Household Gods

She pulled a strand forward to peer at it out of the corner of her eye. It was dark, dark brown, almost black – nothing like her own light brown shoulder-length professional woman’s cut with its faded blond rinse. The name of the rinse was as clear as if she’d read it on the wall: Amber Essence. She’d chosen it as much for its name as for what it did for her hair.

Nicole lowered the hand with care, folded back the blanket, and rose gingerly to feet that had not, till now, belonged to her. They were filthy, black with grime, hard-soled and ragged-nailed. They were – and this was almost a pleasure – both smaller and narrower than her own broad Austrian farmer’s feet. Cleaned and pedicured, they might have been something to look at.

They protruded from beneath the hem of a garment as completely unlike her Neiman-Marcus sweats as this body was unlike her own. Wool again – no wonder she wanted to scratch – dyed much the same color as the blanket. The rasp of her legs against it told her what her eyes confirmed as she pulled it up: they were desperately in need of shaving, though not grown out as full and shaggy as if they’d never been shaved at all. Under the furze of dark hair they were, like her arms, leaner, narrower, finer-boned, than the ones she’d always owned, with long ropes of muscles in the calves. The ankles were fine, finer than hers had ever been; her legs went to thunder thighs at the drop of a plate of strudel. No thunder thighs here. These were lean but shapely, muscled and strong, as if she – this body – worked out on the stair-stepper every day.

Her foot brushed something under the bed. She reached down and pulled out a pair of sandals that, for fancy leatherwork, would have run into three figures at a boutique on Ventura Boulevard – if they were new. These were anything but. The leather was faded and filthy and sweat-stained, and patched here and there.

For a moment, as she reached for the sandals, she’d touched something else. She hesitated, shutting down visions of skulls and bones and monsters under the bed. Go on. Find out everything.

She stooped and got a grip on the thing and pulled it out. Her nose wrinkled. Bigger than a skull, than two skulls, wide-mouthed, unglazed like the lamps, sloshing with acrid liquid: no doubt about it. She’d found the facilities. A chamberpot. A real, live chamberpot.

She wasn’t dreaming. Dreams didn’t take care of every last detail. Even fantasy gamers didn’t do that – and she’d seen a few when Frank was in his Multiple-User Dungeon phase. Dreams slid over the essentials of life: an unshaved leg, a half-full chamberpot, a bladder that told her in no uncertain terms it would like to finish filling the pot.

So she’d gone crazy, yes? Gone right around the bend. She’d never had such a detailed dream in her life.

She’d never heard of anyone going crazy quite like this. Delusions could come only from your own experience. She knew that. She’d seen it on TV, one night when she’d actually had time to watch, some shrink show or other, or maybe one of those movies, disease of the week, delusion of the decade, whatever. Maybe it was the shrimp she’d had for dinner. No, they’d been frozen. The ones from lunch at Yang Chow? God, shrimp twice a day. Not only was she in a rut; she was repeating herself from one meal to the next.

This sure wasn’t any repetition of anything she’d done before. She was feeling punchy again. She couldn’t get a grip on anything. This body she was in, this room, these things that were all completely and unmitigatedly strange – this was insanity. Had to be. The shrink show had talked about that, too. “Things aren’t real,” some thin intense person had said, rocking back and forth, talking to her – his – its knees pulled up to its chest. “Things don’t connect. The world isn’t there, not the world. You know? Just all this not-realness.”

This was not real, it could not be real, but it was as real as a stink in the nose, a prickle of wool, a taste of sour morning mouth and bad teeth and something she couldn’t identify and didn’t want to.

She got hold of what she could get hold of, which was an increasingly urgent need to use the bathroom. Except that, according to the chamberpot, there was no bathroom.

She glanced at the door. A bar lay across it, a heavy wooden thing lying on dark metal hooks. She had no desire, none whatsoever, to lift that bar and open that door and see what was on the other side of it. Even if it was her bedroom, or a nice safe insane asylum – because it might not be. It might be blank nothingness, or worse: it might be the world that went with this room.

She pulled up the tunic to identify the garment underneath: linen, she recognized that, though it was rougher than her linen suits, and undyed. It looked more like a loincloth than panties, and had no elastic to hold it up. She tugged at it. It came down over hips narrower than her own were – had been. What it had covered…