Elise steps a little ahead of me. She knows her walk drives me crazy, even after seven months or so of living together. It’s like the way she is in bed. Totally committed. Every move is a caress. If it’s not me or her plants she’s stroking, it’s the air, her clothes, the sawdust she’s walking on.
She’ll do. She’s unsophisticated and decorative. Ideally, I’d have found someone without any education, but hell, everyone’s been to college these days. At least she doesn’t remind me of things, and she tries awful hard to please me.
The thing I guess I feel guilty about is leading her on. She obviously thinks she’s going to work on me real hard and maybe I’ll ask her to marry me. She’s wrong.
I’ve already decided to marry her. But I have to keep up appearances. I’m the strong, silent type, remember? Chuck will have to be coaxed.
Damn it, I’ve got to stay in character! Would it do her any good to have Them catch up with me?
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Her hand is on my arm, playing with the thick hairs that gather under the shirt cuff. Those deep brown eyes of hers—she uses them like fingertips to touch my face lightly, shyly, as if to make sure I’m really there—they seem to show concern. Is it that obvious I’m not myself tonight?
That jet, flying so high in the sunshine… young Allan Fowler coming by later, to pester me with his foolishness… then all this philosophical crap I’ve been internalizing all night. Yeah, I’m going to have to pay attention to the old facade.
The secret of lying well is to do as little as possible.
“Oh, I was just thinking about that song they’re doing now. We used to sing it when I was a kid. There’s about a thousand verses.” I take a long pull from my beer.
“I didn’t know you used to sing, too. Is that when you learned the harmonica?” Her voice trembles just a bit, but the part of me controlling the mouth doesn’t seem to notice. I’m on automatic.
“Um, yeah. Some of the other kids with folks at the Institute and I, we formed the Stygian Stegosaurus Band. Thought we were pretty hot shit. We played frat houses and the like. Nothing serious. Father bought me a banjo, but it never really took like the piano.”
My next exhalation feels like a sigh. The song ends and so does the set. I look around and everything is peaceful, but I still check twice. When I was in the service I used to be able to smell trouble. Now I have to use my eyes.
Now, stop that. Don’t think about the service! What’s gotten into you, anyway?
I’m tired of yelling at myself. What a rotten day.
I turn to talk to Elise… Now, what’s she got that look on her face for? What is it, amazement? Hope? Fear?
Oh, boy. What I just said.
Think… Father… I never mentioned my father before, though she used to try to draw me out about my past.
And the Institute! And music, my childhood… the piano.
There is a haze in front of me, a barrier of palpable grief. It hangs like a portcullis, cutting off escape. By touch I grab up the beer and swallow to hide the turmoil on my face. Think. Think.
The band’s name she’ll bleep out. Probably thinks it’s dirty. Must recoup the rest. How? Make the Institute… “the Institution”?… A place for delinquents? Father could become “Father Murphy,” a kindly priest…
I can envision my old man grinning at me now. “See?” he’d say. “See how hard it is to maintain a good lie?”
I put the beer down without looking at her. “I’m going for a walk. Get some air. Tell Joey I’ll be right back, okay?”
I can see out the corner of my eye that she nods. I try to walk straight on my way out the door.
…Her eyes were gray… When she laughed it felt like my chest was a kite and I’d light up into the sky… Parmin introduced us—I never knew a woman like her could exist…
“Go,” he said.
“But Parmin, Janie has her own work to do, and my team is expecting those B-1 and Trident parts to be integrated into the ships …”
“No. Your deputies can take over for a time, while the two of you go for a honeymoon. Am I not the expert? Have I not been watching your species for twenty of your generations? I will not have two of my department heads distracted later, while things are approaching completion.
“Go, Brad. Look into each other’s eyes, make love, get a baby started. The child will be born on a new world …”
I rest my head against the cool, damp bricks. Around back of the Yankee Dollar, near the garbage cans, I try to keep from crying out loud.
The pain is hot. A searing, almost hormonal rejection, as if my body were trying to throw off a revolting insertion… a transplanted organ, or an alien idea. The agony is dull and sweaty, with a faint delusional quality, and the rejected organ, I realize, is my own mind.
My hands grope against the wall. Fingers dig into the recessed lines of mortar that surround each of the bricks, my anchors. The texture is hard, yet crumbly. Little fragments break off under my fingernails.
The gritty coolness crackles against my brow as I roll it against the masonry… feeling the solidity of the building.
It is comforting, that solidity. Good heavy brick. Bound by steel rods and thick goops of cement that permeate and bond—to hold up the roof. To stand. It’s comforting to think about bricks.
Think about bricks.
Bricks are hard because the constituent molecules are bound. They all hold together and gravity is defied. Randomness, too, is held off. Chaos is stopped so long as the molecules don’t leave their assigned places.
And they can’t do that. The vibrational energy they’d need would be too high. No way over that barrier, except if they all decided to tunnel. And brick molecules can’t all decide to tunnel at once, can they? Without someone to tell them to?
My fingers claw harder into the gritty mortar and a layer of skin scrapes away painfully. Don’t tunnel, I cry silently to the molecules. Don’t. Stay here and be content as a brick. A simple honorable brick among bricks, which holds up roofs and keeps the cold wind off people …
I plead desperately… and somehow I sense agreement. At least the wall doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In a momentary shiver, the fit is over. I’m left standing here feeling drained and a bit silly, with a dusty brow and filthy hands. I let the latter drop and turn to rest my back against the wall with a sigh.
It is a damp evening. Faint tendrils of fog creep across the twenty yards of parking lot between me and the far fence. The fog curls past like the fingers of an old blind woman—touching lightly the corner wall, the parked cars, the overflowing garbage cans—and moving on.
I start to cringe as a vaporous flagellum drifts along the wall to brush me. Don’t. It’s only fog. That’s all. Just fog.
I used to like fog. It always smelled good. Lots of negative ions, I suppose. Still, here next to the garbage cans the stench must be pretty bad. I wish I could tell.
Laughter feels dry and artificial, yet I laugh. Here I am, suffering something akin to a psychotic break, and I’m worried about my damned sense of smell!