Maya leapt at the dog as he attacked the second cat. She tried to grab at the matted fur of his neck. He turned with enormous feral speed and ease, and bit her on the shin. It was as if she’d slammed her leg in a fanged iron door. She screamed and fell.
The cat tried hard to climb the wallpaper. The dog seized the cat’s tail with his dreadful grasping paw and threw the cat down and killed him with his teeth.
Maya yanked at the door and ran away.
She had nothing. She had no shoes. She knew the dog would come for her now. Her leg was bleeding and she stank of fear, enough fear to crush the world. She ran. She ran down the hall and into an elevator. She stood there and shook and moaned until the doors closed.
There was nothing else to do now. So she caught a train.
On the first day she stole clothes. This was very difficult now because she was so afraid. It was easy to steal things when you were perfectly happy and confident, because everyone loved pretty girls who were perfectly happy and confident. But nobody loved crazy girls who had funny stiff hair and who limped and who winced and who looked like a junkie and who carried no luggage.
The dog was inside the net. She couldn’t imagine why she’d ever thought a net was a nice thing. A net was a thing to kill fish with. Big pieces of the dog’s gray meat had grown inside the net. He had been haunting the palace, and he had used it to track her down. He was smelling after her, and he was all over the world like a kind of vapor.
The police would find her the moment she stopped running. She was very tired and very guilty and she hurt. Whenever she sat still, blind panic gripped her, and she had to go throw up.
But in the Sinai, it was summer. This wasn’t Europe. She found no release in the sensation of travel now; it felt bad and strange to be traveling. The actress was in a Red Sea resort. It was a place to go when you were very tired. The actress had naturally left strict orders not to be disturbed.
Maya convinced the staff of the spa that she had news of a death in the family. They saw that she was shattered, haunted and struck with grief, so they believed her little story and they pitied her. They were kindly people, in their little Edenic niche of desalination and pampered jungle. Their business was to care for others. They gave her a notebook and told her how to hunt for the actress’s spoor.
The actress was a furry hominid with thick black nails and hairy calloused feet. She was naked and covered in wiry black fur. People could do this sort of thing conveniently if they were willing to activate some of the human junk DNA. It wasn’t a medical activity that lengthened the life span, so it was the sort of thing that one did in a spa.
In certain modern circles it was considered very relaxing to retreat to a prehominid form. A few soothing months of very dim consciousness, with the hunt for food to keep one toned. The prehominid guests at the spa ate fruit and chased and killed small animals with sticks. They wore tracking devices and were feted once a week on carrion.
Maya followed the hints from the notebook. Eventually, she found Miss Jeskova. Miss Jeskova was staring out to sea and cracking raw oysters with a fist ax.
“Are you Olga Jeskova?”
Miss Jeskova loudly slurped an oyster. The notebook said something in Czestina. Maya manipulated some menus. “[Not right now,]” the machine said ambiguously.
“My name is Mia Ziemann, Miss Jeskova,” she said, speaking into the notebook’s inset microphone. “I’m sorry that we have to meet this way. I’ve come from Praha and I have some bad news for you.”
“[Bad news can wait,]” said the notebook in English, crankily. “[Bad news can always wait. I’m hungry.]”
“I was living in your apartment. I was taking care of your cats. I was your cat-sitter in Praha. Do you understand me?”
Miss Jeskova chewed another oyster. Her hide twitched and she scratched herself vigorously. “[My nice little cats,]” the notebook said at last.
The staff had warned her that communication would take patience. People at the spa didn’t go there to chat, but they left certain mental conduits in case there was an emergency.
“[What about my little darlings?]” said the notebook at last.
“They’re dead. I’m very sorry. I was a guest in your home and your cats were killed. I feel truly terrible about it. It was all my fault. I came here as soon as I could, because I had to tell you myself.”
“[My cats are dead?]” Miss Jeskova said. “[When I go home, this will make me very sad.]”
“A dog got in and killed them. It was awful, and it was all because of me. I had to come and tell you myself. I just had to.” She was trembling violently.
Miss Jeskova looked at her with timeless brown eyes. “[Stop crying. You look bad. You must be hungry.]”
“I guess I am.”
“[Eat these stone sweeties. So juicy and good.]” She deftly whacked another oyster with her hand ax.
Maya fished the raw oyster from its broken shell. It took a lot of courage to swallow the thing. The tactility was gruesome but it was a deeply sensual experience.
Maya studied the Red Sea. It was hard to understand why they called it Red when it was so intensely blue.
Maybe they’d done something strange to it, primally changed the whole character of the ocean somehow. But there were waves rolling in, crashing against black rocks with an absolute and unhurried rhythm, under a million blue miles of hot and easy sky. “They say that drowning is really quick. It’s a good death.”
“[Don’t be stupid. Eat.]”
Maya had another oyster. Her stomach slowly eased from an anguished knot and rumbled in ecstasy.
“I’m hungry,” she said suddenly. “I can’t believe how hungry I feel. Good heavens, I think I haven’t eaten anything in days.”
“[Eat. Dead girls are worse than dead cats.]”
Maya ate another oyster, and stared out to sea. The waves glittered rhythmically. A strange intensity began to grip her. A waking up all over, as if her skin had become one giant eyelid.
The light of the world flooded within her.
She was broken inside. She knew then and there that she would always be broken inside. She would never become a single whole woman, there were scars far past healing at the very core of her being. She was a creature of pieces and seams, and she would always be pieces and seams.
But now, for the first time, all those pieces were gazing at the same thing. All of her, gripped by the same hot light, perceiving the world outside.
Then suddenly there was no window anymore. She was standing inside the world. Inhabiting the world. Not dodging through the fractured alterity within her own skull, but living and breathing in the world that the sun shone upon. It wasn’t happiness, not much like pleasure; but it was radiant experience that touched every shred inside her.
The world beneath the sun astounded her. It was a world vastly huger, and far more interesting, than any little world inside herself could ever be. That world touched her everywhere. She had only needed to really look. She was engaged within that world. Alive and aware and awake, in the clear light of day. The world was entirely, heavily, inescapably and liberatingly real.
“I feel the wind blowing through me,” she murmured.
Olga only grunted.
She turned and looked at her hairy companion. “Olga, do you understand anything I’m telling you? I hardly understand it myself. I’ve been having such a very hard time lately. I think that—I think I’ve been having some kind of fit.”
“[You don’t understand anything,]” Olga said. “[Life is patience. You are careless, you talk too much, you hurry too much. I know how to be patient. Grief is bad, but you get over it. Guilt is bad, but you get over it. You don’t know that yet. That’s why I’m wiser than you even when I’m a monkey.]”