by Ellen Datlow
“Cut herself?” The waitress returned to refill their cups. The woman added cream to her coffee, lightening it until its color was so swarthy as her skin.
“She knocked on Alice’s door, saying that she’d nicked her hand badly while slicing bread. She held a washcloth on the wound but couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. Alice took a towel and wrapped it tightly around Leah’s hand. Once the blood stopped Alice saw that it wasn’t a deep cut, though she said it looked very frightening until she got used to seeing it.
“She asked Leah if she wanted to go to the hospital to make sure it didn’t need stitches but she said it didn’t, and that she had gauze in her apartment. Alice went back with her to make sure she’d be all right, for then as always Leah appeared so fragile that she might have broken beneath the gentlest touch.
“Her apartment was clean and neatly furnished, as if she used it only for storage. The bathroom, Alice said, was the coziest room in the place, and when she was telling me this she said she remembered how surprised she’d been to see how much gauze Leah had.”
“So she might have been clumsy with knives,” he said. “It could have happened before.”
“Alice also said the only bread she saw in the kitchen was already sliced,” she said. “My suspicions naturally arose. I liked Leah immediately, but for some time afterward the secret agent side of me emerged, and I found myself often attempting to draw theories from what few data I had, but nothing I could imagine seemed likely enough. She and I hit it off well, and we talked often before and after class, and the three of us started going to movies together, to those depressing middle European ones you’re always teasing me about. She was so pleasant to be around, even when she was sad, and she seemed so often sad.
“Private, too, intensely private at times. She’d built any number of walls around herself, and only allowed one gate to open at a time. But she let us in, part of the way. Leah said she’d been raised a Catholic, but that now she was agnostic, like me. Perhaps she thought it would make me feel more comfortable; she was very sensitive to the beliefs of others. She told us she’d never gotten along with her family, and that was why she’d moved. Once she made an odd remark, or so we found it at the time, that babies should not be born of men and women, that parents’ pain could forever after harm their children. She was safe in that regard, she told us; she could never have her own family to destroy. When we asked her to elaborate, she wouldn’t.
“We were certain she was seeing someone. She often went out at night, Alice said, not returning until morning. At first we were rather worried about her, until we realized she always seemed all right upon her return, and that she had been going out for some time before we became concerned. Alice eventually saw the someone she saw. He was a good deal older, and from his bearing and unfashionable dress Alice inferred that he was a former professor of Leah’s. She inferred as well that their relationship was more than academic, but Alice couldn’t say how much more.
“We imagined that she was content, if not happy, with whatever she had.
“One morning after a discussion on the Inferno I noticed a red stain spreading along Leah’s sweater cuff, and pointed it out to her. She was quite comfortable around me by then; I think in some ways more comfortable than she was around Alice, because I didn’t live so nearby. Without thinking she rolled up her sleeve. Her arm was so thin, and her skin so translucent, that she looked as if she were starving. One of her cuts had reopened, and she bled.”
“One of her cuts?”
“Woven into her arm were dozens of thin scars. Small ones, whiter than her skin.” The woman replaced her cup within her saucer’s basin, and set aside her fork. “She was deliberately cutting herself, you see.”
“Why would she do such a thing?”
The woman offered no theory. “When Leah saw me staring at her arm she quickly pulled down her sleeve, and I felt so embarrassed, as if I’d come into her apartment with friends to surprise her, and found her in the bathroom, naked and sick. She behaved as if nothing were amiss, and left at once, saying she needed to talk to her adviser. I intended to mention it to Alice that evening, but never had the chance, because the three of us went out that night. We were taking her to a party because we thought it was good she should get out and meet new people. The most awful thing happened there. I mean that in both senses of the word.”
“What was that?”
“Did you ever fall in love with someone at first sight, or watch as it happened to others?” The man shook his head. She sipped her coffee; some spilled onto the table as she lifted the cup to her mouth. “The only experience I could compare it to, not an exact comparison, would be a religious conversion.”
