"Eakin-Monogamy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eakin William R)WILLIAM R. EAKIN MONOGAMY I waited for her, tasting her: almonds, a faint bitterness, coffee-tastes from the earlier morning, the biting peppermints of toothpaste. Finally she came into the room with the silver tray of espressos and cream, kissed me before she set it down with the gentle aloofness of our marriage, then served. There were clouds of coffee aromas in the room now: the midmorning ritual had its own proper incense, strong like chocolate. She said, "You've been distant again, these past several days." And instead of sitting down as she almost always did, she went to stand at the open window, pushing even further back the heavy, Tyrian purple curtains of my library. A thin light streamed down on her face from the east. I didn't say anything. I knew if I responded, we would start into it. I didn't even want to like her anymore. She said, "You've been seeing a lot more of the other women lately." I fought against a squirm, watched her with the Stoic expression of a seasoned poker player, chose a spoon and stirred. I saw her in profile and was amazed at how just ten years could age someone who had been so young. She looked a great deal like her father. It figured: the old man dominated our lives; our whole situation was his fault anyway, the fault of the wedding gifts: the property and money, the other gift. I never really even thought I would use it: I was enamored of the girl, wrapped up in the lace and flowers of the wedding and the honeymoon and seven truly good months. And then, after months when I admittedly grew a little tired of it and her breath seemed stale and things settled into everyday weariness without the magic I married her for, I used his gift and started thinking of him as my best bet at salvation, the old bastard; we really did belong together to some fraternity that bound married man to married man. "I don't want to get into it tonight." "You have been with them," she said gently, more to herself than to me. I thought of them as other lives, lives not consecutive but simultaneous. "You grow more and more distant and however many bright moments we've had together over these ten years, most of them are gray and dull, and it's because you've stopped having feeling for me." It was true. I replied with banality: "But I do love you." She shrugged. I knew she would. We'd had lots of conversations like this and frankly I didn't care anymore, and I didn't care if she cared. There were much better things to do, much more exciting people to be with, who didn't go stale, like bread left out in the air, in only seven months. There were people out there who were interesting for years and maybe forever; who met my needs. She walked to her chair and sat to drink coffee. We looked out across the dusky library through the window and watched the stillness of the birch grove. A blue flash: the blue of sky, and of the ocean rushing by. The salt wind blasted over the windshield. I put on sunglasses and shifted gear. The Austin-Healey rumbled, then purred like a kitten into overdrive. It was winter in southern Florida, but the place knows no seasons. It was hot enough for muscle-shirts. Now I saw oranges; I handed one to Madhur. She giggled; she always giggled, something I would never have expected from someone with a wasted Ph.D. in physics or a penchant for knife fights. Oranges were all we could afford for lunch, with the Glenlivet scotch. I rammed the gas pedal and the bug-eyed Sprite danced through the traffic of Oceanside Drive. Some old woman honked and I refrained from flipping her the bird, but when she honked again, I fingered the double-barreled sawed-off at my feet, my head raging, until Madhur squeezed me right where I was most likely to respond, and my head cleared, and I made the car lurch forward and leave the woman, so close to her own road killing, far behind in the maze of traffic. "You get wrangled up about everything, ole Jack. You need to learn to control it." "To hell with it," I told her, and I took the bottle and fueled rage with burning water. I didn't look at her. The bruises I'd given her were almost gone, almost imperceptible against her dark skin; the worst were hidden under the shades anyway, but I could see them too well. No remorse, of course, but I could see them all the same. She giggled and said, "All we need are the pigs to come down on us now with all that cash and paraphernalia and crap; ole Jack, if you get us knocked up just because you can't drive, then I'll slice your throat, okay? While you sleep." I sneered at her, knowing she was only half-serious, and rammed up the volume of the stereo. The techno-strains pumped into the roar of wind. We exited the freeway without changing speed, and hurtled through the mass of housing projects to the dilapidated, whore-infested pit of a neighborhood where people like us lived. The shiny, spoked wheels of the Austin-Healey screeched and we were in front of the white, two-room plank house on Elm Street. Madhur giggled and looked at me and I knew excitement flashed through her brown eyes even though they were hidden behind dark plastic; I felt the adrenaline pulsing from her pores. I could smell it, simultaneously clean and dirty like the sweat she worked up when we ripped off a place, when we were criminals together, when we came home to sex and violence and a warped love on piles of green paper. That we'd done earlier. This time we were a little more cautious, until now, when there no longer seemed any sense in it. "Okay, let's go see it," I said. She smiled like a girl. It had been only the second time in our two-year marriage we'd had real money, made a real haul, and we'd kept each other from it for a day to let the steam dissipate. She pulled the keys from the ignition and was on her way up to the concrete front steps. I came after her, pulling my sawed off after me, and carrying it mechanically against my leg. The piece felt warm to me, warm because it had rested on the warm floorboard. But the warmth was the same as when it was fired pointblank against the pulsating chest of the old security guard of the Branch Bank at 1st and Oceanside. And my fingers against the double triggers had the sensation of having just pulled and released. I tried not to think about it, tried to think about the money. But even before I reached the door I was feeling the sensation again, looking down and realizing I hadn't cleaned the old man's blood from the barrels. She managed the working plantation and I taught part-time at a local college. In the quiet mornings together we drank espresso and sometimes did business. Now when she handed me the plantation's monthly financial report, her hand quivered. The quiver startled me. She never did that. "Are you all right?" I asked her. She looked at me stonily with her gray eyes. "Things aren't all that bad, are they, Laura?" She didn't respond. "Is it money?" I looked down at the report and saw that things had never been better. It was us. "Do we have to? Do we have to fight? Can't we just -- just once have a nice cup of coffee and relax and go over the business and -- and not fight? Does everything between us have to be so damned dramatic?" I closed my eyes: I really meant so boring. And surely she felt that, too. I opened my eyes and she said, "Did you do it just then? I mean just now?" "No, I didn't do it, just now." I couldn't help sneering. "You closed your eyes like --" "I'm still here, right?" I found this kind of interrogation increasingly irritating. "It's hard to tell, sometimes." That was the beauty of the technology, of course. I smiled at her, almost involuntarily, with a taunt. Over the years, our very bodies had learned to irk each other; little digs were so much a part of us that they were unconscious, second nature. Irritability, too much caffeine, too many years. "You know we're skating our way to a divorce." I looked at her and shrugged. "Things aren't that bad between us. Really. It's not like we have knock-down-drag-out fights, right? I mean, we're hospitable, right? Even if we bicker continuously. It's not me, you know, who's always so gray and --" "Stop being so nervous and defensive." "I'm not being defensive." "Look at you -- guilty, that's what it is." "I'm not feeling guilty," I protested. I heard something in me say to get the hell out of the place. "You are. It's written all