I thought I’d been living in the real world, bravely coming to terms with the truth of life. But I hadn’t. I’d missed all the upheaval that must have been happening, somehow, all about us. The apartment on Tolerance Street, our pitches, our romantic, poetic existence. How far from life they really were. Only another cocoon. But now the axe blow of fact had broken through.
I’d told no one where I was. No one knew. Therefore, no one knew where Silver was. Had they been looking? No, that was insane.
We were in our block, going up the stairs. I imagined shadows looming up from the dark by the door. But no shadows loomed. We opened the door. Lights would flare, a voice would shout: Surrender yourselves! But the room was empty. Even the cat had let itself out through the flap. (Remember when he cut the flap, efficient and stylish? “I just read the instructions.”)
He guided me over to the wall heater, switched it on, and together we watched the heat come up like dawn.
“Silver,” I said, “we won’t go out.”
“Jane,” he said. “This has been going on some while, and we never knew. And we never had any trouble. Did we?”
“Luck. We were lucky.”
“I was bought and paid for,” he said. “They’ve probably written me off.”
“They can’t write you off. The City Senate has done a deal with them. They can’t just leave you loose.” I stared at him, his profile drawn on the dark by the heater’s soft fire. “Aren’t you afraid, too?”
“No, I’m not. I don’t think I can get to be afraid. You’ve taught me several emotions, but not that one. Like pain, fear is defensive. I don’t feel pain, or fear. I’m not intended, perhaps, to defend myself, beyond a very basic point.”
“Don’t,” I said. “That makes it much worse.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“We won’t go out,” I said again.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Food,” he said. “Rent money.”
“Then I’ll go alone.”
I grasped his wrists, lace and skin. Skin. The fluid movement of the strong fingers, shifting, returning my grip.
“Please don’t argue with me,” I said.
“I’m not arguing,” he said. His face was grave.
We stood there, motionless in the firelit darkness, a long while.
Gone to earth, we stayed in the flat five days. It was a fearsome, banal, claustrophobic existence. We discussed strange topics, as for example that he could protect me from attack, and maybe not himself, the distances between certain types of stars, what the insides of the walls were like. We also talked of constitutionals through the subsidence—but didn’t risk them. I lived on apples and crackers. It was hopeless, since there was no foreseeable end. Finally something embarrassing and embarrassingly simple drove me out on the street. As I’d missed my contraceptive shots, I began again to menstruate, as I had at twelve and thirteen. I’d been aware it might happen, but never got around to more than the most cursory of the provisionings against the event. So, rather than starvation, hygiene forced me back into the unsafe world.
I ran along Tolerance, along the boulevard. Eyes everywhere accused me. Under the elevated a woman stepped out of a shed and caught me eagerly by the arm. “You’re the bitch who sleeps with a robot!” But she didn’t say that. She said: “We missed you at the market. People asked after you both. Where’s he? Not sick, is he?”
“Oh, no. It’s just so cold out.”
I forget what else we said. Something, and then she let me go. When I got back into the apartment, I was shaking. But later I realized, and Silver explained to me, over and over, that all this proved nothing had changed.
Next day, I went out alone again. I walked through the streets, through the stores. A couple of times people said hallo to me. No one accused me. Something inside me, a tense wire, sagged and slackened. E.M.’s retraction was a tiny little wave, which had hit the beach of the city, and passed unnoticed.
He sat cross-legged on the brass bed, playing the guitar softly, and said to me, “Go out again tomorrow, and if nothing happens, we’ll go out together tomorrow night. One pitch only. An experiment.”
“No—”
“Yes. Or you’ll be down to eating the poor cat’s candles.”
So the next day I went out, about three in the afternoon. I walked along the frozen sidewalks and around into the arcade where he’d sung the first time and I’d been so afraid of singing myself. As if to sing were something to fear. To sing.
I glanced around the arcade. No one was in the archway, but people trotted to and fro and in and out of the shops. A long translucent icicle hung down from one of the ledges above, pointing like an arrow to the spot on the snow beneath, where Jason and Medea stood and looked back at me, with two tight little matching smiles.
• 2 •
“Hallo, Jane.”
“Hallo, Jane.”
“Ooh, what a silver face you’ve got.”
“Yes, Jane, it is rather silver. Makeup, or did you catch it off him?”
I’d forgotten, my heart hammering its way through my ribs, my breath snarled up in my throat, forgotten that when you learn to sing you learn to control your voice. But I was doing it anyway.
“Catch what off whom?” I said.
“Gosh,” said Jason, “what impeccable grammar. Off that peculiar actor friend of yours.”
Do they know? How can they be here? As if they’re waiting for me—
Don’t answer. Switch. Throw them.
“Isn’t it cold?” I said.
“Not for you in that lovely green cloak.”
“Is that his?” Medea inquired.
“Whose?”
“Your rude friend.”
“I have a lot of rude friends.”
“Oh,” said Medea. “Does she mean us?”
“She doesn’t want to talk about him. Obviously had a lovers’ tiff. What a shame, when you’re living here in the slums to be with him.”
They know. I think they know it all. Do they know where I live? Where Silver is? How can they…
“If you mean the man with the red hair you saw on the bridge,” I said, “we’ve split up, yes. He’s gone east.”
“East?”
“Out of state.” (Like Swohnson and E.M. and their new line in farm machines.) “There’s the chance of a good part there, in a drama.”
“And left you all alone? In this slummy bit of the city?”
“Jason,” I said, “what gave you the idea that I live around here?”
“Well. You’ve left your mother, and your mother’s stopped your credit and your policode and all that. Then we asked around rather. Described you very accurately—diet-conscious, bleached hair—And we heard about how you sang in the street with your friend who’s gone east. How brave, when you can’t sing. Do you do it the way we do? Someone said you come here, to this arcade.”
They’d been searching for me. It couldn’t be for any reason but pure nosiness and spite. And today was the day Silver and I used to come to the arcade—they’d found that out too, and stationed themselves here, waiting. And, used to coming to this spot at this time, on this day, I’d done it without considering. And walked right into them. (They know he’s a robot, they’ve spoken to Egyptia, or Clovis. They know.) But—they hadn’t found out where we were living—or they’d have turned up there. (I can just imagine their smiling faces in the doorway.) Of course. Nobody did know where we lived, we’d never told anyone, even the musicians whose lofts we’d visited had never yet been invited back.