by Julian Gough
He opens his eyes again, but he can’t look at her.
She’s a hacker. That’s amazing.
They should talk about hacking. But he’s not sure how you do it, how you move into a new area. This is already the longest realworld conversation he’s ever had with a stranger.
He looks over her shoulder, at the window. The rain is still slapping against it, running down it. The glass looks like it is endlessly melting. Maybe he could turn an imaginary dial in mid-air, like he does with Mama? He starts to raise his hand; drops it. No; he’s pretty sure other people don’t do that . . .
‘But even the pattern changes, no?’ she says. ‘What’s a baby got in common with an old man? Same person, but—’
‘Exactly!’ says Colt. ‘Nothing. None of the atoms. Not the structures. No memories in common. Nothing in common, not even the pattern. That’s the problem.’ He’s making himself anxious talking about this, but he has to keep going. ‘If my pattern changes, there’s nothing solid there at all. And the more I eat, the faster I change.’ He waves the back of his hand at the pizza, like he’s shooing a fly. ‘And I don’t want to change.’
‘But . . .’ she waves a slice of pizza in the air, ‘we have to grow up.’
‘No! Growing up is just . . .’ Mama has a word for this . . . ‘it’s just a euphemism for dying. Look at the adults you know.’
She raises her eyebrows again. ‘Some of them are OK.’
Colt shakes his head. ‘They slow down. They stop believing in things. They become really conservative and anxious and . . .’
She’s shaking her head. ‘Wait, let’s go back. I think you’re trapped in language. If you see atoms as all these separate objects, then . . . OK, have you ever done mushrooms?
He shakes his head, no.
‘Mmmm,’ she says, and pauses. Studies his face. Takes a breath, and continues. ‘Well, the first time I did them . . . this is hard to describe . . . the world stopped being a thing, you know, an object, and it became a process, a . . . sort of . . . OK, this’ll sound flaky, but the name that came into my head at the time was, an energy dance. The world . . . well, the universe, went from being a noun to a verb.’
Colt circles the metaphor warily.
Finds a way in.
‘Like, mass is energy,’ he says, ‘so, instead of seeing it as mass, you saw it as energy?’
‘Yeah, exactly,’ she says. ‘But it was stronger than that; mass was an illusion, energy was true. It was all just energy, changing form. And it was all one thing, we were all just part of it, not separate.’
‘But then . . . uh—’
Colt doesn’t know what his objection is; but he knows some part of him is worried, is objecting.
She shakes her head, and leans forward across the table and looks straight into his eyes and keeps talking, like Mama does when this is important, ‘—so, you’re not a pattern, separate from your atoms. You are the atoms, which means you are energy. Just energy. You’re just an energy dance. Not an individual, separate, dancing; but part of one big, universal energy dance. Everything’s dancing, with everything else. You, me. All our atoms. Stars, planets, comets, dust; dancing. And a dance has to unfold over time, it has to change.’
‘Yeah. Yeah.’ He’s trying to see the world the way she sees it, but he can’t, and panic rises.
Maybe this is what Mama calls woo-woo. Maybe she is cuckoo. Maybe this is cuckoo woo-woo.
Dancing . . . It’s OK. Dancing is just interacting according to rules. It’s physics. Not woo-woo. Call it interacting. Quantum entanglement . . .
He gets a glimpse of something that feels true.
Everything’s interacting.
Everything’s entangled. OK.
He calms down a little. Her eyes are amazing.
He’s admired her code. It’s elegant. Her snow was so good, he put in higher mountains, to make more use of it. The Snow Queen.
He says it out loud, by mistake, ‘The Snow Queen . . . Sorry, sorry.’
She straightens up, and extends her right hand across the table. She blinks, in a pattern, and he realizes that, while he’s been thinking, he’s been blinking at her in a soothing sequence.
He blinks again.
She blinks.
He’s setting her off.
She has to match his pattern. Wow.
‘My name’s Sasha,’ she says.
