by Ana Calin
Leona sat by me on the bed’s edge as I towel-dried my hair.
“I say we take this to Hector,” she said. “I mean, come on, there’s no such thing as an ex-BioDhrome. They’re a vicious pack, they traffic organs and conduct genetic experiments on humans, I doubt they let anyone out of their ranks alive. There must be an awful lot of power behind what BioDhrome does, and I’m talking megalomaniac oligarchs who want to live forever, maybe backed up by entire freaking governments. Novac wouldn’t have been able to escape them, so he must still be in the game.”
“Damian admitted both he and Dad now work for BioDhrome’s antagonists, who are just as powerful.”
“In your place, I’d try to get more information out of him.” Leona stood and started preparing the bed for the night, her toned backside wriggling through her satiny night robe. It made her look like a temptress from a Latin American soap opera. “If anyone stands a chance of winning his trust, it’s you.”
“I’ll talk to him again tomorrow,” I said a few moments later as I turned off the light and tucked myself in. “I’ll push for more answers.”
The mattress warped as Leona turned on one side, facing me in the half-darkness with an arm curled under her head.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
“And? Am I right?”
I exhaled in surrender and pulled the blanket up to my nose, as if that could conceal my thoughts and fantasies.
“I guess so.” Yes, I was completely taken with him, even under the circumstances.
“I think he’s pretty much into you, too.”
“You think?”
“Don’t take this wrong, it’s not like I want the two of you together anymore. Damian Novac is dangerous, but his attraction to you is good for your self-esteem. For you to lose the preposterous complexes Tony left you with.”
I snorted. “Are you even sure he likes me?”
“I don’t have the slightest doubt, and I’m pretty darn certain his feelings are way beyond ‘liking’.”
I didn’t reply, allowing her time to say more. I couldn’t hear enough of this. But there was something else Leona seemed eager to talk about. She propped herself on an elbow and turned the reading lamp on. “There’s something going on with you, Alice.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re different. Something changed. I mean, you’ve always been pretty, but . . .”
“Good night,” I cut her off and turned my back at her. I wasn’t in the mood to hear, “You’re beautiful the way you are.” But Leona jumped out of bed, grabbed my hand and pulled to drag me out.
“What the hell are you doing?” I squealed.
She rummaged in her bag and took out a makeup set the size of a cell-phone. She opened it and stuck the mirror out to my face.
“Just look at yourself and save me the effort of explaining.”
An eye appeared first, then the mouth, then a cheek. Leona didn’t succeed in centering the thing on my face, but I doubted there was anything special to see anyway.
“I still don’t see your point.” I pushed her hand away.
She dropped next to me, forcing me to look into the mirror. She pointed her finger at this and that part of it, which surely reflected my face from her angle, but all I could see was the plastered ceiling seemingly afloat in the vague lamplight.
“You’re different since you came back with Novac at Marvimex, as if his presence had somehow activated the femme fatale in you,” she said, gaining more and more enthusiasm. “Your skin is silken and smooth in a natural and yet unnatural way. Your lips are rosy even though you’re not wearing any make-up. I don’t know what happened with you tonight, but you look ravishing, Alice.”
“I don’t see anything, to be honest. And I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation, it’s just plain stupid. And vain.”
She clapped the makeup set shut and gave me a narrow-eyed scowl. “The Alice I know is very much in touch with her inner bimbo. ‘Phony they are if they deny her.’ Should I go on?”
“I recognize my own quotes, thank you.”
Leona nodded, neck long and face drawn in mock-refinement. “Words put to paper in your dear philosophic period. Freshman year, wasn’t it? When you were still fearless. Why put up a false pretense now, Alice? You know that most women want to be desirable. Fuckable.” She sneered the last word in my ear.
“I did say that, didn’t I?”
“You must’ve read it somewhere.”
“Surely some misogynistic philosopher.”
“Aren’t they all ...”
“Maybe Nietzsche. I’d expect particular impertinence from him. Wouldn’t hurry to ascribe it, though, it was a while back.”
