Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

When the ceremony was over and done with, the crowd around the grave broke up, its members drifting away in all directions as though the emotion of the occasion had temporarily suppressed their sense of purpose. When the widow turned toward her, and shook off someone’s restraining hand, Anna knew that the confrontation she had half feared and half craved was about to take place. She wasn’t in the least tempted to turn and run, and she knew before the woman paused to look her up and down that this was what she had come for, and that all the sentimental rubbish about wanting to say good-bye was just an excuse.

“I know who you are,” the widow said, in a cut glass voice which suggested that she took no pride in her perspicacity.

“I know who you are, too,” Anna replied. The two of them were being watched, and Anna was conscious of the fact that the dissipating crowd had been reunited by a common urge to observe, even though no evident ripple of communication had passed through it.

“I thought you were in hospital, out of your mind.” The widow’s voice was carefully neutral, but had an edge to it which suggested that it might break out of confinement at any moment.

“I am,” Anna told her. “But the doctors are beginning to figure things out, and they can keep me stable, most of the time. They’re learning a lot about brain chemistry thanks to people like me.” She didn’t add and people like Alan.

“So you’ll soon be back on the streets, will you?” the widow enquired, cuttingly.

“I haven’t worked the streets since I was sixteen,” Anna said, equably. “I was in a Licensed House when Alan met me. I can’t go back there, of course—there’s no way they’d let me have my license back after what happened, even if they could normalize my body chemistry. I suppose I might go back to the street, when I’m released. There are men who like spoiled girls, believe it or not.”

“You ought to be quarantined,” the widow said, her voice easing into a spiteful hiss. “You and all your rancid kind ought to be locked up forever.”

“Maybe so,” Anna admitted. “But it was the good trips that got Alan hooked, and it was the withdrawal symptoms that hurt him, not the mutant proteins.”

A man had joined the widow now: the fascinated crowd’s appointed mediator. He put a protective arm around the widow’s shoulder. He was too old to be one of her sons and too dignified to be a suitor ambitious to step into the dead man’s shoes; perhaps he was her brother—or even Alan’s brother.

“Go back to the car now, Kitty,” the man said. “Let me take care of this.”

Kitty seemed to be glad of the opportunity to retreat. Whatever she’d hoped to get out of the confrontation, she hadn’t found it. She turned away and went back to the black-clad flock which was waiting to gather her in.

Anna expected a more combative approach from the man, whoever he might be, but all he said was, “If you’re who I think you are, you shouldn’t have come here. It’s not fair to the family.”

Another Isabel, Anna thought. You’d think someone like him would know better. By “someone like him” she meant doctor, lawyer, or banker. Something professional in the nonironic sense of the word. Alan had been a stockbroker, careful overseer of a thousand personal equity plans. She’d often wondered if any of his clients had shares in the company which owned the House. Like everything else in today’s complicated world, it had been part of some diverse conglomerate; the parent organization’s share price was quoted every day in the Guardian’s financial pages, under the heading “Leisure and Entertainment.”

“I’m not doing any harm,” Anna said. “You could all have ignored me, if you’d wanted to.”

“I believe that was the gist of the argument which prompted the legalization of prostitution,” the other replied, mustering a sarcastic edge far sharper than Kitty’s. “It does no harm, they said, and anyone who disapproves only has to ignore it. When the cosmetic engineers progressed from tinkering with shape and form to augmenting bodily fluids they said much the same thing. The new aphrodisiacs are perfectly safe, they said, it’s all just for fun, they’re definitely not addictive—and anyone who disapproves can simply stay away from the new generation of good-time girls, and let the fun-lovers get on with it. In the end, though, the rot crept in, the way it always does. It all went horribly wrong. Isn’t it bad enough that we had to lose Alan, without having to suffer a personal appearance by his own particular angel of death?”

She felt something stirring in the depths of her consciousness, but the comfort blanket of her medication was weighing down upon it. It was easy to remain tame and self-possessed while the doctors’ drugs were winning the battle against her own perverted psychochemistry. “I’m sorry,” she said, effortlessly. “I didn’t mean to cause distress.” Like hell I didn’t, she thought, by way of private compensation. I came here to rub your turned-up noses in it, to force you to recognize how utterly and horribly unfair the world really is.

“You have caused distress,” the man said, accusatively. “I don’t think you have the least idea how much distress you’ve caused—to Alan, to Kitty, to the boys, and to everyone who knew them. If you had, and if you had the least vestige of conscience, you’d have cut your throat rather than come here today. In fact, you’d have cut your throat, period.”

He’s a punter, Anna thought, derisively. Not mine, and not the House’s, but someone’s. He fucks augmented girls, and the juices r eally blow his mind, just like they’re supposed to, and he’s afraid. He’s afraid that one fine day he, too, might find that he just can’t stop, and that if and when his favorite squeeze goes bad, it’ll be cold turkey, forever and ever, amen. Like every man alive his prayer has always been “Lord give me chastity but please not yet!” — and now it’s too late.

“I’m sorry,” she said, again. The words were the purified essence of her medication, wrought by a transformation every bit as miraculous as the one which had run its wayward course within her flesh and her spirit. The real Anna wasn’t sorry at all. The real Anna wasn’t sorry she had come, and wasn’t sorry she was alive, and wasn’t sorry that this black-clad prick saw her as some kind of ravenous memento mori.

“You’re a degenerate,” the black-clad prick informed her, speaking not merely to her but to everything she stood for. “I don’t agree with those people who say that what’s happened to you is God’s punishment for the sins you’ve committed, and that every whore in the world will eventually go the same way, but I understand how they feel. I think you should go now, and never show your face here again. I don’t want Kitty thinking that she can’t bring the boys to visit Alan’s grave in case she meets you. If you have a spark of decency in you, you’ll promise me that you’ll never come here again.”

The clichés begin to flow in full force, Anna thought—but even the medication balked at sparks of decency. “I’m free to go wherever I want to, whenever I wish,” she asserted, untruthfully. “You have no right to stop me.”

“You poisonous bitch,” he said, in a level fashion which suggested that he meant the adjective literally. “Wherever you go, corruption goes with you. Stay away from Alan’s family, or you’ll be sorry.” She knew that he meant all of that quite literally too—but he had to turn away when he’d said it, because he couldn’t meet the unnaturally steady stare of her colorless eyes.