Green Eyes

  ‘And in the day, maybe, if you don’t mess the floor or scream too much or spit out your medication, they’ll let you into a big sunlit room, the sun shafting down from high windows so bright the light seems to be buzzing inside your ears and melting the glass and glowing in the cracks. And there’ll be other women wearing the same starched gray shift as you, and their faces will be the same as yours, dulled and lined and depressed about something they just can’t get straight, gnawing their fingers, talking to the cockroaches, shrieking and having to be restrained. Sometimes they’ll wander silent as dust around the room, the loony housewives and the mad nuns and the witchy crone who eats cigarette butts and dribbles ash. And there you’ll be forever, Otille, because they’ll never turn you loose.’

  Otille got to her feet, shrinking from the room but unable to tear her eyes off it.

  ‘They’ll stuff you with pills that turn the air to shadowy water, put larvae in your food that uncurl and breed in your guts, give you shots to make you crazier. Electro-shock. Maybe they’ll cut out part of your brain. Why not? No one will be using it, and nobody will care. The doctors and lawyers will grow gray-haired and fat spending your fortune, and you’ll just sit there under your light bulb trying to remember what you were thinking. And in the end, Otille, you’ll be old. Old and dim and sexless with one sodden black thought flapping around inside your skull like a sick bat.’

  Without any fuss Otille took a stroll into the room. She ran her eye along the walls, her attention held briefly by something near the ceiling. The calmness of her inspection was horrifying, as if she were checking a gas chamber for leaks prior to consigning her mortality to it. Then she turned, her slack features firming to a look of fearful comprehension, and darted at him.

  The attack caught him off guard. He tripped and landed on his back, and she was all over him. Kneeing, biting, scratching. She had the strength of madness, and he was hard put to throw her off and climb to his feet. As she circled, looking for an opening, it seemed to him a wild animal had become tangled in her robe. Her eyes were holes punched through onto a starless night; her breath was hoarse and creaky. Every nerve in her face was jumping, making it look as though she were shedding her skin. She rushed him again. Wary of her strength, he sidestepped and hit her in the ribs. The bones gave, and she reeled against the wall. He aimed a blow at her head, but she ducked; his fist impacted a carved trunk, and ebony splinters flew. Panting, she backed away. She stroked her broken ribs and hissed, appearing to derive pleasure from the wound. Then she let out a feral scream and threw herself at him. This time he drew her into a bear hug, and she accepted the embrace. Her hands locked in his hair, her legs wrapped around his thigh, and she sank her teeth into his shoulder, tearing at his tendon strings. He yanked her head back by the hair. Blood was smeared over her mouth, and she spat something -something that oozed down his cheek, something he realized was a scrap of his flesh - and tried to shake free. He took a couple of turns of her hair around his wrist, pried a leg loose, walked over to the door of the Replaceable Room and slammed her against the wall. She lay stunned and moaning, her hair splayed out beneath her head like a crushed spider.

  ‘Oh, God. Donnell,’ she said weakly. She reached out to him, and he squatted beside her, taking her hand.

  He should finish her, he thought; it would be the kindest thing. But she had regained her humanity, her beauty, and he could not. From the angle of her hips, he judged her back was broken; she did not appear to be in pain, though - only disoriented. She whispered, and he bent close. Her lips grazed his ear. He couldn’t make out the words; they were a dust of sound, yet they had the ring of a term of endearment, a lover’s exhalation. He drew back, not far, and considered her face a few inches below. So delicate, all the ugly tensions withdrawn. He felt at a strange distance from her, as if he were a tiny bird soaring above the face of the universe, a floor of bone and ivory centered by a red plush mouth which lured him down, whirling him in a transparent column of breath. Half-formed phrases flittered through his thoughts, memories of sexual ritual, formal exchanges of energy and grace, and he found himself kissing her. Her lips were salty with his blood, and as if in reflex, her tongue probed feebly. He scrambled to his feet, repelled.

  ‘Donnell,’ she said, her voice rough-edged and full of hatred. And then she pushed up onto her arms and began dragging her broken lower half toward him. Dark blood brimmed between her lips.

  He stepped back quickly and closed the door.