Green mars (52 page)

“Too bad Arkady didn’t survive,” Vlad said. “The Bogdanovists would come around a lot easier.”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “Him and John. And Frank.”

“Frank,” Marina said scornfully. “If he hadn’t killed John none of this would have happened.”

Maya blinked. The railing was holding her up.

“What?” she shouted, without thinking. Across the pond .the little figures jerked and looked at her. She detached herself from the railing one hand at a time, and half ran around the pond, stumbling twice.

“What do you mean?” she shouted at Marina as she neared them, the words bursting from her without volition.

Vlad and Ursula met her a few steps from the benches. Marina remained seated, looking away sullenly. Vlad had his hands out and Maya tore right through them to get at Marina. “What do you mean saying such foul things?” she shouted, her voice painful in her own throat. “Why? Why? It was Arabs who killed John, everyone knows that!”

Marina grimaced and shook her head, looking down.

“Well?” Maya cried.

“It was a manner of speaking,” Vlad said from behind. “Frank did a lot to undermine John in those years, you know that’s true. Some say he inflamed the Moslem Brotherhood against John, that’s all.”

“Pah!” Maya said, “We have all argued with each other, it means nothing!”

Then she noticed that Sax was looking right at her—finally, now

that she was furious—staring at her with a peculiar expression,

cold and impossible to read—a glare of accusation, of revenge, of

_ what? She had shouted in Russian and the others had replied in

kind, and she didn’t think Sax spoke it. Perhaps he was just curious about what had upset them so. But the antipathy in that steady stare—as if he were confirming what Marina had said—hammering it into her like a nail! Maya turned and fled.

She found herself in front of the door to her room with no memory of crossing Sabishii, and threw herself inside as if into her mother’s arms; but in the beautiful spare wooden chamber she drew up short of the bed, shocked by the memory of some other room that had turned from womb to trap on her, in some other moment of shock and fear ... no answers, no distraction, no escape... . Over the little sink she caught sight of her face as if in a framed portrait—haggard, ancient, eyes bright red around the rims, like the eyes of a lizard. A nauseating image. That was it— the time she had caught sight of her stowaway on the Ares, the face seen through an algae jar. Coyote: a shock which had proved not hallucination, but reality.

And so it might be with this news of Frank and John.

She tried to remember. She tried with all her might to remember Frank Chalmers, to really remember him. She had spoken with him that night in Nicosia, in an encounter unremarkable for its awkwardness and tension, Frank as always acting aggrieved and rejected... . They had been together at the very moment John was being knocked unconscious, and dragged into the farm and left to die. Frank couldn’t have ...

But of course there were surrogates. You could always pay people to act for you. Not that the Arabs would have been interested in money per se. But pride, honor—paid in honor, or in some political quid pro quo, the kind of currency Frank had been so expert at printing... .

But she could remember so little of those years, so little of the specifics. When she put her mind to it, and forced herself to remember, to recollect, it was frightening how little came up. Fragments; moments, potsherds of an entire civilization. Once she had been so angry she had knocked a coffee cup off a table, the broken handle bare like a half-eaten bagel on a table. But where had that been, and when, and with whom? She couldn’t be sure! “Aahh,” she cried involuntarily, and the haggard antediluvian face in the mirror suddenly disgusted her with its pathetic reptile pain. So ug|y. And once upon a time she had been a beauty, she had been proud of that, she had used it like a scalpel. Now ... her hair had gone from pure white to a dull gray in recent years, changed somehow in the last treatment. And now it was thinning, for God’s sake, and only in some places while not in others. Disgusting. And once a beauty, once upon a time. That hawkish regal face—and now— As if the Baroness Blixen, also a rare beauty in her youth, had crumbled into the syphilitic witch Isak Dinesen and then lived on for centuries after that, like a vampire or a zombie—a ravaged living lizard of a corpse, 130 years old, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you... .

