by Patrick Ness
Lying there naked with her, idly brushing a last drop of come off the end of his cock, Thomas had said, oh so casually, oh so lackadaisically, —Did you enjoy that?
In a way, Jacki thought, in a way absolutely, but in another way—
—Yes.
—I’ve got something that you might find makes this whole experience even better.
—What is it?
—Just something special I thought you might like to share with me.
—But what is it?
—You’re a very beautiful woman, Jacki.
Her big, bulky body blushed, almost from head to toe. She may not have been drunk enough to believe him, but when he pulled out the syringe full of high-grade Forum (—But just a taste for you tonight, Jacki. Just a little honey to make you feel warm.) she was drunk enough not to notice that after he had injected her, the needle never got anywhere near his own skin. By that time, though, waves of utter goodness were melting in her brain, and she no longer cared.
Looking back, Jacki realized for the first time that Thomas hadn’t needed another entertainment. He had probably just started out the evening wondering if he could make her bend, but then she had told him about her breast milk and that had been the end of it. He was probably disappointed when she ran right into his open arms. After that, the equation was simple. He would bring her more Forum, though never quite enough, and she would do whatever he wanted. They never made love again.
She cleared her throat.
—Davis?
—Yes, Ms Strell?
—It’s Jacki, please.
—All right.
She cleared her throat again. Her voice was abandoning her. She looked up straight into Davis’ eyes, and when the image shifted, Jacki realized she was crying.
—Please don’t take me home.
—What, Jacki? I can barely hear you.
—Please. Don’t take me home.
34. A Shot Across the Bows?
—Good Lord, what did you do?
—What could I do? I sent him home. Told him to think about it good and hard and that I’d need an answer by Monday. Excuse me, more coffee, please.
—An answer? You mean a definite yes or no? No more for me, thanks. Has it gotten that serious?
—Did you see that sneer? She’s just frittering away her tip. Yes, it’s gotten that serious. I didn’t plan for it to be. I thought I’d just scare him out of a daze, but lo and behold, he wasn’t just brooding. He was serious.
—Well. Shit.
—No kidding. I mean, I hope his answer is yes, because—
—Because a lot of people have done a lot of work—
—Fundraising—
—And ass-kissing—
—And hand-shaking and so forth, but putting all that aside, it’s better for everyone in the long run if we’ve got a candidate who actually wants the job. Could I get a little more cream, please, or rather some cream, since you didn’t bring it the first time? Thanks ever so much.
—You’re being unpleasant to the help, darling.
—She’s not ‘help', Albert, she’s being paid, and she’s acting like she has a cab waiting.
—So what do you think he’ll do?
—I wish I knew. I’m just trying to let go, leave the results up to fate.
—You are not.
—I’m trying. I have no control over the matter.
—You could try counseling him some more.
—He’s had as much from me as he can take, I think. I’m surprised he hasn’t told me to butt the hell out already. It is his campaign, after all, not mine.
—Please, Cora. It’s been your campaign the whole time, and you know it.
—Well, of course it has, but I don’t want it to look that way. At least I’m throwing myself behind a good man.
—A good, if indecisive, man.
—He’s deciding this weekend. That’s the whole point. Hi, what’s your name? Jenny. Jenny, I could get you fired in the time it takes me to sneeze, so how about you stop being such a resentful little cow and bring me some cream already?
—You’re not like this.
—I’m agitated. She picked the wrong time for subpar service.
—I thought you hated people who threw their power around.
—I do, but after twenty years I’m allowed a grumpy moment or two.
—Only one or two?
—I’m hardly an angel.
—Thank God for that or this marriage would never have worked. Speaking of …
—Oh, dear.
—There’s a possibility down at the auction house who might be game.
—All the usual questions apply.
—His name’s Kevin, dark hair, dark eyes, a bit short but in nice shape.
—Does he turn your way or mine?
—Mine, but he’s got the right glint in his eye.
—I’ll bet. Discreet?
—Darling, have I ever failed us before?
—Almost. Remember Pierre?
—Not my fault. One does not inquire if one’s godfather is a High Court Judge.
—How close is he?
—Actually, I think the asking might be enough. He’s got that sporting feel.
—Mmmm … all right. Might be fun to have a little recreation this weekend. After all, it’s been quite a while.
—Almost three years.
—Really? To be honest, I don’t think I even noticed.
—Interestingly enough, neither did I until this one showed up.
—We’re getting older.
—Yes, and it’s not nearly as frightening as I expected. It’s turned out to be fine as long as I’m spending my time with you.
—Oh, Albert. What a thing to say.
—In the midst of all your crabbiness, I do still love you, you know.
—I honestly feel as if I might cry. You can still get to me, old man. Amazing.
—Thank you for walking me back, darling.
—How could I treat my beloved wife any less?
—Do stop, Albert. You’re going to lapse into sentimentality if you’re not careful.
—Warning heard and ignored.
—Afternoon, Lisa.
—There’s a message for you, Mayor.
—Here? Why didn’t you send the call in to Angie?
—It was a walk-in. Someone named Tybalt Jon Noth stopped by for you.
