Kelley Eskridge (18 page)

Then it was time for the last deep
surgery. It was time for Snow. Jackal wrote it on her white board.
Snow. She considered it for a time. Snow. Wiped it slowly away. And
there it was again: Snow, still shining bright, barely smudged,
stubborn like Snow herself. Behind it, within the glossy surface of the
board, the reflection of Snow's face as Jackal had last seen it the
night before her sentence began, wet with tears, puffy with pain.
Snow's mouth was open, as if she might speak at any moment: perhaps she
would say don't, Jackal, don't. But Jackal did: she erased Snow's
pleading face stroke by stroke, over and over and over and over again.
And even when Snow was completely gone, Jackal kept rubbing the place
in her mind where Snow had been, like polishing one spot on a silver
globe until it was shining and smooth. Then she was clean and empty.
When she looked inside, nothing looked back.

Day 900

She was stone.

She no longer counted to four thousand.
She no longer folded her clothes right side over left. She did not hear
voices anymore. She was sea glass, opaque, utterly smoothed by a
battering tide.

No, not quite smooth; as she sat on the
floor of her cell with the remains of a meal scattered around her, as
she thought of being a seashell, the image of the ocean brought her the
memory of swimming laps, furious exhausting laps in Ko gymnasium's
hundred-meter indoor pool, where the air smelled of chlorine and human
bodies, and the noise of people echoed like the music of soft drums;
swimming hard in the middle lane and riding the surges made by other
bodies. She found herself rocking slightly on her crossed legs on the
floor of her cell, her neck stretched as if she were about to turn her
head to come up for air before lunging forward into the next stroke.
And yet even the small amount of energy to stand and replace her used
plate in the cupboard suddenly seemed too much to spare. She sat
lotus-legged with her arms loose and her hands cupped beside her knees,
her head bent so that her hair hung before her like a curtain almost
closed.

Oh, fuck, she thought, with infinite
sadness: Jackal, this just won't do.

It was too much for her. There were too
many memories. The lightest touch of her former life, the faintest
breath of the Jackal that was, could crumble the rock from her and
expose the flesh that hurt, that missed, that mourned. No matter how
many times she rebuilt, there would be another memory ready like a
typhoon to bring it all down. She would have to wash all her self away
if she wanted to stand like stone through the next five and a half
years.

She began to breathe harder and faster.
Wash it all away. Her chest felt tight. What had she done? She had
scrubbed out her home, her family, her lover, her life, like rubbing
grease from her hands. She had tried to wash herself away, but here she
was, still clinging to herself like a stubborn stain. She had tried to
wash herself away. Now she was trembling. How could she have done that?
It was like killing herself, or something close to it. It was like
finding a dark pit inside herself and pitching headfirst into it, when
what waited at the bottom was not that much different from the teeth of
the crocodile. She began to weep. I didn't mean it! But she had meant
it and it was done. Ko and the Earth Court had taken most of her life
away and Jackal had given them the rest, like an earnest child trying
to be good.

I am in prison. She reached out and
touched the wall nearest her. This is my cell. She touched her fingers
to her breastbone. This is my cell. She thumped herself once, hard.
This is my cell. Then she stood, looking around her, breathing,
turning, looking, breathing, touching herself, for a long time.

Day 1105

She was learning to be alone.

It was not at all what she had expected.
She had time; and now she was spending a great deal of it studying each
piece of her experience and how it fit into the whole of her. She paced
the perimeter of her cell for hours while she reconstructed the year of
the crocodile, stopping to stretch, or eat, or rest in front of pastel
Mandelbrot sets on the screen. She lay in bed in the dark and recalled
her time of stone, and the terrible way that she had flensed her life
from her. It was the most difficult work she had ever done; to wrap her
mind around those dreadful moments and try to see them clearly. She was
not sure she even knew what clear was; but she knew it was important to
find out.

She imagined a window into herself, and
through the window she looked at Jackal Segura.

