Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Ah, she should be thinking about Dolly. Dolly must leave Geraldo; and do what for money? To try to get money out of Luis was squeezing orange juice from a paper clip … . Dolly and she would live together. This place was small here for all of them, but it would get Dolly away from Geraldo and then they could look for another apartment together. Money. How to get money? She would wake again in a house with children. She would help Dolly through the pregnancy and cook and clean and rub her back. But would Dolly trust her? Leaving a child‑abuser with your little ones–for shame! That’s how Luis would make her feel. Carmel would flop back and forth, a little jealous, a little relieved. Carmel worked in a beauty parlor and always her hair was some new neon color and crimped into curls resembling the colored excelsior that used to come in Easter baskets, but she stood on her feet in a blast of hot air for ten hours a day, evenings too, just getting by. Little enough she got from Luis, because she had truly loved him but had not been able to get him to marry her legally. She had been his common‑law wife, a consensual marriage the whole family had viewed as a perfectly good marriage until the lawyers of Shirley’s family had proved that it never existed.

Her father, Jesъs, had brought them Easter baskets one year when Connie was ten, little baskets from the dime store full of shredded cellophane and jelly beans and a chocolate bunny wrapped in foil. Tonight she could use something sweet, a chocolate bunny, even a purple jelly bean. She lit her after‑supper cigarette and flicked the channels all around. Nothing. Coughing from deep in her chest, she flipped the pages of the rumpled paper, looking for something to touch her mind.

She felt so lonely, so aware of being alone this Friday night with spring percolating through the tenements that when she had smoked the cigarette down to the filter she laid her face on her crooked elbow and shut her eyes. Smell of newsprint. He had asked her to think of him. Who knew what he wanted? To kill her and then it would be over and done. She shut her eyes and tried to think of nothing as debris of the day flickered past. Dolly’s face frowning with worry. Then she saw that Indio face. She did not care. Passive. Receptive. Here she was, abandoning herself to the stronger will of one more male. Letting herself be used, this time not even for something simple like sex or food or comfort but for something murky. It could only be bad. Yet she found herself concentrating on that face, waiting.

Maybe a life could become threadbare enough so that even disaster beckoned, just so it wore a different face than the usual grimace of trouble. “So come, Luciente. See, this time you can come without me being asleep or stoned.” She was going crazy a new way. After all, she no longer had a baby daughter to punish for being hers.

Still, she jerked as a tentative hand tapped her shoulder. “Thank you, Connie. Much easier this way.”

“Easier for what? To rob me? To kill me?” She sat up, shaking back her hair.

Luciente took the chair where Mrs. Polcari always sat. “Please, you embarrass me. I don’t understand what I do that scares you. Tell me how to make you less … anxious.”

“How? That’s easy. What do you want? How do you get in here?”

“Obviously this laying a tablecloth over the compost is doing no good. Try to believe me–I say this, knowing you won’t.” Luciente laughed like a kid, showing strong ivory teeth. “I’m not from your time.”

“Sure, you’re from Mars and you came in a big green saucer. I read about it in the Enquirer.”

“No, no! I’m from a village in Massachusetts–Mattapoisett. Only I live there in 2137.”

Connie snorted. She tossed her hair back. “And you came flying to me in your time machine.”

“I knew it was going to be like this!” Luciente shrugged, throwing up his hands. Tonight he was wearing a ring of blue stone he played with, turning it round and round as he spoke. “Actually … I’m not here.”

“You’re telling me?”

“We arein contact. You are not hallucinating. Whether anyone else can see me, I’m not sure. Frankly, this … contact is experimental. It’s even, grasp, potentially dangerous–to us, I mean. Please don’t get frightened again. You’re happier being sarcastic.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re from the future, and naturally you picked me to visit rather than the President of the United States because I’m such an important and wonderful person.”

“Fasure we wouldn’t pick that person because of political reasons, as I understand the history of your time. Anyone in the hierarchy that made decisions? The Establishment, you called it? I know that, although I’m not a student of your history. Actually I’m a plant geneticist.”

“Staining cells!” Connie pointed at his hands. In her freshman year she had had a biology course.

“I’m working on a strain of zucchini resistant to a mutant form of borer that can penetrate the fairly heavy stalks bred fifteen years ago.”

“You’re a college graduate?” Maybe he wouldn’t beat or rob her. Just genteel slavery, like Professor Silvester.

