Skin (4 page)

I would have
told her it wasn’t my choice but I was too distracted by her
knowing so much about me. If she looked like anyone else it would
have been creepy.

She led me back
through the large room with the birds. “My aviary,” she said.
“Three hundred species of birds from the world over. Did you know
there are ten thousand different species of birds on this
planet?”

“
I did
not,” I said.

“
And did
you know that the domestic chicken is not only the most populous
species of bird, but it is also the fifth most populous animal
species. Chickens outnumber humans eighteen billion to seven. Isn’t
that remarkable?”

What was most
remarkable was the banality of the conversation this strange woman
in this strange place was having with me.

I followed the
woman and her freaky cougar through the aviary and down another
hallway where the walls were made of floor to ceiling aquariums.
Fish of every shape and colour cruised the blue depths, a rainbow
of weeds danced among coral towers that reminded me of the city we
were floating above.

“
Of
course,” she continued on from her previous spiel as though she
hadn’t stopped. “We’re unable to account for the population of fish
or certain insects like termites, so these numbers aren’t
perfect.”

“
I see,”
I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“
How many
species of fish do you think there might be, Rev?”

“
I have
no idea? A trillion?”

“
Plus, I
am sure. And let’s not forget, the ocean is the last uncharted
place on the earth. Unimaginable depths still hide unthinkable
creatures. It’s wonderful don’t you think?”

“
I
guess.”

“
We spend
so much on space exploration and there are still areas of our own
planet that remain a mystery. Why wouldn’t we strive to know
everything about where we come from before we go studying
Mars?”

“
Because
people can’t live underwater,” I said. Sveta paused, scratching the
cougar behind the ear.

“
You are
very smart, Rev. I suspected that.”

“
So,” I
said. “Can we get to the part about why I’m here, why you’ve been
tracking me, how you know my name and what this talent business is
all about?” I was unsure if asking her so directly would land me in
some kind of trouble. I couldn’t be precisely clear why I feared
this woman so much, it was something beyond the fact she had a pet
that could tear me through with a single swipe. It might have been
her obvious money, which meant power, or the fact she knew my name
and a lot about me. It was definitely her arresting
beauty.

“
I know
your name because I asked,” she said. “We live in a world where we
put all of our lives freely available to anyone with a computer or
a telephone and then we get upset when people find out things about
us.”

“
I don’t
do that online stuff,” I said. I didn’t. I didn’t share every
snapshot of every minute of my daily life. I didn’t post, publish,
update or upload. And I was fiercely intentional about
it.

“
Ah, but
you do,” she said. “You bank and you shop and you have friends who
do all of those things. Are you aware how many photos of you there
are online thanks to your girlfriend? Your girlfriend who then goes
and posts, albeit anonymously, on discussion boards, complaining
her boyfriend and all sorts of other details of her life she is
desperate to broadcast?”

I felt trapped.
Victoria was always snapping stupid phone pictures of us, uploading
them to Instabook or Facechat or whatever she called those
websites, captioning and tagging and presenting and posing. I might
have hated it about her if everyone else hadn’t been doing the same
thing. It was like hating someone for watching television.

“
I don’t
want you to worry, Rev. You have been selected. Chosen. It’s a good
thing I’m offering you and you’re quite welcome to say no, return
to your life as it was before, never see me again. Though I had
hoped that we might become…” She paused and reached out a hand to
my cheek, stroking a perfectly manicured finger down to my jaw. My
skin tingled with electric waves and another unbidden stirring. “…
friends.”

She dropped her
hand and continued walking along the pebbled path, stopping at a
sliver elevator door. A set of clothes hung on the wall. She
pressed the button to go down and the lift shunted to life
somewhere deep in the building.

“
This is
the way out,” she said. “And as promised, a clean set of clothes
printed fresh and made especially for your body. I hope they’re to
your liking”

A white t-shirt
and a pair of black shorts, exactly like the set I’d been wearing
at Saturn’s before coming here, but the fabric was crisp and new,
iridescent white and a black glossy in its newness. Every day I
washed out my clothes by hand in my kitchen, not wanting to waste
money on a laundromat. Everything I wore was softened and fuzzed
around the edges, colours muted and everything just that little bit
grey. I knew about the tech of printing your own clothes but it was
just one of those irrelevant facts I’d never bothered to pay
attention to, until now, when this outfit, something as a simple as
a pair of training shorts and a boring old T-shirt seemed like the
most outlandish extravagance. I held them close to my chest. They
smelled like plastic.

The lift opened
with a beep.

“
See?
You’re not being held against your will.”

“
And I
still wouldn’t know what I would be being held for,” I said. Sexy
as she was, the evasiveness was beginning to annoy me.

“
Forgive
me, my mind does tend to wander among thoughts.” Her lips pulled
into that same small smile and she looked almost bashful. It was
gorgeous. “Rev, and let me remind you it won’t take me long to
discover if that’s really your name or just an ideologically
appropriate nickname, I am offering you a membership to a very
private club. A place to perform your nightly worship to your own
body. I own a very elite… we’ll call it a fitness centre, and I
would like you to come and work for me.”

That’s the big
reveal? She was offering me a new job in a gym?

I’d done as
Sveta had ordered me to do before I left her place and was waiting
on the other side her building. It was late in the afternoon.

I must’ve
walked by this place a thousand times or more and never thought
what might be behind these windows, blacked and completely
clandestine. There was no signage to betray there was apparently a
private gym in there. No one moved in or out, there was none of the
usual sounds of weights being dropped or the pulse of bass from
loud music.

