“What are you thinking?” Joan asked, taking my hand.
That simple touch caused my head to swim. I saw that she had removed her green lenses; her eyes were still brilliant, live wheels of agate. The tip of her tongue flicked the underside of her upper lip. I was overwhelmed by sensory detail. The push of her breasts against green silk, the long sweep of her thigh…
“I’m trying to make sense of this,” I said.
Joan leaned close, kissed my cheek, then—briefly—my mouth. “How does one make sense of a kiss?”
Her comment distanced me, seeming to imply a perspective on the situation that I had not yet achieved. I asked her if she cared for a drink, signaled the bartender and ordered two glasses of wine. A soul, I thought. A scrap of energy to which only trace memories attached and yet which sustained emotions such as love. A force that could be transferred from one mouth to another. My thoughts, pure contraries, ideological oppositions, began to strangle one another before they could fully establish themselves.
The wine came, and we drank. Everywhere I cast my eye I saw someone I knew and whom I sensed that I had also known half a millennium ago. Thomas Hamada who, until his incompetence cost me a large sum of money, had served as my accountant. Diana Semple, a former patron. Several old lovers. There were, as I’ve stated, about a hundred people in the Martinique that night, and I suspected that if I were to introduce myself to each and every one, I would discover there were exactly ninety-two, and that their names would be those Villon had mentioned in “The Testament.” The poem, I decided, was likely central to the rite that Guillaume had mentioned. And since I was ostensibly the poet, I must also be central to it, trapped in its unclear heart like a flaw in the depths of an emerald.
“I want to be alone with you,” Joan said.
I wanted to be alone with her, too, though I was not entirely certain why. Something was being orchestrated here, some music of action and word I was supposed to perform. The thought that I was being manipulated infuriated me, and I felt a more profound rage as well, one emblematized by a section of “The Testament” that then surfaced from my mind:
I renounce and reject love
And defy it in blood and fire
With such women death hustles me off
And they couldn’t give a damn…
Ignoring Joan’s startled cry, I stood and walked briskly away, intent upon returning home and getting to the bottom of whatever was going on; but as I made for the door, Carl McQuiddy and Amorise emerged from the crowd to block my path. She had changed out of her robe into a black cocktail dress with a short skirt and low-cut bodice—her weapons in full view, she seemed even more the predator. “Where are you going, David?” she asked.
That she dared to ask this or any question of me, it was like gasoline thrown on a fire. I lunged at her, but McQuiddy stepped between us. I shoved him back and drew my knife. “Stand aside,” I told him.
“A knife,” said McQuiddy. “That’s so fifteenth century!”
He gave a flick of his left hand an almost imperceptible shadow briefly occupied the air between us. I felt the skeins of the macroweb settling over me, flowing down my face and shoulders in a heartbeat, growing and tightening, rendering the upper part of my body immobile. I knew that to strain against it would cause the web to tighten further, and I stood without twitching.
“What do you want of me?” I asked Amorise.
“I want you to enact the laws of your nature,” she said.
“I was about to do that very thing,” I said. “Dissolve the web—I’ll be happy to oblige.”
The web began to tighten. McQuiddy was standing beside me. I could not turn my head to see him, but I knew he was controlling the web, because I had not stirred. The mesh cinched about my throat and chest—I had difficulty drawing breath.
“Carl!” Amorise frowned at him. The web loosened slightly, and McQuiddy whispered in my ear, “Just like old times…eh, Francois?”
Amorise moved closer, so that her startling green eyes were inches from my own. Perhaps, I thought, they were not lenses.
“If you let your soul speak,” she said, “you will know what I want.”
“My soul? Are you referring to the thing you breathed into me, or the one whose place it usurped?”
“There’s no difference between the two now. But don’t be alarmed, David. You worked in machines instead of words, but you always had the soul of a poet maudit. I’ve done very little to you. I’ve simply given you the chance to fulfill your destiny.” Then, to McQuiddy, she said, “I’m through here. Take his knife and release him.”
Grudgingly, McQuiddy did as instructed.
As the web dissolved, a more protracted process than it had been to ensnare me, Amorise studied my face. What she saw there must have pleased her, for she smiled and allowed herself a laugh, a mere spoonful of sound.
“I’ve chosen well,” she said. “You will create a beautiful text.”
Je te deteste…
Je te deteste…
Je te deteste, Amorise…
Had they not been given me to say, I would have said those words on my own, repeated them a thousand times as I did that night and into the morning, for I hated Amorise. Whenever I said them I hated her more, for no change followed upon them. Whether Villon or a transformed David LeGary, or a syncretic being comprised of the two, I was trapped in the role Amorise had designed for me, thanks to her witchery…and what else could this be but the product of witchery? Science did not rely on kisses for an empirical result. My thoughts were iron flails demanding a target. I strode about my apartment, lashing out at end tables, framed photographs, sculptures, and chairs, wrecking the accumulation of a life to which I had ceased to relate. At one point, giving in to a longing I was unable to suppress, I called Joan Gwynne’s office; but she had not yet come in to work and I couldn’t pry her home number out of the secretary. I flung myself onto a couch and scribbled down some thoughts and then realized that what I had written formed the first few verses of a bitter poem concerning my previous relationship with Joan. I crumpled the paper, tossed it into a corner, and continued to drink, to destroy the artifacts of David LeGary’s trite existence, and then drank some more. And when morning came dull and drizzly, like an old gray widow hobbling out from the dark, her cold tears freckling the sidewalks, in all my drunkenness and disarray, I went down to Emerald Street to seek my satisfaction.
“Mister LeGary,” said the blond woman, Jane Eisley, who had dealt with me the previous afternoon. “We’ve been trying to call you.”
Something about her seemed familiar, in the way that the individual members of the crowd the night previous had seemed familiar, but this resonance did not interest me. “I broke my phone,” I said grimly. “Where is Amorise?”
“I’m afraid she no longer works here,” Jane Eisley said. “But I have good news. We checked the machine she used to treat you. It was inoperable. The power leads were burned out. She could have done nothing to you. That’s why we had to let her go. She received payment for work she didn’t do. I have your refund here.”
She held out a slip of paper that I supposed was a record of a transfer to my credit line. I knocked her hand away. “Where is Amorise?”
“You’ve no reason to act this way!” She fell back a step. “Take the refund. She didn’t do anything to you.”
“The hell she didn’t! She doesn’t need a fucking machine. Give me the address!”
When Jane Eisley refused to cooperate, I pushed past her and went along the corridor searching for the office. At the very back lay a room with a desk atop which a computer was up and running. I searched the files for Amorise’s address. It was listed under the name Amorise LeDore, and I recognized it to be a house on Vashon Island whose defense system I had installed six weeks before. I recalled that I had not dealt with the owner, but her lawyer, who had referred to her merely as “my client.”