Nothing Sacred Part 4

MOMO 6.

I pointed to my pail and informed the guard I was ill and needed a doctor, in Chinese, which I don't think he understood. It seems to me that this meal was brought much sooner than the other one. More water too. Wish I had a toothbrush. My mouth tastes vile enough that it alone is good reason to toss my cookies.

MOMO 7.

d.a.m.n. I never understood why solitary confinement was such a horrible punishment before-all these years when I wished everyone would go away and leave me alone so I could study. I'm learning.

Sensory deprivation is such a nice civilized term for being buried alive, like one of the old anchorites.

What I wonder is why? And why me? I didn't do anything to be punished for. I'd already met the men.

How could she know how badly I'd need company now when I didn't even know? Guess it must follow a pattern. She didn't seem stupid, exactly. I can't figure her out. She looks so young-kind of an avant-garde Red Guard, I suppose, the Chinese equivalent of the Hitler Youth or the Cambodian kiddie killers of the Pol Pot. I wonder if their eyes looked like that too-no lines around the edges, no furrowed brows, no droopy lids to make them anything but wide and s.h.i.+ny and yet old and hard, but with that kid's love of seeing what will happen next-I saw that look on some of the troops back in Katmandu.

It reminded me of some old tunes in Granddad's collection, songs with lines like "So I took my razor blade, laid old Reuben in the shade. Started me a graveyard of my own." Her eyes are like that.

Old and cold but with a little theatrical flair about them, a little sensationalism, like a yellow journalist enjoying her own prose when she writes about a ma.s.s murder. Yuck. I tend to underestimate her when she overplays the propaganda bit so that she sounds like some kind of a missionary. I have to watch intellectualizing my response to her too much. Abject fear is what she wants. That's easy. What's hard is maintaining a little control. It would be easier if I weren't so d.a.m.ned sick all the time. Vomiting and stomach cramps are killing me. Can't think about that. Think positive. Yeah.

So, okay, positive. I'm not as deprived of input as she thinks. I have the paper and also have this dim bulb, which may not let me sleep too soundly and keeps me from telling day from night, but at leastallows me to find the paper with my pen. I have the generator's rock and roll for company-I can make up all kinds of lyrics to go with that beat, "Bin in this camp too long, whup!"

Then there's the scrabble of rats, the opportunity for a sniff of fresh air my ceiling hole affords and my s.p.a.cious cell, which, compared to some of the little boxes I've read about some POWs occupying, seems like the honeymoon suite of solitary accommodations. Yes, my blessings are legion but, I hate to say it, it doesn't cheer me one f.u.c.king iota.

Okay, then. There's the changing decor as the ceiling hole dribbles a constant patter of rock and plaster and the companions.h.i.+p it affords when it s.h.i.+nes, periodically, with bright feral eyes before little slick-furred bodies with long skinny tails plop to the floor to investigate my slop bucket for cast-off momo. Better the bucket than me. I do not discourage these visitors, because if I can ever digest anything again, I may decide to add meat to this vegetarian diet I'm on. Then too, a more enterprising prisoner might see the ceiling hole's potential as an escape route. But it is really very small and I ask you, escape to where? Those stalwart men I met when I first arrived, if they are truly prisoners, have been here years and years without finding a way back across the mountains. Far be it from me to show them up. But maybe with perseverance I can open the room up so I can see something else. I've memorized these d.a.m.n walls.

LATER.

Something's gone wrong. The generator has stopped. Could it have been what I did? I was trying to enlarge the hole and even though I didn't seem to be making any progress, all of a sudden all this dust and s.h.i.+t started falling into the cell, as if a whole room above was collapsing on me. I shoved my hands up against it and finally dammed the flow of debris, but I coughed so hard I started puking again. d.a.m.n, there's no air. I'll bet the generator pumps it in. I'll bet the guards are asleep and don't know it's broken.

How far down am I, anyway?

Mixed with the rancid fat/B.O. stink there's another smell, fainter, sweeter, sickening-toxic gas?

That does it. I'm yelling for the guards.

AT LEAST A DAY LATER, MAYBE TWO (BUT NO MOMO).

So much for calling the guards. If the place burns to the ground, floods, anything, I'm dead. They came running when I screamed and I tried to tell them in Chinese about the generator and the gas, but the woman guard hit me across the mouth. I knocked her arm away and tried to get past her out the door.

