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“
Just you and the whole gaming industry.” He seemed
delighted by her response. “There are at least three major animé
series based on
The Pirates
, and
that’s just the legal stuff. Yet it was panned when it was first
published. The critics dismissed it as fantasy.”

“
You’re not trying to tell me it’s based on fact?”

“
Isn’t everything? Everything is real in a way, once you’ve
imagined it.”

“
You sound like – ”
You sound like the old
woman
, she wanted to
say, but then thought better of it. She did not want to bring
Thanick Acampos into the conversation. It was bad enough that she
kept popping into her head all the time. Layla bit her lip and
turned away towards the window. The sunlight lay flat on the lake
like the sheen on satin. She wondered when Alcander had last been
outside in the open air.

“
Sound like what?” said Alcander. He was grinning at her, the
gesture now more recognisable for what it was and less like a
grimace of pain. She knew it was impossible for such rapid
improvements to have taken place in Alcander’s condition, yet she
could hardly deny the evidence of her eyes.

She told
herself it was simply that she was becoming accustomed to the way
he looked, that it was the man she was seeing now, not the monster
that his sickness had made him.

“
Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to say you reminded
me of Plato or something. One of those people. I don’t know what
I’m talking about really.”

His mouth
stretched wide in a soundless gagging she realised was laughter. “I
think you know a lot more than you let on. Anyway, I don’t have
much time for philosophy, all those tidy little theories they dream
up. I sometimes think the philosophers are as keen on averaging
people out as the lawmen. That’s why I love the poets so much. A
poet isn’t really interested in any system of thought except his
own. The academics would say Panteleimon was an anarchist, a
supporter of the founding twelve hundred. But really he was too
wrapped up in his own life even for that. And it’s only when
someone speaks for himself and for himself alone that you know he’s
speaking the truth.”

His speech
ended in a burst of coughing, a terrible raw hacking that made it
sound as if his insides were being wrenched free. He covered his
mouth with both hands. When he finally lifted them away Layla saw
that the palm not covered in bandages was smeared all over with
green phlegm. He wiped his hand on a square of towelling that had
been left looped over the headrest, then reached for a porcelain
cup on the invalid table. His fingers were trembling. Layla leaped
up from her seat and went to his side. She picked up the cup, which
was heavy and bulky as a beer tankard. She supposed that made it
less likely to be knocked over. The water in the cup had the same
metallic smell as the water she had drunk from the fountain on the
road to Corinth, and once again she found herself thinking of
Thanick Acampos. She held the cup to Alcander’s lips, holding it in
both hands to keep it steady.

“
You shouldn’t talk so much,” she said. “Not all in one go,
anyway.”

She smiled,
and he gulped the water, but his face when he raised it afterwards
had a stricken look.

“
How embarrassing,” he said. “God only knows what you must
think of me.”

“
I think you’re probably the most interesting person I’ve ever
met.” She took the cup from his hands and placed it back on the
table. “And definitely the bravest.”

“
Interesting and brave.” He pulled a face. “That’s almost
worse than good sense of humour.”

She laughed.
“What if I was to tell you that interesting is the finest
compliment I know.”

“
I’m not sure I’d believe you. I’d have to suspend
my judgement until I knew you better.” He reached again for the
cup, and Layla saw that his hands had stopped shaking, that he was
able to lift the beaker by himself. “If you’re forbidding me to
speak then you’ll have to talk instead. The way you responded
to
The
Pirates
, as if it was
vTV, or some exciting news story – that’s exactly how poetry should
be read. If you treat works of art like fossils that’s what they
become. You understood that instinctively. I want you to tell me
why you said you didn’t know anything about poetry when clearly you
do know a lot.”

“
You’re wrong,” Layla said. “I don’t know anything. It was the
colours, that’s all, the way he described things.” She paused. She
realised this was a turning point, that this was the moment she
must decide if what she felt for Alcander Xenakis was important
enough for her to allow herself to trust him. She had never shared
the facts of her life with anyone. With John Caribe she had
constructed a relationship based on the facts of her life since she
had arrived in Atoll City. With her co-workers at the Minerva less
even than that.

