Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  “So you’re a human statue because holding still is something you can do?” I said, examining a head of crinkly green lettuce for spots.

  “It’s not just holding still. It’s the stillness.” She was smiling dreamily, distantly. “I like the stillness. I like the way it builds from a little tiny speck deep inside. It swells, spreads all through me. When I get it to go just right, the whole world is flowing around me while I just stay.”

  “Like a rock in a stream?”

  Sophie shook her head. “Better than that.”

  “Sounds very … stoic.”

  “Does, doesn’t it?” She beamed at me. “Stoic. That’s a good word, stoic. Stoic. Strong. We shall not be moved.”

  I grinned. “‘Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling upon her mat.’”

  She paused with a head of curly green in one hand and a softball-sized radicchio in the other. “Say again?”

  “It’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson. ‘The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door; on her divine majority, obtrude no more.’”

  “I love it,” Sophie said. “‘On her divine majority, obtrude no more.’ That’s a good mantra for stillness.”

  “Well, a long one, anyway.” I shook my head and put a head of cos in the good pile. “Stillness is another thing I don’t understand. When I was your age, I couldn’t hold still for two seconds.”

  Sophie threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, man, what is this when-I-was-your-age shite? You make it sound like you’re old enough to be my mother when I’m pretty sure you’re not.”

  “Actually, I think I am,” I said, wincing.

  “Bollocks.”

  “Well, technically old enough if not really mature enough. If you know what I mean.”

  “Ah, right,” she conceded, mirroring my wince. “Sometimes when people come in here with little kids it suddenly occurs to me that I’m old enough to be their mother.” Sophie gave a small shudder. “Really weirds me out.”

  “What about when you’re a statue? Does it weird you out then?”

  “Nah. Statues can’t have children.” She looked down at the crate on the floor between us. “They don’t have kids and they don’t get older.”

  I gave a short laugh. “Everything that exists gets older. Statues are no exception.”

  Sophie tossed a wilted mass of curly-red in the bad basket. “Not the same way people do.”

  “Oh, no, honey,” I said unhappily. “Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks ‘age’ is a dirty word.”

  “Oh, come on, Lee—are you saying you wouldn’t stay young if you could?”

  “Got it in one, girlfriend.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “Why? Can you really not conceive of someone who doesn’t want to stay young?”

  She stared at me incredulously. “If I had the choice, I’d take it in a minute. And you’ll never make me believe that you wouldn’t, either.”

  I thought it over while we picked through some more greens. A dismaying amount of it was wilted. Stored too cold. Finally, I said, “Would you go back to high school? Pardon me, secondary school.”

  Sophie’s lovely English Rose face took on a revolted expression. “I knew what you meant. And the answer is a resounding hell, no, I’d rather die in a fiery car crash, thank you very much.”

  “OK, how about elementary school? That was usually a lot more fun for most people.”

  “Uh-uh, not there, either.”

  “Well, all right, then,” I said. “Now you know how I feel.”

  Her revulsion changed to puzzlement. “About what?”

  “About staying young. I’m glad I was young, of course. I didn’t waste much time being sensible, I took full advantage of my youth—I did all kinds of reckless, crazy things, I made a shitload of mistakes and generally made a right prat of myself, as you Brits put it. Je ne regret rien, pardon my French.”

  Sophie looked pained. “I will but the French wouldn’t.”

  “I’m also glad I was young when I was young,” I added. “Oh, what a time it was, there were giants in those days, blah-blah-blah. But I’m over it.”

  I could see she was mulling it over. “Staying young and going back to school isn’t the same thing,” she said finally. “Think about it. I mean, really think about it. Having a young body, more flexible, without so many aches and pains? No wrinkles? No gray hair? Never getting tired, having limitless amounts of energy? What about those things?”

