I look at my hands. I bring them to my face and smell them. Something from childhood. Something half there and half imagined.
The image comes to me in a retinal flash. My brother as a boy, a field away from me. In my hand a red rock. A children’s game. I shove my fist into the dirt and push down and down until my whole girl-arm is buried. My hand connects with something hot or cold, or both, not solid, but moving, like a wave. I let go of the red rock when my hand and arm feel like they’re dissolving. Not until I hear my brother screaming down the field from me—“It’s a rock! A red rock! It shot up out of the ground”—do I understand.
There is current underground.
Could that be what he was talking about before he died? I look at his lifeless face, gray among the detritus on the cave floor across from me.
Without thought, as if from muscle memory, I jam my hands into the earth up to my wrists, nearly breaking them against the hard ground, and then I shove them down deeper, to my elbows, and then deeper still, until I’m shouldering the dirt, my face an inch from it. I smell what’s still alive on the planet, beetles and worms and potato bugs; I stare at my dead brother and the blackened place where Leone used to be; and I press on until half my body is buried. I close my eyes. My face burrows like an animal’s. My mouth tastes the dirt. The blue light at the side of my head ignites and hums. The song explodes inside my skull and the opened cave begins to shiver like a convulsing body. My hands and arms start to burn—or are they freezing?—something, some energy, has my arms, as if they are not part of me any longer, something alive and electrical in the dirt. And then my arms feel like they are no longer arms at all, but extensions of light, long-tendrilled beams shooting out from my torso and into the ground. I’m burying myself, but in my mind’s eye I can see thousands and thousands of beams of light underground, crisscrossing like a strange highway of flame, with my own body serving as an interstice. My head shoots back, my mouth opens, my jaw locks, and light—aqua light and orange light and indigo light and red light—shoots out from my eyes, my nose, my mouth and ears and every pore of my body, and finally an enormous blast catapults me into the air and back down to the earth with the thud of an animal’s body and a snapping sound in my sternum.
Silence.
When I open my eyes to the dead air, calm again, I am not alone. There is my body, my brother’s corpse, the loss of my Leone, and now, someone else.
Someone is here with me.
Chapter Twenty
“Trinculo Forsythe, you stand accused of aiding and abetting a known eco-terrorist and enemy of the state—”
“Your mother was an artless ass-fed canker. Aussi, s’il vous pla?t, to what entity precisely do you refer when you use the word state? Because I know you can’t possibly mean this shit-pile of orbiting techno-corporeal hackery. You have no authority over me, you clay-brained skin-husk. Go fold up into your own clouted grafts.”
Christine’s heart breaks open and she falls for Trinculo all over again. He had earned himself a trial after all, and he meant to make it his, starting with this preliminary meeting between accused and abuser—accuser.
Spittle wells up in her mouth. She swallows. Bites the inside of her cheek. She is now in the terrible position of witness, as if her agency had been given a new point of view.
Where is her place in the story?
Her terror slowly degrades her courage. She bites the inner flesh of her cheek harder, tastes the metaled secretion of blood. Snap out of it. You are a writer. But what happens when the story is stolen away from its author? Don’t panic. Don’t be an ass. Learn to inhabit any role.
Christine can’t see everything happening in the room, but thanks to the spider’s microscopic lens she can see things in glimpses, and of course she hears everything. Jean de Men’s horrible overflowing robes of grafted flesh hang from his head like an old French aristocratic wig, draping down from his arms in faux-crocheted brocade, dragging across the floor with ludicrous pomp. His eyes hide beneath several folds of graying grafts, but his mouth is black and open and terrible, his tongue too pink, almost red, his teeth strangely yellow and small.
Her Trinculo, though bound and attached to some kind of mobile sentry unit, looks magnificent in his indifference. Each time Jean de Men speaks or gestures, Trinculo studies the ceiling or floor or his own crotch. If his hands were free, she felt sure he would have scratched his absent balls. But what crumples her heart is his chest—the land of body between his shoulders. The graft there is hers. Or was. She’d spent such careful hours there, inventing a story about a city of androgenes in which only he could provide pleasure. It seemed to her ever after that he carried himself differently. Chest forward, chin up. Shoulders back. As if to tell the microworld of their stupid floating existence: once there were bodies. Read yourself back to life. In place of their sexual union, she’d written desire straight into his flesh.
The spider lodges itself near the bones of his clavicle.