“As when one joins a cult, I suppose.”
“Not at all. In this there’s one messiah, true, but only one apostle as well, and both participants slip in and out of both roles as the drama demands. The surrounding world becomes as gauze around them. Food, drink, sleep, all else is suddenly inessential to life. Nothing becomes so important as being with, and in some ways even attempting to become, the other person. The desire that one blood might beat through two hearts can so swiftly overwhelm.”
“I’m as glad I’ve never experienced it, then,” he said, motioning to the waitress that they should receive more strudel. “You make it sound dreadfully obsessive.”
“Have you ever heard the old belief that the soul is visible through the eyes?” she asked. “When two people meet and fall in love at first sight I think they do see one another’s souls, and know even before they speak that their minds have at once become as one between them, that a true juncture exists. It’s an easy enough step in most circumstances to conjoin the bodies, after that. But the last step is most difficult.
“If the souls themselves are enabled to merge, then an apostate such as myself could call it—well—not transubstantiation, I don’t believe, but certainly impanation, where a union is affected without loss of respective substance. The triangle is given its point, in a sense. The trinity is complete.”
“I gather this is something else you weren’t told about in graduate school,” he said.
“Call me romantic, if you’d like. Such love can bring the glow of paradise unto the world. But if something goes wrong, it can as easily turn on all the lights of hell. And something did go wrong.”
“She met someone. A man?"The woman nodded. “What was he like?”
“From what little I saw, and from all I heard, he was very much like her. Sometimes I’ve wondered that if they’d only been more dissimilar they might still be together.” For a moment the woman stared into the surface of her coffee; the waitress returned with their second helping. “Probably not. If they hadn’t been so alike, would they have been so attracted as they were?”
“You’re asking me?”
“No,” she said. “What was he like? His name was Henry. He was a writer, though I never read anything he wrote. The time or two I’d seen him before he’d struck me as being even shyer than she was, and not nearly so adept at putting it to good use. I gathered he generally avoided social events like the plague. He was older in years than we were, but not by many, and in many ways I suspect that even Leah was truly older.
“They saw one another, and we didn’t see them again the rest of the night, and by morning they were inseparable. When I say that even now I feel responsible for their getting together, I know I shouldn’t, that it was nothing more than serendipity, but still—” “You’re too quick to blame,” he said.
“Too slow, sometimes,” she said. “But they were such lonely people after all, and when lonely people meet you can’t help but hope they’ll be happy.” “Were they happy?” he asked.
“Even coming into class Leah gave every impression of walking on clouds. Those friends of ours who knew Henry told us of the most marvelous transformations in his being, that his voice, his facial expressions, even the way he breathed, changed. So much becomes other so quickly in this sort of relationship. Even
the sense of time is subverted, you see. A day may seem to hold a week, or a year. A month might feel no longer than a minute. When two people believe that they’ve known each other forever, after all, that their meeting itself was at some eternal point preordained, then what is time but something of which there’s never enough?”
“Did they stay happy?”
“They wanted to, I’m sure,” she said. “After the first few days they were but rarely seen in public together. Alice probably saw them more often than most, in truth, because he stayed at Leah’s so often as she stayed at his place, or wherever else it was that she still sometimes stayed, for sometimes Alice would hear him leave, late at night, and then hear her leave soon after, and she’d know she was going to see the other man. That bothered Alice, but there were other aspects that troubled her more.”
“Such as?”
“By the end of their first week together he had become so pale as Leah, and even in autumn a tan shouldn’t fade so fast. Then, too, the walls in Alice’s building weren’t especially thick, and sometimes Alice heard more than she wished to hear. She was alone herself at the time, and of course even at the best of times one tries not to think of what your friends might do in bed, even if you truly want to know. Sometimes they were very noisy, and sometimes they weren’t, and it was when they weren’t that most disconcerted Alice.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Alice knew the layout of Leah’s apartment and knew which of Leah’s rooms abutted hers. Some nights as she lay in bed, Alice would imagine that they’d gone to sleep at last, and then realize that they hadn’t, that they were in the bathroom. Each night Henry came over a pattern repeated itself.