over your face." I tried to make my face innocently smooth. "I'm not. Really. Not a fuckin' guilty bone in my body." She grasped my arm. "Don't do it. Stop doing it -- so much." "Doing what." "Damn it, Will, you've got to stop it." "What, will I go blind or something? Have I ever neglected you? Ever not been attentive to your needs.?" "Damn it, you're married to four other women." "Just fantasy -- nothing wrong with fantasy." "Four other women. It's not just fantasy." Get the hell outta here. And I did. GREEN: It was a summer night but green neon spilt onto wet pavement from the icon above the Green Garuda Lounge: a man holding a martini glass alternating with a bent pink bird that was supposed to look like an eagle, transforming from mortal into eagle, I supposed. An immigrant Kasmiri family owned the place; at least they could fix a good drink. I shook the water from my feet and passed underneath into the dark bar and sat at our booth; forest green naugahyde seats squeaked against my slacks, and I ordered a stiff Salty Dog. I waited, it seemed for hours, and finally she came, covered in a trench coat. I was on my third then, and bought her one. "So Lily, how was the show?" I asked. She did not remove the overcoat. Not enough underneath to do so. "You need to drop the perturbation in your voice," she said. Hers was husky, deep for a woman's. I looked at her and tried to see through the darkness into her eyes: hazel, sometimes green like the bar; I thought once we married, I'd be able to see directly into them, but I never could. I thought marrying her would be rescuing her, me with the shining armor. Another dead end. This was my place, this Green Garuda. I never went to hers: at least, I had not been there since we started dating, and finally married. I could not believe I allowed her to continue to dance. I hated her for it. She sipped the Salty Dog. "Why don't you skip the next show --" I started. I'd asked her thus numerous times. I'd pleaded with her. I already knew the answer. "What, and get booted out of the Kit-Club? Don, let's don't get into it. If you don't stop this heavy-handed stuff when we meet, I --" I shrugged her comment away and she sat back against the overstuffed bench. "Look, honey, we used to have such a good time meeting like this --" Now it was mechanical. Now it was pure form. I met her after work, between her shows, had a drink, went home alone, drank myself to sleep. Why had I come back to this lifetime? Why? "I know you don't want me to work anymore, you know I'm going to work forever, and so there's no reason to talk about it, so why not just relax and have fun like we used to --" "I thought once we married, eventually, it would change -- "God, why had I come here? I had the choice of frequencies, why this one. today? Maybe -- to call it quits. "I'm an erotic dancer, Don. You married a friggin' erotic dancer. You didn't marry Annette Funi-Mickey-Mouse-cello, or Donna-Wax-the-floor-Reed. And I'm sure as hell not gonna ever be that, got it, Don? I'm my own person, and you can't strip my personhood away, got it? Maybe you could do that with all your other girlfriends or whoever the hell you were dating before we got hitched. But, damn, you married an erotic dancer, someone whose very existence is that, you see? It's my profession. And I told you, I don't want to get into it tonight." Something in her tone startled me. I tried to see into her eyes: I'd said the same thing, a few moments and a lifetime ago: I did not want to get into it. Was she smiling? Was she taunting me? I turned away from her' and pulled the Salty Dog to my lips. I'd been attracted to her in this seedy part of town precisely because she was an "erotic dancer." Now I couldn't stand the idea. I couldn't stand it. shook my head finally and said, "I'm sorry Lily, I don't know what's going on with me. I don't even know why I'm here. Really." I was so damned wrapped up in her. That was the irony. I think I'd really fallen in love with her. But I couldn't say it: when I tried, I could only see visions of half-drunk lonely men gaping at her, watching her gentle breasts sway with a wild vulgarity that did not seem consonant with the nature she had when we were alone. I tried to tell her I loved her and could not say it. "You should never have let me love you," I told her. I ached for her. I wanted her, I wanted her changed. She read my thoughts: "You're doing it, blaming me. Your discontent is your own damned creation. And I'm not going to change to fit it." She's pushed me to this! I told myself. Over the years, she made me love her, she lured me to it, to marriage, to totally enfolding myself in her, to dedicating everything I was to her, to finally being nothing except in relation to her-- and then to be faced with this contradiction of who I had wanted and who I now wanted. "You're an ass, you know, not accepting me as I am, as you loved me. You're not ever going to do it, are you?" She was mad now. She slugged down her drink. She left. Something was critical in the air of the bar; as if the universe itself could snap in two. Why had I come back to this lifetime? I wanted out. I wanted to end it. To shut oft the frequency, close down the world, end it. At our apartment with Jack Daniels at my elbow and my face hovering in the mirror of the medicine cabinet, I did precisely that. She slapped me across the cheek and I was startled back into consciousness. "Now." She said sternly. "Now is the critical time. Be with me." "What..'" I shook myself and realized I'd brought myself back to Laura. She was animated now, standing over me. She'd been pacing back and forth in front of me. I saw life in her face, even if it was angry life. It amused me. I'd seen life in that same face at our wedding, when she lifted that veil, and I kissed those lips -- even then, she tasted of almonds, but then it was a sweetness. We'd gone too far together to be happy. "Stop it," she said at me. "Be here, with me, now." "I am here." She took me by the shoulders, something she never did; she was rarely physical. She shook me. I was utterly amazed. She said, "Damn it. It's critical. Now. After all these years. Be here now!" "I'm all yours --" "Will, Dad gave me one of them, too." "What?" "Dad gave me --" She let go. "He gave me one, too." All I could spout was: "You -- you didn't use it, of course." "I didn't use it until you started doing it so much. Until you started drifting so far from me --" "But, he shouldn't have --" "Certainly if the husband can, the wife can, too." "But --" I couldn't believe my ears. I closed my eyes. I saw the wedding reception. Sure, it had smelled like half-mummified flowers, but it had been beautiful, and she had been beautiful, and I cried to look into those loving, gentle eyes of hers, cried to sense everyone listening as I spoke vows I truly meant, sealing something deep in the heart of the universe. And when her father pulled me aside, I couldn't believe what he said about men and women, and I couldn't believe I would ever use his gift. "A certificate --" he'd said. "Take it down for a simple implant. It'll work something like the old insulin pumps some diabetics used to wear. Of course, it'll be under the skin, no one will know you have it; the buttons are so tiny they feel like pimples --" "I don't think I'll ever need --" I was young, awash with champagne, giddy in a cricket suit, stupid. "Sisyphus condemned to roll a rock up a hill, perpetually: that's marriage." "Not mine. I love your daughter --" "So a man who's going to grow, who's going to become a whole man, or higher than a man, has to stuff as much experience as possible into each moment looking at that boulder. And some men-- well, we wish we could be married to a lot of other women, know what we're missing. Sometimes we wish it so much that we can't even "Really, I won't need that --" I protested. "Besides, I like to be fully conscious --" "You don't lose consciousness; you just wake up after the shift, as if you've suddenly caught yourself drifting while reading a book. Your body, most of your mind, everything works on automatic: like driving a car on familiar streets. It's just that the little pinpoint part of your consciousness you call 'I' will be -- on vacation." "Honestly, I don't think that's appropriate for a marriage. It's cheating -- I won't use --" "You'll use it; someday, you'll need a getaway. Believe me, I know my daughter very