Balot started thinking about the things that had died such a long time ago. Things that had been buried underground for many years, slowly turning to stone. Things long since forgotten. Why did they then have to be dug up again?
Oeufcoque changed the subject. “Isn’t it about time for your medication?”
Balot tidied her tray away and went to the self-service water cooler to take the medicine the Doctor had given her. Skin stabilizers, hair growth agents, medicine to fix her eyelashes, vitamins, calcium tablets. Lots of things she had to take—and she took them all.
As she swallowed her medicine she thought about the fossils. One fossil in particular. A swirling shell. What were those things called that stayed hidden in their shells except for their moplike hands and feet that they used to crawl along the seabed?
“Ammonite or something, that sort of thing, wasn’t it?” Oeufcoque answered conscientiously when asked.
After she’d walked through the mall for a while, she did indeed come across a collection of spirals.
They were in the form of some computer graphics projected onto the wall of a building. Balot stopped in front of the stall that sold them.
The shop sold Eject Posters. Small square boxes that, when fitted to a wall, would project images onto the space just below. There were a number of patterns lined up in a row, and there was a memory card that contained over a hundred different pictures of fossils.
“Why not buy something that takes your fancy? It’d be a pleasant diversion, and the decor in your room is pretty dull,” said Oeufcoque.
Balot took advantage of his offer. She bought an Eject Poster and a card with the fossils on it, then walked on, eyes on the instruction manual. Computer simulations of live ammonites, nautiluses, trilobites, along with photographs of the fossilized creatures, mixed with other minerals and fossilized into spirals of silver and gold and crystal.
After a while she put it away in her bag. She was somehow excited.
“Of course.”
Balot went to the stationery section of a department store and bought a PDA—the sort a child might use— and six different types of colored markers. And she bought some lipstick that caught her eye in a shop that she happened to pass by. Because she liked its bright poppy red and the design of the case.
As she went around the department store she felt more and more that she and Oeufcoque were becoming one.
No matter where they went they were as one. Like the mojo, that protective charm so often sung about in the blues.
But there was a moment when Oeufcoque resisted.
“Stop, Balot. I’ll be waiting outside, so…”
The pendant
“I’ve already said, haven’t I? That I don’t want to be called a Peeping Tom?”
He spoke so pitifully that she
“I’ll keep an eye out for you, so off you go.”
He spoke as if to a child who was scared of the dark.
Balot went into the women’s restroom.
The toilets were clean and empty. She went into the stall at the very end, loosened her belt, and lowered first her shorts, then tights and underwear, down to her knees, layer by layer.
Relief and anxiety assaulted her in equal measure as her lower body was freed from its wrapping.
She sat down on the toilet seat and took some ointment from her jacket pocket. She squirted some bright white hydration cream on her palm and rubbed it on her stomach and thighs. These were the only parts that were still rough, still scabbed.
As she rubbed the cream into her skin it started peeling off, like the thin membrane of a boiled egg. She brushed the skin off and rubbed the remaining cream on her shoulders and elbows.
She sat on the toilet, waiting to pee. She stared absentmindedly at the linoleum wall with not a single piece of graffiti.
All of a sudden she felt that something was not quite right. As she did her business she thought about why she might be feeling this way.
Her urine smelled of medicine. A result of the eighteen different pills she had to take every day.
Not a single one of those was a tranquilizer—the Doctor himself was surprised by this fact.
Even after she had finished on the toilet, washed herself with the bidet, and flushed all the evidence away, there was still a faint smell of medicine in the air. She fixed her clothes and fastened her belt even tighter than before.
Then she put her mind to her earlier feeling that something was out of place.
She soon discovered why—a plastic bubble fixed to the tank that connected the toilet to the flush button. She gave the bubble a wrench and it came off easily, and, shaking it, a tiny fingertip-sized camera emerged.
Balot expanded her consciousness and interfered with the camera’s magnetic field,
The two hundred hours of continuous footage stored in the camera’s many microchips was replaced bit by bit by images of the department store’s mascot doll waving into the camera. As if someone wearing the doll costume was looking into the camera and waving for all eternity.
Balot then put the camera back and took the lipstick from her bag.
She wrote on the wall right next to the bubble. And then she added this:
Balot left the booth.
But the department store wasn’t about to stop its dirty tricks just because she revealed the existence of a camera. Balot knew this fact all too well. Bribes given to the cleaners and security guards.
She even knew all about the money paid to the shills, the women who ostentatiously “bought” the most expensive items on display in order to encourage real customers to spend more.
She knew everything, right down to how much they were paid.
03
As she emerged from the toilet, the alarm bell squooged into the shape of a mouse and jumped onto Balot’s shoulder. Without missing a beat he ran to her neck and became a choker complete with crystal pendant.
“You took your sweet time.”
“Look, I…”
“Camera?” Oeufcoque thought about this for a while before it clicked. “You mean illegal cameras set up in order to get close-up footage of women’s bodies?”
