Slow River

“No. It’s a job, just like any other. You don’t begrudge Jamaican cane cutters a smoke to make their work less monotonous, do you? Or Chileans a good chew of coca leaf to get them up the next mountain trail where the air’s too thin for anything except their goats. So why deny yourself?”

“Because I hate what we do.”

“You just said you enjoyed it.”

“I do, at the time.”

“Then you’d rather not enjoy it?”

“I’d rather not do it at all.”

“And you’d rather not eat, too?”

“There has to be another way! We could use a fake PIDA, a good one, to get a job. We could-”

“We have a job.”

“I hate it! It makes me feel ashamed, and I’m sick of being ashamed.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You haven’t hurt anyone.”

“I’ve hurt myself. This is my body, my-”

“Temple, right” Spanner shook her head. “It’s not a temple, it’s a sack of meat.” She slapped herself on the thigh. “A tool made of muscle and skin and bone, to be used the same way we use any other tool.”

“No.” Lore was horrified. “Your body isn’t just a tool like a… a screwdriver. It is you. What it does and feels makes you who you are. Don’t you see that?”

“You are who you fuck?” Spanner’s eyes were challenging. “Then who does that make you?”

“Someone I’m ashamed of.” And Lore understood with blinding clarity why Stella had killed herself. To be used like a receptacle, a commodity, and to know it, to be helpless before it, and then to see that helplessness reflected back at her every time her eyes met her abuser’s across the table, every time she saw herself in the mirror. There would never be any way to escape that kind of shame. She looked at Spanner, who was waiting with her eyebrows raised. “What happened? What happened to you, to make you feel you have to do this?”

“Nothing had to happen. I’m not some pathetic victim, reacting instead of acting.” She folded her arms. “I’m simply a realist.”

Lore stared at her, then shook her head tiredly.

“You don’t believe me?”

But that was not what Lore had meant by the head shake. How could she argue against someone’s reality?

She looked at Spanner for a long time. At the hair that needed combing, the light blue eyes she had seen cry only once, at the beginning of the wrinkle on the left side of her mouth, where the muscles pulled when she laughed. She wanted to hold Spanner close, stroke her hair, tell her it was all right, she didn’t have to be a realist all the time; she, Lore, would let her dream, let her stretch and reach and try, and if she failed, then it wasn’t the end of the world.

But Spanner’s pupils were tiny and her arms were still folded and her face was like a mummy’s: thin, drawn too tight, used up too early. She had never had the chance to play, to laugh without calculation, without looking over her shoulder. Kittens should be round.

Lore was suddenly very, very tired. “I’m going to lie down.”

She went into the bedroom and drew the curtains against the lights outside, The close, dark air reminded her of the tent. She felt trapped. There had to be a way out. For both of them.

She fell asleep and dreamed of Stella, surrounded by her friends at Ratnapida, laughing, watching the net charity commercials, thumbing her PIDA into the base of.the screen and sending thousands to some aid organization Lore had never heard of. Then jetting off to some other island paradise to do the same thing. Always traveling. Running, running, but never getting away. Stella, who had escaped by dying.

When Lore woke it was dark, and she knew how they could escape.

* * *

I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling stiff and sore, as though my body had tried to rearrange itself physically to fit three people inside one skin. I felt denser, more closely packed. Solid and strange. There was a message on the screen from the plant: shifts were back to normal. I had received four other calls, all aborted without leaving a message.

The flat was stuffy. I went down to Tom’s. “I brought you a recording of the…” I was suddenly embarrassed. Scam, I thought, fake commercial, and was ashamed. I held out the disk. He took it. “This is yours, too,” I pulled the small packet of debit cards from my pocket. “We got more than I thought. There’s about five thousand here.” It was more than the share we had agreed upon, but he needed it more than me. Now it was his turn to look embarrassed, but he took the packet. “I thought Gibbon might want a walk.”

We walked along the canal, the dog at the fullest extent of his leash. A stiff wind pushed the clouds along at a tilt and slapped water up against the banks. The air smelled of weeds and wind and Gibbon’s coat. We saw two Canada geese landing in a wide dike. Gibbon ran for them, barking and dragging me behind him, but the geese just ignored us. He wanted to run some more, so we did, feet thudding on the densely packed dirt of the towpath, mouths open.