Sex (22 page)

“What about Oliver?”

“Mr. Oliver?”

“No, Oliver Moore.”

The man shook his head, sending the gold braid on his cap into a dance. “Never heard that name, either.” He squinted at Gaia with pale gray
eyes. “You sure you've come to the right building, miss?”

Gaia gritted her teeth and stared through the glass door behind the man. She could see a long, marble-floored hallway leading back to a pair of elevators and the old metal button between them that would take her up to her father. “This is the right building,” she said. “My father lives here, and I want to see him.” She started to move around the doorman, but the old man stepped back against the door and shook his head again.

“You can't come in. Not unless someone inside says it's okay.”

“My father—”

“I don't know your father,” said the doorman. “You give me a name I know and I'll ring a bell, see if someone wants you on the inside; otherwise you need to get out of my door.”

The muscles in Gaia's jaw tightened into a painful knot. The pleasant idea of kicking the man's bony ass down the street came and lingered for a few moments in her mind. Reluctantly she shoved it away. She had no doubt that she could take this guy out with both hands behind her back and blindfolded. But the doorman was just an old guy doing his job. A sour old guy, yeah, but that didn't mean he deserved to get his ugly wrinkled face turned inside out.

Gaia turned away from the door without another word and marched back along the sidewalk. She heard
the old man give a grunt behind her. He sounded awfully satisfied with himself. Maybe he would get another medal. The Medal of Doorman Honor for keeping ignorant kids out of the building.

As soon as she was around the corner, Gaia stopped. She tipped back her head and looked up the long side of the building. She could see the first few floors well enough, but the top was nearly lost in dingy gray fog and darkness. Eighteen floors was… what? Two hundred feet? Something like that.

It was one of those moments when fear would have been handy. It would have been nice to know if the decision she was about to make was very brave or just really, really stupid. But there was nothing. Not even one of those gut-grabbing jolts she'd been having ever since her uncle tried to cure her of fearlessness.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Time:
2:45
A.M.

Re:
Answers

Oliver,

I have no idea if this e-mail address is even operable anymore, but that's how pathetically desperate I have become.

I have been left with no choice but to contact you. I require some answers to a vast number of questions, and I have lost what little remaining support system I had.

If I thought there was any chance of another source being able to provide answers, believe me, I would not have contacted you. But you see, there are simply no remaining figures in my life whom I can trust.

So, sadly, I might as well try you.

Please respond.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Time:
3:02
A.M.

Re:
Answers

Dearest Gaia,

I am thrilled to hear from you and want so much to speak with you and make up for our last most unexpected and horrid good-bye.

I am currently out of the country, but upon my return, I will be happy to answer any and all of your questions with as much detail as I can and with, complete honesty. Fear not, Gaia. You won't be alone for much longer.

I thank you for putting your trust in me, however tenuous it may be. Looking forward to our meeting.

Love,

Uncle Oliver

Wrong
about Heather. Wrong about Gen. Wrong about Tatiana. My track record here is beyond pathetic. God, what if I've made the wrong choice about Ed, too? Maybe avoiding him is the worst possible choice I could make? I mean, what has happened to me here? Is
this
what fear is? Just buckets and buckets of horrible judgment? No instincts at all. I honestly thought that being fear
less
was ruining my instincts, but maybe it's the other way around?

GAIA

Listen to me. Just
listen
to me. I'm not
me.
I'm not Gaia. I'm just this lost, amorphous blob of a human being with a bunch of unanswerable questions. I came downtown to try and find some stitch of home, just the faintest reminder of who I am, and all I've ended up with is
more
stupid questions. I mean, there has to be a limit, doesn't there? There has to be a limit to the amount of unanswerable questions I can live with.

Or let me rephrase,
not
in the form of a question. Let me at least speak like Gaia even if I can't be her:

I have reached my limit of unanswerable questions.

I mean, for chrissake, I thought I had surrendered already, but apparently not. Apparently I need to surrender to my surrender. Because I need answers now. I need to know who I can trust. I need to know if I'm going to be stuck with these nagging fear symptoms for the rest of my nonlife. I need to know what on earth Josh is up to with Heather. Does Loki have it in for her? And most of all, I need to know if I'm protecting Ed from someone or just shooting myself in the foot with a giant loneliness gun.

Do you know what's even more tragic? I haven't just left myself with a hill of insurmountable questions. I've left myself with no one to answer them. No one except that vulture who
always seems to be circling whenever I'm dead in the water.