well. Lived with her these twenty-odd years, you know." The stalwart old gentleman had a presence that was hard to resist. He spoke softly, but firmly, as if he knew nothing else except to stand as an authority. It was the way of the world, he told me patiently. Men had found adventures outside their marriages for centuries. And with this little device, a moment's infusion of nanotech receptors, men could do so in the privacy of their own consciousness. Shift frequencies and a man was a user tuned into an entire world, a new location, a new time, a new person, meeting other users, interacting, having, as he called them, "adventures." It was like virtual reality only much more real, much more powerful. "These little receivers, each one for a separate frequency--your choice of worlds -- see, will put your 'I' in another world. Do I need to say more?" "I like marriage too much, marriage to your daughter too much, to think about it -- Surely...surely it's too expensive a gift." "I own stock in the company. Own outright the broadcast transmitters down in Omaha. Major investment in the comsats that make it possible worldwide. And I wrote the programs for two of our four alternate planes." I had heard about him even before meeting Laura; some sort of technowizard with old money and esoteric roots in a merely rumored mythic Illuminati tradition. I didn't trust him. I started to ask him about himself when he pressed the certificate into my palm, nodded wisely at me, and was lost in the crowded reception. And now I looked into my young bride's eyes, older, but still her eyes. Something cracked. I was too overwhelmed and confused to speak, and could only retreat. Her dress was yellow and she looked at me with admiration, and, of course, I did not look at her but gazed out the window of my library at the dripping leaves of the magnolias that lined the road to the Big House. Horses ran on the track beyond -- my horses. She was obviously, painfully Southern -- charming graceful in the slow motions of an Old South etiquette that had not quite died even after two hundred years, appropriately modest and always naive. Naive. And that was what I wanted in herr the naivete and the inability to do anything, anything except adore me. Talk about fantasy. Grace Prud'Homme: she was pale against the yellow dress, which was simply a pull-over and not the formal gown of a debutante -- but it seemed that way. I had always thought this world too painfully close to Laura's, but this girl was nothing like her at least. This world was mine. So what if I'd projected into a plantation environment? "I'm goin' to be workin' on some sewin' projects," she was telling me. "Most of the day." I sipped tea. I smiled. To hell with anything else. Who needed a business woman for a damned wife. Someone who could cook, sew, massage the tired back of the patriarch: that was life. On Tuesday nights she went with me to the vestry meetings for the church. Of course, she was on the flower guild and would hover around in the sanctuary for a while, but then she came to the meetings to watch from the sidelines, to watch and obviously adore her man, who was really a man, and a fine upstanding model citizen, community leader, all that. Gag: Sometimes when I thought about myself, I gagged with the perfection of it all. But I loved it, ate it up; if these alternate worlds were fantasy, then let the fantasy run! "Did you hear what I was saying, dear?" she asked. I looked into her eyes. Flat character. Oh well, whoever she was in some other dimension, in some other lifetime, here and now she served one function: to adore me. The identity of the user, cloaked behind that shallow, witless character, did not matter. What mattered was that here, in this world, the admiration and servitude were real, as were the strength, the prowess, the authority I held here even if I could not in that other life, the one that didn't matter squat. The one with Laura -- damn it; damn her. The beauty of the alternate lives was that I could forget the one I'd come from, the dull one, the -- the real one. But I was finding it difficult today. What had Laura meant, that this moment in our marriage was critical? I felt uneasy. I tried to wash her from my mind. "What about supper?" I asked Grace. "Oh, I'll be sure to wrangle up somethin' you like. I won't let the fun and games of the sewin' circle get in the way of takin' care of my baby." I felt a twinge. "All right, honey," I told her. She stood. She was shapely, sexy, for me. She wiggled slightly in that yellow dress as she walked. For me. I closed my eyes as she left. What was she saying earlier? I had to think back, I'd blanked out on her, drifted off into another plane. I remembered with my body's memory, and could hear her speak. "Darlin', are you awake?" "Uh, yeah, yeah; just daydreaming." I'd been looking out the window. "I was saying, the Circle girls will be here. We're doin' a charity quilt. I want you to get out, go riding, don't think about me for a while." "Oh, I don't know --" "Please, go. Enjoy it. I've already called down to have Agni saddled." Agni, my favorite Arabian. A beauty. Remembering now that that was what I was to do, I nodded to myself, and strode like a horseman through the house, past the closed door of the massive chamber she called her "sewing room," and down into the gaping Great Room, where we'd married some seven years before. I could almost see all the guests, the room full of old widows and the rarer old men, the air full of the smell of lavender and potpourri and her dress smelling of cedar. She had wooed me; in this lifetime, I was an entirely self-made man, but she built me up. It was as if she expended all her time and all her energy -- to be my wife. And, God, I loved getting married. To her, to the others, to -- it was just damned Romantic. And it was too bad that the magic left, always left. Well, not here. The magic of her absolute adoration, however I had won it, was worth all the other lives put together. I walked down to the stables to find Agni saddled and ready to go, but I wasn't in the mood. I sat on the horse, stroked her shining hide, breathed in the aroma of her pungent horseflesh, and could not get the now-seven pleasant years of marriage to Grace from my head. How unlike Laura she was! Thank God. I tried to shake the comparison, and rode, but Grace's image, surrounded by the yellow flowers of our wedding bed, floated in front of me, and the more I thought of her, the more I thought of that damned Laura and that first real marriage, and I generated a desire for Grace to build up the contrast. I shook my head and spurred Agni into a gallop, the green fields like a carpet in every direction. The thought of Grace back in that house called to me. I wanted her; I wanted her as I wanted no one else, no other wife, no other possible wife. Certainly not Laura. I turned the horse's head unexpectedly and went back. The big house grew larger. I rode through the gate and down the narrow old carriage lane below the moist magnolias. "Okay," I said to myself. "She is it. Not Laura, damn her, not anyone else. I'm gonna stay, close off the other frequencies, never leave again. This is home, her home and mine, because she lives for me." I didn't bother to take the animal to the stable, but tied her to a post on the veranda. A car had already arrived while I'd been riding. Sewing circle -- well, they could leave. I wanted to make love with Grace as I'd never made love to anyone. This moment and no other counted. This love. This life. I felt the hormones rushing in a cloud through my taut muscles; the cupid-like desire pulsing as lightning through me. I leaped up the stairs to the door. I heard voices. A man's voice; it was ugly and coarse to my ears, because I had expected the voices of lavender-smelly grandmothers. It said, "You're beautiful. You --" And then there were noises, animal, wet, unbridled, grotesque. I pushed the door, found it locked, then kicked it open. There she was, on the sewing table, on her back, her dress hiked up above her thighs, and some man with his face buried between them. "What the hell!" I cried at them and the yellow statue I'd been broke. Her head whipped around with an ugly, alien stare; and the man, sloppy with their sex, stood and pulled a gun. I was unable to respond. Then she said in a cavernous, distant, animal voice that "This wasn't the way we planned it, but it'll do." I realized the "we" did not include me but him, the co-conspirator. Then they were on top of me, binding me, the Colt .45 -- something from my own collection -- squeezed into my temple. It didn't seem possible. "What the hell --" I grunted. I was too stunned to move. "It has to look like an accident," she sneered at me. Inhuman. "How long have you been --" I groaned as he kicked me in the gut. It didn't matter how long she'd been conspiring against me: all the seven years or from the moment her name was on my will or just this last moment. A single flash of it was enough to bring me down. They dragged me to the top of the stairs. I looked, I swooned, I felt deeply empty. And I pushed against them, but only half-heartedly, then fell into a wide expanse of blue. I was looking at blue toilet paper. I was in the john at the house on Elm Street. I heard Madhur singing to herself in the next room. What the hell was she doing? Counting the money. She'd broken into the damned money. I flushed the toilet. 