Benighted (42 page)

“Why did you come back here? After everything that happened here, how could you stand to be back in this building?”

He flexes his hands. “I don’t like black spots in my mind. I didn’t want my last memories of this place to be what happened downstairs.”

That’s what he says, that he wants to come back to a place where we put him through the Inquisition, because he wants better memories of it. Black spots in the mind. Brain damage at birth. “You’re a better person than me,” I say.

He shrugs. “I’m out of their reach. They can see me but they can’t do anything about it. It’s sort of satisfying. No one can do anything to me now. Except maybe you.”

I sit at my desk, and I think about what he said.

I think about getting away with things.

Somewhere on the other side of this is the woman I wanted to be, the woman who would have done what I should have done, who would have known what it was. Not someone cross-hatched with scars, not someone carrying an armful of dead babies. Are there parents who accepted Parkinson’s offer? People who know what he did to children?

Johnny did. When Johnny tried to protect the new children Parkinson shattered the back of his neck with a silver bullet.

Seligmann will go down for that. We give the doctor a scapegoat, we wash his sins away. Johnny is silenced. Parkinson can tell himself that nothing ever happened, and no one will say otherwise. He can walk the streets like an innocent man.

I think about what Paul said, about wanting his last memories to be better ones.

When Becca comes to see me, she’s impressed at the look of my apartment. I’ve washed the floors, the shelves, the windows, the curtains, I’ve thrown away half of what I own. There were a couple of days where I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t even stand without pacing, and I ended up walking to a hardware shop and buying cans of paint. My living room has become paler. Becca calls the color cream, I call it bone. It looks all right, I think. Different, anyway. I just couldn’t stand being surrounded by red walls.

She sits Leo on the sofa beside me, leans him back, and he keeps upright; his spine is flat and sturdy, he’s balanced. I shake his hand and tell him what a clever boy he is, and he tips forward into my lap. I hoist him up, let him gnaw at me with his sharpening gums. My free hand rests on his head, the round warm little skull sheltering his clean, unbruised brain. As he nips and scrapes my skin, I hold on to him. Parkinson delivered him. I saw it happen. I remember asking Parkinson if he would come feet-first like he should, saying that Becca didn’t want a bareback baby. If I hadn’t been there, might Parkinson have looked at the notes, seen Becca had a bareback sister and decided she was a prime candidate for a mutilated child?

His teeth on the heel of my hand are becoming too painful, so I pull away and let him bite my fingers. His chest is barely wider than my palm, and it rises and falls against me, fast and steady. My sister’s perfect son. Have I saved him?

“Becca,” I say over Leo’s head, “I need to ask you a favor. A big one.”

When Johnny went to see Parkinson, he went alone. He took a gun, and Parkinson took it off him and shattered his skull.

When I go, I go with my sister. Her thriving son rides in a stroller before her, and she waits with me. She doesn’t quite understand, but when I tell her I can’t explain, she comes with me anyway.

The foyer carpet crushes under my feet like moss, the walls glow. There’s a pretty receptionist with amber freckles and neat white teeth who smiles up at me.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asks.

“I don’t,” I say. “But I wondered if it would be possible to see Dr. Parkinson. It needn’t take very long.” She wrinkles her forehead. “Could you give him a message, at least?”

“Of course.” She reaches for a pen; it’s black and glossy with a gold band around it.

“Could you tell him I’ve been thinking about what he said?”

Her lashes flick down as she watches her hand write the message. I’ll never know if she knows.

We sit in the elegant reception room for more than an hour before we’re finally allowed through. I take the scarf from around my neck and dangle it above Leo’s face to pass the wait, and he reaches up for it. He can grab things now, he’s accurate. He catches it every time.

When Dr. Parkinson finally appears in the door, Becca stands, gathers Leo up, and walks in with me. I glance at her, indicate she can wait in the foyer if she wants, but she shakes her head, takes a firmer grip on her son and walks ahead of me through the door.

I study Parkinson as I come in. All the things I’ve noticed before, the straight back and clean hair, the skin aging smoothly as fine suede, they’re still there. His nails are pink and rather wide, the pale cuticles rise in a steep curve to cover half the area. I look him over for marks, scars, but my eyes slip up and down his face, finding nothing. He can’t have passed a life with no cuts or slashes, I know. He’s just a lyco. Nothing’s cut him so deep that it wouldn’t heal at the end of each moon night.

“How are you, Ms. Galley?” he asks. There’s no aggression there, not even unwillingness, which surely any straight doctor would feel if a patient turned up and demanded to see them in the middle of a working day. Jones was as good as his word, there’s been nothing on the news about me arresting Seligmann, but Parkinson knows I work for DORLA. That I’m a bareback. That’s all he thinks he needs to know about me.

“I’m very well, thank you. I do hope you’ll forgive me turning up unannounced like this.” I’m a legal adviser in a government department, and I work hard. I’m a professional. I can do a civil voice as well as he can, if I know I need to.

“That’s quite all right.” He glances over at Becca. She’s sat herself down in a chair in the corner, and is sitting Leo up on her lap, pulling his shirt straight.

“You remember my sister, I’m sure,” I say. “And Leo. You delivered him.”

Parkinson glances from me to her, just for a second. He doesn’t look certain, but I sound confident about Becca’s presence, and he’s waiting for me to confide in him. He can’t afford to protest. “How nice to see you again,” he says.

Becca nods, and raises Leo’s hand as if in greeting.

“I hope you received all the results satisfactorily,” he says to me.

He means the letters confirming that I’m still all right, that nothing has made me sterile. “Yes, thank you.”

He’s waiting for me to make the next move, but I leave a pause.

“I understand you had something you wanted to discuss,” he says in the end.

