Metallic Love

He put out one hand and ran over my hair a light caress like electric fire.

“It’s better to forget Jane,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “But one other thing.” Patiently, his hands already resting on me, molten through my flesh into my bones. “Did you send a message to her from—I mean, when you were dead?”

He shook his head. The long, long hair flamed, shadowed. “Loren,” he said regretfully, “how could I? I wasn’t dead, only switched off and dismantled. Death is for humans. Souls, if they exist, are for humans.”

The sunray struck over my eyes as his first deep kiss bent back my head on his arm. I sealed my eyelids tight.

I am with the demon lover.

I am making love with the statue of a god cast in metal, and Jane’s Book was a lie.

Without excuses, I have to tell you, I still wanted him. Desired and yearned to make love with him. For if he was the statue of a god, it was one of the gods of love, so how could I—anyone (almost anyone)—resist? I tingled with need—with lust.

Do I quote her again now, our lying, self-deceiving little Jane? (Yes, a liar. She lied about the names of streets, didn’t she? Other things. She even hinted she was going to, to protect certain people, her god-awful mother, and so on…. )

She said:

But he was beautiful and silver, with the blaze of a fire at his groin. All of him was beautiful. All. His hair swept me like a tide. No part of him is like metal, except to look at. To touch, like skin… without unevenness or flaw.

No lie there. None.

He stripped us both with a deft and gracious economy. Then we were naked, moving over each other, searching, amalgamating, linked. Everything he did to me was exquisite, unbearably so. I felt a hundred times glorious annihilation plunge towards me along a tunnel of lightning—but, just like Jane the Virgin, in the very end, I knew I couldn’t dive off that final precipice.

I didn’t confess. He knew, anyway. He tried, resourceful and tactful, to make it happen for me. With Jane (unless it was another lie) the

rollers of ecstasy

rushed in and claimed her. But not me.

She’d been innocent, as he said. And I, who’d climaxed so mundanely and successfully and often in the arms of lesser creatures like myself, lay at last numbed by struggle—and a type of frightened boredom.

Then, at my laxity and unwillingness, my stasis, he drew away.

“Can I do something else? Is there anything special you would like?” (His library of abilities must also include, naturally, our kinks and perversions.)

“No. I’m only tired. Human, you see. A nontechnical fault in my libido.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you needed. Perhaps,” he said, as he put on his clothes again, pristine still, no sweat, no need to shower or shave or eat or sleep, “we might try this again. In the future.”

“Yes,” I said. But I didn’t know what I said.

I wanted him to stay with me. I wanted him—oh, yes—I wanted him gone.

It was I who’d failed the bloody test, not this angel of the fiery firmament.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m registering they want me home.” He said that quirkily. He grinned at me his fantastic grin. No confidence lost by this missed hit. Why would there be, for him?

Don’t leave me.

Leave me—go—hurry.

He leaned over me. For the last? He kissed me on the mouth. “Ah, Loren,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Next time.”

“Will there be one?”

He stood against the light. His white clothes had changed to dusty gray denim. I hadn’t noticed him do that, but it would have taken only seconds. Yet how had he done it? They had been removable garments—I’d seen them lying on the floor.

Whatever, it seemed he’d been aware of the unpopularity of the rich or famous on the lower streets, after all. His personal colors and his metal, though, were the same. Would mere denim be enough?

The morning window was behind him. I couldn’t see his face anymore, only the gleam at an eye’s corner, the whiteness of his teeth.

“Ah, Loren,” he said again. “I do so want to take you there. Carry you up and throw you off into the stars. That’s built into me. So, I insist. There’ll be a next time. You and me. Believe it.”

I lay there and he went out the door, which he closed. Noiselessly he descended the apartment house stairs. Should I creep to the window and watch him stride off along the street?

I turned onto my stomach, and slept like the soulless human dead.

• 3 •

Those two magpies that live in the quake-site garden out back are dipping around today like crazy. There’s that bronzy burnish on the trees down there, still green, but getting ready to turn for the fall. It’s warm, but clear. This afternoon you can just see the ghostly shape of the Asteroid, as sometimes you can when the moon, also a ghost, visits the daytime sky. Men have walked on both. And then, as we know, governments around the world decided that to blast the Asteroid to “safer” smaller bits, or try to shift it off orbit and back into space, were both too risky. Instead they rigged up some kind of early warning on it, about the time they collected stones, and carefully mined a little surface metal (asterion). The idea of the warning is so we’d all know if it ever goes ballistic again and starts to drop the conclusive miles right on top of us. But, of course, they’d never tell us. Only the so- called important ones would scuttle down into their huge secret shelters, about which, over the years, quite a mythology has been invented. Some are supposed to be no better than deep dungeons. Others the apex of fantastic luxury. Not that this will be of any use to the rest of us. We’ll find out as soon as the damn thing hits us, and that will be that. You’d think, wouldn’t you, nobody could go on living a quarter-way normal life with that kind of Damocletian Sword hanging over our heads. But we do, don’t we? People always have. Humans are survivors. We have to be, or we wouldn’t put up with a single minute in this place. I remember Danny used to say that babies cried, not to get air into their lungs, but to say, “Oh, God, I’m not here again!” Danny believed in reincarnation and rebirth. So did I, once.

When I woke up again that day in the apartment house, it wasn’t day, it was sunset, day was done.

I’d slept all that while, apparently, lying on my arms, and both had gone to sleep.

Silly, that. I found it quite awkward to get myself off my face, being used to at least one working arm for a lever. I started laughing, then I made it.

Then the depression came down like the cloud of polluted night.

Unlike the babies, I don’t cry. Jane said, and I believe this part of her story still, that she often cried. She judged she did it too much. At Grandfather’s Hell-house, if you shed tears, you got whupped. He beat it out of us, at least out of me. And anyhow, there’s always so much to cry at. Why waste the time.

But the depression was like a fog.

I got up and went down the hall and used the showers. No one in there again. Either they all got clean in the mornings, or they were a filthy lot on West Larch.

After I was back in my room, I sorted my possessions and began to pack up. I could see no point in staying there now. I’d found what I’d come to find and never knew I really could. And it was—or wasn’t—it was nothing I recognized. I hated what I’d found.

Despite that, did I take the panel out of the closet and retrieve the Book? Oh, yes.