Shelter (34 page)

    Instead she began doing the housework herself dusting, setting tables, polishing silver and scrubbing floors. It was soothing work, repetitive and productive, a form of contemplation. It reassured her that in a world where horrible things happened, she could at least maintain the calm and order of wood and marble and tile. The work exercised her body and disciplined her mind. It was her dance, her prayer, her narcotic. She still saw flashes of metal and blood, still heard Raji screaming, still woke weeping from dreams of ills embrace, but at least there were other things in the world too, tasks both demanding and simple: the challenge of producing a perfectly waxed tabletop, of cleaning blinds and chandeliers.

    "Honey," her mother said, several weeks after Meredith had abandoned her dorm room, "I really wish you wouldn't. It makes me feel like the wicked stepmother in Cinderella."

    "I want to," Meredith said.

    Constance cleared her throat. "All tills cleanin—Meredith, it looks an awful lot like OCD. You've been under an enormous amount of stress. Of course this is when that would develop. It's understenable, but—"

    "Mom," Meredith said with a sigh. "It's not OCD. It's worship. Or maybe it is OCD, but it's still worship. All right? It's helping me."

    Constance grimaced. "I talked to Dr. Honoli. He agrees with me. He can give you meds."

    "For what? The fact that Raji's dead? No meds will fix that! Mom, this is helping me. It's therapy, all right? Leave me alone!"

    Meredith knew that most of the people around her, even the ones who didn't know about her brain damage, thought she'd gone quietly insane, although none of them blamed her for doing so. She didn't care what they thought or whom they blamed. She craved order and cleanliness, the oblivion of antisepsis. She wanted to make the space around her, the space she lived in and could call her own, safe and beautiful.

    She had taken a leave of absence from school, supposedly temporary, although she found herself unable to imagine returning. She no longer attended Temple. At her mother's insistence, she received visitors. Matt and Gwyn brought flowers and fruit and long embraces; they told her it wasn't her fault, and cried, and tried to get her to cry with them, urging her to rage and to mourn. At each new entreaty, she felt herself becoming stonier, more isolated, and finally they went away. Raji's lab supervisor came, and told her it wasn't her fault, and told her that the university was setting up a scholarship fund in Raji's name. "Really?" she said. "For people who are targets of terrorists? Does it come with an armed tank?" Dan winced and bit his lip, and went away. Zephyr came, and tried to tell Meredith that it wasn't her fault, but Meredith didn't even let her fInish the sentence. "So tell me," she said, "when you saw the tape, did you feel sorrier for Raji or the bots?" Zephyr began to cry, and went away.

    Reporters came. She refused to see them. Psychiatrists came. She refused to talk to them. Sonia and Ahmed came; she fled to her room, locked the door, and stayed there, shaking, until she saw them drive away again. She knew they hated her, whether they had given her the shawl or not. The gift had only been for the benefit of the cameras. They had to hate her. If they hadn't hated her before the memorial, they must have hated her afterward, for not being able to thank them more warmly for the gift. She had shoved it into the back of her closet, a mute reproach. She wanted to return it or bury it or burn it, but knew she could do none of those things.

    Through everything, Jack and Constance and Preston cajoled her, pleaded with her, told her they loved her. She wouldn't listen. She found herself humming to drown people out, humming always the same tune. Please don't think it's funny when you want the ones you miss, she hummed, always without words, hoping everyone would go away. There are lots and lots of people who sometimes feel like this.

    Everyone went away. She found herself completely alone with her mops, her sponges, her cleansers and wax and polish. If only he'd been rigged. If he'd had a rig, I could still talk to him now, even if it wasn't really him at all, even if it was only a program. It wasn't fair that her father was still somehow conscious, and that Raji wasn't.

    Her father tried to help her. "I miss him too, Meredith. I miss him terribly. I have been thinking about all of our old conversations. I have reconstructed some of them. If you would like to see—"

    "No," she said. She carried Raji's image in her head, ceaselessly; she couldn't bear to see any others. She acknowledged the paradox: she both wanted Raji out of her head completely and bitterly envied Preston, whose memories of Raji would never fade, who would never fade himself.

