they were headed down. Downstairs was quieter. There was a woman in the corner playing a mechanical harp. Dancers writhed in glass tubes.
“I want to get to the part where we’re alone,” said Irene.
“Are you sure you want to?” said George.
“Yes,” said Irene. “I’m sure.” She felt herself begin to laugh or cry. Was this what sexual frustration felt like?
“OK,” said George. “Right this way.”
Down a hallway, down another flight of stairs, they came to a little room and went inside. It was paneled, like a sauna, but there was a cool breeze coming from a vent. She set her drink down on a little table. George shut the door, and Irene’s heart raced. There was a desk in the corner, some papers, a laptop. A sofa pressed against the wall with a lamp on each side.
“Whose office is this?” she asked.
“The owner. Don’t worry,” he said. “No one will come.”
For a moment she was shy. She couldn’t look at his face. He was so near to her, so captured in this privacy, she wanted to take each breath from him, think about it, see it, experience it. When she did look at his face, he was looking at her. She saw the skin of his neck, so close, the blood vessels beneath it. His chin bent down close to her. She saw the muscles behind his ear. It didn’t make her uncomfortable. It moved her. She felt a significant inner peace, inside some dark place of her body, cooling and spreading out, as if it was overtaking her with calm. She felt good.
“Are you claustrophobic?” he said.
She laughed. She touched one of his hands with hers and he clasped it, so they were holding hands. His face looked smooth and young, and she thought, It’s so improper. Me the damaged, soulless thing. Him this beautiful boy that everybody wants to be next to. Why is he here with me? Why is he holding my hand? She could see something in him that was hers, something beckoning to her to find it, take it, use it. Irene watched him unbutton the collar of his shirt, and his hair fell down over his forehead, and she wanted to reach out for it, that piece of shirt, that curl of hair, to touch it and make sure that it was real. She felt that each of her breaths was fighting to leave her lungs. She felt her ribs fighting to pull the air back in. She sat back against the desk.
“Take off your clothes,” said George. His hands on his own buttons.
A burst of fresh air came from the vent, smelling a little bit of cucumber, like the drink she’d barely touched. What was in her blood right now, making her lose her grip on twenty-nine years of keeping her legs crossed? Making her want to open them, tear off her shirt, spread her breasts across the room for him, feel the cucumber air make her shiver? George reached inside the collar of her shirt and touched her just above her heart. It was the simplest touch, not a stroke or a caress, or even really purposeful, but just a finger moving from up to down, touching a little stretch of her. Maybe he did not even notice it. She said nothing. But she knew that she would remember that touch forever, until the day of her death, as the moment she woke up. It was a moment of total danger and fear followed by a moment of complete surrender.
“I want you to take them off,” he said. His voice was deep.
She knew in that moment there were two Georges: the wisecracking, sunny-smiling George whom she could tease and ridicule over fish tacos, who made jokes and made things easy for her. And then there was another George, inside that George, that was darker, and more strange, and she felt in that one finger pulled down across her chest that the animal George inside had reached out through the human George and touched her.
All men are just this way, she thought. Until now she would have looked upon this animal with contempt or just disgust, with a glowering, impatient desire to bring out that animal and tame it and destroy it. But now Irene felt a new thing: a desire to meet that animal and to know it. Her own animal rising. This was the danger: the animal inside her, pushing to the front. This was the surrender: but she didn’t care. She could growl and snap if she had to; she could wail and moan. He wasn’t going to look on her with anything other than the best of love. He wasn’t going to let her out of this room until she was done. This was where it was all going to come apart: here in safety, here with George. She put her hand over his heart, inside the collar of his shirt, and pressed her fingers into his skin. When she looked up at his face, it was her real face looking up, her animal face from dark inside, and his animal face responded.
He made a noise inside his chest, she felt that noise as a vibration in her hand, and it was the most powerful stimulant she had ever felt in her life.
Gone the snide remarks. Gone the lifetime of making men subservient before her. Gone the wide cracks in her, the bitterness with which she filled the cracks. She looked into his face and she knew him, and she let
the cracks fall wide open. She began to undo his belt. He lifted her shirt up and pulled it over her head. She yanked the buttons of his shirt. He pulled her jeans to the floor. They moved like automatons, held in each other’s notice, and frantic to get more close, more near.
