Steel Beach (42 page)

It was peaceful now. The concentric circles of seats were in shadows. The sound system was silent. The blood gutters around the ring had been sluiced clean, ready for the evening’s fresh torrents. Some of that new blood would come from the man now standing alone under the ring of harsh white lights suspended from the obscured ceiling; MacDonald. I walked down the gentle curvature of the aisle toward him.

He was nude, standing with his back to me. I thought I didn’t make any noise, but he was a tough man to sneak up on. He looked over his shoulder, not in any alarm, just curious.

“Hello, Hildy.” No shock of recognition, no comment that I’d been male the last time he’d seen me. Maybe he’d heard, or maybe his eyes just didn’t miss much, and very little could surprise him.

“Do you get nervous before a fight?”

He frowned, and seemed to give the question real thought.

“I don’t think so. I get…  heightened in some way. I find it hard to sit down. Maybe it’s nervousness. So I come up here and re-think my last fight, remember the things I did wrong, try to think of ways not to do them wrong the next time.”

“I didn’t think you did things wrong.” I was looking for stairs to join him in the ring, but there didn’t seem to be any. I hopped lightly over the meter-high edge.

“Everybody makes mistakes. You try to minimize them, in my line of work.”

I saw that he had a partial erection. Had he been masturbating? I couldn’t deal with that just then, had never been less interested in sex in my life. I put my hand on his face. He stood there with his arms folded and looked into my eyes.

“I need help,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, and put his arms around me.

He took me down to his dressing room, locker room, whatever he called it. He bustled around for a while, making drinks for both of us, letting me regain some of my composure. The funny thing, I hadn’t cried. My shoulders had shaken, there in his arms, and I’d made some funny noises, but no tears came. I wasn’t shaking. My heart was not pounding. I didn’t know quite what to make of it, but I’d never been nearer to screaming in my life.

“You interrupted my crazy little ritual,” he said, handing me a strawberry margarita. It didn’t occur to me until later to wonder how he knew I drank them.

“Nice bar you have.”

“They take good care of me, so long as I draw the crowds. Cheers.” He held his own glass out to me, and we sipped.

Excellent.

“I hope you’re not drinking anything too strong.”

“No matter what you may think, I’m not suicidal. Not now.”

“What do you—”

“I always go out there alone,” he said, getting up, standing with his back to me, cutting off the question he didn’t seem ready to answer yet. “The dirty little secret is, the anticipation turns me on. I’ve read up on it. Some people are aroused by danger. It’s more common to be aroused
after
you’ve come through a life-threatening situation. Me, I get it before.”

“I hope I didn’t ruin anything for you.”

“No. It’s not important.”

“If you want to relieve the pressure, you know, make love, we could.” I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Under other circumstances, sure…  in fact, damn sure. He was gorgeous, something I hadn’t realized the other times I’d met him, being male myself at the time. The body was quite good—lean, compact, made for speed and stamina rather than power—but, so what? It was a Formula A fighter’s body. His opponent this evening would be wearing essentially the same body, plus or minus three kilograms, even if she was female. What I’d been noticing about him were two things: the hands, and the face. The hands were long and wide, the knuckles a bit thickened, the palms rough. They moved with a total assurance, they never dithered, never fumbled. They were hands that would know how to handle a woman’s body.

The face…  well, it was the eyes, wasn’t it? It was a handsome enough face, craggy in a way I liked, strong brows and cheeks, the mouth maybe a little prim, but capable of softening, as when he put his arms around me. But the eyes, the eyes. Without my being able to describe any one quality or even set of qualities that should make them so, they were riveting. When he looked at me, he looked at
me
, nothing else, unwavering, seeing more of me than anybody ever should.

Again, he seemed to be considering the offer. He made the small smile that was the most I’d ever seen him give away.

“It’s been a long time since I accepted an offer made with so much enthusiasm as that,” he said.