‘Sorry. Yes.’ He finishes blinking the pattern, a simple arithmetic sequence, while watching her follow his sequence.
Her hand is still there, extended over the table.
OK.
He reaches out his right hand, and carefully takes her hand in his. Warm and dry and alive, very alive. He shakes it once, and lets it go, breathing heavily.
She starts blinking, a new sequence, and, without thinking, he follows her pattern.
His breathing slows and deepens.
They’re just sitting there, blinking at each other in sequence.
If anyone could see this, Colt thinks, they would laugh at us. They would try to hurt us.
But there is nobody to see us.
A surge of an emotion, a good one, fills him.
It’s the happiest he’s ever been with a strange woman.
He nods.
‘Sasha Bajewski,’ she says.
‘Nice name,’ he says, because he’s heard people say that, a lot, and he can’t see how that can go wrong.
‘Yeah?’ She laughs. ‘Well, it’s the one I’m stuck with. I always think it sounds like the punchline to a joke in Polish. Sashabajewski! And everyone cracks up . . .’
‘Do you speak Polish?’
‘No, no. Polish grandfather. Well, Russian, but he lived in Poland. I never even met him. So, is Colt an old family name?’
Colt shrugged. ‘It was hard to find a name they both liked. So, Dad likes guns. Mama likes horses.’
Sasha laughs, and waits for him to say more; but he hadn’t even realized it was funny, and he’s run out of things to say.
Now stripped of their avatars, their character traits, their high rankings, their weapons, they sit in silence.
Not proper silence, not the still silence of the desert into which you can just relax. This silence is a gap, that will have to be crossed, that keeps getting wider, and harder to leap.
The rain’s easing up. She’ll probably go soon.
What do I do now?
And just as the silence becomes unbearable, she says, ‘Show me your room.’
His breathing speeds up. Can he say no? She seems so certain.
She indicates the door. Stands. He stands too, uncertain.
She reaches out and takes his hand; and he becomes tremendously aware of his hand, as an object, surrounded by her fingers. Constrained. It cannot move in any direction except back out, out of the tunnel of her hand.
But the touch is too light, it’s like fire, his skin is tingling, burning, and his hand jumps in hers, jumps free.
‘Sorry,’ she says. She starts again, reaches out, but this time she squeezes his hand firmly in hers.
The firm pressure calms his skin; his flesh; his hand; him.
She leads him by the hand towards his room.
37
In the room, she sits him on the bed. ‘There.’
She sits beside him.
He doesn’t know what happens next.
He has no script for this. What would I do, ingame?
No, he can’t do that, here, in the room he sleeps in, the room where his mother wishes him good night . . .
He gets a memory, hot, painful, of the videos his schoolmates made him watch, a couple of times, back when he still went to school.
Not those. Not those.
He had tried to run away from the other kids, at lunch break. They had held him down, made him watch. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, didn’t want to believe these things were real. But they were real. When he had closed his eyes, they had pulled his eyelids back with their thumbs, and put the screen up agai
nst his face, held his head from turning, so he was inside the harshly lit videos of women and men doing things to each other that he didn’t want to understand.
Women who sometimes looked like his mother, but of course it was never his mother, but they said it was, but they were lying . . .
Sasha puts her hand on his thigh, and Colt shudders at the intensity of the sensation.
Oh, he knows, he knows technically, what happens, between a man and a woman. And he knows it doesn’t have to be like those videos. But he’s avoided seeing it, seeing anyone doing it, since then.
He could look it up, quietly, now.
What’s normal? What do you do?
But he doesn’t want to look it up, it’s too late to do research. What if she noticed what he was doing?
She moves her hand very slowly, keeping the pressure firm, a little further up his thigh. Rests her warm, firm hand just short of his hidden penis, which is painfully hard now, trapped sideways, poking out of one leg of his bunched briefs. Its sensitive head pushes against the rougher fabric of his trousers, throbbing.
