"Please. I did nothing. The guard never came to lock me up again last night."
They haul you to your feet and slam you down again. A knee swings up, smashing your genitals against the back of your pelvis. One spongy testicle smears against this vise of bone. The wave of red shoots up through your spinal column and comes out through the seams of your skull.
Even unconsciousness cannot protect you. Each time you wake, the pain sucks you back under. You come to at last, your face in a pool of vomit, the half-digested dinner from your evening of liberation. The Qur'an can't tell you how long ago that was. Scores of verses pass before you can straighten up and stand.
By the book's count, they leave you on the chain for a full month. The day they take you off again, your atrophied flesh collapses after four slow drags around the oval. Two more weeks pass before you can lift your knees without puking.
Then, late one evening run, your laps closing in on their old target, it happens all over again. The half-hour trot widens into three-quarters. Once more, you feel the awful accident of freedom. The day's meals have all arrived. No one else is coming. Six mobile hours could easily build back half the muscle you've lost.
But there's something too casual this time, too obviously cat and mouse. A test of last term's lesson. A blatant taunt. A cheap trick to justify another beating. Anyone might barge in, at 2 a.m., to catch you in flagrante, flaunting your freedom. They are huddled, even now, over a hidden peephole in these walls, to catch you in the very instant of joy. Sick and beaten, worse than an animal, you return to the padlock and submit. You close the loop tight around your own ankle. The metal clicks; your eyes swell with humiliation. The hate you bear yourself exceeds any that you can feel for your captors. They have their cause; you have nothing. All self, all dignity, sold. All night long, the pathetic dose of freedom that you deny yourself snickers at you from the darkness. Debasement complete, you bare all your openings to the rape.
36
They flew back to a Sound rearranged in their absence. Adie forced Spiegel to come home with her the night they landed. To her island cottage, her safe haven. Once might have passed itself off as an accident. Twice had to mean something. But still, she wouldn't tell him what. And he wouldn't ask, afraid she might tell him. Willful ignorance could still pass itself off as anything.
With nothing but touch, she unlocked a loft inside him, boarded up since college. He made love to a long-dead invention, she to the only person who loved her ex-husband more than she did. Sleeping together became a dare, a mutual suicide pact to cast off the last drag of ballast and lose what was left to lose. To raise loss to the level of high art. To scatter projection to the winds and push the past down into pure aesthetics.
They clung to each other as if it couldn't be obscene, so long as neither looked. Spiegel broke the pact of silence first. Less than two weeks after their return from Ohio, Adie logged in to her Cavern workspace. There, a missive in a bottle waited to ambush her. It launched itself from a niche in system memory that Adie thought had been empty. She scrambled to don a pair of stereo glasses. Beyond that, all she could do was stand and watch.
From out of nothing's well colors rose up. Specks of light off at various horizons rushed toward her from a slew of deep-space vanishing points. Space expanded along all axes at once. Her body succumbed to the pull of conflicting vertigos while the sky around her scattered with novas. Each star migrated to its own slot on the spectrum, only to split again into something fuller. The bursts bent closer over her, fireworks drooping back to awe their earthbound audience. Their flares passed a threshold of definition where she at last made them out: descendants of that first wire-frame leaf that Lim had made for her. Cut blooms from her abandoned jungle.
Petals rained down into the space around her. The full weight of the bouquet pressed against her eyes. She laughed at the trick, astonished. She flashed in anger. How dare Spiegel steal her tool set? The vector-drawn blossoms drew near, blowing away all pretense of ownership. These growths weren't hers to copyright. Even Rousseau had stolen them from too many sources to start counting now. Every human mark was mortgaged to the hilt.
She stood in this petal shower, someone's gift to her, someone from whom she had only taken. The day was coming, faster than these fireworks fell, a day when anyone could give shape to their innermost space and leave it on another's digital doorstep. All our private declarations of long love would come home for inhabiting.
The petals expanded until they had no more place to grow. Adie stood surrounded in a circle of stamens taller than she. The corsage grew bigger than the room that held it. The walls flashed pink, dragging her below the tissue surface. Still the view zoomed in. She passed through the cell wall and into a sea of cytoplasm, ever deeper down, punctuated by chaotic phase changes at each shift in gauge. Skeins of biochemical skeleton, pirated from Bergen's Molecule Room, rose up around her.
At last she found herself in another jungle, the flowers now huge colored spheres of amino acids, their entwined stems a dance of protein chains. The molecule bouquets bobbed on all sides of her, eager in space, whichever way she turned her head. And up flush against her, whispering binaurally close to her ear, the voice of the man who'd made her this living card said, See what a flower I have found you!
Darkness brought her back. When she again located the size of her own body, she used it to walk out of the Cavern and down the hall to the man's cubicle. Steve sat at his own workstation, toying with variable declarations.
It's beautiful, she told him.
She dropped herself into the scoop of plastic next to his desk that passed for a chair. The race that engineered the Cavern could not design a chair that comfortably fit the shape of a seated human being.
She shook her head at the colors she still saw. So fast, she said. So quick.
Adie! How long have I known you? How slow do you want to go? Oh. No. Real blood shot up to crimson her face. Not that! I mean, you built that… piece so fast. A few days.
He leaned forward. He put his hand to her mouth, palm flat, as if he were blind and gazing on her for the first time. J used one hundred percent existing parts.
It felt by turns sacred and profane. A man lay between them in bed, dying between them in an unattended nowhere, having lost the last control over his body. They both made love to him.
I lived with you so long, he said to her, in the dark. My whole adult life. Every year, you seemed more solid to me. And every year, I felt less real. I thought of you for so long, I felt myself becoming you.
She let him talk.
She brought Pinkham, whenever she came to stay the night with him. Love me, love my dog.
Oh, I love your dog, all right. I haven't decided yet what to make of you.
And sometimes, stretched in bed, he'd watch her transported, tranced out, waiting on the edge of herself for the rapture to come, steering her whole body with telekinesis toward climax, moving herself the way she had once, as a girl, moved the shutters of that painted
room.
Release would plunge her into a postcoital abyss so profound she would burst into tears, lost in the depths that such filling opened up. It was the greatest sadness that life offered, consummation.
It's nothing, she'd say, trying to keep her devastation from him. It's not you. It's just physiology.