    When her memories of Raji began to fade, she would ask Preston for his, if she still wanted them then. Not now. It was too much. She couldn't handle too much memory. She methodically sent away all her visitors, and busied herself with her mops and cleansers and brushes. She knew that she was putting herself back into isolation, but she had to. She was contagious.

    The only person who sometimes managed to break through her armor was Theo. His laughter cheered her when nothing else did. He drew pictures for her, lopsided people and animals and houses which she hung in her room; she read stories to him, about intrepid rabbits and determined trains. On the days when Meredith felt so removed from the world that she forgot to eat, Constance sent Theo to her, bearing snacks. "You eat this apple, Merry. You eat yours and I'll eat mine." "I don't want half this muffin. You eat it." "Hot eggs, Merry. Eat them!" "Merry, Mommy's sad. She mafe cocoa for you."

    Mindful that Theo was rigged, Meredith usually ate the food; she spoke to him more often than to anyone else, and far more gently. Theo, she knew, had rig memories of Raji. The child probably didn't consciously remember the nice man whose shoulders he had ridden on; certainly he wouldn't for long. But after Theo died, when he was uploaded, those memories would be as clear as actual experience: Raji's resurrection. Raji lived on in cypberspace even now, through her father's memories, if not through Raji's own. She supposed he would have wanted that. He certainly would have wanted her to be kind to Theo, of whom he had been truly fond. So she was kind to Theo, for Raji's sake and because she loved the little boy in her own right. Everyone else, she shut out.

    And then one day, as she was on her knees in the bathroom, cleaning the tile with a toothbrush and baking soda, her mother appeared in the doorway. "Someone's here, Merry. Your drafting teacher."

    "Who?" she said. A section of grout was stained here, an ugly brown; she couldn't seem to get it to turn white again. She'd never noticed the stain before, but it was amazing what you saw when you got down with your nose an inch from the floor.

    "Your drafting teacher." Constance's voice was impatient. "I told you that. Get up and go say hello to him, please."

    She didn't get up. Drafting? That had been a million years ago. Before. She had to struggle to remember it, in tiny, dimly lit images, as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. "Professor Zakamura? An old man with a beard? What's he doing here? Tell him to go away."

    "No," her mother said. "It's a young guy. His name is Kevin Lindgren. He brought your drawings. He said you might want them."

    "Oh," she said, frowning. Lindgren, Lindgren. "Oh-the TA." She started humming, and resumed scrubbing the tile. Perhaps lemon juice would work on the stain, or bleach.

    "Meredith!" Constance raised her voice to compete with the off-key melody. "Merry, he was in charge of cleaning out the drafting room and throwing away anything that wasn't claimed, all right? He brought your stuff over here instead. He didn't have to do that. He thought you'd want it."

    "I don't," Meredith said, eyes still on the grout, annoyed that her song had been interrupted. There are lots and lots of people who sometimes feel like this. Why wouldn't they leave her alone? "Tell him to throw it all away."

    "No. I'm not going to do that, Merry. The least you can do is go downstairs and say thank you."

    Meredith looked up, truly perplexed, and Constance said sharply, "No, I'm not going to do it for you! I'm not your servant! It's been four months—it's about time you stopped behaving like a bot and started acting like a human being again! Stop that goddamned buzzing and get off your knees and go downstairs, Meredith Walford! And change into something decent before you do! You're disgusting!"

    Constance turned on her heel and walked away, her footsteps sounding a furiously receding staccato down the hallway. Meredith shrugged, put down the toothbrush, stood up, looked down at her stained sweatpants, and shrugged again. She'd go downstairs to keep her mother off her back, but she wasn't going to change her clothing. Lindgren hadn't been invited; she damn well wasn't going to dress for him.

    He was sitting in the solarium, gazing thoughtfully at one of Constance's prints on the far wall. Meredith stood for a few seconds, watching him watch the shifting patterns of light on the glass covering the artwork. Finally, since he didn't seem to realize that she was there, she said, "You brought my drawings back."

    "Yes," he said absentmindedly, and kept looking at the print. Now he squinted at it. Now he cocked his head. She saw him sketching something with his finger on the leg of his jeans.