I was thirteen
years old when I came to Guessing for the first time. My mother had
a show on in the big arena that still stands down by the Central
Station. On the morning of the big fight, she gave me fifty bucks,
a ten ride ticket for the bus and her good wishes to get out and
see the city. A thirteen year old kid let lose alone in a city like
this, even then I knew it wasn’t cool. I spent the whole day riding
the buses as far as they’d let me go and then swiping my ticket
again to get another hour of not having to walk around the streets
alone.

When the last
ticket ran out and I’d hit the end of the route, I was in Downtown
not far from where I stood waiting for the strange woman with the
snake’s eyes to let me into the blank building. It was late in the
afternoon then too. The sun was sinking. The horizons in a city are
right in front of your face so the shadows were already long and
dark. I’d spent five of my fifty dollars on a Coke, something my
mother would have come down on me for in an instant as if I’d
bought crack, and I leaned against a bill clad wall, trying to look
like I was meant to be in this place.

You don’t grow
up in the Sprawl without hearing stories about what happens in
Guessing. About what lurks on the streets where I was standing,
eyes darting, and clutching the Coke bottle so hard that the
plastic crimped. Even then I could feel the real down of the
Downtown, the underground, the places behind the streets and the
bright twenty four hour snack shops, the bars, the Cineplexes, the
places that flashed the neon XXX signs even in the day. I could
feel Guessing was there, waiting for this weedy kid to look in the
wrong way at the wrong time and she’d nab me in her neon and
concrete claws and take me down to that beneath place.

I had that
same feeling standing against the black glass trying to look like I
was meant to be there, like I knew what I was doing, like I
belonged and wasn’t nervous. I didn’t have a plastic bottle to grip
onto, but my hands balled, jammed in my pockets, my nails pressing
too hard into my palms.

Just when I
was about to leave, thinking I had the wrong building or, more
likely, that I’d been stooged or imagined this whole thing as some
hallucination brought on my head trauma, a narrow door opened and
Simone, the red haired maid I’d met the day before, poked her head
around the corner.

“
She
said you can come in now.”

I moved
inside.

I stepped into
a small foyer, face to face with twin silver elevator doors. The
air was cool and smelled vaguely of lemon perfume. Simone pressed
the buttons for both lifts. The doors slid open smoothly with a
soft ping. She pointed to the one on the left.

“
That
one’s down,” she said and stepped into the one on the right. The
doors closed and I was alone with nothing else to do but keep on
going.

There were only
two choices in the lift, up or down, and no indication of floor
numbers or where I was heading. After a quick ride of what seemed
like three or four floors, I stepped into the mystery underground.
My hands still shoved in my pockets, my jaw clenched.

A frosted glass
door and a high tech key pad; a series of numbered buttons and what
looked like a camera lens. I tried a few numbers at random. Nothing
happened as I had expected.

“
Hello?”
I called, pressing my eye close to the lens. “What happens
now?”

The door
clicked and moved to open just a gap. I pulled it open wide. My
mouth dropped.

I stepped into
a cavernous space, a place that looked like it might have been made
especially for me and me alone. The room was softly lit by lights
that twinkled from the high ceiling like stars. A glass panel was
set into the ceiling. A stained glass pattern, the same symbol I
had seen in Sveta’s home of the wing, paw human hand wrapped around
the old tree. It was lit from behind and shone down on the scene
like a glowing message from heaven. The scene below was heaven
enough for me.

The floors were
smooth, dark stone, a mezzanine platform of polished wood skirting
the main area. Exercise equipment gleamed in the warm light; free
weights, all of the machines I knew and contraptions I’d never
seen. Mats and balls and elastic supports suspended from beams.
There were a few people, men and women working out. Lifting
weights, pulling themselves into bizarre yogic stretches. One
person suspended from bands on the ceiling, twisting her body
around on itself like a ribbon on the breeze. Another man was
pressing a weight that would have had to have been over three
hundred clean above his head. Everyone wore black. The walls were
blank, there were no ads, no powders for sale, not a motivational
slogan or false image of an impossibly cut person anywhere. It was
all so clean. The room was silent except for breath, the occasional
soft grunt of exertion and the gentle clang of metal. I was in
love.

“
Welcome
to our Sanctuary,” Sveta’s dulcet voice came from behind me. “I’m
so pleased you’ve come.” She kissed me on the cheek as if it was
the most natural thing in the world for her to do.

“
This is
really something,” I said unable to hide my enthusiasm. “You own
this place?”

“
Let me
show you around, introduce you to our friends. Today is just for
you to play, to do your routines and get to know us. I’ll put you
to work tomorrow.” Sveta took my hand and I felt like a school boy
on a first date.

“
This is
my temple,” she said, leading me along the wooden platform that
skirted the workout floor below. “We worship our bodies here, we
worship the bodies of others. You will not see a Mech here, that’s
really our only strict rule. This is the floor, you’re welcome to
use anything at any time. Through there,” she pointed to another
frosted glass door “You will find showers and dressing facilities.
I’ve taken the liberty of labelling a cubicle with your name and
laying you out a set of clothes.” Sveta ran her finger along my
shoulder and down my chest, stopping and deliberately lingering
just above my shorts. With any other woman, I might have reacted
right there, moved in, wrapped my arms around her with my hands
starting in the small of her back. I might have kissed her. Before
Sveta however, I was frozen but no less eager to touch her. She
smiled playfully, dropped her hand and winked her incredible eye.
My heart wasn’t the only part of me about to explode .

“
Imogen,”
Sveta called, turning from me. A sleek woman stopped a yoga routine
and moved obediently to Sveta’s side. “Imogen, this is Rev. He is
our new attendant.”

If Sveta was
the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, Imogen was a close
second. Her hair, lose to her shoulders shone like polished
obsidian and swayed as she moved. Her skin was dark olive, with
dark blue eyes to match. She was lean, muscled and moved like a
cat, svelte and purposeful.