Three more recovery days later, smoke jetted from her bony crotch, her ears twirled like whatzits. She hunched over a workbench in the garage and squeezed a tube of silicon, wanding the applicator over crushed neoprene. Never mind the slices in her drysuit’s kneepads, her mind eeled along—never mind a week ago she’d rocketed from Cleargate terrified beyond her skull and before that crawled a thousand feet through Milford’s mandibles of flooded rock, mask a bedazzle of tears, claustrophobia banging her brain. Never mind—here was the situation. On those dives she’d silently begged for mercy, but she’d done a fair job calculating her gas usage, a more than fair job embracing the biochemical curtsies and swoons and soaring exchanges in the bloodstream that had her at addict, at more—she whistled a mechanical seesaw while she worked now, just thinking. Next dive—deeper, if she planned it right. If all went according to plan. And when the inner garage door slung open—her husband just home from the office, wincing, last night’s congress evidently forgotten—she stored her suit on a hanger and recalled how much the custom fit cost back in the day. Now she’d have to get it taken in. Restore the dark shape to her own newer, trimmer one. How much that would cost her.
As if he were thinking the same thing, the pinched face on him. As if he should care! She let fly and cornered him by the tanks. Shirt wilted and trousers creased around the groin. He puffed his cheeks and extended his neck at an angle usually seen on men too old to fix. Where were his glorious blue tats now? Gone, erased like stubborn but not invincible water marks. Do not threaten me, he said. He said, Everything is different now. Game changed. You’re different now.
Huh, she said. Is that right?
He kept working his jaw. Finally his voice seemed to catch up with the motion and he said, I’m trying to make this simple so you can understand. I am not babysitting you anymore. No. More. Get it?
Well now, she said, and twitched her chin with her thumb to pantomime thinking. She said, For a man of few words you suddenly have a lot to say. She said, Threaten? Don’t mind if I do.
35
The next morning Bowman said, Princess, don’t make me get on the blower with him.
She said, Try it, baller. I think there’s something you’re forgetting. She said, What? I tell you I’m going to dive Marshall Wall deep on air, no fancy gas mixes. And what? You think I should solo it instead?
A little later she slammed her car door. Rand had already left for the day but Bowman she couldn’t seem to lick—he was in her earpiece like cream in a Twinkie. Dickweed. Why she ever had to kiss him. Ugly did not begin to say. So she shut it and cranked the heat, then trammelled right then left and ran a yellow. Smile for the camera. Cool and bright today. Bowman croaked on—another story. She transponded the newest limits with their upstart municipal checkpoints gussied folksy—single-story cinder blocks with polyurethane-thatched roofs and guards in belled floral skirts and dimity slacks and purple-laced jackboots. When had all that happened? She roared past pillared entrances to the interconnected subterranean malls and finally coasted the old residential streets once wide as fields and now as doll-tiny as the old Jane and old Marilyn—such girls. She nosed the car by a life-sized woman wrestling some recycling curbside. Two boys sworded sticks across a narrow lawn. In Marilyn’s rearview they vaulted the narrow ditch and clambered into the road to remonstrate in her direction like miniature trolls. She cruised the main thoroughfare, every second or third bronzed doorway a restaurant or specialty market with storefront windows boasting signs in Cyrillic and Korean, Farsi and Franglish—as far as she could tell all saying You Should Eat. Her stomach rumbled. Resolute, she toured alongside the park she and Jane, once upon a time, practically owned—it appeared strangely unchanged save for being uninhabited. She buzzed down her window and stuck out her head, single-handing the wheel. Swings swung in the lilting wind. Sugar maples rustled their last few crimsons and umbers. Princess? Bowman said. Still there?
Still there. Here, barely. She pulled over. Sparrow, grass. She’d fallen behind. Her adipose cross-sections and abnormal thyroids modelled in cinereous hand-drawn pencil sketches, then software-remodelled—her bread and butter—lay half done and not done. Undone—ten days off for a little vacay south with the husband and all goes to hell? So much for her ancient history of steady-Freddy building relationships with clients. So much for all that, she thought as the engine ran and ran until she thought to cut it. She circled her wrist in the air, testing. Bowman continued to carp, nearly bleeding her auricles. Bad idea, he kept saying. Rand is right, princess, that is one bad idea. You do not need to do that fucking dive now. Or ever. You have everything to lose. You. Him. You hear me?
She heard him. She knew. But she also thought, yes, but you’ve had your bad ideas. And survived them.
And this idea, she thought, is mine.