    "That was nice of you," she said. "Now you can leave."

    Evidently annoyed, he waved her to silence and kept squinting. Again the fingers moved, tracing squares and lines.

    Arrogant bastard. "Excuse me, this is my house, not a museum. You have to leave now."

    "What?" he said, as if surprised to be spoken to. ''Just a minute. I'm looking at your mother's picture."

    "You can buy prints at half a dozen places in town," she said. "We'll give you a list." But she sat down, curiosity battling with anger. All of the people who had come to the house since Raji's death had done and said exactly what she had expected them to do and say. What had oppressed her more than anything else, perhaps, was the horrible, monotonous predictability of life after tragedy, as if everyone had been handed a hackneyed script and was somehow managing to say the lines with a straight face. Without knowing it, she had yearned for someone to do something different. So far, Theo was the only person who had obliged. Here was another. Theo was sweet and Kevin was rude, but at least they were both different. Which didn't mean she had any intention of being nice to him. "Why are you doing that to your leg?"

    His finger stopped moving, finally, and he turned to face her. "I was studying that central figure," he said crisply. "It's an illusion and a paradox. This painting is supposed to be a two-dimensional representation of circuitry, but if you look at it as a three-dimensional sketch, it's an Escher cube, a Moebius room, a space that doesn't make sense: inside and outside keep shifting on you. I'm wondering what your mother would say if I asked her about that."

    Gaia's gas. Who does this conceited idiot think he is? "She'd say it was a drawing of a circuitry," Meredith said. "She doesn't appreciate overinterpretation. Neither do I."

    Kevin shrugged. "Of course not. Your mother's been pegged as a popular artist, and if she started theorizing about her own stuff, she'd just be laughed at. Which doesn't mean the rest of us can't find other levels. Here, let me show you something." He opened his briefcase, took out a piece of paper and a mechanical pencil, and drew a quick, sure sketch.

    "See?" he said. "See how it keeps turning inside out?"

    Meredith yawned. "Very nice. It's actually a floor plan of my parents' bedroom suite: two sleeping rooms and two dressing and sitting rooms at right angles to them, with that square bathroom in the middle. My mother designed it. She says the angles are avant-garde." Meredith hadn't noticed the shape embedded in the painting, and she was annoyed that Kevin had, but at least she could show that she knew more about her mother's work than he did. And at least this discovery wasn't painful, the way Zephyr's uncovering of Squeaky's acorn had been.

    He gave her a bemused glance. "Not that I'm trying to pry into your parents' personal life or anything, but that raises some interesting questions, wouldn't you say?"

    Taken off guard, Meredith put on her frostiest voice. "No, I wouldn't."

    "Then you're not thinking about it very hard. Ask yourself why she would have drawn the bedroom suite as an impossible figure, something that could only exist in two dimensions. Ask yourself what such a paradoxical element is doing in the middle of a computer circuit that's supposed to epitomize logic and binarity, either/or, one or zero, inside or out. This thing's both at once, neither/nor. You see? What do you think of all that?"

    Meredith's throat tightened. She thought that Kevin Lindgren was entirely too impressed with his own intelligence, and she thought that she shouldn't have told him about the layout of her parents' bedroom. "I don't think any of that is any of your business. Or anyone else's, for that matter."

    Kevin immediately put his pencil down, and looked at her directly for the first time during the visit. His eyes were an unusual deep green. "Of course not. You're absolutely right."

    "Yes," she said, and stood. "I am." She held out her hand. "Thank you for bringing my drawings."

    He didn't stand up. "You're welcome," he said. "When are you coming back to school?"

    She didn't sit down. "I haven't decided. Did my mother put your coat in the closet?"

    "I didn't bring a coat," he said. "It's not cold enough for a coat. Don't you know that? When's the last time you were out of this house?"

    "That's none of your business."

    "You should get out," he said. "It's a beautiful day. The sky's bright blue and the grass is bright green and all the buildings look like they've been polished. You couldn't have done a better job yourself. Come out and see it. I'll buy you a coffee. Remember I said I'd do that? I still want to."