An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  Laura takes a step back when she approaches. It is clear she hasn’t had much to do with children. She turns and stares back at the rest of the people. Bookish girls with short green and pink bobs and a serious set to the mouth, hugging thick textbooks, standing firm in their heavy-soled boots. Boys with glasses and startled expressions who look permanently surprised to be alive at all. An ungendered person, small and slight with a lightly furred chin, perhaps caught mid-transition from the neutral space into male.

  Laura quickly looks back towards the snaking line and clutches her handbag to her chest. She is wearing matching pink heels. She is long and lithe and beautiful and yet here, where no one seems to notice her, she has lost her position as something extraordinary. I can feel the small slump of her shoulders, the studied pout. She is here because she is being paid to take me here, but she would prefer to be at home.

  The line creeps forward and the hail dwindles to heavy rain. We pay our money at the gate and I remember the man who takes our cash. His name is Herb, which is nice when you end up in the scented garden and imagine him eating his lunch on a break amid the rosemary and the thyme. She barely looks at him when he takes her money but I move her eyes back. I look. He seems tired, like he’s slept badly.

  Ask him how he is today.

  ‘How are you today?’

  He looks up at her for the first time. He almost smiles.

  ‘Very well, thank you for asking.’

  He gives her change and she smiles a little and he seems grateful for the smile, grinning back and opening the gate for her to walk through.

  ‘The ten o’clock show is about to start,’ he says. ‘Oceans of the Past.’

  I love that one. I’ve seen it but I love it. I smile again and we nod.

  We sit in rows like a lecture theatre. Almost every seat is taken, which seems to surprise her, and we have to push past an Indian man with a neat glossy beard and an old lady with her hair tied severely back into a bun to get to the only free seat. There is a father and his child on the left side of us and a young man with a T-shirt that says Plato’s Cave: Search and Rescue Mission on the front. I smile and her mouth makes the shape of it but I can tell she is baffled by my amusement.

  She is as uncomfortable here as I was in her nightclub. She puts the headpiece on and looks from side to side. The child is jiggling up and down, thumping down onto his hands, which he rests beneath him. The Search and Rescue man is shy and quiet at her other side. He smells like smoke. It is as if he has come straight from warming his hands at an open fire and I wonder what he was doing before his trip to the planetarium. Forestry perhaps. Maybe he was just at home, burning off debris from the last storm.

  We start the experience in water. It happens quickly and unexpectedly, and even though I have been waiting for the show to begin I am, as always, surprised by it. The tiny fish dart between our fingers and she feels them flicking silvery, nibbling at the skin of her elbow and so I feel it too. It is a strange piggybacking. She is imagining these fish are real. They are created directly in her neural pathways. She senses them as clearly as she senses the man beside her holding his hands up to let the fish slip against his palms. Her own senses are tricking her into believing that the whole space is filled with schools of fish. And here I am, my own senses fooling me into believing I can feel her hands reaching up to brush a fish away from her cheek. I feel the slip of its scales, the cool weight of it, the way its muscular body adjusts and finds its place in the school. Layer upon layer upon layer of deception and yet this is all we are, this filtered interaction with the world. I am in her body therefore I have a body. Her body.

  I remember fish, I tell her, real fish.

  No way.

  I am one hundred and thirty years old. When I was a kid I used to go fishing in the ocean. With a rod and bait, and we didn’t know how rare a thing that would be in just a few years.

  I can feel her wonder. She puts out her hands and there are bigger fishes now to stroke and turn in our imaginary water. A large angelfish darts past and she reaches across to touch it and the man beside us reaches at the same time and our hands link. We have missed the fish entirely but here we are, our fingers locked together and we look at each other’s faces for the first time and I see that his eyes are heavy lidded and very brown. I notice his skin, dark and buttery and even his fingers in my hand feel soft. I smell an open fire and the hidden sweetness of soap beneath. He has balanced a satchel of books on his lap; I can see the corner of one peeking out and I know the image on the jacket. I have that same edition, or I used to.

  I reluctantly let go of his fingers and smile, nodding down into his lap. ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle?’ The words come out of her mouth seamlessly. My thoughts, her words. She no longer feels like a car that I am driving. She feels like me. I am the car, and I ease myself out into the oncoming traffic.

  He is nodding.

  ‘I love that book,’ I tell him. ‘I always felt that she was me, you know? That I lived in that castle. That book felt like it described me exactly.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I know what you mean. That scene at the beginning when she walks into the shop? To be honest, that’s about as far as I’ve got but I love it already.’

  I laugh and then I flinch, hold my hands up in front of my face to ward off the big graceful shadow of the shark. He laughs and reaches out to touch the sandpapery skin.

  ‘I can’t get used to sharks,’ I tell him. ‘I still get scared they are going to eat me with all those teeth.’

  ‘That’s crazy.’

  ‘When—’ but the words are taken away from me. Laura has closed her lips and keeps them tight shut.

  When I was a girl? she asks silently. Really? Are we going to tell him your fishing stories?

