Grey

her left eye. She screamed and fell as more razors lodged into her legs and body. I continued my program while paramedics dragged her away.

When I think of myself back then, especially, how I didn’t even slow my routine for an instant, let alone stop to help, I can see how hollow and unhappy I was—a boy who was very good at one thing, but derived no pleasure from it. Worse, down deep I think I despised the world that adored me, as I was little more than a marionette in Father’s marketing schemes.

But soon after Elinor W was taken away, something happened. What I like to think is that the guilt and self- hate built up so much in my chest that my heart began to seize. In the middle of Engraved Blood by The Burning Spines, the ice buttons had melted and my shirt hung open, revealing my puffed chest. Admiring dancers surrounded me like worker bees. Each time a drop of sweat flew from my forehead or torso, they dropped to the floor, and shoved and pushed for the chance to lick it up.

The first sensation of my heart attack was in my jaw. A strange, cool numbness made my teeth buzz, but I ignored it and figured it was the strength drugs or some odd harmonic from the speakers. But gradually, the coldness traveled into my eyes and brain like a slow, thick liquid. Then the chill traveled into my arms and legs and turned dark and leaden. I slowed, lost my rhythm, and one of the beats slammed into me hard. I tried to regain my groove, but was knocked back and forth like a pinball. As I lost consciousness, the colored lights high above grew so bright they seemed to shine through my skin and into my emptiness.

They say the crowd rose to their feet and screamed in adulation, until they realized that toppling over backward and slamming my skull on the floor wasn’t my newest move.

Two days later, when I woke, I heard a tremendous cheer and slowly realized that I was in a hospital bed, in the middle of the dance floor, and that the place was packed with ten thousand watching my every twitch. I had never felt so vulnerable and exposed. I insisted that I be taken away. My house was quickly reconstructed, made quiet and dim. The silence felt good, so I told my choreographers, stylists, consultants, and trainers to leave me. I lay in bed and did nothing. One of the doctors, concerned about my low spirits, brought me a magazine. I remember paging through the thing, at first fascinated, since I had never seen one before. Gradually, though, I became discouraged and angry as I couldn’t read a word or even recognize a single character.

I decided I had to read and begged for a tutor. Father refused because he wanted me to resume dancing as soon as I could, but when my body wouldn’t respond to the healing drugs, he acquiesced, if only to shut me up.

All of the candidates came in party clothes—feathered shoes, fog bras, chrome nose-plates, gelatin shirts. I liked them all, then at the end of the second day, a woman with violet eyes came in a dark tailored suit, a shirt that matched her eyes, and black shoes with tiny grey stitches around the slender sole. I laughed since I had never seen anyone dressed so drearily. Maybe it was impish curiosity, but instead of telling her to go, I let her answer the interview questions like everyone else.

All the party people I knew were full of bombast, like Father. They shouted and swore, bragged and boasted. Joelene did none of that. Instead, she spoke softly, but with a fluid and powerful ease. At the time, I felt like I had discovered a new type of human. I hired her because she fascinated me, and I knew she would irritate Father.

Two years later, I could read and felt like I was becoming a person. Then she introduced me to Pure H and everything changed again.

Published every other month, the magazine is one-half meter square and printed on the most luscious and expensive paper made. It is a joy to touch and hold. But the most extraordinary thing about the magazine is that one anonymous person produces it. Although I’d heard speculation about who he might be, I preferred to enjoy his art without worrying about identity. He photographed every photo. He wrote all the copy. And each issue was a complex puzzle to be savored and deciphered.

I became grey. I began listening to the silence DJs, like Love Emitting Diode, Huush, and ZZZ. I discovered my tailor, Mr. Cedar, and began wearing grey frocks, vests, and suits made of colorless moon and satellite wool. And by then Father and I had come to hate each other.

“Look at these creases,” said Joelene, as she held up the gen-cotton shirt. Indeed, it was beautifully ironed. And at the bottom of the right tail was Ise–B’s fanciful signature of wrinkles.

“Generous of him,” I said, as I put out my right arm. While I loved it, it was small consolation for all that had happened.

“Patience.” She added, “Miniature city flickers.”

The photo^R5 that accompanied that copy was of a translucent house at the edge of a dark, piney wood. A woman stands in a clearing. Her twisted hair is powdered a light grey, and her ball gown by H. Trow is a beautiful alpaca-silk and platinum draped creation that creates a perfect hourglass. Her face is young and fresh. Her eyes are tart, her lips, moist. Something about her posture—the way her back is arched, her legs bent—makes her look burdened with melancholy, perhaps even pain.

When I first saw the image, I thought a spotlight or some illumination was creating a halo around her, but as I studied the print I decided that it wasn’t just light but flame. The delicate corona that surrounded her looked exactly like the nearly invisible flames of an alcohol fire, and I decided that the photo^R5 was taken the split second before the heat began to singe her hair, skin, and eyes.

Behind her, beyond the translucent wall, stands a man in a black suit and black tie. Although the details are hazy, clearly he is facing toward her. But the way he holds his head both cocked to the right and angled too high, he appears at once blind and yet cognizant of her. At first I assumed he was her killer, but after careful study, decided he was her lover and that he too is dying. His right hand is the clue. His fingers are tense and gnarled in what seems like both grief and regret. On the floor beside him are several sharp dark shapes, like shards of a glass. He drank poison and dropped the glass as the toxins had not only immediately blinded him, but have begun to astringe his veins and muscles, moving from his extremities toward his heart.

When I had finally deciphered the photo^R5, I sat and stared at it for a long time, frightened and disturbed. I discussed it with Joelene, and she explained that it was about the beautiful inevitability of entropy, the wilting of flowers, the browning of leaves, the cooling of cream coffees, the fading of color. Then I understood that I, too, appreciated these things. I sought them out and savored them. But as Joelene slipped the jacket over my shoulders, and I felt the servomotors create perfect folds and wrinkles as I moved, I knew I could never appreciate a world without Nora.

Three

Joelene and I rode back around the globe to the RiverGroup family compound in the speeding silver teardrop that was my limousine. For the first few minutes, I reviewed the post-date interviews, but soon, I switched off the screen and stared out the window at the scenery rushing by. But that motion reminded me of the Bee Train and of my last date with Nora, so I closed my eyes.

“Nora is at Slate Gardens,” said Joelene. “For cold baths, mud, and mourning.”

I refused to look at the photos or her family’s publicity release. Joelene read part of it aloud, and it sounded like something a phalanx of lawyers had produced. I counted the word regrettably five times.

As the car exited the Loop, the super highway that only the upper echelon of the families could use, and we wound our way through the baking desert southwest, my feelings shifted from despair to anger. Of course it wasn’t Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, nor was it as Joelene had said, a terrible and inopportune breach. It was Father! It was his ineptitude, his incompetence, and his dreadful strategies. Like so much of what had gone wrong in my nineteen years, it was all his fault.

The access road began to rise above the garish city of Ros Begas, into the Rockies where a valley had been dug in a mountain and the RiverGroup compound had been built. Just as the car came to the top of the lip and started down, a ray of sunlight glinted off the huge glass dome that protected the buildings from the sun, the insects, and the carbon dioxide. Beneath stood the dozen mismatched buildings that made up our little city. Some were windowless warehouses with flat roofs. Several were covered with wooden shingles as if they were trying to be old-fashioned ski lodges. Around the edge were smaller office buildings. Most were glass; a few had metal skins, one was stone. Dead center, sat the black and gold, now abandoned, PartyHaus, with its wide stairs, Ionic columns,