1 couldn't believe she'd broken into the money without me. She knew better than that. She knew better than to cross me. She knew better, damn her. The shotgun was at my feet. I jerked my underwear and my trousers up in a single motion and grabbed the gun, too. I'd hit her with it before, many times, and with many other things, too, mostly my fists, but obviously that was not enough. It hadn't taught her jack. It hadn't taught her obedience or to respect me or to love me. Never go to Vegas in a fast car with a lot of whiskey and a drug-wasted physics student. Turns a man into a damned criminal, with no respect. Okay, so it'd once been exciting. Bonnie and Clyde. Now she needed a real lesson. Damn her, she needed something she would never forget. The pulse in my tracked-up arms raged against the skin. I shouldered the gun and burst in on her, and there she was surrounded with little slips of paper. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" I leveled the barrels at her chest, pushed them against her, pushed her with them across the room and up against the wall. My fingers throbbed with a heartbeat. She said, "Go ahead. It's all fake anyway." "What?" I sneered into her face, my eyes and teeth rushing like a bull toward hers. "That old man," she said in a small, unemotional voice. "He gave us bags of monopoly money, ole Jack. He didn't even give us real money. You wasted him for monopoly money." My fingers strained against the triggers, and rage burst out of the top of my head like a furious, flaming bird. And then I was left, a vibrating mass barely holding the gun. I looked into her eyes, and knew something more was going on than what was happening on the surface. I said, "You want me to do this. You're making me do this." She shook her head at me. "Do you see our outcome, at least? I mean here, the outcome of this? It comes to killing me, too?" Who was me? The end of the gun quivered visibly. For some reason I thought of my father-in-law, on a distant plane, on Laura's plane. He'd died there from natural causes. There, at least. I sensed acutely the dried blood splattered across the end of my gun. Then I tried to look deeper into her eyes. They were brown, radically different from those of my other wives in my other lifetimes. Or maybe not. Maybe not radically. "Now," she was saying. Tears were streaming down her face. "Don't you see, that our marriage needs this now, this moment?" I looked at her bewildered, startled, awed. I said, "He gave you one, too? The implant --" "And why not? Do you think he believed in some sort of macho double standard? Do you think he would have been so supportive of us and not believed in marriage?" "But, I-" "Do you know how hard I have worked to save our marriage..'" She was crying, really crying, and I was, too. "But, Laura," I couldn't help the tears; I wasn't even sure why. "Laura, what are you saying --" "Do you know how hard it was to find you in those other places? In all these five worlds?" I couldn't bear what she was telling me. I couldn't take it. With the stupid, awesome, shaking sobs running through my body, cracking the shell so that the vulnerable softness inside me could again meet the softness inside her, I touched the implant just below the skin and was gone again. Red. I had not been here for some time. It was the first of the four lifetimes I'd visited beyond the real one with Laura, the first persona I'd created, and the first to bore me, with deathly boredom. In the world of this city, other users walked by-- users who would be strangers to me on any other frequency, in any other world. A lot of strangers used the technology, shifting worlds, living multiple lives simultaneously on different planes, interacting in fantasies that were all too real. Strangers: but maybe they weren't all strangers. I went to Becky's house. The proverbial red light was on outside, illuminating a weathered peacock on the sign that said simply, "Becky's." I'd been such a juvenile in these daydream worlds, in the marriages I felt I needed and wanted. I couldn't believe now that I'd married a madame, or that at one time I'd found purely physical lust to be a good reason to do it. What the hell: it was just fantasy, right? Becky no longer did tricks, so that was cool. She just did me; my persona in this world lived with her on the top floor of the brothel, and lived off the fruits of the labor of her girls. Had she sensed the absence of my consciousness at all? I doubted it. Most of us walk around only semiconscious anyway; no one seems too upset about it. I doubted she cared. Now as I walked into the house, past the girls in the lobby, I wanted her again. The "I" in me wanted her, her breast-flesh, the comfort of her scarlet womb-like room and the warm embrace, the smell of deodorant under her slightly thick arms, the moisture of her thighs. I wanted her. I found myself in her room. She was writing bills at a little Queen Anne desk. The room was scarlet. It smelled of her body, and of my own sweat. "How's things, Tom?" she said. Her voice was gentle, motherly. I couldn't believe how I'd seen her as through and through a simple mass of flesh, an object to pound into, something to use. "Are you all right?" A gentle voice! The tears streamed down my face. "Laura," I said. And she, too, began to cry. "He was a wise old fellow," she said. She'd turned again to the window. Only now her stance was not like stone. A full light came into the study. I saw her hair for the first time in years, how it sparkled with many colors in the light, and how tender it seemed, curling and falling onto her shoulders. I saw her in color, and not in the grays with which I'd imaged her for virtually the whole of our marriage; I saw the ripe fullness of her, the red, blue, green, yellow and beautiful white in her robes and hair and lips and skin and eyes. They weren't so old and tired after all. I couldn't respond to what she said. I didn't understand it. I was afraid I would cry if I said anything at all. She answered my silence. "Dad: he knew what marriage was like, you know, what men and women can be like. And he knew how much I loved you, how many years and how much I was willing to invest to make our marriage work, to help you be here fully, with me. You asked a few moments ago if it was a conspiracy. Don't you think --" She nearly choked with the gentle knots of the emotions. "Don't you think a bride consults with her father about the future of a union? And when he loves her, don't you think he senses how much she loves the new man -- and that a father makes a kind of commitment to sacrifice himself if necessary for the things for which she would sacrifice herself?" "I--" I couldn't speak. The vibrating feelings were too deep for words: I'd been like a shallow pool at the top of a reef that opens below the crusted coral into startling depth, soft depth where two people could really meet. Amazing that it took ten years sometimes for a marriage to begin to work, for a man to become whole for just a moment. She turned. I stood and was with her. The soft parts inside us met again, and did not curl back into harsh shells. They were open and vibrated with warmth and tears and the pulse of life. I felt new. And I saw into her eyes again, as if she lifted a bridal veil; I saw the old man's wedding gift, and his daughter's sacrifice and in the depths of those eyes, a sparkling, clear