by John Park
“So now you know,” he said finally, and waited, still watching her.
The cold had sunk into her bones. She could feel nothing but the tension that petrified her, that would shatter her if she tried to move. Then she saw how the same rigidity held him; she saw his eyes looking out from it. “You’ll never be happy now,” she whispered. “Never again.”
He flinched, as though a cold gust had struck his face. His gaze lost focus, then returned to her with full intensity. “That’s all you have to say to the monster? You’re not appalled.”
“It’s in the past, what you did,” she said, clinging to the last illusion. “It’s over.”
“Is it?”
Of course it wasn’t over: he was making plans. She said nothing.
“If you’re not appalled,” he whispered, “you should be terrified.” There was intense concentration in his face now. She could almost see the opposing tensions threatening to pull him apart. “You should get out of here and run for your life.”
If she moved, he might spring at her. If she got up, if she left, she would tear herself open. “Is that what you want?” she asked. “Do you want me to run away from you?”
He shoved the chair back and stood up. For a moment he loomed towards her. Then he had turned and was pressing his forehead against the window. “I enjoyed it, what I did—I still enjoy it. You realise that? And to women. You don’t know what you’re risking. You haven’t seen—you can’t know . . .” He swung round to face her with his fists held shaking in front of him. His face was white. It contorted, and was immediately expressionless again. Through bloodless lips he whispered, “Why are you doing this to me? Why did you come?”
“What am I doing to you? Say it. Say it, say it—because otherwise I’ve gone mad and tied myself to a monster that doesn’t care for me or anything human.”
“Care for? Is that what you want me to say?” For the first time, he was shouting. “Care? Like a six-year-old with a best friend—with a kitten? Did the arena bull care for the dart in its flesh? Does the whale care for the harpoon? If I could rip you out of me, I’d do it, and be myself again.”
“But you can’t,” she said, and was briefly, shockingly comforted. “We can’t.”
“No,” he said flatly, “I can’t . . . So we’re tied to each other. Is that what it’s come to? Conjoined twins? If one is destroyed, the other goes too.”
“And if we try to cut the bond, we bleed,” she acknowledged. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can help each other. We can be stronger than we were separately. Oh god—don’t look like that. It must work. It has to. We’ve got to make it work.”
“That—that leaflet was right. We’re insane, both of us. Or if we’re not, this will drive us mad.”
“Jesus Christ. . . . Yes I know.”
He had been gripping the back of the chair with both hands. Now he scraped the chair across the floor and moved towards her. “Why did you have to come here today? I was . . . I had it all coming into place. Everything was clear. It fitted: who I was, what I was going to do—and I’m still going to do it! I am! They’ll see what I am, all of them. They’ll hate me, they’ll scare their children with my name, but they’ll remember. . . . And you’ll hate me. You hate me now, part of you does, and you hate yourself for being here. Hate and pain and fear—they’re what make people act, they make us what we are, because you can drive out anything else with them. Anything at all. And they last. Have you seen a man who’s been broken by pain, or who’s just discovered the strengths of his own terrors? He’s marked for life—deeper than if he’d lost an arm. And love—have you seen what happens between a man and a wife when pain is used to divide them? Or between a mother and child?”
“Stop it! You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to be this way. Give it up—”
“Don’t I? Don’t I really?” He fumbled with the fastening of his sleeve, then tore the button off and ripped the cloth back from his arm. He brandished his scars at her. “How do you think I got these?” Before she could speak, he snatched up a glass and swung it against the edge of the table. Shards flew and the remains glittered in his fist.
“Glass,” he said, and thrust it towards her. “It’s sharp, it cuts. It hurts.” Then he brought the splinters to his arm and began to rake them along his scars. She saw his wrists quiver with strain, his free hand spasm and clench.
