Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (6 page)

He did; and gave her also, ‘I have to use the words I already have, to speak.’ He gave it because he heard silences around him in a new way now, as though voices moved and pulsed in them that wanted words. To listen to those voices and speak them was easier than remaining silent before the older, ritual drummings. ‘The new ones, like “transition”, take time to …’

She blinked, surprised. ‘… settle?’ she offered back. ‘Settle in place?’ She stood.

‘Settle
wasn’t a word he’d used often and not for many years. ‘… to settle,’ he said. ‘In place.’

‘I think I…’ she smiled – ‘understand.’ Taking up his other arm, she passed the plate down it, and down again, now over, now under, brushing away powder, now brushing her own hair.

Powder lay in a ring on the sand about them.

‘What is it,’ she asked, ‘that you want to say?’

‘… didn’t have a father,’ he repeated, because something brought back the words he’d said before – the momentum that had impelled speech since his arrival at the Institute, if not before.

The doubled voice made a stutter in his mind, in the middle of which, between
know
and
want to know
, desire for knowledge bloomed and fountained and obliterated rage, to which, at the instant each question posed its interrogative tingle, the glove responded with a million tastes that, on no diet at all, he’d never known existed; he shook his head to get away from their overwhelming bitternesses and sournesses and saltinesses and sweetnesses and burnings.

She dropped his other hand, clean as the one in the glove now. ‘What is it?’

‘I think,’ he said, ‘in this world it is very important not to have a father if you want … to know anything.’

She gave him her most confused grimace. Then laughter broke through it (while his own mind began to catalogue reason after reason why his statement had been preposterous, meaningless, inaccurate, interesting, suggestive, insightful, right, wrong …); she said, ‘I think that’s very wise. Only I haven’t the faintest idea how that could have come into your head. I mean now, here. Nobody mentioned fathers to you. What are you talking about?’ But she was pleased. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Please …’ slipping the plate off her hand. ‘Please, I want you to clean me now.’ She looked back and forth between his hands. ‘I guess you put it on the … Well, no. You decide.’

He took the plate and slipped it over his bare hand, recognizing and wondering at the approval that wrote itself from bottom to top of her face. (Moments later he realized her approval was because she most likely thought the gross currents in the plate might have interfered with the workings of the glove had he put it on the other hand; she had taken his choice as sign of the glove’s
success.) He felt a small surge of pleasure at her response, even as the glove informed him by a series of angular pronouncements and diagrams, slapped blindly across his mind, that she was wrong: the glove contained enough stabilizing circuits and bracing units so that it would not have been bothered by the plate’s impedance at all. The pleasure was as unconnected as the still towering rage – yet he enjoyed it even if enjoyment meant as little as the rage did.

He reached for her shoulder with the humming plate, brushed her shoulder with his other hand – but nothing much to brush, which made her laugh. Anyway, she’d brushed every two or three passes.

‘You do that very well.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Almost as well as I do. And that’s nice.’

‘… good,’ he said. In her smile and closed eyes there had been a request (rather than a question) he could not read; and for years he had been someone who’d feared questions and answered requests.

‘You’re
not
the same rat I brought from the polar station!’ Suddenly she opened her eyes with a kind of delight. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘I’m the same,’ he said, and was confused because that wasn’t what she wanted, but what she wanted was not what he knew. He ran the plate’s edge beneath her left breast, then her right: she took a surprisingly large breath and closed her eyes again.

The strap was very tight around his hand.

The upper part bare and the bottom part in pants and sandals, her body was oddly interesting. There was a small scratch on her ribs, and he realized he was unused to seeing scars on women’s bodies. Certainly in the rat cage and in the city he’d seen injured women – but the women in the projected shows at the Muct were never scarred, so that the … stereoptical view (and
that
was
suddenly a concept he understood well enough to make a metaphor out of it – and metaphor was another concept, a stereoptical concept …), which that gave him, blended to blur the real through the idealizations/flaws inherent in any representation.

All sensations, as well as the faintest memories associated with them, were given a word and three written versions of it, in syllabics, alphabetics, and ideographs, each of which dragged behind it connections, associations, resonances … He’d known about the ideograms and the alphabet; but he’d never known his written language included syllabics before.

The new condition was not so much an alternate voice loud enough to drown the voices of childhood as it was a web, a text weaving endlessly about him, erupting into and falling from consciousness, prompting memory and obliterating it, that was simply more
interesting
than the drumming voice asserting or denying ignorance or knowledge.

She said, ‘Remember, you’re cleaning a truly extraordinary bitch. I want you to do exactly what you’d do if a beautiful … female asked you to clean her – before you went to the Institute, I mean. Wait a minute –’ She reached down and unsnapped her pants, letting the flaps fall open, pushing them down her hips a little. ‘And you can, pretend I’m wearing my face,’ which was what, in that language, the wire masks were sometimes called: though he’d never known that before. (But the glove now told him.) ‘Myself, I can’t stand the things. So I don’t usually wear –’

The feeling was in his body; and perhaps he moved his body, in the course of moving the plate over her shoulder, to locate the feeling more clearly; discomfort was the word that joined it, followed by a correction: sexual discomfort.

‘Yeah,’ he said, knowing as he said it that it would also not be what she wanted. So he changed it to, ‘Yes,’ a form of the word he hadn’t used since that day at the Institute.

She frowned at him. (She too must have thought it odd.) ‘Don’t tell me you got to the Institute before anybody ever got to
you …?’
She touched his face. ‘The scars there, from the epithelial herpes – you must have had it rather badly. Frankly, though, you see so much of it these days, once the actual sores are healed, like yours, I find the pits and texture rather attractive.’ She paused again, dropped her hand. ‘How old
were
you when you went to the Institute? I know they don’t take you under fifteen …’

‘Nineteen.’ He lifted her arm as she had lifted his, to clean beneath.

