Slow River

My mother, who was all too human. She had got away with hurting her children because she was so… acceptable. But someone must have known. Tok had. And he had tried to tell me. Why had he taken so long to speak out?

My father should have known! But so should I. No: I was a child. Not really.

Had Oster known? I tried to remember how he had behaved that afternoon with Stella in the fountain. He had known something was wrong. He had even asked me what I knew…

He should have known. I couldn’t get away from that. He was my father—Stella’s father—and he should have taken some responsibility, some interest in us apart from that absurd competition with his wife to make us love him more.

He should have known. But he wasn’t a monster. And I missed him. I wanted to have him back. I’d spent the last three years believing him to be something he was not, and I wanted to touch him, maybe have him ruffle my hair, anything, just to make contact again with the father I had thought I had known.

A barge hooted from downriver, a burly morning noise. Almost dawn.

I stretched and stood, feeling strange: wobbly and light-boned. So much had changed. I had my father back, and had lost my mother. And Magyar knew who I was. She could see through the obscuring reflections. To her I wasn’t van de Oest, I wasn’t Criminal, I wasn’t Bird. I was just me, Lore.

Lore’s birthday came and went. Twenty. She went out in the blustery September wind with the cat’s daily ration of leftovers. As usual she knelt to push the plate under the bushes without really looking, but this time the plate bumped into something soft. She peered into the tangle of dry wood and old, dead leaves.

It was a kitten. Dead. Probably about two weeks old.

Ski

She looked at it a long time, then went inside to get her work gloves and spade. It weighed nothing.

Kittens should be round, she thought. It struck her as terribly wrong for something so young to look so used-up. It should have had warm milk, and spring, and a skyful of butterflies to chase. Not a short, hard life and an end on the cold ground.

It was wrong. All wrong.

Spa

“Because it’s a lie.” Because kittens should be round.

Spa

“What?” Lore was confused for a moment; then she realized Spa

Spa

“You’re being obtuse.”

“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” Spa

“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?” Spa

“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 Spa

“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 Spa

But Spa

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. Ru

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.