I looked at her, blinking thickly, and said, “Are you here?”
“No. You’re still asleep. I mean in virtual. If I were there, I’d have carried you to bed, so I didn’t have to wake you. One of the problems with being discorporate.”
“What time is it?”
“About three in the morning.”
“Oh, God,” I said, finally coming awake, “I’ve got the interview of my life tomorrow and I’m completely unprepared—”
“Don’t worry. I’ll give you a moistdisk in the morning. You’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.”
I went to bed without undressing, setting the adapter on my nightstand. She stood by the door, where, it seemed, she meant to keep vigil all night. And just as I fell asleep—or did I dream it?— she came and kissed me on the eyes. Her lips seeped a little way through the lids into the liquid depths behind them: small, cold kisses: silver coins.
(The Frog)
(Dreams aren’t stories. They don’t have a point, a theme, a plot, a moral. All those things take skill to craft, and the sleeping mind is inept. That’s why most dreams are just a lot of aimless wandering. Once in a while you’ll be awake enough for a small part of you to feel you should be getting somewhere, and then the dream becomes a nightmare.
All night I dreamed that I was walking through the streets, carrying a sack of groceries that I could not manage to look into. Then I dreamed I woke up from that dream, to find myself back in the reclining chair in the living room. Keishi was floating above the floor. My left hand had detached itself and was holding a scalpel; it had slit my arm open, from finger to elbow. The skin was fastened back to the arm of the chair with dissecting pins, and among the flayed muscles, I could see my arteries begin to pulse. Keishi drifted toward me, bent down as if to whisper some secret in my ear, and then opened her mouth and exhaled daisies.)
2
PHYSICAL BONES
“However,” added objective Pnin, “Russian metaphysical police can break physical bones also very well.”
Thirteen
ICARUS
Rain: I woke to the sound of rain crashing above me. The falling drops were blowing against the wire mesh of the window-screen, filling it in square by square, like pixels on a monitor. Perhaps all the windows in the city, if seen from a sufficient distance, would form some enormous image that only the gods could see. I lay there trying to guess the pattern a long time. Then I stretched in my pocket of warmth beneath the blankets, and turned over. The camera chip was there, still plugged into its adapter. It had been no dream.
I went into the bathroom, opened the little window above the shower, and cleaned out all the crumpled newspaper—blank newspaper; they sell it in Leningrad stores expressly for the purpose of being wadded up in windows. I jammed it all into the wastebasket and opened up the outer window, so the clean, cool air from outside could dispel the bathroom’s mustiness. Then I took a shower, hot and luxuriously long. I should be careful about the water, I knew; but I would be careful tomorrow, tomorrow would be soon enough. Today, even the city was being cleansed by this downpour. I closed my eyes and imagined it, as I worked lather into my hair. The sky threw down great solid sheets of water that fell against the rooftops, where they shattered into drops. The rain poured down along the shingles, picking up and carrying with it every crumb of dirt that Leningrad possessed; and streaming down from eaves and windowsills, it crashed into the streets and ran down gutters in excited single-files, which met at drains and, crowding round them, plunged together into nothingness. Even the veins of stink that lay beneath the city must, I thought, have been washed clean by this exuberance of rain. “Freedom,” Keishi had said; and though I knew that it could never be so simple, I allowed myself to hope.
I put on my robe, fed the bugs, and ate breakfast, scooping up leftover chickpeas with a hardened bagel. My body, unused to anything but coffee and nanojuice at this hour, soon warmed to the idea and sent me scurrying after the lentils, which I finished with a spoon. They tasted better than they had last night. They were better cold; no, I had been distracted; no, I had forgotten how to taste food years ago, and only now remembered.
When I’d finished my makeshift breakfast, I gathered the camera chips, replaced them in the rosebox, and took it into the bathroom to dress. I opened all three flaps of the box, set it on end, and watched it rotate. How do you dress for the biggest interview of your life?
Exactly like any other day, I realized, and I put the box under the sink. This interview would bring scrutiny. If I had suddenly changed moistware just before it, people might suspect something. But if I changed a few days after, it would look like I went out and spent my bonus on an upgrade, and no one would think twice. I went to the living room to retrieve my old camera chip.
The moment I slotted it in, I was glad of my decision. That chip and I had been through decades of obscurity together; it would be heartless to change now, on the cusp of my first real success. And she could love me even so; I knew that. She had known me no other way.
I put on the most ordinary outfit in my closet and went back into the kitchen. As I poured coffee into a selfheating News One mug, a note on the refrigerator caught my eye. It hadn’t been there at breakfast. I put down the coffeepot and went to look. There was no salutation, no signature, only two words in a large flowing cursive: BE BOLD. I stood there looking at the note a long time, feeling the warmth of the mug as I rested it against my collarbone. Then I reached out to touch the note, and passed my hand through it: unreal.
The phone chimed, and I answered it without begrudging the intrusion.
“Good morning,” Keishi said.
I had to choke back my usual rejoinder—“That’s an oxymoron.” Instead I said, “Yes, I think it is.”
She smiled appraisingly. “You know, this has really changed you. You look five years younger than you did last night.”
I sniffed the air. “Are you testing my sense of smell again?”
She laughed politely. “I take it you’re not having second thoughts about last night.”
“When I do, you’ll know.”
“Then, ah, may I ask why you’re not wearing the murder weapon?”
“Gold and dead gods aren’t my style, I guess. Why do they do that, anyway? You see Egyptian gods plastered over everything that’s African, but nobody worships them.”
“That’s why they do it. They figure that since those gods are dead, they won’t get pissed off about how you use their images.”
“Oh, I see. Same reason people throw around the Coca-Cola logo.”
Keishi smiled. “You’ve got two other sets, you know. The polychromes can look like whatever you want. Including the Coca-Cola logo.”
“I thought I’d better wait a few days,” I said, more soberly. “This would be a bad time for a mysterious upgrade. It’s better to wait till the worst of the furor has passed.”
She bit her lower lip. “The new chip will need some burning-in time, you know, if it’s going to do all its tricks. It can use the pathways your old one established if it has to, but it really ought to add more.”
“All the more reason not to try using it today.”
She looked away from the screen, then back at me. “Maya, can I ask you to just slot one of the 6000s? I can’t tell you why until— until later today. But I wouldn’t ask unless there were a good reason.”
“Look,” I said firmly, “I’m as disappointed as you are. But you promised me ten years, and I mean to collect every minute. It’d be foolish to throw it all away because I couldn’t wait for a couple of days.”