“I won’t lose him,” declared Champ, resolved to win at least one battle in his life. “I won’t let those assholes do this to him.”
“I do not mean to be confrontational,” R.J. the Third responded, “but it appears that they have indeed already done it.”
“But they don’t have him yet.” Champ ruminated for a moment. “You know people who’re good with electronics, right?”
“I know many such individuals. The people in my fan club are amongst the smartest—”
“Do you think any of them could open him up, find whatever wireless controllers are in there and rip them out?”
“I know a Frenchman named Sagesse who extricates stolen merchandise from the Net. He is very familiar with—”
“Good,” said Champ. “Call that guy. Where is he?”
“He dwells in a place that is humanity’s greatest shame and most odious mistake.” R.J. the Third shook his head mournfully. “I speak of New Queens: the cancer of planet Earth.” (In the bathroom above, Architect mewled.)
“Tell him we’re coming over.”
“I am loath to go there, but for two such valuable allies of floor six, I shall.”
Champ envisioned himself and R.J. the Third awkwardly loading the locked-down mannequin into a cab. Into his lily, he said, “Connect to Mikek.”
“Have you heard about your father?” inquired the driver, his voice slurred by beer and fatigue.
“Take an ethanol pill, suck a vapor tube, get the truck and meet me in front of my place as quickly as you can,” ordered Champ. “It’s important.”
“Get the garbage truck? Now? Tonight?”
“Please, Mikek.”
“Shit on shit.”
“Was that a yes?”
“An angry one.”
* * *
Champ and R.J. the Third positioned their boots at the edge of the trapdoor and hoisted the rope ladder that they had tied to the kneeling mannequin. The machine—lighter than a man of comparable size—rose steadily. Epaulette bulbs and piccolo flutes soon turned the bathroom into a claustrophobic dance club.
“¡La cabeza! Dondes?”
“His head retracted into his torso,” R.J. the Third informed the woman. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Do you guys have a tarp or something—like for moving furniture?” asked Champ. “We shouldn’t take him outside like this.”
“I get,” said the herpetology student.
The garbage man leaned over, untied the rope and curled his hands behind the knees of the inert mannequin while the popinjay secured the machine’s shoulders. Together, they carried the blackened body through the apartment and to the front hallway, where they set it down as if it were a recliner chair that had been wounded in battle.
The herpetology student emerged from her hall closet and threw a plaid tarp over the kneeling mannequin. Champ tucked the fabric around the L-shaped machine, and R.J. the Third bound it with twine. The lights were obscured by the woolen tarp, as were the dissonant flutes.
“He now look like a furniture,” commented the woman.
Champ eyed R.J. the Third. “Let’s get him downstairs.”
“Has your peer arrived?” inquired the popinjay. “Your brother in rubbish?”
“He’ll be here soon. And I’d rather have my dad downstairs, ready to go.”
Champ grabbed the bundled mannequin’s knees with his sooty hands while R.J. the Third clasped the machine’s shoulders. The herpetology student fingered the placard, and the fleximetal door slid into the ground.
Quietly, the bearers hastened from the apartment, reached the stairwell and—in tandem—began their descent.
“Do you recall seeing eggshells piled upon the fifth-floor landing earlier this evening?” asked R.J. the Third in a whisper.
Champ’s right foot caused an antique step to creak. “They were there.”
“Then the absence of such detritus would evince recent activity by our adversaries?”
A stuffed cabbage smacked the side of the garbage man’s head.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Champ. Cold raisins, ground meat and wilted leaves clogged his right ear and clung to his neck.
Undaunted, the sixth-floor residents continued their descent to the landing, where they saw two twenty-one-year-old hostiles in the abutting hall. Each enemy wore a kitchen apron and held a bucket that was filled with stuffed cabbages and rotten fruit. The tall skinny Indian who stood on the right reached his rubber-gloved right hand into his stockpile and divined a moldy mango, which dripped clear serum.
Flies buzzed encouragement.
“Not tonight,” warned Champ. “We need to take this chair downst—”
The Indian flung the mango, and it impacted the wrapped mannequin, erupting in a welter of orange pulp, clear fluid, moldy clumps and hoary fur.
Furious, Champ set his half of the burden down and ran directly at his foe.
“Class III, Class III!” shouted the frightened Indian, dropping the noisome bucket and raising his open hands. “Shoving and slapping, shoving and slapping only!”
Champ swung a hard fist at his foe’s jaw, and the cracking impact burned his knuckles. The Indian’s head jerked to the side, and his dark eyes turned white. Unconscious, he fell face-first upon his own shadow.
The other adversary retreated to safety.
Rejoined, the sixth-floor warriors carried their wrapped burden down the stairwell. They were not again molested.
“That interaction shall put us in Class IV,” R.J. the Third observed when they reached the ground floor.
At that moment, Champ was not especially interested in the rules of intra-building warfare.
