Afterwards he props himself up on his arms, with a big boyish smile. “Dr. Verbrugge, I’ve been waiting for that for such a long time, have I ever told you you’re wonderful?” “Dr. Verbrugge?” His smile broadens: “I find the formality sexy and besides, we’re just getting started. Being on a first-name basis is something you earn.”
You make a joke: “You like … experienced women?”
“Maybe. You’re the first one I’ve met. But I’m falling seriously in love with you.”
“Seriously? I’m twelve years older than you.”
He shakes his head as he lays down against you. “We’re the same age, Dr. Verbrugge. It’s not the number of years that counts. It’s the experiences. And we’ve had the same ones.”
You look at him, his profile, the so-familiar lines of his cheekbones, of his jaw, the already spidery laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, you mumble, deliberately. “I’ve had a few others.”
“Yes, it would seem so.”
No, not right away. Not yet. You say, “I’m hungry,” and you get out of bed, naked, you go to the kitchen, you take out some eggs, ham, cheese. He gets up too, naked also — he’s no more prudish than you, as if using your last name was enough to clothe both of you. He doesn’t bother you in the kitchen. He walks slowly around the apartment, without touching anything, making no comments when he sees the equipment you use for your martial arts training beside the expensive Bowflex, which occupies the biggest room. No comments either on how bare your shelves are. He knows it takes time to put down roots when they’ve been brutally torn up: people prefer to travel light, sometimes for a very long time; you saw his place when he invited you in to get warmed up, the evening when you were caught in a little storm leaving the nearby movie theatre.
“It’s pretty,” he says, though, when he comes back into the bedroom. He has seen the bracelet of beads, of course, with the blue glass gem, lying alone on its little shelf.
“It’s from Africa,” you comment as you come into the room with the omelette on a plate, and two forks. You set everything on the bed, sit down, and start eating without waiting for him. He sits down in turn, his knees up, his arms wrapped around his legs. But he says nothing. Patient. Wily. Or sensitive. It varies. He takes a mouthful of omelette, says “hmmmm!” and eats for a while without speaking.
“I understand now why you are so tireless on a skating rink,” he says finally.
He didn’t start with the bracelet. Of course. He reaches out with a finger, traces the line of the muscles of your forearm. “But I didn’t see you as someone who would be into kung fu and stuff, I have to admit. So many hidden talents.”
He’s not making any accusations, but he’s not exactly smiling, he’s leaving the door open a crack. He’s naive after all. You wanted to help him sabotage the experiments, you protested with him against the bosses, and you finally opened your body to him. Whoever or whatever you are, he trusts you. He only wants you to trust him now. For you to really be partners.
“You know what they say about curiosity and cats?”
He pretends to stretch languorously: “I’m not a cat.”
“No, you don’t have nine lives.”
The retort just comes out, you’re as surprised as he is — but for him, it was your tone of voice. He sits up, staring at you, he places one hand on your thigh, again this reflex he has to touch you in these situations, pulls it away immediately when he feels the muscle stiffen, mumbles finally, softly, with an even voice: “Who have you lost, Katrijn?”
Me.
Who? Who inside you just said that? You purse your lips, then force yourself to take another mouthful of omelette, vaguely shrugging your shoulders. He doesn’t press it. He lies down on the bed, his hands under his neck. A long silence. You’re not the one who’s going to break it. What’s he going to come back with now, after that?
“Do you believe in it, the thing Frölich was talking about yesterday? The strong anthropogenic hypothesis?”
You weren’t expecting him to take this tack. But they surprise you sometimes. It still happens.
The strong anthropogenic hypothesis. What makes human life possible on Earth, and by extension in the universe, is regulated so tightly in all areas (such a minimal shift in one direction or another would suffice to make it impossible) that this universe must literally be made for humans — or, variation, a play on words, by humans that are consubstantial with it: one could not exist without the other.
Frölich’s remark was surely not innocent: he may be starting to condition the team to the idea of future trials on human guinea pigs. If teleportation exists, and if the strong anthropogenic theory is valid, the guinea pigs must survive, wherever it is they go. A logical non sequitur rather than a valid inference on Frölich’s part, who can’t really know that he’s right.
“A hypothesis that’s difficult to disprove.”
“But if the guinea pigs go into another dimension, as you suggested, and not into ours, what guarantee is there that they’ll survive there? The physical laws would be perhaps — almost certainly — different.”
You start laughing: “I was joking!”
“But at the stage we’re at, it’s a hypothesis that is no more or no less legitimate than the hypothesis of simple teleportation within our own universe, or even only on Earth.”
Where’s he going with this? He seems to be asking himself the question honestly, as much as he’s asking you. He can’t imagine… No. Absolutely not. They’re intelligent, they still have imagination, but not to that extent. Not here, in any case, not this one.