She saw only Jackal; and that was the
first new thing. She had never before seen just herself. She had always
painted herself against the backdrop of Ko, or the web, or the Hope.
Was she still Jackal now that she was out of context? That was
frightening enough to make her want to stop this nonsense. She cursed
herself, and went on.

She found inside her things that shocked
her. She was shamed by all her surrenders: the conflicts with
Donatella, with Tiger, with Ko; with the crocodile, with the stone. All
failures. She had pretended not to be alone, and then she had pretended
that it did not matter. But it did. It mattered more than anything.

One night when she had been on her back in
bed for hours, blinking up at the dim ceiling, she understood: she had
always been alone. She had just never been alone all by herself before.
Alone was the ending and beginning of everything she had been,
everything she might be if she survived. The realization, the
simplicity and the flowing beauty of it, brought her bolt upright.

She took a rest for a few days. She ate,
and stretched her body gently. She told herself her favorite stories,
slowly, making the telling as plump and round as she could. She sat
back against the wall and let herself be overcome by remembered music.
When it seemed time to open up the window again, she found all her
failures of confidence, of honesty, of will, lined up to display
themselves for her, like a blister that had risen within her and burst.
She had so little to show for herself. She was so much less than she
had ever thought.

Another break, this one less restful. She
felt toxic, contaminated by self-discovery. She prowled her cell,
measuring its limitations foot-length by foot-length from her heel at
one end of a wall to her toe butted right up against the other, and
then a right turn and do it again. She became irritated by the way her
food lay in its dish, by her sheet's refusal to stay tucked in. Red and
green patterns on her screen reminded her of Christmas, and made her
sad and bitter and so enraged.

More lessons in letting go. It was harder
this time. Her anger was utterly dependable, always on time, always
loyal: a best friend with a loving smile and a butcher knife behind its
back. She was tempted to wall up her anger without looking too closely
at it, to put it in a cell like the one she was in now, with no way in
or out. But she knew that it would only grow until it pushed down the
walls.

No short cuts, she told herself grimly,
and kept going.

There came a moment in a long line of
formless hours when she despaired of ever feeling good about herself
again. She was a bag of weakness, a half-empty glass. She had made a
bad job of herself, and that was the worst of all.

She curled up in a miserable ball and
drifted, not awake, not asleep, until a thought flared in her head,
strong and compelling, like the second voice in an ongoing conversation
that she had not been aware of until it said: So what? Do better this
time.

She felt again as if she were standing at
the edge of a very high place. But it was not Mirabile, not the long
fatal fall. Do better this time. She didn't know what this place was,
except it was not a place that she could just fall into like the mouth
of the crocodile. She would have to step out, face forward, arms open
wide. She would have to reach.

Her answer was instinctive and immediate.
“I'll do better this time,” she said out loud. “I will do better.”

She smiled and fell instantly asleep.

When she woke, she felt curiously rested,
and there was something else; something brief that washed through her
and left her clean and open. She was astonished to find that she had
forgiven herself. She was astonished to find joy. And that was the next
new thing.

Day 1170

It was not that solitude was any easier to
bear. In some ways, it was harder now than ever before, because there
was no one to tell her that the work she was doing was good. She had no
one to share those flashes of joy in just being Jackal, in being new
and alive. Sometimes that joy made her terribly sad for lack of someone
to pass it on to.

But being Jackal Segura was easier now,
even convicted and abandoned and alone. It was better in some
incomprehensible way to be all those things if she was also still
herself. She wasn't sure what it meant, and she decided it did not
matter. What mattered was that some days she wept for grief, and some
days for exultation, but it was never the crocodile or the stone who
cried: it was always the human Jackal.

Day 1279

When she put her foot down in its last
step of the heel-to-toe progression along the west wall, there was an
inch of space between it and the facing north wall.

That wasn't right. She stood rocking in
her tightrope stance, left arm against the wall for balance, and
frowned at the wall in front of her. It did not look any farther away;
and she was sure that after almost four years of standing nose-to-brick
with it, she would have noticed. But there was a difference.

