“I’ll bathe you, my darling dear, my poor darling love,” he said. “My poor beloved Rowan.” Were they dancing in circles? Or was it only that she was so dizzy? She smelled the bathroom-soap, shampoo, clean things.
He laid her down in the cold porcelain tub, and then she felt the first jet of warm water. “Not too hot,” she whispered. The glaring white tile was moving, marching up the walls all around her. Flashing. Stop.
“No, not too hot,” he said. His eyes were bigger, brighter, the lids better defined when she had last looked at them, the eyelashes smaller yet still luxuriant and jet-black. She noted this as if jotting it down on a laptop computer. Finished? Who could guess? To whom would she ever give her findings? Dear God, if that package had not reached Larkin…
“Don’t fret, my darling dear,” he said. “We are going to be good to each other, we are going to love each other. You will trust me. You will love me again. There’s no reason for you to die, Rowan, no reason at all for you to leave me. Rowan, love me.
She lay like a cadaver, unable to work her parts. The water swirled round her. He unbuttoned her white shirt, pulled loose the pants. The water rushed and hissed and was so warm. And the dirt smell was being broken. He hurled the soiled clothes away.
She managed to lift her right hand, to tug at the panties, and rip at them, but she hadn’t the strength to pull them off. He had gone into the other room. She could hear the sound of sheets being ripped from the bed; it was amazing all the sounds our minds registered; sheets being thrown in a heap. Who would have thought that such things even made a sound? And yet she knew it perfectly well, and remembered foolishly an afternoon at home in California when her mother had been changing the beds-that very sound.
A plastic package torn open; a fresh sheet let to fall open and then shaken out to loose its wrinkles and land on the bed.
She was slipping and the water was rising to her shoulders. Once again she tried to use her arms; she pushed and pushed against the tile and managed to sit forward.
He stood over her. He had taken off his heavy coat. He was dressed in a simple turtleneck sweater, and as always he looked alarmingly thin. But he was strong and stalwart in his thinness, with none of the twisted neurotic apology of the very lanky and the underfed and the overgrown. His hair was so long now it covered his shoulders. It was as black as Michael’s hair, and the longer it became the looser its curl, so that it was now almost wavy. In the steam from the tub, the hair at his temples curled somewhat, and she could see a glistening sheen on his seemingly poreless skin as he bent down again to caress her.
He steadied her against the back of the tub. He lifted his little knife-Oh dare she try to get hold of it! — and he cut loose her soiled panties, and pulled them up out of the bubbling water and threw them aside. He knelt by the tub.
He was singing again, looking at her, singing or humming, or whatever it was-this strange sound that almost reminded her of the cicadas at evening in New Orleans. He cocked his head to the side.
His face was narrower than it had been days ago, more manly perhaps, that was the secret, the last of the roundness had left his cheeks. His nose had become slightly narrower, too, more rounded at the tip, more fine. But his head was just about the same size, she figured, and his height was very nearly the same too, and as he took the washrag and squeezed it out, she tried to figure whether his fingers had grown any longer. It did not seem so.
His head. Was the soft spot still there in the top? How long would it take for the skull to close? She suspected the growth had slowed but not stopped.
“Where did you go?” she asked. “Why did you leave me?”
“You made me leave,” he said with a sigh. “You made me leave with hate. And I had to go back out in the world and learn things. I had to see the world. I had to wander. I had to build my dreams. I can’t dream when you hate me. When you scream at me and torment me.”
“Why don’t you kill me?”
A look of sadness came over him. He wiped her face with the warm, folded rag, and wiped her lips.
“I love you,” he said. “I need you. Why can’t you give yourself to me? Why have you not given yourself? What do you want that I can give? The world will soon be ours, my darling dear, and you my queen, my beauteous queen. If only you would help me.”
“Help you do what?” she asked.
She looked at him, and drew deep on her hatred, and her rage, and with all her might tried to send some invisible and lethal power against him. Shatter the cells; shatter the veins; shatter the heart. She tried and she tried, and then exhausted, lay back against the tub.
In her life she had accidentally with such hate
“Is that all I am to you?” he said, his lip quivering. “Oh, God, what am I? A mere experiment?”
“And what am I to you that you hold me prisoner here, and leave me for days on end like this? Don’t ask love of me. You’re a fool if you do. Oh, if only I had learned from the others, learned how to be a real witch! I could have done what they wanted of me.”
He was convulsed with silent hurt. The tears stood in his eyes, and his pliant glistening skin flamed with blood for an instant. He made his long hands into fists as if he would hit her again, as he had in the past, though he’d vowed he never would again.
She did not care. That was the horror. Her own limbs were failing her; tingling, aching; pains in her joints. Could she have escaped from here herself if she had managed to kill him? Perhaps not.
“What did you expect me to do?” he asked. He leant down and kissed her again. She turned away. Her hair was wet now. She wanted to slide down into the water, but she feared she might not be able to bring herself back up. He crushed the rag in his hands, and began again to bathe her. He bathed her all over. He squeezed the water into her hair, washing it back from her forehead.
She was so used to his scent that now she didn’t really smell it; she felt only a warm sense of his nearness and a deep enervating desire for him. Of course, desire for him.
“Let me trust you again, tell me you love me again,” he implored, “and I’m your slave, not your captor. I swear it, my love, my brilliant one, my Rowan. Mother of us all.”
No answer came from her. He’d risen to his feet.
“I’m going to clean everything for you,” he said proudly like a child. “I’m going to clean it ail and make it fresh and beautiful. I’ve brought things for you. New clothes. I’ve brought flowers. I’ll make a bower of our secret place. Everything is waiting by the elevators. You will be so surprised.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yes, you will be pleased, you’ll see. You’re only tired and hungry. Yes, hungry. Oh, you must have food.”
“And when you leave me again, you’ll tie me up with white satin ribbon?” How harsh her voice was, how filled with utter contempt. She shut her eyes. Without thinking, she raised her right hand and touched her face. Yes, muscles and joints were beginning to work again.
He went out, and she struggled to sit up and she caught the floating cloth and began to wash herself. The bath was polluted. Too much filth. Flakes of human excrement, her excrement, floated on the surface of the water. She felt nausea again, and lay back until it was gone. Then she bent forward, her back aching, and she pulled up the stopper, fingers still numb and weak and clumsy, and she turned on the flood again to wash away the tiny crusted curls of dirt.
She lay back, feeling the force of the water flowing all around her, bubbling at her feet, and she breathed deep, calling upon the right hand and then the left to flex, and then on the right foot and then the left; and then began these exercises over again. The water grew hotter, comfortably so. The rushing noise blotted out all sounds from the other room. She listed in moments of pure and thoughtless comfort, the last moments of comfort she might ever know.
It had gone like this:
Christmas Day and the sun coming in on the parlor floor, and she lying on the Chinese rug in a pool of her own blood, and he sitting there beside her-newborn, amazed, unfinished.