It won’t make any difference anyway.
“We couldn’t allow ourselves to take that kind of risk,” he murmurs. And concludes: “I won’t allow myself to take that kind of risk,” in a tone of voice that indicates clearly that this is not a conditional statement for him. If it comes to that, he’ll resign.
But it won’t come to that.
“Maybe people would volunteer,” you remark, just to see, to prod him a little.
You carry the empty plate and the forks back to the kitchen. His voice follows you, incredulous, vaguely shocked: “Would you volunteer?”
You come back, stare at him, arms crossed, one knee on the bed, with a little knowing smile. He smiles back at you. If he’s surprised to see you bring the conversation back in this direction yourself, he doesn’t show it: “Ah. That’s right. You like to live dangerously.”
“That’s right.”
“And was it in your dangerous lives that you learned how to carry out sabotage without getting caught? Because I really don’t know how you did it.”
You put the other knee on the bed. You’re straddling his thighs now, both hands on his hips. You lean over and you whisper in an excessively suggestive voice: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
His hands reach for your back, your ass, pulling you closer. “Let’s wait a bit then,” he whispers in the same tone of voice, suppressing his laughter, and he lifts himself towards you to kiss you.
Afterwards, he’s thirsty. He stretches across you to grab the bottle of mineral water on the bedside table, and you take the opportunity to caress his back, his side, his torso and his bum, as smooth as a teenager’s. He’s an adolescent, a child, the youngest of all the Egons you’ve met. What difference does it make? They’ve all been adolescents. But with him, it’s now. Can that change anything?
You watch him drink. He offers you the bottle, but you say no. He drinks the whole thing. He lies down again beside you. You press yourself against him, your head on his shoulder, he has taken one of your hands, placed it flat against his, palm to palm, he has big hands, delicate wrists, you’ve always loved his hands and wrists, he’s always laughed this way comparing your fingers, his always extending a whole phalange beyond yours. “…such a tiny little hand,” he a
lways says in a sleep-leaden voice, “tiny little Katrijn…”
You listen to his breathing slow down, you watch him closely, those long lashes, too thick for a man, the fine pores of his skin, the shrapnel scars on his right jaw — he always has scars along his jaw, on the right side, shrapnel, burns, car accident, motorcycle accident, fall as a child, youthful brawl.
You are in the compartment. There are no buttons. You have programmed everything. You hear his voice. Again. You shouldn’t be hearing his voice. Kathryn, don’t do it, there’s still time, we can help you. You press the button. The gas hisses into the compartment, the voice fades in the distance as the sphere closes.
But you don’t go to sleep. You see. You see through the sphere. Egon’s body. One body, two bodies, ten bodies. Always the same. And all that blood.
I wake with a start, did I fall asleep? I never fall asleep. But it was his smell of orange and musk, his warmth, that lethargic silence, animal, innocent in spite of everything, in spite of him, in spite of myself. I get ready, nothing special to do, nothing to take, I can never take anything, lights out, I don’t need them in the dark that is not dark to me, no shadow moving in the windows alerts the watcher, in his car, on the other side of the street.
He is sleeping. He won’t wake up. I never make any noise, even though it makes no difference. He is lying there on the bed, barely covered by the sheets, still, a negative statue, dark skin against a white background, one way or another he is always lying still there every time I leave, but there’s no blood here, no, no blood. Once I cut myself, I had broken the frame of our photo together, and I cut my hand on a shard of glass as long and sharp as a stiletto, there was glass everywhere, there is always glass everywhere, not this time, no, but no time to think about it, no more time, have to go, now, right away, immediately.
One last look. I always look one last time. The glow from the streetlight illuminates a blue sparkle on the shelf. If I could take something, that would be it. The bracelet. I don’t know why.
I don’t know why I pick it up, one arm is hanging off the bed, limply, hand open, I put the bracelet on his wrist. The blue bead against the dark skin. The contrast. I don’t know why. For the journey.
I go noiselessly out the back, through the alley, running silently, I head towards Beaudry and its taxis, no way I’m taking the metro, waiting, no. The car carries me to the Technocity, which is still lit up beside the river strewn with ice jams, and it’s a very clear night, and if I was on the fifth floor of Cryovital I could see the south shore stretch out towards the tower of the stadium, the familiar sloping tower, but it’s not there this time, it’s not from there that I’m going to leave. At the Cryovital entrance, the guards greet me without surprise, as does the agent at the security checkpoint. They don’t even ask me why I’ve come back — insomnia, an experiment to check on, or the animals, they’re used to it. I go down to the lab, I hook up the camera circuit to the device that will replay the loop of ordinary images taken yesterday, the day before or another day, I lock the door, I launch the program that will automatically set the process in motion, I activate the timer for the bombs set in each of the adjacent labs, I undress, I lie down in the compartment, comfortable, the silk, it just fits me, tiny little Katrijn, with the last bomb on my belly, set to go off just after the magnetic field disappears. No anesthetic gas. A bottle, homemade, I spill it into the compartment as the sphere closes. I am in the compartment. No buttons. No voices. Especially, no voices.