She had an ugly thought, dropped down
cross-legged, too hard, onto the floor, and pulled her foot up into her
lap. It looked the same as it always had. It didn't seem crooked or
suddenly shortened. That was a relief, and a puzzle. She poked the
north wall experimentally with a foot, then a finger. Finally she lay
flat on the floor and pushed her face as close to the uninvited inch of
space as she could without losing focus.

The inch looked back at her, unhelpfully.
After a while she stood up and went back to her pacing. The other walls
were the same length they had always been. But the next time around,
the west wall was still too long. And it stayed that way.

Day 1499

Something extraordinary happened.

She was thinking; measuring out the edges
of the floor and remembering how it had felt to visit Al Iskandariyah
when she was a Hope and the world still smiled upon her. She was there:
the stone square scrubbed to the color of bone by millions of feet, the
afternoon sun that made the air ripple and dance, the racket of the
marketplace two streets over muted by the buildings of dense stone that
squatted around the open plaza, the crooked lengths of date palms and
the spiked cactus around them that flowered red and impossible
vibrating shades of pink. And there was Jackal, boots and sun-glasses,
walking tall with arms swinging loose and free, alive and buzzing with
possibilities like a young bee hovering just over the cactus before
dipping down to the first flower. She smiled and put out one hand to
touch the wall of her cell; oh, she remembered how it was to step out
strong, it was just like this—

And she pushed out her left foot,
expecting it to slide the extra inch and thunk emphatically into the
stone in front of it. Instead, it went right through the wall.

She went down hard on her bottom and hip,
her right knee bent and her left leg still stuck absurdly through a
foot-sized hole. She sat that way for a very long time, blinking slowly
and trying to imagine what she should possibly do next. It was
inconceivable that there could be a hole in a virtual cell, where there
had been none before. She sat for much too long thinking about how none
of it could be true before she realized that her opinion didn't seem to
matter at all to the hole. It was there, wrapped around her left ankle.
She leaned forward and touched it with her left hand. It was ragged at
the edges. It felt like a hole in a wall.

Idiot, she thought, and focused her
attention on her left foot. There was nothing special about the way it
felt; not hot or cold, no discernible texture difference. She drew it
slowly back in. It looked fine, just like a virtual foot should look.
She tucked it up under her, in a tailor's seat with the right foot for
company, and regarded the hole. It was where the spare inch had
previously been.

What the hell is going on? Suddenly she
was frightened, almost as much as that sharp-toothed day of the
crocodile. She hauled herself up and backed away from the corner and
the light that shone faintly from someplace outside. Outside. “Jesus
fucking Christ,” she said aloud. She turned in a circle, making fists
and pressing her fingers together hard enough to hurt. “Oh god I don't
please what is going on GODDAMN IT!” and now she was yelling with her
arms fisted out from her sides and trembling, shaking her head and
yelling again, “STOP DOING THIS TO ME! STOP DOING THIS TO ME! LEAVE ME
ALONE!”

And that was just absurd. Leave me alone,
she thought, what a goddamn stupid thing to wish for right now. She
didn't know whether she was going to cry or hit something, and then to
her great surprise she found that the easiest thing to do was to lean
over with her hands braced against her thighs and laugh quietly.
Through it all the light went on shining from some place outside her
prison cell.

Well, Jackal, what are you going to do
now? she asked herself afterwards. Another stupid question: what else
was there to do but to stretch herself on the floor, put her face up to
the hole, and look out.

She had a good long look. When she finally
lifted her head from the floor, she felt that she must move very, very
slowly. She opened the cupboard and took out ham and butter and bread,
constructed a careful sandwich, ate it with deliberation. She never
took her eyes from the hole and the pale light that rippled across the
stone floor and into the opposite corner. When the last methodical bite
had dissolved down her throat, she put her plate aside and stripped off
her clothes, carefully folding the soft trousers and loose shirt that
showed no wear from their years of use. She worked her way through her
entire exercise routine. She stretched every muscle and flexed every
tendon she could. She was thorough. When she was done, she rubbed
herself down with her blanket and put her clothes back on. After a
moment's thought, she reached under the bed and pulled out the shoes
that she had not worn in more than two years. They felt odd on her feet.