We fumbled for each other, our lips and fingers numb. “Don’t take my bra all the way off,” she said. She pulled one cup down and her nipple was cold and sticky and sweet. Too sweet. “It’s too late,” she said.
“Then take me with you,” I said.
That was the end of our last conversation.
“Sort of a Stonehenge,” my ex said when she came by on Thursday with some microwavables. She was shuffling through my paintings again. “And what’s this? My God, Ray. Porn is one thing; this is, this is—”
“I told you, they’re images from dreams.”
“That makes it even worse. I hope you’re not going to show these to anybody. It’s against the law. And what’s that smell?”
“Smell?”
“Like something died. Maybe a raccoon or something. I’m going to send William over to check under the studio.”
“Who’s William?”
“You know perfectly well who William is,” she said.
Saturday night I was awakened by a banging on the studio door.
“DeCandyle, it’s two in the morning,” I said. “I’m not supposed to see you till Monday anyway.”
“I need you now,” he said, “or there won’t be a Monday.” I got into the Honda with him; even when he was hurrying he drove too slowly. “I can’t get Emma to retrocute. She’s been in LAD space for over four days now. This is the longest she’s ever gone. The home tissue is starting to deteriorate. Excessive signs of morbidity.”
She’s dead, I thought. This guy just can’t say it.
“I let her go too often,” he said. “I left her inserted too long. Too deep. But she insisted; she’s been like a woman obsessed.”
“Step on it or we’ll get hit from behind,” I said. I didn’t want to hear any more. I turned up the radio and we listened to
It seemed appropriate.
DeCandyle helped me up onto the gurney and I felt the body beside me, swollen and stiff. I quickly got used to the smell. Tentatively, with a feeling of fear, I slipped my hand into the handbasket.
Her hand in the glove felt soft, like old cheese. Her fingers, for the first time, didn’t seek mine but lay passive. But of course—she was dead.
I didn’t want to go. Suddenly, desperately, I didn’t want to go. “Wait,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew I hadn’t a chance. He was sending me after her. The gurney was already rolling and the small square door shut with a soft
I panicked; my lungs filled with the sour smell of atropine and formaldehyde. I felt my mind shrink and grow manageable. My fingers in the glove felt tiny, miserable, alone until they found hers. I expected more stumps but there were only the two. I made myself quiet and waited like a lover for the sting that would—Oh! I floated free at last, toward light, and saw the dark lab and the cars on the highway like fireflies and the mountains in the distance, and I realized with a start that I was totally conscious. Why wasn’t I dead? The lattice of light parted around me like a cloud and suddenly I was standing on the Other Side, alone; no, she was beside me. She was with the Other. We drifted, the three of us, and time looped back on itself: we had always been here.
Why had I been afraid? This was so easy. We were inside the pens, which were a ring on the horizon in every direction, so many, so much stone; close enough to touch yet as far away as the stars I could barely remember… and at my feet, black still water.
Plenty of darkness but no stars on the Other Side.
I was moving. The water was still. I understood then (and I understand now) what physicists mean when they say that everything in the universe is in motion, wheeling around everything else, for I was in the black still water at the center of it all: the only thing that doesn’t move. Was it a subjective or an objective reality? The question had no significance. This was more real than anything that had ever happened to me or ever would again.
There was certainly no joy. Yet no fear. We were filled with a cold nothingness; complete. I had always been here and will be here forever. Sorel is in front of me and in front of her—the Other—and we are moving again.
Through the black water. Deeper and deeper. It is like watching myself go away and get smaller.
This is no dream. Noroguchi is going under. Sorel grows smaller, following him into the black water: and I know that there is another realm beyond this one, and other realms beyond that, and the knowing fills me with a despair as thick as fear.
And I am moving backward, alive with terror, ripping my hand from Sorel’s even as she pulls me with her; then she too is gone under.
Gone.
I reach up with both hands and touch the lid of my coffin. My hand out of the glove drips cold plasma down on my face. I am screaming soundlessly without air.
Then a shock, and warm darkness. Retrocution. When I woke up I was colder than I’d ever been. DeCandyle helped me sit up.
“No good?” He was weeping; he knew it.
