Those That Wake 02: What We Become (7 page)

Silven closed the door behind him and, without sitting down at his intimidating desk or even taking another step into the carpeted room, spoke quietly.

“Mal,” he said in an urgent tone, “why did you come here, of all places?”

Mal looked around him somberly and dropped heavily on a leather couch near a bar in the wall. Rose could see that the journey here had depleted the last of his resources. He was struggling just to keep his eyes open. Rose herself was struggling to remain hyperaware, to gather every word they said and parse some meaning from all of this.

“Maybe the same reason you did. I needed to see that it wasn’t here anymore,” Mal said, plunging things even more deeply into mystery.

“It’s not,” Silven said. “Of course it’s not. This isn’t even the same building. They put this up afterward. It’s just what it looks like: concrete, glass, metal. Nothing else.”

Mal nodded slowly.

“You knew that,” Silven pressed, “as well as I did. Why are you here now?” Mal didn’t look up at him, just leaned back in the sofa and closed his eyes. Silven’s own eyes, unadorned by cellenses—though the metallic button of a cellpatch protruded near his ear—searched Mal’s figure with sharp, mathematical precision. It was a meticulous precision, Rose realized, that did not exactly fit the surface polish.

“Mal?” he said.

“He’s had it kind of hard lately, Mr. Silven.” Rose’s voice sounded like a thunder crack in her own ears.

Silven looked up at her as if stumbling on an entirely new piece of the equation all at once.

“My name isn’t Silven, Rose,” he said to her. “It’s Remak. Jon Remak. And I’d very much like to help you.”

EARLY IN HER SENIOR YEAR
of high school, Laura’s boyfriend had been Ari. Never had there been such an absolute, total,
professional
douche as Ari. Big and sleek, with the hard, streamlined physique of a track and field athlete, Ari had bright blond hair with a steel earring riveted in his ear, a quiet smile, and a low voice that never lost control. He appeared an extremely confident, tightly controlled guy. Having lost her virginity only at the end of eleventh grade, Laura was still in the throes of discovering what made sex good and what could make it better. She liked the idea of Ari’s apparent discipline and control, and, some two months into their relationship, she found herself comfortable enough to take things to that level. Ari had a quiet enthusiasm for it and energy that he had earned by cutting all those math classes to put extra time in on the track. Best of all, as a result of that tightly bound self-control, he seemed only too happy to let Laura take the lead. Until . . .

Until the day he brought her home while his parents were gone for the weekend and they found their way into his mom and dad’s huge king-size bed, and as she lay there, naked, he mysteriously excused himself for a minute and returned with his track-mate, Mike—no, not Mike,
Mark
. Where had Mike come from? Mark was slim as a razor, with a nervous twitch on his lips and a hazy look in his eyes. He had a jumpy energy and his speech was slightly slurred, and while he undressed, Ari came over to a stunned Laura, kissed her gently on the check, and spoke in that quiet, always controlled voice.

“Enjoy it,” he said. “I’m just going to watch.”

Naked, Laura came out from under the covers, slapped Ari across the face so hard that the echo of it rang off the bed frame and the lamps, and she blew right past the confused and slow-moving Mark. Never had Laura felt unsafe in an intimate physical situation, never before felt
invaded
; a very unfortunate introduction of darkness into something so playful and joyful. Her fascination in and pursuit of psychological theory had already begun, and she had an inkling of what was healthy and what was not, and that it was, to a great extent, in
how
things were done as much as in exactly
what
things were done. Ari had fucked that one up to high heaven, fucked it up unforgivably, turned himself from a strong, quiet mystery into a leering pervert in the space of less than a minute.

One might’ve thought that the slap and exit would have ended the story, but the following Monday, in school, after a weekend of sobbing silently into her pillow and trying to decide whether she could ever tell her mother and father about this, Ari came up to her, looking concerned.

“You seemed really upset,” he said at the lockers, the rest of the student body streaming down the hallways on the way to their first class. “Is everything okay?”

