I put my hands over my eyes, to make the black more like space or death or what I remember of movie theaters. Tiny sparks of white dance under my closed lids. Memory plays out in condensed and displaced fragments, as in a tiny experimental film.
My body grows abnormally quickly and changes shape. I have the winged arms of a great womanbird, the haunches of a lioness. By the end of the dream I am a white sphinx, in some desert I don’t know, sand blowing across my interspecies textures—feathers, fur, scales, and skin—for eternity.
It’s a stupid dream.
Except that Trinculo likes the sphinx part. He’s often asking if we can “play sphinx.” It’s hard not to give in. There’s something wonderful about assuming that position on the ground, posing my head regally, making L’s of my arms and extending my ass behind me like an elegant animal.
Without much consideration I jump from my bed and creep toward the opening of my cell. I get down on my hands and knees. I know he can’t possibly see me in the mandated dark time of the Panopticondrum, but perhaps he can feel my energy. I point my body as gloriously as I can manage in Trinculo’s direction. I lift my head, square my jaw, and rest my arms there on the cold floor, and stare hard into the black, through the back wall of my cell, as if I could see through the wall out into space, straight into the sun. Burn my eyes from my head. Burn us all to death. Get it over with. Finish it. Burn us into living matter again.
“Trinculo,” I scream, sounding like a new animal species.
Silence.
But then, “Cackle for me, you far-flung sea witch!”
And there my beloved is after all, Trinculo’s voice floating up from his cell to mine.
Followed shortly by the arrival of a short and slightly crooked android, whose appearance recalls that of a tree stump. If the android had been a person, it would have been considered ugly, even malformed. As a machine, it just looks pathetic. I learn that I am being issued a citation only, and I will be released that afternoon. There is, apparently, no charge strong enough to hold me, although they confiscated several material items from my living space.
I step forward toward the viewing wall, as I’d come to think of it. “What’s the story?” I yell playfully across the space between us.
“What?” he shouts. “I demand my cackle, you gut-infested she-whore!”
If a cackle was what would give him pleasure in this idiotic interim, it was the least I could do. I draw in a huge breath of air and give it my all. What emerges sounds like a grandmother with respiratory problems, or perhaps a turkey’s gobble.
“That is by far the worst cackle I have ever heard,” he says dully. His voice carries a fatigue older than his years.
It is true. I am ashamed, but in my defense, I have no idea how to produce a worthy cackle. “What’s the verdict?” I hurl down toward his layer of purgatory. I know his punishment will be more severe than mine. He is under surveillance for a prior offense of a sexual nature.
What I receive in return is possibly history’s greatest and most profound cackle. But then Trinc does something odd: his cackle abruptly arrests, and then, nothing. Something is wrong. There is never a truncated joke with Trinculo. I crane my neck to try to catch a glimpse of him, but it is no use. I signal to my automated keepers that I want a word. Something like a treadmill comes toward me and cocks its “head.”
“Data on Cell Seven-seven-two,” I say, without inflection. “Trinculo Forsythe.”
“Negative,” is the only response the thing offers in return.
“Listen, you jumble of bolts and wire, I have high-level clearance. Christine Pizan. You will tell me the data on Cell Seven-seven-two. Or I’ll thread a rusty bolt through your ass-valves.”
For a moment I feel sorry for it, as if its feelings may have been hurt. The machine does a sort of half-circle this way and that, and its bobble-headed screen tips toward the floor. Then it buzzes back to attention, pushes away from my viewing hole, and blurts, “No access.” It then hovers higher and shoots a laser that slices a gash in the wall less than a centimeter from my cheek. I half expect to feel blood when I reach to touch my face. Killing me would mean nothing. Letting me live means next to nothing, too.
I move as close as possible to the electrical current that is my cell’s wall and yell, “Trinculo?”
Nothing.
Back in bed, I hold as still as a corpse, hoping that the tiny silver spider will visit me. More than waiting: I hope so hard I try to will my desire into the insect’s shape. When you live in space, far from the former natural world, it’s easy to remember that everything is merely matter and energy. Conjuring up a cyber creature seems as simple as calling a dog to your feet. And yet, if it was truly no more than a matter of energies, I could simply walk through the containment wall and its force field, like monks walking through fire in old stories of faith or magic. In truth I’d be burned to a crisp so instantly it would appear as if I simply vanished. There’s not much blood or guts or gore in space. Most energies simply signal through the flames when they end. One dissipates.
The spider does indeed visit me. Late. Wakes me from sleep. It is in the space between my shoulder and my jaw. It tickles, but also feels comforting somehow, almost like a caress. God, how lonely and stupid I’ve become. I close my eyes, hold still, and wait for the small pattern I suspect might emerge against my skin. I tap my fingers after each beat to be sure.
-- -.-- - . . . . .-. --- . . . - . -. . .- -- - --- - . . . . . -.- . -.-. .- - . -.
My—beloved—I—am—to—be—executed.