Glasshouse

ABOUT two weeks later I finally reach the end of my tether. It's a hot, tiresome Tuesday evening. I've spent the morning exercising outdoors—there are still no neighbors, although a couple of families are due to move in when the next cohort arrives in a couple of weeks' time—and then worked in the garage all afternoon. I'm trying to relearn welding the hard way, and I'm lucky not to have burned my arm off or electrocuted myself so far.

I have vague recollections of having done this stuff a long time ago, in gigaseconds past, but it's so long ago that the memories are all second-hand and I've clearly forgotten almost everything I knew. There's something wrong with my technique, and the pieces of spring steel I'm trying to make into a single fabrication are going brittle around the weld. I try bending the last one in the vise and the join I've just spent an hour working on snaps and small fragments go flying. If I was standing a bit farther over to the left, I could have got one in the eye. As it is, I get a nasty shock and go inside to try to sort our di

So I'm in the kitchen all on my own, rummaging through the frozen packages in the freezer cupboard for something we both eat, and I manage to drop a pizza box on the floor. It splits open and the contents spill everywhere. It's one of those moments when the whole universe comes spi

I'm trapped in a wholly inadequate body, with only patchy memories of whoever I used to be left to prod me along in search of a better life. I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs. Here I am, thinking I remember being in rehab, reading a letter written to myself by an earlier version—and how do I know I wrote the letter to myself? I don't even remember doing it! For all I know it's a confabulation, my own bored attempt to inject some excitement into a life totally sapped of interest. Certainly the rant about people who are out to kill me seems increasingly implausible and distant—outright unbelievable, if not for the man with the wire.

I can't remember any reasons why anyone would want me dead. And even a half-competent trainee assassin would find killing me a trivial challenge at best, right now. I can't even put a frozen pizza in a microwave oven without dropping it on the floor. I'm spending my spare hours in the garage trying to weld together a crossbow and busily pla

I feel helpless and lost and very, very small, and I stare at the pizza through a blurring veil of tears, and right then I hear the front door lock click to itself and footsteps in the front hall, and it's more than I can bear.

Sam finds me in the kitchen, sobbing as I fumble around for the dustpan.

"What's wrong?" He stands in the doorway looking at me, a bewildered expression on his face.

"I'm, I—" I manage to get the box into the trash, then drop the brush on top of it. "Nothing."

"It can't be nothing," he insists, logically enough.

"I don't want to talk about it." I sniff and wipe my eyes on the back of my sleeve, embarrassed and hating myself for this display of weakness. "It's not important—"

"Come on." His arm is around my shoulders, comforting. "Come on, out of here."

"Okay."

He leads me out of the kitchen and into the living room and over to the big glass windows. I watch, not really comprehending, as he opens one of them. Floor to ceiling, it forms a door in its own right, a door into the back garden. "Come on," he says, walking out onto the lawn.

I follow him outside. The grass is getting long. What do you want? I wonder.

"Sit down," he says. I blink and look at the bench.

"Oh, okay." I sniff again.

"Wait here," he says. He vanishes back into the house, leaving me alone with my stupid and stupefying sense of inadequacy. I stare at the grass. It's moist (we had a scheduled precipitation at lunchtime, water drizzling gently from a million tiny nozzles embedded in the sky), and a snail is inching its way laboriously up a stem, close to my feet. Not far away there's another one. It's a good time for mollusks, who haul their world around with them, self-contained. I feel a momentary flash of envy. Here I am, trapped inside the biggest snail shell anyone can imagine, a snail shell made of glass that exposes everything we do to the monitors and probes of the experimenters. And in my hubris I think I can actually crawl out of my shell, escape into my own identity—

Sam is holding something out to me. "Here, have a drink."

I take the tumbler. It's blue glass, with a fizz of bubbles trapped in the weighted base and a clear liquid half-filling it. I sniff a bouquet of bitters and lemon.

"Go on, it won't poison you."

I raise my glass and take a mouthful. Gin and tonic , some submerged ghost of memory tells me. "Thanks." I sniff. He pours himself one, too. "I'm sorry."

"What for?" he asks, as he sits down next to me. He's shed his jacket and necktie, and he moves as if he's weary, as if he's got my troubles.

"I'm a dead loss." I shrug. "It just got too much for me."

"You're not a dead loss."

I look at him sharply, then have to sniff again. I wish I could get my sinuses fixed. "Yes I am. I'm wholly dependent on you—without your job, what would I do? I'm weak and small and badly coordinated, and I can't even cook a pizza for supper without dropping it all over the floor. And, and . . ."

Sam takes another mouthful. "Look," he says, pointing at the garden. "You've got this. All day." He shakes his head. "I get to sit in an office full of zombies and spend my time proofreading gibberish. There's always more make-work for me, texts to check for errors. It makes my head hurt. You've at least got this." He looks at me, a guarded, odd look that makes me wonder what he sees. "And whatever it is you're doing in the garage."

"I—"

"I don't mean to pry," he says, looking away shyly.

"It's not secret," I say. I swallow some more of my drink. "I'm making stuff." I nearly add, It's a hobby , but that would be a lie. And the one person I haven't actively lied to so far is Sam. I've got a feeling that if I start lying to him now, I'll be crossing some sort of irrevocable line. With only myself for an anchor, and knowing how fallible my memories are, I won't be able to tell truth from fantasy anymore.

"Making stuff." He rolls his glass between his big hands. "Do you want a job to go to?" he asks.

"A job?" That's a surprise and a half. "Why?"

He shrugs. "To see people. Get out of the house. To meet people other than the score whores, I mean. They're getting to you, aren't they?"