—What?
—Said he was an old friend. Said you’d probably know him by ‘Jon’.
—Are you sure it was Jon Noth?
—Yes. He even spelled his name. He was actually very charming.
—Of course he was. What did he look like?
—Um, sort of light green eyes, short salt-and-pepper hair.
—The eyes I remember. What was he wearing?
—Okay, that was strange. He was wearing all black.
—That’s Jon Noth. What in God’s name did he want?
—I don’t know. He thought you’d be happily surprised to hear from him.
—He’s half right.
She turned to Albert.
—What could Jon Noth possibly be doing back in town?
—I don’t know. It’s been a long time.
—Nearly forty years.
—I can’t imagine … Lisa, did he leave a number?
—No, he just said to say that he stopped by.
—Is he going to come by again?
—He didn’t say.
—He just stopped by to say that he stopped by?
—Yeah.
—That sounds like Jon.
—Don’t get riled up yet, Albert. We don’t know what he wants.
—When has he ever wanted anything that caused our lives to be easier?
—It’s been forty years. A lot can happen to a man. You just like being angry with him.
—As should you. You don’t suppose it’s a shot across the bows?
—What? In a new war to win my hand that wasn’t even a war in the first place?
—He was always a stubborn one.
—A rival for your hand. How romantic.
—Not especially, Lisa. Thank you, that’ll be all. Send my calls to Angie for the rest of the afternoon.
—Yes, Mayor.
—You going to be all right, Cora?
—Yes, of course, why should this upset me? It’s a surprise, that’s all.
—Call me later.
—Yes, darling. I will. Jon Noth.
—I know.
—What do you suppose he could want after all this time?
35. The Story of Cora, Jon, and Albert, as told to Eugene by Jon.
I was a history major in college, which in those days was even more frustrating than it is now. (—What was there to even study? —My whole point.) The Recent Histories were almost forty years more recent than they are now, giving us poor scholars of the period a whopping fifty years of material with which to write theses and dissertations. I can’t tell you how many of us were working on projects about the lack of an oral tradition after Pistolet’s destruction of the Prior Histories. You would have thought that an oppressed people would have passed something along to its grandchildren, but apparently not. (—He killed almost everyone over twenty in the Wars. —Very astute, Eugene. —And then he took nearly everyone else with him when he saw he was losing the Six Years’ War and did that Grand Immolation thing. —Excellent. I’m heartened that someone your age has such an immediate grasp on the issue. —I heard all about it from my grandparents. —Proving how the oral tradition has at last reasserted itself.)
A saving grace was that history studies then also had the exciting facet of archeology. Today, we’ve recovered what?, maybe fifteen per cent of the Prior Histories, but when I went to school, there was almost nothing. The old computer codes hadn’t even been discovered, much less any manner of putting them to use un-erasing anything that hadn’t been completely annihilated. It was daunting, but it was also thrilling to be right at the start of the greatest recovery project ever undertaken. (—That we know of. —I’d be awfully surprised if any previous society had to spend decades unraveling even the barest facts of its own history.) Fully half of my class time was spent out in the Brown, among the mile-high dunes and the rock fields further north. The heat was unbelievable. We had to do most of our excavating at night under chemical lamps, but even then the desert gnats made it almost as unbearable. It was dangerous and exciting, just after the end of that idiotic Gentlemen’s War. A great time to be a student. (—So this was at Mansfield? —Yes. —I wanted to go to Mansfield. —What happened? —I didn’t.)
There were periods where I would be in the desert for weeks and months at a time. The school would truck in supplies and shelters, because we weren’t just doing schoolwork; everyone, especially the government, was interested in what we might find. Everyone wanted to know where we’d all come from. Everyone wanted to know what their family trees looked like and when the cities were settled and where Pistolet had come from and who he conquered when he took over. All of that still to be found. Everything was amazing. Everything. Every day was full of hope and expectation, as if we could discover the whole world, which in a sense was exactly true. I regret to this day that we couldn’t find more of it, that Pistolet’s policies were so devastatingly effective. It’s impossible to know what could still be out there.
I was in the graduate program, and part of our requirement to the university, besides handing over any major discoveries we happened upon, was to teach the undergraduates they would drag into the desert and drop on us. As you might imagine, they were generally more trouble than they were worth, asking smartass questions and kicking up a lot of dust. You know Mansfield, what it’s like, what it was like. Busloads of greasy-haired lesbians in tank tops and hiking boots and frat boys whose idea of high entertainment is urinating out of doors. Frightful. The graduate students had to teach them elementary things like Surveying 101, how to construct rudimentary history hypotheses, and, more or less, how not to die in the Brown. Tedious, but those were the requirements, and it was where I met a student named Cora Trygvesdottir, the future Mrs Albert Larsson.
(—Have you ever been in love, Eugene? —I think so.
—Then no, you haven’t.)
