Almost Real

by Charlotte Stein

  “Oh no, please don’t say that, please, that’s terrible. Okay. Okay. Let’s just…let’s just do whatever you’re comfortable with, all right? Whatever you need, that’s fine,” she said, because she had to, she had to. She couldn’t let him go around feeling like this. She didn’t want to see those fists clenching and unclenching, or those eyes so suddenly filled with a kind of terrified light.

  She just wanted him to be calm and happy.

  Anything he needed to be calm and happy.

  But oh boy did she live to regret that wish.

  Chapter Nine

  She wasn’t sure what he was doing at first. She came out of the bathroom full of a kind of buzzing excitement, sure and certain that some kind of conversation would probably ensue. They couldn’t spend all night just lying there, both of them terrified of accidentally doing something. They couldn’t, because now both of them knew that the other person was terrified of accidentally doing something.

  The two things cancelled each other out.

  Or at least, she thought they did. But now that she stood watching him build an unsettling structure out of pillows, she was no longer quite as sure. Was he making some kind of fort? Some kind of cushiony fort to keep her out? Surely that was the most ridiculous thing in the world. It couldn’t be the case.

  No—he was just creating a mountain of pillows down the middle of the bed.

  Much better, in absolutely no way at all.

  “Is that really what you need to make you comfortable?”

  She had to ask. She’d made the promise, but even so. This was a little more than what she’d expected. This was probably a little more than twelfth-century virgins expected. At least they only had to make do with a sword or a roll of material. This was the Berlin Wall in their bed. Once she lay down she wouldn’t even be able to see him, never mind any accidental touching.

  But then maybe that was the idea.

  “This way, there’ll be no temptation.”

  “Oh God—honestly, I can contain myself. I—”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  Her whole body flushed hot at the words, the urge to face-palm and frantically apologize forgotten. He didn’t mean he was concerned about her transgressions. He was worried about his. He was worried about the terrible, intense, passionate, filthy things he might try to do, instead of lying there frozen.

  And now she was worried about them too—though probably in a very different way. Suddenly her head was full of sexual possibilities, to the point where she could hardly think of anything else. She wanted to answer him, but instead found herself sort of fixed to the spot, mouth hanging open.

  It probably wasn’t a good look. Plus, if she carried on like this he was undoubtedly going to notice. Here he was trying to focus on being good and virtuous, and she’d started drooling like a maniac. She had to get a grip, or at the very least walk across the room and get into the bed.

  That would show that she respected his choices. It would support him in his efforts to really focus on something other than her hair. Oh God, why had he said that about her hair? She couldn’t stop thinking about that, either. She couldn’t stop thinking about how he had discovered the marzipan smell. He was so massive…he must have actually leaned over for that specific purpose.

  But that seemed so crazy she could hardly wrap her mind around it. She slid under the covers with the puzzle still fizzing in her head, always on the verge of asking for clarification but never quite daring. He didn’t want her to ask for clarification. She didn’t want to contravene his wishes. And even if both those things were not the case, there was other stuff standing in the way.

  Like the giant wall that literally stood between them.

  Once she was flat on her back it seemed even bigger than it had before. He must have visited different rooms to amass this many cushions and pillows—despite how insane that idea sounded. Nobody would go to such lengths, she thought, and yet she knew there was no other explanation.

  She was in bed with a man who hunted down extra pillows. And then the light suddenly snapped off and she was in bed with a man who hunted down extra pillows then plunged her into pitch-black darkness. He didn’t even say good night, which wasn’t a big deal in the scheme of things.

  But when added to the other stuff it kind of was. The silence swelled between them, getting thicker and murkier the longer they went without those two words. Should she say it? She kind of felt as if she should but then couldn’t remember if it had ever been a thing before. Maybe they’d never said good night to each other. Maybe she was just imagining the bulging, ultra-pressurized quiet. Maybe—

  “Christ, I feel like I’m being strangled by silence.”

  “Oh thank God, I thought I was the only one.”

  Her words came out in a bursting rush, as relief-filled as anything she’d ever experienced. It felt as though someone had wrapped a metal brace around her throat, and he’d suddenly decided to tear the thing off.

  Now she could breathe. Now she could speak.

  And so could he.

  “Nope, you’re not. Somehow I got this urge to talk. You know how many times I’ve had the urge to talk in my life? I’ll tell you how many—fucking zero.”

  “Well, maybe you want to unburden yourself about the whole—”

  “I don’t want to unburden myself.”

  “Maybe you want to explain the pillow wall.”

  “I already explained the pillow wall.”

  “We could talk about work.”

  “What do you want to discuss?”

  “The gigantic hole in the roof, possibly.”

  “Nothing better you can think of?”

  There was something. It had been nagging her since the control room—though if she was being honest it had started nagging her long before that. Innocuous thoughts had led to tiny concerns, and tiny concerns had piled one on top of the other until finally here she was, wondering and worrying about what he would say if she just spoke the words out loud.

