“Can you move?”
“Yes,” I said, sorry that I hadn’t broken my skull.
“Come,” she said, giving me a hand up. “We must hurry. Put your goggles on.”
“I’m not going back in!”
“No,” she said, “now it’s your disguise.”
I hesitated for a second, then pulled the mask over my face, but didn’t through the tube. We stepped from the bathroom into a long dark hallway. At the end of it was a twelve-foot-tall wooden door. Joelene pushed it open.
Then we were on the street in boiling hot air filled with meat smoke from street vendors, hundreds of intense perfumes, and a note of rotting trash. Hundreds of people passed in all directions—salarymen in cheap cherry, peach, and lavender suits, shoppers with bags and boxes, tourists in night swimwear and headpieces, partiers in sheer garb, and dating couples holding hands, kissing, or leaning against the walls feeling each other. I saw two Box 4 readers all in white with artificial tears dripping from metal tubes next to their eyes. I saw an Om Om girl in a brown suit with her lips cut open. Two Ball Description girls were dressed as cats in big pastel gowns. And all up and down the street hung glaring speakers singing about rewoven fabrics, buttons, beads, lace, ric-rac, and other notions. Others promised recreational surgery, vegetable alcohols, and iambic psychodramas.
“’Is way,” said Joelene, enunciating her words like someone might while holding a cigar between their teeth. As we wove our way through the masses, we must have looked like two service men on their way to a biohazard and no one recognized me. A block down, we crossed the street, ducked into an alley, and soon came to the unmarked side entrance to the SunEcho.
Joelene said, “We only have a minute.”
I paid no attention as I started to unsnap the jumpsuit.
“No!” she said. “We’re back on the system. Don’t take if off.”
“I can’t see her in this!”
“You have to.”
I hated to have come this far only to look this bad. Grasping the metal bar, I yanked the door open and marched inside.
The SunEcho had been in existence as long as I had been alive. The story goes that not one customer came in for a decade. Then, one day, a tall, lean man entered. He wore a long, dark grey jacket and had his face covered with charcoal net. After he drank a cream coffee, he sat and scribbled in a notebook for several hours. He then paid and never returned. Exactly a year later, a new magazine, called Pure H, appeared on the newsstands. The magazine soon sold out as fashion devotees discovered the brilliant writing and imagery. And in that issue was a story about a disfigured but disguised man, who visited the SunEcho, worked in his notebooks and went on publish a copy magazine. Since then, the waiting list for the SunEcho was more than six thousand days.
Although Nora and I didn’t need reservations, we were not going into the main sitting room.
It was a square room thirty by thirty feet at the back of the shop. Why it was there, or what purpose it served wasn’t clear, except to the owner, one assumed. The walls were covered with , double-warp wool broadcloth. Underfoot was a mosaic made of scrap metal from 100 Loop Besides the two doors, one leading out into an alley, and the other into the concierge’s area, the only other feature was a single small, straight-backed wooden chair that sat in the middle.
The room was packed and warm. As my eyes adjusted to the dim, I saw Nora two feet from me. She wore a long grey coat buttoned to the neck. Her hair looked darker, her nose flatter, and something was odd about her eyes. For an instant, I worried that her father had hurt her—beaten her or given her some terrible and disfiguring drug. A second later, I realized it wasn’t Nora.
The two women on either side of her resembled Nora, too. The one on the left had her eyes, but her lips were too thin. The other had her chin and neck, but her eyes were the wrong shade of mahogany. The three of them looked me up and down and sneered.
As my eyes continued to adjust to the dim, I saw that the room was filled with young women all Nora’s height, with dark hair, and olive complexions. Each was similar to her, but wrong.
My heart sank. Nora wasn’t here! She hadn’t come because she had hated the date. And she hated me. She didn’t want to see me after I had even pretended to flirt with that cat-bunny-beaver girl. And now instead of her, I was in a room filled with Pure H imposters and Pure H pretenders. I felt heartbroken and angry, and was about to tear off my goggles and throw them to the floor, when I noticed someone on the chair.
She too wore a long grey coat, but its material was smoother and more refined than all the others. And her loosely hanging hair had been brushed not combed and was at once perfectly ordered and yet free and unfussy. Most of all though, she was the only one not glaring at us, not trying to guess who we were, or trying to decide if we belonged. She alone waited patiently and calmly.
Eight
When I stepped before her and saw her face, I chided myself for thinking that any of the others even slightly resembled her. And it wasn’t just that her skin was softer and smoother, her features perfectly symmetrical, her eyes a deeper achromatic black, but that she seemed at once stronger and more vulnerable than all of them put together.
She had been gazing forward, with her smoky-colored eyelids half closed, as if meditating. When I stepped beside her, first she looked up with fright, but then as she peered into my eyes through the mask, warmth filled her. Standing, she put her arms around me, nestled her mouth close to my ear, and said, “A week of green rain.”
Her words completed the full quote from our first date. And she was we had become that dead couple in Pure H, who lay side by side, their hands an inch apart. Only it wasn’t rigor mortis or chance that had separated our hands, it was the world… it was our families.
I held her to me for the first time and discovered how our bodies matched, how her eyes met the height of my lips, how my arms surrounded her and exactly fit the curve of her back. Squeezing her to me, I inhaled the sweet sandalwood of her hair.
Then she removed the goggles and air supply from my face. I felt silly for having left it on and was about to say so, when she tilted her head to the right then touched her mouth to mine.
Like an enormous bubble, the universe collapsed, and the only thing that remained was the two-dimensional plane where our lips met. Hers felt warm and creamy, like butter frosting. Then, I don’t know which of us began moving first, we were circling our lips against each other. to build. We rubbed our lips together, and then we were pressing our bodies firmly against each other. We opened our mouths, and just as I felt like I wanted to kiss her hard, or bite her, she pulled back.
Her nostrils were flared, her lips, swollen. She was breathing through her mouth. And several errant hairs fluttered in front of her eyes. One stuck to her moist forehead. With a husky breath, she said, “Stop.”
I wanted the opposite like I have never wanted anything and moved toward her, but she pushed me away. The world returned. I had completely forgotten, but we were in public—in the SunEcho auxiliary room. Fifty fake Noras were glaring at us, several were muttering to themselves, and all of their cheap perfumes filled the air with a saccharine and impatient musk. A shameful heat covered me. And as I let my arms fall to my sides, I could feel the ventilation system in my suit struggle to circulate air beneath the velvet jumpsuit.