Irene was naked now, the clothes gone. The light was bright, and she stood there in that little room, exposed and raw but closer, closer to him and his body. She wanted to be close. She could see all of him, open to her. He put his hands gently around her and she took in a deep breath. There was no place to go but onward. There was no reason to it, and no sense. Then he was moving her to the sofa, his hands fully locked around her rib cage, his mouth on her neck, and the feel of him was pure other-George, the George behind the sun, the dark animal she had felt moving the hand over her heart. She felt him so acutely that it made her cough. This black animal, grappling with her blackness. Bathed in the brightest light, naked to each other, locked in.
She felt the pressure as he pushed against her, heard a soft moan, was it him or her with mouth open, making sounds come out? And then he pushed on inside. It was so easy, and it was done. She lost herself immediately, her legs wrapped around his thighs, her belly against his, her breasts against him, hands raking along the cushions of the sofa to get herself closer and closer. She wanted to scream, This is how a vagina should be! Full. How stupid I’ve been carrying around an empty one for all this time.
“You can never take it out again,” she said to the side of his face. “Just remember that. Never never. I never want to lose you again.”
He began to move inside her in a way that was rhythmic and thrilling, and she felt her mind tripping away. She was spinning in this world, on the point of him in her, and as she felt herself joined up with him, there in her depths, in the geometric depths of her round cervix, her mind spun again, and she saw what was entirely mathematical. A vision before her face of a circle and a point and a line, and the way they moved together, up and down, back and forth. One circle inside another circle becomes a point that moves just up and down.
“It’s the Tusi couple,” she said to him. “It’s the Tusi couple. It’s happening inside me.”
“Oh,” he said. “Good. Can’t talk now.”
“It’s the Tusi couple, George!” she said. “It’s happening inside me!” Rolling around, rolling around. Up and down. He wouldn’t tell her no, his forehead was pressed into the fabric, his hands around the back of her, and the feeling she was having inside her only grew.
“You know about the Tusi couple, George,” said Irene. She was grasping, grasping to hold onto her words. “You know what it is.”
“Shhh,” said George. She glanced at him, her eyes open wide in the light. Was he smiling or was that a grimace? Was his head thrown back in laughter, or was it pain? What was happening inside her, between her legs, so sweet and urgent.
“Copernicus,” she gasped. “This is Copernicus we’re talking about! Copernicus!” How can Copernicus be wrong?
“Copernicus, shhh…” said George, his voice rough and low. His hands now found her breasts, and he rolled her nipples roughly between his fingers. He sank his teeth into her shoulder, his tongue following the line of her collarbone, and the firmness rubbing between her legs, shooting up into her and drawing down again, sending electric shocks out into her extremities, tunneling into her body and filling it with energy.
Then Irene found she couldn’t talk either, and the Tusi coupling inside her found its own rolling rhythm, and she and George, pining for each other, and finding each other, pressed together on themselves. In the dark behind her eyelids, she lost track of who she was, and who was with her, and who was not her. She felt him through her body, inside her body, and she could feel the whole of him. And there, down inside, she met him, quiet and slow and dear.
“George, there’s something wrong with you,” said a voice inside them.
“No, there’s not,” said another voice.
“I can feel it. I can see it. I can’t be this close and not see it. I can’t be so near, and not feel it.”
“No, there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“It’s you, not me,” said a third voice. “It’s you there’s something wrong with.”
The Tusi couple went on spinning in itself, one circle rolling inside the other circle, the point on the line going up and down, up and down, and the deep conversation hovered on the edge of her consciousness, until she could hear that it was just repeating. When it was over, Irene locked her arms around him. “You can’t take it out,” she said again, her voice sounding strange to her now. “I already told you that.” She felt likely to cry. She felt likely to shut off the lights, yank off her face, crawl under a rock. The fan blew its cucumber air. The sofa creaked behind her back. Had it always been creaking? “Please don’t leave me,” she cried. She calculated the effort it would take to pull her clothes back on, yank the door open, march back up through the club and out, give the ticket to the valet, get her car, drive to the Anthony Wayne Bridge, stop the car, get out, climb over the railing, jump off, and die. Or the effort it would take to stay here, entwined with this creature who was so strange and so familiar, whom she did not know she had been missing so much.