The pair bore the mannequin outside and placed it upon the sidewalk. Dim and artificial light illuminated the drear avenue.
The garbage man double-tapped his lily. “Connect to Mikek.”
A moment later, the driver said, “I’m five blocks away.”
“Open up the containment tank.”
“It’s full of soap. Tonight’s scrub-down.”
“Dump it,” ordered Champ.
“In the street?”
“Yeah. Be discreet.”
“If we get caught, I’m gonna say you made me do this—had a migraine pen pointed at me the whole time.”
“No problem.”
Champ did not know if the tank’s meter-thick polymer walls would block the signals that the mannequin both sent and received, but he intended to do all that he could to prevent wireless communications between the machine and its makers. Suddenly paranoid, he looked up and down the street for Corpus Chrome, Incorporated officials. All that he saw was a tangled young couple who were busy inhaling each other several blocks away.
“I, too, believe that the tank will block the signals,” said R.J. the Third, who then paused to appraise his comrade. “I didn’t know you were intelligent.”
The orange and green garbage truck turned onto the empty street, its headlights blazing across weathered façades and illuminating the kissing couple. A nozzle extruded from the side of the vehicle and sprayed suds.
“You goddamn idiot!” shouted the young man as he and his mate scrambled away from the squirting vehicle, their legs dripping with foamy excreta. The girl then launched more obscenities than could fit inside a jumbo-sized crossword puzzle.
Remorselessly, the garbage truck sped away from the dampened pair, roared up the avenue and stopped beside Champ, R.J. the Third and the kneeling mannequin. The metal flap to the containment tank swung wide.
Carefully, the sixth-floor warriors loaded the machine into the sudsy metal coffin and shut the door.
Of the peed-upon couple, Mikek said only, “It’
s rude to kiss in public.”
Chapter XVI
We Walked Upon Harp Strings
With nimble gelware fingers, Ellenancy removed an errant blonde hair from the lapel of her beige silk suit and pointed the follicle at the oval room’s picture window. “How many people died in the fire last night?”
Beyond the glass, funereal smoke tainted the sky.
“Three hundred and twenty-one are presumed dead,” said Lisanne.
The re-bodied woman dropped the hair. As it fell, she dexterously plucked a melancholic melody from the lute in her lap, a phrase that was an excerpt from a piece entitled “The Line That Defines the Boundary Between Compromise and Defeat.”
“That was well-played.”
“Danke. I will be able to play the entire piece correctly on Saturday.”
“I agree.”
During the last two weeks, the twins had spent nearly every waking moment rehearsing for their upcoming reunion performance at the Perfect Pitch Auditorium in Lincoln Center. Ellenancy’s prowess with her new body and her ability to play assorted instruments had improved daily, at a rate that Mr. Johnson described as “quite extraordinary,” and the re-bodied woman no longer spoke of relinquishing the mannequin. The siblings rarely discussed things other than music, and when Lisanne had mentioned Osa, Ellenancy had remarked, “If you are still seeing her when I’m granted autonomy, I’ll be happy to meet her.”
The petite blonde had seen her tall mate thrice in the last fourteen days, and these visits were strained, tired evenings from which neither woman had derived much pleasure. Their patient lovemaking had been corralled into smaller, hastier experiences, during which Lisanne’s thoughts flitted about as erratically as a bat’s shadow.
Osa had noticed the change.
During the fire the previous night, the tall beauty had called from her Brooklyn City apartment and declared, “I’ll be at your place tomorrow. We need to talk.”
The woman hung up, and the petite blonde had slept for three twisting, anxious hours before she finally gave up, drank her morning quadruple espresso and wearily returned to the Corpus Chrome, Incorporated Building.
The Sisters Breutschen reviewed their alterations to “The Dotted Line,” discussed (and dismissed) a radical modulation, and changed the instrumentation in the coda from bassoon and piano to violin and piano (partially because Lisanne now needed to play all of the wind instruments). Concurrent with these discussions, Ellenancy played scales, melodies and etudes upon a violin, two lutes, a viola and a harp. Lisanne helped to remedy errors.
Outside their window, the sun walked across the welkin, its ramble a clandestine act that was hidden behind an inky veil of smoke.
The conversation with Osa drew nearer, and Lisanne’s preoccupation with it grew. She did not know what the result of the talk would be, but she hoped and believed that their problems could be fixed if they were both patient and thoughtful.
At twenty-one fifteen, the petite blonde left the Corpus Chrome, Incorporated Building.
Her mind was a pretzel.
* * *
Lisanne pondered the coming conversation as she rode into Central Park, departed the cab, walked through the living wall into her building’s mustard lobby, strode past the gelbench upon which (nearly five months earlier) Osa had waited for her with an apology, entered the elevator that knew her name, rose past the floors that had witnessed the couple’s first kiss, saw her own reflection, frowned at the circles that were under her eyes (and the brown sleeveless dress that she was wearing), exited, walked south upon the one hundred sixty-eighth floor, stepped through the living wall and entered her apartment.