  “We could talk about cloning,” she tried, then held her breath.

  She needn’t have bothered, however. He didn’t have anything notable or controversial to confess—not even when he finally bothered to open his mouth.

  “I never talk about cloning.”

  “You never talk about a lot of things.”

  “No, but especially not that.”

  “Oh really? How come?” she asked, but knew she’d been too flippant immediately. She should have heard the sudden darkness in his tone, or maybe the way he phrased it—with far too much emphasis on the especially. But the trouble was…she’d grown too used to ordinary people who didn’t give a damn.

  And he was not an ordinary person.

  “I think you know already, if your expression when those fucking caught-a-clone segments come on is anything to go by.”

  No, he was the kind of person who said fucking in this really angry way, and noticed her expression even though she was sure she’d hid it well. All these years she’d been sure she had to hide it well, around semi-friends who would probably have her committed, and a company that could likely do worse.

  But here she didn’t have to.

  That was the point—she didn’t have to.

  For the first time she could just say.

  “You think we’re doing a terrible thing?”

  Her voice sounded strange and new, as though she were suddenly speaking out of someone else’s mouth. The most unsettling thing about this wasn’t the ventriloquism, however. It was the suspicion that the wrong person had been talking all this time. The new voice was her real one.

  Her old voice was just pretend.

  “Want me to say no? You’ll be waiting a long time.”

  “So why are you here? If you think it’s terrible, why are you here?”

  “It’s my job,” he said, but it sounded as if he’d used another word. It’s a nightmare I can’t get out of, she thought, and suddenly her heart was thudding in this weird
, sickly sort of way. And it got worse when he added, “People do jobs that hurt other people all the time. Way of the world.”

  Had he just said…had he…

  “You called them people.”

  “They are people. We just pretend they’re not.”

  She put her head back against the pillow for the first part, and closed her eyes for the last. There it was, as plain as day. The thing she’d always known but never really wanted to accept. Everyone just pretended. They pretended.

  “I don’t want to pretend anymore,” she said, only now her voice wasn’t new and strange. It was a thousand years old and riddled with cracks, everything leaking out before she’d had chance to grab hold of it. She sounded desperate, she thought.

  So desperate he could hear it.

  “Hey, hey—come on, don’t do that. Don’t be sad, honey. You’re not the one pushing them through the meat grinder, you know?”

  “But I’m the one placing them on the conveyor belt. I’ve helped make and process thousands of clones, and all of them are most probably dead now. Suffocated to death in the mines on the moons of Jupiter. Pushed into traffic, mutilated and mangled at any sign of rebellion. I’m the overseer at a death factory.”

  “That’s not true. I’ve seen the way you care for them.”

  “No you haven’t. You’ve no idea how I care. You want to know the real way I look after them? I let them run off into the darkness of the desert, because I don’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what to do.”

  She was sure a silence would follow those words. A terrible silence of accusatory understanding—but it didn’t, it didn’t. He spoke directly after her, in a voice so soft she could hardly stand it.

  “So they didn’t take her.”

  Of course he knew about it.

  Of course he did.

  He’d probably seen her file and read about the clone who’d been “stolen” by terrorists on the road to some conference. And then he’d seen her face when those horrible programs came on, and guessed the rest. Likely as not he’d guessed it weeks and weeks ago, though she wanted to confirm it anyway.

  “No. I let her go. I had to let her go.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said in so soft a tone she couldn’t have seen it as anything bad. No one could have seen it as anything bad. It didn’t matter whether it was or not though, in truth. Once the dam had broken she had to babble out the rest.

  There was no other choice.

  “When they attacked, the first thing she did was protect me. I told her that they were here to help her, but she didn’t seem to care. And I thought…I’ve thought ever since that she just didn’t know any better. I told myself that she didn’t.”

  “But she did.”

  “I think so. I think she might have,” she said, and here her voice cracked again. “I think she was my friend. I think she might have been the only friend I’ve ever really known, and I just told her to go off into the desert. God knows where she is now. God knows what happened to her—my friend, my friend.”

  “What else could you have done?”

  “I could have helped her more.”

  “You helped her as much as you could.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t help any of them. I just watch over them the way a car manufacturer watches over engine parts.”

  “If that were true you wouldn’t be talking like this,” he said, but behind her eyes she could see B’s face. She could see that liquid gaze fixed on her, could feel the hand that had taken hers. Don’t you want to come with me?

  Dear God, anyone would have gone with her.

  Why hadn’t she gone with her?

  “Wouldn’t I? Anyone can feel guilty.”

  “Then how come no one else does? Huh? How come no other fucker does?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “You do know. Tell me the reason.”

  His voice and his words were a noose. She could feel them tightening around her neck, making her frantic, making her search for explanations she didn’t have.

  “Maybe because I…I see them every day and I—”

  “That’s not it. Try again.”