He doesn’t know what to do. He starts to moan.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says, uncertainly.
His anxiety is blinding, like a headache, he can hardly see her face.
She moves her face towards his, tilts her head; reaches out, touches his neck with her other hand, to bring him closer; it’s like being hit by lightning, and he jerks his head away.
This is too real.
Yes I want to do this but I don’t know how to do this, it looks like she is glowing, I can’t do this.
She adjusts her balance, moves her hand on his thigh, and brushes lightly against the tight cloth that covers the head of his penis.
He wants to laugh, and he wants to scream, as his whole body judders.
There is a feeling and it is crawling through him, cell by cell, and it is taking him over and it is a huge feeling and it is too much he can’t breathe, the feeling is enormous, it’s warm and it is beautiful, beautiful, and she is beautiful, glowing, she is glowing, the feeling comes from her, from looking at her, but it’s too much and he cannot . . . breathe . . .
‘No,’ he says, and stands up, and his trapped cock bends and hurts as he stands.
‘What did I . . .’
‘No!’ he says.
She stands up too. Her face is doing something, it is doing something he doesn’t like, it is making an expression that he doesn’t like, it’s crinkling, it’s like something collapsing, something being demolished, and she is saying, ‘Colt?’ and he backs away. ‘Are you—’
‘You have to go now,’ he says, and his chest is very tight.
He gets the words out, but then it’s hard to pull air back in. She’s looking at him, her face is moving, twisting, he can’t look, he turns away and gets dizzy. He sways.
‘Did I . . .’ she says, and it’s a totally different voice, so small.
‘I have work to do,’ he says, without looking.
He has heard his mother say that, towards the end, when she had a boyfriend with a ponytail, once, for a very short while. It worked, the man with the ponytail went away.
‘I have a lot of work to do.’
And he closes his eyes for a lot of the next couple of minutes, he isn’t quite sure what happens, it’s too much, he has to close down the input, and he hums, Mmmmmm, Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm . . .
She says something, but if he really concentrates on the humming, on feeling the vibrations in his head, he can’t hear her.
Eventually, through the humming, he can hear her putting on her jacket, the rattle and clack of the buckles as they brush against the metal of the chair in his room.
‘Thank you,’ he says, yes, be polite, ‘Thank you.’
And then he hears the door, and the motorbike starts; and off it goes; she is gone.
38
After they have rested for a few minutes, the man unties her wrists.
Naomi gets up and goes to the bathroom.
Back in the room the guy starts to talk.
Why do they always have to talk?
Well, maybe he’s passing the time while he recovers. Maybe she can get a second round out of him in twenty minutes, if she pretends to listen. She can smile and nod for twenty minutes.
It’s a war story. She’s heard a lot of war stories, over the years.
In this one, his vehicle is blown up and his interpreter is killed. He goes into a lot of detail about his vehicle, but she’s not really listening. Pinned down in Helmand province. Unable to get to the body of their interpreter. He has to spend a night in an irrigation ditch, and it’s cold. He pauses. She nods. I don’t care, she thinks.
‘In the morning,’ he says, ‘I looked through my sights, and I saw a raven perched on Adam’s face.’
She realizes he needs to talk more than he needs to fuck. No, she won’t get any more out of him.
‘Pecking out an eyeball,’ he says. ‘Peck; tug; peck; tug; peck.’
The guy waits for a response. She says nothing. And she’s all out of smiles and nods.
‘Maybe it wasn’t a raven,’ he says. ‘I don’t really know much about birds.’
A long silence.
Naomi begins to put on her clothes. ‘You shot the bird,’ says Naomi, feeling a need to finish the story. No, feeling he needs her to finish the story.
‘No,’ said the man. ‘I thought I would. I thought I should. I looked through the sights for a long time. But the bird looked straight back down the sights at me, and he wasn’t afraid.’
‘You were too far away,’ says Naomi. ‘Not moving. Most birds don’t do great shape recognition, they react to movement . . .’
