Near + Far (21 page)

C
urled on the leather couch, Jamie tried to pick a stubborn bit of popcorn kernel from between her teeth, worrying at it with a fingernail. On the TV, a talk show host quizzed a guest resembling a small willow tree. Yet another alien, visiting Earth. She'd taken him/her/it around the city last week.

"We need to talk," Emilio said.

The popcorn was wedged to the point of pain between a side molar and gum. She stared at him. His tone sent a panicky thrill down her spine.

"I've decided to join the PsyKorps," he said. "I haven't had luck getting any other job, and they say I'm qualified. They say one human out of a thousand has the physiology to accept a shunt, and I have it."

"I make enough money for us," she said in protest. PsyKorps? It was unthinkable. He'd become someone capable of riffling through a person's thoughts, picking through their innermost being. "You don't need to sell your soul to the government. My guide job gives us food and a roof over our heads."

More than that, if truth be told. Aliens paid well.

"PsyKorps does good work," he said. "Keeps the airplanes able to fly, for one. Catches criminals. Monitors events of state and provides absolute security where needed."

"God knows what else," she said. She would have said, "You can't," would have asked, "Does this mean you're leaving me?" but the look in his eyes forestalled her. She tried again to unwedge the popcorn, bowing her head so her bangs fell forward, obscuring the tears welling in her eyes.

He had made up his mind, she could tell, and was prepared to resist any argument. Why bother?

After lovemaking that night, he stroked her hair tenderly, still struggling to control his breath. Once the gesture would have suffused her with love, left her sodden as a sponge with helpless emotion.

But now the touch roused a terrible impatience in her. He had caused the pain that led her here, curled in her bed around the embryo of his decision. It felt as though she had fallen in battle. Her enemy knelt beside her, inexplicably tender and remorseful.

All's fair in love and war
,
she thought, one of those cynical-edged observations, brittle as old paper, that had swirled through her mind since Emilio's revelation of his decision.

She pushed away, went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her burning cheekbones, driving away the heat of tears.

When she came back, Emilio was sprawled on the bed, comfortable as a sleeping cat. Light laddered across his body from the streetlight outside the blind. A car screeched past on the street. The area they lived in was respectable, but just barely, and bordered a more dangerous neighborhood. It was what they could afford, if they wanted this much space. If their income doubled, they could move someplace nice, Greenwood maybe or Queen Anne.

In three months Emilio would be a fully active Psi. In three months they'd know whether or not they could stand it, a Psi and a normal living together. Others before them had tried. All had failed. Living with someone who could read your mind when you couldn't reciprocate—it would be like being a rat in a cage, an experimental animal. What lay on the other side of that line? She couldn't imagine it.

Their marriage was a patchwork of threadbare compromise, but she'd thought it was a partnership. Was there some point at which he'd agreed?

He snored and stretched out in his sleep when she nudged him.

She wanted to shake him awake and say, "Can't we go back to the way things were, where I told you about my day and the extraterrestrials I dealt with? Sure, I always saw the envy in your eyes, but there was no
need
for it. I'd share it with you, share every scrap of it. If I could, I'd remote you, let you be the one walking among godlike creatures with just my voice whispering in your ear. I'd ghost for you, become a shadow of my former self. I would have done that willingly. Instead, you cut out my heart without asking, you tore it away and never consulted me, just made it collateral damage, an accident of your own quest."

It was the last realization that pissed her off. She'd been reduced to a peripheral, an odd accessory to his life while on her part, he'd been the piston to her pump. Now she felt as though she couldn't function anymore, as though an integral part had been teleported away, its means of abduction unfathomable.

She hugged the pain to her as though it might fill that void. It was the only thing she could think of, now that he'd gone away, leaving his body behind to let her know what she'd miss.

"I want to go over what the process will be like," Emilio said during dinner. "So you know what to expect."

Jamie'd been too exhausted to cook. It felt as though the day had passed in one weary, numb blur. She'd ordered pizza. It sat on the kitchen table between them, a circle of congealing grease studded with pepperoni wheels.

Why bother
, she thought, but she nodded.

"The shunt won't immediately work," he said. "I'll have to train myself to focus and hear thoughts. They said I could practice with you, would you be up for that?"

He beamed at her, pleased to have figured out a way to involve her in the process that would subtract him from her existence. But she couldn't think of how to put that without feeling as though she were raining on his parade.

"Okay," she said, and put a smile on her lips to match his. She wasn't sure if it fooled him or not.

Aside from that, they didn't talk about it.

It wasn't that it wasn't on her mind constantly. When she woke it was her first thought, and it chased her, circling like the shadow of a shark, into the murky depths of her dreams. She felt submerged, awash, only her arms above the surface to try to signal. Not waving, drowning.

Sometimes she wanted to talk about it, but she was afraid of what he'd say. She was afraid it'd only make him move faster. She had always disliked the inertia of action that sometimes surrounded him. It reminded her unpleasantly of the laissez faire attitude her father had taken to so many things when she was growing up.

But now she prized that quality, thinking that where her words couldn't prevent him, perhaps that force could.

But it didn't.

A handbook arrived from the PsyKorps Institute, mental exercises Emilio was supposed to work on before the shunt was installed, to prepare him for its use. She flipped through it.
Envision water,
it said.
Imagine a pool that is deep and clear. Sunlight plays on the water's surface. Watch the patterns that the light creates.

She closed her eyes and tried to see the pool. But there was only darkness behind her eyes, flecks and freckles of light that seeped below her lashes, the imaginary light that one sees in a darkened room, the hallucinations of luminescence that trail one when half asleep, like ancient acid dreams.

Emilio kept a notebook, as the handbook suggested, detailing his moods and the influences that might affect them: sleep and food and sex, and a précis of the day's activities. He wouldn't watch TV with her, saying that he didn't want those patterns imprinted on his mind. He shied away from music as well, and kept his laptop closed.

He went for long walks in the park near them. He invited her to accompany him, but she declined after the first one. She could tell he wanted to walk in silence, but to her the silence ate away at their relationship, with the sureness of waves eroding a shoreline, erasing its contour grain by relentless grain.

While he was gone, she lost herself in videos, long painful love stories that made her go into the shower and cry, hot water washing away her tears. These bouts left her feeling ragged as a torn towel, fragile and frayed. She would not show this side to him, she kept it shelled inside like an unhatched chick. He would see and despise it soon enough.

She thought to herself that marriage depended on the ability to lie about little things, about daily farts and other human matters. Perhaps it was the lies that kept us human, kept us from being forced to judge publicly, to confront the things that would tear us apart.

The day of the shunt's installation, Emilio rose and sipped some water. They had forbidden him any food the night before. She'd contemplated fixing his favorite meal: steak au poivre, and broccoli with a cheese sauce, and cherry pudding for dessert.
Too obvious.

She drove him to the hospital.

"You don't need to stay," he said. "If you want to just take the car, go shopping, come back in three hours. They say that's how long it'll be until I'm done."

She knew all that. He'd explained it to her several times. But she nodded, smiled and waved goodbye to him as he passed through the hallway. He never looked back at her. She stood there with her glassy smile, watching him go until he was gone. She settled into the orchid-scented waiting room with her paperback.

Trying to read was a futile enterprise, though. The words crawled and slithered along the page like recalcitrant insects, persistently worming outside of meaning. She looked at the page. Three chapters in and she still had no idea what was happening. She didn't want to read any further. A traditional love story might make her cry. She did that a lot nowadays.