“What’s that?”

They stared at each other in mutual confusion. “Where you go to study. To get a degree,” Connie snapped.

“A degree of heat? No … as a hierarchial society, you have degrees of rank? Like lords and counts?” Luciente looked miserable. “Study I understand. Myself, I studied with Rose of Ithaca!” He paused for her appreciation, then shrugged, a little crestfallen. “Of course the name means nothing to you.”

“Okay, where do you go to study? A college. What do they give you if you happen to finish? A degree.” Connie lit a cigarette.

Luciente leaped up and backed away. “I know what that is! I beg you, put it out. It’s poisonous, don’t you know that?”

Dumbfounded, she stared at him. He seemed terrified, as if she held a bomb, and indeed his hand was fumbling behind him at the locks on the door. Bemused, she stubbed the cigarette out, and after the smoke had cleared, cautiously he approached the table fanning wildly. “We study with any person who can teach us. We start out learning in our own village, of course. But after naming, we go wherever we must to learn, although only up to the number a teacher can handle. I waited two years for Rose to take me. Where you go depends on what you want to study. For instance, if I were drawn to ocean farming I’d have gone to Gardiners Island or Woods Hole. Although I live near the sea, I’m a land‑plant person.” Luciente clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Blathering about myself! I distract. There must be someplace to begin, if I could blunder on it. Well, at least you’re no longer scared of me.”

“So you want some cola? Or some coffee maybe? I have no wine. I have no beer. Unless soda scares you too?”

“Nothing, thank you. I ate before I came.” Then he grinned sheepishly, touching her hand. “Besides, I confess I am afraid to eat here. It’s not true, is it, the horror stories in our histories? That your food was full of poisonous chemicals, nitrites, hormone residues, DDT, hydrocarbons, sodium benzoate–that you ate food saturated with preservatives?”

“Some people–like me when I have any money–are good cooks! I could cook you a meal that would make you beg for seconds.”

“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Connie. I’m sure many of the tales we hear are gross exaggerations. Such as the idea that you–you plural–put your shit into the drinking water.”

“I never heard such nonsense!” Connie flounced up and turned on the faucet of the sink. “That’s drinking water.” Then she hauled him up by the arm and marched him into the hall. He hung back skittishly until she said, “There’s no one.” Then he scuttled behind her nervously as she opened the door and showed him the toilet. She wished it were cleaner. She felt a little embarrassed. The other people who used it never cleaned it, and she cursed as she cleaned for all of them once a week. She flushed the toilet, pulling the chain for demonstration. “See? It goes down and is flushed away.” Following him back to her apartment and routinely locking the door with the bolt, the Yale lock, the police lock with its metal rod that fit into the floor, she sucked her lip with satisfaction. For the first time she had scored a point. Then she realized her reaction made sense only if she was such a naпve idiot as to believe his fairy tale.

“So that’s a water closet!” Luciente rubbed his scalp, setting his long thick black hair flying. “I can’t believe it! So it’s all true.”

“What’s true? The water comes out of the faucet in the sink. Then you use the toilet and the waste goes away.”

“The garbage? Where does the food waste go?”

“I put it downstairs in cans. Believe me, some people around here just throw it out the window. But why foul your own nest? I could see carrying it downtown and putting it by City Hall, to teach them to improve the garbage pickup. In white neighborhoods, you better believe it, they don’t drown in their garbage. In the summer, how it stinks! There in the white apartments, they have a super who picks up the garbage in the hall. Or else they have a dumbwaiter–that’s a little elevator–and the garbage goes down to the basement, where the super unloads it.”

“The super is the name of the task? The person who does the job of returning the garbage to the earth?”

“He puts it in cans in the street and the city comes and takes it away.”

“And what does the city do with it?”

“They burn it.”

“It’s all true!” Luciente shouted with amazement. More gently he added, “Sometimes I suspect our history is infected with propaganda. Many of my generation and even more of Jackrabbit’s suspect the Age of Greed and Waste to be … crudely overdrawn. But to burn your compost! To pour your shit into the waters others downstream must drink! That fish must live in! Into rivers whose estuaries and marshes are links in the whole offshore food chain! Wait till I tell Bee and Jackrabbit! Nobody’s going to believe this. It all goes to show you can be too smart to see the middle step and fall on your face leaping!”

“All right, smart ass. What do you do with garbage and shit? Send it to the moon?”

