Still holding his hand, she looked at the little girl sleeping on the floor.
“Lark,” he urged. Probably thought he was saying “Larque.” But it didn’t matter anymore how he spelled it in his head. She knew who she was. Sort of.
Now that she was in pieces she more or less knew. But she hadn’t known then, not when it had started.
She said, “I didn’t feel real.”
“You didn’t feel real?”
“I had lost track of who I was going to be. What I wanted to do.” She looked mostly at Sky, who, albeit a snot-nosed brat, had gotten through to her and nearly died doing it. “There were things—ever since I was little I always wanted to do things. I wanted to have adventures. Ride a painted pony. Sing in the night. Fight the bad guys. Who the hell was this woman who just stayed home and gained weight and painted pictures of cows and fixed bad imitation Chinese for supper all the time? It didn’t feel right to be this middle-aged person who never did anything.”
“You did things,” Hoot said.
“But there were huge parts of me that never got to live. The little girl in me. And the part that happens to be characterized as male.”
From the look on his face he clearly couldn’t agree to her having maleness in her at all. But he was giving it a try. He wasn’t saying anything.
“Anyway, that’s sort of how it started,” Lark muttered. “Boys get to do things.”
Cautiously Hoot asked, “You feel like you’re, uh, better off? The way you are now?”
“Yes—no. I don’t know.” There were gay bashers. There was the fear of AIDS. But wasn’t that what she had wanted in her life, some danger, something to brave? “If it was just me, yes, maybe—but I need you.”
His hand jumped under hers. She looked into his face. His eyes were hiding under a scowl, trying not to show emotion, not to hope. He was afraid.
“Don’t bite,” she told him.
“It’s that damn body of yours,” he complained. “I feel like I’m talking to you, but then I look up and I’m holding hands with a fag. It spooks me.”
“Don’t call me a fag.”
“If it wasn’t you, I wouldn’t feel like I had to. Look, how the hell am I ever supposed to get used to you like this? And what about the boys? What the hell kind of role model are you for them?”
“Better than Yutz Face or Candy Ass.”
Hoot got very quiet, and his hand went limp under hers. “Christ,” he whispered after awhile, “I keep on thinking I can go back. I keep on forgetting—I’m just one of your damn doppelgangers.”
“I’ll find a way to put you back where you belong,” Lark said. Every time she thought of the boys she felt cold. Smart-ass Jason, sweet prudish Jeremy, loud little Rodd, to be raised by things her mother had blinked out of her and Hoot? It was unthinkable.
“Without you? I don’t know if I can take that either.” But he pulled his hand away from hers. “Let me alone. I’m going to sleep.”
He did it, too. How could he do that, just sleep and shut everything out? Lark couldn’t sleep. She wandered the apartment, looking out all the windows, watching the action in the street, in the alley. Briefly she considered going out into the Popular Street night for some action of her own, but she did not. Instead, in the bathroom, she tried to tug off her detachable dong. It would have been a first step toward—toward going back; she had to admit it, she would try to go back if she could. But the thing would not come loose.
When had that happened? Somehow this endowment of flesh they call manhood had become not merely an ornament, a toy, but part of her now.
Talk about being in a pickle. There was a joke for Byron in that phrase somewhere. Talk about a pickle being in—
Joking didn’t help.
Lark felt her own heartbeat shaking her and ordered herself not to panic. There were sure to be ways—Shadow could do a magic makeover, or the thing could be surgically removed. But every part of her was spurting sweat, and she recognized the feeling: it was like the time, when she was Larque and had gained weight, the time she could not slip her wedding ring off, not even with soap. It was stuck on her finger, embedded in her flesh, like she would wear it to her grave. Not that she did not intend to do that anyway, but—married literally forever? What if she changed her mind? Where had her choices gone?
Yet, if she knew who she was—what did it matter? Being real meant closing off some of the options, some of the mutability. Wouldn’t she always be Hoot’s wife?
