“I would like to clean myself before your meal is ready,” she said. “I have too much of the marketplace on me.”
“The market, huh? You didn’t bring home any bags.”
“I wasn’t shopping, I was looking for something.”
“Didn’t find it?”
“Not yet, but perhaps I will tomorrow.”
“Cool. Well, this is gonna be ready in a minute. Want me to join you in that shower?”
She smiled. “Yes, I would.”
Eve stood, took off her blouse, and left the room.
* * *
The pasta was not as tasty as the lunch from the market, but it sat better and left her with fewer regrets.
The sex was much improved.
This was not to say anything had been lacking in their first day together, but sex was something she’d always found to be more engaging when novelty and familiarity were balanced. They were reaching that point.
There were no notes from Rick the following morning releasing her from any expectation of being there at the end of the day. He left for work assuming she would be there when he got back.
She was.
Eve spent the day at the marketplace again, this time taking note of which buses to employ to complete the round-trip. She returned to the marketplace again the following day, and the day after, and another six days after that—including two days constituting the weekend, in which Rick did not have to appear at his employer’s office. He went with her to the market instead, and gamely attempted to comprehend why they were sitting together on a bench and apparently just staring at people.
By the morning of the ninth day she was prepared to surrender the quest and initiate the much more mundane task of seeking employment. So of course it was on that day she found what she was looking for.
It was an elf, and he had a cold.
Nearly all creatures could get sick. In one instance—demons—the acquisition of a disease was nearly always fatal, but in most it was dealt with in the same way as it was in humans. They suffered until they get better, or they didn’t get better and, over time, they died.
The concept of immune systems was a medical one for which Eve only recently developed an understanding, because science moved faster than her attention to it. But she could draw a correlation between life expectancy and relative immunity.
Elves and goblins—they were actually the same species, but with different regional identifiers—lived about as long as humans, and so got sick roughly as frequently. Likewise satyrs. Incubi and succubi lived about twice as long (and looked twenty-five for most of their lives) so became ill less often. Imps lived longer still, got sick less, and so on.
Those were only the most obvious species, the ones that were common and could pass unnoticed fairly easily as human in the light of day. There were rarer things out there that she knew less about, and didn’t care for an opportunity to improve upon that understanding. The rakshasa, for instance, she would just as soon not get to know better. Likewise the djinn, provided there still existed any.
The elf with the cold was dressed in slacks and a blazer, with a white shirt and tie. She’d spent enough time in the market by then to recognize the minor differences in formal clothes from man to man. There were suits where the fabric of the jacket and the pants matched in pattern, color and type. These were less common and more likely tailored to fit. The men who dressed like this also tended to have a crisper-looking shirt, a striped tie with a color in it that closely matched the suit, and a piece of metal in the tie to hold it to the shirt. They also had shinier shoes. Eve thought it was possible these more thoroughly formal outfits were indicators of status, but she couldn’t be sure.
Much more popular was the dark pants and dark blazer, where the two didn’t appear to have been purchased as a set. A range of shirt colors went with this pairing, the ties were often more haphazard and free-swinging, and there was, overall, a sort of ruffled quality to the wearers. The outfit still matched the uniform of the local business industry—whatever that business was—but had a more every-day sense to it. This arrangement of clothing could have also been linked to status, in the same way as the tailored suits.
Her impression of the elf was that he was not a member of the ruling class of bespoke suit-wearers, yet more important than the people who wore no suits at all. (Those people often had uniforms as well, but the kind indicating a position in the service industry.) He carried a white tissue in his hand and appeared either about to sneeze or just recovering from one. His eyes and nose were red-rimmed, which was all the more noticeable on a creature known for a light complexion.
As was true for everyone else in the market, the elf was in a hurry to get somewhere. Eve decided to follow.
It became apparent almost immediately that the elf knew he was being followed, due to some skill on his part, a lack of subtlety on hers, or a combination. His direct route to wherever he had intended to go—it was toward the office buildings so she presumed his destination was one of them—turned into an indirect meander. It wasn’t until a trip down a side street became an evasive duck behind a dumpster and into an alley that Eve decided she had better exercise caution.
One must always assume, in dealing with an elf, that they have a knife on their person.
“Hello,” she said, from the edge of the alley. The smell of liquefied waste in the dumpster was hair-curling. “I didn’t mean to alarm you, I only wanted to ask a question.”
A long silence followed. She wondered if he had exited the other end of the alley and she was talking to an empty space. She also wondered if it would have been a better idea to have Dee with her.
“What is your question?” came his reply.
“May I enter?” she asked.
“With your hands out, yes.”
She stepped past the dumpster, hands at her sides and palms out.
The elf was a third of the way down the alley, using what little shadow he could find. The knife she suspected him of carrying was in his left hand. His right held the tissue.