“There was a window,” he said, between ragged breaths, “in the passageway from the garage, when they took me to the treatment centre back there. It looked into a storage area. An old window in a grey wooden frame. I disabled one of the guards and put my fist through it. Then I raked my arm. They had a tight schedule; I knew they wouldn’t have time to get rid of the scars. I wanted something to remind me, when I got to this side. If necessary, if I’d had time, I’d have gouged an eye out. I’d do it now.”
On his forearm the glass left ragged white furrows that turned red and dripped. He faced her until her gaze was wrenched back to his eyes. “Tell me now it’s not necessary,” he whispered. “Tell me I can give up anytime. Tell me I can stop being what I am.”
“God damn you, you can try! Is hurting the only thing that matters to you, is that all you understand? You think because you do that to yourself, because you’re in pain, it justifies anything? It doesn’t. It’s a show, it’s to convince you more than me.”
She had risen and moved close to him; but when she reached for the glass in his hand, his wounded arm jerked up and he seized her wrist. The shards with their red smears and globules threatened her face. “I am,” he muttered. “Not some puppet they think they’ve made.”
She forced her gaze back to his eyes. “I won’t beg.” Her tongue was shrivelled, her lips numb. “Either use that thing or give it to me.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what happens. So many of them start out like that, saying they won’t talk, they won’t confess, they won’t beg.”
“Add me to your list then, or let me go. Your arm needs bandaging.”
She moved her free hand, found his shirt sleeve, felt towards the wrist. She would not look away from his eyes. His skin was hot and damp. His hand quivered, but was immovable as the handle of a locked door. She dared not look down to see if her fingers were smeared with blood. She found the glass, sticky when her thumb brushed a sharp edge, then smooth and cold. She tugged, and it came into her hand. His fingers slipped from her other wrist.
She did look down. The glass was clutched in her fingers, a cruel, leaking gem. On her other arm were yellowish marks, as though she had been manacled, darkening as she watched. Carefully, she reached out and put the glass on the table. It rattled as it left her fingers. She pulled her arm back and turned to him. Her mouth spoke. “Let me see your wrist.”
Her body made its way to the bathroom, found bandages, returned. It wrapped his arm like a parcel, with fingers as brittle as glass tongs. When it was finished, her hands tied the bandage, and, marionette-like, she walked back to the bathroom with the remainder.
When she returned, he had picked up the broken glass from the table and was testing its edges with his thumb.
She screamed and ran at him.
“Throw it away!”
Glass shattered on the floor. She struck out, shouting, trying to hurt, then to seize him, shake him—
And then they were clinging together, their shared solidity the only refuge in a world gone to chaos. There was no room in them for gentleness. Instead of warmth there was desperation, and passion in place of hope. Her body felt weak as if it had been beaten, so that she looked for bruises when she bared it. But there was only the pale vulnerability of a drowned swimmer in the light of the morgue.
He was faceless with the light behind him, tearing his shirt off—his head drawn out into a horned grotesque—and black as his shadow. Then he came to her, cold waves of light sliding across his skin, his face that of a man awaiting execution.
He went to her, and his shadow slid from her fa
ce to enshroud her body. His skin trembled, as though he had been charged with lightning, and to discharge that tension would flash him out of existence. And yet the tension would not be borne. He was compelled towards her; and though she was the one who gasped and arched when they touched, he felt the shock throughout his body.
Before, she had been motionless; now she seized him and writhed and choked against his cheek. He could no longer help her, only let her hold him, and hold to her himself, while something in his spine, in the back of his head, and finally close behind his eyes, tightened and pulled and stretched, and would not, would not break. His mouth strained wide. He had lost sight of her, and darkness covered his eyes. The only sounds were the sounds of suffering. And the tension bent him backward without promise of release.
She spasmed and moaned aloud, then fell silent, then moaned again. His eyes flickered open. Her face was crimson, crumpled like a newborn child’s.
He bent towards her—and the tension broke. The shock of discharge surged through his limbs and erupted into his brain—a white incandescence of sensation beyond pain or joy, that obliterated all he had ever been.