She took him out back, to the slim, shady strip of grass between the PE equipment storage and the maintenance shack, and laid into him. He stared down at her, dark in his eyes, but no expression on his features until, when she felt she was about halfway through, he simply turned around and walked away; he never spoke to her again.

That had been it through the end of high school. She had searched for memories during the second half of that year: seeing him at graduation, giving him a final glance of electric hatred. But she knew not to go searching through those memories too closely now. She was fighting hard to avoid a resurgence of those problems that had plagued her first few months at Vassar, problems that were just now coming to a head. With Josh. Her latest breakup.

She sat at their favorite bench on the round, her black hair tied in a tight ponytail, sticking out from under her father’s Mets cap; a little moral support for a girl diving into weird, unknown waters by sheer instinct. She was careful not to wear anything Josh particularly liked—no tight, white tank top, no capri jeans with the psychedelic flowers up the side—just a blue T-shirt and jeans. She wasn’t his great love; she was just some girl about to break up with him, that he’d moon over for a bit, then remember fondly, and eventually let go of. But she was sitting on their favorite bench, just the same, to acknowledge that they had something good for a while.

He jogged up breathless, fifteen minutes late. She had spent the time, unaware of it, searching through her own spinning head.

“It was Professor Garner.” He had his famous lopsided “I’m a dope” grin when he sat down and explained, giving her a swift kiss on the cheek. “He held me after class for a couple of minutes.”

Her attention focused around that comment, and she turned her eyes on him. She had bright blue eyes; they almost seemed to glow at her from the mirror in the half-light sometimes. She fancied sometimes that they dimmed, grew dark when she was angry or her mood had darkened.

“Why did he do that?” Her voice was more penetrating than she’d intended.

“Oh, it was nothing. He just had . . .” Josh was looking sheepish. He had been, since she’d known him, an awful liar. “All right. He caught me on a call during class. These cellpatches are so easy to use, you almost can’t help it. Guess I need a little more practice with the subvocalizing, though.”

Laura looked down, shaking her head.

“Oh, come on. It’s a new toy. I was just playing around.”

She was one to talk. She hadn’t even attended a class since yesterday morning. She could feel the weight of the work piling up and inexplicably, miraculously, didn’t care, which was not like her at all.

“I know.” She looked straight into his eyes. “Josh. We can’t do this anymore.” Right there, out with it, quick and simple like a solid cross to the face rather than a slow and painful series of gut shots. And why was it so violent in her head? Had she taken up boxing in her sleep or something?

Josh closed and widened his eyes at the same time. The lids slowly opened in sheer astonishment.

“Are you—what? Is this . . .” His head was spinning; she would swear she could actually see it. “Are you, like, breaking up with me?”

Students walked by on the path, their faces bright, oblivious.

“Yes.” Her voice was small. What else was there to say?

“Because of this?” He touched the metallic dot at his temple.

“No, Josh. No, of course not.”

“Because I’ll get rid of the goddamned thing. Laura, you are so important to—”

“Don’t, Josh. Please don’t. You
should
get rid of the thing, if you even can. It’s going to, I don’t know, hollow you out.”

“What are you talking about?”

She wasn’t even sure herself.

“You should get rid of it, but that’s not what this is about.”

“What, then? Please tell me, Laura. I know we can work this out.”

“We can’t.” Sure, definite. Like the slap in the face for Ari. You needed to be clear where you stood for everyone’s good. “This is not about the kind of person you are, Josh.”

“You’re not going to say that this is about you, not me, right?”

She was. She was going to say that, God help her.

“Josh, there’s something going on with me, and it’s—”

“I know. I can see that. That’s what I’m here for, to help you with what’s going on. If something is going on with you, do you really think shutting me out is the best idea?”

“You’re part of what’s going on with me. I’m in this relationship because it’s filling in for something that I’m . . .”

“What?”

“Missing.”

He stared hard at her. Goddamn him, there was no anger in those eyes, just desperation, longing.

“Josh . . .” She put a hand on his shoulder, though she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to touch him. “You are kind and smart and funny and compassionate. You’re a lovely, lovely person. But you’re not for me.”