“I’m sorry to have worried you,” she said.
He looked puzzled. “Do you dye your hair?”
“No.”
“My eyes are watery and the sun’s bright, but you look like kin, except for the hair.”
“I am no kin to an elf.”
“Human?”
“In a manner, yes.”
“Come closer.”
She approached, until they were only a few paces away. With his knife still exposed, he looked her up and down. She kept her hands where they were and did her level best to not appear threatening.
“What do you mean, in a manner?” he asked.
“I’m human, but I’ve been known by names of beings you would not consider human. An elf might know me as Iounn or Idunna. I’ve also been called the Way-Finder, and the Gardener.”
He laughed. “I was a kid when I heard those stories. Is Zeus with you? He’s running late, perhaps.”
“No, Zeus is long dead,” she said, entirely serious because it was true. The proto-Greek man whose stories later became married to the Zeus god-myth was long dead. “I thought most of your kind kept to the secret stories.”
“You mean, we believed them?”
“That’s what I mean, yes.”
He shrugged. “I guess there are some that still do. A pretty redhead in an alley claiming to be a passel of ancient gods is a long way from that, though.”
“Most people would say the same about a man claiming to be an elf.”
He laughed, but the laugh quickly turned into a cough, which became bad enough to grab hold of his entire body. Soon, the knife was on the ground and he was leaning on Eve for support while waiting for the attack to subside.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I’m glad you aren’t here to mug me. I think I just gave you the opening you needed.”
“No. Only a question, as I said.” She bent down and retrieved his knife. He took it from her, hilt-first, and slid it i
nto his sleeve.
“Go ahead.”
“Who is your doctor?”
“I’m… sorry?”
“I assume you are seeing one?”
Elves and goblins could pass easily as humans in most arenas of life, but a medical exam wasn’t one of those places. This was equally so for other species, and it led to a shadow medical industry few were aware of. If an elf were sick he would go to a doctor who treated elves. If he wanted his pointed teeth capped he would go to a dentist who specialized in that and so on, all the way down to schooling and matrimonial bonds and funeral arrangements.
“Do you need a doctor? I thought you said you were human, why don’t you see one of theirs? They aren’t rare.”
“I don’t need to see him for medical advice for myself, but I do have some questions I believe a medical expert in the more exotic species may be able to answer. Have you already sought treatment for your condition?”
“For this? I was there a few days ago. He gave me some pills. He said I should be better soon.”
“So… he knew what you’ve contracted?”
“Sure, he called it… I forget. He did say to expect it to get worse before it gets better, but I should turn the corner by next week, if I keep up with the pills.”
“I see.”
There were questions she could have asked if she understood disease even a little better. There were different kinds—viral, bacterial—and there was cancer, and surely there were other types still. She would have liked to ask what the pills were supposed to be doing for him, and how. But she was certain even if he knew the answer she wouldn’t understand it.
I’ll ask the doctor instead.
“Can you provide me with a way to contact him?”
“Sure, I can give you his name. So this is for a friend?”
“Yes, exactly. It’s for an associate of mine who was recently ill. I was looking for advice on helping them.”
“Be easier if you just brought the friend.”
“Yes, I might.”
The elf pulled out his wallet and extracted a business card. “I always keep one or two extras with me. You never know when you’re going to meet another one of our kind looking for a referral.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking the card. “And I hope you feel better soon.”
“Thanks, I’m sure I will.”
She sincerely hoped that was the case, because when she caught him during his coughing fit, she touched his skin.
It was sticky.
FIVE
“Tell me again why we’re doing this?”
Rick was driving. The car they were using was borrowed from a service he subscribed to, via a process he attempted to explain but which she failed to fully grasp.
It seemed as if the world had developed indirect substitutes for money, which was confusing inasmuch as money was itself a substitute for goods. A car was a very real object, but he hadn’t purchased the car, he’d bought time from the company that owned the car. Except that was also not accurate. He had bought a lump of time from the company, using an internet-based monetary instrument, which had a value that appeared to be unrelated to the value of a known currency, at least until the day he needed it to represent real currency, and then he could exchange it at whatever rate was current at that moment.
The acquisition of a lump of time struck Eve as a wholly ridiculous expenditure, as time was even less real than money, internet-based or not. Nonetheless, he was able to take a portion of this lump of time and transfer it to the company that owned the car, which gave him use of the car for roughly the same amount of time as the lump he’d given them. It was only approximately the same time lump, as there was something called free minutes involved, and that was when she gave up trying to understand.
“I just want to ask him some questions. I have never seen anything like this before.”
“I know, but this doesn’t seem so much like just curiosity any more. I mean, happy to do this with you, I just wanna make sure there isn’t anything you aren’t telling me, here.”
