Kelley Eskridge (17 page)

She licked her bowl one last time and put
it back dirty into the cupboard. Then she folded her blanket into
quarters and sat on it cross-legged against the north wall. She began
by counting out loud: today by threes, from one to four thousand and
two. Tomorrow she would count by fours.

After she counted, she paced out the
perimeter of her cell, skirting the bed, fitting toe to heel so that
her feet measured each pace precisely. It had become a point of
reference whether or not she made a mistake in her count, or stumbled
in her measuring. Today was perfect. She knew it was a good sign; today
would be a good day, an easy day to do.

“Snow,” she said aloud.

She was not sure exactly when there had
begun to be people inside her to talk to. She found it easier not to
worry about it. It was nice to be in charge of all her conversations,
to choose when and to whom she connected, to be able to repeat the best
bits over and over if she wanted. On good days, like today, she really
could hear people's voices between her ears, and she did not have to
rewind parts of the conversation to adjust the responses, to make them
sound more true. On good days, her people came to her and she was
comforted. She had such wonderful talks with Snow, with Bear. She had
forgiven her parents. She understood Tiger so much better now.

“Hi, honey,” Snow said.

“How are you?”

“I'm okay. Training's going better now.”
Snow told Jackal all about the line re-engineering and total quality
human resource management program that she had recommended to resolve
labor issues at a Ko micro-subsidiary in Aberdeen.

“I miss you,” Jackal said.

“How do you like being alone?”

What did that mean? “I try not to think
about it too much. Sometimes I feel like I'm not even here, like I'm
nowhere. That's good, really. The time goes by fastest when it's like
that.”

“So you just check out, is that it? What
are you afraid of?”

“I—”

“What's the point, then? What good are you
if you can't face it, look it right in the eye and rise above it? Rise,
remember? I

do
, therefore I am.
Descartes was an idiot.”

She realized she was digging her
fingernails into the skin of her forearms, hanging on tight. Why was
Snow talking to her this way? And then she had a bad thought.

“Who is this?” she said.

“Puppy. Cow,” the voice said, not
bothering to sound like Snow at all now, rich and malicious and
perilously loud within her: and suddenly it wasn't a good day anymore,
in spite of the tasty meal and the perfect counting. Suddenly it looked
like one of the very worst days indeed.

“Moo,” the voice said softly, just inside
her right ear. It had become her greatest fear that one day she would
hear the voice speak from across the room, or right beside her: that it
would chew its way out of her brain and she would be locked up with it,
and it would eat her alive.

“Moo hoo,” soft in her ear. She shook her
head once, again, harder. “Go away!” she hissed.

“Moo too.” In her left ear, now. Then
sudden laughter traveling along the inside of her skull from left to
right and back again. She jerked onto her feet. “Stop it,” she yelled,
and shook her head harder as the laughter rattled around inside it. She
swung around to face the screen; distorted multicolored squares and
triangles seemed to wink in and out in time with the noises in her
brain.

“NO,” she yelled. The voice stopped like a
jaw snapping tight around the sound, and the colored shapes on the
screen winked into black. Her breath seemed to go with them, and she
thought she might fall over. She leaned forward and put her hands on
her knees to steady herself. When she looked up, the screen was once
again placidly running through its fractals as if nothing had happened,
as if no time at all had passed since she sat down with Snow.

Snow. How was she going to be able to talk
to Snow, after this? How would she know it was really Snow, and not the
thing pretending to be Snow so it could sneak up on her, climb up out
of her, take her by the throat and shake her until she broke? She stood
in the middle of her cell, rubbing her hands around each other, right
foot tapping, breathing hard. Goddamn voice. She snorted. Goddamn
voice, pretending to be Snow, ruining her day. It couldn't be allowed,
she would have to deal with it, show it, show it—

She went rigid and stood still, fists
clenched, knees locked, taking in slow deep breaths until she felt in
control again. She would find other things to do with her time. Better
things.

She asked the viewscreen for the date. It
told her that today was Day 377. Her second year.