Would she? Or was her body trying to tell her something?
She wanted choices? Well, sooner or later she was going to have to choose.
FOURTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING ARGENT AND SHADOW GOT UP EARLY. Way too early to suit Lark, who had not achieved sleep until nearly dawn. But she was bedded down on their kitchen floor, and Argent kept tripping over her as he made coffee, so she groaned and got herself moving.
“Ready for Project Doppelganger?” Argent greeted her the moment she achieved verticality.
“Suck a hatchet.”
“Good morning to you too!” he called after her as she staggered toward the bathroom. But during the next half hour he fed her pecan buns, sugar-cured bacon, broccoli omelet, and coffee. “Ew!” Sky said, coming in as he broke open the eggs.
“Ew, what?”
“Egg snot. I hate the way the egg snot drips out. Ew!” Sky said, as he mixed in the cooked chopped broccoli. “Ew, monkey brains, ew!”
Argent looked over at her with a grin that seemed pulled out of him from someplace way too deep. “Skylark, you haven’t changed,” he said.
“You sure have,” Sky retorted. But then she had to climb into Lark’s arms and bury her face against Lark’s chest. Lark cuddled her and stroked her hair, willing to give the kid all the time it took, feeling what was happening—the child in her arms was being nourished, finding sustenance in Lark as surely as if she were a baby nursing at the breast. A while later, Argent put food on the table in front of both of them. Lark ate, finding her father’s cooking good. Sky did not eat, but it didn’t matter. She was being fed.
Hoot wobbled in, big, substantial, flushed from sleep. “Coffee,” he requested hoarsely.
“You’re no doppelganger,” Lark teased him. “You’re the real thing. I can tell.”
He did not appreciate this sort of levity before coffee. Never had. He gave her a look with ice cubes in it. “Define ‘real,’” he challenged sourly.
“Define ‘doppelganger,’” Argent added, though not nearly as sourly. “As opposed to, say, somebody like me. Or some poor schmoo your mother has blinked.”
“Lark.” Shadow, though he had been sitting dark and silent in the kitchen all the time, seemed suddenly to come back from somewhere else. He sat up and leaned toward her, placing his immaculate hands side by side on the table. “How many doppelgangers have you made in your life?”
“Hundreds.”
“Tell me some of them.”
“Uh.” Where to start? “Cats, dogs, birds, and anybody with obvious dyed hair or a toupee, and I doppelgangered a woman into a hippo at a restaurant once, and then there was my naked date, and I’ve done various people into swine—I seem to be hung up on pigs. And I doppelgangered my kids all the time, just because I kept thinking about them. Once they got out of diapers and started to grow up there were always doppelganger babies floating around in the air like helium balloons. We used to play keep-away with them.” She paused for breath. “And a teacher of Jason’s once,” she added. “I doppelgangered her into a turkey gobbler while she was telling me what a terrible attitude he had.”
Sky got restless on her lap. “Doppelganger, coat hanger, gopplepanger, bell clanger,” she chanted. “Nose banger, boomeranger.” The little girl got up and skylarked out of the room.
“Lark doppelgangered me into a dickhead once,” Hoot said almost proudly.
Shadow turned to him, intent. “Are you still?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The qualit
y of being a dickhead. Is it still in you, or is it gone now?”
Hoot tried out a scowl, but the coffee had mellowed him; it was too much trouble to take offense. “I resemble that remark,” he quipped.
“He hasn’t changed any,” Lark told Shadow.
Stark serious, Shadow asked her, “Then it went back into him, don’t you think?”
“You know more about these things than I do.”
“It must have. There is a kind of attraction or cohesion between the aspects of a personality.… What about the other ones? Dogs, cats, naked men? What ever happened to them?”
“I don’t know.”
He arched his brows at her.
“I don’t know! I was embarrassed to death about leaving a trail of doppelgangers wherever I went; I didn’t want to know. I didn’t try to find out.”
“What about the babies, then?”
