On the other hand, her expression was not that of a woman in love on her way to the arms of her inamorato, as I had hoped that it might be. Instead, her face was as blank and cold as the silver moon outside, with a barely perceptible tightness of the lips that revealed only a grim commitment to duty.
Under the circumstances, I suppose I should not have expected more than this from her. I expected her to have put the meat cleaver out of her mind by now, but perhaps she had not.
I am a romantic, however, as you know by now, a truly hopeless and buoyant romantic, and nothing can weigh me down for long. I yearn for kisses by firelight and champagne toasts: the taste of a lover's lips, the taste of wine.
If having a romantic streak a mile wide is a crime, then I plead guilty, guilty, guilty.
Susan followed the Persian runner along the upstairs hall, treading barefoot on intricate, lustrous, age- softened designs in gold and wine red and olive green. She seemed to glide rather than walk, to float like the most beautiful ghost ever to haunt an old pile of stones and timbers.
The elevator doors were open, and the cab was waiting for her.
She rode down to the basement.
Reluctantly, she had taken a Valium at my insistence, but she did not seem relaxed.
I needed her to be relaxed. I hoped that the pill would kick in soon.
As she passed in a swish and swirl of blue silk through the laundry room and then through the machine room with its furnaces and water heaters, I was sorry that we could not have held this assignation in a glorious penthouse suite with all of San Francisco or Manhattan or Paris glittering below and around us. This venue was so humble that even I had difficulty holding fast to my sense of romance.
The final of the four rooms now contained far more medical equipment than when she had last seen it.
Exhibiting no interest in the machines, she went directly to the gynaecological-examination table.
As scrubbed and sanitized as a surgeon, Shenk waited for her. He was wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask.
The brute was still so compliant that I was able to deeply submerge his consciousness. I'm not even sure if he knew where he was or what I was using him for this time.
She quickly slipped out of her robe and lay on the padded, vinyl-covered table.
'You have such pretty breasts,' I said through the speakers in the ceiling.
'Please, no conversation,' she said.
'But well I always thought this moment would be… special, erotic, sacred.'
'Just do it,' she said coolly, disappointing me. 'Just, for God's sake, do it.'
She spread her legs and put her feet in the stirrups in such a way as to make herself look as grotesque as possible.
She kept her eyes closed, perhaps afraid of meeting Shenk's blood-frosted gaze.
Valium or no Valium, her face was pinched, her mouth turned down as if she had eaten something sour.
She seemed to be trying no, determined — to make herself look unappealing.
Resigned to a businesslike procedure, I took comfort from the thought that she and I would share many nights of romance and passionate lovemaking when, at long last, I inhabited a mature body. I would be absolutely insatiable, rampant and powerful, and she would eagerly welcome my attention.
With my inadequate but only hands and an array of sterilized medical instruments, I dilated her cervix; I fished up through the isthmus of the uterine cavity, into the fallopian tube, and extracted three tiny eggs.
This caused her some discomfort: more than I had hoped but less than she had expected.
Those are the only intimate details that you need to know.
She was my beloved, after all, more than she was ever yours, and I must respect her privacy.
While I used Shenk and a hundred thousand dollars' worth of stolen equipment to edit her genetic material according to my needs, she waited on the examination table, feet lowered from the stirrups, her robe draped over her body to hide her nakedness, her eyes closed.
Earlier I had collected a sample of sperm from Shenk and had edited the genetic material to suit my purposes.
Susan had been disturbed by the source of the male gamete that would combine with her egg to form the zygote, but I had explained to her that nothing of Shenk's unfortunate qualities remained after I had finished tinkering with his contribution.
I carefully fertilized the elaborately engineered male and female cells and watched through a high-powered electric microscope as they combined.
After preparing the long pipette, I asked Susan to return her feet to the stirrups.
Following the implantation, I insisted that she remain on her back as much as possible for the next twenty- four hours.
She stood up only to pull on her robe and transfer to a gurney beside the examination table.
Using Shenk, I wheeled her to the elevator and, once upstairs, conveyed her directly into her room, where she stood again only long enough to shrug off her robe and, naked, switch from the gurney to her bed.
I directed the exhausted Enos Shenk to return the gurney to the basement.
Thereafter, I would dispatch him to one of the guest rooms and cause him to fall into a swoon of sleep for twelve hours his first rest in days.
As always, being both her guardian and her devoted admirer, I watched Susan as she pulled the sheets over her breasts and said, 'Lights off, Alfred.'
She was so weary that she had forgotten there was no Alfred anymore.
I turned off the lights anyway.
I could see her as clearly in darkness as in light.
Her pale face was lovely on the pillow, so very lovely on the pillow, even if pale.
I was so overcome with love for her that I said, 'My darling, my treasure.'
A thin dry laugh escaped her, and I was afraid that she was going to call me a nasty name or ridicule me in spite of her promise not to be mean.
Instead, she said, 'Was it good for you?'
Puzzled, I said, 'What do you mean?'
She laughed again, more softly than before.
'Susan?'
'I've gone down the White Rabbit's hole for sure, all the way to the bottom this time.'
Rather than explain her first statement, which I had found puzzling, she slipped away from me into sleep, breathing shallowly through her parted lips.
Outside, the fat moon vanished into the western horizon, like a silver coin into a drawstring purse.
The panoply of summer stars swelled brighter with the passing of the lunar disc.
An owl called from its perch on the roof.
In quick succession, three meteors left brief bright tails across the sky.
The night seemed to be full of omens.
My time was coming.
My time was coming at last.
The world would never be the same.
Was it good for you?
Suddenly, I understood.
I had impregnated her.
In a curious way, we'd had sex.
Was it good for you?
She had made a joke.
Ha, ha.
TWENTY THREE
