Gann, he thought. “Sally,” he said.
“It’s me,” she answered behind the door.
He sat up. “Sally?” he said, astonished. The blood didn’t matter anymore, it had conjured her, he thought, and it didn’t matter if he got blood on the door when he went to open it.
“It’s me,” Mona repeated, in his doorway.
“It’s you,” he agreed, looking at her. She had a coat pulled around her, and appeared cold. He stepped aside and she stepped through the doorway into the dark of his unit. He closed the door and turned on a lamp. He motioned her toward the only chair as he sat on the bed. She sat on the chair for a moment, and when neither of them said anything she got up and came to the bed and sat on the edge of it next to him. In the light of the lamp she touched the battered side of his face, where he’d been thrown against the wall of the Arboretum.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She took one of his hands. “You’re still bleeding?”
“No,” he shook his head, “I’m all right.”
“I think I caused trouble for you.”
“No.”
“I think so,” she nodded.
“Do you know him?”
“Yes.”
“Does he hurt you?”
“Yes. No. I can’t go back now, except to leave.” They sat in silence, the light of the lamp growing a little dimmer. Glancing casually around the unit, she turned back to him to say, “Do you want to sleep?”
“I can’t sleep,” he answered, exhausted.
“If you try.”
“I mean I can’t let myself. I have dreams.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have dreams?”
“I dream of the room falling.” She stood and took off her coat and he wasn’t surprised that beneath the coat she wore only the black stockings of the Fleurs d’X. She sat casually naked on his bed. He worried that she was cold. “Should I go?” she said.
“Are you cold?”
“I’m cold,” she admitted.
Instinctively he moved to put his arm around her.
“It’s all right,” she said, raising her hands.
He pulled back. “OK.”
She hadn’t meant he couldn’t touch her. She hadn’t really thought through, as she followed him from the Arboretum out of Desire into the city, whether or not she would let him touch her. She had only recoiled from the promised shelter of his arms, not from his bloody hands touching her. Just as instinctively as he’d moved to put his arms around her, she touched herself, since it was her job to touch herself — a vocational habit — since she’d long since come to define all of her relations with men by the way she touched herself in place of their own hands. I’ll do the touching for you, was what she said to every man. And so when Etcher came to her not so much out of desire as to protect her from the cold, and when she rebuffed him, she tried to repair the reproach by touching herself for him. Her little gift to him.
There was no blood on her fingers. Her fingers were clean and dry of blood. They didn’t mar the butter of her thighs or the precarious labyrinth of her labia to which she attended every moment, pampering its petals and soothing its inflammations after Wade’s violations. Watching, Etcher sank into the swirl of her. On the bed next to her he reached out to touch the place where her body opened, that he might raise his fingers to his mouth and taste something other than blood, since taste was the one sense he never dreamed, since taste was the sense that told him it was not a dream. He was inches from her when she knew she had to decide now to let him touch her or not: she never said no, but her abrupt gasp at the moment of truth made him draw back again. He felt a bit humiliated, in his position. In her position, he knew instantly, a man would feel humiliated as well, except that it was the fundamental difference between a man and woman, the difference in their brands of humiliation. “I was made,” she explained, “to be seen and not touched.”
He nodded. It was the fundamental difference between a man and woman that she would not, in such a position, feel she’d let him down. But she did offer a consolation.
“I can take you from the city,” she said.
36
SHE ADDED, AS AN afterthought, since she didn’t believe it would matter to him, “It’s dangerous,” though she might have meant the two of them sitting there together, in the silence and the dark.
“How?” he finally asked, startled.
“Things can happen.”
“I don’t mean how is it dangerous. I mean how would you get me out of the city.”
“Through the Arboretum.”
“There’s a way out of the city through the Arboretum?”
Her voice dropped. “I can take you and show you,” she said. “You have to be sure. No one changes his mind at the last minute. They’ll kill you before they let you change your mind.”
“The police are watching me,” he advised her. “They know you’re here right now.”
She got up and put on her coat. Looking around, she said, “It has to be tonight. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It has to be tonight, if you want me to take you from the city. It has to be now. You’ll need money and you can’t bring anything with you. Do you have money?”
“Some,” he answered, wary.
She knew he didn’t trust her. “Well, it’s up to you,” she said. Her accent was most pronounced when she was speaking colloquially. She leaned over and turned out the lamp, and when she’d turned out the lamp she leaned over and kissed him, in case she never saw him again, or in case he was the sort of fool who trusted a kiss. “I’ll be at the Arboretum in an hour….”
“Where will I find you—?”
“I’ll find you, if you decide to come. One hour. I won’t be there after that. He’s looking for me.” She opened the front door soundlessly and sailed out against the rapids of the night. She didn’t close the door the whole way and he sat on the edge of the bed looking out the crack of the door until he got up to push it almost shut. With the flash of her blond hair the police would certainly see her leave. In the dark Etcher changed his clothes as quietly as possible and got together all the money that he still had after what he’d sent north to Sally. Then he sat for ten more minutes and waited. He waited for that moment when the police would begin to relax, having seen the blonde leave and decided Etcher had gone to sleep. There would be no fooling them for long but he needed that extra minute or two; once he got as far as the outlaw zone they would fall back a little. He couldn’t appear to be up to anything but another trip back to Fleurs d’X. It was going to make the police nervous no matter how you cut it, two trips to the Arboretum in one night; it was going to look unusual. Etcher hoped it wasn’t that maniac Mallory who was out there.
It figured that if there was a way out of the city it was the Arboretum, though Etcher couldn’t imagine what it was short of a hot-air balloon from the top-level tenements or an underground tunnel through fifty miles of cold lava. But he couldn’t wait anymore. He couldn’t stand this feeling he had, he couldn’t stand any more dreams. Whether the Woman in the Dark was telling the truth or lying, whether she was correct or mistaken in what she thought she knew, if there was any getting out of Aeonopolis it figured to be through the Arboretum; and he couldn’t wait anymore and that was that, and he got up from the bed and pulled open the door he hadn’t quite shut, and stepped out into the circle. He didn’t run but walked, not across the white of the circle but around the black edge, and then he slipped out of the circle between two darkened units. He didn’t look back to see the police following him. He didn’t think about never coming back again.