See Kathryn walking in the street. Because you’re walking, aren’t you, Kathryn? Yes, I’m walking, she’s walking, we’re walking. It’s another transition, another universe, another world, but above all it’s the beginning. Completely new. We’re almost curious. Nice weather — no meteorological correspondences from one universe to the next, it will be a long time before there’s any snow this time, too bad. And no Bridge likely for the time being, too early, but we’ll find it, we’re not in a hurry. No need to run.
Not yet.
Newbie Wrangler
by Timothy J. Anderson
At first it seemed the silence had woken me, ominous and heavy outside the tent. A slip of grey light slid under the canvas when a slight breeze stirred, just enough light to bring to life the serious black eyes peering at me from the other side of the brass rail at the foot of the bed. I pretended to sleep.
A grubby hand at the end of a thin grey arm nudged my foot through the glimmering sheet. A waif of the desert, I thought.
“Can I have an orange?”
Cheeky beggar, coming into the tent. At least the kid asked instead of robbing me blind in my sleep. I grunted a little and stretched, and I could hear the kid open my pack. I kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to look on disappointment.
“Thanks,” the urchin said. “I like ’em fresh.”
A pulse of light as the tent flap flashed open, and then the dim grey once more. The sound of a child’s voice piping high in a language I didn’t recognize, answered by several others. I burrowed my head under the pillow, enjoying the peace, the relative cool of the morning, the solitude.
A small hand shook my foot.
“Mister, can I have an orange too?”
“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled. “If you can find one, go right ahead.”
The last oranges had come at least a month ago. They had been a miracle, tumbling out of the supply truck and into the bright desert sun. We’d devoured them. We even ate the rinds, we were so hungry for anything that didn’t come from a pouch. We’d cleared away the rotting body parts and planted the seeds in the sand and we all agreed to set aside a ration of water toward the future orange grove. For two weeks we allowed ourselves to think of a future. Then the hostilities broke out again, and our carefully tended plot of sand was cratered by shells and littered with pieces of our friends and we used our water to clean wounds.
I stretched under the thermal sheet, breathing in the citrus-scented acrid air filtered through the sheets, my tongue feeling like a foreign substance in my mouth, dry enough to click, I thought. This would be a good day to learn the local language.
A whisper of tent flap and tiny hands jiggling both my heels. “Hey! Hey!”
“Take your bloody oranges and let me sleep.”
Treble giggles and the sound of sand scuffed into the legs of the bed by tiny sandals. There must have been a cease-fire, I figured. So many children wandering through the camp in the morning, looking for anything to eat after the destruction of the night before. By now they would be halfway to the rubble of their homes, taking their oranges back to anxious mothers moaning in the rubble.
The images flooded in: imploding buildings, dust, the spray of concrete, of blood, the litter of papers and lives torn apart, the noise and stench and numbness.
Another hand touched my heel and I started, drawing it up and away.
“I told you it was too late,” the voice of the first beggar said. “They’re all gone.”
“Is there anything else?” a second voice asked.
“Nothing we want. Maybe later. Let’s go!”
I stayed on the bed, lying on my stomach, and watched the patch of light where the tent didn’t quite meet the sand. I waited for it to brighten, for the line of shade to move as the sun moved across the sky. I waited to feel another small hand on my foot, to see another pinched face on the other side of the brass footboard. While I waited, the memories of war played themselves out in a series of lucid dreams which I knew I could stop at any time if I got out of bed.
The children didn’t come and the light got no brighter, and my memories filled my brain with a clattering montage that didn’t stop when the tent flap opened and the interior brightened for a moment.
“Time to get up, newbie,” a man’s voice said. “Bring your guitar. We’ve got work to do.”
The sound of canvas flapping back into place.
The kids took the oranges but not the guitar? Hunger will do that to you.
There it was, at least I thought it must be the guitar, a vague shape lying against the side of the tent. I reached out from my prone position, but the guitar was out of reach. Odd that it was out of the case. Not great to have it in this dryness. I shouldn’t have brought it, not to the desert.
I hadn’t. I’d left the guitar at home. The brass bed — I hadn’t slept in the brass bed since I visited my grandparents after the second year of college. The oranges came weeks ago and we devoured them and planted the seeds. My feet had been taken off by a blast three days ago. Well, mostly by a blast and the rest was done by a surgeon.
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