Blind Lake (18 page)

When she looked at her first entry Marguerite was unhappy with what she had written.

Not because it was incorrect, though of course it was—it was outrageously, deliciously incorrect. Errors of attribution everywhere. The social scientists would be appalled. But she was tired of objectivity. Her own project, her private project, was to put herself in the Subject’s place. How else did human beings understand one another? “Look at it from my point of view,” people said. Or, “If I were in your place…” It was an imaginative act so commonplace as to be invisible. People who couldn’t do it or refused to do it were called psychotics or sociopaths.

But when we look at the aboriginals, Marguerite thought, we’re supposed to pretend to indifference. To an aloofness almost Puritanical in its austerity. Am I tainted if I admit I care whether the Subject lives or dies?

Most of her colleagues would say yes. Marguerite entertained the heretical idea that they might be wrong.

Still, the narrative was missing something. It was hard to know what to say or, especially, how to say it. Who was she writing for? Herself alone, or did she have an audience in mind?

A couple of weeks had passed since the Subject left the city—the time when Tess had cut her hand so badly. If she carried on with this there would be a great deal more to write. Marguerite was alone in her study, bent over her notebook, but at the thought of Tess she raised her head, sampling the night sounds in the town house.

Chris was still awake downstairs. Chris had made his own space in the house. He slept in the basement, was gone most of the day, took his evening meals at Sawyer’s and used the kitchen and the living room mainly after Tessa’s bedtime. His presence was unobtrusive, sometimes even comforting. (There: the sound of the refrigerator door closing, the rattle of a dish.) Chris always looked distressed when he worked, like a man struggling desperately to recapture a lost train of thought. But he would often work unceasingly, long into the night.

And he had been a help with Tess. More than a help. Chris wasn’t one of those adults who condescend to children or try to impress them. He seemed comfortable with Tess, spoke freely to her, wasn’t offended by her occasional silences or sulks. He hadn’t made a big deal of Tessa’s problems.

Even Tess had seemed a little happier with Chris in the house.

But the accident with her hand had been troubling. At first Tess would only say that she had leaned too hard on the window, but Marguerite knew better: a window at night in a lighted room was as good as a mirror.

And it wasn’t the first mirror Tess had broken.

She had broken three back at Crossbank. The therapist had talked about “unexpressed rage,” but Tess never described Mirror Girl as hostile or frightening. She broke the mirrors, she said, because she was tired of Mirror Girl showing up unannounced—“I like to see
myself
when I look in the mirror.” Mirror Girl was intrusive, often unwelcome, frequently annoying, but something less than an outright nightmare.

It was the blood that had made this time seem so much scarier.

Marguerite had asked her about it the day after they came back from the clinic. The painkiller had left Tess a little sleepy and she spent all that afternoon in bed, occasionally glancing at a book but too scattered to read for long. Marguerite sat at her bedside. “I thought we were all done with that,” she said. “Breaking things.” Not accusatory. Just curious.

“I leaned on the window,” Tess repeated, but she must have sensed Marguerite’s skepticism, because she sighed and said in a smaller voice, “she just took me by surprise.”

“Mirror Girl?”

Nod.

“Has she been back lately?”

“No,” Tess said; then, “not very much. That’s why she took me by surprise.”

“Have you thought about what Dr. Leinster said back at Crossbank?”

“Mirror Girl’s not real. She’s like some part of me I don’t want to see.”

“You think that’s right?”

Tess shrugged.

“Well, what do you
really
think?”

“I think, if I don’t want to see her, why does she keep coming back?”

Good question, Marguerite thought. “Does she still look like you?”

“Exactly like.”

“So how do you know it’s her?”

Tess shrugged. “Her eyes.”

“What about her eyes?”

“Too big.”

“What does she want, Tess?” Hoping her daughter didn’t hear the edge of anxiety in her voice. The catch in her throat.
Something is wrong with my girl. My baby
.

“I think she just wants me to pay attention.”

“To what, Tess? To her?”

“No, not just to her. To everything. Everything, all the time.”

“You remember what Dr. Leinster taught you?”