  I started to feel more than a little defensive. “I don’t think I’m all that wrinkled. Gray hair—” I shrugged. “There are people who pay big money to get these highlights. And as for the rest of it, well, I don’t remember having limitless amounts of energy and never getting tired, but then, I wasn’t actually all that flexible back then, so I wasn’t wearing myself out doing gymnastics, either.”

  “But what about all those mistakes you claim you made?” Sophie gave me a sly grin. “You had to have a lot of energy for those, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Sleep all day, party all night.”

  Her eyes widened. “Christ, what were you, a vampire?”

  “Of course not. Today you’d have to be a vampire. Back then you only had to be a hippie. Never mind,” I added in response to her puzzled look. “Different world.” I tossed another wilted head of curly green into the bad pile and paused to massage the back of my neck.

  “Did I mention aches and pains?” Sophie asked playfully, watching me.

  “Hey, if people my age didn’t have aches and pains, the ibuprofen companies might go out of business, which would lead to a worldwide economic crash and depression. You think we want that on our conscience?”

  “Very funny,” Sophie said, laughing. “But seriously—”

  “But seriously, yourself, girlfriend. If that’s what getting older means to you—aches and pains and gray hair and wrinkles, you’re a lot shallower than I thought you were.”

  Sophie looked as if I had slapped her.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you shallow,” I went on. “But that’s not all there is to getting older.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So tell me some wonderful things.”

  I hesitated. “That’s like you asking me to tell you how wonderful it is to be me and I just can’t. It’s my Catholic school education—I had modesty beaten into me by a succession of husky nuns with thick rulers.”

  We both laughed and went on sorting lettuce while I wondered if she knew just how badly I had copped out with my modesty excuse. Tell her what’s so great about getting older. Well, Sophie, honey, first of all, you’re still alive. Second, you’re, uh, still alive. And third, uh … well, you see, girlfriend, whatever else might be good about getting older, still being alive trumps them all. The whole idea is to keep breathing and last as long as you can.

  Sophie quit while I was off sick for a few days. I didn’t find out till I came back and met the gangly eighteen-year-old guy replacing her. He was recently out of school, friendly and polite and reasonably intelligent, and everybody had already taken a liking to him. I felt betrayed and abandoned.

  When my shift ended, I headed straight over to Covent Garden. I wasn’t really expecting Sophie to talk to me, about the store or anything else. I just felt the overwhelming and rather selfish need to show her my unhappy face.

  It was after three when I stepped out of the tube station and headed down toward the piazza. The intermittent sun had done a disappearing act and it was misting out (never turn your back on a London sky, as I heard a customer say once) but there were still a lot of people milling about on the street. No, not milling—they were assembled, watching something.

  No, not merely watching—staring, hard. Transfixed.

  There was only one human statue on the walkway but, for a moment, I actually wasn’t sure that it was Sophie. She was the bronze Amazon and there was no mistaking that—the spear, the helmet and wig, the torn cropped shirt, the modified swimsuit bottom, that perfect b
ronze-metal color coating her well-conditioned body. She stood with her feet about shoulders’ width apart, just starting to raise the spear in her right hand, as if she had glimpsed some hazard that had yet to show itself clearly. Her eyes never blinked, at least not that I saw, nor could I see any sign that she was taking even the shallowest of shallow breaths. Her other arm was by her side, bent slightly at the elbow, wrist starting to flex, ready to provide counterbalance if/when she threw her spear.

  Perhaps it hadn’t been the weather that had driven away all the other statues. The toy soldier, the clown, the rag doll, the fox, Marilyn Monroe—I could picture them stepping down from their boxes and stools, shouldering their gym bags and retreating, defeated by Sophie’s power. It was something well beyond what the word stillness had meant to me, well beyond what I had seen Sophie do in the past. Maybe even well beyond the motionless nature of a real statue.

  Fascinated, I eased my way forward through the crowd, which was also very still and quiet—so quiet, in fact, that it felt wrong even to move, but I wanted to get up as close as possible. I was ten feet away from her when I saw something in her face change. It was barely there, not even so much as a shimmer in the heavy mist. I knew it meant that she had seen me.