From the midst of silence a low murmur would rise as if from a dream; a sound of pain followed, manifesting itself sometimes as a cry, sometimes as a moan. It never seemed to be Leah’s voice that she heard, but then neither of them was loud, and Leah was undoubtedly more subdued because she was more used to it. Then all would be quiet again, until they returned to bed, seemingly with renewed vigor.
“One morning Alice took her trash to the basement. Leah’d already taken hers down, Alice saw, for she recognized a shopping bag she’d seen Leah come in with a day or so before. It was from a medical supply house, and it was filled with what Alice at first took to be red party streamers, disposed of as if after a Valentine’s Day celebration. But this was just before Thanksgiving.
“After Thanksgiving I ran into Leah on Broadway, and I could tell she’d been crying, her eyes were so red they looked as if they’d been bleeding. I said let’s go somewhere and talk, and she said she had to meet Henry in a little while but readily agreed to come with me, and we went to Café 112. I asked her what was upsetting her so. Do you know how sometimes strangers share with you the sort of revelations friends never share? It can happen, too, with people you know, so long as you don’t know them well.
“As she talked to me she spoke in such a way that on one level nothing was said, while on another level all was revealed, or at least much more. She began telling me about the older man she saw, without letting slip any details other than that they’d been together a long time and that they’d met in the same way as she’d met Henry. As a mentor, she said, he’d helped her in innumerable ways, but as she continued to speak I perceived an aspect of their relationship that possibly neither of them saw. If theirs, too, had been love at first sight, and I don’t know that it was, then their convergence hadn’t quite been true; that perhaps with her compliance his mind took over a part of hers, or even replaced it entirely for a time, and thus it wasn’t always Leah who spoke when her lips moved. If we stick with the metaphor I was using earlier, then I’d say that what occurred between them was more of an inadvertently forced consubstantiation.
“Too soon for him, too soon for Leah, he discovered she’d fallen in love with Henry, and he didn’t take it well at all. She tried to explain to me as she’d tried to explain to him the realities she understood. He found her relationship with Henry disturbing enough in ways other than how it interfered with their own that he was having none of it. So one night she told him she’d been able to become closer to Henry in a way he was unable, or unwilling, to be.
“As she recalled how that upset him it upset her anew, and she pulled at her hair until she dislodged her barrette. It fell to the floor. I leaned down to pick it up for her, and when I did I saw that her socks had drooped over her ankles. Her legs were thin as her arms, and as laced with tiny white scars. They looked as if for years her nerves had been trying to break free of her skin, that they could no longer be rubbed raw.”
The woman drank the rest of her coffee before continuing her tale. He watched her drink, forgetting to eat.
“Both made her better, she told me, and both made her worse, and she thought she knew who helped the most, or rather who hurt the least. But she had no idea how to tell the other of her decision, and so for the moment decided not to decide. The angles of the triangle seemed too perfect to disturb, but she said she knew they had to be. There was, you see, one more complication.”
“What?”
“My period, she said. You’ve stopped having it? I asked, thinking at first I grasped the complications without her telling, unable to imagine that she could have ever been regular, thin as she was. I started, she said.
“What could I do? I took her hands—you can’t imagine how cold they were—and held them, and sat with her awhile longer. I waited for her to say more, but surely she knew when she’d said enough. She looked at the clock on the wall and told me she needed to go meet Henry, who lived around the corner. As I walked along with her I felt as if I were accompanying a ghost as she commuted between the houses she haunted.
“Henry stood on the stoop of his building, awaiting her; she smiled so when she saw him, and, taking leave of me, ran to him. They were happy, and that was the most frightening thing of all. When he slipped his arms around her I saw the cuffs his bandages made.