Slowly he came back into himself, into suspension between the poles of his existence. His cruel hand smoothed and caressed. His clinical eyes watched, and were clouded. His awareness, his vision of future possibility was shrinking to encompass only this other human, this other sack of vulnerable struts and pulp. His practised fingers touched flesh, and they trembled.
She stirred, slowly and heavily rising from her private depths. Her eyes were closed, turned away from his face, their lashes wet. Helpless, he held her against the hollowness in his chest.
Her jaw moved against his sternum several times before the words came. “I can’t stay here. That’s what it comes down to. We’ll just keep torturing ourselves if we go on this way.”
She slipped away from him and began to dress.
When she left, he watched her through the window until she was out of sight. The sun was sinking towards the mountain tops, and the inland passes were spilling cloud into the valley. Catching the sun as it came in along the river, a dirigible descended towards the landing field. He turned away and went to clean the blood and glass from the floor.
The next weekend, Elinda let Carlo take her to a dance. In her closet she rediscovered a cream silk blouse and a maroon calf-length flared skirt. She tried to lose herself in the primitive energy of the music and her sheer physical exertion on the dance floor. Then she had one or two drinks too many. The bass was booming in her head. Obstinate, she thought, obstinate bass, it never changes.
Faces would swirl around her. After they had gone, she was able to identify them, wonder what they had said. Jessamyn with her friend, staring and frowning. Or had that been later, after she had bumped into Dr. Henry? Literally. Almost knocked them both down, him into the arms of the blonde beside him. She remembered apologising to him, and then talking for so long that Carlo got uncomfortable and left and came back with more drinks. Which perhaps was not the greatest idea in the world, because it was then that the faces started eddying past her and blurring, and she couldn’t remember what she’d said to Henry or when he had left.
Some time later she was outside, with the divided moonlight freezing onto her face, and Carlo was becoming aggressively friendly. She tried holding him at arm’s length, then pushed him away impatiently. When he tried again, she lost her temper and told him she’d find her own way home. There was an unpleasant scene that afterwards she could remember little of. In the middle of it, Carlo had shouted something like “You’re not supposed to have met, you’re not supposed to be interested any more.”
Crazy drunken evening, she thought. Only when she was climbing the slope to her home and she remembered she was alone and unarmed did her mind start to clear. Then the pain in Carlo’s face started to haunt her, and his last words.
“You’re what I made.” Had he really said that, or was it just part of the drunken chaos slopping about in her mind? “I tried to prevent all this, and you won’t even let me show you the truth!” He had been staggering away from her, or she had been lurching out of his reach, and the streetlight had glistened on his face. He looked haunted.
Snapshots, she thought; the mind playing games. Already the memory, if was a memory, was sharpening, changing focus as she examined it. Had he been reaching for her hand then, or had she added that to the picture herself? She couldn’t tell how drunk he had been, either. She could ask him what he had meant, but only if he had really said it, or believed he had said it.
Crazy, crazy evening. She felt lucky to have reached her front door without anything worse happening. The lights buffeted her when her hand slid onto the switch, and she moaned and turned them off again. She groped her way to the bed and dived gratefully into oblivion.
Grebbel worked on the terminal in the lab, waiting until Osmon finished checking out the atomic-absorption spectrometer. He searched the database for the delivery schedules and payload capacities of both the shuttles and the dirigibles, and tried to estimate the amount of hardware in orbit. Finally Osmon disconnected his circuit probes and moved towards the door, and Grebbel called him over.
“I’ve been talking to some of the others,” he began. “But I need someone I can trust. I think we have enough in common to be able to understand each other.”
“Indeed,” said Osmon. “Are you referring to private interests that go unfulfilled, or something larger?”
“Both. But mainly freedom. In the past, a hundred men, properly equipped, have been able to overthrow an empire. What do you think a dozen men—perhaps two dozen—properly organised, could do here?”
