The Silver Metal Lover

to him, the silent, violent upheaval shaking itself through him. Earthquake of the flesh. I was the one who cried out, as if the orgasm were mine. But my body was only shaken with his pleasure and my pleasure in his pleasure. So I knew what he’d known before, the joy in my lover’s joy.

The silence was very long, and I lay and listened to the candle wax crackling in the saucers. As I listened, I kissed him, his hair, his neck; I stroked him, held him.

Eventually, he lifted himself again. He lay on one elbow, looking down at me. His face was unchanged. Amused, tender, contemplative.

“Technically,” he said, “that just isn’t possible.”

“Did something happen? I didn’t notice.”

“Of course,” he said quietly, “a human man would have left you proof. You’ll never be sure it wasn’t—”

“Faked? I’ve heard so much about you. I know how it goes when you fake. Not like that. As for proof, it’s just as well there isn’t any. Along with everything else, I missed my contraception shots last month.”

“Jane,” he said, “I love you.”

I smiled. I said, “I know.”

He lay down next to me, and for another hour at least I was drowsily making up songs in my head, before I fell asleep.

So, we’re at the end of the story now. If you read so far. You don’t want to know any more of what we say to each other, or how we feel about each other. And I don’t need to write about it. The record—it is a record—is for… ? Even Silver hasn’t seen it, though he knows I’ve written it. But maybe, it’s a record for people who fall in love with machines. And—vice versa.

I write songs. I always could, and didn’t credit it. I can improvise sometimes, too. I am very good with hideous puns.

They groan, and they pay. The man who gave us a button, gives me another button. The first time he heard me sing, he gave us two, the double price Silver had stipulated.

Sometimes I see myself, a sort of bird’s-eye view of me in the distance, doing these things, singing solos and harmonies, playing at the crowd, and with the crowd. Sometimes it’s two hundred strong. And I’m astounded—is this me? But of course it isn’t. This is Jain. Jain with her blond hair, her twenty-two-inch waist, her silver skin, her peacock jacket, her cloak of emerald green velvet, lined with violet satin. It was as if a skin encased me. I could only just see through it. Then the skin tore wide open.

One month and a half now we’ve lived here in this wonderful squalid place.

It snowed yesterday and today, early, fierce snow, so we stayed in. We made love and homemade wine. The latter nearly blew the kitchen hatch off when the sugar exploded. I stress, the latter. And I finished writing all this.

The white cat comes to visit, and is lying like a blob of warm snow in the middle of the brass bed we bought two weeks ago, almost literally for a song. It makes a luxurious creaking noise when we move about on it—the bed, not the cat. Actually, the cat belongs to the caretaker. We get the rent to him in bits and pieces, and he doesn’t make a fuss. He’s also frankly but unconsciously in love with Silver.

Some days we still don’t eat. Sometimes we dine in expensive places. Performing, no store has ever told us to move on; occasionally they ask us to sing inside.

So many years of days since I saw Clovis, Egyptia, Chloe. My mother, Demeta. The temptation to call her is often very strong, but I resist it. I don’t need to crow. She doesn’t know where I am, but she knows I’ve won. Sometimes I dream about her, and I wake up sobbing. He comforts me. I apologize for being a bore. We argue about my paranoia, the fight ends in sex, the bed creaks and the white cat, if present, yowls.

There are things I try not to think about. When I’m sixty and he’s just the same as now. There’s Rejuvinex —we might be rich by then. He stresses that there’s metallic decay and creeps round the room making sinister clonking noises. And a comet could always hit the earth. To hell with all that.

The subsidence is white with ice and snow. The rooms glow, and we in our colors.

I love him. He loves me. It isn’t a boast. I can hardly believe it myself. But he does. Oh God, he does.

And I’m happy.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Look, everyone,” said the star, “I’m burning so bright.” And then it went nova. And when the light faded, the star was nowhere to be seen. The moral of this story is obvious.

• 1 •

My whole arm hurts too much for me to write this. I don’t know why I’m trying to. Is there any point? Is it a sort of therapy? I’m not writing it for a record, anymore. How childish. But then, if I’m not writing it, childishly, for anyone else, I must be writing it for me. And it won’t help me, so that’s that.

No. I have to write it.

It will be easier if I just start. Just go on. From those words—I’m happy. But I can’t.

I’m happy. I’m burning so bright.

Ohgodiwishiwasdeadandthewholebloodyworldwasdeadwithme.

No. I have to write it, so I will. And I don’t wish the world were dead. But I won’t even cross that out, or tear it up. I’ll just go on. Please help me, someone. Jain, please help me.

The snow became porcelain under a pane of blue sky. The weather was exquisite, the cold like diamond. After a couple of days, the wine and the raisins ran out, and we emerged again. We opted for most of the indoor pitches, particularly Musicord-Ectrica, on the corner of Green and Grande. If you don’t know, Musicord is the biggest all-day, all-night instrumental store that side of the city, and caters to the rich from the center as well as the starving dreams of the poor from the Arbors. There are so many anti-vandal and anti-thief devices in the shop, the decor mostly consists of them, and they hire their own robot poliguard. Silver was welcome because he could play any instrument in the store and make it sound its full worth and something extra, a wonderful inducement to customers to buy. Rather than take coins here, Musicord offered us a fee, and now and then a free late dinner in the lush restaurant above.

At first, I thought we’d keep meeting people I knew in the store, and wondered uneasily how I’d deal with them in my new persona. But my friends aren’t musical, knowing little except for the most recent songs and the odd snob-value bit of Mozart.

There were a couple of meetings, though, with musicians who came in and fell in love with Silver’s musicianship. Jealous and elated and intrigued, I’d listen to the oddest conversations, as they tried to find out what band he’d been with, why he wasn’t professional, and so on. As a liar, this creature who’d told me he couldn’t lie, proved most accomplished. I watched him languish esoterically over his escape from the rat race of the professional stage in some far-off city, I heard him invent curious debilities of the wrist or spinal cord that would let him down and so prohibited full-time public playing. Of course I came to realize these weren’t actually lies. He improvised, just as he did with songs. But a handful of musical evenings followed, extraordinary firework displays of talent, invention and good humor, in damp basement rooms or craning attics or quasi-derelict lofts. They played and he played. The excitement generated was insane and wonderful. Only his brilliance made them wary, and occasionally stumble. But I used to sit through these sessions and think: I like this. This is so good. And then I’d think, quite consciously, just as I wrote it down: I’m happy.

We came out of Musicord-Ectrica about two in the morning, then, and stood in the golden snow where the glow of the store lights was falling. We looked, from the outside, back in at the scarlet pianos, one of which Silver had been playing most of the afternoon and evening. A large visual screen, with a loudspeaker wired out to the