“I love you.”
“I'm warning you, don’t start.”
“If I’ve screwed up, just give me a chance to put things right. I’ll try harder—”
“There’s nothing worse than when you try harder. The strain is so fucking obvious.”
“I always thought I’d—” I met her eyes: dark, expressive, impossibly beautiful. Even now, the sight of them cut through everything else I was thinking and feeling, and transformed part of me into a helpless, infatuated child. But I’d still, always, concentrated, I’d always paid attention. How had it come to this! What signs could I have missed… when, how? I wanted to demand dates and times and places.
Gina looked away and said, “It’s too late to change anything. I’ve found someone else. I’ve been seeing someone else for the last three months. If you really didn’t know that… what kind of message did you need? Did I have to bring him home and screw him in front of you?”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear this; it was just noise that made everything more complicated. I said slowly, “I don’t care what you’ve done. We can still—”
She took a step toward me and shouted, “I care! You selfish moron! I care!” Tears were streaming down her face. Beneath everything I was struggling to understand, I just ached to hold her; I still couldn’t believe I was the reason for all her pain.
She said contemptuously, “Look at you! I'm the one who’s just told you I’ve been screwing someone else behind your back! I'm the one who’s walking out! And it still hurts me a thousand times more than anything will ever hurt you—”
I must have thought about what I did next, I must have planned it, but I don’t remember turning to the sink and hunting for a knife, I don’t remember opening my shirt. But I found myself standing by the kitchen doorway, carving lines back and forth across my stomach with the point of the blade, saying calmly, “You always wanted scars. Here are some scars.”
Gina threw herself at me, knocking me off my feet. I pushed the knife away, under the table. Before I could get up, she sat on my chest, and started slapping and punching me. She screamed, “You think that hurts? You think that’s the same? You don’t even know the difference, do you? Do you?"
I lay on the floor and looked away from her, while she pummeled my face and shoulders. I felt nothing at all, I was just waiting for it to be over—but when she stood up and started to leave, making sniveling noises as she staggered around the kitchen, I suddenly wanted to hurt her, badly.
I said evenly, “What did you expect? I can’t cry on cue like you do. My prolactin level’s not up to it.”
I heard her dragging the suitcases along the hall. I had a vision offal—lowing her out the door, offering to carry something, making a scene. But my desire for revenge had already faded. I loved her, I wanted her back… and everything I could imagine doing to try to prove that seemed guaranteed to hurt her, guaranteed to make everything worse.
The front door slammed shut.
I curled up on the floor. I was bleeding messily and gritting my teeth as much against the metallic stench, and a sense of helpless incontinence, as against the pain—but I knew I wasn’t cut deeply. I hadn’t gone insane with jealousy and rage and severed an artery; I’d always known exactly what I was doing.
Was I meant to feel ashamed of that? Ashamed that I hadn’t broken the furniture, disemboweled myself—or tried to kill her? I could still feel the sting of Gina’s contempt—and if I’d never really known her thoughts before, I’d understood one thing as she knocked me to the floor: because I hadn’t been overwhelmed by emotion, because I hadn’t lost control… in her eyes, I was somehow less than human.
I wrapped a towel around my superficial wounds, then told the pharm what had happened. It buzzed for several minutes, then exuded a paste of antibiotics, coagulants, and a collagen-like adhesive. It dried on my skin like a tight-fitting bandage.
The pharm had no eye of its own, but I stood by the phone and showed it our handiwork.
It said, “Avoid strenuous bowel movements. And try not to laugh too hard.”
8
Angelo said glumly, “I’ve been sent.”
“Then you’d better come in.”
He followed me down the hall into the living room. I asked, “How are the girls?”
“Good. Exhausting.”
Maria was three, Louise was two. Angelo and Lisa both worked from home—in soundproof offices—taking the childcare in shifts. Angelo was a mathematician with a net-based, nominally Canadian university; Lisa was a polymer chemist with a company which manufactured in the Netherlands.
We’d been friends since university, but I hadn’t met his sister until Louise was born. Gina had been visiting mother and daughter in hospital; I’d fallen for her in the elevator, before I had any idea who she was.
Seated, Angelo said cautiously, “I think she just wants to know how you are.”
“I sent her ten messages in ten days. She knows exactly how I am.”
“She said you stopped suddenly.”
“Suddenly? Ten acts of ritual humiliation is all she gets, without a reply.” I hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but Angelo was already beginning to look like a peace envoy stranded on a battlefield. I laughed. “Tell her whatever she wants to hear. Tell her I'm devastated… but recovering rapidly. I don’t want her to feel insulted… but I don’t want her to feel guilty, either.”
He smiled uncertainly, as if I’d made a tasteless joke. “She’s taking it badly.”
I clenched my fists and said slowly, “I know that, and so am I, but don’t you think she’d feel better if you told her…” I stopped. “What did she say you should tell me if I asked if there was any chance of her coming back?”
“She said to say no.”
“Of course. But… did she mean it? What did she tell you to say if I asked if she meant it?”
“Andrew—”
“Forget it.”
A long, awkward silence descended. I considered asking where she was, who she was with, but I knew he wouldn’t tell me. And I didn’t really want to know.
I said, “I'm meant to be flying out to Stateless tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I heard. Good luck.”
“There is another journalist who’d be willing to take over the project. I’d only have to make one call—”
He shook his head. “There’s no reason to do that. It wouldn’t change anything.”
The silence returned. After a while, Angelo reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a small plastic vial of tablets. He said, “I’ve got some Ds.”
I groaned. “You never used to take that shit.”
He glanced up at me, wounded. “They’re harmless. I like to switch off sometimes. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.”
Disinhibitors were non-toxic and non-addictive. They created a mild sensation of well-being, and increased the effort required for considered thought—rather like a moderate dose of alcohol or cannabis, with few of the side effects. Their concentration in the bloodstream was self-limiting—above a certain level, the molecule catalyzed its own destruction—so taking a whole bottle was exactly the same as swallowing a single D.
Angelo offered me the vial. I took out a tablet reluctantly, and held it in my palm.
Alcohol had almost vanished from polite society by the time I was ten years old, but its use as a “social lubricant” always seemed to be lauded in retrospect as unequivocally beneficial, and only the violence and organic damage it induced were viewed as pathological. To me, though, the magic bullet which had taken its place seemed like a distillation of the real problem. Cirrhosis, brain damage, assorted cancers, and the worst traffic accidents and crimes of stupefaction had been mercifully banished… but I still wasn’t prepared to concede that human beings were physically incapable of communicating or relaxing without the aid of psychoactive drugs.