Metallic Love

Silver, though, then spoke to the man in fluent Italian. And the man began to beam and wave his hands. He came right out from behind the counter and guided us across the restaurant to a private niche, warm and dry. He took our coats, and returned with a pot of hot chocolast, with real cream.

“What did you say to him?”

“Not so much. About my Italian mother. And hot chocolast.”

“You don’t,” I said, “look affluent enough to carry a platinum I.M.U. Not to mention that I don’t.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“How do you have one?”

He showed me the card. Embossed across the edge was the acronym META.

“You are an employee?”

“Like you, Loren.”

We drank the chocolast, I without the cream. He without needing to. When the pot was empty, we each had a glass of wine.

By then the latening sun was out again and the whole of Russia sparkled under a spiderweb of raindrops and flyer lines.

“So we spent the afternoon together, after all,” he said.

“What do they think we did?”

“Kissed. Then came out to walk. They hear snatches, not all. I monitor which ones. I can do that easily while we’re talking. The Asteroid, you see, effects that kind of pickup if I’m outside. They’re still working to try to get around that.”

“Like the old mobile phones.”

Very quietly he produced for me, from his own voice box, the exact sound of a cell phone’s signaling tone. The sort you still hear in old movies. I jumped. I said, “A party trick.”

“I was trying to make you laugh. Not shock you.”

“Of course you shock me.”

“Say my name,” he said.

I looked at him. Then I said, “Verlis.” Getting it right the first time, not stumbling over any unspoken leading S for Silver.

“We can have,” he said, “the rest of the day. All night, if you want. Not for sex, if you don’t want that. We can walk, talk, go someplace and dance, or gamble on this bottomless card of mine. Or eat. How is your stomach, by the way?”

“I lied,” I said. “I got sick from nerves.”

“Another failure on my part,” he said. “Loren, I really think you’d better come out with me tonight, or I’ll have no confidence left.”

“This won’t work with me,” I said, shaking my wine slowly round and round inside the glass.

“Because you read Jane’s Book, and know how it goes. I’ve been trying to tell you, it doesn’t go like that.”

“She wanted to make believe you were human.”

“Lots of human beings want, and are going to want, to do that. And if that’s what they like, I accept it. With you, if you prefer, I can use the cell phone call-tone, when we’re in private.”

His smile was so—winning. And anyway, I was already won. So I kept playing with my wine.

Then he said to me, in his own voice, hushed and close against the drums of my ears, “You have a tiger’s eyes.”

“Not cowrie shells, then?” I answered sharply, before I could stop it.

“Jane’s words,” he said.

“Jane’s eyes. Or so she said you told her.”

“I don’t want to talk about Jane.”

“You told me they located her.”

“They have. And I did tell you. I think we have that organized now.”

Something—his smile—yes, now I saw it, turning to ice. And how he looked away, as if I abruptly bored him. Showing my persistence was losing me his intense, temporary regard.

Then he got to his feet. “Shall we go?”

We collected our coats, unspeaking. As we walked out past the man at the counter, Verlis spoke one further time in Italian, like “his mother.” They shook hands, man and machine. Outside on the sidewalk, Verlis nodded at me. “Thank you,” he said, cool and unfriendly, like others I’d known, “for your time. We must do it again. Get wet together.”

I turned my head and looked across the street. I didn’t know what to say to him.

Then he said, “Perhaps one thing you should know. You were the first. Not interested? Okay. See you, Loren.”

I jerked round and stared back at him, frowning. “First.”

“In the sack.”

“You… said you’d been given two previous partners.”

“Naturally. I explained about my skill of lying. Wouldn’t you have been very profoundly uneasy about screwing me, if you thought I’d had no prior experience? Yes, I’m the demon lover. I can do it all, and all the other All most of you never tell anyone you want. I can do all that, too. But I never had.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fair enough.”

I thought, vaguely, we must look like any couple having a spat.

“You say you were a virgin,” I said. “But that’s stupid, you’re not. You’ve slept with other people in the past, before—”

“The one I was isn’t the one I am now. Get that through your head, Loren. Got it? I am brand-new, all over again. Why the fuck do you think I am dreading seeing her again, that woman from before? I was, it seems, everything to her. But now I don’t fucking feel anything about her. If you want to know, I feel more about you.”

“Stop,” I blurted. “For Christ’s sake—”

“Scares you, doesn’t it? What do you think it does to me?”

The—disgust in his voice.

Can he do this? How is it his programming allows—but he can lie, he can deflect built-in surveillance and forge re-imaging. He can imitate a cell phone. He can maybe shape-shift. Oh, I guess he can just about manage to be disgusted, too.

I leaned back on the wall of the cafe. I felt weak and dizzy, and he frightened me. All of it did. And I couldn’t make myself say to him, Leave me alone.

I’d sworn my vows. Dust, rust, must.

“I apologize,” he said. He had said that before. He sounded neutral. “I’ll take you home. Come on, give me your hand.”

I gave it.

• 2 •

Turquoise.

More blue than green. That’s the color of love, then, for me. At least, of sexual love.

Will I always think that now? Associate that shade with that act?

Who knows.

It wasn’t like any other time. Nor like the time with him before.

Modest Jane said she wouldn’t give you details.

I want to give you details.

That is, I mean, I want to write them here, pages, a whole book about that single joining together on the