Steven Brust - Agyar

“But you-?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I can wait. I don’t want to kill you, child.”

“Why not?”

“You are of no use to me dead.”

“Oh.” Her lips formed the word, but I heard no sound.

I thought I would say hello to Susan, so I went over and tapped softly on her bedroom door. She called for me to come in. She was lying in bed, hands clasped behind her head. The bedclothes were down by her waist and she wore nothing. She greeted me with words I cannot now recall. Then, I suppose seeing some expression on my face, she said, “What is it, Jonathan?”

“There is a scent in this room,” I said. “A cologne that I do not recognize.”

“Oh, yes, that is Jennifer’s.”

“Jennifer?”

“A friend.”

There was a burgundy-colored button-up blouse draped over a chair. Susan would not wear burgundy. It came to me that the last time I’d been in her room, there had been a pink sweater hanging from one of the knobs of the closet door, and she wouldn’t wear pink, either.

“What is it, Jonathan?”

And, beyond the perfume, there was the unmistakable odor of sex in the room. Recent sex.

I said, “What did you say your friend’s name is?”

“Jennifer.” And yes, it was there in the way she said her friend’s name, too. Perhaps everyone else called her Jenny, but Susan had needed her version, one that she could say sleepily, while holding her in the warm afterglow of love.

I said, “I just wanted to say hello.”

“Well, hello,” she said brightly.

I smiled, keeping my feelings off my face, and closed the door. I went back into Jill’s room. She hadn’t moved. I took her shoulders in my hands; it came to me, as if from somewhere outside of myself, that if I let myself begin I would kill her; so I threw her back onto the bed. I heard something like a sob escape my throat. Jill was staring at me with a hurt-puppy look that made me wish very much to strangle her; instead I stepped around the bed, to the window, flung it open. Mist poured in like smoke, and I felt the clouds gather above. “Don’t go driving anywhere,” I told Jill. “Winter storm warning,” and I passed out through the window, into the fog and the swirling snow of the storm.

I remember little between the beginning of the storm and my arrival in this room, but my brain is full of images of swirling snow, and of lightning dancing back and forth between clouds, and throwing my rage down on the helpless Earth below me.

The storm cleared as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving me numb, as I sit here before this infernal machine. Now I am no longer cold, but I think I am still numb, and able to wonder, in a distant, abstract sort of way, what sensation will come to fill the void once the numbness has worn off.

I’m feeling about the same as before, although perhaps it isn’t quite as intense. After typing up what happened, I sat very still for a while, then went down to Jim. He said hello, and looked at me for just a moment. He asked me what had happened, and I just shook my head. He waited for a few minutes, and when I still didn’t say anything he took himself upstairs. I realized that he was reading what I’d just written, and that made me uncomfortable at first, but there were so many conflicting passions clamoring for my attention that I finally realized I didn’t care, so I just waited, wondering what he’d say.

When he came back down he asked me to explain it to him. I was not entirely certain that I could, and told him so. He said, “But this can’t be the first time something like this has happened.”

“Something like what?” I said.

He frowned, and I got the impression that talking of such things made him uncomfortable, which, just then, was fine by me; I was still in the grip of some nameless combination of emotions in which anger was, if not dominant, at least a part; I badly wanted to strike out at something or someone. In any case, he said, “Discovering that your lover has someone else.”

“ ‘Lover,’” I said. “Now there’s an interesting word for it.”

He continued to stare past my shoulder, at my chest, or occasionally at my forehead. “What word would you prefer?”

“How about ‘victim.’”

“Susan is your victim?”

“No,” I said, the word out before I actually thought about it.

“Well, then?”

“If she’s a lover, than she’s the first lover I’ve had since…”

“Yes?”

“Since Laura.”

“Kellem?”

“That’s right.”

“So this hasn’t happened before.”

“No. Other times, like with Jill, if there’s someone in her life, I either ignore him or deal with him, as the case may be.”

“But this is different.”

“That’s right,” I said. “This is different.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to kill her?”

“Susan?”

“No, this friend of hers.”

“Oh. Jennifer. No, I’m not going to kill her. I wouldn’t do that to Susan.”

“Yo shonuff gots it, don’cha?”

“Cut it out.”

Jim graced me with one of his rare smiles and said nothing else.

After several minutes I said, “So, what would you do?”

“What would I do? Why ask me? I’m not even alive.”

“You’re more alive than most of the people I pass on the street. Besides, what does being alive have to do with anything? You’re human, aren’t you? What would you do?”

He turned around and watched the cold fireplace for a moment, then he said, “I don’t know, Jack.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

He just shrugged. I heard myself growling, and I suddenly wanted to take myself away from there. It was exactly the same as when I’d run away from Jill so I wouldn’t kill her, although I knew I couldn’t really hurt Jim.

I take that back. I think I could hurt Jim, and perhaps I even have. But leave that; there is no way I can hurt Jim physically. I thought I ought to type until the feeling passed, but it hasn’t.

I must get out of the house for a while.

I’m back once more, feeling maybe just a little better, and a little worse at the same time. I left the house and walked about in the immediate neighborhood, until at last all the walls came down, and then I ran. I jumped the fence into Bill’s yard, and there was a growl and a yelp and whine, and then I was gone.

Sometime later I remember walking the streets. I can’t tell you how warm or cold it was, or whether there was a wind, or what people or animals were on the street. I just walked.

I eventually made my way to Little Philly, and found where the girls were enduring the cold. I picked a tall black girl named Stacy who had long legs and a haughty look that set my teeth on edge.

She said, “Hey, honey, wanna date?”

I said, “Sure, honey. I don’t have a car. Where do you live?”

“Not far, sweets.”

“I have the money,” I said. “You have the product.”

She laughed a phony laugh and showed me to a greasy-looking hotel, and when I left she was no longer wearing her haughty look. I left her with a hundred dollars, which was five times what she’d asked, and I left her still healthy enough that she’d probably survive, which I had not originally intended. I didn’t care a great deal if she didn’t; I’m perfectly willing to let the embalmers finish what I start.

I came back home after that, and I sit here filled with that horrible mixture of physical well-being and emotional self-disgust that I’ve had before on such occasions, which is, at any rate, a distraction from thoughts of Susan.

It makes no sense to me that I should feel this way about picking up whores, though; if it is still the remainder of my upbringing (my parents belonged to the Reformation Church and took it very seriously), then all I can say is that one’s upbringing has more power than even the head doctors think, because I don’t know one of them who has ever said that childhood conditioning can stay with you beyond the grave.