‘Just how many sexual encounters did you
have
before you went to the Institute?’ She still frowned.

The rush of accurate memories, enhanced by verbal tags, produced a strain he hadn’t known since becoming a rat. ‘Fifty …’ The strain made him speak slowly, while the figure was corrected within the muscle of his tongue: ‘A hundred fifty …’ which was obliterated by more fragment memories, averages, extrapolations, approximations. ‘Maybe two hundred fifty. Maybe more.’

‘Well!’ She laughed. ‘You certainly outdo me! I doubt I’m
that
much younger than you, and I think of myself as quite a sophisticated woman – with a mere twenty-seven men behind me. I don’t have to worry about
your
knowing what to do with a bitch!’ But the frown battled through. ‘How many sexual encounters have you had
since
you went to the Institute?’

‘One …’ he said after a different rush of words, of concepts, memories of the little man in the tall mask, the
tall man at the Muct, of approximations no less complicated than the others for all the difference. ‘Two, maybe. You’re – maybe – the third.’

‘Oh. Well, like I said, I want you to do whatever you would have done in any of those situations.’ She closed her eyes. ‘You can do what you want. Anything. Anything at all. How does that sound to you? No, don’t answer.’

He lifted her other arm, trying to understand, in the play of signs, memories, and facts that stuttered about the glove, what answer she might want. The silence that for years had hung about words uttered in his presence filled with ordered comprehension. Yet there was another silence, a cube bare of all inscription, outside the answer she’d made clear she did not need or want, that as clearly was wanted, was needed. Many people purchase slaves for sexual reasons, the man at the Institute had said. Recalling it now, however, was his new knowledge’s result, not its cause.

‘Do what you want,’ she repeated. ‘You’d better do it, too.’ She closed her eyes again. ‘Because, afterwards, I intend to do
just
what I want with you.’ She opened them, frowned.

He said: ‘I’m not …’ The word rocking his tongue in his jaw’s cradle was one he’d heard before but, like so many, had never tried to say. ‘… Not het – heterosexual.’ As though the glove responded to his difficulty, a host of colloquial synonyms flicked up from his hand to beat about his head. ‘A front-face …’ He said that one, while the list continued:
a quick-in-and-out
, which was a term he’d actually used before he’d come to the Institute, but was not one he would ever have thought of using
to
one of them, even a bitch. So instead he said one further down the list: ‘… not a stiff-stuffer –’

‘Yes?’ she said, blinking. ‘Oh, shit … !’ She took the smallest step backward, small enough so that the glove
said it was the swaying of a larger than usual breath coupled with the slightest movement of one heel, but – because he had not changed – he chose to read it as a stepping back. ‘Wouldn’t you know!
My
luck … No, you don’t have to say any more!’ Then she stepped six inches over sand towards him.

He swayed, moved his heel. But did not step back.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Whatever you are, you still
know
what a dog would do!’ And ‘dog’ was a term he’d occasionally heard that some women used about men when the men were not there; but of course no women had ever used it to him. ‘You can do it …? Sure you can! Go on …’ Here, she grabbed her breasts and pressed them upwards, which he found both confusing and distracting – though moments later he remembered one of the projected stories at the Muct where a very bad woman had made something close to the same gesture.

The glove had nothing to say.

So he did what she asked.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard, as long as he stayed relaxed; and staying relaxed in the face of most things had been assured him at the Institute years ago. To do it, he just had to think about the same kinds of things – indulge the same fantasizings, the glove offered him as paraphrase – he would have with a man her height. Still, his erection was something of a surprise to him. Moments before he came, she suddenly pushed him off, rolled him over the edge of the transport flooring (that’s where they were lying), and demanded he be still – though he wasn’t moving – while she unplugged the plate and hit him on the back with the end of the wire. What she wanted to do, it seemed to him, was not much different from what the man at the Muct had wanted done to him. Still, he did not find it pleasant. And it distracted him from all
sexual thoughts, so that for a while he tried to stop thinking altogether.

With the glove, though, that was impossible.

She lay against him after a while, holding him tightly, which was uncomfortable because of the edge of the transport’s floor under his hip. When she got up, she was breathing hard. ‘You can get up too.’

So he did and turned to her. Some of his blood from the little nicks had smeared over her breasts and down her side. She moved uneasily, teeth now again clenched. ‘No…’ she said several times. ‘No, that wasn’t quite …’ And once, suddenly staring at him: ‘More than two
hundred …?
I’ve only had a chance to do
this
maybe three times in my
life!’
She took a breath. ‘So you can’t blame me if I don’t get it right the first time, huh?’ After that she climbed back into the transport. He stood looking out through the force field at the sand, smeared over in long streaks now, messy with the sunset, till she called him inside and put down the wall.

He sat beside her, watching the instruments’ glow, green on her neck, under her chin, on the roofs of her eye sockets. Outside cloudy night rushed them, split by headlights, to slap to at the side windows.

He thought: She’s tired.

He said: ‘I’ll drive for you.’

She glanced at him. ‘You know how to drive this?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is that the glove?’ She touched an auxiliary current knob as if to adjust it, but didn’t. ‘You’re not supposed to have any skills at all, they said at the station. Those were the only rats they’d sell.’

Through wired velvet, dry flesh between, with wide fingertips he felt his knuckles. ‘I can drive this kind,’ he said. ‘I learned before … before I came back.’ Then he
said: ‘They didn’t know, though. They never checked … my records.’