She and the man threw me back on the stone couch and all the time I'm struggling with them, trying to tell them about the generator. Finally, she pulled a roll of tape out of her pocket and taped my mouth shut.

They tied me up and left me there. She made an impatient shus.h.i.+ng gesture as she left the room, like I was a kid. Boy, I'd hate to have had a mother like that. Dust sifted into my eyes and nostrils and I couldn't move my head far enough to avoid it. The ropes bit into me where the stones didn't.

I felt my circulation shut off and my skin start swelling, ballooning out so that I pressed into the stone on all sides. I thought: anytime now I'll burst out of these ropes and the tape will pop right off my mouth and I'll start screaming again, sputtering around the room, spurting blood and breaking bones.

My gorge rose and I gulped and swallowed and choked down every drop of moisture in me trying not to throw up, because I would have choked to death, with the gag. The rats started trying to burrow into my clothing and all I could do was wiggle and make the ropes bite into me harder to try to chasethem away. That made me even more nauseated. If they bit me, it would hurt and maybe the infection would kill me later, but if I vomited, I'd drown in my own juice.

I exhaled as much air as I could through my nose, blowing away the dust, held it, and inhaled, taking in as much oxygen as I could. Or toxic gas. If it was toxic gas as I'd believed, then it might be a better way to die. But the guards hadn't been bothered by it.

All at once the generator kicked in again, and the throb that had once seemed so faint reverberated like a jackhammer through the stone of the cot and walls, each beat booming through my body until my heartbeat was absorbed into it and my breaths skipped two, then three sputters, then four, lengthening, quieting, as I tried to forget where I was and lose myself in that mechanical pulse.

At some point another sound surfaced beneath the throb and mutter, a sound that had been there all along, surely, but that must have been drowned out by the rustle of my clothing and the sound of my breathing. Now it came deep and sonorous, a chant, rising at times then droning away.

Words. I heard words. Most of the chant was like a long groan, a long "oh" sound stretched to infinity, but then, underlying it, were the words. They grew louder, were coming closer.

And slowly, as I listened, I lifted my head, my neck, my shoulders from the cot, very carefully and silently so as to keep in touch with the sound. The chant was not Chinese, not Latin, and certainly not English, though at times the words, phonetically, seemed to be-"war-lord, war-wh.o.r.e, glory-war" over and over again. Then the key s.h.i.+fted, the pitch rose.

My eyes flew open and just for a moment I caught the wall in the act of breathing. It mimicked my breath. When I released mine, the wall released the breath it had been holding and folded in toward me, as if it was the inside of a great lung. Watching for it to expand again, I glanced down and saw myself still lying on the cot, bound and gagged, with my eyes closed.

"Oh," I remember thinking, "so that's it. I'm having an out-of-body experience. Grandma Viveka warned me there would be times like this. Does this mean I'm dying?"

I decided it must because in the doorway sat the old woman doctor, the colonel, dressed in her guerrilla nomad garb and sitting crosslegged in a lotus pose, staring at me. As I watched, she retreated, never breaking the pose, through the closed door. In fact, she sat-well-within the door for a long time, still staring at me. Her face was so perfectly composed that even her wrinkles were arranged in a methodical design possessing a harmonious beauty which would have astonished the surgeons at home who considered only youthful smoothness beautiful.

But whether I was dying or only dreaming I needed to get my astral-self-out, away from the cell.

The doctor nodded a long slow nod that took as long as three phrases of the chant, which was now enhanced with what sounded like a brushed drum or cymbal. I stepped through the door and into the corridor.

Light and the music of the chant flowed through me. I was within the chant, my bare feet sliding along cool tiles instead of the rubble and dirt the floor had consisted of when I was first imprisoned. On graven beams of precious wood spanning the stone walls, animals played and lovers twined, the flickering of the b.u.t.ter lamps in sconces below lending animation to the carvings, so they danced in the smoky glow.

Within a horde of spectral figures, I glided past rooms glittering with filigree and swathed in sunlit smoke. Within the rooms people swayed gracefully as they moved about at their daily business. Thewindows and deep double doorways beyond them were filled with snowy mountain vistas.

Through one such doorway I entered a broad courtyard. Above and below it gleamed golden roofs and I saw that I was no longer in the underground prison, but in a palace with more tiers than a wedding cake or a California cliff house. The entire edifice was dwarfed, however, by the perfect, conical peak which rose thousands of feet above it. Gardens and rhododendron trees swept down the mountain path from the palace to the foot of the small mountain containing the buildings. Below the path an aquamarine lake spread sparkling to the foot of the peaks opposite.

