Just teach me how to stop before I kill someone…
There was nothing to unpack, nothing to eat, nothing to do, so Clay left the television playing to nonstop news of the world beyond, crawled into sheets that needed washing two months ago, and decided to sleep until the last eight hundred miles were leached from his system.
*
He was aware of her in the doorway before he really awoke and saw her. Footsteps on creaking floors and a voice lingering in the bedroom doorway; the grind of a tiny motor like a metal whisper.
"And this is an asshole, you can tell by the way he just lies there. They're everywhere, but this one's a bigger asshole than most, and it's not often you find them this defenseless."
She came in just as he was focusing, skirting the bed in a shuffling half circle, legs and arms and a body and a video camera leering in.
Sudden flash: strapped into bed — no, wait, he could move — and they had sent in clones of people from his personal life to invade even his sleep chamber, to record every moment; perhaps he slept differently than normal people. No observable behavior was too minute to tweeze away from his life, to dissect and examine through a lens.
No — Erin. Only Erin.
She halted her impromptu documentary and lowered the camera to her side, looking at him as if not trusting that he was really there. Beneath a slouch hat, bottle-blond again — when he'd left, her hair had been its normal brown — and the thinner kind of thin she got when not eating much. Hollow-cheeked, with a full-lipped mouth whose corners tended to turn down, and blue eyes that naturally seemed to ache from some recent wound.
"So where've you
been
?"
"A psychiatric ward."
She stared, lips and tongue frozen on the edge of sly retort, and it looked as if the camera was about ready to swing up and resume documentation. Then her shoulders sagged. "You're not kidding, are you? They really did it to you this time. They really did it, didn't they?" Erin spun in a slow circle, shaking her head, then sat on the edge of the bed. "Here?"
Clay shook his head, thick inside, webbed with sludge. "Arizona. Tempe."
Normal people would have asked what he was doing there, would have taken every answer as a clue to pry another question out of their disbelief, backtracking one step at a time. Erin would not. Something about her took it as a matter of course that it was perfectly natural that he should end up in Arizona, while his car remained at the curb for the entire trip. It made for a welcome kind of shorthand.
"What happened to your forehead?" She pointed at the bandage, the yellowing bruise creeping beyond its edges, the ghost of a fading black eye. "Did you get that in a fight?"
"With myself." A soft huff. "I had a nightmare, and … you know how I can get." Erin found it hard to sleep with him unless he was so saturated with chemicals that he did not dream; almost anyone would. "I had a cast on when it happened."
"A cast." She looked him over more closely, lingering across his knuckles, the backs of his pale hands. The ugly fresh scars that slashed and curled their way over the healed bones. "I guess that explains the Frankenstein look."
So he decided, why not, fill her in on the more important details. Nothing surprised her anymore, if it ever had, and she did not judge. He told her about the initial journey, the fight; told her about Ward Five and Adrienne. He left the more recent developments alone, and Erin never interrupted. She videotaped, though, sitting opposite him at the end of the bed with her camera steadied on both knees, and he was used to this by now. Sometimes it was her way of listening.
"They tell you anything this time that you didn't already know?" she asked, just a voice behind a camera, not expecting him to say yes — it was apparent in every word.
Oh, just business as usual for Clay, they just kept him a little longer for a change.
"Yeah," and he looked into the camera eye, Erin hidden, patient, trying to find the perfect frame in which to fit him, an angle to capture his essence in all its contradictions, or take what was there and banish it, leaving him neither brute nor human. He exhaled, long and heavy, stale morning breath — or was it afternoon by now? "I'll tell you later."
She lowered the camera, mildly disappointed, mildly chiding, mildly amused. "You're boring."
"I'm tired."
Erin reversed ends and stretched out on the bed alongside him, thin rack of bones and curves and layers of clothing still chilled from outside. He looked to the window, saw that it was trying to rain, spatters striking glass in hushed counterpoint to the constant murmur of CNN in the living room. Bare branches swatted helpless and angry in gusts of wind. The sky was gray as iron, cold looking, and if it could care about anything at all it would surely be hostile.
"How's everybody else?" he asked.
"The same, I guess. I think you scared Graham. You've never been gone this long, have you? I didn't think so. After a while he just wouldn't talk at all about you being gone. Uncle Twitch was trying to take bets on when you'd show up again."
"Did anybody take him up on it?"
"Just Nina. But that doesn't really count, keeping it between the two of them like that. So, no takers."
"Not even you?"
She rolled her head over, now face-to-face, glaring with no-nonsense eyes. "I was already out sixty-odd bucks for your bills, what do I need to lose more for?"
"You'll get it back."
She glared a little fiercer, yet seemed to have softened somehow, lightly touching her forehead to his; the swelling beneath the bandage throbbed. "You
could
thank me, at least."
Erin was right. He knew he was lax when it came to certain words, certain phrases. It wasn't that he did not know gratitude; it was just that it could leave you so indebted.
"Thank you," he tried anyway, and found it did not kill him.
It was enough. Erin expected little, planned for no future, took everything as it came along — a supremely pragmatic outlook in dealing with him. He was fully aware that most women, assuming they could have tolerated him any length of time at all, would now be ready to choke him, and would not necessarily be out of line.
