Small World (33 page)
Leyna turned on the car again. As it chugged patiently, waiting to be shifted up, to run as it was it meant to, she looked around. The surface she was on was smooth, reflective, and hard, a brick-red in color. The sky overhead was the same one that she had seen so long, except that it did seem farther away. The horizon was completely flat in all directions around her. As she turned in the seat, craning to see as far as she could, Leyna made out indistinct shapes and colors but had no name for anything she saw.
So she sped away, not too fast, slow enough to observe what she could. She moved in the opposite direction from Dorothy, not out of any sense that she might escape her, but in distaste. Escape was the farthest thought from her mind. All this was in her own mind. How could she escape herself?
She passed enormous square pillars that supported a roof, a structure that would have to be measured in acres. There was a familiarity about its dimensions but nothing she understood as yet. After some time, she passed another of the strange, heaven-scraping columns. This one was festooned with thick cables that had her think, wildly, of the bean stalk that Jack climbed. Behind her, she was aware that the Giant Dorothy moved, but at a distance.
She stopped the car, suddenly very tired. The red plain around her stretched for hopeless distances. Its nakedness made it seem sven larger and more abandoned than it was. It was a vast dead end; there was no place to go. It was suitable only for racing, only at great speeds.
A knot of anger and resentment formed in her chest. The Giant’s gifts were always sawdust in the mouth. Just another form of torture, she thought, and brought the heel of her hand down on :he horn, driving it into its own well. The blatting rose in an angry crescendo as she pumped up and down and then, when she released it, fell silent.
The mass that was Dorothy was silent, watching. Why should she respond? She was the one in control.
The tiny car jerked and then shot away, turned a perilous
wheelie to face Dorothy and came roaring at her, except that to her ears the roar that Leyna heard was the angry hiss of a hornet. She couldn’t see the tiny face hunched over the wheel of the car but she understood, instantly, the meaning of the sudden fierce race, with her as its goal.
She laughed and stood up. Deliberately, she placed one foot in the path of the little car, too close for it to be able to swerve away. The projectile slammed into her shoe. She felt it. It was like stubbing up against the furniture, a mild ache that would not even bruise. The car bounced off her shoe and stopped.
She picked it up and regretted it immediately. The hood was hot enough to scald. She held it gingerly in her palm. Its tiny occupant flopped like a rag doll in the seat. The windshield was patterned with an abstract sunburst of cracks. The car’s pink metal skin was wrinkled; the bullet end flattened and fissured.
Dolly pulled Leyna’s unconscious body from the little car and deposited her in her bedroom on the neatly changed bed. Brushing back Leyna’s hair, Dolly could see that her forehead was rosy and swelling. The skin was barely broken, dotted with a few dewdrops of blood.
‘Ice,’ Dolly muttered, and remembered that Roger had neglected, while he was busy shrinking ten days’ worth of food for Leyna, to zap a few ice cubes. Even a single cube would be like dropping an old-fashioned cake of ice on her. Besides, the mess from its melting was unthinkable. She would have to crush some herself and use the tiniest pieces.
‘Silly little nit,’ she scolded the still-unhearing Leyna.
While Ruta looked on surreptitiously over the top of her movie magazine, Dolly crushed the ice personally in the food processor. It made her feel wickedly efficient. Roger had charged her with the care of their tiny house guest and no one could say she wasn’t doing it, taking care of her. The thought made her laugh out loud. Ruta dared to drop the magazine and stare at her directly.
‘I spilled some glue. If I freeze it, I can pick it off,' Dolly told her.
Ruta grunted. If she had any real curiosity, it appeared to be satisfied.
In the dollhouse room, Dolly spilled a chip of ice from the bowl she had carried from the kitchen onto one of the miniature washcloths from Leyna’s bathroom. When she piled it gently on Leyna’s forehead, the tiny woman groaned, almost too faintly to be heard. Dolly had folded the cloth neatly in a band, and it looked as if it were going to stay put.
The silly thing was going to have a rotten headache, if she didn’t already, but it was her own fault for being so careless. Too bad Roger hadn’t zapped a little aspirin, too. Perhaps she ought to crush some of her own, but then again, it might be dangerous. Poor little Leyna might just have to suffer the consequences of her own bad temper. Might teach the little beast a lesson.