Although tides of exotically dressed people rolled up the stepped pathway, I slid easily through them and ran toward the lake. But the farther I ran, down the hill and between the blossoming trees toward the cool blue expanse, the fainter the chanting grew until it was suddenly overpowered by a dull pounding, a faint jingle, a grating, and a sharp pain as something was yanked from my face at the same time my legs banged against a wall as I tried to keep running.

The transition from hallucination to reality blurred when I sensed that the guards who had just entered my cell, a woman in thick old-fas.h.i.+oned spectacles and a man I didn't see very clearly, were apparently trying to be human. The man thrust forward an orange quilted uniform that was very much like the blue outfits the guards wore, though theirs were accessorized with boots and belts and hats and such.

The woman carefully finished untying me and even chafed my wrists and ankles, then handed me the uniform and indicated a dish of water and a sliver of soap she'd brought. Tentatively, she made was.h.i.+ng motions on her own chest in case I was unfamiliar with the procedure. I swear the man even turned his back when I stripped and wiped up my mess with my flight suit. She watched, though, while I dressed in the orange outfit.

"Thanks," I said. "That's better. Anybody for a hand of canasta?" I thought she was almost about to smile. Instead, almost regretfully, she pulled out two pairs of handcuffs. With one pair she cuffed me to the man, with the other pair to herself, and the three of us sidled through the door and marched down the hallway, into another hallway, through a maze of ever ascending twists and turns until we pa.s.sed a door I was almost certain was the one to Wu's office. That puzzled me, because I thought they were taking me to see her. Then I wondered if I was to be shot instead. They had to half drag me up the stone steps, my feet stumbling on the smooth gullies worn in the stones by the tread of many previous soles.

But I was too dazed from the dream to be very frightened. If they shot me it would relieve the tedium at least, part of me said. And as we emerged into the fresh air and canopy-shaded suns.h.i.+ne, it seemed worth the risk of being executed if only they would do it outdoors. The air I found so thin and oxygen-impoverished when I first arrived now seemed rich and winy compared to the miasma of my cell.

I gulped it greedily, coughing out the stinking dusty stuff from my lungs.

We negotiated the ruins in a comical fas.h.i.+on, three abreast, until we came to the very edge of the camouflage canopy. Wu is quite the poser. The little scene she had set up resembled something from an old movie set in one of the resorts Mother used to write about, with the elegant worldly traveler, crosslegged and idle, sipping a drink at her table under a beach umbrella. She was waiting for a companion-me? Surely not. The table held two wine flutes, a bottle, and a bowl of oranges. Down the hill the miniature figures of happy peasants toiled in their fields. Well, actually these were prisoners pounding apart boulders and hauling them from one place to another, as I saw when I looked closer, but it was a nice illusion.

"Viv," she said, waving a wine flute at me. "Sit down. I've been reading your confession. It is a very confusing doc.u.ment. I believe a simple chat might help you clarify your thoughts."I tried to sit, but the command was awkward to follow with a guard cuffed to each wrist so I had to sit with my hands suspended at shoulder level, while I suppressed an urge to bark.

Wu, however, was determined to chat. She even tried to sound helpful as she said, "I'm very much afraid you are still missing the point."

"Yes?" I had heard her bulls.h.i.+t before and even though it was bulls.h.i.+t vital to the preservation of my life, I was busy being dazzled by the sheer spring sweep of the snow-laden landscape beaming down at us from its incredible height. More incredible, the prisoners working in the valley below were nude to the waist and waded through green shoots, fronds, and lacy ferns proliferating among the stones. A few hardy young trees sprouted on the lower edge of the embankment, and small, courageous splashes of scarlet, orchid, jonquil and a pale tender pink that could only have been flower blossoms raised their heads defiantly toward the sun.

She followed my eyes and said proudly, as if she was personally responsible for the scenery, "Here in Kalapa we are warmed by the sun caught in this bowl and protected from the winds by the peaks."

Distantly, glaciers creaked and valleys hidden from us rumbled with unseen storms. Wu listened with me for a moment, then continued quietly. "Once this place was as beautiful as its setting, with a lake below where you see now only stones and many happy people living here and in the valley until your bombs blew the mountain down on top of them. Even now, after so many years of back-breaking labor trying to recover some of what was lost, we have barely scratched the surface."