“Calm down and wait for her to go away.”

“Does that still work?”

“I guess. Sometimes I forget.”

Dr. Leinster had told Marguerite that Tessa’s symptoms were unusual but stopped well short of the kind of systematic delusion that might point to schizophrenia. No drastic mood swings, no aggressive behavior, good orientation to time and place, emotional affect a little muted but not off the scale, reasonable insight into her problem, no obvious neurochemical imbalance. All that psychiatric bullshit, which boiled down to Dr. Leinster’s last banal verdict:
most likely she’ll grow out of it
.

But Dr. Leinster hadn’t had to wash Tessa’s blood-soaked pajamas.

Marguerite looked back at her journal. Her act of illicit storytelling. Still not up to date: there was nothing about the East Road Ruins, for instance… but enough for tonight.

Downstairs, she found the lights still burning. Chris was in the kitchen eating rye toast and leafing through last September’s copy of
Astrogeological Review
, leaning back in one chair and resting his feet on another. “I’m just down for a nightcap,” Marguerite said. “Don’t mind me.”

Orange juice and a dab of vodka, which she resorted to when she felt too restless to sleep. Like tonight. She pulled out a third chair from the kitchen table and put her slippered feet up next to Chris’s. “Long day?” she asked.

“I had another meeting with Charlie Grogan out at the Eye,” Chris said.

“So how’s Charlie taking all this?”

“The siege? He doesn’t care too much about that, though he says he’s feeding Boomer ground beef these days. No dog food coming in on the trucks. Mostly he’s worried about the Eye.”

“What about the Eye?”

“They had another little cascade of technical glitches while I was out there.”

“Really? I didn’t get a memo about it.”

“Charlie says it’s just the usual blinks and nods, but it’s been happening more often lately—power surges and some ragged I/O. I think what’s really bothering him is the possibility somebody might pull the plug. He’s nursed those O/BECs so long they’re like children to him.”

“It’s just BS,” Marguerite said, “all this talk about shutting down the Eye,” but she didn’t sound convincing even to herself. She made an awkward attempt to change the subject: “You don’t usually talk about your work much.”

She had already finished half the drink and she felt the alcohol working through her body ridiculously quickly, making her sleepy, making her reckless.

“I try to keep it away from you and Tess,” Chris said. “I’m grateful to be here at all. I don’t want to spread my troubles around.”

“It’s all right. We’ve known each other what, more than a month now? But I’m pretty sure whatever people say about your book isn’t true. You don’t strike me as dishonest or vicious.”

“Dishonest and vicious? Is that what people say?”

Margaret blushed.

But Chris was smiling. “I’ve heard it all before, Marguerite.”

“I’d like to read the book sometime.”

“Nobody can download it since the lockup. Maybe that works to my advantage.” His smile became less convincing. “I can give you a copy.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“And I appreciate the vote of confidence. Marguerite?”

“What?”

“How would you feel about giving me an interview? About Blind Lake, the siege, how you fit in?”

“Oh, God.” It wasn’t what she had expected him to say. But what
had
she expected him to say? “Well, not tonight.”

“No, not tonight.”

“The last time anyone interviewed me it was the high school paper. About my science project.”

“Good project?”

“Blue ribbon. Scholarship prize. All about mitochondrial DNA, back when I thought I wanted to be a geneticist. Pretty heavy stuff for a clergyman’s daughter.” She yawned. “I really do have to sleep.”

Impulsively—or maybe drunkenly—Marguerite put her hand on the table, palm up. It was a gesture he could reasonably ignore. And no harm done if he did ignore it.

Chris looked at her hand, maybe a few seconds too long. Then he covered it with his own. Willingly? Grudgingly?

She liked the way his palm felt on hers. No adult male had held her hand since she left Ray, not that Ray had been much of a hand-holder. She discovered she couldn’t look Chris in the eye. She let the moment linger; then she pulled back, grinning sheepishly. “Gotta go,” she said.

“Sleep well,” Chris Carmody said.

“You too,” she told him, wondering what she was getting herself into.

Before she turned in she gave the direct feed from the Eye a last look.

