But tonight he didn’t fade once. He was with her the whole time, admiring the dinner she’d thrown together (she was sorry now she hadn’t paid it more attention) and even showing interest in her retelling of the story about the Moscow cocktail party, this time emphasizing the International Society for Cultural Preservation rather than the meeting with Grigor.
They sat on the sofa together to watch the program, and it seemed perfectly natural for him to put his arm around her and for her to nestle in against him, feeling the steady beat of his heart. They watched the program in silence for about twenty minutes, and then, during a boring bit — helicopters over imperiled green rain forest, portentous offscreen narration — he lifted her chin and kissed her lips. A great languor flowed into her from his mouth, a spreading softness and a heightened sense of her own physical self. His hand very gently stroked her body, and he whispered against her lips, “You are so amazing to me.”
He filled her as though his body were all molten, soft and flowing, as though she were a small mountain lake, hidden and unknown, and his presence turned her to nectar. She moved in slow motion, her arms boneless ribbons around him as he nuzzled within her, her body holding and releasing in long easy swells of a great warm tide, physical sensations and yearning emotions all braided together, coiling around her, a close compelling spiral of flesh and she an electric dot in the very center. It all made her so sad she thought she must be dying, she thought this must be the great sad fulfillment of death, but she didn’t care. She embraced the sadness, the salt of tears and birth and death, time contracting into that electric dot that was herself, everything contracting to that one infinitesimal point in the whole world, and she it, and then that point imploded and left nothing at all.
They smiled solemnly at one another, stretched out together on her bed, the warmth rising from their bodies. And he said two astonishing things. No, not astonishing things, but said in an astonishing way:
“I don’t want to lose you.”
And, “I didn’t know about this.”
Ananayel
I didn’t know about this.
I like being Andy Harbinger. I have made him healthy and attractive and reasonably strong. (I’ve tried a number of human types by now, and prefer comfort.) And he is human. I constructed him, from molecules of myself, so he is both me and human, and I am learning from him all the time, but I didn’t know about this.
The experience of being with Susan was unlike anything I could have imagined. Not like that business with Pami at all, that brutal calisthenics. This was...this was like the best of the empyrean, distilled. How can humans spend their time doing anything else?
Of course, it was even more powerful for me, since I was in some general contact with Susan’s feelings and reactions as well. Andy’s and Susan’s emotions, sensations, all mixing together in my semi-human brain; what an explosive cocktail!
I’m so happy I’ve had this chance to get to know and learn about humans, before the end.
22
Three-thirty in the morning. Pami’d only made two hundred twenty-five dollars tonight, but there wasn’t any action left on the street at this hour. Most of the other whores were already gone. Three-thirty on a Tuesday morning, traffic up Eleventh Avenue for the Lincoln Tunnel was down to a couple tired dishwashers and accordion players; not customers.
Pami had to make a decision now: go home, or hope for just one more twenty-five-dollar hit. It was a tricky balancing act she had to do here. Rush didn’t like her to come home much after three on weeknights — because he had to hear all about everything she did before they could go to sleep — but he could turn mean if she came home with less than four hundred dollars.
Well, it wasn’t going to happen, not tonight. No more tricks tonight. So Pami Njoroge, the little twenty-five-dollar whore, left her Eleventh Avenue stroll and walked to 34th Street and Eighth Avenue to take the subway uptown. To wait for the subway uptown; sometimes you had to wait a long time at this hour in the morning.
And right there on the subway platform was one more trick for the night: a half-drunk Spanish man that first thought he’d just hassle her, but then grinned and got happy when she said, with her clipped, mechanical-sounding Kenyan accent, “You gimme twenty-five bucks, I give you blowjob. Else you go away.”
Down at the far end of the platform was a five-foot-high orange metal box to put trash in. They went down to the other side of that, even though they were the only ones on the platform, and there she exchanged her service for his cash, and at the end of it she saw he was thinking about knocking her on the head and robbing her — Rush would really beat the shit out of her, that ever happen — so she showed him the little spring knife in her tiny shoulder bag, and said, “You want that was your last blowjob in the world?”
All of a sudden, he couldn’t speak anything but Spanish. Backing away from her, brown eyes very round, he jabbered away about his innocence and how she was misunderstanding him, all in his New World Spanish — which she couldn’t understand anyway, and didn’t give a damn about — and then he hurried away to the middle of the platform, where he knew he could be seen by the person in the tollbooth.
About ten minutes later a bunch of drunk black teenage boys came in, loud and full of energy, and Pami tensed up, but they didn’t pay her any attention and soon after that the train roared in. She boarded an almost empty car and sat there with her thoughts on the long ride uptown.
The apartment belonged to Rush, on 121st Street near Morningside Park. The big old building with its gray-stone facade didn’t belong to anybody — maybe the city — and half the apartments were empty, all torn up, the sinks and toilets and wiring and wood molding all ripped out. Sometimes you’d see old mezuzahs on the floor — they looked like water beetles, only they didn’t move — the parchment inside them gone, shredded to dust. The people who stripped the apartments were simple and superstitious, and they knew the mezuzahs were strong religious fetishes of the tribe who once lived here, so they pried the little metal containers off the doorposts with screwdrivers before carrying the wood away. They didn’t want bad luck to follow them out of the building.
Nobody who lived in the building now knew the language or even the alphabet on the parchment papers folded into the mezuzahs. Nobody knew that the word Shaddai on the outside was one of the many names of God, or that the tiny writing on the inside was from the Hebrew Bible (also called, by others, the Old Testament), from Deuteronomy 6 and 11:
Hear, O Israeclass="underline" The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.