"What was it like?" I asked her. "Were there lots of buildings-were some of the rooms aboveground?"

"Oh, yes, I- How did you know? I will ask the questions here."

"Excuse me," I said quickly. "I was only curious. I saw photos once of some of the old lamaseries before they were destroyed and they were quite impressive. I wondered if this might be the site of one of them."

"I-yes, something like that. But now I must tell you, in all seriousness, we have observed that there are stages in an inmate's progress toward gaining an enlightened att.i.tude and frankly, your confession does not reflect that you are receptive to these. You boast of no militancy in your childhood, though I am sure you were taught to oppress others from birth."

"I didn't have much of anyone to oppress, actually," I told her. "Except my mother, when she was home. She wasn't crazy about motherhood. After she stopped traveling-"

"She was on foreign duty with your NACAF?"

"No, she was on foreign duty as a freelance travel writer. But then all the terrorist stuff escalated to the point where so many innocent people were being killed that-"

"What innocent people?"

"The ones killed by terrorists."

"There are no innocents. You are all responsible. Those who claim to be innocent by virtue of being apolitical are most guilty of all - it is their apathy that is the greatest crime of all. They are the ones who turn their faces from the slaughter of people in other lands to enjoy the profits your government reaps from supplying would-be conquerors with the wherewithal to oppress others.""But what about the children? Surely they -"

"Many of the terrorists you speak of are themselves children who were allowed no childhood. But you were telling me about your mother."

I should probably have shut up then. But she was only asking about personal stuff. And I wanted to stay in the fresh air and I wanted to talk to somebody - even Wu. I also wanted her to give me some of the fruit on the table, and kept glancing at it as I talked. I told her how when the United States had first formed the North American Alliance with Canada and what was left of Mexico, Mom had been asked to join up and write propaganda for the draft-and-recruitment program. She had refused, joking that her mama hadn't named her Peace for nothing. She came home to Grandma and Grandpa's house and settled down with us, writing regional stuff. At first it was a little cramped, because the house was just a log cabin in what had originally been wilderness area around Mount Baker. All around my grandfolks'

property urban sprawl from Bellingham, now incorporated into Greater Seattle, had taken over. The grandfolks, of course, had the timber ranch for our back yard.

"So," Wu said. "You helped rape the environment."

"We were too late for that. The old-growth stuff was chopped down a long time ago. But Granddad did have a stand of trees older than he was that he was proud of. I didn't do much myself. Mom's idea of raising me was that I read my books while she read hers. Other than that I helped the grandparents with craft projects-they were crazy about making their own soap and weaving things to wear and throwing kind of ugly pots, not that we couldn't have afforded to buy better stuff. They just liked doing it.

They did ch.o.r.es by hand too. Not much was automated. It drove Mom crazy sometimes but she said that's how they'd always been. Good thing for me, I guess, because later on I sure couldn't afford a lot of luxuries. I wasn't nuts about helping with harvesting-too noisy-but I liked helping Granddad plant seedlings, even though he had some people he paid to do that."

"No doubt exploiting them," Wu said sourly. "And I understand that it is a particular kind of luxury in your country to do things as simply as those in other places are forced to do them for lack of adequate technology and a shortage of resources."

"Which are short," I finished for her, reciting by rote the rhetoric I had heard since childhood, "because we treated the trees like our personal property, buying and selling them, chopping them down and burning their stumps, leaving the country barren and making toilet tissue from them."

"You admit this?"

"My grandparents and their friends were always b.i.t.c.hing- er, expressing the same viewpoint during their spit and whittle sessions. "I'm not sure whether I actually said the last part or thought it. I'd noticed that among the bronzed backs and orange jackets a black torso earnestly stooped and straightened, stooped and straightened. The Colonel? As I finished my last sentence he stopped and stared uphill, straight at me. I wiggled my fingers a little but he gave no acknowledgment. A guard started toward him and he bent back to his work again. I felt myself sagging in the cuffs. He probably thought I was betraying the entire cell-block, though just how I could betray them in my present circ.u.mstances I had no idea. Good thing Wu didn't offer me one of those oranges to dish the dirt with her about my fellow prisoners. I might have made something up to get that orange. The very memory of the taste made me sick with hunger.

"You do not look very well, Viv Vanachek.""I'm not," I said shortly.