At least Dolly had done her duty. She deserved a cigarette. Before looking for one, she picked up the tiny pink car from the drive where she’d absently set it while looking after the foolish driver. It was rather sad-looking. Perhaps Roger could fix it. He would be very displeased with his teeny tiny woman when he saw what she had done to his treat. She couldn’t help smiling just a little at the thought.
Leyna had more than a headache when she came to, in darkness that was relieved only by the light from the bathroom, a faint blur of w hite that cast fantastic shadows into the room. The pain in her head was intense, radiating from the enormous tender bruise that was her forehead. She was stiff all over, from the back of her neck to the base of her spine and in all her limbs. Flexing her reluctant muscles as she lay waiting for her vision to adjust to the nearabsence of light, she inventoried a hundred small aches and pains. Sittipg up at last, she felt her bowels lurch, adding their unease to the general symphony of discomfort. She groped her way very :autiously to the bathroom, becoming thoroughly dizzy along the .'ay. Bending her head into her hands, as the room reeled around her, she emptied her bowels in a spasm of delayed reaction.
The dizziness was so persistent and steady that she feared drowning and did not dare soak the aching muscles in a hot tub. 3ack in bed, she kept her eyes closed. It seemed to help with the ■ ertigo. She dropped back into a fevered doze, full of chaotic dreams that were less coherent dreams than nightmare collages, _nderlined in hot sensations of pain. As she thrashed, she found a *et washcloth on her pillow and sucked it for its tepid, soothing moisture. The darkness dispersed at an agonizingly slow pace. Sometime in the predawn, she slipped into real sleep.
She woke to the noise of the wall rising but did not open her eyes. When the wall was replaced and the sound of intrusion ceased, she peeked, pretending to be waking. The morning tray, already announced by its comforting scents of toast and coffee, '■range juice, and eggs, assumed a solid form, within reach on the
commode. A heap of white chunks in a soup bowl sat next to it.
Leyna sat up, suddenly hungry. The quickness of her movement was quickly regretted; she was promptly dizzy and had to close her eyes again and wait for her body to catch up with her. The smells of breakfast were maddening. There was a faint acid undertone that piqued her curiosity. As soon as she was able to open her eyes, she reached, but slowly and carefully, for the mysterious white chunks. A deep sniff and a quick lick identified them: aspirin. The residual ache in her head, so deep as to be mere background music to the rest of her aches and pains, seemed suddenly stronger, as if it wanted the magic potion. She nibbled the stuff quickly, hating the burning acid taste^n her mouth, and washed it down with a slug of orange juice. Breakfast followed, a deeply satisfying, filling experience. At the end of it, with her stomach full and the plates empty of even the smallest crumbs, she realized the aspirin and food together
had
worked magic. The headache and its cohort of lesser pains subsided to mere discomfort.
She felt strong enough to trust herself to the tub for the long soak she wanted, but she moved slowly, like an old person, to minimize the dizziness that was still there, in a lower key. Squeaky clean and dressed, she neatened her bed and reclined on it. The dizziness prevented any other course of action, beyond minimal self-care. There were books at hand, but she could only page them idly, putting them aside in the shadow of headache. Unable to do anything else to distract herself, she was forced to remember and to think about her situation. It was not pleasant; the headache grew stronger.
She was sick of being miserable, of pain, nausea, and hunger. Since the day she had run around the Mall into the sights of that tourist’s camera, she felt as if she had been tortured, like a fly captured by a sadistic boy. A pair of Giants (mad visions) made appearances to her, and she saw no other identifiable human beings. She was not only physically discomforted, she was lonely.
Her rational mind insisted that what had happened to her in this strange doppelganger of the White House was insane, the product of her own disordered brain. And there was nothing illogical about the division in her thoughts; presumably, the insane could and did suspect that they were not sane. Still, her delusions were wonderfully consistent. If they were hallucinations, she had successfully created a tiny world in which she was imprisoned by giants. The details were worthy of a novelist. Perhaps she had missed her calling, and didn’t belong posturing before the television cameras but dreaming at a typewriter.