If anyone
asked her about her mother she said simply that she had died when
Layla was a child. If she was going to tell Alcander about Romilly
Perec it should be now. It came to her that she was lucky to have a
choice in the matter. The facts of Alcander’s life were seared into
his flesh for all to see. Whether he wanted to be or not, he was
naked in front of her.

“
I’ve always felt safer with pictures, with
colours,” she said. “When you make an image it’s just that: an
image, and an image is only what you make of it. People can say
what they like about it, but they can’t really accuse you of
anything. Words are different. Words are so
final
, somehow. Once you’ve said them you can’t take
them back. You’re stuck with them forever. And people can use them
against you any time they like.”

She crossed to
the window again and looked out at the lake. She wondered what was
really there, behind the simulation. A walled garden perhaps, of a
moderate size, stocked with fig and azalea and dwarf olive like the
gardens of the houses on Athenaeum Street.

If I lived here with him we would go back to
that
, Layla
thought.
Just the garden, the way it really is.
“My mother was a poet,” she said. “She was
executed under the clairvoyancy laws. My father was forced to
publicly disown her.”

Alcander drew
in his breath, and for a moment she was afraid he might start
coughing again. “Layla,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He was looking
straight at her. His blue eyes, she saw, were exactly the same
shade of blue as the small Delft soap dish on the shelf above the
hand basin in the corner. She realised it was the first time he had
called her by her name.

“
Do you know how they execute savants in Messinias?” she said.
“They bind their limbs and throw them off a cliff into the sea. The
law says that if they manage to reach the shore without human aid
they are allowed to go free. But of course with their arms and legs
roped to their bodies most of them sink like stones in less than a
minute. My mother was taken out just after dawn. Normally there
would have been a crowd, but apparently my mother’s execution was
not popular and so it was just the lawmen and my
father.”

“
Your father was there?” Alcander spoke so quietly she could
hardly hear him.

“
Oh yes, that was part of the sentence, that he had to watch.
He told me she floated on her back, at least at first, at least for
a little while. She was a good swimmer, my father said. She was
never afraid of the sea, and that was why she was able to relax
enough to allow the water to carry her in towards the shore. But
then a large wave rolled over her, and when it subsided she was
face down in the water. He could see her trying to right herself
but she couldn’t do it. It’s impossible to do anything in the water
without the use of your arms and legs. I know because I tried it
once. I swam out to sea then turned on my back with my arms by my
sides and my legs pressed together. I began to sink almost at once.
But of course all I had to do was kick out a few times and I was
afloat again.

“
I kept trying to imagine what went through my mother’s mind,
what it was like for her in those last few minutes when she knew
she was drowning and that no one was coming to save her. In the end
I had to stop trying to imagine it because it gave me nightmares.
But they were only nightmares. I could kick my way out of those the
same as I could kick out in the water to stay afloat. My mother
couldn’t do that. She had to live the nightmare right to the
end.”

Layla began to
cry, small, hard tears that forced their way out from under her
eyelids and scuttled away down her cheeks. The last time she cried
in public she had been thirteen, when she had let Iona goad her
into a petty argument about how much vTV she should be allowed to
watch before a school exam. She still remembered the humiliation
she felt, that she had allowed her personal feelings to be exposed
in this way.

This time it
felt different. It felt as if she was sharing something that could
not be shared in any other way.

“
I want to hold you,” Alcander said. “But my hands are so
awful.”

She raised her
head, meeting his eyes, and then took his bandaged hand in both her
own. She did it as gently as she could, afraid that her touch might
be hurting him.

“
Your hands are not awful,” she said. “It’s the disease that
is awful, not you.”