So be it. I'll complete my transition into the penultimate loser and reopen that line of communication. Because it's the only one I have. Yes, I'm giving up
again.
I do hereby surrender from my surrender. Or to be more specific… I'm saying “uncle.”

here is a sneak peek of Fearless ™ #21: BLIND

My
mother loved museums. When I was little micro-Gaia, we'd go all the time. It was the art museums that she loved best, but I always thought they were painfully boring. I mean, come on, when you're six, the difference between pointillism and abstraction doesn't mean a whole lot. The only pictures I cared about were the ones I drew myself: rainbows and smiley-faced stick people. Gaia, the semi-normal child.

GAIA

Sometimes, my mother decided to stimulate other wrinkles in my tiny brain by dragging me along to the Museum of Natural History. That was more my speed. Plenty of dinosaur skeletons with teeth the size of my arm.

One thing I remember clearly from those trips was the diorama of the Neanderthal family. When I first saw it, I thought the museum people had caught a few humans and stuffed them just like they had stuffed that enormous whale that hangs from the ceiling.

Any other child would probably have been scared witless at the
thought, but we're talking about the predictably abnormal me. I ducked under the velvet rope and went right inside the diorama so that I could play house with these freakish stuffed people. When the museum guards showed up to kick us out, I was brushing the baby Neanderthal's hair.

Like everybody else, I figured these stuffed people hadn't been too bright. Stuffed dummies. They stood all stoop shouldery and had this severe, industrial-strength unibrow thing going on. Lots of serious back hair poking out in all directions. I was pretty sure that in person, their body odor would rate a biohazard sign.

Maybe I was right about their stink, but it turns out I was probably wrong about their intelligence. Scientists today say that Neanderthals had the biggest brains in the history of humankind, including modern man. There's no reason to think those Neanderthals weren't at least as smart as any chili-dog eating tourist staring at their bones.

Neanderthals were strong, too. They had thicker bones and tougher muscles than we do.

It's a big mystery why these smart, strong people crapped out and we got to hang around. There are dozens of books about it and probably a thousand ideas. But I think I've figured it out. I think they lacked fear.

Fear is a serious survival instinct thing. Kind of like pain. You stick your finger in the fire, it hurts, you don't do it again. Not unless you're stupid. And if you are that stupid, you probably don't live long enough to pass those “hey Ugg, how 'bout we go play with the fire” genes on to the next generation.

Being fearless might sound cool. Only it's a lot like not knowing when to take your finger out of the fire. There are plenty of things to be afraid of out there in the world. Take your basic uncle who could be a psycho serial killer, for instance. You have something like that in your life, you should learn to be afraid.

The Neanderthals were
too
fearless. I think they saw this new kind
of people coming over the ice age hill and neglected to fear them.

You want to see fearless people? Go to the museum. No matter how much we want to make out that being fearless is cool, it's the cowards that survive.

I took my shot at moving up the evolutionary ladder. I let my uncle shoot me up with some serum that was supposed to put a little fear in my brain. Only it didn't exactly go the way I had hoped.

Instead of getting a normal life, what I got was this twisted feeling that came up at the worst possible times. A combination brain freeze and stomach clamp. More like a fever than fear. If real fear was like that, the Neanderthals would have clubbed us out of existence while we were shaking in our moccasins. Plus, there were hallucinations. Not trippy tie-dyed T-shirt and mirror ball flashbacks from some 60's theme store. More the lock-that-girl-up-in-a-padded-room-and-keep-her-away-from-the-scissors hallucinations.

Obviously, I was not going to get better living through chemistry. In
my experience, normal life cannot be found in a hypodermic needle.

Uncle Oliver's joy juice also didn't do much for my decision making skills. I made the mistake of sleeping with Ed.

Okay, it's not entirely fair to blame the injection. Let's just say I was drug-addled and leave it at that.

Not that it was all bad. There was the sleeping with Ed part, and that was great. In every way. You know how they always say that sex isn't that great? They're lying. They just don't want you to have sex. Because it is that great. Really.

I might not be able to dump my Neanderthal ways, but I left my virginity behind in Ed's bed, and that was a perfect place to leave it. Sleeping with Ed was not a mistake. Having slept with Ed, that was the problem.

See the fine distinction?

In Bed With Ed = Good

After Bed With Ed = Bad

Not that he did anything wrong. He was perfect. He was going to make me pancakes. What's not to love about great sex and pancakes? What made it bad was me. More specifically, my incredibly sucky life.

Ed wasn't out of bed more than ten minutes before someone tried to put a bullet through his head. I came
thatclose
to watching him die while I was still warm from lying next to him. If I stayed with him, if I let the whoever-the-hell-it-is that's after me know that Ed is important, he'd be dead. So I had to push him away. I had to act like the queen of the ice cold bitches and walk out on him.

It was every bit as bad as it sounds.

What I can't figure out is how the Neanderthals managed to survive for something like twenty-thousand years. I don't think I'm going to make it through high school.