It was neither love nor commitment here, on any conventional scale; more a drawing together, as members of some small pack who watched each other's backs, and took care of cauterizing the wounds whenever the need arose. False conceits such as monogamy and exclusivity were of little use. Erin fucked him and she fucked Graham, both on a regular basis, and of the two, it was Graham's heart that seemed to bleed at times over that to which he could never lay sole claim.
But no one had ever accused Graham of being too pragmatic; no one had ever accused Erin of
not
being so. Fucking was also a part of her job description, or at least pretending to. Her face and body were treated well by cameras, and there were a few connected photographers in the area that she knew. She posed with other models for layouts in some of the harder skin magazines on the stands, and the even rawer material available by mail only, or racks in the hard-core shops. She had said she didn't even consider the other models to be sex partners, just other bodies, other props; while there was excitation and insertion high and low, not often was there actual climax, and even less so for her than for the male models.
All in all, to Clay it served as no threat. Once or twice, at least, it was probably a good thing to have a relationship in which you knew you were just one more inserter on the assembly line.
She lay with him through the afternoon, warm company with whom to weather out the worsening assault of chilly rain at the window, and the continuous barrage of news from television in the next room. Daylight waxed and daylight waned, just that, just light; never a sun. She wanted to call the others, Graham and Twitch and Nina, let them know he had returned in one piece, but he said no, not today — what if they wanted to come over already? He had disappeared almost two months ago. The news would keep until tomorrow.
He showered when the road-worn feel of his skin drove him out of bed, for a time huddling on the slick and stained porcelain as water beat down upon his fetal body. A hot rain, but he shivered as if it were the cold deluge beyond the windows. Strange moments indeed: home again, setting his own schedule; in control of his life once more, if he didn't count the lithium. Although that was taking much for granted, and assuming he'd been in control to begin with. Maybe he never had been, and free will was the cruelest of illusions; every step he’d taken and decision that had seemed arbitrary might have been as predictable, to anyone who knew those inscriptions of nucleic acid, as C following B following A. A savvy fortune-teller of the genetic age might be able to divide his cranial lobes and tell all from simple inspection: Kick a man in the teeth even after he has been justly conquered?
There, in that whorl of brain tissue.
Carve a scar on his own arm?
There, there, in that fissure…
For you are not like others
not like others
not like others
He left the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, his damp hair combed back, slick and contoured to his head. Erin was standing at a window off the kitchenette, watching sluggish traffic on the street, when he came up behind her.
"Stitches, too," she said upon turning to see what the bandage had been covering earlier, fingering the knotty black line over his eye. Starting to laugh, then, supple mouth breaking into a smile beautiful in its sadness. "You look like they gave you a lobotomy."
"It might be the only way to fix things," he said, half-joking, and despite the serious half he realized he was almost happy like this. The two of them standing here, it could be mistaken for something normal … rainy Sunday afternoon, what do we do now? Someone peering in from the other side of the glass might even get the impression they were in love.
"They found something genuinely wrong with me," he began, keeping his earlier promise, and he told her. It came surprisingly easy; it sounded like such a joke. Sum it all up in a few brief sentences, and what did it make him, if not a punch line to some evolutionary jest? Somewhere even now Darwin might be laughing.
Eye-to-eye, she did not blink as she held his bare shoulders, biting her lip. Better she ache there than within, right?
"You're so alone," she whispered, "you are
so
alone. Always have to do things your own fucking way, don't you?"
Clay did not know what to say to that, had no arguments, no evidence to the contrary. So he just watched her shake her head and roll her tongue inside her cheek until she sagged, resting her brow against his collarbone. One wandering hand debated where to alight, trailing from his arm to waist to leg, finally fumbling beneath the towel and cupping his genitals. He grew against her, and shut his eyes as soon as he felt a tiny trace of moisture against his chest. If she had shed a tear for him, it was nothing he wanted to know about, nothing he could
afford
to know about.
Erin took the lead in making the way to his bedroom, lay him down on the bed while whipping her own clothing aside: oversize black T-shirt, tight black leggings, black Doc Martens boots, flung into a pile like an exoskeleton. Her every rib was clearly defined, her shoulders as bony as a waif's, although for someone so skinny she was uncommonly large-breasted.
She straddled him and leaned forward along the length of his body, kissed his lips, but with his tongue seeking to probe deeper she pulled away — up, then, to his brow, where she settled her mouth over the stitches. The knot was still exquisitely tender and as sensitive as an erogenous zone. He could feel the tip of her tongue play across the needlework, then a faint teasing pressure from her teeth; strange game of trust, this — he did not wholly feel secure that she wouldn't bite down hard.
In the back of his mind he longed for a condom, but she would not want one. She played that game of roulette in her professional life; her personal was but an extension. It wasn't even so much that he worried about diseases as it was the risk of failure of her birth control pills. What a horrible thing that would be. She could abort, but their child might truly be its father's, consumed by fierce survival instincts; it might fight the scraping and the suction, turn her womb into a battleground. He had always been averse to the idea of bringing a child into the world, even more so now that he knew he was wrong on a molecular level. A second generation might be more hideous still, like every parent's curse become prophecy fulfilled:
Just wait until you have a child of your own someday:
then
you'll see.
He gambled again; parted her and entered unguarded, the fear a dark and shining facet of the thrill.