He stared longer, his eyes going shiny.

“Who is?”

“No, Josh, it’s not like that. There’s no one else.”

“I know that. Not right now. But if I’m not for you, someone else is. Who?”

She stared back at him, and all she could feel right now was his pain. The moment she saw Mark undressing and Ari standing back, preparing for his little diversion, she made a decision, one she could only fully understand in retrospect, that when confronted by boys who hurt her, she would not shed a tear. She would be strong, because if you let them do that to you, control your heart that way, then you were never your own person. But it didn’t work so well when the boy in question wasn’t sick, wasn’t a monster, did it?

She was crying. Crying for him.

“I’m sorry, Josh.” Her hand was on his face. “This isn’t fair at all. But this is what has to happen to . . .” She swallowed. “To make me whole. Or something. I’m sorry.”

She moved to stand, but before her fingers had completely left his cheek, he had her by the hand, and he looked up hard into her eyes.

“Don’t do this, Laura.” His voice was low, filled with concern. “For you, as well as me. These last few days, it’s like you want to walk away from your life. You don’t have to be afraid.”

She took her hand away, looked down at him, the tears suddenly drying on her cheeks.

“I’m sorry, Josh. I’m not afraid. For the first time in a long time, I’m not afraid.”

She turned and walked away. From behind her, there was no call, no sound of his voice at all, as though he had simply ceased to exist. She did not turn around.

With that behind her, the urgency, the immediacy of figuring out what to do next began to gnaw at Laura. By the time she was back in her room, it was practically eating her alive. She locked her door—her roommate was in class, wouldn’t return for hours. She went to her cell, snatched it up. Instead of dialing her mother’s number as she intended, she hurled the thing at the wall as hard as she could, where it rebounded invincibly, falling into the bed’s soft welcome, its high-impact plastic construction able to withstand far worse then she could conjure.

“What do you want?” she said to the room, her vision still swimming in black. “Ask me to my face. I don’t understand the note. I don’t understand who the Librarian is supposed to be.”

“God
damn
it,” she said, focusing on nothing in particular. She picked up her cell, dropped it on the floor, and stomped on it hard. The large single plastic eye of its screen glared back at her, invulnerable in its judgment.

She looked around the room, spinning crazily, trying to find something, spot something, not knowing what. She jammed her fists into her eyes and held them, doing deep-breathing yoga exercises that should, theoretically, slowly melt her muscles and calm her nervous system until all her tension was gone. But they were useless, worse than useless. They felt like a child’s tool now, an affront to this impossible and inexplicable fear and rage welling up in her.

She stormed out of the room, downstairs, across the campus to the library. She walked into it, only barely able to keep herself in a proper state of quiet. She marched through the stacks, tracking each librarian on duty, keeping herself in the shadows as best she could so as not to be seen in return.

Follow the librarian. See where he goes, what he does. Turn the table on him.

But which librarian, you idiot? For how long?

She held her final position, watching the reference librarian stare down at his computer, direct a student, stare off into the distance.

“Hey, Laura. What you up to?” A whisper from behind. She turned: Dunphy, goofy smile, red hair, his huge frame lumbering to a stop; a student in her lit course, books clutched under an arm.

“Not now,” she hissed, hurrying past him and out of this stupid, stupid place.

Outside again, she sat on the stone steps, watching students come and go, others on the green washing back and forth from classes like a tide.

A tall boy with cellenses and a leather jacket sitting on a bench in the round seemed to keep turning his dark plastic eyes on her. But after five minutes, so did a girl with braids coming up the steps and a guy jogging by the front and a couple of girls sitting on the lawn with books spread out before them. Dunphy walked past her down the steps, pretending not to look at her, a metallic dot at his temple. Did he have that last week? Did
everyone
suddenly have them now?

Now she kept thinking she was going to see Josh. Or worse yet,
not
see him, even though he was out there somewhere, watching her flail about fruitlessly for answers. Why was she so easily able to imagine enemies everywhere around her?