It had been different with the babies. Sort of sweet, nothing to be ashamed of, just a harmless family secret. “Oh, they were no problem. After a few hours or a day or two they would just sort of fade. You could see them doing it. They would get thin, like air, and then they would be gone.”
“And your children are thriving?”
“Yes! Well, they all need to have teeth rearranged, but—why?”
“The babies must have gone back into them, then.”
“Not into a different dimension, like Sky did that time she was lost?”
“If your children were without their babyhood, you would know it. No. I think Sky would have gone back into you, but she was afraid.”
“Of Mom. Of what Mom had just done to me.”
“Well, yes. That, too.”
Lark gave him a look. The other thing Sky had been afraid of, she knew, was her. Larque. The one who didn’t want to be reminded of the child she had once been. The one who could leave her unheeded in the dark for twenty years. The one who could starve her to death or kill her with neglect. She did not want to talk about it, but she understood this now.
There was a silence. They all sat listening to Sky singing and prancing around in the next room.
“I’ve got to get that girl different clothes,” Lark said as the heavy oxfords banged out an uncouth rhythm on the floor. “She’d love Jordache jeans.”
“Doppelganger something,” Shadow ordered her.
“Huh?”
“Doppelganger something. Not me,” he added as her glance swiveled his way. “The coffee cup.” He pointed at the stolid brown pottery mug sitting in front of an equally stolid person, Hoot. “Doppelganger it.”
“I don’t doppelganger things to order.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t really know why not, except that it would have been rather like sneezing on command. Or having an orgasm. Actually, the former and latter experiences were rather similar. Maybe that was why the Victorians used to like snuff.
“Why not?” Shadow urged, still intent on the damn coffee cup.
“It’s an inanimate object.”
“So is Popular Street,” Argent pointed out from the vicinity of the bacon-grease-splattered stove, which he was fastidiously cleaning. “But every time you find your way in here you’re doppelgangering it.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t confuse her,” Shadow told Argent. “What’s wrong with inanimate objects?” he asked Lark.
“I don’t know … Popular Street is kind of alive to me, almost like it’s a person. The coffee cup just sits there. I don’t have any feelings about it.”
“Women and their feelings,” Hoot said with a sort of tender exasperation. “So get mad at it.” She felt more like getting mad at him, because of the way he talked about women and the way he was smiling at her, warm, almost misty. He was feeling cuddly, and she had always hated it when he got that way in the morning when she couldn’t respond. By evening, when she herself had mellowed, he would be somnolent.
All of which was pretty irrelevant to her present permacocked condition. Did Hoot the Hetero like snuff? They could take snuff together.
Shadow said with some impatience, “Well, think of something to doppelganger that won’t complicate my life too much.”
A sparrow had perched on the windowsill. Looking at it, Lark sighed, and its translucent doppelganger flew away, leaving the little bird behind.
“You have feelings about birds?” Hoot exclaimed. She was going to have to explain a few things to him.
“Good. Now put it back,” Shadow said at the same time.
It was an idea that startled her to her bad-boy bones. She gawked at him.
“Put it back,” he urged.
“I—” Never did that before. “How?”
“You figure it out.” In other words, he didn’t know. “Just try, Lark!”
The doppelganger sparrow had reappeared, flying in aimless small circles over the street, like a puff of dust. With thoughts that swirled in much the same way, Lark sat blinking at it and the bird on the windowsill. Nothing happened except that the original flew up to join the doppelganger and they both fluttered off somewhere.
“Not bad for starters,” Argent said kindly.
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Try again with something else,” Shadow instructed.
Shadow could be relentless. Lark learned that day as she had not quite learned before. All day, while the pickets picketed and the gawkers gawked in the street below, he badgered, coached, coaxed, scolded, goaded her. By the time evening came she was exhausted, her brain aching like a strained muscle. She had doppelgangered just about everything in the apartment, animate or otherwise, except Sky, Hoot, Argent, and Shadow himself. Wraith-like doubles of horsehead lamps, sofa pillows, shot glasses, Shadow’s zippered black leather undies and Argent’s string ties floated everywhere. Some of the things Lark had duplicated had quietly put themselves back together in a few minutes. Most had not. They hung around like ghosts to haunt her shortcomings.