“We sent it to the earth. We compost everything compostible. We reuse everything else.”

She frowned. Oh, he had to be putting her on. “Are you talking about … outhouses?”

“Out houses? Houses isolated from others?” Luciente made a despairing face. “We aren’t supposed to bombard you with technology, but this is more than I redded.” He raised his wrist‑watch to his ear to see if it was ticking, his lips moving.

“I mean how it used to be at my Tнo Manuel’s in Texas, for instance. They were too dirt poor to have inside plumbing. They had an outhouse. Flies crawling all over. You sit on a board with a hole in it and it goes down in the ground.”

“That’s the idea in very primitive–I mean rudimentary form. Of course now–I mean in our time–it’s composted centrally for groups of houses, and once it is safe, used in farming.”

“You’re trying to tell me you come from the future? Listen, in fifty years they’ll take their food in pellets and nobody will shit at all!”

“That was tried out late in your century–petrochemical foods. Whopping disaster. Think how people in your time suffered from switching to an overrefined diet–cancer of the colon–”

Connie giggled. “You get so serious when you talk about food and shit, you remind me of Shirley–my brother Luis’s second wife. She’s an Adelle Davis nut.”

Luciente shook his head sadly, his expressive dark eyes liquid with sorrow. “I was redded for this, but I can’t find the door to what you’re meaning half the time.” He combed his fingers back through his thick hair. “I worked sixmonth with nine other strong senders. Fasure we’re a mixed dish. A breeder of turkeys, an embryo tester, a shelf diver, a flight dealer, a ritual maker, a minder, a telemetrist, a shield grower and a student of blue whales. Youngest eighteen and oldest sixty‑two. From James Bay to Poughkeepsie, our entire region. We’re called the Manhattan Project–that’s a joke based on a group–”

“I know what the Manhattan Project did,” Connie said with cold dignity. “What are you fixing to blow up? Just everything?”

“It’s a rib, you see, because that was a turning point when technology became itself a threat … . Cause we’re a mobilizing of inknowing resources–mental? We’re the first time travelers fasure–not that I’m actually traveling anyplace!”

“Like the bird that flies in narrowing circles until it goes up its own asshole.”

“We have that rib too.” Luciente beamed. “We must not chill each other. If you’re patient in spite of my bumping along, we’ll succeed in interseeing and comprehending each other. Alia–that’s the student of blue whales–told me that after months with them, Alia can only inknow the grossest emotions or messages. Those long epic operas that are their primary pastime are still garble to per. After a whole generation of com municating with the Yif, we are merely transmitting digital code. We think of the Yif as superrational, a world of mathematicians–and maybe that’s how they vision us … . Anyhow, if you and I suck patience, can we fail to clear our contact? We have only been at this a few weeks, and look how strong and clear we are talking. If we both work at it, we should hear better and better!”

“Work at it!” Connie chuckled, remembering Professor Everett Silvester in bed, working at sex. Her body was a problem he was solving. He put everything in pass‑fail terms. “You’re crazy, you know that? If I’m not.”

“Crazy? No, actually I’ve never been able to. Jackrabbit went mad at thirteen and again at fifteen–”

“Who’s this Jackrabbit?”

“I am sweet friends with Jackrabbit. Also Bee. Both are my mems too–in my family? If we work at this, I hope you’ll meet them soon. Even though you laugh at me for speaking of it so. My own work is velvet for me. And this too fascinates.” Luciente took her hands and squeezed them.

“Second best to blue whales and the Yif–whatever they are!”

“Not to me, truly,” Luciente assured her, nodding vigorously. “I see you as a being with many sores, wounds, undischarged anger but basically good and wide open to others.”

“Ha! You know I’m a two‑time loser?” Connie yanked her hands free.

“Encyclopedia: define two‑time loser.” This time she saw that what she had taken for a watch on Luciente’s wrist was not only that, or not that at all. He was not lifting it to his ear to hear it tick but because it spoke almost inaudibly.

“What’s that?”

“My kenner. Computer link? Actually it’s a computer as well, my own memory annex. I don’t quite follow what you mean, but I myself have done things I regret. Things that injured others. I have messed up experiments–”

“Messing up is something I’m an expert on!”

Someone banged on the door. Luciente sprang to his feet, glancing around.

“Who is it?” Connie yelled.

“It’s me–Dolly! Let me in! Hurry!”

