And the next time when she made love to him it would be real.
Minako lay in her bunk, staring up at the wire mesh overhead, and at the shoes of the man up there.
The monster …It was what she had to call them, no compassion anymore, they were the monster! The monster had made her feel awful things.
One minute she had been terrified and the next she had begun laughing hysterically and the next she was crying, sobbing, tears running unchecked down the side of her face and into her ears.
The monster’s faces had laughed and sneered, and the smiling one had congratulated the other one on discovering this wonderful new game.
How many squares were formed by the wire mesh floor above her? Count and multiply. One, two, three, four, five, six. She counted to fifty, noted that the fifty-first square had a little smudge of green paint; that would make it easier for her to go back if she lost count.
Fifty-two, fifty-three . . .
At some point they had reached her motor controls and had made her right leg twitch painfully.
“Look! Look at that!” Charles had exulted.
“Hah!” Benjamin had said. “Do it again!”
So Minako had sat there spasming, her leg squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, a human puppet.
“Imagine what else we could do,” Benjamin said in a voice that made Minako’s flesh creep.
“Alas, we must return to the more important business of helping this girl to let go of her fear. She is in need of our help, yes?”
Benjamin didn’t answer. But the wild jerking stopped, and a while later the confused memories began to play out again.
There were one hundred and seventy-eight squares in the mesh along the longer axis. Now to count to shorter axis. One, two, three . . .
She had suddenly remembered her father, as a huge, moon-size face looking down at her in her crib. There was a mobile of blue-andgold birds beside him. She had not understood his words. She didn’t yet understand any words.
She had found herself scrubbing her hands in the bathroom sink while her mother called to her to hurry up. In those days the OCD had been all about hand washing. That symptom had lessened, thankfully, but had been replaced by counting.
She saw disjointed, irrelevant visual memories—sand, a leaf, the bars on her playpen, her best friend from fourth grade, Akiye.
She heard audio memories, like a corrupted download that skipped from snatches of conversation to the sound of the wind to a barking dog to something that scraped to something else that pulsed.
A heart. Not hers, but so close. Her mother’s heart, as she had heard it in her mother’s womb.
They were opening her up like a book and reading her. Not that they understood, not that they saw in detail, for their comments were more general.
“That seemed sad,” Benjamin would say, and his brother would say, “Mine felt angry.”
They were leeches attached to her emotions, feeling what she felt in some way that was both distant and intimate, like being groped by someone wearing thick gloves.
And then—
“Gah.” said Benjamin. “The little pig has wet herself.”
She had felt the truth of it. She had wanted to start crying, but she had never really stopped.
“Disgusting. I can’t go on, not until she’s cleaned up. KimKim take her back to her lodge,” Charles had said.
“I need a rest anyway,” Benjamin agreed. “Min! I’ll have a cocktail. I’ve earned it, eh?”
KimKim had hauled Minako, shamed and defiled, back to the lodge. “Take a shower. Change clothes,” he’d said harshly.
And now she lay counting the squares in the mesh and hoping against hope that when she multiplied the two sides she would get a lovely, beautiful number.
TWENTY
They danced.
Anthony Elder and Jessica …He had forgotten her last name.
How had he forgotten her last name?
They danced in a club where two hundred dollars and a plausible fake ID did the trick. There were advantages to being the AFGC
golden boy.
They danced on a parquet floor crowded with twentysomething
white guys in suits, their ties loosened and sweat matting their conservatively cut hair. They danced amid women in sexy-mannish
business suits who wore moderate, serious-lawyer heels and threw
their hair around a lot.
The music was pretty weak, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
They were dancing, a dude and his girl. His girl who blew away every
other female in the room.
That last part, the part about walking around with a stunning
beauty, he’d almost become used to that. The looks. From the guys,
from the women, the looks that said, Man, you are so not in that girl’s league. But now it was different. He was still not in her league, but
now she was free, and every moment she spent with him . . . “Having fun?” he yelled into her ear, straining to be heard over
the music.
“Uh-huh.”
“Really?”
He heard the insecurity in his own voice. He sounded needy.
Then she smiled, and it was a different smile. No one else would
notice, but he did. She was flushed with pleasure. Her eyes, her amazing eyes, were bright, and they watched him.
Gratitude. That’s what he felt. How strange. Gratitude. Like he
wanted to thank God up in heaven.
It was real. That was the thing: it was real.
The dream came back to her as she danced.
Buried up to her neck.
Napalm in her veins.