luminosity. WILLIAM R. EAKIN MONOGAMY I waited for her, tasting her: almonds, a faint bitterness, coffee-tastes from the earlier morning, the biting peppermints of toothpaste. Finally she came into the room with the silver tray of espressos and cream, kissed me before she set it down with the gentle aloofness of our marriage, then served. There were clouds of coffee aromas in the room now: the midmorning ritual had its own proper incense, strong like chocolate. She said, "You've been distant again, these past several days." And instead of sitting down as she almost always did, she went to stand at the open window, pushing even further back the heavy, Tyrian purple curtains of my library. A thin light streamed down on her face from the east. I didn't say anything. I knew if I responded, we would start into it. I didn't even want to like her anymore. She said, "You've been seeing a lot more of the other women lately." I fought against a squirm, watched her with the Stoic expression of a seasoned poker player, chose a spoon and stirred. I saw her in profile and was amazed at how just ten years could age someone who had been so young. She looked a great deal like her father. It figured: the old man dominated our lives; our whole situation was his fault anyway, the fault of the wedding gifts: the property and money, the other gift. I never really even thought I would use it: I was enamored of the girl, wrapped up in the lace and flowers of the wedding and the honeymoon and seven truly good months. And then, after months when I admittedly grew a little tired of it and her breath seemed stale and things settled into everyday weariness without the magic I married her for, I used his gift and started thinking of him as my best bet at salvation, the old bastard; we really did belong together to some fraternity that bound married man to married man. "I don't want to get into it tonight." "You have been with them," she said gently, more to herself than to me. I thought of them as other lives, lives not consecutive but simultaneous. "You grow more and more distant and however many bright moments we've had together over these ten years, most of them are gray and dull, and it's because you've stopped having feeling for me." It was true. I replied with banality: "But I do love you." She shrugged. I knew she would. We'd had lots of conversations like this and frankly I didn't care anymore, and I didn't care if she cared. There were much better things to do, much more exciting people to be with, who didn't go stale, like bread left out in the air, in only seven months. There were people out there who were interesting for years and maybe forever; who met my needs. She walked to her chair and sat to drink coffee. We looked out across the dusky library through the window and watched the stillness of the birch grove. A blue flash: the blue of sky, and of the ocean rushing by. The salt wind blasted over the windshield. I put on sunglasses and shifted gear. The Austin-Healey rumbled, then purred like a kitten into overdrive. It was winter in southern Florida, but the place knows no seasons. It was hot enough for muscle-shirts. Now I saw oranges; I handed one to Madhur. She giggled; she always giggled, something I would never have expected from someone with a wasted Ph.D. in physics or a penchant for knife fights. Oranges were all we could afford for lunch, with the Glenlivet scotch. I rammed the gas pedal and the bug-eyed Sprite danced through the traffic of Oceanside Drive. Some old woman honked and I refrained from flipping her the bird, but when she honked again, I fingered the double-barreled sawed-off at my feet, my head raging, until Madhur squeezed me right where I was most likely to respond, and my head cleared, and I made the car lurch forward and leave the woman, so close to her own road killing, far behind in the maze of traffic. "You get wrangled up about everything, ole Jack. You need to learn to control it." "To hell with it," I told her, and I took the bottle and fueled rage with burning water. I didn't look at her. The bruises I'd given her were almost gone, almost imperceptible against her dark skin; the worst were hidden under the shades anyway, but I could see them too well. No remorse, of course, but I could see them all the same. She giggled and said, "All we need are the pigs to come down on us now with all that cash and paraphernalia and crap; ole Jack, if you get us knocked up just because you can't drive, then I'll slice your throat, okay? While you sleep." I sneered at her, knowing she was only half-serious, and rammed up the volume of the stereo. The techno-strains pumped into the roar of wind. We exited the freeway without changing speed, and hurtled through the mass of housing projects to the dilapidated, whore-infested pit of a neighborhood where people like us lived. The shiny, spoked wheels of the Austin-Healey screeched and we were in front of the white, two-room plank house on Elm Street. Madhur giggled and looked at me and I knew excitement flashed through her brown eyes even though they were hidden behind dark plastic; I felt the adrenaline pulsing from her pores. I could smell it, simultaneously clean and dirty like the sweat she worked up when we ripped off a place, when we were criminals together, when we came home to sex and violence and a warped love on piles of green paper. That we'd done earlier. This time we were a little more cautious, until now, when there no longer seemed any sense in it. "Okay, let's go see it," I said. She smiled like a girl. It had been only the second time in our two-year marriage we'd had real money, made a real haul, and we'd kept each other from it for a day to let the steam dissipate. She pulled the keys from the ignition and was on her way up to the concrete front steps. I came after her, pulling my sawed off after me, and carrying it mechanically against my leg. The piece felt warm to me, warm because it had rested on the warm floorboard. But the warmth was the same as when it was fired pointblank against the pulsating chest of the old security guard of the Branch Bank at 1st and Oceanside. And my fingers against the double triggers had the sensation of having just pulled and released. I tried not to think about it, tried to think about the money. But even before I reached the door I was feeling the sensation again, looking down and realizing I hadn't cleaned the old man's blood from the barrels. She managed the working plantation and I taught part-time at a local college. In the quiet mornings together we drank espresso and sometimes did business. Now when she handed me the plantation's monthly financial report, her hand quivered. The quiver startled me. She never did that. "Are you all right?" I asked her. She looked at me stonily with her gray eyes. "Things aren't all that bad, are they, Laura?" She didn't respond. "Is it money?" I looked down at the report and saw that things had never been better. It was us. "Do we have to? Do we have to fight? Can't we just -- just once have a nice cup of coffee and relax and go over the business and -- and not fight? Does everything between us have to be so damned dramatic?" I closed my eyes: I really meant so boring. And surely she felt that, too. I opened my eyes and she said, "Did you do it just then? I mean just now?" "No, I didn't do it, just now." I couldn't help sneering. "You closed your eyes like --" "I'm still here, right?" I found this kind of interrogation increasingly irritating. "It's hard to tell, sometimes." That was the beauty of the technology, of course. I smiled at her, almost involuntarily, with a taunt. Over the years, our very bodies had learned to irk each other; little digs were so much a part of us that they were unconscious, second nature. Irritability, too much caffeine, too many years. "You know we're skating our way to a divorce." I looked at her and shrugged. "Things aren't that bad between us. Really. It's not like we have knock-down-drag-out fights, right? I mean, we're hospitable, right? Even if we bicker continuously. It's not me, you know, who's always so gray and --" "Stop being so nervous and defensive." "I'm not being defensive." "Look at you -- guilty, that's what it is." "I'm not feeling guilty," I protested. I heard something in me say to get the hell out of the place. "You are. It's written all over your face." I tried to make my face innocently smooth. "I'm not. Really. Not