Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (16 page)

“You have a problem too, you know,” he said.

“Why?” She recoiled. “What? Because I…
modify
myself? Look at indigenous tribes and stuff. People have been doing it for ages.”

“Not that.” Nick gestured at her face. “
This
.” He reached out and placed one hand on those ridges of thin scars along her calf. He felt them, really felt them. It was like a topographical map brought to life under his palm.

She smiled as if she held the secrets of the universe somewhere back in her throat, and
wouldn’t he like to know.

“You might be interested to know,” she said, “it brings a certain clarity, the cutting.”

Just then the scene jerked ahead for Nick, but only by a second or so. Still, he could feel it, like the woozy rush of waking up with the sensation that you’re falling. And the glass that had been in his hands was now a mess of shards on the floor. He gripped his knees and tried to settle his breathing.

“It just happened?” Bridge said.

He nodded. “What did it look like?”

She only shrugged. “It wasn’t so long,” she said at last. “Don’t worry.”

“You were talking about clarity?”

“Right. Like this.” She plucked a hair from his head. Nick flinched and scratched at it.

“Were you awake just then?”

He was. He could see it now, silly as it must be, but he could see it all unfolding before his eyes. Like when he would cry over a scrape as a kid, and his dad would swing his fist overhead, joking,
I’ll give you something to cry about.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

She shrugged.

He turned his head from side to side, trying to shake the idea away. “What on earth is the matter with you? With us?”

Bridge laughed. “Nothing. This is just living.”

He felt revolted and sad and captivated all at once. The light was glinting off her bright, dyed hair and bouncing from metal to metal along the contours of her face. Was she the future or the past, a vision or just the flattest, basest reality? Had she come down to save him or pin him to the ground? He didn’t care. He felt the blood sizzling through his capillaries like the spray of the cars outside, and he wanted to see it, to pry apart the shell of his skin and see what he was made of. Still, he was afraid to look directly at her, so he stared ahead into the dark, empty street, and reached across the couch for her hand. He said, “Show me.”