“Do you think there are two dozen of us ready to take such risks?”
“I think if a dozen of us got ourselves established, we could gather enough others to support a change in regime.”
Osmon looked at him. “Getting established, though . . .”
“It will mean violence, of course.”
“Not necessarily,” Osmon said.
“What are you thinking of?”
“Something in the organisation of this settlement strikes a discord in my ears. That most unfortunate young woman who was found in the woods—she was not the first to be missing. And the way the matter was treated . . . There were accidents in the caves when the turbine rooms were first being opened up, and no effort was spared to find the missing. I believe that these investigations were stifled by someone in authority. If we knew who it was . . .”
“We might create an unwilling ally,” Grebbel finished. “But is there time?”
“We set our own schedule, don’t we?”
“Of course,” said Grebbel, but his fists clenched and opened, then squeezed until the knuckles were white.
Elinda slumped onto the hard chair beside Barbara’s bed. Barbara lay on her side, facing away from her, apparently dozing, but her breathing was fast and light. Her hair, thick and long and dark brown, that Elinda had sometimes spent half an evening combing and braiding, hung tangled over her face, hiding her eyes. Elinda reached out, carefully, tentatively and smoothed it back. She wondered how long it had been since she had touched her former lover.
I’ve betrayed you, she did not say aloud. I’ve left you in here and found . . . someone.
She whispered: “I didn’t mean to abandon you. I won’t abandon you.”
He’s like us, he’s lost his memories. But it’s hurting him; it’s hurting us both. I don’t know what’s going to happen.
“I’m trying to finish what you were doing. I’m trying but it’s hard. Was it about our memories? We went—he and I—we went to the caves and we found Erika’s body. Was that part of what you were looking for too, whatever sent her there? I don’t understand what I’m doing, what it is I’m trying to find.”
Barbara, why couldn’t you have trusted me with any of this?
“Pal’ce,” Barbara mumbled. “Do, do. Go, ’member.”
Oh, why didn’t you le
t me in then? Why can’t you show me what’s going on inside you?
Grebbel found Elinda in the Greenhouse, supervising the harvest of soya beans. “No shortage of volunteers,” he commented, “even this late in the day. Does everyone work like this for the communal good?”
She looked at him. “There’s a duty roster. Your name will come up soon enough. But, yes, several of them are volunteers. What are you looking for?”
“I’m always curious about things like group solidarity and the room for individual goals.”
“This is only a social call, then.” Just public enough to prevent another blowup. Very shrewd. “Except that I don’t believe it. What do you want?”
He drew a breath. “I didn’t want to leave things the way they were after last time. No, you’re right, that’s not the only reason I came, but it is one reason. Please believe me.”
“All right,” she said carefully. “Go on.”
“I was wondering if you had made any more progress in finding out what had happened to Barbara. I still might be able to help.” He paraphrased Osmon’s comments, without saying who had made them.
“I’d already guessed somebody was pulling strings,” she said. “But it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who might be paranoid. No, I’m no further on, and I’m in no position to turn down help. Whatever the reason it’s offered.”
That evening she had invited Louise and Paulina in for dinner, and for the first part of the evening managed to engross herself with the business of slicing vegetables and cleaning the two-kilogram carp she had squandered her coupons on. She would have to live on fish stew for the rest of the week, but at least that would be better than the late-night snacks she too often resorted to.
Louise and Paulina still seemed warily solicitous, which made her wonder what sort of signals she was sending out. Over dinner, she realised she was babbling, while her two guests sat and watched her. Suddenly she ran out of energy, and there was an uneasy silence until Louise started talking about the latest political developments back on Earth. Elinda found it hard to generate any interest. Even when the conversation shifted to a new batch of satellite photos of the land to the south of the Flats, she felt remote from the discussion. Finally Paulina asked, “Have you been to see Barbara lately?” and Elinda felt the world close on her again with a snap.