They’d gone over this two or three times already. It was hard for her to put to words what she was feeling, so she had only supplied him with vague responses. The truth was she could still hear dream-Adam’s voice, now coupled to a strong notion that there was something significantly amiss outside of that dream.
“It is more than curiosity. That is perhaps the wrong word.”
It was late in a weekday, six days after the elf had given her the card, and the first time the doctor—his name was Lawrence Monks—could fit them into his schedule. She had returned to the marketplace each of those six days to see if there were any other sick non-humans to interrogate. There weren’t, but she did see the sick elf two more times. He didn’t look like he was getting any better, but the last time they spoke he promised he felt better, and was sure he was turning a corner.
She hoped this was true. But the same feeling she had so much trouble describing to Rick was also telling her that the elf had gotten worse, and that was the reason she hadn’t seen him again.
“An instinct, then,” he said. “A gut instinct.”
“I suppose.”
They were on a highway and traveling at a preposterous speed. It was late afternoon, so the road was heavily trafficked by people who had gone into the city to work in the morning and were now evacuating. Given the distances involved, the whole concept struck her as ridiculous. She knew of entire civilizations whose citizens never traveled as far in a lifetime as one commuter here might go in a day.
“I’ll tell you how it feels,” she said. “Imagine you enter your home one night. All the lights are off and you live alone. Something isn’t right, but you can’t figure out what, until you notice one end of your couch has been moved backwards by a hand’s width. That’s what it feels like.”
“Okay. Okay, that’s a start. Let’s call that confusion and dread. And the world is your living room?”
“This world is someone else’s responsibility. But I know where all of the furniture is. Metaphorically.”
“Yeah, okay. And the rest of that story is, if I’m in my living room and my couch has been moved, and I didn’t do it, maybe there’s someone else in my living room.”
“Yes.”
“Got it.”
The electronic woman in the car’s front panel informed Rick that they were nearing their exit. Eve understood that the woman was a talking map, but that didn’t make her comfort with this technology any more manageable. Maps used to have borders, and beyond those borders were exciting new lands. The woman’s cold certainty couched in a United Kingdom accent only the map’s borders had run out of monsters.
This could be why I’m chasing a vague feeling, she thought. Something new.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have involved you in something like this. I’m sure I am overreacting to a simple thing.”
“Hey, no, this is fun!” he said, as they took the correct, clearly marked and fully expected highway exit. “I just wanted to make sure I understood all the pieces, in case you were, I don’t know, forgetting to tell me anything.”
“I don’t believe I am, but I am unaccustomed to sharing information as well, so… I apologize if I seem that way. I didn’t intend on staying so long.”
“I told you, stay as long as you like. Just keep in mind there’s probably a bunch of things you don’t know I don’t know. But I enjoy having you around just the same.”
She smiled. Rick liked having her to take care of. She didn’t mind terribly being taken care of, but also knew that no matter how he felt about it, this was a temporary arrangement at best.
The road exit led to a large main street, and then—following a lengthy series of talking map commands—along side roads and into what appeared to be a residential neighborhood.
“You’re sure about this?” Rick asked. “This is pretty Leave it to Beaver out here.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I mean this doesn’t look like a… oh, hey, never mind I guess.”
The termination of the directions was at a house on the corner of two streets. The lawn extended to the sidewalk, and there was a sign embedded in the lawn, which bore the doctor’s legend next to an artfully rendered caduceus.
“There’s your doctor’s office,” Rick said. “Guess I shouldn’t have expect something that looked like a hospital.”
* * *
The entrance to the medical office was through a side door leading to what might otherwise have been a basement apartment. They were greeted there by a tall, thin, older (human) man with a warm smile and a cold handshake. He introduced himself as Dr. Marks and led them to his reception area—a small space with a plywood floor beneath a dozen padded metal chairs, plus another three around a short desk. The walls were lined with empty bookshelves and the space had a faint scent of mildew.
“Now, which of you is the patient!” the doctor asked with a kind of manufactured enthusiasm. “I’m afraid the notes I have on this appointment aren’t at all clear.”
“There’s a complicated answer to that,” Rick said.
“Ah, well, in this world of ours there are a lot of complicated things, aren’t there?” He winked. “Please, sit!”
Marks stepped behind his desk and sat in a weathered office chair as she and Rick took less comfortable metal chairs on the other side of the desk. Having never been to a medical doctor for professional reasons, Eve was uncertain how much of the inherent unwelcoming sense of this room was a product of this particular doctor, and how much was standard for all such offices. Either way, aside from their host’s rehearsed jocularity, she didn’t feel welcome.
The doctor slipped on a pair of glasses and took a closer look at both of them. “If I could be a tiny bit forward, here… Rick is it? And you’re Eve. I am terrible with names, so you’ll have to excuse me if I say them five or ten times over. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say neither of you is here for me. Professionally, I mean.”
Immortal Stories: Eve Page 6