Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

Sophisticated as I was (I am employed as an assistant editor for a flourishing and well-paying men’s magazine) I stopped and turned. Coolly I appraised my accoster.

“I’m Lucia,” she said, eyes level with mine. “James W—, I adore you.”

“Quite right,” I said, my wit somewhat dulled by my late lunch of a reuben sandwich at Renaldos. The sauerkraut had been undistinguished.

“May I?”

“Uh,” I said.

She flung her arms around me and kissed my lips passionately. Something angular in her left hand painfully dug into the base of my neck. The paisley overnight case in her right hand caught me in the small of the back. The girl was stunning.

She stepped back, smile broad, and said, “You will come with me. For a drink.”

“I’m due at the office at two,” I said.

“Come,” she repeated.

It continues, I believe, at Lucia’s apartment. Just as I’m quite unsure about the precise location of this darkened room in which I hang, swaying slightly in a draft of unknown origin, so I am similarly disoriented about my eventual destination that day on North Michigan. I vaguely remember three bus transfers and many flights of stairs. Then my memory blurs completely.

At last, music. The boredom of watching those lights is unbelievable. And giant photo-posters remain mute, even under the most urgent pleas for conversation. But now the music starts, chords swelling in gentle progression from a hidden speaker. It is jazz, quite progressive. I don’t recognize the group, though I’m sure I should. I have listened to nearly all the candidates in our recent jazz poll. The guitar is superb, the guitarist a master. And the piano! I’m certain the fingers belong to Hundley.

My lucid recollections placed me across a gray formica-surfaced kitchen table from Lucia. Each of us held a tall glass, dark-amber liquid inside, dappled condensation outside. Between us wasa four-inch cube of clear Lucite. Inside, the disassembled movement floated in a litter about the handless face.

“It’s the only way I like to see clocks,” she said.

I made a non sequitur remark about Dali.

“I’m in love with entropy,” said Lucia.

I didn’t understand and didn’t want to display my ignorance; she didn’t offer to explain.

“Utter stasis . . .” she mused. “Now there’s a goal.”

I nodded and took another sip from my glass. The liquor was unfamiliar; the taste reminded me of cinnamon and licorice.

“Well, come on,” she said, draining her glass.

And led me to her bedroom.

Somewhere I missed a transition. I was lying there on her bed, naked, waiting for some rush of hedonistic experience. The quilt was cold against my buttocks. I must have been somewhat drunk; I could hear my watch where it lay on the dresser and its beat was irregular.

Lucia knelt beside the bed and began to massage me. “Nice,” I said. “I’m sure I love you.”

“Of course,” she said. Lucia set a silver bucket on the bed by my hip. She dipped into it with her hand and began to pack something white and gooey around my— “Hey!” I said.

“Don’t worry,” said Lucia, packing. “It’s only plaster.”

Something didn’t seem logical. “Oh,” I said.

“Plaster of Paris. I’m taking a cast.”

“Um,” I said. “I, uh, I thought you people only did that with rock stars.”

“Oh, I did. I got all the big ones. Hendrix and Morrison and all the rest. I’m extending my collection.”

At the time it seemed plausible.

And continues. I occasionally wonder whether my prolonged absence has been noted or remarked upon by the guys at the office. Probably not. Tenure at the magazine is tenuous even at the top. And probably the theory has been offered that the upstairs killer got me at lunch on that particular day.

I’ve discovered that I can alleviate the numbness by twisting my body slightly. The muscles in my sides can do it. The slight torque flexes new muscles in turn. But the pain is so intense that I seldom bother to alleviate the numbness.

Instead I dip into my cornucopian past:

I recall awakening and half-opening my eyes and feeling the déjà vu of that Easter demonstration when I first saw the Washington Monument in the dawn. Then my perspectives rushed inward and I knew I was not looking at the Washington Monument.

My movements were very slow, but I crept my hands like spiders up across my flanks and wonderingly touched the hard plaster. I touched. I tapped. I grasped. I wrenched. And stopped, pained. The plaster had a myriad firm anchors.

“I regret the inconvenience,” said a voice behind me. “I forgot to apply the Vaseline first. Terribly stupid of me.”

I tried to turn my head to look at Lucia, but the exertion was too much. She moved into the line of my vision. She had an ice pick in her hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you. This is for obvious sanitary reasons.” She leaned over the apex of the monument and began to chip a hole.

I fainted.

There is a distorted montage of wakenings. Once my eyes opened and I saw Lucia kneeling at my waist, her lips in a horizontal plane with the peak of the plaster. She was blowing gently across the opening and I could hear the deep bird-whistle of a cockatoo.

It will end, I suspect, soon. Here. The feedings of water and drugs and cookies have been more infrequent of late. I hear the invisible tone arm scrutch across the jazz album and there is transitory silence. Something new begins; an acid raga. I would like to dance and my feet make a few sympathetic twitches.

Ah love, there were so many fruitless dialogues:

“Who are you?”

“Who are you.”

“Why am I here?”

“Why am I here.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What are you going to do.”

“Are you a kidnapper for ransom? A twisto? A radical? In league with a Conspiracy? From women’s lib?”

“Who are you.”

The music is louder and faster.

Eyes of Gable, Garbo, Fonda (Jane), Hopper, some Kennedys, Baez stare at me passionlessly. The patterns of light are extinguished and a door opens in the poster wall. My eyes sting with the brightness and I must squint to see.

I am looking through a bomb-bay door at the mountain lake below. The dark island in the center is surrounded by scaled ripples. Perspectives slide back to the apartment in Chicago.

Staring in at me through the diminished doorway is one blue eye.

DARTING into a lighted spot in a dim pool—

Being born—well, Lais remembered it, a gentle transition from warm liquid to warm air, an abrupt rise in the pitch of sounds, the careful touch of hands, shock of the first breath. She had never told anyone that her easy passage had lacked some quality, perhaps a rite that would have made her truly human. Somewhere was a woman who had been spared the pain of Lais’ birth, everywhere were people who had caused pain, and, causing, experienced it, paying a debt that Lais did not owe. Sleeping curled in fetal position in the dark gave her no comfort: the womb she was formed in had seemed a prison from the time she was aware of it. Yet the Institute refused to grow its fetuses in the light. The Institute administrators were normal and had been born normally. If they had ever been prenatally aware, the memory had been obliterated or forgotten. They could not understand the frustration of the Institute Fellows, or perhaps the thought of fishlike little creatures peering out, watching, learning, was too much even for them to bear.

Lais’ quiet impatience with an increasingly cramped world was only relieved by her birth, and by light, which freed a sense she had felt was missing but could not quite imagine. Having reasoned that something like birth must occur, she was much calmer under restraint than she had been only a little earlier. When she first realized she was trapped, when she first grew large enough to touch both horizons of her sphere, she had been a wild and intelligent carnivore, suspicious and easily angered. She had thrashed, seeking escape; nothing noticed her brief frenzy. The walls were spongy-surfaced, hard beneath; they yielded slightly, yet held her. They implied something beyond the darkness, and allowed her to imagine it. All her senses were inside the prison, so she imagined being turned inside out to be freed from her tether. She expected pain.