17
Belion stood on the other side of the small door. He had decided to shrink himself. He had already gone through the door. This was the only course of action he could pursue. He had now pursued it, and he was on the other side.
Silvergirl’s avatar was nowhere on the regular map of the game. She was in a dark spot on his map, or to put it in coding terms she was in a set of numbers that had no definition. The game was coded in chunks, in blocks, and every space, every object, every creature had a number. The numbers she inhabited had not, it appeared, been assigned. They had been skipped.
It was as if when she passed through that door she went into another world—one that had ceased to exist or had not yet been created. Or had she given up on him, quit the game, deleted her character, ended her life? He had never been told by an administrator, “This player has committed suicide. Please erase her avatar and distribute her belongings among her friends.” You couldn’t kill yourself in the game universe. You fought for your life, because a fighter never quits. That was the whole idea. Stabbing yourself in the guts with a knife was an invalid operation. You could, however, inadvertently become a jumper. People did that all the time. Only to regenerate at the fountain in their hometowns, good as new.
On the other side of the door, he quickly made himself big again. He got back his water buffalo horns. He put back on his large-size armor. Enough of being small and going through stupid little doors. He was now gigantic again and a god. He followed a path out of the cave and through the dim forest, listening to repeated ambient noises of birdsong and the rustle of squirrels on a loop.
Belion, sitting in Toledo, turned to a different monitor and checked that he was still listed as online. He was. His character appeared in a dark part of the map. He could see Silvergirl there, too, but he couldn’t see what was between him and her. Belion felt, for the first time in a long while, worried about his safety. He had no idea if he was still invincible. The thought that he could be killed or even hurt was new to him. But instead of unpacking the idea, he felt like throwing it down a well. Stupid idea.
He came to a grand gate in a stone wall. On each side of the gate were huge carved figures, like solemn pillars. They had cone-shaped beards made of regular stone curls, and they wore fez-shaped hats. Their round eyes regarded Belion without concern. Above them was a huge stone lintel, carved in pictures and angular marks. The gate was just an opening in the wall, and nothing was stopping Belion from going inside, so he did.
Before him the main causeway of the city was dusty and empty, lined on both sides by ancient buildings and rubble. He listened intently, but the ambient noises coded into this area were just a whistling breeze and the scratch of ragged linen on stone. He found himself checking his other screen for approaching PCs
, but there was nothing to be seen. He could not tell if he was in danger or not. This was living. This was not spectating, orchestrating, or destroying. This was life.
He stood inside the gates of this dusty old city and surveyed the rough streets, crumbling red stone buildings. At the bottom of his screen, a text box informed him that he felt a thin breeze, and smelled something sour. A horned lizard watched him from the railing on one battered patio. Belion moved toward the first intersection, and almost immediately he was attacked. The thing came at him from the side: a woman with the body of a four-legged beast. It pounded at him with gnarled fists, licking its lips greedily. After the initial shock of seeing his own hit count go down for the first time in a year, he removed its head with one stroke of his club. When he clicked the command to search its corpse for valuables, he removed from it a lavender stone.
He crossed a bridge over a wide river. There were no boats on the river; nothing floated there. On his left he saw an official-looking building, and inside he opened a glass cabinet and withdrew a silver flute. He smashed a table and found nothing underneath. In a murky fountain he saw what he thought might be a rotted arm, but the graphics were so lame, he wasn’t sure.
He turned down a side street, killed two more of the woman beasts, and came to an abandoned marketplace with tattered awnings stretched over dusty stalls. There were stalls that had held tapestries, stalls that had held furniture. In one stall he found something he could pick up—when he examined it, the game told him it was a chunk of venison. Venison. He shook his head and dropped it. He checked the map on his other screen and saw that he was coming near to the dot that marked Silvergirl’s presence. She was alone at the edge of the city.
There were four watchtowers, one at each corner of the city wall. He thumped up a circular staircase, a squeeze for his wide shoulders. No more shrinking, thought Belion. This is it. Upstairs, he found a stone golem and the back of a girl. He saw the wrinkle of her silver cowl at her neck, and knew that it was she. Silvergirl sat in the window, her feet outside, the robe puddled on the sill around her buttocks. The world outside her window was blurry and incomplete. It had not been properly coded and the textures were rough, but she looked at it as if it were some kind of damned sparkling vista or something.