It’s obviously true, and the honesty of it surprises me. “Are you supposed to tell me that?”
“I don’t know.”
He doesn’t shrug or smile or duck his head. I realize he has no affectations. He’s acquired no little tics or habits.
The strangeness of seeing him leaves me speechless. He’s a creature from a dream. He’s something I doodled on a sketch pad, brought to life, fully formed.
I want to touch him. To ensure that he’s real and not some weird trick of my tired mind.
I also just want to touch him. Because… just because.
And I believe I can touch him. I believe he will allow me. I believe this because he is, in some impossible way, mine. Does he know that?
“Do you know who I am?” I ask. I’m not just asking if he knows my name. I’m asking if he knows who I am, what I am. I’m asking if he knows my importance.
It’s the kind of thing I’ve heard coming from my mother on more than one occasion: Do you know who I am? With italics on the “who” and a rising, incredulous tone on the “am.”
I don’t say it that way. But I mean it that way.
It’s insane to even think like this, but despite the magnificence of this boy, he is in some sense mine. And I want him to know it.
You are mine, Adam.
Where the hell does that kind of thinking even come from?
“You are the one who designed me,” Adam says. “I am your perfect match. Your soul mate.”
“You know about all that?”
The first hesitation. He isn’t being coy. He’s considering. “I don’t think I know all of anything, Evening.”
I want to tell him to stop using my name because every time he does it sends a shiver through me. I don’t want a shiver. I don’t want him to make me weak in the knees.
I stay silent and he continues. “I have been given some information. It’s a crude technique, I understand, so all I know is parts of things. I’m still being formed mentally. I have knowledge but no experience.”
“That won’t make you so different from most guys,” I say. It’s a smart-ass remark. A joke. Does he have a sense of humor? I gave him one. At least, I included the codes that would tend to allow him to develop a sense of humor, but does he have the experience to know a joke when he hears one?
“You made me different from most guys,” he says.
That might be a semi-witty comeback. I’m prepared to accept it as such because I don’t think I could ever have a relationship with a guy who has no sense of humor.
Relationship?
Back up there, girl.
Back right up against that… Okay, no. I’m now arguing with myself. Chiding myself. I’m in charge here, right? I shouldn’t even be thinking about him as anything other than a very interesting experiment. He’s my A-plus science project.
Some rational part of my brain points out that this—this person, this creation, whatever Adam is—is a walking crime. Real or unreal, living or fabricated, it doesn’t matter. Adam shouldn’t be here. Someone breathed life into him and sent him out into the world, and that was wrong.
But try as I might, I can’t stand here two feet away from him and not react. I don’t think there’s a person of any gender, or no gender, for that matter, who could stand here and not react to him.
He is a work of art.
If I do say so myself.
“Okay,” I say, mostly just to have something to say, because otherwise I’m just looking him up and down and up and down and it’s impolite to stare. “What did my mother tell you to do once you found me?”
“She wants me to ask you to come back.”
“That’s it? No excuses or explanations? Just ‘come back’? She didn’t say anything else?”
“She said some things which I don’t believe she wanted me to say to you. They were more in the nature of observations.”
Poor guy, he seems to think I’d leave that alone. “Observations?”
“Statements.”
I tilt my head quizzically. He starts to do the same, then stops himself. I inhibited his willingness to be influenced. I gave him that individualistic streak.
“Do you remember any of those statements? Her statements?”
“Yes. They were among the first things I ever heard.”
“Please tell me.”
“Okay.” He frowns slightly with the effort of recall. “She’s a headstrong little bitch, okay, well, so am I, she got that from me. She doesn’t think she owes me anything, she doesn’t think I gave her anything, it was always about her father. Well, too bad, honey, because he’s dead and I’m all that’s left. And now she’s off with Solo, that snake in the grass, I should have known better. I did, didn’t I? I knew I had to keep them separated and then like an idiot I let them meet. I will destroy that little monster, I swear, after all I’ve done for him, taking him in when his backstabbing, criminal parents… and who does Evening think cost her her father?”
I hold up my hand. “What?”
“Do you want me to repeat it? I probably missed a few words. I don’t have a photographic memory. But you know that already.”
“What did she say next?”
“That was it. She seemed agitated—”
“She’s more or less always agitated,” I interrupt.
“But then she stopped herself and said, ‘You don’t need to know any of that. And don’t tell Evening any of it.’”
“Then why did you tell me?”
He smiles. He hasn’t done that before. I gave him really good teeth. Perfect teeth. But I didn’t design that smile, not exactly. That smile, that’s some alchemy, some kind of magic interaction of, I don’t know, but oh yes. Shiver. And warmth. And a general all-over-body feeling like I really want to cut the distance between us and it’s suddenly very difficult to focus on my outrage.
I have to shake my head, hard, and replay his last statement to find my place again. “Why did you tell me if my mother said not to?”
“I’m not a machine, Evening. I’m a man. And you made me to be free. You did that, right?”
“Yes. Yes.” I made him to be free? No responsibility there. Yes, I made him to be free. I wonder what else I made him to be.