"Impure thinking has been known to cause illness," she said primly. Then she surprised me by taking a tone that could only be described as defensive. "You are given good water from the same pool and food from the same pot as the rest of us. You have been allowed privacy and time to think and yet have offered offensive and unreasonable behavior to your attendants. We are not servants and you are not to be a spoiled princess as you were in your homeland. You have yet to present me with a good reason why we should continue to nurture you here."

I wasn't tracking too well by then. My stomach was cramping again and I was half afraid and half longing to barf all over her elegant spread. But two things in her last speech struck me with sudden, startling clarity. One was that she seemed genuinely offended that I didn't admit that I was actually thriving under her so-called care and that solitary confinement provided just the relaxing atmosphere I needed to contemplate the error of my ways. The other was the puzzled note in her voice. This woman, who was supposedly in charge of the camp, had no better idea why I was here than I did. Her rhetoric was an automatic spouting of dogma, but far from having me beaten or even seriously intimidating me, she seems baffled and irritated by my presence. Despite her posturing, I don't think she finds me particularly slimy or guilty of anything. But here I am for some reason we have both yet to learn and she's stuck with me. The writing, which she fortunately doesn't seem to keep very good track of, and the interrogations in the form of little chats, have seemed pointless for a very good reason, which is that she doesn't know the point. And neither do I. It just never occurred to me that there had to be one.

When she dismissed me I tried to burn the image of those mountains onto my retinas as the guards led me away, and I gulped deep breaths of the fresh air, trying to h.o.a.rd it all the way back down to my cell.

LATER.

I can't seem to think. I couldn't keep so much as a nibble down. The guards were p.i.s.sed because my legs stopped working on the steps and I almost dragged us all down headfirst. I'll bet that s.a.d.i.s.tic b.i.t.c.h let me out just so the contrast between out there and down here would make me even more miserable. I wish she'd have these d.a.m.ned belly cramps and tell me it was her impure thoughts. Well, I do reject this whole mess and maybe I eject it too. Why the h.e.l.l is she doing this to me if she doesn't know what I'm here for? Jesus! On the other hand, maybe I'd better hope she doesn't think about it too long. I doubt she'd bother chartering a plane to take me out of here if she thought there was no reason.

In that case, the point is apt to turn out to be at the end of someone's bayonet. They probably don't waste bullets on people who have no purpose being here.

If only I could sleep again. Lately I just sort of drift in and out of daydreams, most of them fragments and abstractions-no more visions, no more real-seeming places like the one in the dream, the one I seem to have picked up from Wu's romanticizing about how this place used to be before the big bad imperialists spoiled it all. Not even any nightmares like the one about the children. When I close my eyes and try to bring back the mountains-both the real ones, outside, and those from the dream- I can barely remember them. Only their general shapes remain. The colors and detail wash away like an overexposed photograph.

G.o.d, a person shouldn't have to have an ident.i.ty crisis in the middle of a prison camp. I don't know what my purpose is, here or in general. I've never made any sense out of anything. Oh, I used to be excited if something in a lecture or a book awakened some response in me, some sense of recognition, so that another piece seemed to slip into a huge puzzle, or turned the kaleidoscope another fraction sothat I caught a glimpse of a whole new pattern. But none of it was any b.l.o.o.d.y good. n.o.body ever asked me at job interviews what insights I'd gained from the sociobiology of the late twentieth century.

As for the facts, the vast piles of data I've acquired, I forgot it as soon as I no longer needed it to pa.s.s exams. As if I were climbing a sand dune, the little individual grains of information slid beneath my feet while I reached for more, so I never made any progress. I might be able to walk around the bottom of the dune, but I can't conquer it and even if I did, miles of other dunes stretch beyond that one. Just knowing that had once been a delight and a comfort but I have never grasped anything that was a solid foundation for anything else, something I can hold in my hand and show someone else. "Here. This is mine. I know this."

I joined the military because there was no other place for me, and I ended up here. Now it seems I have to justify my existence even here. Whatever happened to "I think, therefore I am"? What I think is that I'm too sick and too tired to deal with this s.h.i.+t. Oh, G.o.d. Back to the slop bucket.

LATER.

Forget above. Cramps real bad. Blood in bucket. Can't track. Dying? Maybe.

G.o.d-hemorrhage at both ends. Hide this. I'll hide this so the next poor sap maybe won't be so iso...

PART THREE.

DREAM, DEATH, AND (PARTIAL) DELIVERY.