“A day or so after that I went to Mexico with my parents for Christmas. When I returned I called Alice, to see what had happened in my absence. Much, she told me.
“Henry came over one night during the week before New Year’s. Leah had stayed out Christmas Eve, but Alice had a hunch she hadn’t been with Henry. They didn’t say much that she could hear through the wall, and she had somewhere to go herself, and so she left them to their devices. No one can say what happened after that. Maybe Leah related the decision she’d made to him that night, or maybe she already had; maybe she’d already told the one she needed to tell before coming over, and so took this night to celebrate. But something went wrong—immediately or ultimately, who knows—and he was cut too deeply, and didn’t get help in time.
“When Alice came home the police were still there. They found Henry in the bathtub, she heard, though not from Leah. Leah sat in the hall, wrapping her arms around herself as if they were bandages, pressing her face against her knees until her legs were bloody. An older man stood in the hall, talking to the officials, and if you didn’t know better you might have thought he knew every answer. Eventually he helped her to her feet, and walked with her, down the hall.
“Suicide, they called it, but Henry was no more suicidal than Leah.”
The man lay down his fork, feeling hungry no longer. The waitress smiled as she walked by.
“‘No greater grief than to remember days of joy, when misery is at hand,’” she said.
“What’s that from?” he asked.
“Canto Five of the Inferno,” she said. “Poetry can so often help you get to sleep at night.”
“What happened afterward?”
“Leah didn’t come back to school the next semester,” she said. “Possibly so that she wouldn’t hear what anyone had to say, but I suspect she’d heard it all before. The next time I saw her was in the spring, here in the pastry shop. She sat by herself in the corner over there, seeming more translucent than before, almost as if, with her compliance or
not, she was gradually fading away. I don’t think she saw me at all, though I stood before her, and I never saw her again after that.
“Then a couple of weeks ago, she died. Alice found out that she was buried next to Henry, and we wondered about that for a time. It’d be nice to imagine that life can at least be fair to the dead.”
“What did she die of?” he asked. “She didn’t—”
The woman shook her head. “A virus, we heard. You know how malicious gossip can be. If her older friend retained possession over part of her mind, then I’m certain Henry carried much of her soul away with him. And what was left must have finally given out. Still, she surely did as she thought she had to do. Sometimes I think it’s better to be alone, after all. It’s safer.”
“Check, please,” he said; the waitress walked over, moving through the crowd. “But cutting herself like that. How could she have convinced them to go along—”
“I can’t speak of the ways of courtship,” she said, “but after accepting the trinity, you take communion.”
Love slinks pink-footed and sleek,
Scurries through the soul’s walls,
Eludes the traps set out to kill it,
At night bites the extremities till they bleed.
Jack Womack
REQUIEM
Melinda M. Snodgrass
What does it mean to be human? This question is one that has haunted SF and horror from H. G. Wells’s half men in The Island of Dr. Moreau, through John W. Campbell’s alien shapeshifter in “Who Goes There?” The question of what is human is also central to much of Philip K. Dick’s work, particularly his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The tortured characters in “Requiem” love and appreciate art, and perform music. But they are unable to create. In the context of this story, this alone is what keeps them from being fully human.
Down in the hall someone was enacting the final act of a French farce. Probably Martin Fletcher, Barnaby idly thought, using shunt level to avoid any bleed. Their taste had always run to the absurd. Main level was feeding properly, pain exploding from the tender flesh of his buttocks as the thin switch continued its steady rhythm. Beneath him Lucinda ground with her hips, timing each thrust to the beat of the tiny bamboo whip. He was nearing climax, and Mary increased the tempo of the whipping. He cursed his newly acquired belly. He felt like a barrel trying to balance on a particularly slippery log. Lucinda caught her legs about his back forcing him down atop her, and he groaned as the heavy meal he had eaten earlier in the evening shifted like a sliding load of ball bearings.