  Her stillness didn’t crack for another ten or fifteen seconds, when I was almost within arm’s reach. And that was exactly what happened: it cracked. Not visibly or audibly and yet it was, in a way—visible on the subliminal level, audible only to the subconscious. A few seconds later, her stillness flaked away and was gone, and the crowd was staring at nothing more than a scantily-clad woman in bronze body paint. The heavy mist deepened into rain.

  Umbrellas went up and flapped open; voices murmured, rose, called to each other as people scattered, off to the piazza or the nearby shops and bars. I stayed where I was and watched Sophie come out of her pose like someone coming out of a dream.

  “Dammit, Lee.” Her shoulders slumped as she looked down at me. “This is all your fault.”

  “How?” I forced a laugh. “I didn’t make it rain.”

  We both knew that wasn’t what she meant but she let it go for the moment as she climbed down carefully from her pedestal. A real pedestal, or at least real enough. I rapped my knuckles on it.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked.

  “Who ever heard of a statue on a stepladder?” Sophie said irritably.

  “Good point,” I said. “Does it help? With your stillness, I mean.”

  “Can’t say, really.” She eyed me darkly. “But I can tell you what doesn’t.”

  “I’m sorry I broke your concentration,” I told her. “Truly, I am. I didn’t mean to.”

  Sophie said nothing as she took off her sandals and padded barefoot to the covered space in front of a clothing store to get her duffel bag. I was surprised that she had just left it sitting there and even more surprised that Covent Garden hadn’t been closed down so the bag could be removed and blown up by the bomb squad.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I was just upset when I came into work today and found out you quit.”

  Sighing, she removed the helmet and the wig. “You didn’t really think I was going to devote my life to organic groceries, did you? Sorting wilted lettuces and spotty apples?” She reached into the bag and pulled out a towel to dry the helmet.

  “Why don’t you wipe off the bronze and let me buy you a pint?” I said. “Or even an early dinner?”

  She bit her lip, staring at something over my right shoulder. I turned to follow her gaze and was startled to find a man leaning against a pillar. I thought he must have just sneaked up behind me because I couldn’t believe I’d walked right past someone that close without noticing. He was an inch or two shorter than I was, dressed in an assortment of things, none of which went with anything else, a bit like an extra in a production of Oliver!, but without the theatrical flamboyance. His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Up to you, luv.”

  Sophie didn’t answer. She had the apprehensive look of someone afraid of saying the wrong thing.

  “You know that I’ve nothing against you eating,” he added.

  I leaned in toward her and lowered my voice. “Who’s that? Have you got a manager now?”

  “Something like that,” she said, almost too softly for me to hear. She fiddled with the drawstring on the duffel bag. “Lee’s a friend from the shop,” she said to the guy, then added, “Someone I know, that I used to work with,” as if she were correcting herself.

  He frowned at me the way people do when they’re measuring something.

  “She used to help me out sometimes with my costumes and paint,” Sophie went on, a bit urgently. “And she covered for me at the shop, too, before I quit.”

  “I told you, luv, I’ve nothing against you eating.” All at once he was nose to nose with her before I could even register that he had moved. “Here, I’ll take care of your bag so you don’t have to lug it around.”

  Sophie was slightly taller than he was but she seemed to shrink under his gaze. “I won’t be long,” she said, still in that urgent, pleading tone. A knot gathered in my chest. I didn’t see him nod or make any other sign but apparently Sophie had. She reached into the duffel bag, took out a loose shift, and slipped it over her head. “Right. So let’s go, yes?”

  She was still very bronze. If she didn’t mind, I didn’t, either, but she seemed to have forgotten she was barefoot. I pointed at her feet. A little flustered, she pulled the sandals out of her bag, stepping into them as we walked off together.