  “I’ve worked closely with them—I’ve heard them talk and seen their eyes when—”

  “Come on, Margot, you can do better than that.”

  “I can’t do better than that. I don’t know what it is that makes me different!”

  “Then I’ll tell you, got it? I’ll tell you—it’s because you are the kindest person I’ve ever met. Just the kindest fucking person. How about that, huh?”

  He sounded angry when he said the words, as though he hadn’t wanted to let them out. She’d somehow pushed him to it, just by being completely clueless about who she was. She hadn’t known she was kind. What was it about her that seemed so?

  She couldn’t think.

  “But I…I haven’t done anything worthy of that title.”

  “Sure about that, cupcake?”

  She was sure he’d never called her cupcake, at the very least. Or by her name, if she was really going to be honest about it. That come on, Margot was the first time she’d ever heard him speak it aloud, and her mind kept going back to the way the word had sounded on his tongue.

  Sweet, she thought, very sweet—though not as sweet as this.

  “You just told me that you did something so illegal it could have gotten you executed, and yet you think the illegal thing is not enough. It’s not enough that you let her go. It’s not enough that you thought of her as your friend. You any fucking clue how revolutionary that one word is? I think this whole thing is fucked up, and I’ve never had a clone for a friend. But you did.”

  Everything in her had gone all strange and still. He’d somehow stolen her ability to breathe or move or think—and he wasn’t even finished. There was more mind-altering stuff coming. Great boatloads of the stuff coming.

  “No one’s ever put up with my bullshit the way you do. First dinner we ever had together I couldn’t say a word, couldn’t be polite. I’d forgotten how, from years of no one caring whether I talked or not. But you cared. And you didn’t look at me like I was rude or nothing like that, either.”

  “How did I look at you, then?”

  “Like I was the man I want to be,” he said, in such an awesomely straightforward way she had to put her hands over her face. He said it as though it were nothing, as though it were nothing. She couldn’t stand how small he thought he was.

  He’d just told her she was the kindest, and said that he hadn’t spoken from years of disuse, and still he thought he was small.

  “I don’t know who you think that man is, but I know what kind of man you are. And I promise you, I promise you, you are so amazing in so many different ways,” she burst out, so full of feeling she could hardly stop herself.

  She kind of wished she had a moment later, however. Everything just went so silent, in this really tense way. The seconds ticked by, one piling up on top of the other until they made a minute, then another, and another. Pressure began to build, too tight in her chest and then in her throat. Had she said the wrong stuff? She hadn’t meant to. Things had just seemed so warm between them…and maybe that other word too.

  Romantic.

  Though it was entirely possible that she just didn’t know what romance was. She had so little experience with the stuff that anything probably seemed like hearts and flowers—even this fraught sort of melancholy they had slipped into. She kept leaking out of her eyes, which probably wasn’t a good sign. She never leaked out of her eyes about anything, and certainly not about clones and kindness and people being amazing.

  That just seemed crazy.

  He probably thought she’d gone crazy.

  “I’m sorry—I’m not sure if that was the wrong thing to say.”

  “Sometimes I’m just quiet because I’m stunned. Not because I’m silently judging you,” he said, and for a second she was sure she had misheard. Did he just make a kind of joke? She was sure he’d just made a
kind of joke.

  And one that filled her with relief, to boot.

  “I’m so glad you said that. Most of the time I’m convinced it’s silent judgment.”

  “Well, for the record—it’s never that.”

  “Really? Not even when I sleep-fondle you?”

  “Is that what you think you did?”

  “It’s kind of what I panicked I did.”

  “Oh, Margie.”

  “Did you just call me Margie?”

  “No. What? No. No. Margot.”

  “There had been a distinct gee sound at the end. Where did that come from?”

  She suspected it came from the same place that was obviously trying to make her feel better about everything, but couldn’t quite say so. She didn’t really need to say so, in truth. Everything was already so amazing she didn’t require anything more.

  Yet still he kept giving it.

  “It didn’t come from any place. You’re imagining it. I absolutely never call you cute nicknames in my head. Ever. I’m much too manly for anything like that.”

  “Well, that’s a shame because I was just thinking how great it is when you go against the manly grain. You know, like…when you cook things, and respect my boundaries, and touch me so…gently.”

  “You think I’m gentle?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I…uh…I grabbed you a lot though.”

  She didn’t miss the note of shame in his voice. She couldn’t have missed it—the tone matched her own from a few minutes ago. Apparently, while she’d been busy worrying about touching him or not touching him or seeming as if she wanted to touch him too much, he’d been having very similar issues. In fact, their thoughts had probably intersected exactly on more than one occasion—an idea that kind of made her want to cry and laugh all at the same time.

  Though it did have an upside.

  At least now she could see how absurd she’d been.

  “Oh no. How can I ever forgive you?”

  “I can hear that sarcasm.”