“Love potions are three dollars,” says Madame. “Thank you, come again.”
“You’re misunderstanding,” says Natalie. “What I want is a potion to just make him sort of unhappy with her.”
“So that he can go fool-eyed for you, yes? Three dollars.”
Natalie shakes the bells in her hair. “A love potion would be cheating! I’d never know if he really wanted me or not. I just want to have an honest chance.”
“Do you really think that absolves you of anything?” asks Madame, eyes heavy as smoke.
“I’m plenty damned already,” says Natalie, “for letting him go the first time.”
Latifa digs around in the Keyboard Oracle, pulls out a handful and scatters them on the mouse pad. “ctrl L O S T @/2,” they read.
“Whose control?” she asks.
N E !/1 “/’ S.
Her heart begins to pound like a spacebar. “Somebody summoned something wild, didn’t they?” she mutters. “And it got loose. Am I going to have to debug things, or firewall, or wipe it…” She shakes the little plastic container and upends it.
“ESC,” say the keys, all of them. “ESC ESC ESC ESC.”
She makes for the window, and the virals are already splintering her front door.
“That’s the last surgery, Doctor,” says Larissa.
“Whoof,” says Doctor Zhivago, trying to stand in front of the patient’s taped-together belly. “Good thing!”
“Oh, Doctor Zhivago,” sighs Larissa, dawn blinding on snow in the tentflap behind her. “Don’t they exhaust you, the futile symbols of this crushing war?”
“Yeah,” says Doctor Zhivago, “it’s like… snow is white, but there’s blood all over the place in here, which is red. And red and white are, um, I think Communist colors. Or maybe only red is? So that’s symbolic.”
“What?” says Larissa.
“Listen, I’ve never actually read Doctor Zhivago,” says Doctor Zhivago.
Mhing’s only a part-time secret assassin; his official position is Chosen Supervisor of the Glorious Municipal Plumbing System.
“And my uncle says it IS your responsibility to fix the koi pond,” says Lai smugly.
“I must beg a momentary excuse,” says Mhing, a blue sleeve in his peripheral vision.
“Hurry up!” snaps Lai.
Mhing does hurry: he vaults the garden wall, phoonts a blowdart at a quickly-stiffening court stenographer, and returns, unruffled, before Lai’s tea can cool.
“My tea got cold!” says Lai. “I’m telling the Emperor!”
Mhing regrets that killing Lai would make his assassinness considerably less secret.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Jake discovers a cache of emails from 1999 and, this is the bad part, opens them. The resulting implosion leaves him a much smaller creature: crab-legged and huddling, trying to keep his eyes on four pairs of scuffed shoes. He has become the new god of chagrin.
The problem with godhood, of course, is that people will inevitably make sacrifices along the lines of your patronage. Jake scuttles for dear life from the ashes of their poetry, from the lunging silences that follow him like a misjudged word.
“Love us, o god!” cry the world’s teenagers.
Horribly, helplessly, Jake does.
The length of an ongoing illness can be estimated by the accumulation of materiel on one’s nightstand. Beginning with bottles of water and Advil, it propagates to medication, tissues, spilled cough drops and thermometer probe sheaths. A waste bin arrives and fills itself. Then a TV tray, for tasteless meals and overflow.
Doned’s cold has persisted for seven hundred forty-five days and at some point the entropy collapsed back into order: two bottles, one Kleenex box and a garbage disposal system that borders on the pneumatic. They’re in this together, he and the virus. Neither will let the other go.
“Do you believe your parents about how old you are?” says Marian suddenly.
Robert takes a long time to answer, but that’s why Marian asked him. “I believe my birth certificate,” he says.
“But who says that’s yours?” she says. “It’s a record purely by fiat. And consensus. Both of which could be lies.”
“Some people really don’t know their birthdays. Adopted kids, refugees.”
Marian quiets at that.
“In the old orphanages, they’d all share the same day,” he presses. “See, they didn’t have parents to disbelieve–”
“All right,” she says.
They just sit and wait for the bus after that.
The genius of their treatment is this: there is no trial to determine sanity. Why bother keeping one’s prisoners in prison, when the asylum has room?
Miss Havisham remembers crying six months ago at some unkind words from a romantic interest; how much, she thinks, I have aged. My students are training for a war, and I am a casualty. The memory of school makes her almost smile.
Then the attendants force a bar between her teeth and lever them open, tube of milk and eggs at the ready. Six days of hunger. She isn’t crying. She’s too weak to fight.