Day 424

She opened her eyes and saw gray. She did
not know whether she had been sleeping or only drifting in some other
space, awake but not present, out of her mind. She blinked, and her
vision was still full of gray; so she lay without moving and slowly,
carefully worked out that she was stretched out on the floor on her
left side, with her nose only inches from the stone of one of her cell
walls. That was odd. And she was naked. She rolled over onto her back.
The light was on full bright, and she had to squint and turn her head
away. Light? When was the last time she had tucked herself into bed and
called for dark? When was last night?

She closed her eyes and tried to track
some small scent of memory along its backtrail. Nothing. She turned
onto her stomach and pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, and
then squatted back on her heels. The process took a long time, and was
much more difficult than it should have been, because every muscle was
tight and sore. Red patches on her forearms and shins were beginning to
fade to yellow bruises with blue-purple centers. Her head throbbed. She
found a swollen place above her right ear that hurt when she touched
it; and it all shocked her so much that she could only pull her hand
away from her head and look at it as if she'd never seen it before. She
was not supposed to suffer physical pain in VC, any more than she was
supposed to feel hungry or sick. But she was sore. She was damaged.

She was very frightened.

She looked up at the screen. Tidal surges
of vermilion and naphthol and viridian rolled across a strontium beach;
the screen almost seemed to flex under the weight. “Date,” she tried to
say, and her voice scraped so thick and strained out of her throat that
the screen did not understand her, did not respond. “What is the date,”
she said again, more controlled, and in the lower left corner, amid the
swirling colors, a display appeared: Day 424.

She ran her fingers through her hair,
wincing when they rubbed across the tender place on her skull. She
clasped her hands behind her head so that her elbows were drawn in
tight in front of her nose, and her head was tucked into a little cave
made out of her arms, a small safe place where she could calm her
breathing and think this through.

Day 424. The last day she could remember
clearly was, oh, maybe 421 or 422. It must have been 421, because the
digits added up to seven, which was a bad number for her. She was very
careful on days that added up to seven to observe her routines exactly,
to make sure that things went right. She remembered standing in front
of the open cupboard, trying to decide what the best middle meal was
for a day that added up to seven, and then…nothing.

She could not remember. There was a
sudden, horrible pain at the side of her head and she moaned and the
next instant found herself under her bed, wedged into the corner as far
as her body would go. When she scrabbled out from under the metal frame
to stand and look at the screen, the left corner display read Day 425.

“What is going on?” she shouted, and her
voice cracked around the words.

“Moo, cow,” something said.

She yelped, and spun around in a circle.
There was no one there.

Oh, this is bad, this is very bad, she
thought frantically, very bad, very bad—

“Don't turn around,” said the voice, from
right behind her.

She froze. Her sore muscles spasmed once,
and she winced and squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lower lip.

“Oh, you're a tough one,” the voice said,
with a sort of syrupy glee, “tough as old boots but I got you, I got
you.”

No no no, she thought.

“We're going to have some fun. No, don't
move,” it hissed, as her head jerked back. “No matter what happens you
mustn't turn around, oh no.”

Her eyes were still closed because she did
not want to see.

“I'm the crocodile,” it said, thickly.
“I'm standing behind you with my big big teeth open over your neck.”

And she could feel it behind her, if she
opened her eyes she would see the tips of those enormous jaws on either
side of her. And now she understood how she must have come by her
bruises, fighting unremembered battles. And she had lost. She was lost.
Oh, that was such a bleak thought. And she was so scared. But at least
she could go down with her eyes open. She would see. She opened her
eyes and found herself staring at the harsh colors rippling across the
screen, and then they changed—