He looks in her direction, but she can tell he doesn’t really see her. He’s somewhere else. She’s standing there naked, he’s just come inside her, and he doesn’t see her.
‘No,’ he says. ‘The bird looked at me like he knew me. The bird . . . I had more in common with the bird than with the dead man. I was just scavenging the battlefields too. Living off corpses.’
Oh God, I fucked a philosopher. Give him a fake number and go.
But instead, she hears herself say, ‘When I was a kid, I got beaten on . . . on the ass. Not just the ass.’ Make him see me. Make him see me. ‘My dad was drunk, he was drunk, and I was, my . . .’ She’s going to have to find words. No. She points down at it. ‘It rubbed against him, and he didn’t . . . I don’t even think it was deliberate, he wasn’t trying to touch me there, he was just angry and . . . careless. And I hated being beaten, I hated it, OK, but if I struggled, if I wriggled, I found I could get . . . pleasure out of it. As well as the pain. I could rub against his leg . . .’
He’s staring at her.
Don’t stop. Go on.
‘I didn’t know what I was doing, I was a kid, I was innocent. All I knew was it felt better when I did that. And at least when he beat me . . . he saw me. It was contact. I wasn’t alone. Maybe I thought, by doing that, I could turn it into something nice, something good. I could turn it back into love . . . And one day, he noticed, he noticed that I was enjoying it, that I was being turned on. And he said I was . . . disgusting. And he stopped. He never did it again . . . And when you cross those wires, that early . . . pleasure and pain . . . it’s really hard to uncross them. And I’ve tried. I’ve tried. And I can’t . . .’ Her eyes are full of tears, and that is unexpected, because she thought she was dispassionately telling a story, sharing a story of why she was who she was, so she would be seen. As herself, Naomi Chiang. Not just a memory of a fantasy. Not porn. ‘I can’t come without the pain. I can’t, I’ve tried.’ The nice boyfriends, their faces. Their sad, angry, embarrassed faces . . . ‘It’s not my fault, I didn’t want to do that to myself. It’s not even his fault. It’s nobody’s fault.’
He stares at her blankly.
He swallows, but he doesn’t say anything.
Naomi puts on her bra. The metal hook slides into the metal eye with a little snick.
/> ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry too,’ she says, and swipes the salt water out of her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘And I’m sorry about your friend.’
He walks over awkwardly, approaching almost sideways, like she, or he, might shy away. He reaches out slowly and puts an arm around her.
‘Do you see me now?’ she says fiercely.
‘Yeah. Yeah. I’m so sorry.’
She lets his arm wrap around her, and she puts her arm around him, and they hug each other very tight and hold each other for a long time.
They both know when it’s over.
They let go.
He clears his throat, very formal, like he’s about to make a speech.
‘I’d like to talk to you again.’
‘Sure.’
She gives him fake contacts, and takes down his. She nods – almost bows – turns, walks towards the door.
Well, it’s not a total loss.
For the first time in years, her body feels fierce, and fearless, and alive.
39
That night, Colt goes to bed early; confused, and anxious.
Lying in the dark, he is in the game, but he isn’t thinking about the game.
He is thinking about Sasha.
About the feeling he is feeling.
He feels a little like the way he felt when his father left. No, worse, because he had his mama then, and he was afraid of his dada.
Part of him is missing . . . That’s not quite it.
He is alone.
That’s it.
He was never alone before.
Or rather: he never felt alone before; because he didn’t know he could be with someone else, in a way that meant something.
He was never lonely, because he didn’t know there was an alternative to utter solitude.
Now, he is lonely.
He was, briefly, with someone; and now he is not.
She isn’t there.
Why did he say no?
He wants to know her. He wants her to know him.
He couldn’t process the information fast enough, that was the problem. He couldn’t deal with the data. He was overwhelmed.
He needs an upgrade. Or this will happen again.
The lab. Tomorrow.
Yes.
He wants to rewind. He wants to start again. Meet her again.