“Sorry. It was really stupid. Now you’ll tell me you’re homosexual.”

“Why? Because I turned you down?”

“No, because all my guesses lately turn out wrong. Just the way you looked at me, though I should have known you aren’t interested
now
, I just thought I saw…  something.”

“You’re not doing too badly. No, I’m…  do you want to hear this?”

“If you want to tell.”

He gave a shrug that said we both knew the important things hadn’t come up yet, but he was willing to wait.

“Okay. Briefly, for future reference, I’m mostly hetero, say ninety percent, when male. I haven’t been female for a very long time, and probably never will be again.”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“I had a problem. I didn’t like making love to men. My love life was almost exclusively with other women. I didn’t like…  accepting someone else into my body. I was always afraid to. Women have to be able to surrender too much control. It made me nervous.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that.”

“So I’ve been told. It always was for me.”

“That’s the important thing, I guess.” There may have been a more inane conversation since the Invasion, but no record of it survives. I took another drink to cover my discomfort. This whole thing had been a mistake. I saw I’d made him uncomfortable in some way I didn’t understand, and wished I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. I started to get up, and found I could not. My arms and legs simply would not operate to lift me out of my chair. My arms would still lift the drink—I lifted it, drank, one of the more needed drinks since the night they invented the strawberry margarita—but they defied my orders to do anything about getting bodily elevation.

Screwed up? You bet.

I wasn’t about to tolerate such a mutiny, so I got angry, and broke the process down into steps. Put palms flat against chair arms. Set feet flat on floor. Press down on hands and feet. Do not operate this machinery under the influence of narcotic drugs. There you go, Hildy, you’re getting up.

“I’ve been trying to kill myself,” I said, and sat back down.

“You’ve come to the right place. Tell me about it.”

You do something often enough, you get good at it. My opening-up-and-letting-it-all-hang-out skills had never been strong, but telling my story to Fox, to Liz, even the part of it I’d told to Callie had at least put a polish on the narrative. I found myself using some of the same phrases I’d used the times before, things I’d said that had struck me as particularly droll or that somehow managed to put a better face on the situation. I’m a writer, I can’t help it. I found myself almost enjoying the exercise. It was a story I was doing, and as in any story, there’s the parts you think will sell it and the parts that will simply confuse the reader. And when the audience is small, you tailor it to what you think they will like. So, without my intending it, the story because a pitch for a series I’d like to do in the great Extra Edition of Life. Or if you prefer, the recitations to Fox, Liz, and Callie had been out-of-town try-outs, and this was the big-time critic whose review would make you or break you.

But Andrew wasn’t having it. He let me prattle on like that for almost an hour. I think he was getting a feel for the particular type of horseshit I was selling, its distinctive aroma and texture when you stepped in it, the color of it and the sound it made when it landed. When he knew he’d recognize that particular kind of manure if it turned up in his pasture again he held up his hand until my mouth stopped working and he said “Now tell me what really happened.”

So I started over.

I didn’t
lie
the first time through, you understand. But I’m bound to say I didn’t tell the truth, either. All those years at the
Nipple
had sharpened my editorial skills outrageously, and one of the first things you learn as a reporter is that the easiest way to prevaricate is to simply not tell all the truth. I wondered, beginning again, if I remembered how to tell all the truth. If I even knew what all the truth was. (We could spend a pleasant afternoon debating whether or not anyone ever knows even a small portion of the truth, about herself or about anything, but that way madness lies.) All he wanted was my best shot at telling him what I knew, without all the gimcracks and self-serving invention one throws in to make oneself look better. Try it sometime; it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.

It takes a long time, too. Doing it well involves going back to things you may not, at first, have thought relevant to the story, sometimes
way
back. I told him things about my childhood I hadn’t even realized I remembered. The process was also drawn out by the times I just sat there, staring into space. Andrew never prompted me, never hurried me in any way. He never asked a single question. The only times he spoke were in answer to a direct question from me, and if a nod or a shake of the head would do, that’s what I got. A conversational minimalist, Andrew MacDonald.