Luciente kissed her on the cheek before she could duck and ran long‑legged into the bedroom, saying hastily over his slender shoulder, “Till when! Graze me when you’re free.”

She stood a moment collecting herself. Dolly was banging on the door and screaming. It was a funny time for her to arrive, on a Friday night, when she always had to be working. As Connie released the police lock, she felt the sensation of Luciente’s presence evaporating. She shook her head like a dog coming out of the water. Once Eddie had remained stoned for twenty‑four hours on some strongly righteous grass … .

Dolly rushed in past her, blood running from her bruised mouth.

THREE

Locked into seclusion, Connie sat on the floor near the leaky radiator with her knees drawn up to her chest, slowly coming out of a huge dose of drugs. Weak through her whole useless watery body, she still felt nauseated, her head ached, her eyes and throat were sandpapery, her tongue felt swollen in her dry mouth, but at least she could think now. Her brain no longer felt crushed to a lump at the back of her skull and the slow cold weight of time had begun to slide forward.

Already her lips were split, her skin chapped from the tranquilizers, her bowels were stone, her hands shook. She no longer coughed, though. The tranks seemed to suppress the chronic cough that brought up bloody phlegm. Arriving had been so hard, so bleak. The first time here, she had been scared of the other patients–violent, crazy, out‑of‑control animals. She had learned. It was the staff she must watch out for. But the hopelessness of being stuck here again had boiled up in her two mornings before when the patients in her ward had been lined up for their dose of liquid Thorazine, and she had refused. Pills she could flush away, but the liquid there was no avoiding, and it killed her by inches. She had blindly fought till they had sunk a hypo in her and sent her crashing down.

Letting loose like that brought them down hard on her. She was still in seclusion, having been given four times the dose she had fought. Captivity stretched before her, a hall with no doors and no windows, yawning under dim bulbs. Surely she would die here. Her heart would beat more and more slowly and then stop, like a watch running down. At that thought the heart began to race in her chest. She stared at the room, empty except for the mattress and odd stains, names, dates, words scratched somehow into the wall with blood, fingernails, pencil stubs, shit: how did she come to be in this desperate place?

Her head leaning on the wall she thought it was going to be worse this time–for last time she had judged herself sick, she had rolled in self‑pity and self‑hatred like a hot sulfur spring, scalding herself. All those experts lined up against her in a jury dressed in medical white and judicial black–social workers, caseworkers, child guidance counselors, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, clinical psychologists, probation officers–all those cool knowing faces had caught her and bound her in their nets of jargon hung all with tiny barbed hooks that stuck in her flesh and leaked a slow weakening poison. She was marked with the bleeding stigmata of shame. She had wanted to cooperate, to grow well. Even when she felt so bad she lay in a corner and wept and wept, laid level by guilt, that too was part of being sick: it proved she was sick rather than evil. Say one hundred Our Fathers. Say you understand how sick you’ve been and you want to learn to cope. You want to stop acting out. Speak up in Tuesday group therapy (but not too much and never about staff or how lousy this place was) and volunteer to clean up after the other, the incontinent patients.

“As a mother, your actions are disgraceful and uncontrolled,” the social worker menaced, at once angry and bored. Angelina was sitting in an office chair from which her little legs could not reach the floor and she was sucking a pencil from the social worker’s desk. Connie wanted to take the pencil from her. Lead poisoning: never chew pencils! But she did not dare touch her daughter in front of the bureaucrat from Child Welfare. Angelina had been given a sucker earlier and now she obviously wanted another; a sucker was a big event to her. That afternoon she was to be taken to a children’s detention center while Connie awaited “a determination of the case.” Connie’s case had been determined, all right. “Willful abuse for injuring the person or health of a minor child,” they said, but they also said she was not responsible for her actions. They kept saying what a pretty child Angelina was, and Connie guessed that partly they were expressing surprise that her child was so light. “It won’t be hard to place her, even at four,” she heard the social worker tell her probation officer. “She doesn’t look–I mean she could be anything.”

That was what white people noticed about her baby, but Angelina’s features were obviously her own, the ample sensuous hook of Mayan nose, the small mouth, puckered now as she pouted, the delicate chin, the eyes of shiny black almonds, In fact, what Connie saw when she looked at her daughter was a small dose of herself. Herself cowering in a chair, whimpering. Herself trying to stick out that tiny chin and shouting with an enraged monkey scowl, I will I will! I will too! I will too!Herself starting all over again with no better odds on getting more or less than a series of kicks in the teeth.

