Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

“ ‘If the bridge is weak at both ends,’ “ she recites in a dull, emotionless voice, “ ‘it does not matter what happens in the middle.’ “

The hours unravel and I cannot think of a thing but her.

In bed she tosses just outside my arms. Once she sits up.

“What is that?” she whispers out of what sounds like terror.

“That?” I try to follow the trajectory of her stare. “That?” I get out of bed, pad to the corner, find a thing, pick it out of the dust. “Well, what do you know?” I turn it over and over. “It’s nothing. It’s an old pretzel! Ha.”

I start to toss it over to her but I am afraid she might scream.

Just before I drop off, I study her face, the flawless line of her nose, her soft lip, her shoulders. I can no longer be sure when she is asleep, awake.

There are marks in the muscle of her upper arm.

I bend closer. Everything is a grainy blue-gray in the near dark. But there they are: tiny specks also dot her face above the eye sockets, her forehead, her temples, her cheekbones. With a shaky finger I tip her head to one side on the pillow. Marks along the tendons of her neck. I wonder how many other marks there are.

Dr. Soeul, I realize, has been practicing—what?

What do they call it?

A fist tightens in my stomach.

She promised that she is seeing an obstetrician as well. I believed her. I was busy.

She is weak. It is more than that. It can be stated simply. Something in Shyla is missing. It has not always been this way.

In the middle of the long night I wake at the sound of her voice close by me.

“... All cold and clammy and brassy like a mummy’s fingers ... !” Her voice is racing, lost.

“Shyla?”

No answer.

I try to sleep some more. But I keep listening to her dreams. It is as if I need to hear them.

I wonder what happens when the dreaming stops—or goes mad.

Morning and I come out of it to find her on her back staring into the mottled pattern the sun makes on the ceiling.

I kiss her. No response. I feel like a man who has awakened to find himself bound in cement.

I blow the spider web of hair off her forehead. “Sleep okay?”

“For a while I couldn’t,” she replies. “The moon on the bottom of the bed wouldn’t let me.”

I blink, resume breathing.

But “I thought I heard a voice calling me,” she goes on. “Then in the dark I heard a voice answer, ‘yes?’ “

I can’t even shudder.

Finally I come up with, “Well, I hope you feel better than you did last night. You know—”

“Last night,” she says, still staring at the ceiling, the walls, “I felt my brain shaking like jelly. And the water seeping into the ground.”

I just look at her.

“It’s all right, David,” she says. “You understand what’s happening, don’t you? I’m only coming closer and closer.”

“To what?”

“To the far away.”

I laugh, tight-lipped. I try to think that it is beautiful to have a woman who knows things she will never tell me. I try. She must know. I have to believe in her. I have to return the belief.

She grew thinner and thinner. I continued to fight my case. The time came. Almost came.

Mostly I remember the shadows of the leaves on the trees covering the walls of the living room in a moving black wash through the glass. Shyla on the couch. This one day she chose the darkening living room. I don’t know why.

She wouldn’t leave the city without me and I had to be with the lawyers at the CCCO. And she wouldn’t change doctors. I must have tried and tried. You would think so.

She had been reading a lot of poetry that day. Lastly she was studying the cold black flaming on the wall. Sun through leaves. Black centers deeper than the light.

“I need the dark,” she says suddenly, settling the squirming shape behind her almost translucent belly. Her voice is like a rustling now, her body dotted all over. I haven’t left this room for three days. The file. “Do you know? It gives all . . . and it takes nothing back!”

Turn from the pane. Start to speak. But see. There is no longer any Word possible between her and the dark now.

Something quietly leaves the room.

The sun nails black to the wall. . . .

I sat in the chair. There. After cutting the grass. The sun outside gone away. I don’t think I even noticed when it happened. They say it will rain tomorrow. I don’t worry about the weather. I haven’t for a long time. The sky has lost control.

This afternoon I burned my draft card. I thought about it a long time. I read it over and over. Then I knew you can never decide from the words. Consider the spaces. She taught me that. I think she did. I squirted it with lighter fluid and touched a match to it and threw it on the air. It flared to something black and fell apart. After that I took my file and scattered it down the hillside.

A little while ago I sat in the chair. Then I got up.

I went down the hill. The place called me. I used to go there a lot evenings when I was a kid and it was warm and I was thirsty after helping with the lawn or something.

I wasn’t thinking anything. Down the hill. The leaves at the corner crackled at my heels. I turned around half-expecting to see myself. Fosselman’s was cool neon at the end of the long block. I thought it looked good.

Went in the store. Too many flavors to pick.

Got in line. There was a girl in front of me with a snowy streak put in her hair. She turned around and looked at me and the second time she smiled. But I just turned away. Her dress enclosed her like a self-addressed envelope. She swept out with a cone and didn’t look back. I noticed her ice cream: it was almost colorless, sort of a brain-gray.

The counter was stainless steel and plastic frosted over on the underside. Leaned my palms on it and looked down.

“Double or single?”

“What?”

Mr. Fosselman gave me a look.

“You wanna buy something, or you come here to sprout roots?”

He didn’t recognize. The hair, the way I don’t care anymore. Maybe he did, maybe he did.

Right then a chill touched my face.

And I knew that I didn’t want anything there. I turned and clipped over the waxed linoleum squares, past the wrought-iron chairs, the peppermint shaft and the cardboard boy licking it so patiently.

It was cold outside, but a cold that numbs, without a chill.

I rolled up my sleeves and then threw away my jacket and started east across town, stripping off my shirt, everything as I went, through all the yellow and red lights, stepping on every crack, all the way.

Tomorrow I will find him in among his sharp gold needles and small bottles; I will take them all back from him and I will kill him and read his bloodstains like a Rorschach test and find an answer.

Then I will come back here. They will never find me when they come looking, if they do. I have left everything behind. Maybe I will live here, in the trees and bushes, the lawn and the shadows of the shrubbery, and the headstones. Maybe I will.

LOFDUNS HADNT eaten for five days, and it would be six more before it had any appetite at all, at least in the strictly physiological sense. But it was hungry. The inner lining of its mouth twitched and contracted impatiently as it paced the small hotel room—ridiculously small for a person used to the spacious chambers of the Ansrals villa—and finally resolved to assuage, its appetites. It went to the door and fastened the lock, and then began to search the room for a suitable object.

A melon would have been perfect now, but melons were all but unobtainable on this pygmy colony. Without fruit, without proper meat, it would have to make do. Its eyes moved slowly around the walls of the narrow room, searching, contemplating, discarding. The low mattress was too large; the night-table, although of about the right size, was an impossible shape, with four long, pointed legs, quite unappetizing. Then it spied one of its own bags standing near the closet, round, smooth, and hard, with just a bit of flexibility.