I left the hospital feeling unnerved. There was no way in hell I would not go to that dinner. After everything I had gone through to pay for my sin, I had a right to enjoy it. The doctor had no conception of how dearly I had earned this dinner. Not only would I go, but I would relish every moment of it, absorb it with all my senses, enjoy it to the fullest.
At home, I stood in front of the mirror and practiced the MMO procedure. It looked awful. Something like a cruelly designed cartoon of something that held a vague resemblance to a chipmunk. I would not do it. I would just have to have enough self-control not to laugh or smile. But what if I did not, actually, have enough self-control, and ended up having unprotected laughter? I could just imagine my cut stretching and opening, and the little scar tissue cells getting to work, multiplying. I tried not to think about it. I’d simply have to muster the necessary self-control, period.
Chapter Three
I arrived five minutes early at the restaurant. It was rather small, intimate, and quiet, save for the murmur of a water fountain next to which the headwaiter seated me. Two long candlesticks were burning on the table. I was facing the front door; I would be able to see Damon when he arrived.
I had decided not to diminish the pleasure of this dinner by using it as an exercise in not being myself. I would be myself. As much as I felt like it.
At exactly eight o’clock, Damon entered the restaurant like a body of water. His movements were strikingly fluid, and he was dressed the same way as the first time I met him: his white clothes were made of such thin material that they seemed to float around him, follow his movements in slow motion. He was chewing gum.
Soon after he sat down, I asked him to please not make me laugh this evening or I’d have to do something very unattractive.
“Oh? Really?”
“Yes, I just had an accident, this cut on my lip, and if you make me even just smile I’ll have to perform the MMO procedure, which is an ugly thing.”
“You had an accident?” he said.
“Yes, it was just a fencing accident, I lied.”
“Oh, you fence. Actually, I noticed you were very limber with your wand.”
When he asked what I did in life, I told him I was a Xeroxer and an ear piercer.
“And an aspiring what?”
“Does one need to aspire to anything else?” I retorted.
He shrugged and smiled and said no.
“An aspiring actor,” I said.
He looked struck, even somewhat ill. I asked what was wrong. He shook his head. I asked whether he disliked acting, but he assured me that, quite the contrary, he liked it very much. He said it was a beautiful art form, and he then tried to change the subject by asking if I pierced ears independently or in a store, and where, exactly, was the store located, in case he might have passed by it sometime. I answered his questions.
When I inquired what he did, he replied: “In the past few days? Not much.”
“No, in general,” I said. “In life.”
“This and that.”
“Meaning?”
He said he should warn me that he didn’t like talking about himself, but that he would answer that one question: he was a scientist.
That was the last thing I had expected him to be. “May I ask what area of science?”
“Later, perhaps.”
This time it was my turn to change the subject, and I did so by returning to the subject he had previously changed: “Why did you look upset when I said I was an aspiring actor?”
“You’re persistent.”
“In this case, hardly. I only asked you once before.”
“All right, I’ll tell you. When you said you were an actor, it brought back a bad memory of someone you’ve been reminding me of, painfully, who also happens to be an actor.”
“Someone you hate?”
“No.” He paused. “Just the opposite.”
“A girlfriend?”
“No. A man.”
“A lover?”
He smiled. “No … I’m not …”
“Well, then who?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it further.”
We read the menu and ordered. His manner of ordering was surprising. When the waiter asked him a multitude of standard questions, such as, How did he want his meat cooked, What kind of dressing did he want on his salad, and Did he want potatoes or rice with his meal, Damon answered one of two things: either that it didn’t matter, or that he didn’t care (also stated as, “I have no particular preference”).
However, when the subject came ’round to that of the water, yes, the table water, he was not satisfied with merely choosing bottled over tap, or plain over sparkling; he demanded to know every brand of plain bottled water the restaurant carried. He requested to be shown each brand (there were two), and he spent at least a minute comparing their labels, as if they were wine, before he made up his mind.
We then chatted, only touching on light topics for a while. The food was good, I could see his nipples through his shirt, and halfway through the meal, as he was pouring me more wine (which he had picked with less concern than the water), he said, out of the blue, “Have you ever felt ceaseless torment?”
I was startled and answered hesitantly. “Perhaps of a kind, I suppose. Depending on how you would define ‘ceaseless’ and ‘torment.’ ”
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Have you ever wronged someone terribly?”
“I don’t think so. At least no one other than myself.”
“Save me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Save me, Anna. Why did you save me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know. I must know.”
I could have answered “You looked like you could have used some help,” but decided to be more honest. I said, “I felt like it.”
He didn’t look happy with my response. It seemed to perturb him. “I don’t understand what you mean,” he said.
“Well, I was … in the mood, I guess.”
He gazed at me for a while, mulling this over, and finally said, “Why?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about my meeting with my acting professor, which had been responsible for my dark mood, so I said, “Oh, it was just one of those days, you know.”
“No, I haven’t the faintest notion what you mean. One of what days? I’ve never known of a day that could put someone in the mood to perform such an act.”
“I think I would prefer not to talk about it. It was an unpleasant day.”
It seemed my fears about Damon making me laugh had been unfounded. So far this conversation was very safe for my cut.
“I see,” he said. “All of my days are unpleasant. Particularly the ones since you saved me. Your act has propelled me into a state of such unpleasantness, it is hard to describe. I have hardly been functional. I’ve done little but pace the streets and sit in my apartment in the dark, barely breathing, rarely blinking, having forgotten how to eat. The methods I had perfected, over the years, to soothe my pain, don’t work anymore: being cruel; destroying things; causing fear; taking baths of various liquids such as milk, citrus juice, and wine; burying myself in grass, leaves, or pebbles; subjecting myself to deafening music and noise; riding on roller coasters; watching documentaries on animals eating each other and on concentration camps.”
He paused dramatically, and added, “I, too, you see, have had unpleasant days. I, too, have had days during which I have been disconcerted. All because of how rare, how unsettling it is to find anyone (let alone a young woman), so extraordinarily selfless as to willingly risk her life to save a complete stranger.”
I was so stunned by his mention of the roller coasters and documentaries that it took me a moment to answer. “You give me too much credit. I wasn’t myself that day. And to be honest, I’m not sure I would have done it if I had been.”