I stared at her in surprise. I said, “I didn’t know you were having treatment.”
“You aren’t allowed down here,” she said. “Go back upstairs before someone finds you.”
The blue body bobbed gently between us, waving its hands about in the air like a policeman directing the traffic. It touched her face; examined its own fingertips. It was the exact image of her, moulded in cool blue jelly. She pushed it away.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t seem to find the doctor. Perhaps you could help me. I feel rather ill.”
She looked at me like a stone. “Patients aren’t allowed downstairs after nine o’clock,” she said. She drove the blue body out of the linen cupboard, where it had been trying to thrust its head in among the pillow slips, and started to manhandle it through a door farther along the corridor. I followed her and stood outside watching. She had to struggle with it physically to keep it moving. Her hair fell into her eyes. Once she got it into the room, which was similar to the one in which Dr. Alexandre’s assistant had shown us our first blue body, she dragged it on to a table and lay down next to it. It stared inertly at the ceiling for a time, then slowly turned to face her. One of its legs slipped off the table. She put her arms round it and tried to get it to press itself against her, encouraging it with little clicks of her tongue.
When nothing happened she got off the table with an irritable sigh, went to the door, and looked up and down the corridor. No one was there. Then she got back to the table again. This time something seemed to happened but before I could see what it was the blue body fell off the table, pulling her down with it. She began to shout and scream with pain. I went closer and saw that they were partly joined together along their legs. The blue body had penetrated the muscles of her calves. She was flailing about, calling, “Push us together! Help!” The blue body stared at the ceiling, opening and closing its mouth.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“For God’s sake!” cried the crippled girl. “Help us join back together!”
I backed away and ran upstairs to the common room and sat down. Later that night there was a lot of coming and going, and I heard Dr. Alexandre and his assistant shouting in the passages.
When I first came here it was like a picture painted on a sodden, opened-out cardboard box. I remember the train slowing down between garden fences from which dangled bits of rag; and convolvulus spilling like white of egg out of a rusty old car abandoned in a scrapyard. Some of the soldiers said good-bye to us; most of them went silently away up the platform. All I want now is to stay in this room sleeping and reading. The maid says very politely, “Could you go downstairs for a bit, miss, we want to give the place a thorough going over.” They know they will be getting rid of me tomorrow. W.B. will come and fetch me. We are going over to France, where he has heard of a man who has had above-average success with a new chemical.
Last night, listening to the barges full of conscripts being towed up and down the river, the men singing their mournful songs, I thought: “Places are not so easy to escape from.” I will never go back to Agar Grove, but I see the blue bodies everywhere. Spawned in the violence and helplessness of the treatment shed, shadows of myself cast somehow by rays that no-one properly understands, they bob and gesticulate dumbly at the edge of vision. How many times have I said, “I would do anything at all to be cured!”
Now that I have done everything I feel as if I have been complicit in some appalling violation of myself.
CRUISING
by Donald Tyson
Donald Tyson was born on January 12, 1954 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he still resides. He developed an appetite for science fiction and fantasy at an early age through the works of such favorite writers as Bradbury, Bloch and Blackwood, and began to write during his university years, winning literary competitions for both prose and poetry. Tyson’s short stories have appeared in publications ranging from Black Belt to Black Cat Mystery, while he has written articles for such diverse magazines as The Woodworker’s Journal and Fate Magazine. In 1982 his original radio drama, “The Hitchhiker,” was presented on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program, Audio Stage. Its success resulted in the commission of an original television script, “The Far-Off Land,” due to be produced by CBC Television in the near future. Currently Tyson is working on a novel-length fantasy-adventure epic set at the dawn of the Iron Age. With “Cruising” Donald Tyson shows us he can pack a lot of power into just a thousand words.
Tires shrieked on sun-baked asphalt, and the music of a car radio emptied itself across the quiet city intersection. Inside the car Johnny Sheen tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel and looked up at the red light. He was bored. Aching for something to happen. It was a summer Sunday afternoon, and the streets of the city were like lanes through a graveyard.
Sheen was young and tough—what they call street smart. He had never read a book, but he knew what he wanted from life. His hair was razored in a spiky punk look and he wore mirror shades to hide his eyes. Drove a ’78 Camaro with custom flame painted on the sides. Days he worked as a mechanic in a garage to earn enough for the upkeep on the car. Nights and weekends he cruised the streets. Cruising for action was his life.
An old Chevy sedan pulled up beside him in the fast lane. He gunned his engine and looked across with the faint mocking smile that never left his lips. Two teenage girls with long greasy hair and T-shirts sat in the front seat of the Chevy. His eyes measured the car professionally. Dented and covered with dust, it had come a long way. The windows were rolled down against the heat. He noticed a steel ring around the roof column, probably to keep the front door shut, and a line of ugly red decals on the front fender.
The brunette, who sat nearest him, looked over archly at the sound of his engine. Johnny smiled, knowing she could not read his eyes. She leaned over to the blonde driver and whispered into her ear, then glanced back at him. The blonde looked and laughed.
The light went green. He let them win and fell in behind, stalking them with animal patience. This was his game and he always came out on top in the end. They looked like sluts, but he was in no mood to be critical. Sunday afternoon was slow. He followed close and drafted them around a corner, the tires of both cars screaming. The brunette waved her hand at him through the dusty rear window, laughing, as the driver wove her way through the light traffic. Sheen stayed on her bumper, his interest growing. She might be a slut, but she drove like a bitch.
Another red. He swerved right and pulled close beside the Chevy, the music from his radio pacing his pulsebeat. The faces of the girls were flushed with excitement, the driver’s red mouth cruel as she raced her engine. Laughing wildly, her friend reached across through the open window of the Camaro and caressed Sheen’s cheek. He took her finger into his mouth and bit it lightly, then leaned out of the car and met her lips with his in a bruising kiss that was broken abruptly as the blonde raced through the changing light.
Cursing, Sheen opened his four-barrel and went after them. The Chevy was a sleeper with dual pipes and big inches under the beaten metal, but the Camaro pulled even as the girls got held up in traffic. Waiting for an open stretch, he swung in close beside and reached through the window of the Chevy with both cars moving fast. Tauntingly the brunette let him touch her breast, then pulled away across the seat. The blonde cut the Chevy left and Sheen followed, his nerves tingling as his eyes flicked between the road ahead and the wicked faces beside him.