After Claud had died of hepatitis in Clinton, she had mourned him in a haggard frenzy of alcohol and downers, diving for oblivion and hoping for death. She had sat for weeks in a chair, letting Angelina scream and weep herself to sleep in fear and hunger. Connie had torn at herself with her nails, with pills, with bottles, with lack of food and all poisons short of open suicide, until she had a nightmare and awakened shivering with sweat in late afternoon on the couch right under the window on Norfolk Street with the flashing blue light of a police car outside playing on the ceiling.

She dreamed that Claud was being born again: that her mourning hauled him out of the grave and drove his restless soul back into a baby’s body. Even now from his junkie mama, Claud was being crushed into the world with a habit, and waiting for him was the pot balanced on the edge of the stove that would blind him and seal his face ever after from the light of the world. Reform schools, the courts, zip sixes for kids picked up on federal raps, those rotten sixty‑day‑to‑six‑year indeterminate sentences, all the institutions that would punish him for being black and blind and surviving. All the scorn and meat hooks of the world were waiting to carve off chunks of his sweet flesh. As Claud was crammed into the baby’s writhing body, as he was forced into the small flesh and vast terror, he cursed her.

She wakened cold with sweat on the couch, her back aching, and the first thing she heard was Angelina screaming. Angelina was standing about ten feet away in their one room, screaming and kicking the wall with anger, kicking the leg of the metal table. Connie dragged herself from the bed hungover and strung out, and it hit her that having a baby was a crime–that maybe those bastards who had spayed her for practice, for fun, had been right. That she had borne herself all over again, and it was a crime to be born poor as it was a crime to be born brown. She had caused a new woman to grow where she had grown, and that was a crime. Then she came staggering off the couch and saw that Angie, in kicking the table, in kicking the wall–every blow the blow of a hammer on her aching head–had kicked a hole in her lousy cheap shoes. Those were the only shoes Angie had, and where in hell was Connie going to get her another pair? Angie couldn’t go out without shoes. There rose before Connie the long maze of conversations with her caseworker, of explanations, of pleas and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate, and trips down to the welfare office to wait all day first outside in the cold and then inside in line, forever and ever for a lousy cheap pair of shoes to replace the lousy cheap pair Angie had just destroyed.

“You fucking kid!” she screamed, and hit her. Hit too hard. Knocked her across the room into the door. Angie’s arm struck the heavy metal bolt of the police lock, and her wrist broke. The act was past in a moment. The consequence would go on as long as she breathed.

As she slumped against the wall of the bleak seclusion cell, tears ran into her lap, soaking the yellow dress, faded from repeated laundering. Tears for Claud dead, for Angelina adopted into a suburban white family whose beautiful exotic daughter she would grow into. Remembering what?

Why had Dolly betrayed her? Well, why had she betrayed her own daughter? She had thrown Angelina away from the pain of losing Claud. She should have loved her better; but to love you must love yourself, she knew that now, especially to love a daughter you see as yourself reborn. She slumped against the wall clutching her knees and tried to concentrate on the pain of the old burn that had never quite healed, to blot out memory.

She felt then that sense of approach almost as if someone were standing behind her wanting to come through, that presence brushing her consciousness. The feeling was at once an irritant and a relief. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, lacking anything else, and made a grimace of disgust at the sloppiness. How she hated to be dirty. She felt ugly, bloated with the drugs, skin deadened and flaking, lips dry and split, hair lank and dirty and bleared with feverish sweat. Her throat was sore and the back of her neck ached all the time.

Vanity before a hallucination? If she could so clearly imagine him, why couldn’t she imagine herself clean and beautiful? At least a proper hallucination would be some kind of company, so she let her eyes shut, leaned against the wall, and permitted the presence to fill her. For perhaps ten minutes she remained thus, head back and eyes tightly closed.

“Connie, at last! Fasure it’s been three weeks!”

“This is the first time I’ve been by myself since the first night.”

“Are we responsible for your being here?”

She did not immediately open her eyes. “No.”

“Fasure? You’re not just painting the bones?”

She briefly described the night of her commitment. When she opened her eyes she saw Luciente consulting the watch that whispered.

