"Yeah, well, I'm probably gonna change that too."
Alex paused. "Can we come in?"
"Oh hell, yes!" Jane laughed. "Come on in."
She knew that the place looked disastrous. It was astrew with printouts, textbooks, and heaps of disks. There was a giant framed multicolored chart on the wall reading UNITED STATES FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS: THE RADIO SPECTRUM.
Jane threw a cat off the couch-a paper-covered futon and cleared a small space for them to sit. "Are you still allergic to cats?"
"No. Not anymore," Alex said.
"How long has it been, Alex?"
"Eleven months," he said, sitting. "Almost a year."
"Damn," Jane said. "What can I get y'all?"
Sylvia spoke up for the first time. "You got any ibogame?"
"What's that?"
"Never mind, then."
Jane touched her brother's shoulder. "They must have been pretty good to you in Cyprus, because you look pretty fine, Alex."
"Yeah," Alex said, "they tore out all my seams and rewove me, in Nicosia. They tell me I'm supposed to be this fat. Metabolically, I mean. Genetically, I'm supposed to be a big fat blond guy, Janey. Of course, I'll never get over being stunted in my youth." He laughed.
"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you at first. Mostly it was that suit."
"No," he said. "No, I'm completely different now, I know that. Genetics, it's the core of everything, Janey, it's mega witchcraft. Just look at my hands! It was supposed to change my lungs, and it did that, my lungs are like rock now. But look at my hands! They never looked like this."
Jane held her own hand out and placed it gently against his. "You're right. They look just like my hands now. They're not all... well, they're not all thin."
"It's simple, really," Alex said. "I didn't have a life before they rewove me, and now, after this, after everything I went through, I actually have a life! I'm just like anyone else, now. The curse is lifted. It's been erased, wiped out. I'm probably gonna live a really long time."
Jane glanced at Alex's girlfriend. She~assumed this was a girlfriend. Normally a woman wouldn't dress so provocatively and travel alone with a guy unless there was something happening. Her being here could only mean that Alex was deliberately showing her off.
But then there was that face. That huge blotch on her face. It was really hard to look at. And she'd done something to it too; it wasn't just a giant port-wine-stain birthmark, she'd messed with it too; she'd outlined the edges of it in some kind of very fine and very elaborate stippling. Like dots of rainbow ink, that shimmered. Jane had never seen anything like it. She found it frightening.
"How are the Troupe people doing?"
"Oh, we hear from them sometimes," Jane said. "Buzzard, quite a bit. Rudy and Sam and Peter and Rick have their own team up in Kansas now, they're still chasing. Martha never calls much, but I never got along much with Martha. We see Joe Brasseur socially sometimes, he's got some cushy job in town with the State Water Comnusslon.
"I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was about Greg and Carol. And Mickey too." -
"Well," she said simply, "Mickey was a good man, and Greg and Carol were my closest friends."
"How is Ed?"
"Well, Ed's got the use of both his arms again. Not like before, but pretty much. Ellen Mae is a lot better too. She's up in Anadarko now...
"How is Jerry doing? Is Jerry here?"
"No. He's at The University. I'm expecting him." She glanced at her watch. "You want some lunch? I'm making tacos, it's easy."
"I'll help," Alex said.
THEY DRIFTED INTO Juanita's cramped and ancient kitchen. Sylvia stayed on the couch. Alex winced as he heard her deftly fire up the TV with a remote. She began methodically combing through Austin's eight hundred available channels, with repeated dabs of her thumb.
He moved beside the electric range and watched the taco mix bubbling in a pan. The top of Juanita's stove was liberally spattered with orange grease. Jane shook some garlic salt at the taco mix, as if trying to choke it into submission. His sister had to be the worst cook in the world.
"You gotta make allowances for Sylvia," he said quietly. "She's not real good with other people, just kind of shy."
"I'm just touched that you would bring your girlfriend along to meet me, Alex."
"I'd kind of like it, if you and she could get along. She's kind of important to me. The most important woman in my life, really."
"That serious, huh?" -
"I don't have a lot of room to judge there," he said. "I met her on the nets, in a genetic-disorder support group. Sylvia's good on nets. People like Sylvia and me, people who've been through a lot of sickness when young, it tends to narrow our social skills. She had kind of an autism thing, she's had a hard time of life. But she's all rewoven now, and she's okay underneath."
"Boy, it really is that serious," Jane said.
"How is Jerry? Are you getting along?"
"You really want to know?"
"Yes, really."
"He's different. I'm different. We're a lot different than we were a year ago." She looked at him hard, and he could see it there behind her eyes, waiting to pour out.
"Tell me," he said.
"Well, it's since the baby... . Alex, he's really good with the baby. The baby really got through to him, he's so good with his little son. It's like... he's really good when he has someone he doesn't have to reason with. He's so patient and kind with that little kid, it's really amazing."
"How about you, though?"
"Us? We get along. We don't even have to get along. We're stuck here in this dinky little house, but you wouldn't know it. He's got his little office here with the virching stuff and his university link, and I've got my net-rig in the back in the baby's room, and he does his thing, and I do my thing, and we do our together-thing, and it works out okay, it really does."
"What are you working on these days, exactly?"
"Net-stuff. The usual. Well, not the usual. Mommy net-stuff. The kind of stuff you can do with one hand, while you're wiping warm spit off your forearm." Jane laughed, and poked at her taco mix with a wooden spoon. "Anyway, that data we got-the stuff you recorded when the stream broke down on us? That made itqn three final release disks! We got money for-that. Pretty good money. We bought this house with it."
"Alex, this isn't a big house, I know that, but it's a stand-alone in a really prized area. I've even got a real garden in the backyard, you should see it. And you wouldn't believe the neighborhood politicals here in Austin, they are really fierce. You can walk to campus, and play with your kid right in the parks, anytime day or night, and it's a really pretty area, and it's really safe too. The crime rate is very low here, and you never see a structure hit, never. It's a real enclave here, it's a mega-good place for a little baby to live."
"Can I see the baby?"
"Oh! Sure! Let me turn this down."
She shut down the stove and led him into the back room. The nursery. The nursery was the first room in the house that actually struck him as a place where Juanita lived. The nursery looked like a room where an intelligent and hyperactive woman with design training had spent a long time thinking hard about exactly how things should look. It was like a big jewel box for a baby, it was like some monster bassinet in shades of fuzzy-cuddly midnight blue. It was the kind of room that created in Alex the instant urge to flee.
Juanita bent over the antique, hand-stripped, repainted wooden crib and looked in on her child. Alex had never seen quite that expression on her face before, but he recognized it. He recognized it as the place where all Juanita's raw ferocity had gone. All that steamy energy she'd always had, had been sucked into that all-encompassing Madonna look.