She strode to the sink and yanked on the side of the mirror, revealing a crowded medicine cabinet. Nail scissors on the top shelf. Somewhere on Mars they made nail scissors, of magnesium no doubt. She took them down and pulled a hank of hair out from her head till it hurt, and cut it off right against her scalp. The blades were dull, but if she pulled hard enough they worked. She had to be careful not to cut her scalp, some tiny remnant of her vanity would not allow that. So it was a long, tedious, painstaking and pain-giving job. But a comfort, somehow, to be so distracted, so methodical, so destructive.

The initial cut was ragged enough to require a great deal of trimming, which took a long time. An hour. But she could not make the hairs come to the same length, and finally she got out the razor from the shower, and finished by shaving, patting with toilet paper the cuts that bled copiously, ignoring the old’scars revealed, the awful bumps and hollows of the bare skull, so close under the skin. It was hard to do it all without ever looking at the monstrous face hanging from the front of the skull.

When she was done she stared ruthlessly at the freak in the mirror—androgynous, withered, insane. The eagle become vulture: skin head, wattled neck, beady eyes, hook nose, and the lipless downturned little mouth. Staring at this hideous face, there were long, long moments when she could not remember a single thing about Maya Toitovna. She stood frozen in the present, a stranger to everything.

A knock at the door made her jump, and released her. She hesitated, suddenly ashamed, even frightened. Another part of her croaked, “Come in.”

The door opened. It was Michel. He saw her and stopped in the doorway. “Well?” she said, staring at him and feeling naked.

He swallowed, cocked his head. “Beautiful as ever.” With a crooked grin.

She had to laugh. She sat on her bed and began to weep. She sniffed and sniffed. “Sometimes,” she said, wiping her eyes, “sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get so tired of it, of everything that I’ve done.”

Michel sat beside her. “We’re locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be—convict, or idiot?”

Maya shook her head. “I was down in the park with Vlad and Ursula and Marina and Sax who hates me, and looking at them all, and we have to do something, we really do, but looking at them and remembering everything—trying to remember—we suddenly all seemed such damaged people.”

“A lot has happened,” Michel said, and put his hand on hers.

“Do you have trouble remembering?” Maya shivered, and clasped his hand like a life raft. “Sometimes I get so scared that I’ll forget everything.” She sniffed a laugh. “I guess that means I’d rather be a convict than an idiot, to answer your question. If you forget, you’re free of the past, but nothing means anything. So there’s no escape”—she started to cry again—”remember or forget, it hurts just as bad.”

“Memory problems are pretty common at our age,” Michel said gently. “Especially events in the middle distance, so to speak. There are exercises that help.”

“It’s not a muscle.”

“I know. But the power of recollection seems to strengthen with use. And the act of remembering apparently strengthens the memories themselves. It makes sense when you think about it. Synapses physically reinforced or replaced, that sort of thing.”

“But then, if you can’t face what you remember—oh Michel—” She took in a big unsteady breath. “They said—Marina said that Frank had murdered John. She said it to the others when she thought I couldn’t hear, said it as if it was something they all knew!” She clutched him by the shoulder, squeezed as if she could rip the truth out of him with her claws. “Tell me the truth, Michel! Is it true? Is that what you all think happened?”

Michel shook his head. “No one knows what happened.”

“I was there! I was in Nicosia that night and they weren’t! I was with Frank when it happened! He had no idea, I swear!”

Michel squinted, uncertain, and she said, “Don’t look like that!”

“I’m not, Maya, I’m not. I don’t mean anything by it. I have to tell you everything I’ve heard, and I’m trying to remember myself. There have been rumors—all kinds of rumors!—about what happened that night. It’s true, some say Frank was—involved. Or connected to the Saudis who killed John. That he met with the one who died later the next day, and so on.”

Maya began to weep harder. She bent over her clenched stomach and put her face on Michel’s shoulder, her ribs heaving. “I can’t stand it. If I don’t know what happened ... how can I remember? How can I even think of them?”

Michel held her, soothed her with his embrace. He squeezed the muscles of her back, over and over. “Ah, Maya.”

After a long time she sat up, went to the sink and washed her face in cold water, avoiding the mirror’s gaze. She returned to the bed and sat, utterly despondent, a seeping blackness in every muscle.