a fuckin' guilty bone in my body." She grasped my arm. "Don't do it. Stop doing it -- so much." "Doing what." "Damn it, Will, you've got to stop it." "What, will I go blind or something? Have I ever neglected you? Ever not been attentive to your needs.?" "Damn it, you're married to four other women." "Just fantasy -- nothing wrong with fantasy." "Four other women. It's not just fantasy." Get the hell outta here. And I did. GREEN: It was a summer night but green neon spilt onto wet pavement from the icon above the Green Garuda Lounge: a man holding a martini glass alternating with a bent pink bird that was supposed to look like an eagle, transforming from mortal into eagle, I supposed. An immigrant Kasmiri family owned the place; at least they could fix a good drink. I shook the water from my feet and passed underneath into the dark bar and sat at our booth; forest green naugahyde seats squeaked against my slacks, and I ordered a stiff Salty Dog. I waited, it seemed for hours, and finally she came, covered in a trench coat. I was on my third then, and bought her one. "So Lily, how was the show?" I asked. She did not remove the overcoat. Not enough underneath to do so. "You need to drop the perturbation in your voice," she said. Hers was husky, deep for a woman's. I looked at her and tried to see through the darkness into her eyes: hazel, sometimes green like the bar; I thought once we married, I'd be able to see directly into them, but I never could. I thought marrying her would be rescuing her, me with the shining armor. Another dead end. This was my place, this Green Garuda. I never went to hers: at least, I had not been there since we started dating, and finally married. I could not believe I allowed her to continue to dance. I hated her for it. She sipped the Salty Dog. "Why don't you skip the next show --" I started. I'd asked her thus numerous times. I'd pleaded with her. I already knew the answer. "What, and get booted out of the Kit-Club? Don, let's don't get into it. If you don't stop this heavy-handed stuff when we meet, I --" I shrugged her comment away and she sat back against the overstuffed bench. "Look, honey, we used to have such a good time meeting like this --" Now it was mechanical. Now it was pure form. I met her after work, between her shows, had a drink, went home alone, drank myself to sleep. Why had I come back to this lifetime? Why? "I know you don't want me to work anymore, you know I'm going to work forever, and so there's no reason to talk about it, so why not just relax and have fun like we used to --" "I thought once we married, eventually, it would change -- "God, why had I come here? I had the choice of frequencies, why this one. today? Maybe -- to call it quits. "I'm an erotic dancer, Don. You married a friggin' erotic dancer. You didn't marry Annette Funi-Mickey-Mouse-cello, or Donna-Wax-the-floor-Reed. And I'm sure as hell not gonna ever be that, got it, Don? I'm my own person, and you can't strip my personhood away, got it? Maybe you could do that with all your other girlfriends or whoever the hell you were dating before we got hitched. But, damn, you married an erotic dancer, someone whose very existence is that, you see? It's my profession. And I told you, I don't want to get into it tonight." Something in her tone startled me. I tried to see into her eyes: I'd said the same thing, a few moments and a lifetime ago: I did not want to get into it. Was she smiling? Was she taunting me? I turned away from her' and pulled the Salty Dog to my lips. I'd been attracted to her in this seedy part of town precisely because she was an "erotic dancer." Now I couldn't stand the idea. I couldn't stand it. shook my head finally and said, "I'm sorry Lily, I don't know what's going on with me. I don't even know why I'm here. Really." I was so damned wrapped up in her. That was the irony. I think I'd really fallen in love with her. But I couldn't say it: when I tried, I could only see visions of half-drunk lonely men gaping at her, watching her gentle breasts sway with a wild vulgarity that did not seem consonant with the nature she had when we were alone. I tried to tell her I loved her and could not say it. "You should never have let me love you," I told her. I ached for her. I wanted her, I wanted her changed. She read my thoughts: "You're doing it, blaming me. Your discontent is your own damned creation. And I'm not going to change to fit it." She's pushed me to this! I told myself. Over the years, she made me love her, she lured me to it, to marriage, to totally enfolding myself in her, to dedicating everything I was to her, to finally being nothing except in relation to her-- and then to be faced with this contradiction of who I had wanted and who I now wanted. "You're an ass, you know, not accepting me as I am, as you loved me. You're not ever going to do it, are you?" She was mad now. She slugged down her drink. She left. Something was critical in the air of the bar; as if the universe itself could snap in two. Why had I come back to this lifetime? I wanted out. I wanted to end it. To shut oft the frequency, close down the world, end it. At our apartment with Jack Daniels at my elbow and my face hovering in the mirror of the medicine cabinet, I did precisely that. She slapped me across the cheek and I was startled back into consciousness. "Now." She said sternly. "Now is the critical time. Be with me." "What..'" I shook myself and realized I'd brought myself back to Laura. She was animated now, standing over me. She'd been pacing back and forth in front of me. I saw life in her face, even if it was angry life. It amused me. I'd seen life in that same face at our wedding, when she lifted that veil, and I kissed those lips -- even then, she tasted of almonds, but then it was a sweetness. We'd gone too far together to be happy. "Stop it," she said at me. "Be here, with me, now." "I am here." She took me by the shoulders, something she never did; she was rarely physical. She shook me. I was utterly amazed. She said, "Damn it. It's critical. Now. After all these years. Be here now!" "I'm all yours --" "Will, Dad gave me one of them, too." "What?" "Dad gave me --" She let go. "He gave me one, too." All I could spout was: "You -- you didn't use it, of course." "I didn't use it until you started doing it so much. Until you started drifting so far from me --" "But, he shouldn't have --" "Certainly if the husband can, the wife can, too." "But --" I couldn't believe my ears. I closed my eyes. I saw the wedding reception. Sure, it had smelled like half-mummified flowers, but it had been beautiful, and she had been beautiful, and I cried to look into those loving, gentle eyes of hers, cried to sense everyone listening as I spoke vows I truly meant, sealing something deep in the heart of the universe. And when her father pulled me aside, I couldn't believe what he said about men and women, and I couldn't believe I would ever use his gift. "A certificate --" he'd said. "Take it down for a simple implant. It'll work something like the old insulin pumps some diabetics used to wear. Of course, it'll be under the skin, no one will know you have it; the buttons are so tiny they feel like pimples --" "I don't think I'll ever need --" I was young, awash with champagne, giddy in a cricket suit, stupid. "Sisyphus condemned to roll a rock up a hill, perpetually: that's marriage." "Not mine. I love your daughter --" "So a man who's going to grow, who's going to become a whole man, or higher than a man, has to stuff as much experience as possible into each moment looking at that boulder. And some men-- well, we wish we could be married to a lot of other women, know what we're missing. Sometimes we wish it so much that we can't even be where we are." "Really, I won't need that --" I protested. "Besides, I like to be fully conscious --" "You don't lose consciousness; you just wake up after the shift, as if you've suddenly caught yourself drifting while reading a book. Your body, most of your mind, everything works on automatic: like driving a car on familiar streets. It's just that the little pinpoint part of your consciousness you call 'I' will be -- on vacation." "Honestly, I don't think that's appropriate for a marriage. It's cheating -- I won't use --" "You'll use it; someday, you'll need a getaway. Believe me, I know my daughter very well. Lived with her these twenty-odd years, you know." The