  I had been thinking in terms of sandwiches, but since her manager had gone to the trouble of saying not once but twice that he had nothing against her eating, I decided to blow the budget at a nearby brasserie. On my salary, that really was blowing the budget—I’d be living on the store’s cast-offs for a while but I didn’t care.

  The brasserie hostess didn’t even blink at Sophie’s body paint, although she did look significantly toward the loo. Sophie took the hint and excused herself while the hostess showed me to a table. I ordered a large platter of potato skins as a starter and two glasses of red wine while I waited. When she returned from the ladies’, less bronze but still somewhat stained, she didn’t look thrilled.

  “I worked up quite an appetite today,” I said as she sank into her chair, “and it’s been a long time since I’ve indulged in comfort food. Hope you don’t mind too much.”

  “I don’t mind you indulging,” she said, emphasizing the you slightly but pointedly. “But you really should have asked before ordering wine for me.”

  “Hey, my treat, remember?”

  “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it. I do. It’s just that I’m off alcohol completely.”

  I wondered if she realized she was holding the wine glass and gazing at the shiraz with a longing that bordered on lust. “One glass of red wine with a meal is healthy,” I said. “Didn’t you read any of the nutritional propaganda at the store?”

  She chuckled a little. “Red wine and potato skins? Very haute cuisine.”

  “This is just the appetizer. Here comes our waitress to take the rest of our order.”

  “No!” She didn’t actually yell but she spoke loudly enough to make the people on either side of us look up to see if someone was about to make a scene. “I mean—well, it’s just that I don’t know if I can eat more than what we’ve got right now,” Sophie added, slightly apologetic. “That’s a whole lot of potato skins.”

  “Give us a little while with our appetizer,” I told the waitress, grabbing Sophie’s menu before she could get rid of it. “I think we just have to make up our minds.”

  Sophie frowned annoyance at me as the waitress moved off to take someone else’s order. “In case you’ve forgotten, I can’t work if my stomach’s too full.”

  “But it’s the end of the day. You haven’t taken to working after dark, have you?”

  She sighed, put-upon. “Did it occur to you that I might have a gig this evening?”

 
Now I felt like a complete idiot. “Oh, shit, Sophie. No, it didn’t. I’m so sorry.”

  Her grin was a bit mean as she pushed her wine glass over to me. “So you’ll pardon me for not drinking this nice wine. And you won’t try to force me to overeat now, will you?”

  “No, of course not. But surely you’ve got to have a little something in your stomach to give you stamina—” I broke off and put my head in my hands. “Oh, Christ.”

  “What? What is it?” She sounded genuinely concerned.

  I peeked through my fingers at her. “I sounded exactly like my mother just then.”

  Sophie burst into hearty giggles.

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” I said, relieved that she still had a sense of humor. “But if you’d actually known my mother, you’d be making me crawl for forgiveness.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “You have no idea. But seriously, Sophie. If this—” I gestured at the potato skins “—is too heavy for you, what can you manage instead? A salad? Fruit? Yogurt?”

  “I’m fine with a couple of these,” she assured me, her expression softening. “Look, I didn’t mean to be pissy. I’m just kind of nervous. This is my first big evening gig.”

  “What is it?” I asked. “Some corporate bash? Or have you hit the big time with a celebrity?”

  Her smile faded away. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Top secret, huh? Then it’s either politics or royalty.”

  Sophie laughed uneasily. “I told you, I can’t talk about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t let my imagination run away with me, right?”

  “Sure, sure.” She pulled one of the potato skins onto the small plate in front of her. “Knock yourself out.”

  My feeling that Sophie wouldn’t be able to resist the appetizer proved correct. While I drank her wine and mine and then in a drunken folly ordered a third glass, Sophie ended up eating over half of the potato skins. Eating the first one seemed to loosen her up; after that, she was reaching for them casually, with no hesitation. When we got down to the last two, I helped myself to one and pushed the other one off the platter onto her plate. “That’s yours,” I said cheerfully.