Cora was something quite extraordinary. She was a law student taking History & Archeology as an elective, but right away I could tell she was a different breed than the other students. Brighter, quicker to pick up the basics, and then more thorough in her understanding of even the esoteric aspects of our work. Beautiful, but not in that transient way of your average college beauty. She was a beauty that I could tell would last and only become more thrilling with age. And more than that, she had a presence, an assumption of the space around her, a way of making herself seen by everyone she talked to and a way of making yourself feel seen by her. Do you understand what I mean? (—No.) It’s really no wonder she succeeded in politics. She was distant and formidable, but she was also the kind of person who was first in your mind when you needed a definitive opinion. Obviously smarter than everyone else but at the same time lacking a need to tell you that. The word that leaps continuously to my mind is ‘impressive'. She was impressive. A cut above. Made from different cloth. You might disagree with her, you might even dislike her, but you would never not take her seriously.
She was under my tutelage for four weeks out in the desert. I taught her how to date archeological metal, how to test old circuits, and so on and so forth, but I also was able to teach her in the off hours. I showed her how to get water out of casque plants, how to keep the gnats out of our food when we ate, how to pick up a rattleback without getting bitten, every little trick that I had learned as a history digger. And the talks we would have about where we were from and where we were going, what made us happy, and what we had gone through, things that you only discuss with persons you hold dear. It was marvelous, one of the happiest times of my life. My, to be young again.
Foolish me, I fell madly in love with her, and like a lot of other young, dumb, idealistic twenty-somethings, I didn’t say a word. (—Why the hell not?) It was the time of the New Man. Remember him? Of course not, you’re too young. Shelbert Shelbert had just published The Third and Final Chance as a rebuke of the Gentlemen’s War. This was five or ten years before he blew his head off. We were all trying to be better people, trying to recognize what we had, what opportunities we could make of the world with our whole history lost to us. It seems laughable now, but I was trying to attain some sort of pure higher ground, a kind of love on an intellectual plane, a meeting of the souls rather than just mindless physical pleasure that could be done with anyone.
(—You were scared. —I was not scared. I wanted something more. —Bullshit. You were scared. —I’m going out on a limb here for you, Eugene. Are you interested in hearing the rest of this story or would you rather I just be your boss?
—All right, sorry, you say you weren’t scared. —I wasn’t scared. —Fine, I believe you.)
Cora went back to campus, I stayed in the desert, and we began a correspondence. Mail only came out once a week with the supplies, and I would receive a new letter from her and drop a new letter from me into it at the same time, so we essentially had two lines of conversation overlapping. These were not silly love letters. No snatches of bad poetry, no flowery language. This was pure cerebral engagement. We discussed philosophy, the reorganization of the government, the ecology of the desert, the backward reconstruction of precedent that her law studies were plowing through, all kinds of fascinating, living, life-of-the-mind things. A love was growing between us, unstated and unsullied by childish emotions, a true love, honest and strong and bright, an impressive love that I thought was suitable for her, one that lived up to her, one that was good enough for her.
And then she met Albert Larsson. On a nude beach. Where he had just finished having sexual relations with some man in the bushes. (—Did you know that’s how they met, Eugene? On a nude beach? —I don’t think I’ve ever c
ared, but it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. I’ve been to that beach. The one down around the Point? If you’re here trying to cause a scandal, I don’t think that one’s going to fly. —I’m not trying to make a scandal, Eugene. I was merely trying to point out what she forsook and what she accepted as love. —Have you ever heard of an ‘Albert and Cora'? —No. —It’s a legal term for a binding contract. —Doesn’t matter.) I heard all about it in a letter I received one week. How he was the most honest man she had ever met. How he was a free spirit who cared nothing about crossing boundaries and blazing new trails. How she had immediately fallen in love with his purity of feeling. Can you imagine saying that to me after all the things we had shared? Every word of it without the slightest acknowledgment of what had passed between us.
I was hurt, of course. Who wouldn’t be? But I decided to fight because, not to sound too jejune, a man fights for what he believes in. I sent her letters declaring my love for her. Not just letters, Eugene, epic expressions of myself and how I felt, wherein I poured out all the contents of my heart to her. I wasn’t mistaken in what we’d shared, what we still must share. I think perhaps she was just too intimidated by it or it was just too big for her to handle at the time, and so she went for the next bright prospect that came her way. Simple transference. She couldn’t express her love for me so she lavished it upon Albert, that frivolous, ridiculous man.
She answered my letters in the worst, most painful way possible. With politeness. She said she was flattered by my attention, that she thought I was a wonderful person, that it wasn’t anything I had done. It was just one of those things. ‘One of those things'. How could she say that to me? How could she be that cruel? How could she act so counter to her true feelings? Of course, Albert was an influence on her. How could he not pit her against me? But still I fought for her. I cared about her that much. I pleaded with her in person. I waited for her outside of her classes in order to talk to her. I talked to Albert, as a gentleman, to get him to release his claim, but of course he would have none of it. I finally even challenged him to a duel for her, to prove that his love wasn’t as great as mine. He laughed in my face, and then when I struck him for laughing, he tricked me and left me savagely beaten. This was the final straw, the final slap to my dignity. It was going to have to be enough that I knew I was right and that I knew what Cora and I could have had together.