That day in the lab with Aislin comes back to me in high-definition imagery. Aislin ogling, me pretending to be so much more puritanical than I really am, because that’s part of my relationship with Aislin.
I see him now in memory. I see the eyeballs floating, disconnected. They look much better in his head. I see the chest I designed, the stomach I created. I picture all the choices I made.
It’s disturbing.
He’s here and real and beautiful and I made him beautiful. And this is why Solo would destroy my mother? Is this boy, this man, is his existence really some kind of a crime?
In what mad, unholy universe could this work of art—my work of art—be a crime?
My phone chimes. I hear it, but I don’t really care much. Then I realize its chimed before. Several times.
“Excuse me,” I say. For some reason, I feel I have to be formal with Adam. I don’t know what the rules are. I’ve never stood around chatting with my own amazingly attractive creation before.
I fumble for my phone, my fingers not finding it in my purse. I don’t want to—almost can’t—take my eyes off him. I apologize again for shifting my line of sight. How dare I not gaze upon you in wonder? How dare I look down at the rat’s nest that is my purse?
I find the phone. It’s a message.
Maddox shot. SF General Hospital. Please come.
To my shame, I hesitate. I think, damn him and damn her, I’m talking to Adam, here!
But somehow, from some depth of my soul, the better side of me asserts itself and tells me I have to go.
I’ll ask him to come with me.
No. No, wait, who created whom, here? I didn’t create this person just to turn into the same diffident, critical, shy girl I usually am. I’m in charge in this relationsh
ip.
Right? I ask myself. Right?
“Adam,” I say. “Come with me.”
– 36 –
She is not quite what I expected. Visually, yes. Visually I know that Evening is the very epitome of young, female beauty. I know this as surely as I know anything. I have been given this truth.
But she does not quite sound as I expected her to.
She does not act precisely as I expected her to act.
I’d learned that she was headstrong, difficult, naive, very smart, very talented, with all the potential in the world.
That phrase is in my head: all the potential in the world.
That girl has all the potential in the world. She could be anything. She can do anything she wants. Anything! But she is frittering her life away hanging out with that drug addict slut loser friend of hers.
Having now spoken with Evening, I agree that she is intelligent. I don’t know if she has all the potential in the world.
A thought occurs to me. “This person we are going to rescue. Is it your drug addict slut loser friend?”
We have been running down the pier toward the Embarcadero. Evening stops.
“What?” Her eyes narrow. “Where did you get that idea?” Before I can answer she interrupts with a slashing hand gesture. “Never mind. I can guess.”
We run some more. We reach a trolley just as it pulls to a stop. We leap aboard, then wait impatiently for several minutes while the driver gets out and inspects his vehicle.
“Don’t believe what my mother told you,” Evening says.
I feel a rush of terror. “Evening, all I really know is what your mother told me. If I were actually to stop believing everything she told me…”
We are sitting beside each other. Her thigh and shoulder are pressed against mine. She turns to me and I turn to her and this brings our faces very close together.
“I—” she says, and then her voice makes a croaking sound. Her eyelids lower, as if she’s sleepy. Slowly, slowly she’s moving closer.
Suddenly, her eyes widen. I see something like alarm in her gaze as she pulls away.
“I have to sit somewhere else,” she says in a rush.
“Why?”
“I just do, that’s all.”
She has not moved. “Where?”
“What?” Her eyes are at half-mast again. “Oh. Yes. This seat in front here.”
She gets up, but just then, the trolley lurches. To keep her from falling over into the aisle I put my right arm around her abdomen and then she slips down a little so that my arm slips up and then stops because it can’t go any farther.
The trolley accelerates away and centrifugal force—that’s a misconception, it’s actually momentum—pushes her back against me.
We are the only passengers.
She struggles a little to stand up, but her struggle is not very forceful, and she sits for a while even after the trolley has stopped decelerating.
“Oh my,” she says in a strained voice.
She repeats it, but with a long pause. Like this: “Oh……… my.” Then, sounding really as if she isn’t talking to me at all but to some other person entirely, she says, “Yes, getting up. Absolutely getting up and moving. Because, no. Wrong, that’s why. So. Getting up.”
With a sudden heave, an uncoordinated pushing off that I find strangely enjoyable, she stands up. She looks wobbly, although the trolley is moving with admirable smoothness.
Evening drops heavily into the seat in front of me. She blows out a long sigh and runs her fingers through her hair and says—again, as though she’s not really talking to me—“Okay. Okay. I can do this.”
I remember her mother’s words and say, “You can do anything you want.”
She answers, “Mrrgghh,” in a high, strained voice.
Twenty minutes later, we reach the hospital.
– 37 –
The ER entrance is a narrow, automatic door in a slab of concrete. There’s a cheery pink sign above that reads “Emergency Room,” adorned with a blue teddy bear. I think it may be the ambulances-only entrance, but I decide I don’t care. We slip in behind a gurney carrying a wildly flailing drunk.
The drunk is yelling, “Purgatory! Purgatory!”, so no one notices us.
Until they notice Adam.
