“All these years,” Andrea said. “All the years and now five months…”
“Yeah?”
“Everyday, there’ll be two or three times when I see you, like just now, when I look up and see you, and it’s like a blow…a physical blow that leaves me all ga-ga. I want to drop everything and curl up with you.”
“Me, too,” I said.
She hesitated. “It just worries me.”
“We’ve had this conversation,” I said. “I don’t mind having it again, but we’re not going to resolve anything. We’ll never figure it out.”
“I know.” She jiggled her line, forgetting to twitch it. “I keep thinking I’ll find a new angle, but all I come up with is more stupidity. I was thinking the other day, it was like a fairy tale. How falling back in love protected us, like a charm.” She heel-kicked the bank. “It’s frustrating when everything you think seems absurd and true all at once.”
“It’s a mystery.”
“Right.”
“I go there myself sometimes,” I said. “I worry about whether we’ll fall out of love…if what we feel is unnatural. Then I worry if worrying about it’s unnatural. Because, you know, it’s such a weird thing to be worried about. Then I think, hey, it’s perfectly natural to worry over something you care about, whether it’s weird or not. Round and round. We might as well go with the flow. No doubt we’ll still be worrying about it when we’re too old to screw.”
“That’s pretty old.”
“Yep,” I said. “Ancient.”
“Maybe it’s good we worry.” Then after a pause, she said, “Maybe we didn’t worry enough the first time.”
A second ripple edged the surface, like a miniature slow tsunami. The light faded and dimmed. A degree of tension seemed to leave Andrea’s body.
“You want to go to Russia?” she asked. “I’ve got this conference in late May. I have to give a paper and be on some panels. It’s only four days, but I could take some vacation.”
I thought about it. “Kiwanda’s pretty much in control of things. Would we have to stay in Russia?”
“Don’t you want to go clubbing in Moscow? Meet new people? I’ll wear a slutty dress and act friendly with strangers. You can save me from the white slavers—I’m sure I’ll attract white slavers.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. “But some of those slavers are tough.”
“You can take ’em!” She rubbed the side of her nose. “Why? Where do you want to go?”
“Bucharest.”
“Why there?”
“Lots of reasons. Potential for vampires. Cheap. But reason number one—nobody goes there.”
“Good point. We get enough of crowds around here.”
We fell silent again. The eastern slopes of the Bittersmiths were drowning in shadow, acquiring a simplified look, as of worn black teeth that still bore traces of enamel. But the light had richened, the tree trunks appeared to have been dipped in old gold. Andrea straightened and peered down into the hole.
“I had a nibble,” she said excitedly.
I watched the surface. The water remained undisturbed, lifeless and listless, but I felt a presence lurking beneath, a wise and deliberate fish, a grotesque, yet beautiful in the fact of its survival, and more than a murky promise—it would rise to us this day or some other. Perhaps it would speak a single word, perhaps merely die. Andrea leaned against me, eager to hook it, and asked what she should do.
“It’s probably just a current,” I said, but advised her to let out more line.
EMERALD STREET EXPANSIONS
I went down to Emerald Street in search of something new, an attitude with keener claws, a sniper’s calm and distant eye, a thief’s immersion in the night. I wanted some red and unreasonable religion to supplant the conventionality I believed was suffocating my spirit…though I was less dissatisfied by conventionality itself than by my lack of dissatisfaction with it. That I had embraced the cautious and the conservative so readily seemed to reflect a grayness of soul. I thought adding a spare room to my mind, a space with a stained-glass window through which I could perceive the holy colors of the world, would allow me to feel content within my limitations.
It was a gloomy Seattle morning with misty rain falling and a cloud like a roll of silvery dough being squeezed up from the horizon and flattened out over the Sound. The shop, to which I had been directed by friends—satisfied customers all, successful young men and women of commerce who once had suffered from maladies similar to mine—was a glass storefront sandwiched between a diner and a surgical arcade. A hand-painted sign above the door depicted a green crystalline flash such as might be produced by a magical detonation, with the name—EMERALD STREET EXPANSIONS—superimposed. As I drew near, two neutral-looking, well-tailored men in their thirties, not so different from myself, emerged from the shop. The idea that I might be typical of its patrons diminished my enthusiasm. But recognizing that the mental climate that bred this sort of hesitancy was precisely my problem, I pushed in through the door.
The interior of the shop was furnished like a living room and all in green. The color of the carpet was a pale Pomona, the grouped chairs and couches a ripe persimmon, and the attendant was a woman of approximately my own age, wearing a parrot-green dress with a mandarin collar and a tight skirt. Her features were too strong for beauty, her cheekbones too sharp. Yet she was striking, impressive in her poise, perched alertly on the edge of a chair, and I had the thought that this was not a considered pose, that she must always sit this way, prepared to launch herself at some helpless prey. Her skin had a faint olive cast, testifying to a Latin heritage, and a coil of hair lay across her shoulder and breast like the tail of a black serpent. She glanced down at her hand, at a tiny palm console that—assuming the doorway was functioning—revealed my personal information. She smiled and indicated that I should sit beside her.
“Hello, David,” she said. “My name is Amorise. How may I help? Something to brighten the overcast, perhaps? Or are you interested in a more functional expansion?”
I explained my requirements in general terms.
“I assume you’ve read our brochure,” she said, and when I said I had, she went on: “We provide you with a perceptual program that you’ll access by means of a key phrase. It’s the usual process. The difference is that we only do custom work. We expand what is inborn rather than add an entirely new facet to the personality.” She glanced down at the palm console. “I see you design weapons. For the military?”
“Personal protection devices. Home-defense.”
“David LeGary…” She tapped her chin with a forefinger. “Wasn’t there a piece about you on the news? Murderous appliances, windows that kill…that sort of thing.”
“They sensationalized my work. Not all my designs are lethal.”
We talked for fifteen or twenty minutes. As Amorise spoke she touched my hand with a frequency that appeared to signal more than simple assurance; yet I did not believe she was teasing me—there was a mannered quality to her gestures that led me to suspect they were an element of formal behavior. Her eyes, of course, were green. Lenses, I assumed. I doubted such a brilliant shade was found in life.
“I was going to pass you off to another therapist,” she said. “But I’d like to treat you myself…if that’s all right.” She rested a hand on my forearm. “Do you want to hear what I have in mind?”