Nothing much was doing. Subject continued his two-week-old odyssey. He was far along the eastern road, walking steadily into another morning. His skin looked increasingly dull as the days passed, but that was probably just ambient dust. There had been no rain for months now, but that was typical of a summer in these latitudes.

Even the sun seemed dimmer, until Margaret realized that the haze was unusually thick today, and particularly thick to the northeast, almost like an approaching squall line. She could ask Meteorology about it, she guessed. Tomorrow.

Finally, before she took herself to bed, Marguerite peeked into Tessa’s room.

Tess was soundly asleep. The empty pane in the window beside her bed was still protected by Chris’s plastic-and-veneer lash-up and the room was cozily warm. Darkness outside and in. Mirrors happily vacant. No sound but Tessa’s easy breathing.

And in the quiet of the house Marguerite realized who she was writing her narrative for. Not for herself. Certainly not for other scientists. And not for the general public.

She was writing it for Tess.

The realization was energizing; it chased away the possibility of sleep. She went back to her office, turned on the desk lamp, and brought out the notebook again. She opened it and wrote:

More than fifty years ago, on a planet so far away that no living human being can ever hope to travel there, there was a city of rock and sandstone. It was a city as large as any of our own great cities, and its towers rose high into that world’s thin, dry air. The city was built on a dusty plain, overlooked by tall mountains whose peaks were snowy even during the long summer. Someone lived there, someone who was not quite a human being, but who was a person in his own way, very different from us but in some ways much alike. The name we gave him was “Subject”…

Sue Sampel was beginning to enjoy her weekends again, despite the continuing lockdown.

For a while it had been a toss-up: weekdays busy but tarnished by the tantrums and weirdness of her boss; Saturday and Sunday slow and melancholy because she couldn’t hop in the car and drive into Constance for some R&R. At first she had spent her weekends restlessly stoned, until her personal stash began to run low. (Another item the black trucks weren’t delivering.) Then she borrowed a handful of Tiffany Arias novels from another support-staffer at the Plaza, five fat books about a wartime nurse in Shiugang torn between her love for an air force surveillance pilot and her secret affair with a hard-drinking gunrunner. Sue liked the books okay but thought they were a poor substitute for Green Girl Canadian Label Cannabis (regularly but illegally imported from the Northern Economic Protectorate), a quarter-ounce of which she was conserving in a cookie tin in her sock drawer.

Then Sebastian Vogel showed up on her doorstep with a billet note from Ari Weingart and a battered brown suitcase.

At first sight he didn’t look promising. Cute, maybe, in a Christmas-elf kind of way, pushing sixty, a little overweight, fringe of gray hair framing his shiny bald head, a bushy red-gray beard. He was obviously shy—he stuttered when he introduced himself—and worse, Sue got the impression he was some kind of clergyman or retired priest. He promised to be “no trouble at all,” and she feared that was probably true.

She had asked Ari about him the next day. Ari said Sebastian was a retired academic, not a priest, one of the three-pack of journalists who were stranded in Blind Lake. Sebastian had written a book called
God & the Quantum Vacuum
—Ari lent her a copy. The book was a lot drier than a Tiffany Arias novel but considerably more substantial.

Still, Sebastian Vogel wasn’t much more than a silent partner in the household until the night he caught her rolling a joint on the kitchen table.

“Oh, my,” Sebastian said from the doorway.

It was too late to hide the cookie tin or the papers. Guiltily, Sue tried to make a joke of it. “Um,” she said, “care to join me?”

“Oh, no, I can’t—”

“No, I
completely
understand—”

“I can’t impose on your hospitality. But I have a half-ounce in my luggage, if you don’t mind sharing it with me.”

It got better after that.

He was fifteen years older than Sue and his birthday was January ninth. By the time that rolled around, she was sharing her bed with him. Sue liked him enormously—and he was a lot more fun than she ever would have guessed—but she also knew this was probably just a “lockdown romance,” a term she’d picked up in the staff cafeteria. Lockdown romances had sprung up all over town. The combination of cabin fever and constant anxiety turned out to be a real aphrodisiac.