  And I know she’s right. I can’t go around telling everyone that I’m just a collection of neural patterns. No flesh left, just a jumble of quantum probabilities.

  ‘What?’ he asks and balances a cuttlefish on the palm of his hand.

  ‘When this is done,’ Laura continues for me, ‘do you want to go get something to eat?’

  She startles both of us with her suggestion. I can see him backing away, cautious. He is not used to a strange woman asking him out on a date. I am not used to asking someone. He and I have both been ambushed by her superior confidence with men. The hesitation is only momentary. He begins to smile cautiously as he nods.

  ‘I would love to. Actually.’

  ‘Oh. Octopuses,’ I say, pointing, and Laura seems to disappear from my consciousness as I point and feel a single tentacle wrap around my finger, the suckers tasting her flesh, or pretending to taste because it isn’t real. It is imaginary and yet it is tasting her skin. I am probably not real either and yet I feel the press of his knee against mine. She has encouraged him and I don’t pull away from the warmth of his leg. I wish I had done this more often when I had a body, I could have just come to the planetarium and watched the fishes and picked up some strange, sweet boy. But I was too old. For so much of it I was just too old. I doubt that this boy would have pressed his warm leg against my wizened old flesh. By the time I was old enough to know what I wanted, the men I wanted, I was too old to be attractive to them.

  I am in Laura’s body now and she is more beautiful than I ever was. It would be such a sweet surprise for someone who looks like her to be at all interested in someone as bookish as this young man now.

  When the blue whale lumbers gently through the water overhead we both look up and his fingers find mine. The pressure of his hand seems right. We watch the sky and there is a leviathan passing overhead and I remember that time in my father’s fishing boat. How old was I? Ten, maybe? I remember the sound, a huffing coming out of nowhere. I remember my father switching the engine off and drifting, open mouthed, and I didn’t know what we were waiting for until the whale surfaced, not close enough to touch but even at that distance it seemed magical. A southern right whale, and my dad reaching for my hand and the two of
us just bobbing in the boat watching the slow curl of its dark body rising above the surface of the ocean. I felt a little wave of fear because it wasn’t close enough to knock our boat over but maybe if it dived down and surfaced one more time it would be. Still, even with that shudder of worry I felt the excitement too.

  The whale disappeared and we waited in the silence but it never surfaced again. I wasn’t disappointed. I had never seen a whale that close before and it was a new and wonderful thing. My father kept holding my hand for the longest time and when he finally let me go to start the motor of the little boat I set my mouth in a firm line and told him that I was going to be a marine biologist when I grew up.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘But you have to do well at maths and science if you are going to do that.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. A turning point. One of the few in my life that I remember clearly. I didn’t study fish but I still love them, even now when there are no whales left in the oceans and hardly any fish at all. When I had a body I would go down to the sea and watch the swarm of jellyfish bob at the surface, and remember.

  The whale passes over and is gone. The boy lets go of my hand and I feel the disappointment of both these things.

  ‘I’m Liv,’ I tell him and then I hear the sharp tut from my mouth and it is Laura, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  ‘I’m Anthony,’ he says, and he finds my hand again, this time to shake it as we acknowledge our first formal introduction.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  His fingers curl up with mine on the arm of the chair between us. We are holding hands. Openly.

  I feel a slight unease. It is just like when my father and I saw the whale breaking the surface. It was the size of the beast, the beauty of it, something about its immensity that made me frightened, knowing how easy it would be to capsize.

  I feel this now. The potential for a fall. The threat is not immediate; we are safe at the moment. The whale is still a little way off. The water is undulating, but at this point relatively still. I hold on to Anthony’s hand and I feel as if this boat we are in is precarious. If you fall in the water in winter you have minutes, my father used to tell me. That’s out there—pointing. You have to get yourself back into the boat quick smart. If the sharks don’t get you then the cold sure will.

  I feel a small shiver tracing the line of my spine. I grip his fingers more tightly. They feel warm. Real, more than the dancing or even the sex. His body feels like a small anchor and holding his hand here under the impossible ocean I feel like I am finally coming to rest after a long time of drifting about unmoored.

  *

  I still need sleep. This has been a surprise. I have taken on more work, but I find that I will be working on one problem or another and there is a sudden slowing. If I were corporeal I would be getting bleary-eyed. Without actual eyes, or the ability to switch to soft focus, I would have thought I could just follow on from one task to another. But that is not the way it is. I find myself slowing. Time is still linear for me. Even with this strange kind of immortality I am bound by the temporality that holds a body in space. I come to the end of a paragraph and if I had eyes I would be rubbing them. I allow myself to drift into what at one time I would have called sleep. It is a different space, one where thoughts are left to randomly generate more thoughts. I leap from image to image without censoring myself as I do in waking life and you might call this space dreaming. Day dreaming.

  The deadlines I have set myself are stringent and yet I need to take a period of time to cut my intellect free. One thought circles around to another and I am back in the cafe with Anthony, laughing, talking about books we both like, making plans to meet again. Finding ourselves holding hands in a cinema, his breath in my ear. Hail up to our ankles, crunching under our boots, melting away so quickly as the spring day folds back on itself and the steam begins to rise and dampens our shirts.