—and she saw herself. Her face. Just her
face, calm in a way that she had never felt, strong in a way that she
had never seen in her mirror, not fearless but not afraid. A face made
from the inside out. Here it was, looking straight at her; and it was
for Jackal as if she paused in front of the open elevator doors of
Mirabile, only an impulse away from the fatal step. She was so tired.
She wanted to weep. She wanted to lean back and rest in the jaws of
madness. But she also wanted to be the face that she saw before her;
and it was not a mad face. She was so tired. She bent her head, and the
flesh of her cheeks and forehead tightened until she thought her skull
would shatter under the force. Behind her there was an indrawn breath,
a sound of preparation, a feel of motion in the air: and Jackal threw
back her head and screamed from her guts, an ululation of rage and
despair, and whirled her body around with her fists punching and elbows
stabbing, her teeth tearing at the air behind her. “I won't let you,”
she yelled, “I won't let you!” She grabbed the air and held it as she
went down hard, and then she was rolling, kicking, ripping,
bludgeoning, still yelling, and the crocodile voice was barking in
anger, wailing in resistance, snarling, pleading and then

snap
it was gone. There was
nothing
but
the sound of her own ragged breathing.

She lay on the floor, winded. When she had
the energy to raise her head, she saw that her body was unmarked. The
bruises were gone, as if they never had been there. Nothing hurt. She
touched herself gently. She felt fine. “I won't let you,” she
whispered, and then, finally, she began to cry.

Day 500

She lived now as if recovering from a long
illness. She treated her body like something that might easily break.
She made no casual movement. She breathed shallowly. She tried not to
make any noise. She ate small, frequent meals and sipped constantly
from the bottle of clear water that refilled itself over and over in
her cupboard. She was jumpy. She dropped things. She spent hours
staring at the patterns on her screen.

She slept in long stretches during her
nights, and in short, hard daytime naps that left her feeling confused.
Her first waking thought was always that the crocodile was back, hiding
under the bed with its terrible jaws turned sideways to catch an ankle
or a dangling hand. She woke every day to fear, and she walked
carefully.

One day she ate three meals in a row of
cold boiled egg crumbled onto buttered pumpernickel bread, with salt
and pepper. It was one of her earliest taste memories, undemanding,
comforting. She sat on the floor with the egg-and-bread cupped in her
hand, taking half-bites, making it last. She thought about what she had
been doing since the crocodile: trying to stay quiet, trying to give
little notice to the unfilled moments. Trying to make the small
comforts last. She sighed and swallowed the last bit of buttery crust.
That was all there was. Empty time between empty meals. Confined in
this empty place.

This empty place is my cell, she thought.
I am in prison and this is my cell. She felt a sort of cold wonderment,
and a sense of standing again on the edge of the long drop. Oh no,
mustn't fall. And that idea, fuzzy and inarticulate as it was, gave her
something to grip, an anchor. She must continue to walk carefully. She
must not splinter and scatter herself again. She must not break. She
must endure.

Day 752

It took a long time to understand what she
had to do, but when she did it made such sense. The way to endure was
to have nothing that could be taken away. And for that she needed
control. The crocodile had gotten to her because she was undisciplined
and soft; but now she would be tough. She programmed each moment. She
was relentless about keeping a meal schedule, but she no longer noticed
what she ate. It didn't matter. She exercised once every day, and
reined in her restlessness at other times.

She planned it as Neill had taught her at
Ko, one step at a time, and when she was ready, when her discipline had
hardened, she began to make herself unbreakable. She went about it
precisely and with great purpose. First she made a white board in her
mind. Then she let a thought draw itself in colored ink on the clean
surface, and erased it, and it was simply gone. No longer anything to
do with her. Some things were harder to wipe away, but she persisted.
It was like a mental fast; she cleaned the impurities from herself
until her mind ran like stream water, shallow and cold.

It took a long time. She worked hard. She
cut away the grief of the company's betrayal. She burned out the image
of her parents, the way her father's shoulders had bowed when he turned
away from her the last time, her mother on the net. She stripped the
web away, the living and the dead, one person at a time. She cauterized
all her memories of Ko Island: the long pebbled beaches; the solid
silence of the wood that would grow now without her; the enormous,
lucid sky. She put away her dreams and her fears of being a Hope. That
was gone.