Come evening she crawled into her bed—or rather, onto her allotment of floor—dead tired. That night Lark slept and didn’t care what Shadow and Argent were doing or whether Hoot was lying awake.
Going to sleep, though, she knew a few things:
She knew Sky was sleeping soundly. She knew she loved Sky. What was hard to understand now was why she hadn’t loved the little girl before.
She knew some of her abilities. She had a feeling she could in fact put all her doppelgangers back where they came from—but not until the rebel in her would let her. Not until she truly wanted to.
She knew she could be a woman again. She might not even need Shadow to make her over. She might be able to do it for herself. If she truly wanted to. If she could make up her mind.
She knew it was not just her mind. Heart and soul had to go together on this too. Up until now she had been doppelgangering in a half-baked way, making wispy things, strewing them about, turning her back afterward, living in a limbo inhabited by the voiceless spirits of her world, her life. But doppelgangering done right had to be bone solid and true and go all the way. To do it right, she had to be a truthteller.
She knew that if she learned how to fully control her abilities—
No. The thought frightened her even more than finding that her detachable dong did not detach. Talk about really being in charge, really having choices—what about Hoot, then? Assuming she got back together with him: if she had real control and could choose when and how to doppelganger things, then there would be no more embarrassing public accidents—and, therefore, Hoot would no longer be the only man she could have married, the only one who could love her. If she wanted, albeit in a middle-aged body, she could have her choice of the available and interested men … no, God, no, it got worse. With her ability to take whatever she wanted and make a solid duplicate, she could have her choice of all the soft-eyed wet-lipped sweet-shouldered hard-bellied high-cocked taut-assed young stud-lovelies she ever saw. She could doppelgan
ger their lustiness and leave their pride behind; she could make them docile and she could make them desire her. Would she want to stay with Hoot Harootunian?
Would she spend her life dreaming of Shadow?
It was too much to deal with. Lark went to sleep.
In the morning, before she got dressed, Lark doppelgangered Sky some shirts and jeans and boots out of hers. She made the things solid, scaled down in size from her own and, as an afterthought, she changed the color of some of the shirts to yellow, Sky’s second favorite. (The kid’s favorite color was red, but no proper cowboy would wear red shirts, which were reputed to spook the cattle.) When she was sure she had it right she left the new clothes lying by Sky’s pillow—the girl was still asleep, her face dewy and her hair wildly strewn. Lark went into the kitchen, where she started the coffee.
“Coolsville!” she heard Sky exclaim a few moments later.
“See if they fit,” she called. How maternal. And she was pouring cereal, yet.
It occurred to her—another day, another frightening thought—that there was no pressing practical or financial need to go back to being Hoot’s wife. She could doppelganger objects out of other objects and sell them. If she told them to stay real, they would stay real. She could deal in cash and barter. The tax people might never catch up with her, especially as Lark the young stud did not technically exist. In a Popular Street sort of way she could get by.
Was there a pressing need, practical or otherwise, to go back to being a woman?
The only way to deal with her life now was to take it, as Shadow would say, one crisis at a time.
“They fit great!” Wearing her new clothes, Sky pranced into the kitchen.
“C’mere, cowboy.” Lark hugged her. The kid had chosen a yellow shirt, she noticed. “You look ready for anything. Maybe we oughta go shoot some bad guys today. Hungry?”
By the time Sky was on her third bowl of cereal the others were up. About time, as it was ten o’clock Saturday morning and the shops were opening. The Bareback Rider should have been opening too.
“What’s the use?” Argent grumbled when Shadow said as much to him. “The Doppelganger from Hell and Florrie the Moral should be here any minute with their faithful minions.”
Larque on the Wing Page 21