Her fingers trailed over the quilt of her bed. She could feel the stitches in it, the nap of the fabric. With her eyes closed, she used her other sense to inform her of her world. The faint smell of breakfast, yet lingering about the tray, and the soap from her ~ath, the vague sachet, a potpourri of roses and spices, that perfumed every drawer and pocket of the room. The smell of sunshine itself, a little dusty, reminiscent of a hot iron, and the warmth of it, on her skin. She felt the cloth under her, the smooth w ood of a bed post against her toes. What she touched spoke back to her about herself: her toes were warm and a little leathery on their bottoms; a current of air ruffled the downy hairs on them. The nappy cloth of the quilt brushed her smooth skin and she was aware, because of its caress, of the muscle that lay, dense and ■Mood-warm, under the epidermis. Her jogging shorts were snug around her bottom, and a little loose at the crotch, so that the a arm air penetrated there, among the glossy pubic hairs. She tightened her stomach; once upon a time, before she came to live ;n this house, she had had a husband, and lovers. They had eiothed themselves in her flesh, as she was now clad in her velour shorts. She touched her breasts, weighting the sweat shirt with their silky roundness, and suddenly they ached for what she could not say. A lover’s caress, a child’s mouth, a letting down of milk, a knife. Tears trickled over her cheeks, lining her face, with its fine Dene structure, its velvety, flawless texture. She tasted the tears, salt wetting her soft lips, and good upon the rough tastebuds of her tongue. Her shoulders ached, the back of her neck ached, as if from bearing some insupportable burden, and yet the pain -e minded her of the muscles, the good and faithful meat of her :«n body. All clothed in skin that was more wonderful in its :e\ture and properties than any cloth, breathing and sweating, reeling all there was to feel. She drew air shakily into her lungs, -eard the pounding of her heart that pumped the hot blood throughout her body.
Oh, God,’ she whimpered and hugged herself, curling slowly in .pon herself. ‘Oh, God.’
The agony passed. She lay in the lee of her emotions (like an nr’ant after squalling) in the peace and exhaustion. Lunch was delivered; she didn’t notice until after the smells had penetrated beyond her closed eyes. Pulling herself to a sitting position, she ate, slowly and with great savor, the spinach salad, soft cheeses, crackers, and pate. The wine was a California Riesling, a silky delight. Pacing herself, she felt the first glass' almost immediately in the warming of her knees and thighs; the second was also her last. She recorked the bottle firmly and hid it in the commode. With it, she hid the corkscrew which she discovered, after examination and trial, to be sharp enough to pierce the tip of her finger, given a good hard jab.
Curling up under the quilt, she feigned sleep again. Within the hour, her ears informed her of the Giant Dorothy’s presence. The Giant seemed pleased about something; she was humming. A puff of cigarette smoke wafted into the room. Leyna turned her face to the pillows and held her breath until the smoke dissipated. Distantly, she heard the Giant chuckle. When the tray was gone, and the room silent again, she remained by force of will as still as she could be. She wanted to be sure that her enemy would not return immediately.
At length, she crept out from the cover, smoothed it automatically, and retrieved the art blade and the corkscrew from the commode. Crouched by the side of the bed, she unplugged the bedside lamp from its floor socket and began patiently to strip the black plastic skin from the wire by scraping it with the art blade. When she had exposed about eight inches of bare wiring, she wrapped the wire around the lamp and hid it under the bed. If she was lucky, Dorothy wouldn’t notice its absence.
After tidying up, returning her tools to their hiding place, she drew a bath and had a long soak and a shampoo. The dizzy spells were not quite so insistent, but she was not sure if they were really diminishing or if she was just getting used to being chronically lightheaded. After her bath, she spent some time poking in the wardrobe, which was now filled with her Barbie doll clothes. Finding nothing she wanted to be caught dead in, she pulled on her shorts and sweat shirt once again.
Suppertime came around and found her genuinely napping. She woke to the prodigious clatter of the wall’s removal and pushed herself up into a sitting position with exaggerated care.