I smile. “Yes. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about it, and—well, I’m interested in what you said. But there’s a few things I wanted to get straight. I just wondered if I could discuss them with you first.” I sound like I’m leveling with him.

He smiles back at me and takes a seat. “Of course. Any questions you have, I’m happy to answer.” It’s a prepared sentence, one he must have said many times before.

“The thing is—well, this isn’t my area. I was wondering about the legalities of it, that’s the first thing.” He doesn’t have to hear the warning that I’m a lawyer in that if he doesn’t want to. I sit myself down opposite him and wait for him to answer.

“I wouldn’t concern yourself with the legalities too much,” he says.

“I am concerned, though.” I don’t sound forceful, just unconvinced.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” he says pleasantly. “I just follow the laws as they stand.”

“As long as they’re applicable.”

“Yes indeed. You have to exercise a little common sense when it comes to laws that are out of date.”

I smile at him. “I think you’ve just told me my whole career in miniature.”

“Your career?”

“Didn’t I mention it? I’m a lawyer.” There’s a swift, small instant of silence. “I specialize in curfew law and anmorphic law generally.”

“That must be interesting,” he says. His voice is too polite for a conversation this far along.

“Yes, you see, that’s why I’m wondering. Most of my colleagues are involved in DORLA law somehow, and—well, if I took this course, I’m wondering about confidentiality. I’m not sure how it would be received.”

“Confidentiality goes without saying.” He sounds almost emphatic in defense of his profession. “Cases like this are entirely personal. It’s a matter of individual choice, and there’s no question of revealing the patient’s decision.”

“Really?”

“Of course. If you make a decision about your child’s future, of course you have the right to keep it to yourself.”

“I’m not sure they’d consider it a decision I had a right to make.”

“Of course you do. No one else does.”

Becca sits quiet in the corner. Leo snuffles in her arms.

“You think it’s my decision, then?”

“Of course I do.” He looks almost pleased at the opportunity to expound. “Medicine has come such a long way since the days of those laws you were worrying about, Ms. Galley. We can do so many things now that would have been unimaginable even twenty, thirty years ago. Patients have every right to take advantage of the new techniques available.”

“What’s the point of discovering something new if people don’t get to use it?” I ask the question quietly. Behind me, I hear Becca shift Leo on her lap.

“Exactly.” A smile lights up Parkinson’s face. I’ve said something he believes in.

“Even if it’s not really ethical?”

“Excuse me?” The smile goes, he looks at me in perplexity.

“I mean, surely you don’t have to do something just because you can?”

“You should give the patient all possible options, Ms. Galley.” He’s frowning at me now, his eyes twitch toward his watch.

“Do you, though?” I say. Becca shifts in her seat, I hear the rub of fabric against leather. She never liked arguments.

“Excuse me?”

“It just seems to me unlikely that you’d get agreement from many DORLA members. Do you think so? I’m just concerned that it’s the patient’s decision.”

“I’m sorry, how does this affect your condition?” Authority rises in his voice, years of making decisions.

“I just wondered how often…The thing is, I just wanted to know. I know what a bareback would think of it, what most barebacks would think of it. That’s why I doubt you always consult your patients, I mean, beyond a few oblique soundings-out they might not recognize for what they are. I just wondered—” I almost say “what a man like you,” but I don’t, I say, “I just wondered what you think makes it acceptable. Injuring babies at birth. Turning them into…” I spread my hands wide, almost in a shrug, the white thick scar on my forearm upwards, “well, into this.”

“Ms. Galley—” He stands up.

“Johnny Marcos,” I say.

He stops. “What did you say?”

I look blank-faced. I keep looking at him. “You couldn’t know what life is like with this disability. You’re an intelligent man, though, you must be able to think about it.”

He sits back into his chair, slow, not looking away from me, not answering.

“It’s really a bad life,” I say. My voice betrays me, it shakes for a moment, and I curl my fingers up tight, covering my soft palms. “You know about the miscarriage I had, I told you about that. That was from a lune attacking me. And the thing is, nobody was surprised. It was generally agreed that I got off easier than I might have.”

Leo whimpers in the corner, and Becca shushes him. I don’t turn and look at her, but I hear her voice, tight as a stretched rope.

“We can’t afford psychiatrists,” I say. “But we suffer just about every abuse in the system, one way or another. And there aren’t any compensations.”

His hands rest on the desk. The fingers are curled, as if relaxed, but tendons stand out at the knuckles, and I see he’s holding them in that position, stiff like spiders.

“You’ve probably heard this before,” I say. “You do remember Johnny Marcos, don’t you?”

He doesn’t move.

“Are you thinking about that?” I ask. “All this time you thought I was a patient?”

“What do you want?” he says. It’s the voice of a man talking to a blackmailer, a mugger.

“I want you to keep your hands where I can see them, to begin with.”

“May…”

I glance over my shoulder, and hear my voice going soft. “If you want to wait in the lobby, that’s okay. He’s seen you, he knows you know I’m here.”

Becca looks at me, then at Parkinson, and shakes her head. Her face is pale and her arms are tight around her son, but she stays in her chair.

“It’s all right,” I tell Parkinson. “In the way you’re thinking, it’s all right. I’m not here to blackmail you, or arrest you. That’s not my department. I’m not going to get between the mills of DORLA and you.” He thought he was safe. I can see it in his face, no one’s mentioned Johnny Marcos to him before this moment. Maybe they’ll come for him one day, quietly, in secret; maybe they won’t. If they do, the day they do, will I get to hear about it?

He looks up at me, and I see his face draw itself tight. He looks like a younger man, steady and calm. “I don’t think you could if you wanted to.” I raise my eyebrows. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. What is it you want, Ms. Galley?”

“I want to know why you did it.”