“Well, you know what they say. We forget names and titles, but the content shapes us. Do you still believe in your old thesis?”
I pondered and fished the truth right out of the darkest depths. “Strongly.”
Leona smiled. “Then hear and savor: You returned home different tonight. It must be the adrenaline Novac makes boil in your blood. You’re still the sweet Lolita with baby blue eyes and creamy caramel locks but somehow more . . . glamorous. Striking even.”
“But still Lolita,” I whispered, deflating. Beautiful or not, Lolita was still a child and a subject I resented. “How’s George feeling? Any improvements?”
Leona dropped back on the bed, hand already reaching to turn off the reading lamp. I caught it.
“I’m listening.”
She rolled on her back. When she spoke, she did so as if she talked to herself. “All he wants to do is cling to my chest and snivel. The entire time. Among sobs he might repeat apologies.”
“Apologies?”
“He feels guilty for being violent with me. He fears he might’ve killed me like...he did that guy.”
A heavy silence fell over us. What was I supposed to say? “Oh, honey, everything’s gonna be all right?” Overused and devoid of meaning. I lay on my back by her side. She turned off the light, and for minutes both Leona and I stared upwards in the darkness.
“You think he would’ve done it, Alice?”
The question I feared. I squeezed her hand, my voice faint. “Yes.”
Further moments of silence, even though we were both wide awake and haunted. I decided that, since we took off the gloves and wielded the dirtiest of truths again, we might as well do it all the way. Plus, this particular truth might just free her.
“You would’ve done it, too, Leona.”
The sheets rustled as she rolled on the side to face me. I didn’t do the same, but kept staring upwards, eyes darting all over the ceiling in search of words.
“The gas, it raised our adrenaline to a level that stripped us of everything...leaving only the most basic of instincts. We were . . .”
“Enraged animals,” she completed.
“Every one of us was ready, willing, and eager to spill blood.”
“Not every one. You weren’t.”
I couldn’t keep back a bitter laugh. The memory of the peasant in rubber boots, his bad-smelling grin, the wrinkled, bloodshot eyes that my fingers had clawed into, all of it played before me like a movie on fast-forward.
“Oh, yes, Leona, me too.”
She squeezed my hand harder. “That was different. It was self-defense.”
“You call it self-defense when you don’t have a choice. But I overpowered him, Leona. I scratched his eyes, he couldn’t have followed if I’d used the chance and run away. But no, I wanted to finish him.” I took a deep breath. “Malice is in all of us, I guess. When stripped of the icing of civilization and given the proper chemical input, we’re all just instinct. We’d never guess who we really are until we get down there, to the most basic level.”
Another few moments of silence, grotesque memories sucking us both in. When Leona talked again, I heard her as if through static. “I don’t know, but basic isn’t how I felt.”
“How did you feel?”
“Sup
erior.”
The mattress wobbled as she rolled on the other side, her back to me. She cried herself to sleep that night. For hours I thought about what she meant by superior. How could anybody feel like that in the state we’d been? We’d been animals. Stronger than in our civilization-coated environment where most of us are lost to apathy, but still basic.
Indeed better than merely human in some sense. Tougher, more efficient, darn resilient. All due to the gas that had turned our bodies into some kind of high-performance machines. I’d even recovered from multiple fractures and God knows what else before I’d woken up. The realization gave me the chills.
But if the gas alone could do that, resulting in blood tests that baffled doctors, then what had BioDhrome done a whole year with Damian Novac? I shuddered at the idea of him lying on a metal table, needles sticking out of his body, his eyes half-closed and mouth open, tubes snaking down his throat.
Then I thought about Giant. His being so large that he could’ve easily won Mr. Olympia could be ascribed to steroids, the brightness in his eyes to the gas, but combined? In the context of Damian’s and BioDhrome’s story? With his breathtaking looks that bordered on inhuman, Damian seemed to be of the same outlandish league as Giant, so the latter was surely one of BioDhrome’s experiments, too. Then it hit me.