Michel took her hand again. “I wonder if it might not help to know. Or at least, to know as much as you can. To investigate, you know. To read about John and Frank. There are books now, of course. And to ask the other people who were in Nicosia, particularly the Arabs who saw Selim el-Hayil before he died. That kind of thing. It would give you a kind of control, you see. It wouldn’t be remembering exactly, but it wouldn’t be forgetting either. Those aren’t the only two alternatives, strange as it may seem. We have to assume our past, you see? We have to make it a part of what we are now, by an act of the imagination. It’s a creative thing, an active thing. It’s not a simple process. But I know you, and you are always better when you are active, when you have a little control.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said. “I can’t stand not to know, but I’m afraid to know. I don’t want to know. Especially if it’s true.”

“See how you feel about it,” Michel suggested. “Try it and see. Given that both alternatives are painful, it might be you prefer action to the alternative.”

“Well.” She sniffed, took a single glance across the room. From the room on the other side of the mirror, an ax murderer stared out at her. “My God I am so ugly,” she said, revulsion making her nauseated to the verge of vomiting.

Michel stood, went to the mirror. “There is a thing called body dysmorphic disorder,” he said. “It’s related to obsessive-compulsive disorders, and to depression. I’ve noticed signs of it in you for a long time now.”

“It’s my birthday.”

“Ah. Well, it’s a treatable problem.”

“Birthdays?”

“Body dysmorphic disorder.”

“I won’t take drugs.”

He put a towel over the mirror, turned to look at her. “What do you mean? It may be a simple lack of serotonin. A biochemical insufficiency. A disease. Nothing to be ashamed of in that. We all take drugs. Clomipramine is very helpful for this problem.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“And no mirrors.”

“I’m not a child!” she snarled. “I know what I look like!” She leaped up and tore the towel off the mirror. Insane reptile vulture, pterodactylic, ferocious—it was impressive, in a way.

Michel shrugged. He had a little smile on his face, which she wanted to punch, or kiss. He liked lizards.

She shook her head to clear it. “Well. Take action, you say.” She thought about it. “I certainly prefer action to the alternative, in the current situation we’re in.” She told him about the news from the south, and her proposal to the others. “They make me so angry. They’re just waiting for disaster to strike again. All but Sax, and he is a loose cannon with all his sabotages, consulting with no one but these fools he has—we have to do something coordinated!”

“Good,” he said emphatically. “I agree. We need this.”

She regarded him. “Will you come to Hellas Basin with me?”

And he smiled, a spontaneous grin of pure pleasure. Of delight that she had asked! It pierced her heart to see it.

“Yes,” he said. “I have some business to finish here, but I can do that quickly. Just a few weeks.” And he smiled again. He loved her, she saw; not just as a friend or therapist, but as a lover too. And yet with a certain kind of distance, a Michel distance, some kind of therapist thing. So that she could still breathe. Be loved and still breathe. Still have a friend.

“So you can still stand to be with me, even though I look like this.”

“Oh Maya.” He laughed. “Yes, you are still beautiful, if you want to know. Which you still do, thank God.” He gave her a hug, pulled back and inspected her. “It is a trifle austere. But it will do.” She pushed him away. “And no one will recognize me.” “No one who doesn’t know you.” He stood. “Come on, are you hungry?”

“Yes. Let me change clothes.”

He sat on the bed and watched her as she did, soaking her up, the old goat. Her body was still a human body, amazingly enough, demonstrably female even at this ridiculous posthumous age. She could walk over and squash a breast into his face and he would suckle it like a child. Instead she dressed, feeling her spirits scrape off the bottom and begin their rise; the best moment in the whole sine wave, like the winter solstice for the paleolithics, the moment of relief when you know the sun will come back again, someday. “This is good,” Michel said. “We need you to lead again, Maya. You have the authority, you see. The natural authority. And it’s good to spread the work around, and for you to concentrate on Hellas. A very good plan. But you know—it will take more than afiger.”