Страница 62 из 87
54
So I did go to work at Scales after all. In some ways it was a relief. I liked having Mordis for a boss because at least it was clear what pleased him. He made me feel safe, maybe because he was the closest thing to a father I was ever going to get: Zeb had vanished into thin air and my real father hadn’t found me very interesting, and in addition he was dead.
But Mordis said I was really something special – I was the answer to every dream, wet ones included. It was so encouraging to be doing something I was good at. I didn’t like the other parts of the job that much, but I did like the trapeze dancing, because nobody could touch you then. You were up in the air, like a butterfly. I used to picture Jimmy looking at me, and thinking that it was really me he’d loved all along, not Wakulla Price or LyndaLee or any of the others, or even Amanda, and that I was dancing just for him.
I do know how useless this was.
After going to Scales, I was only in touch with Amanda by phone. She was away a lot, doing her art projects; also I didn’t want to see her in person. I’d feel uncomfortable because of Jimmy, and she’d pick up on that feeling and ask about it, and I’d either lie or tell her; and if I told her she’d be angry, or maybe just curious; or she’d think I was being stupid. There was a hard side to Amanda.
Jealousy is a very destructive emotion, Adam One used to say. It’s part of the stubborn Australopithecine heritage we’re stuck with. It eats away at you and deadens your Spiritual life, but also it leads you to hatred, and causes you to harm others. But Amanda was the last person I’d ever want to harm.
I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.
Then Amanda broke up with Jimmy. She let me know about it in a roundabout way. She’d already told me about her outdoor art landscape installation series called The Living Word – how she was spelling words out in giant letters, using bioforms to make the words appear and then disappear, just like the words she used to do with ants and syrup when we were kids. Now she said, “I’m up to the four-letter words.” And I said, “You mean the dirty ones, like shit?” And she laughed and said, “Worse ones than that.” And I said, “You mean the c-word and the f-word?” and she said, “No. Like love.”
And I said, “Oh. So Jimmy didn’t work out.” And she said, “Jimmy can’t be serious.” So I knew he must’ve cheated on her, or something like that.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you really pissed off at him?” I tried to keep the happiness out of my own voice. Now I can forgive her, I thought. But really there was nothing to forgive her for because she hadn’t done anything hurtful to me on purpose.
“Pissed off?” she said. “You can’t be pissed off with Jimmy.” I wondered what she meant by that, because I was certainly pissed off with Jimmy. Though I still loved him.
Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.
After a while, Gle
Gle
Sometimes he’d say he was working on solutions to the biggest problem of all, which was human beings – their cruelty and suffering, their wars and poverty, their fear of death. “What would you pay for the design of a perfect human being?” he’d say. Then he’d hint that the Paradice Project was designing one, and they’d dump more money on him.
For the finales of these meetings he’d rent the feather-ceiling room and order up the drinks and the drugs and the Scalies – not for himself, but for the guys he’d bring with him. Sometimes he’d even entertain the top CorpSeMen. They were sinister, those guys. I never had to do the Painballers, but I had to do the CorpSeMen, and they were my least favourite clients. It was like they had machine parts in behind their eyes.
Occasionally Gle
I was part of the threesome the night he gave us a sort of quiz. What would make us happy? he wanted to know. Was happiness more like excitement, or more like contentment? Was happiness inside or outside? With trees, or without? Did it have ru
He never asked us about sadness, though. Maybe he thought he knew enough about that.
Then he started bringing a woman – an Asian Fusion body type with a foreign accent. He said she wanted to familiarize herself with Scales because ReJoov had picked us as one of their prime test venues, and she’d be explaining a new product to us – the BlyssPluss pill, which would solve every known problem co
I could tell she’d been one of us: a girl for rent, of one kind or another. It was obvious if you knew the signs. She was acting all the time, giving nothing away about herself. I’d watch them onscreen: I was curious because Gle
The two of them had pet names for each other. She’d call him Crake, he’d call her Oryx. The other girls found it strange – the two of them being lovey-dovey – because it was so out of character for Gle
“That Russian or something?” Crimson Petal asked me. “Oryx and Crake?”
“I guess,” I said. They were extinct animal names – every Gardener had to memorize a ton of those – but if I said it the girls would wonder why I knew.
The first time Gle