A genetically modified organism.
I sat up in a flash. This is it! This was the result of everything linked together: BioDhrome’s illegal medical experiments, the R.I.S.’s chase for them, my Dad’s part in it as a geneticist, the extraordinary Giant and the striking Damian, all of it led to one conclusion: BioDhrome agents were genetically engineered.
An urge hit me to find out exactly what they’d done to Damian, and what made him unable to live among people, as he’d told me tonight. An Upgrade, Dad’s specific words came to mind. Yes, that’s what they must be called, Damian and the Giant. Upgrades. Superhumans.
For hours I strolled in circles around my room. Barefoot and gnawing at my fingernails. When Leona found me in the rocking chair in the morning, my eyes were still open.
“What are you doing, curled up there?” she inquired, black hair messy, eyebrows raised.
“I’ve got it, Leona. I’ve got it.”
Telling her the conclusion I’d reached during the night was only a matter of minutes. Leona listened with her usual concentrated frown.
George still snored as we picked our outfits for the day. It was an easy and fast process, with Leona grabbing her bags from Marvimex, which she’d dropped on the chair by George’s couch when she’d stormed to him yesterday. I plucked black khakis and a loose sweater from the wardrobe. It wasn’t my favorite outfit, but more creaking would’ve woken George.
Mom was up ahead of us, as usual. A rich breakfast was already on the table: marmalade, chocolate croissants, butter, scrambled eggs and, luckily, black tea, the only thing I managed to get down my throat.
Mom grinned, guessing what knotted my stomach. “Anxious about seeing Damian today?”
Leona’s eyes flipped up at me over the rim of her teacup.
“He’s just a friend,” I muttered. The word prickled my tongue.
“Now that you mention it, I never got to ask,” Mom said. “How long have you known each other?”
I thought about the first time I’d laid eyes on him mid-November. “Two months,” I replied, recounting our history in my head.
I’d stalked him from afar for about a month and then made plans over the Christmas break with Leona to get his attention. I couldn’t help but smile as I remembered stumbling into his arms at that party. We’d started talking in the cafeteria afterwards. Then the trip to the mountains and the events that had shaken us to the core. And now we had . . . wow, already mid-February. “Three, maybe.”
“Hmm,” Mom said. “I’ve seen great loves develop over that amount of time.”
“Not the case here,” I retorted, a little acrid.
“He seems to like you,” Mom insisted.
I rolled my eyes for the first time in over a decade. “Are you in league with Leona? The guy is every girl’s fantasy. The competition’s fierce for him. And he’s actually seeing one of the campus Barbies, so forget about it.” A flash of Damian rolling his hips between Svetlana’s legs made me wince.
Mom placed the aluminum-foil clad sandwiches in our bags. I remembered the rice pudding she’d packed once back when I was in elementary, the entire classroom laughing and pointing fingers at me in the lunch break.
“What are you doing, Mom?”
She ignored the question and proceeded. “He’s great looking and, as far as I can tell, darn smart, of course there’s competition for him. But his eyes are on you, my dear.”
Leona intervened. “Jenna, are you saying you have a good feeling about this guy? I thought you hated that whole Prince Charming vibe.” She sounded and looked surprised, too.
“Actually, I do have a good feeling about him,” Mom replied with a warm smile and the look of wisdom on her face that I’d trusted all my life. Had I been wrong about her superior mom intuition?
The morning unfolded as per usual. We took the bus to campus—a true pleasure ride. It was packed and stunk of onions, but there was no way Officer Sorescu was going to offer his private escort services ever again, so crowds were the safest place to be.
The campus hallways were an explosion of voices and laughter, and the cafeteria was as busy as ever. I risked a glance over my shoulder in search of Damian and found him looking as muscular as ever in a thin beige knit. It was tight on his arms, and made my chest squeeze up into a ball. He was in the middle of an animated conversation with his friend when Svetlana teetered up to him on her sky high, pin thin heels—giggling girlfriends included. Her long arm coiled around Damian’s like a viper around a thick tree branch, her grin large and white, her hair falling long and glossy platinum down her back. Dressed in a white blouse and slim khakis, she looked beautiful and seductive. Damian didn’t even glance at me, but Svetlana’s girlfriend whispered something in her ear, and Svetlana looked at me and doubled over with laughter.