“It’s running hard for me to comprend,” Luciente said in his high excited voice. “Might as well be Yif. Your mem has a sweet friend who abuses per and who … sold your sister?”

“Her pimp, Geraldo. And she’s my niece, not my sister. Geraldo is a pig! He didn’t want her to have his baby.”

Luciente looked deeply embarrassed. Passing his hand over his mouth, he shifted from haunch to haunch, squatting before her. “Uh, I know you people ate a great deal of meat. But was it common to feed upon person? Or is this slavery, I thought wiped out by your time?”

The urge to cry was still burning her eyes. “Sometimes we have nothing to feed on but our pain and each other … . What’s that about meat?”

“How did this Geraldo sell per flesh then, and pigs too?”

“She hustles!” Seeing blank incomprehension, she snorted and said harshly, “Puta. Tart. Whore.”

Luciente began fiddling with the wrist gadget again till she reached out to stop him. Small bones he had, little heavier than hers. “Who do you talk to with that?”

“My kenner? It ties into an encyclopedia–a knowledge computer. Also into transport and storage. Can serve as locator‑speaker.” Luciente’s face changed suddenly and he smiled. “Oh. Had to do with sex. Prostitution? I’ve read of this and seen a drama too about person who sold per body to feed per family!”

“I suppose nobody in your place sells it, huh? Like they say about Red China.”

“We don’t buy or sell anything.”

“But people do go to bed, I guess?” Connie sat up, holding herself across the breasts as she shook back her lank hair. “I suppose since you’re alive and got born, they must still do that little thing, when they aren’t too busy with their computers?”

“Two statements don’t follow.” Luciente gave her a broad smile. “Fasure we couple. Not for money, not for a living. For love, for pleasure, for relief, out of habit, out of curiosity and lust. Like you, no?”

Like sunshine in her cell, he looked so human squatting there she heard herself ask half coyly, “Do you like women?”

“Allwomen?” Luciente looked at her with that slight scowl of confusion. “Oh, for coupling? In truth, the most intense mating of my life was a woman named Diana–the fire that annealed me, as Jackrabbit says in a poem. But it was a binding, you know, we obsessed. Not good for growing. We clipped each other. But I love Diana still and sometimes we come together … . Mostly I’ve liked males.”

“I thought so.” Why should that make her feel gloomy? He had shown no signs of sexual interest, except for all that patting and hand holding. But shouldn’t a figment of her mind at least satisfy her? Perhaps being crazy was always built on self‑hatred and she would, of course, see a queer.

“You’re lonely here, and I just let you down. Truly, I’m not rigid and I like you.” Luciente took her hands between his warm, dry, calloused palms. “What is this place? You seem to be locked in. I’ve seen holies about your prisons and concentration camps. Is this such a place?”

“No. I’d rather be in prison. Unless you’re on an indeterminate, at least you know when you’re getting out. They can keep me here till I go out with my feet in the air. It’s a loony bin–a mental hospital.”

Luciente consulted his wrist. “Oh, a madhouse! We have them.” He looked around. “But it seems … ugly. Bottoming.”

“Are yours so fancy?”

“Open to the air and pleasant, fasure. I never stayed in one myself–”

“Big deal!” She pulled her hands free.

“But Jackrabbit has–just before we fixed each other, and we’ve been sweet friends three years. Bee and I have been lovers twelve now, isn’t that strange? Not to stale in so long. And Diana goes mad every couple of years. Has visions. Per earth quakes. Goes down. Emerges and sets to work again with harnessed passion … . But I have to say this–in truth you don’t seem mad to me. I know I’ve never gone down myself, I’m too … flatfooted … earthen somehow, so it’s beyond my experience. Bee tells me that I’m the least receptive person in our base, and person has to scream in my ear to get through … . I don’t mean to pry or make accusations, but are you truly mad?”

“Here they say if you think you aren’t sick, it’s a sign of sickness.”

“You’re sick?”

“Sick. Mad.”

“We do not use these words to mean the same thing.” Luciente tilted his head to one side. “Could it be you’re bluffing? Truly, I have never gone down, but I have been close to Diana when person was far inward, and … you seem too coherent. Perhaps you’re tired, unable to cope for a while? Sometimes, among us, this happens.”

“I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with me, aside from seeing you–that’s the best sign of being crazy I can think of.”

“No, I’m in touch with you, really.” Luciente scowled at the room. “This place bottoms me. Would you like to take a walk?”