I must have fainted and fallen off the bunk, hit my head on the floor. Maybe I slipped in the blood. It was everywhere, gus.h.i.+ng out from between my legs, sounding like a fountain splas.h.i.+ng as it hit the floor, exploding against the wall as I vomited, choked, coughed and vomited again. Cramps sledgehammered my guts, pumping the blood out at both ends. One minute I was drowning in it, the next a blinding cymbal crash of pain reinitiated the soft, guttural chanting.

It rose and fell, rose and fell, timed to my belly's churning, its sonorous moan all the while descending in volume and pitch until it came from the guts of the palace, the dungeon, then from the earth itself. But as the last long "O" note faded, a high chiming note reinforced it, and the liquid tinkle of a single bell.

The tiled corridor reached out to meet me this time, fan folding away as I rushed through it, until I came upon an outer door so filled with mountain that not until I had left the confines of the building andwalked several feet out onto the terrace, looking up and then higher and yet higher still, could I see the whole vast muscle of the earth, sleeved with white, immense and powerful. Below, almost straight down, the lake glittered as if sprinkled with blue and silver sequins, beckoning me. But I remembered from the other dream that when I ran straight toward the lake, I woke up. So this time I resisted my yearning for the lake and with an effort turned away from it to gaze at the palace surrounding me.

The golden roofs were not really gold, but tiles of lapis and amber the sun's blinding rays had melted into a honeyed glaze. Dragon gargoyles with elephant tusks leered through the rivulets of water running from their mouths down the corners of the buildings. Stone steps, geodes inlaid among the rocks, led from the terrace where I stood to another terrace and into another room and there a beautiful young Asian woman played what I would have thought was a spinet piano-except that the notes still rang like bells and chimes. The woman's slender hands danced on the keys, the curve of her long black hair flowing past her shoulders suggested serenity itself.

She didn't speak or acknowledge me and I accepted that I must be a ghost, or she was, and with the music somehow growing louder as I drifted farther from her, I entered another open doorway.

Beyond was no dreary corridor but a room bigger than the lobby of the Federal Building in downtown Seattle. The ceiling was painted, not carved, and inlaid with a design of silver-and-gold-rimmed ivory clouds. The walls were lined with bookshelves filled with everything from wood and leather-bound tomes to well-thumbed bright-colored paperbacks. At tables scattered throughout the room, people studied, worked puzzles, and played games like chess and checkers and others that were unfamiliar. The dice they used and the game pieces were beautifully sculpted from exotic woods such as zebra wood and vermilion. One chess set had pieces carved from amethyst on one side and garnet on the other. I fingered the books-the most beautiful were old sets of cla.s.sics, many of them my favorites, others by unfamiliar authors; yet others had the t.i.tles and names in Cyrillic script, Hebrew, Arabic and other less common alphabets. Fiction, mythology, folklore, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, architecture, every imaginable subject and discipline was represented. I stroked the supple spines and read the t.i.tles yearningly, wondering if I could possibly stay long enough to read any of them.

But a perfume stronger than that of old paper, wood and leather led me on, with something of jasmine and something of musk in its fragrance. A wisp of white flickered through a set of double doors and I followed it.

And was suddenly swimming through a sea of billowing silken scarves. Like clouds flying past the moon, they played with the wavering light so that the rest of the room was even less substantial as to size, shape and feature than the scarves themselves. I might have been outdoors, with the scarves fluttering from tree branches, for all I could tell while I was among them. Filmy and deceptive, they concealed, then revealed, what usually turned out to be another wave of scarves. Once it seemed that they parted for a fraction of a fraction of a second and, as if through a distant well-curtained window, I glimpsed the moon, though a short time before I'd stood in sunlight. But the time was not an issue. No urgency existed here aside from that which mysteriously drove me.

The scarves fluttered tickling like moth wings or eyelashes and I breathed them in as if they were a cloud of insects. I knew that just ahead lay something beautiful, something-perfect, but as I strained toward it the scarves fell tangling in my hands and feet, dragging the ground, weighing me down and down until I sank back into something soft and spongy, sticky and sore.

"Viveka? Viv, now you stay with me, girl. Stay with me now." The voice was prosaic, dull and flat, the music gone. Thibideaux and Marsh swam into focus, looming above me like a two-headed monster.Marsh patted my arm. "You should have said you were pregnant. These people can be human sometimes too, you know."

"How was she gonna know that?" the man with the childish blond curls, Danielson, snapped." Look at her bruises. They probably beat her until she lost it."