“
But if you live with something long enough it becomes you.
That’s what frightens me, anyway. That without this thing to define
me the person I know as myself wouldn’t exist.”

“
That’s rubbish,” Layla said. But it occurred to her even as
she said it that he might be right. Would she still be who she was
without her mother’s execution, and the way she had secretly formed
her identity around it all these years, guarding its horror within
her like a vital organ? The thought was new to her and terrifying.
But she guessed it was too late to worry about it now.

She saw the
way Alcander looked at her as she held his hand, with wonder and
also with fear, as if he knew, even so soon, that in allowing
another person to approach him so closely he was opening up an
entryway for hurt.

She saw also
that he looked tired.

“
I should go,” she said. She thought he might object but he
did not, either because he really was tired or because, like
herself, he wanted to be alone to think about things. She squeezed
his fingers gently, exerting the slightest possible pressure. The
bandages were stiff to the touch, encrusted with solidified mucus,
and this repulsed her even as she felt anger rise up inside her at
the thought of his pain. She felt like crying again.

“
Should I see your mother before I go, do you think?” she
said.

“
Don’t bother,” said Alcander. “She goes on the simulation
most afternoons.”

“
You mean – ?”

He
nodded. “You’ve seen the garden? She had a print made of Dad, the
same kind of ultra-high-resolution holoprint. The holograms are
like a drug with her. She’s probably bonking her brains out as we
speak.” He smiled wanly. The mention of sex seemed to float in the
air between them, a miasma of yellowish particles, acrid as
pollen.

“
What about your sisters?” Layla said finally. “Who looks
after them while she’s…gone?”

“
The girls are holograms too. I thought you knew.”

“
But I touched them. I talked to them.” She remembered the
fairy cakes and then the lemonade, sweetly fizzy against her
tongue. She did not believe she had imagined these things, though
she had to concede that the more she tried to concentrate on them
the vaguer they grew. She did not know which was worse: that Nashe
Crawe should have to invent two normal children in order to make up
for the fact that her real child, Alcander, was probably dying, or
that Alcander appeared to be alone in the house with an insane
mother.

“
I don’t like leaving you,” she said.

“
I wouldn’t worry. There are servants. Real ones, I mean. They
keep me clean and tidy, mop up the mess.”

“
Don’t joke about it.”

“
I’m not.” His hand shifted in her grasp as he tried to
squeeze her fingers. “I’m so happy you came back. Will you again,
do you think?”

“
I will,” Layla said to him. “Soon.”

She made her
way back through the house, listening for the sounds of Nashe Crawe
cavorting with her simulacrum, but there was nothing. The silence
was deep and total, and if she had not been with Alcander just a
moment before she would have sworn that the place was empty and had
been empty for years.

It was a ghost
place, like the bombed tenements she had seen out in Tsokla. She
could almost imagine that if she were to return to Alcander’s room
and fling open the door there would be no one there.

The house, she
thought, was like a glass palace. Viewed in a certain way and in a
certain light it would slide out of existence entirely. She
remembered something John Caribe had once said to her, that once
you surpassed a certain level of material wealth you attained a new
level of madness, something the rest of the world had no conception
of. She had reacted with scorn at the time. Now she found herself
inclined to believe him.

The afternoon temperatures were in the high
nineties,
and without
air conditioning the flat became too hot to work in. Once her shift
at the factory was over Layla rode the trolleybus out to Voula
where she would swim off the rocks and afterwards take an iced ouzo
at one of the beach tavernas. The friable heat of late August made
her glad to escape the city, and during those hours she spent
staring across the water towards the humped island mass of Aegina
she could almost imagine she was back in Kardamyli, that if she
stayed at the beach just a short while longer she would catch sight
of her father, steering the
Auster
into port. It was at these times that she thought of
leaving Atoll City, of packing up her studio and secreting herself
in one of the dozens of dilapidated farmhouses out at Stoupa or
Areopoli. She could work there undisturbed and in total
safety.