Strange Flesh (43 page)

A
t ten
AM
, Olya’s not in her office or the Orifice. When I call her, I’m surprised to hear that she’s working out.

The room on the top floor where I find her is beautiful in the way of ruins. A former dance studio with crumbling brick walls and worn oak flooring. The far side is a huge mirror that has a barre running down its length. The glass is violently cracked, perhaps from the meltdown of a high-strung ballerina. Olya has installed herself in the cool morning rays coming through a mansard window. She’s wearing a pale pink halter-style ballet dress and is
en pointe
doing leg lifts. She sees me enter but doesn’t stop.

“Zhimbo. What did you want to see me about?”

I watch her for a while, getting lost in her rhythmic movements. Finally I ask, “Our Erotobot operation here was your idea?”

“Idea? They are my children.”

“Yeah, but who conceived them?”

One thing I love about Olya is that she catches on quick. You don’t have to waste a lot of time with the initial
stupid
lies. She squints at me and snaps out another couple leg lifts. “You know, I wish you’d spend as much time thinking about our glorious future as you do wallowing like a pig in the past.”

“Olya, did you steal Fred and Ginger from your dead girlfriend?”

That irritates her. She turns and says, “What is this you’re asking? Did
I work with Gina on this? Yes, of course, but it was
our
project, and she’s not here anymore. So what do you want me to tell you?”

“Just tell me all of it.”

I’m expecting an angry defense, but what comes out is more like an elegy. It’s revealing to hear Olya speak without aggression, outside of the imperative case. Her voice is slower and softer; she closes her eyes as if she’s really trying to call up the past.

Olya says, “Gina, she is very pretty and nice, and at NYU everyone
likes
her, but she doesn’t have any friends. Other than this shit-head Billy, who uses her for his stupid videos. He takes over her apartment for days to make that thing. He forces her to act like this high-tech whore on camera. And then she keeps that horrible torture device afterward to give her dark thoughts. All this because she doesn’t know how to say no. I used to see her every day during lunch sitting by herself at this tiny café. I don’t know why I care, but it starts to drive me crazy. A woman with these gifts, you know? I decide that we will be friends. I want to help her. So I start sitting with her at boring coffee place.”

Olya relates to me how Gina eventually began asking her abstract questions regarding her specialty in exotic materials. Ever direct, Olya soon ferreted out that she was dancing around the idea of simulating flesh, and it became obvious what this inhibited prodigy had in mind. Gina was an
engineer
. She was looking for a material solution to problems residing in her mind. But being a pathologically shy girl overwhelmed with religious guilt, she couldn’t take the first step.

Olya sure as hell could, however. When they graduated, she convinced Gina to accept a GAME residency. Their cover project was to create tactile games for blind children, but really they started working in earnest on what would become the Dancers. Gina already had the basic idea and much of the design mapped out. So over the summer, they started prototyping.

She describes how after weeks of searching fruitlessly for a trustworthy source of start-up capital, Gina rolled in and laid a cashier’s check for forty thousand dollars on her desk. She said it was from an “anonymous patron,” but of course Olya forced Billy’s identity from her. She yelled at her that this asshole could not be a partner in their enterprise. But Gina
replied, “No, it’s a grant. He doesn’t even know what the project is.” Then she blushed and said that when the Dancers were done, she was going to surprise him with them.

Olya says, “Ginushka goes red as beet. With this silly man she is again acting like a prostitute. But this time for real. I do not like Billy, but this is a lot of money, so I think,
We must be practical
.”

But while Olya couldn’t abide the thought of Billy as a long-term partner, she also couldn’t help but wonder about the source of his seemingly unlimited wealth. In researching its origins, she figured out who his siblings were and learned from Gina of the estrangement between them. And rumor had it that Blake was an easy touch when it came to new media.

“I think,
Why not?
I have a unique product, maybe he will understand. So I go to his office. You maybe understand that I can get meetings with most men easily. Blake has this very bitchy secretary, so I sit in his waiting room for a long time. Then I see him walk by. She tries to stop me, but for a bitch, she is only a Chi-hua-hua. So I take his arm and say, ‘Maybe I know a very good way to torture your little brother.’ Blake is interested, so we come to an arrangement.”

They worried that Billy knew too much about the project, but they eventually concluded that he probably wouldn’t want to mess up their plans out of loyalty to Gina. So he’d be furious he’d been displaced, but impotent—a prospect Blake had found especially appealing. In the end, they decided it didn’t matter what Billy did. Blake said, “I can handle my brother.”

Everything seemed perfect to Olya.

“So I set up surprise meeting with Gina to tell her this very great news that we finally have a good investor. I think she will be happy, maybe to get rich. She is from poverty, you know. Blake when we meet is smooth, but Gina . . . she is crazy. She says nothing and runs away. I apologize to Blake. He told me before they have this history. Maybe they fuck ten years ago. I tell him I’ll talk to her and make everything okay. It’s no problem.

“I go back to her place. You know what she is doing? She’s in the bath, drunk like a moose. And she is sawing her wrists with a knife. The water is bloody, but they are . . . not deep cuts. She babbles all this religious shit. Verses from the Bible, I think. This is all from her parents,
you know. I can understand nothing, so I haul her out and bandage her wrists. I put her in bed . . .”

Olya falters here in her story.

“What?” I ask. But Xan has already told me what’s coming.

