I didn’t sleep, of course. I huddled by my suitcase on the old couch by the window. I knew I couldn’t stay here. I knew I would have to go home. But where was home?
When day came, I went on huddling. I knew my next move was to go to Egyptia, and then to Clovis. Repay Clovis, persuade Egyptia. And then I’d take Silver. I’d really have bought him, as Casa Bianca had bought my furniture. He’d belong to me. And I couldn’t. After everything, I couldn’t. Couldn’t buy him or own him. Couldn’t bring him here to this frightful place.
I dozed, and when I woke, the day was shrinking away behind the girders as if it were scared of them. My stomach was queasy and sore because I hadn’t eaten, except for a sort of sandwich I’d made myself in the servicery at the house. I drank some water from the drinking tap in the muddy bathroom of the rented apartment. The water tasted very chemical, and full of germs.
My mother would be home, soon. I wondered what she would do. I became frantic, and saw her shock as she found the suite stripped of furnishings and me. I began to believe I’d done something truly awful to her. I wanted to run down to the pay phone in the foyer of the rental apartment block, down all the cracked cement steps, for the lift here didn’t work anymore. But then I knew I couldn’t. And then at last I knew that I was afraid, terribly, violently afraid, of Demeta, who only wants the best for me, the very best, as she sees it.
Eventually, I found the paper pad I’d written on and which I’d put in the suitcase with the money and the few clothes, and I started to write this, the second chapter of what’s happened to me.
When it got pitch dark, I turned on the mean bare overhead light, but it will cost money, so I worry about it. I have three hundred left on my card for the rest of the month. Whatever did I spend the rest of it on? I’m cold tonight, and I’d like to turn on the wall heater. Maybe I can wait a little longer?
Stars are caught in the girders. The name of this street, actually, is Tolerance.
Silver, I need you. I need you. All this is because of you and yet, how could I blame you for it? I’m nothing to you. (Does the touch of real flesh secretly repel you?) But I was beautiful with you. All night, all the hours of the day you were with me: Beautiful. And I never was before.
I’m so tired. Tomorrow, I must make up my mind.
There’s a flyer going over. It’s quiet here, I can hear the lines whistling, and below, the roar of the city, that never lies down to sleep.
* * *
CHAPTER THREE
A rose by any other name
Would get the blame
For being what it is— The color of a kiss,
The shadow of a flame.
A rose may earn another
name,
So call it love;
So call it love I will.
And love is like the sea,
Which changes constantly,
And yet is still
The same.
* * *
I dreamed of him that night, after I wrote the second chapter of what had happened. The first time I ever dreamed of him. We were flying over the city. Not in a flyer, but on the wings of angels out of an old religious picture. I could feel the beat of the wings through my body as they opened and closed. It was effortless and lovely to fly, to watch him fly just ahead of me. We passed over the broken girders and our shadows fell on the ground among the orange foliage of the autumn weeds. It’s supposed to be a sexual dream to dream of flight. Maybe it was. But it didn’t seem to be.
When I woke, it was early morning, just like the dream, and I looked out of the window at the orange twining the girders, where our shadows had fallen. Beyond the subsidence was a blue ghost of the city I could just see, cone-shaped blocks all in a line, and the distant column of the Delux Hyperia Building. The view wasn’t ugly or dismal anymore. The sun was shining on it. In five years, if they left the subsidence alone, a young wood of weed trees might be growing there. The sky was blue as Silver’s shirt had been.
Dazed by the dream and the sunlight and the autumn weeds, I went into the bathroom and ran hot water, though it was expensive. I showered and dressed, and brushed my hair. My hair looked different. And my face. My hair, I guessed, was fading out of tint and needed molecular restructuring or the bronze tone would all go, but I’d sold my hairdresser unit. I could go to a beauty parlor, and get a color match and molecular restructure done, but it might not be the exact shade. Anyway, it would cost a lot. I’d have to revert to being dull brown, or whatever it was I’d been that hadn’t suited me on my coloressence charting. My face though, what had happened to that? I turned three quarters on and saw that my flesh had hollowed slightly. I had cheekbones, high and slender but unmistakably there. I looked older, and peculiarly younger, too. I leaned close to the spotted glass, and my eyes became one eye, flecked with green and yellow.
I put the Casa Bianca P.O.D. check in a sling purse over my shoulder, and went out and down the cracked cement stairs.
I couldn’t tell what I felt, but I didn’t feel as I had. The street turned into a run-down boulevard with an elderly elevated running overhead, the lines long unused, and rusting. I bought a bun and an apple and a plastic cup of tea at a food counter, and ate and drank as I waited for the city center bus. By daylight, I knew my way about far better than I’d thought, even here. Of course, I’d sometimes been in ramshackle areas, always with other people, always a tourist, but still enough to have a few scraps of knowledge.
The blue sky made the sidewalk interesting. People moved about, ran, argued, and steam came out of food shops. Flowers spilled from the elevated.
I’d always known the city. I had no reason to be afraid of it, even now. And my jeans looked shabby because I’d slept in them on the hairy old couch, shabby enough not to attract attention. The shirt would get shabby.