I know, he said. You don’t have any secrets from me. We’re soul mates, you and I, now and forever. It was a nicer way of putting it than saying he was addicted to her booby-trapped flesh, but it came to the same thing in the end.
She went away then: back to the tube station, across zones three, two, and one, and out again on the far side of the river. She wanted to be alone, although she knew that she never would be and never could be.
The receptionist demanded to know why Isabel hadn’t brought her back in the car, so Anna said that she’d asked to be dropped at the end of the street. “I wanted to walk a little way,” she explained. “It’s such a nice evening.”
“No it isn’t,” the receptionist pointed out. “It’s cloudy and cold, and too windy by half.”
“You don’t notice things like that when you’re in my condition,” Anna told her, loftily. “I’m drugged up to the eyeballs on mutated euphories manufactured by my own cells. If it weren’t for the medication, I’d be right up there on cloud nine, out of my mind on sheer bliss.” It was a lie, of course; the real effects were much nastier.
“If the way you’re talking is any guide,” the receptionist said, wryly, “you’re almost back to normal. We’ll soon have to throw you back into the wide and wicked world.”
“It’s not as wide or as wicked as all that,” Anna said, with due kindness and consideration, “and certainly not as worldly. One day, though, all the fallen angels will learn how to fly again, and how to soar to undiscovered heights—and then we’ll begin to find out what the true bounds of experience are.”
“I take it back,” the receptionist said. “I hope you haven’t been plaguing your poor sister’s ears with that kind of talk—she won’t want to take you out again if you have.”
“No,” said Anna, “I don’t suppose she will. But then, she’s not really my sister, and never was. I’m one of a kind.” And for once, there was no inner or outer voice to say Don’t flatter yourself, or Better be grateful for what you’ve got, or We’re all sisters under the skin, or any of the other shallow and rough-hewn saws whose cutting edges she had always tried so very hard to resist.
I suppose the seed of this story was sown in 1983, on the rainy day when I met Norman Macrae at Ascot to discuss some background material on possible developments in biotechnology that I was to provide for his futurology book The 2024 Report. He wondered whether the roads might become safer if we developed methods of getting high that didn’t have the undesirable side effects of alcohol; I wondered whether sex might become more exciting once nature’s ludicrously inefficient aphrodisiacs were replaced by all those which ingenious science could produce; Pusey Street won the big sprint at good odds by virtue of being drawn on the outside (Ascot drains toward the stands, so if it ever starts raining heavily when you’re there, avoid horses drawn low on the straight course). The 2024 Report was an upbeat book—it suggested, among other things, that the Russians would simply give up Communism in disgust in the late 1980s—so my contribution to it concentrated on rewarding possibilities, but the time inevitably comes when one is tempted to turn such brightly minted coins over, just to see what might be lurking on the other side.
Fetish
MARTHA SOUKUP
Martha Soukup is a Nebula Award–winning short story writer and playwright who lives in San Francisco, California.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF the affair I decide to grow a beard.
“Susan,” my roommate Lelana says, warningly. Her skin is very dark and perfect; she would not risk its flawlessness. But she has seven tiny holes in her left ear. By day she wears seven small hoops of metal in them: copper, brass, bronze, pewter, silver, platinum, and gold. When she dresses to go out, seven gem studs spark her ear’s rim: ruby, amber, topaz, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and diamond. The diamond cost her two months’ pay, and though she keeps it in a matchbox in the back of the tool drawer, she makes nervous remarks about burglars when she is not wearing it. A beard cannot be stolen.
I think about what it will look like. The tiny hairs I have plucked from under my chin are not light brown, but mahogany brown or translucent blond or light red. I wonder what they might combine to be.
There is a body-modification studio near my two favorite used-book stores. None of its signs ever attracted me: Tattoos. Piercing. Scarification. Branding. A new sign says Body Hair, and it did not at first attract me either. I thought of legs and chests and the busboy at the coffee shop who has grown his arm hair thick as an orangutan’s, and dyed it orange-red. He wears a bloodred tank top to show it off. I always look in my coffee cup for orange hairs, which are never there.
I stand at the history shelf in the store next to the body studio and flip open a book on Egypt to a drawing of Cleopatra, her Pharaoh’s beard, a proud ruler’s beard. It is not real. Not like mine. Like mine will be.
I stroke my chin.
Inside the studio are displays of jewelry, steel rings, and chains, simple and in intricate combinations, stapled to framed swaths of black canvas. I don’t know which parts of the body each piece is designed for. Perhaps a clever person can wear them anywhere. The woman behind the counter is talking to a young man. He is conservatively pierced, at least that I can see, two small silver hoops through one eyebrow. She has a pattern of scarification arching from the bridge of her nose across her temple, where it disappears in the wispy black hair over her left ear. I have lived in the city for six years now, and seen a thousand such alterations. It still looks odd to me.
“Yes?” she says, after the young man has written out a check and left.
“A beard,” I say. When she opened her mouth I could see a silver stud in her tongue.
“Yes, what style are you interested in?” She lisps, just a little, enough to remind me not to look at her mouth. I look at her scar, a curlicue like an edge of paisley. If she didn’t want me to look at it, she wouldn’t have had it put there.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ll stimulate the follicles wherever you want it,” she says. Shtimulate. “You won’t have to trim it like some man would, since you’re starting out with nothing there at all. Where you don’t have it added, nothing will grow.” She gropes around under the counter and pulls out a small spiral-bound book, line drawings of strangely shaped sideburns, fringes of hair like necklaces, Dali moustaches: facial hair in patterns of tufts, in lines and curves, I have never imagined.
“I don’t know. Just a beard.”
“Think about it. You can call for an appointment.” She gives me a brochure, “Hair Growth and You.” “We haven’t had too many women yet for this. I think you should do it.”
“Would you?” I ask her.
“Oh no, that’s not me,” she says. She traces her forefinger in a curl down her right cheek and up to the corner of her mouth. “I’m going to mark myself here, as soon as I get the pattern drawn up exactly right. Hair would cover it up.”
Myshelf.
At home I read from the brochure to Lelana. She frowns but stops telling me to shut up after the third time. “ ‘Within two days of topical Hirexiden application and regular intake of the supplemental hormones, most clients will find unstimulated fine body hairs falling out and new, thick hair taking its place.’ ”