“Stop glaring,” Leona said as she placed her tray on the standing table, facing me. “It’s obvious you’re jealous, and that doesn’t work in your favor.”
Leona was right. I shook off the feeling, lest anyone notice my bitterness showing.
“This isn’t about Damian,” I grunted, still looking daggers at my father’s mistress. “I feel I owe it to my dad to smash her face.”
“I’m sorry, Alice, but your dad has no one but himself to blame that his much younger lover fell for his much younger bodyguard. Or friend, or pseudo-son, or whatever Damian really was – is – to him. Besides, I don’t believe you. This is about Damian, and you know it.” She slid a plastic bottle of water over to me. “Here, cool off.”
I caught the bottle, unscrewed the top, and took a swig with my eyes still on Svetlana. Yes, jealousy ate at me like an army of rodents at a piece of cheese.
Svetlana averted her gaze. Perhaps it was obvious in my glare this time that I was ready to tie a pretty bow around her neck using her own jugular, even if it cost me a bruised face.
She began rummaging in her designer bag, and I looked away. When I looked back up, a man’s face blocked my view. He stood real close, and I had to back up a couple of steps to bring him into focus. My mouth popped open.
“Tony?!”
He smiled a shy smile. “Hi, Alice.”
I stared at him, unable to utter a word. It had been a long time since this guy had stood before me, although part of me thought not long enough. He looked older and run down—his face was bloated and blotchy and his smile sagged like some sort of misshapen pumpkin. Too much partying, I thought. The air of arrogance was still in place though, his hair slicked back like that of mobsters in old movies. He looked halfway presentable in his coat á la Clark Gable.
“I,” he began, voice shaky. “I saw you on the bus, I –”
“Aha.” Eyebrows
high up, I still couldn’t recover from surprise.
“You were with Leona,” – who, I now noticed in a glance, also stared with an open mouth – “and I wondered if I should come and talk to you. I, I heard what happened, you know.”
“What did you hear?” shot automatically out of my mouth.
“The whole story, you know. The train, broken down in the mountains. The avalanche, you were trapped there. Until they found you, the villagers, you know,” he stuttered.
“I see,” I said, thinking of the adjusted version the R.I.S. had given the police, and the police had given the public.
“You’re looking good, Alice, really good.” Now he ogled me from head to toe, much the way Officer Sorescu had the evening before.
“It took a while until I decided to come here and talk to you,” he said.
“I understand.”
“You do?”
“Perfectly.”
“You still haven’t forgiven me, have you?”
“You still ask?”
A slam on the table made me wince, and the bottles clatter. Leona’s eyes stabbed Tony, her fist clenched, knuckles showing white.
“Watch yourself, asshole,” she spat, so loud that every head in the cafeteria turned in our direction. My eyes darted to Damian, who looked at us like a wolf ready for attack. I had an idea.
I placed a light hand on Leona’s forearm. She gave me a questioning glare with a quirked-up eyebrow.
“It’s all right, Leona. The man has good intentions. Why don’t you tell him what happened in the mountains, if you feel up to it. I sure don’t yet.”
Leona glared at Tony. It took a few moments until she was able to address him again, eyes down to her books, hand angrily flipping pages to stay busy. While she detailed our adventure, I casually observed and gauged Damian’s reaction.
A tight jaw and fixed eyes on us for the win—maybe he feared we’d say too much.
Tony stayed until after the last class that evening. He was there every break. He must’ve really wanted to redeem himself.
“Listen, Tony,” I said, smile broad, eyes soft, hand light on his shoulder, all to convey the show as far as to the corner Damian’s group had gathered in. “Let’s talk about this in a more comfortable place. Why don’t we go to Portofino?”