stalwart old gentleman had a presence that was hard to resist. He spoke softly, but firmly, as if he knew nothing else except to stand as an authority. It was the way of the world, he told me patiently. Men had found adventures outside their marriages for centuries. And with this little device, a moment's infusion of nanotech receptors, men could do so in the privacy of their own consciousness. Shift frequencies and a man was a user tuned into an entire world, a new location, a new time, a new person, meeting other users, interacting, having, as he called them, "adventures." It was like virtual reality only much more real, much more powerful. "These little receivers, each one for a separate frequency--your choice of worlds -- see, will put your 'I' in another world. Do I need to say more?" "I like marriage too much, marriage to your daughter too much, to think about it -- Surely...surely it's too expensive a gift." "I own stock in the company. Own outright the broadcast transmitters down in Omaha. Major investment in the comsats that make it possible worldwide. And I wrote the programs for two of our four alternate planes." I had heard about him even before meeting Laura; some sort of technowizard with old money and esoteric roots in a merely rumored mythic Illuminati tradition. I didn't trust him. I started to ask him about himself when he pressed the certificate into my palm, nodded wisely at me, and was lost in the crowded reception. And now I looked into my young bride's eyes, older, but still her eyes. Something cracked. I was too overwhelmed and confused to speak, and could only retreat. Her dress was yellow and she looked at me with admiration, and, of course, I did not look at her but gazed out the window of my library at the dripping leaves of the magnolias that lined the road to the Big House. Horses ran on the track beyond -- my horses. She was obviously, painfully Southern -- charming graceful in the slow motions of an Old South etiquette that had not quite died even after two hundred years, appropriately modest and always naive. Naive. And that was what I wanted in herr the naivete and the inability to do anything, anything except adore me. Talk about fantasy. Grace Prud'Homme: she was pale against the yellow dress, which was simply a pull-over and not the formal gown of a debutante -- but it seemed that way. I had always thought this world too painfully close to Laura's, but this girl was nothing like her at least. This world was mine. So what if I'd projected into a plantation environment? "I'm goin' to be workin' on some sewin' projects," she was telling me. "Most of the day." I sipped tea. I smiled. To hell with anything else. Who needed a business woman for a damned wife. Someone who could cook, sew, massage the tired back of the patriarch: that was life. On Tuesday nights she went with me to the vestry meetings for the church. Of course, she was on the flower guild and would hover around in the sanctuary for a while, but then she came to the meetings to watch from the sidelines, to watch and obviously adore her man, who was really a man, and a fine upstanding model citizen, community leader, all that. Gag: Sometimes when I thought about myself, I gagged with the perfection of it all. But I loved it, ate it up; if these alternate worlds were fantasy, then let the fantasy run! "Did you hear what I was saying, dear?" she asked. I looked into her eyes. Flat character. Oh well, whoever she was in some other dimension, in some other lifetime, here and now she served one function: to adore me. The identity of the user, cloaked behind that shallow, witless character, did not matter. What mattered was that here, in this world, the admiration and servitude were real, as were the strength, the prowess, the authority I held here even if I could not in that other life, the one that didn't matter squat. The one with Laura -- damn it; damn her. The beauty of the alternate lives was that I could forget the one I'd come from, the dull one, the -- the real one. But I was finding it difficult today. What had Laura meant, that this moment in our marriage was critical? I felt uneasy. I tried to wash her from my mind. "What about supper?" I asked Grace. "Oh, I'll be sure to wrangle up somethin' you like. I won't let the fun and games of the sewin' circle get in the way of takin' care of my baby." I felt a twinge. "All right, honey," I told her. She stood. She was shapely, sexy, for me. She wiggled slightly in that yellow dress as she walked. For me. I closed my eyes as she left. What was she saying earlier? I had to think back, I'd blanked out on her, drifted off into another plane. I remembered with my body's memory, and could hear her speak. "Darlin', are you awake?" "Uh, yeah, yeah; just daydreaming." I'd been looking out the window. "I was saying, the Circle girls will be here. We're doin' a charity quilt. I want you to get out, go riding, don't think about me for a while." "Oh, I don't know --" "Please, go. Enjoy it. I've already called down to have Agni saddled." Agni, my favorite Arabian. A beauty. Remembering now that that was what I was to do, I nodded to myself, and strode like a horseman through the house, past the closed door of the massive chamber she called her "sewing room," and down into the gaping Great Room, where we'd married some seven years before. I could almost see all the guests, the room full of old widows and the rarer old men, the air full of the smell of lavender and potpourri and her dress smelling of cedar. She had wooed me; in this lifetime, I was an entirely self-made man, but she built me up. It was as if she expended all her time and all her energy -- to be my wife. And, God, I loved getting married. To her, to the others, to -- it was just damned Romantic. And it was too bad that the magic left, always left. Well, not here. The magic of her absolute adoration, however I had won it, was worth all the other lives put together. I walked down to the stables to find Agni saddled and ready to go, but I wasn't in the mood. I sat on the horse, stroked her shining hide, breathed in the aroma of her pungent horseflesh, and could not get the now-seven pleasant years of marriage to Grace from my head. How unlike Laura she was! Thank God. I tried to shake the comparison, and rode, but Grace's image, surrounded by the yellow flowers of our wedding bed, floated in front of me, and the more I thought of her, the more I thought of that damned Laura and that first real marriage, and I generated a desire for Grace to build up the contrast. I shook my head and spurred Agni into a gallop, the green fields like a carpet in every direction. The thought of Grace back in that house called to me. I wanted her; I wanted her as I wanted no one else, no other wife, no other possible wife. Certainly not Laura. I turned the horse's head unexpectedly and went back. The big house grew larger. I rode through the gate and down the narrow old carriage lane below the moist magnolias. "Okay," I said to myself. "She is it. Not Laura, damn her, not anyone else. I'm gonna stay, close off the other frequencies, never leave again. This is home, her home and mine, because she lives for me." I didn't bother to take the animal to the stable, but tied her to a post on the veranda. A car had already arrived while I'd been riding. Sewing circle -- well, they could leave. I wanted to make love with Grace as I'd never made love to anyone. This moment and no other counted. This love. This life. I felt the hormones rushing in a cloud through my taut muscles; the cupid-like desire pulsing as lightning through me. I leaped up the stairs to the door. I heard voices. A man's voice; it was ugly and coarse to my ears, because I had expected the voices of lavender-smelly grandmothers. It said, "You're beautiful. You --" And then there were noises, animal, wet, unbridled, grotesque. I pushed the door, found it locked, then kicked it open. There she was, on the sewing table, on her back, her dress hiked up above her thighs, and some man with his face buried between them. "What the hell!" I cried at them and the yellow statue I'd been broke. Her head whipped around with an ugly, alien stare; and the man, sloppy with their sex, stood and pulled a gun. I was unable to respond. Then she said in a cavernous, distant, animal voice that "This wasn't the way we planned it, but it'll do." I realized the "we" did not include me but him, the co-conspirator. Then they were on top of me, binding me, the Colt .45 -- something from my own collection -- squeezed into my temple. It didn't seem possible. "What the hell --" I grunted. I was too stunned to move. "It has to look like an accident," she sneered at me. Inhuman. "How long have you been --" I groaned as he kicked me in the gut. It didn't matter how long she'd been conspiring against me: all the seven years or from the moment her name was on my will or just this last moment. A single flash of it was enough to bring me down. They dragged me to the top of the stairs. I looked, I swooned, I felt deeply empty. And I pushed against them, but only half-heartedly, then fell into a wide expanse of blue. I was looking at blue toilet paper. I was in the john at the house on Elm Street. I heard Madhur singing to herself in the next room. What the hell was she doing? Counting the money. She'd broken into the damned money. I flushed the toilet. 