“Something like that.”
“Egyptia—” I murmured, drowning in his hair, the taste of his skin—unmortal and yet flesh—the flesh of a demon—”if you didn’t find pleasure with Egyptia—”
“You make it sound like a cafe we were looking for. I did.”
“Yes… She’d be terribly clever.”
“Egyptia is totally passive. The pleasure is in finding what pleases her.”
Minutes later, as the strange wing-beats began to stir inside me, I couldn’t prevent myself from saying, “I wish I could find what pleases you. I wish, I wish I could.”
“You please me,” he said. It was true. The delight mounted in his face as my delight mounted within me—different, yet dependent.
“You fool,” I gasped, “that isn’t what I mean—”
When I fell back into the silence, the room of the apartment thrummed gently. It had the scent of oranges, now, and glue, and paper bags…
“I can stay here with you,” he said, “or I can start work on this place.”
“I want you with me,” I said. “I want to sleep next to you, even if you can’t—don’t—sleep.”
“You mean,” he said, “you aren’t going to ask me if I wouldn’t rather be anywhere except beside you?”
“Am I as paranoid as that?”
“No. Much worse.”
“Oh.”
“Your hair’s changing color,” he said.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Are you? I think you may be quite pleased when the change is complete.”
“Oh, no. It will be horrid.” Curled against him, lulled and childishly almost asleep, I felt safe. I was whole. We were in a boat, or on the back of a milk-white bird.
“Birds?” he asked me softly. “As well?”
“Yes,” I said. “And a rainbow.”
He must have left me at some point during the night. When I opened my eyes in the effulgent, now-curtain-filtered sunrise, there was blue sky on the ceiling, blue sky and islands of warm cloud, and the crossbow shapes of birds, like swifts, darting statically between. And a rainbow, faint as mist, yet with every transparent color in it, passing from the left hand corner by the door, to the corner nearest the window. It was real. Almost.
He was sitting on top of a rickety old chromium ladder he must have borrowed from somewhere in the building, from the bad-tempered caretaker perhaps. He was taking a devilish joy in my amazement as I woke and saw.
“But you’re a musician, not an artist,” I said dreamily.
“There’s a leaflet in with the paint which explains how to do this sort of thing. Being a machine—well, it’s easy for me to get a good result.”
“It’s beautiful—”
“Then wait till you see the bathroom.”
I ran into the bathroom. The ceiling was sunset in there, soft crimson nearnesses, and pale rosy distance. A white whale basked in the shallows of the clouds.
“A whale in the sky?”
“Make the metaphysical assumption the bath is the sea. And that the whale’s a damn good jumper.”
Five days later, you came up the cracked steps, opened the door, and walked into somewhere else.