  I am going to need more money. It is essential that I climb back into Laura as soon as she will let me. It has been a long stretch of days since I saw him. My nervousness increases with each passing hour.

  How is it that I can feel this way about a boy who is young enough to be my great-grandson? It’s like when I was a teenager waiting anxiously by the phone. Is there something wrong with me? I think about the research I did with the Cameron model, in the years before the whole program was abandoned and Cameron himself was finally shut down. The unnatural attraction the hebephiles felt for him. I wonder if there is something just as wrong with an ancient crone slipping her wrinkled old fingers between the smooth fingers of a young man in his twenties. Well, of course it’s unnatural. But one thing I learned from my long life was that we are always attracted to youth and healthy flesh.

  I wake, if that is what you could call it, and I am full of doubt. I am a different kind of monster, not a pedophile or a hebephile but some new and terrible creature born from this new and terrible modern world. Never mind the rights and wrongs of my feelings for Anthony. He thinks that I am something lithe and beautiful. He thinks I’m Laura. He could never love me for myself. No teasing out of possibilities settles with a happy ending. He falls in love with her and I am alone. He finds out who I really am and is disgusted and I am alone. Laura ups the price and there is no way I can afford it and we part ways and I am alone. Laura finds her own love, marries, looks towards children and I am alone.

  I go back to the lonely work of making narratives for others. My own book, Memoir of a Woman Older than Flesh, remains unfinished. The imperatives of the real world have taken the wind out of my literary sails. I check my bank account. A robust sum. More than enough for someone who needs no food or clothing. My ‘housing’ costs are the computer storage space I have to pay for. The rest of the money is to spend on Laura, and through Laura it must be spent on Anthony and on me.

  I don’t know what you see in him.

  I like him, I tell her. I have pulled her hair back into a low ponytail like the one I used to wear when I was a child. I have toned down her eye make-up, ditched the false lashes. She has reluctantly bought a pair of boots and an apron dress, as instructed. She stands and stares at our reflection in the mirror.

  God. Are you sure?

  I like it. What’s wrong with it?

  The figure in the mirror seems familiar. She’s not me but she does look like someone who might be from my life, a girl who might once have been a friend of mine.

  I’m not sure men would like this. She points at her own reflection. And I know a few things about men.

  She has a point, but I turn our body around in the mirror and can’t find fault with this new version of her. Still physically perfect. Still beautiful by anyone’s measure. And yet I am here in some small way looking back at myself in the mirror. Recognising in those unadorned eyes a small fragment of what I have lost. I am here, they whisper through the shape of Laura’s eyes. See me? I am here.

  *

  The kiss has been hovering near our lips for days. Every time we speak our eyes move to each syllable as if the muscle movements of a kiss were hidden in the words. There is, as usual, a storm stomping around beyond the walls of the restaurant. We can hear the angry charge of it approaching—its flamboyance of lightning and thunder—but even this feels somehow joyous, like a naughty but benevolent god celebrating the first touch of our lips.

  I am too old now to imagine that I could fall in love so swiftly and yet when the kiss ends—as it must, to save us both from suffocation—I am in love.

  We will be going home to his place. He lives with his mother, but she is travelling and so we will be alone. We will make love for the first time, but all this is a formality. A sweet denouement. We are together completely now. I look into his surprised but joyful face and I know that any deal we need to make has been done. We are together. More truthfully, he is with the body of Laura and the pattern of my brain. We call a taxi and it pulls up in the dry space as we climb into it. Me, Anthony and Laura. Always Laura hiding
in the shadows. Almost, but never completely, leaving us to be alone together. What a strange new world we are making.

  In the future, pairings like this, signed in triplicate, will be considered normal. This is clear to me now as the cab accelerates blindly through the pelting hail. For now this is unique, even if Anthony is still unaware of exactly how. For now it is just me and him, and of course there is Laura. An unlikely threesome to become pioneers.

  *

  I resent her in his bed. Surely she must know this. Anthony is hesitant. His penis swells as if with breath, then exhales. He is frightened, or he is unused to this kind of naked attention. He apologises and clings to my shoulders, burying his chin in the crook of my neck.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell him, and it really is okay. We could sit here reading Tolstoy, lying in each other’s arms. Or describe each other’s bodies with our exploratory hands. That would be enough. I love you is what I want to say, but there is Laura holding me back. She is like my conscience. She lets me take a few surefooted steps forward and then her hands take over from mine. Her mouth bends down to taste him for the first time, and when I put my own hands to the seat of my pleasure she intervenes.

  This is impossible, I tell her, acknowledging her presence directly for the first time since we climbed into his bed.

  She hears my frustration but shrugs it off.

  He doesn’t want you just getting off on him while his cock is all limp, she says, and it is true. I hate to admit that she’s right, but she has been in the business of restoring men to their manhood for a few years now, and even in my significant stretch of life experience, I almost never had to think of anyone’s pleasure but my own.