“And then I make love to her.”

She closes her eyes, playing back the evening in her head. Her lips seem to want to tug upward. Then she shrugs. “Ai. It sounds very bad maybe, but I think it works. Gina is not like normal person. She doesn’t care about food, clothing, money, where she lives. All she needs is hard problems for her head, and a little love for her heart. But you know, she’s so strange, she doesn’t get much of that. And she is a wonderful girl. I do love her in certain way.”

Olya tells me that in their new relationship, Gina blossomed like a hothouse orchid. She became vivacious, and her newfound energy fed into her work. Gina went from sulking in coffee shops playing
Spore II
to spending all her time in the lab playing Pygmalion.

And Olya knew that her need for Gina was just as strong, because she’d caught the holy fire for teledildonics. “Zhimbo, I think maybe you feel this way, but it’s like I was born to do this. When I work, I feel the angels next to me. Maybe they are really devils, but I don’t care. So we can’t have deal with Blake. Fine. We scrape by until we find someone else.”

But while they were building their electrosexual ambitions, Gina’s real project morphed into a towering passion for Olya. One that demanded a grand gesture.

“She wants us to move in together. Make all these commitments.” She shakes her head at the absurdity. “I find out, the girl, she goes and buys me a ring. She’s thinking when our children are ready to be born, we should get married. In Massachusetts.” Olya pronounces the state’s name as though it’s a rarely observed asteroid.

And Olya wasn’t the only target for Gina’s declarations. Intoxicated with this mad love and resolved to permanent rebellion, she decided to tell her parents. She thought one decisive stroke could free her from a lifetime of resentment against her awful family. Then she could begin building real happiness with her soul mate.

“I don’t know what happens when she goes to Boston. I am sure all this seems very unnatural to her parents. But when she comes back, she’s
like a zombie. She won’t work. Doesn’t do a thing for a month. She’s fucked-up all the time. I try to help her, but she keeps talking all this Bible shit about butt-fucking.”

“Sodom?”

“This is butt-fucking, yes?”

“Among other things. So what happened?”

“After weeks of this, I invite her to dinner at this stupid Chuck E. Cheese place she likes. Obsolete video games and rat robots; this is just how she is. I want to try to cheer her up, you know. But she doesn’t come. Won’t answer her mobile. So I go to her place to look for her.”

“And?”

Olya glances down sadly. “And I find her in the bath again. Bleeding.”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out.

“The cut is again nothing. Used dull scissors. She’s not really trying. It’s just her craziness. Better if it were like the last time. I make love to her, and everything’s all right. But this time she attacked our project. I can’t believe it. She cut all the Dancers’ wires and then set the laptops on fire.”

“What did you do?”

“I took hammer and put a hole in the tub.”

I must look dismayed. But Olya doesn’t get defensive. Just gives a weak, melancholy shrug.

“Sometimes people need a shock. She’s crying like a beaten dog. I don’t know half of what she’s saying. It’s like ‘Can you forgive me? Can you forgive me anything?’ But I don’t want to forgive her for damaging our children. I want her to stop being this crazy bitch. She keeps saying, ‘I won’t do this anymore. I can’t bear it.’ I’m tired of her acting so conflicted all the time. So . . .”

At this point in her narrative, Olya pauses for a long time, playing the scene back in her head. Finally she says, “Well, I guess you know I have a very great temper . . . Also, I have not had the easiest life, and . . . I have learned how to hurt people.”

She finishes this with a catch in her voice. Her eyes are brimming. I’m astounded that the ice queen is about to melt with only me here to witness. Olya takes a long blink.

I didn’t think it was possible to recall tears back into their ducts, but when Olya opens them, her eyes are dry.

“The next night she was dead.”

I move to comfort her, but she spurns this and turns back to the barre.

“You can blame me.” She shrugs. “Other people do. I knew she was depressed, I put all this pressure on her, I say terrible things to her, and now she’s dead. And so it’s my fault.”

“Olya—”

She puts her hand up. “But I ask, what about her family? I only knew her a year. They had her whole sad fucking life.” She flicks her fingers with distaste. “So they tell her she needs Jesus. I say she needs Prozac. But Gina? She decides what she needs is nothing.”

“Maybe a little unconditional love would have gone a long way that night.”

“Yeah? Or maybe a little less vodka. Or a little less bullshit religion. But too late for that now, is it not?” She slowly rotates back to look at me in the mirror.

I come very close to saying it, but some instinct for self-preservation stops me.

Convenient that she died, isn’t it?

But this echo of Billy’s question to her sits uneasily. If it’s convenient for Olya, it’s doubly so for me. If Gina hadn’t died, IT might have been in production by now, and I’d just be jerking it at Fleshbot as I wait to find out when I can order one.

I take a different tack. “Thanks for the confession. You have any other revelations about our intellectual property?”

Olya, her face divided crazily by the cracked glass, fixes me with an unreadable expression. “Well, Zhimbo, you think we’re being unfair to poor Gina’s estate? You should meet her father. Maybe we put him on the board?”

M
y talk with Olya shed some light on Gina’s final days. After her death, Olya assembled the iTeam, and of course went back to Blake for money. His initial rejection as a suitor had further piqued his lust. Olya thought she had things under control. “But,” she said, “now this
svoloch
Billy is making shit for everybody.”