Blind Lake

He wondered what it would be like to break free of all these biological imperatives and see the world as it truly was. To our eyes horrible, Ray thought, bleak and unforgiving; but our eyes are liars, equally as enslaved to DNA as our hearts and our minds. Maybe that was what the O/BECs had become: an inhuman eye, revealing truths no one was prepared to accept.

Tess had come back to him this week. He called hello as he entered the house. She sat in the living room in the chair next to the artificial Christmas tree, hunched over her homework like a studious gnome. “Hi,” she said listlessly. Ray stood a moment, surprised by his love for her, admiring the way her dark hair curled tightly to her skull. She wrote on the screen of a lap pad, which translated her babyish scrawls into something legible.

He shed his coat and overshoes and drew the blinds against the snowy dark. “Have you called your birth mother yet?”

It was in the agreement he had signed with Marguerite after arbitration, that Tess would phone the absent parent daily. Tess looked at him curiously. “My birth mother?”

Had he said that aloud? “I mean, your mother.”

“I called already.”

“Did she say anything disturbing? You know you can tell me if your mother causes problems for you.”

Tess shrugged uncomfortably.

“Was the stranger with her when you called? The man who lives in the basement?”

Tess shrugged again.

“Show me your hand,” Ray said.

It didn’t take a genius to know that Tessa’s problems back at Crossbank had been Marguerite’s fault, even if the divorce mediator had failed to figure it out. Marguerite had consistently ignored Tess, had focused exclusively on her beloved extraterrestrial seascapes, that Tess had made several desperate bids for attention, transparent in their motivation. The frightening stranger in the mirror might as well have been Marguerite’s Subject — oblique, demanding, and omnipresent.

Glumly, head lowered in embarrassment, Tess held out her right hand. The sutures had been removed last week. The scars would disappear with time, the clinic doctor had said, but now they looked ghastly, pink new skin between angry divots where the stitches had been. Ray had already taken a few photographs in case the issue ever arose in court. He held her small hand in his, making sure there was no sign of infection. No small life eating the life from his daughter’s flesh.

“What’s for di

“Chicken,” Ray said, leaving her to her books. Frozen chicken in the freezer. Subject removed from cold storage the butchered flesh of a ground-dwelling bird and began to sear it in a pan of extracted vegetable oil. Plus garlic and basil, salt and pepper. The smell of it flooded his mouth with saliva. Tess, drawn by the odor, wandered into the kitchen to watch him cook.

“Are you worried about going back to your mother tomorrow?”

Your birth mother. Half your genetic bag of tricks. The lesser half, Ray thought.

“No,” Tess said, then, almost defiantly, “why do you always keep asking me that?”

“Do I?”

“Yes! Sometimes.”

“Sometimes isn’t always, though, is it?”

“No, but—”

“I just want everything to be okay for you, Tess.”

“I know.” Defeated, she turned away.

“You’re happy here, aren’t you?”

“It’s okay here.”

“Because you never know with Mom, isn’t that right? You might have to come live here all the time, Tess, if anything happens to her.”

Tess narrowed her eyes. “What would happen to her?”

“You never know,” Ray said.

Fourteen

Before he left the city, Subject’s life had been a repetitive cycle of work, sleep, and food conclaves. It had reminded Marguerite dismayingly of the Hindu idea of the kalpas, the sacred circle, eternal return.

But that had changed.

That had changed, and the circle had become something different: it had become a narrative. A story, Marguerite thought, with a begi

Even to the Subject’s death, if it came to that. And it might.

Early on, she conceived the idea of writing the Subject’s odyssey, not analytically, but as what it had become: a story. Not for publication, of course. She’d be violating the protocols of objectivity, indulging all kinds of conscious and unconscious anthropocentrism. Anyway, she wasn’t a writer, or at least not that kind of writer. This was purely for her own satisfaction… and because she believed the Subject deserved it. After all, this was a real life they had invaded. In the privacy of her writing she could give him back his stolen dignity.

She began the project in a spiral-bound blue school notebook. Tess was asleep (she had come back from her father’s two days ago, after a disappointing Christmas) and Chris was downstairs messing up the kitchen or raiding her library. It was a precious moment, hallowed in silence. A time when she could practice the black art of empathy. When she could freely admit that she cared about the fate of this creature so unknowable and so intimately known.

Subject’s last days in the city [Marguerite wrote] were disturbed and episodic. He ma