Crackling nanobuilders healed the wound of her ingress.
A charged spectral element that Lisanne could not properly define informed her of Osa’s presence in another room.
The petite blonde tapped an up arrow, set her clutch inside the extruding drawer, pressed the close button, and walked past the parlor hall, through the den (where the women had watched both great and terrible mote aquarium experiences), up the ramp and into the dining area, where she had shared her first morning coffee with the woman whom she loved.
Seated upon a buoyed chair at the marble table was Osa. A glass of wine that matched her burgundy dress stood beside her folded hands.
Lisanne said, “Guten Nacht.”
“Hi.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
No lectures about tardiness spilled from the tall beauty’s mouth.
The petite blonde walked over and kissed her mate upon the lips, but was dryly received.
“I didn’t know what you’d want to drink,” said Osa.
“I shall get myself a water.”
Lisanne walked out of the room, towards the wall unit in the kitchen; her nerves were taut.
“How’s your sister doing?”
“She is adjusting very well to the machine.”
“That’s good,” said Osa, the timbre of her voice both contradicting and confirming this sentiment.
Lisanne tapped the water bottle icon, and the bottom of a crystal container extruded from the wall. Claiming the vessel, she returned to the dining room, where her mate sat staring at her wine glass as if it were a cauldron.
“I’m nervous,” said the petite blonde.
Osa nodded in agreement, but did not look up.
Lisanne sat across the table from her mate, thumbed the bottle’s iris and moistened her parched throat.
“I’m not happy,” said Osa.
“I know.”
“Thanks for noticing.”
“I’m not happy that I’ve made you unhappy. I didn’t sleep well after we spoke last night.”
Osa drank a sip of wine and set the glass down. “I know this is gonna sound selfish, but…is this how things’re going to be? Now that she’s back?”
“I honestly do not know,” admitted Lisanne. “She and I are preparing for the Saturday performance, and have begun a new composition. And she is still adjusting to the machine.”
“I know, I know, but after this passes—after you do this show and she is okay and out of CCI—how do you think things will be? With her and with us?”
The petite blonde would not varnish the truth. As her first husband Garren had said during their final conversation as a married couple, “It is better to assess the malignancy of a tumor than to push it deeper down.”
Looking at her mate, Lisanne said, “A major person has returned to my life and I am writing music again. I very much want to be with you, but things cannot continue exactly as they were before. My life has changed.”
Osa nodded. “I’m happy that you have her again, and that you’re writing new music—really—but I’m not sure where that leaves us. We had something that was intense and worked, and now it seems like I’m gonna get about half as much of your time and attention, if even that much. And if these last few weeks are any indication, you’ll be preoccupied during a lot of the time we do share.”
“I had several serious relationships—and two marriages—during Ellenancy’s first life,” defended Lisanne.
“But Garren and Robert saw how available you were from the start. They knew what role Ellenancy had in your life and accepted it.”
“And you cannot accept it? That is beyond your capabilities?”
“Talk to me like that again and I’ll throw you across the fucking room.”
Fear tingled Lisanne’s skin like static electricity: Osa had spoken of the physical fights that she had gotten into with Georgia (the shriekpunk singer), as well as with her Cuban mate in college. Violence was suddenly very possible.
Osa looked down at her wine and shook her head. “I hit a student yesterday,” she admitted, shattering her crimson reflecti
on with a fingertip. “I’ve never done that to a kid before. Never even come close.”
Lisanne waited for an explanation, hoping that her face did not betray her alarm.
“I haven’t been sleeping very good,” the tall beauty continued, “and last week, Autumn made some comment about how tired I looked and asked if it had something to do with you. I ignored her, but she started talking about you—she listened to some articles after your visit—and I pulled her into the hall. She told me not to grab her, and before I could stop myself, I slapped her across the face.
“I went home.
“I typed a formal apology to her parents, but they took her out of my I.S. anyways, which I don’t blame them for doing.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Lisanne. “I know that she was your favorite.”
“That’s when I knew…I knew I couldn’t just wait and see how things went with us. I tried to be patient, but my behavior—my body—told me I needed answers. I know how huge all this is for you, but I just can’t wait around in limbo and hope. I need assurances. I need to feel significant in this relationship…or I need closure.”
Lisanne took Osa’s left hand and said, “I love you.”
“That’s not what I’m asking for. If I thought you didn’t love me or if I didn’t love you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Your sister coming back—it’s like…it’s like all of a sudden you have a child and a best friend and a job that you didn’t have when we started. It’s taken you away, physically and emotionally. And completely.” The tall beauty withdrew her long sepia hand and added, “And maybe you don’t realize this, but it’s very fucking hurtful that you haven’t introduced me to her yet.”
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