She seemed unable to shrug off the argument—the fight had shredded her nerves. As the night advanced she grew ever more irritable. She was jumpy, short-tempered. She felt bad—a strange internal tightness.
Her breasts grew swollen and achy. Then she realized the truth. It had been such a long time that it almost felt like an illness. But it was womanhood. She was about to have her first period in forty years.
They went to bed. Sex chased his bad mood away, but left her feeling as if she’d been sandpapered. The night wore on. She began to realize that she was in for a very hard time. No mere lighthearted hiatus in the month’s erotic festivities. The event stealing over her body was something vengeful and postwomanly and medical. Her eyelids were swollen, her face felt waxed and puffy, and an ominous intimate ache was building deep within the pelvic girdle. Her mood was profoundly unstable. It seemed to rocket up and crash down with every other breath.
Emil tumbled into sleep. After an hour she began to quietly weep with bewilderment and pain. Crying usually helped her a lot nowadays, it came easily and would wash any sadness away like clear water over clean sand. But weeping wasn’t working that way tonight. When the tears gave out, she felt very sane, and very lucid, and very, very low.
She shook Emil awake as he lay peacefully slumbering.
“Darling, wake up, I have to tell you something.”
Emil woke up, coughed, sat up in bed, and visibly reassembled his command of English. “What is it? It’s late.”
“You remember who I am, don’t you?”
“You’re Maya, but if you tell me anything this late at night, I won’t remember tomorrow.”
“I don’t want you to remember it, Emil. I just want to tell it to you. I have to tell it to you. Now.”
Emil grew alert. He tucked the heavy curtain behind the headboard of the bed and a turbid mix of moonlight and streetlight entered the studio. He looked into her eyes. “You’ve been crying.”
“Yes …”
“And you have to confess something? Yes, I can see.… I already know it. I can see the truth there in your eyes.… You’ve been unfaithful to me!”
Amazed, she shook her head.
“No, no,” he insisted, raising one hand. “You don’t have to tell me a word! It’s all too obvious! A beautiful young girl, with a poor shattered crackpot—no man in the world could be easier to deceive! I know—I offer nothing to command a woman’s loyalty. My arms, my lips—what do those matter? When Emil himself is a ghost! A man who scarcely exists!”
“Emil, listen to me now.”
“Did I ever ask you to be faithful to me? I never asked for that! All I asked was that you not humiliate me. I gave you freedom to do as you please—take a dozen lovers, take a hundred! Just don’t let me know. And yet you have to let me know, don’t you? You have to shatter my illusions with this … this last vile confidence.”
“Emil, stop it! You’re acting like a child.”
“Don’t call me your child, you tramp! I’m twice your age!”
“No, you’re not, Emil. Be quiet now. I am much, much older than you. I’m not a young girl named Maya. I’m old, I’m an old woman. My name is Mia Ziemann and I’m almost a hundred years old.” She began to weep.
Emil was stunned. A ghastly silence passed. Slowly, Emil withdrew by inches to his edge of the bed.
“You’re not joking?”
“No, I’m not joking. I’m ninety-four—ninety-five, something like that—and in my own way, I’m a lot like you. I underwent a very powerful upgrade. Just a few months ago. It made me this way, and it broke me into pieces, it put me on the far side of everything. ”
“You weren’t unfaithful to me?”
“No! Emil, no, that has nothing to do with reality! I’m telling you the truth here. Get it through your head.”
“You’re telling me you’re a hundred years old. Even though you’re very obviously about twenty.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re not an old woman. I know old women. I’ve even had old women. You may be a lot of things, my dear, but you’re not an old woman.” He sighed. “You’ve taken something. You’re tight.”
“The only thing I’m tight on is Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification, and believe me, compared to the harmless tincture dope you little kids like to mess with, this stuff is voodoo.”
“You’re telling me you’re a female gerontocrat? Why aren’t you snug in your penthouse with a hundred monitors on you?”
“Because I tore them all off and I skipped town, that’s why. I signed all their papers for very advanced treatment and then I broke every law in the book. I hitched a plane to Europe. I’m on the lam. I’m an illegal alien and a fugitive from a research program. And Emil, someday they’re going to catch me. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” She began sobbing bitterly.
He waited a while, and when he spoke again his voice had changed. Bewildered, quizzical. “Why are you telling me this?”
She choked on her tears, too wracked with anguish to go on.
He waited another while, and then spoke in yet another tone. Speculative, stunned. “What am I supposed to do with you now?”
She wailed aloud.
“I think I understand now,” Emil concluded at last, loudly and finally. “You’re something truly freakish, aren’t you? You’re like a little vampire! Feeding on me! Feeding on my life and my youth! You’re like a little lamia from the storybooks. A little … bloodsucking … posthuman … demon-lover … incubus!”
“Stop! Stop it! Don’t go on, I’m going to kill myself!”
“Something like this could only happen in Praha,” Emil declared slowly, and with increasingly obvious satisfaction. “Only here in the Golden City. The City of Alchemists. That’s a very, very odd story that you just told me. It’s almost too odd to think about! To have heard such a story! In a very strange way, it makes me feel very proud to be Czech.”
She wiped her streaming eyes with the edge of the sheet. “What’s all that?”
“I’m the victim in this tale, aren’t I? I’m the sacrificial victim. I’m the toy for a sexual golem. Why, it’s the most amazing thing … the most amazing, mystical … It’s so dark and strange and erotic.” He looked at her. “Why did you ever choose me?”
“I just … I just really liked your hands.”
“It’s too astonishing.” Emil adjusted his pillow. “You can stop crying now. Go ahead, stop it.” He leaned back and interlaced his fingers on his hairy chest. “I won’t tell a soul. Your terrible secrets are completely safe with me. No one would believe me anyway.”
The extent of his egotism stunned her so much that she almost forgot her despair. “You don’t think I should … kill myself?” she said in a small voice.
“My goodness, woman, what’s the point? There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re no criminal, you just defrauded the gerontocrats of a few of their lab-rat studies. What are they supposed to do to you—make you old again? Shrivel you up in daylight like an apple in a cellar? They can’t do that. They think they rule the world, but they’re all doomed, a gang of sick centenarians with their ridiculous technologies.… Trifling and tinkering with human flesh, when they have no concept of the power of imagination … And all to send me you! You! Like a little pink beach crab just pulled out of her shell!”