Metallic Love

“Loren.”

“How are you here?” she said. “Did you break in?”

“Somebody brought me here. Shouldn’t I be here?” I was trying to keep it, despite everything, neutral, normal.

“Well, not really. It’s where I’ve been staying with Tirso. Only he got sick of it and went to a hotel—and why am I explaining? Shouldn’t I just tell you to get out?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, hell,” she said. Then she laughed. Pretty, her laugh. She is beautiful—exactly as he told her she was. Twelve years older—which made her what? Twenty-eight twenty-nine? Jane. Jane who wrote the Book. “It’s presumably some misunderstanding, this, isn’t it? I mean, my bloody mother—she’s probably done all this to make it even more disturbing. As if it weren’t enough already.” She looked at me flatly, seeing something else.

Her mother. The mom from the Pit. Did Jane know how I knew her—that I’d read the Book?

I said, “I’ve read your Book about Silver. I read it when I was eleven. And since.”

“That makes me feel old,” she said. She smiled. “Funny, isn’t it? I’m not, not yet. What did you think?”

“What everyone did.”

“Which was?”

I shrugged. “Don’t tell me you don’t know the heart-tearing and subversive impact it had on so many of us.”

Then she looked vague, and also nearly ashamed, but whether of all her private revelations darting through so many devouring hands, eyes, brains, or of in some way misleading us, I couldn’t tell.

What she said was, “And now, there’s this. This resurrection. It’s—it’s not Silver,” she said to me, stern and anxiously sad, and as if I’d argued, shaking her head again. “Truly, I swear to you. It’s the same body, but it isn’t him. I’d know. Would I? I even start to doubt myself—but no, no. It isn’t.” She had a bag over her shoulder, and she opened it and took out a bottle of apple wine. “I was going to drink this to try to get some sleep. I don’t think I have slept for about a week.”

“No.”

“There are a couple of glasses in the bathroom. Could you?”

I did what she said. Had she had any authority in her youth? Maybe not. She did now. It was courteous but definite. Or was it just the situation that had put her in charge?

She was meant to be here? Her mother had—arranged it? Had Verlis known that?

When I came out with the glasses, which took about a count of twelve, she had the wine undone, and also a bar of Chocoletta, quite an expensive one, lying on its foil.

“Help yourself,” she said. She poured both glasses full.

I’d had so many wild dreams of Silver. But had I ever thought, in the wildest of them, I could end up eating chocolast and drinking mildly alcoholic juice with Jane?

I assessed her as we ate some of the candy. Like it, she didn’t look badly off, I mean, she looked as if she could buy decent things. But not rich, not like this mother she’d so astonishingly mentioned. She did wear makeup, color on her lips and shadow on her eyelids. And Tirso—was he her current lover, the fair-haired man at the concert?

“It must have been bad for him,” I said. “Your boyfriend.”

She sipped the wine. “He isn’t. He’s actually the boyfriend of an M-B male friend of mine.”

“Clovis!” I exclaimed.

She laughed, as she had before. “Yes, Clovis. Tirso is his partner, but when Clovis said—as of course you’d expect he would—‘I am not going anywhere near any of this,’ then Tirso said, ‘She can’t go on her own.’ So he came with me. Only the mattress-thing—the one in the other room—put his back out, so he’s gone to a hotel tonight. Clovis wouldn’t forgive me, would he, if I wrecked his lover’s back.”

Like the biggest idiot on earth, remembering, I said, “But Clovis only liked guys that looked like him—tall, dark curly hair.”

“He got over it,” she said. “He got over it after Silver. We’ve grown up, Loren. And, well, I wrote my story the best I could, but you have to allow for slight bias. I was only sixteen. I was—in love. Then he was dead, and so was I. Only I came back. He didn’t.”

I put my glass down. “Can I ask you something?”

“I thought you were.”

“I want to ask you about the last part—when Clovis had the seance and Silver… That part.”

“You want to know if I lied, or dreamed it, because I was off my head.” She stared at me. She said, “I was off my head, but I didn’t lie, or hallucinate. The spirit message came through. Ask Tirso. He’s heard Clovis go on about it, now and then. I suppose I could put you in touch with Clovis, if you’d really like to verify the data. I can’t guarantee he’ll reply.”

The room, despite the apple wine, felt chill now. Jane got up from sitting on the floor, and spoke to a wall. “Heat on, please.”

And there was the faintest buzz, and the chill began to lift. If she’d also needed to prove she knew this house and what it had to offer, she had just done so.

“It’ll heat the water, too,” she said. “I’m aiming for a bath.”

How trusting she was. She in the bath, and me, the unknown commodity, in here.

“Did I hear you say your mother has something to do with your staying here?”

“That’s right. How about you?”

“I don’t know. I might not know what your mother has arranged. She was—is—a powerful woman.”

“She’s that, all right. But you’ll have heard. You work for META, don’t you?”

I paused too long. But she didn’t prompt me. I said, “Kind of. Used to.”

“So you get to stay here. And either she, er, overbooked us, as it were, or she did it to throw me. She’ll still try that.”

This was Jane. Who else would say to the heating system Please? Yet now her face went sharp and stony and I saw another face under hers, and I knew it was the face of Jane’s mother, the way, once in a while, I see the face of my own mother under mine. (Yes, I saw my mother once. Forget I said it.)

Jane added, “In fact, this whole foulness of a megastunt could be her trying to throw me. Or is that too solipsistic?”

Although the room was already warm, a coldness began in me. Something shifted in my mind, and I glimpsed a horrible insanity, like a razor in a cloud.

Woodenly I said to her, “I’ve just thought of something I’ve never thought of before. I don’t know why not. About your mother. Her name—”

Jane glanced at me. “My God, didn’t you realize?”

“No. I read your Book a long while ago, and her name, I sort of—”

“Demeta,” said Jane. “After the Greek goddess of the grain.”

“Demeta,” I said. “META,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I was told it stood for Metals Extraordinary Trial Authority.”

“It does, Loren. As well as being the last four letters of her name. A kind of acronymical pun. Because my mother is the head of the corporation, the goddess of the corporation. Why the hell else do you think anyone ever got the disgusting idea of starting all this shit up again? She got it, from me.”

Jane’s Book:

When I finally called my mother, she accepted my voice regally, and she invited me to lunch with her… She guesses I want to use her…. She might even agree. She has no basic respect for the law or the poor, being above