The gurney falters. The two guys pushing it stare, their jaws dropping a little. A woman doctor comes out, lights a cigarette, takes a puff, and stops. The smoke drifts out of her mouth. She’s forgotten to exhale.
The drunk—he’s an old dude, maybe sixty, maybe a hobo—stops yelling and looks baffled.
“Excuse us,” I say. No one hears me. No one sees me. It’s kind of getting annoying. I do exist, after all, even when I’m standing next to Adam.
There is zero possibility that anyone will stop us as we move past the gurney and into the busy emergency room treatment area. Nurses bustle, doctors amble, everyone looks dopey-tired.
There’s less shouting and drama than you see on TV shows, and the lighting is much worse. Maybe the doctors are all having interior monologues about their love lives, but it seems more likely that they’re all just waiting for their shifts to be over.
Adam stops the place cold.
I’m concerned that people may be dying while the medical professionals stop to stare.
“Where’s Maddox Menlow?” I ask.
Again, there is apparently no sound coming out of my mouth, so I yell, “Aislin! Where are you?”
“E.V.?”
A white curtain flies back and Aislin’s head pops out of one of the treatment areas. I run to her. There’s hugging. Then I look at the bed. No Maddox.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“They just took him to be operated on.”
“Oh no,” I say. “How bad is it?”
She has a hollowed-out look in her eyes. “They shot him in the stomach. It’s… they don’t know. I mean, there was a lot of blood.”
I don’t know why, but I’d just kind of assumed that if Maddox had really been shot, it was in the foot or the elbow or something. Nothing like this. Nothing potentially fatal.
I feel like a jerk.
“Was it those same guys?” I ask.
Aislin looks down at her feet, embarrassed. “Look, he didn’t give them that money, the nine thousand dollars. He used it to buy some stuff. He was then going to resell it, so he could pay those guys and still keep some.”
Despite vivid images in my head of a gut-shot Maddox, I can’t stop the flame of anger kindling inside me. I got him that money. It wasn’t so he could deal more weed.
I lean against the bed. “Did they catch the guys?”
Aislin shakes her head. “I know, all right?” Her eyes brim with tears. “I know what he is. And I finally know I have to get rid of him. But not while he’s maybe dying, right?”
“Right,” I say, but I don’t believe she’s going to dump Maddox, injured or well. She’ll go back to him, like she always does. Suddenly the sheer doom of it all hits me. Aislin will spiral down with Maddox, or whatever asshole eventually replaces him.
And what’s my own great plan? To help Solo destroy my mother? And then what? Wander the city homeless, with my beautiful creation in tow, stopping traffic?
I realize—and I blame Adam for distracting me—that Solo has no doubt already succeeded. The devastating data is probably on its way. My mother’s doom is sealed.
Not about me, I chide myself. This is about Aislin.
“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” I say. Aislin sniffles into her sleeve, and I guide her from the emergency room to the cafeteria.
I’m sipping coffee before I realize I’ve left Adam behind.
“He’ll be okay,” I murmur.
“I don’t know,” Aislin says miserably, assuming I’m talking about Maddox. Then, bless her, she worries about me. “What’s happening with Solo? Did you guys do it?”
For once I know that when Aislin says “do it,” she doesn’t mean “have sex.”
&n
bsp; “He took the flash drive and left,” I say.
“Oh.” She doesn’t know what to say, and that’s okay, because in her place I don’t know that I would be thinking about anything.
Why do I love Aislin? Because with her whole life falling apart, she thinks about me. She still cares about me.
I’m not as good a friend as she is.
“So… your mom?” she manages.
I shrug. My stomach is churning; my head is fuzzy. I’ve been reacting to Adam, not even thinking. What is the matter with me? Solo’s busy destroying my mother and I’m sighing over Adam.
It’s just that he’s so… perfect.
I’m so confused.
“Aislin,” I say, “there’s something I have to tell you. Show you. Someone.”
“Okay. Do you have any Kleenex on you?”
I grab a couple napkins from the dispenser. “It can wait,” I say. “You’ll see, soon enough.”
Suddenly someone sits down in one of the spare chairs. It’s rude, so I shoot the interloper a chilling look.
He’s a good-looking twenty-something Asian guy. He doesn’t smile. He’s wearing a green leather jacket. It takes a few seconds before I realize that I’ve seen him before. In Golden Gate Park.
The blood drains from Aislin’s face.
“Get out of here, you piece of crap” she snarls.
The guy looks at her, vaguely interested and not at all intimidated. He crosses his arms on the table and leans forward.
“I don’t suppose either of you ladies has a spare twelve thousand dollars, do you?”
“It’s nine,” I say.
“It was nine.” He makes a sort of sympathetic shrug. “Interest rates are high.”
“Actually,” I say with all the superior condescension I can manage, “the prime rate is quite low.”
It’s an amazingly stupid thing to say, but he takes it in stride. “We’re not the Fed. Our rates are higher.”
He sees my surprise. “Yeah, I know, I’m a thug so I must be unintelligent and uneducated. Truth is, I do work with some people who are like that. But I’m three credits away from a business degree.”
“Then you should be smart enough to find another job,” I snap.
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