1 couldn't believe she'd broken into the money without me. She knew better than that. She knew better than to cross me. She knew better, damn her. The shotgun was at my feet. I jerked my underwear and my trousers up in a single motion and grabbed the gun, too. I'd hit her with it before, many times, and with many other things, too, mostly my fists, but obviously that was not enough. It hadn't taught her jack. It hadn't taught her obedience or to respect me or to love me. Never go to Vegas in a fast car with a lot of whiskey and a drug-wasted physics student. Turns a man into a damned criminal, with no respect. Okay, so it'd once been exciting. Bonnie and Clyde. Now she needed a real lesson. Damn her, she needed something she would never forget. The pulse in my tracked-up arms raged against the skin. I shouldered the gun and burst in on her, and there she was surrounded with little slips of paper. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" I leveled the barrels at her chest, pushed them against her, pushed her with them across the room and up against the wall. My fingers throbbed with a heartbeat. She said, "Go ahead. It's all fake anyway." "What?" I sneered into her face, my eyes and teeth rushing like a bull toward hers. "That old man," she said in a small, unemotional voice. "He gave us bags of monopoly money, ole Jack. He didn't even give us real money. You wasted him for monopoly money." My fingers strained against the triggers, and rage burst out of the top of my head like a furious, flaming bird. And then I was left, a vibrating mass barely holding the gun. I looked into her eyes, and knew something more was going on than what was happening on the surface. I said, "You want me to do this. You're making me do this." She shook her head at me. "Do you see our outcome, at least? I mean here, the outcome of this? It comes to killing me, too?" Who was me? The end of the gun quivered visibly. For some reason I thought of my father-in-law, on a distant plane, on Laura's plane. He'd died there from natural causes. There, at least. I sensed acutely the dried blood splattered across the end of my gun. Then I tried to look deeper into her eyes. They were brown, radically different from those of my other wives in my other lifetimes. Or maybe not. Maybe not radically. "Now," she was saying. Tears were streaming down her face. "Don't you see, that our marriage needs this now, this moment?" I looked at her bewildered, startled, awed. I said, "He gave you one, too? The implant --" "And why not? Do you think he believed in some sort of macho double standard? Do you think he would have been so supportive of us and not believed in marriage?" "But, I-" "Do you know how hard I have worked to save our marriage..'" She was crying, really crying, and I was, too. "But, Laura," I couldn't help the tears; I wasn't even sure why. "Laura, what are you saying --" "Do you know how hard it was to find you in those other places? In all these five worlds?" I couldn't bear what she was telling me. I couldn't take it. With the stupid, awesome, shaking sobs running through my body, cracking the shell so that the vulnerable softness inside me could again meet the softness inside her, I touched the implant just below the skin and was gone again. Red. I had not been here for some time. It was the first of the four lifetimes I'd visited beyond the real one with Laura, the first persona I'd created, and the first to bore me, with deathly boredom. In the world of this city, other users walked by-- users who would be strangers to me on any other frequency, in any other world. A lot of strangers used the technology, shifting worlds, living multiple lives simultaneously on different planes, interacting in fantasies that were all too real. Strangers: but maybe they weren't all strangers. I went to Becky's house. The proverbial red light was on outside, illuminating a weathered peacock on the sign that said simply, "Becky's." I'd been such a juvenile in these daydream worlds, in the marriages I felt I needed and wanted. I couldn't believe now that I'd married a madame, or that at one time I'd found purely physical lust to be a good reason to do it. What the hell: it was just fantasy, right? Becky no longer did tricks, so that was cool. She just did me; my persona in this world lived with her on the top floor of the brothel, and lived off the fruits of the labor of her girls. Had she sensed the absence of my consciousness at all? I doubted it. Most of us walk around only semiconscious anyway; no one seems too upset about it. I doubted she cared. Now as I walked into the house, past the girls in the lobby, I wanted her again. The "I" in me wanted her, her breast-flesh, the comfort of her scarlet womb-like room and the warm embrace, the smell of deodorant under her slightly thick arms, the moisture of her thighs. I wanted her. I found myself in her room. She was writing bills at a little Queen Anne desk. The room was scarlet. It smelled of her body, and of my own sweat. "How's things, Tom?" she said. Her voice was gentle, motherly. I couldn't believe how I'd seen her as through and through a simple mass of flesh, an object to pound into, something to use. "Are you all right?" A gentle voice! The tears streamed down my face. "Laura," I said. And she, too, began to cry. "He was a wise old fellow," she said. She'd turned again to the window. Only now her stance was not like stone. A full light came into the study. I saw her hair for the first time in years, how it sparkled with many colors in the light, and how tender it seemed, curling and falling onto her shoulders. I saw her in color, and not in the grays with which I'd imaged her for virtually the whole of our marriage; I saw the ripe fullness of her, the red, blue, green, yellow and beautiful white in her robes and hair and lips and skin and eyes. They weren't so old and tired after all. I couldn't respond to what she said. I didn't understand it. I was afraid I would cry if I said anything at all. She answered my silence. "Dad: he knew what marriage was like, you know, what men and women can be like. And he knew how much I loved you, how many years and how much I was willing to invest to make our marriage work, to help you be here fully, with me. You asked a few moments ago if it was a conspiracy. Don't you think --" She nearly choked with the gentle knots of the emotions. "Don't you think a bride consults with her father about the future of a union? And when he loves her, don't you think he senses how much she loves the new man -- and that a father makes a kind of commitment to sacrifice himself if necessary for the things for which she would sacrifice herself?" "I--" I couldn't speak. The vibrating feelings were too deep for words: I'd been like a shallow pool at the top of a reef that opens below the crusted coral into startling depth, soft depth where two people could really meet. Amazing that it took ten years sometimes for a marriage to begin to work, for a man to become whole for just a moment. She turned. I stood and was with her. The soft parts inside us met again, and did not curl back into harsh shells. They were open and vibrated with warmth and tears and the pulse of life. I felt new. And I saw into her eyes again, as if she lifted a bridal veil; I saw the old man's wedding gift, and his daughter's sacrifice and in the depths of those eyes, a sparkling, clear luminosity. |
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