Two things alerted me to the fact that I was through with my story: I had stopped talking, and a plate of sandwiches had appeared on the table beside me. I fell on the food like a Visigoth sacking Rome. I don’t know when I’d ever been so hungry. As I stuffed my face I noticed three empty margarita glasses; I didn’t remember drinking them, and I didn’t feel drunk.

As the food reached my belly, as brain cells resumed working in isolated clumps throughout my head, I began to notice other things, such as that the floor was shaking. Not bouncing up and down, just a steady, slightly scary vibration that I finally identified as crowd noise. Andrew’s locker room was almost directly beneath the center of the Bucket of Blood. We had come down some ringside stairs to reach it. I looked for a clock, in vain.

“How long have we been talking?” I asked, around a mouthful of cold cuts and bread.

“The main event is still almost half an hour away.”

“That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

It didn’t bear thinking about. I’d arrived in the early afternoon, and there had been nine bouts listed on the fight card before Andrew’s Deathmatch. It had to be ten, eleven o’clock.

“There’s no clocks in here,” I said, hoping he’d take it as an apology.

“I won’t allow them, before a fight. They distract me.”

“Make you nervous?” Maybe it was a needling question. How
dare
he not get nervous before a fight? His unearthly calm was a little hard to take.

“They distract me.”

I was noticing other things. It seems ridiculous to say I’d spent so much time in such a small room and not seen it, but I hadn’t. Not that there was a lot to see. The place was as impersonal as a hotel room, which I guess it was, in a way. What I saw now were four telephone screens on the wall beside him, each displaying a worried-looking face, each with the sound turned off and the words URGENT! PICK UP! flashing beneath the faces. I recognized two of them as people I’d seen around Andrew the last time I’d been here. Trainers, managers, that sort of thing.

“Looks like you’d better take care of some business,” I said. He waved it away. “Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, talking strategy with those people? Getting pep talks, something like that?”

“I’ll be glad to miss the pep talks, frankly,” he said. “It’s the worst part of this ordeal.” I had to admit the four people on the phone looked more nervous than he did.

“I still better get out of your way,” I said, getting up, trying to swallow a mouthful of food. “You’d better do what you need to do to get ready.”

“With me, it was ten years,” he said.

I sat back down.

I could pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it would be a lie. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and he promptly proved me right by saying:

“Ten years of false memories. That was six years ago, and I’ve spent all that time looking for someone to tell about it.”

“That, and trying to get yourself killed,” I said.

“I know it looks that way to you. I don’t see it that way.”

“But you did try to kill yourself.”

“Yes, six years ago. I found there was absolutely nothing I had the least interest in doing. I am well over two hundred years old, and it seemed to me it had been at least a century since I’d done anything new.”

“You were bored.”

“It went a lot deeper than that. Depressed, uninterested…  once I spent three days simply sitting in the bathtub. I saw no reason to get out. I decided to end my life, and it wasn’t an easy decision for me. I was raised to believe that life is a precious gift; that there is always something useful you can do with it. But I could no longer find anything meaningful.”

He was a lot better at telling it than I had been. He’d had longer to practice it, in his own mind, at least. He just hit all the high points, saying several times that he’d fill me in on the details when he got back from the fight. Briefly, he had been marooned on an island that sounded very much like Scarpa, only tougher. He’d had to work very hard. He suffered many setbacks, and never achieved anything like the comforts granted to me. It was only in the last two years of his ten-year stay that things eased up a bit.

“It sounds like the CC put you through the same basic program,” he said. “From what you describe, it’s been improved some; new technology, new subroutines. I accepted it at the time, of course—I didn’t have any choice, since they weren’t my memories—but reviewing it afterwards the realism factor does not seem so high as what you experienced.”

“The CC said he’d gotten better at that.”

“He’s forever improving.”

“It must have been hell.”