backpack.
“That felt lovely,” she said. “Plumbing is wonderful. I’ve been sleeping in a tent for four weeks.”
“A tent, is it? How adventurous.”
“Yeah, mostly up under the trees in Buena Vista Park. Up
“Is it safe?”
Brett shrugged. “This is San Francisco! Half the population is civil support. Nobody will bother you. What are they supposed to do to me, rob me? My clothes are all in stores and my designs are all in virtuality.” She pulled a little plastic vial from a pocket of the bag, then produced her rattlesnake.
She opened the torpid animal’s gaping cotton-white jaws and jabbed its fangs, one after another, through a pinhole in the elastic top of the vial. Then she pressed its dented, scaly head with the flat of her thumb. When the snake’s fangs were loaded she stuffed it back in the bag. She took out a metal tube with a pull-off cap. She twisted a waxy taper from within the tube and began carefully anointing the spaces between her toes.
“This is foot wax,” she explained. “Live bacteria but they can’t reproduce. They just eat up the jam and sweat and stuff so you don’t get any wild flora living on you.”
“That’s clever.”
“Well, you have to know how to squat, y’know! You can’t just drop everything and start sleeping under trees and bridges. If you do it right, there’s a lot of science to it. It’s an artifice.” Brett began working on her furry armpits with a roll-on.
“Where do you keep your spare clothes?”
Brett was surprised. “I’m a professional! If I need new clothes I just have them instanced out.” She took out her cellular netlink and began plucking her brows in its mirrored flip-up screen.
Mia cleaned and put away the dishes. “How about dessert?”
“No, thanks.”
“Something to wear? I’ll loan you something.”
“Oh, never mind, it’s warm in here, I’m all right.”
“A tincture, then?”
“Can you do hot chocolate?”
“Sure. Cacao is fun.” Mia brought out her tincture set and began reconfiguring the catalyzers and synthesizers. Little tubes of amber polyvinyl and steel alloy. Gilded O-rings. Enameled pinch-clamps. Osmosis screens. Brewers and strainers and translucent hookah chambers. Step-by-step instructions. It was something to do with your hands while people talked.
Brett fished out her snake, and slapped it sharply on the back of the head. It recoiled at once and emitted an angry hissing rattle. Brett offered up her right forearm. The snake instantly lashed out and sank both fangs into her flesh.
Brett gently coaxed the snake loose and petted it soothingly. Then she dabbed an ointment on the twin puncture marks. A tiny rill of blood escaped. “Ouch,” she remarked.
“What did you put in there?”
“Oh, the girl who gave me this stuff made me promise never to tell,” Brett said smugly. “It makes me feel safe and warm whenever I sleep in strange places.… It does make me feel nice, but it’s not really good for me. That’s why I always let it hurt some. If you do unhealthy things and you don’t let them hurt you first, then that’s a good way to get into big trouble.”
“An animal bite must be a big infection risk.”
“What, nasty warm-blooded germs from a nice coldblooded mouth? I don’t think so. Snakey’s really fast and clean. She’s just my good friend in my backpack.… It’s nice to have special things. And special friends.” Brett blinked, heavy lidded. She smiled.
They had some cocoa. Brett fell asleep.
Mia tucked a blanket over Brett and retired to her narrow bed. She shoved the hyperbaric seal away and pulled the covers to her chin and fell into uneasy reverie. Her little bedroom chamber felt dead and empty, like the paper cell of an abandoned wasps’ nest.
She had kept thoughts of the funeral at bay all day, but now in the dark and the silence the taste of mortality began, in its subtle limbic way, to prey upon her mind. Mia began to ponder, with pitiless clarity and accuracy, the endless list of syndromes in the aging process. The endless richness and natural variety of the pathways of organic decline.
Sutures knotting and calcifying. Cartilaginous membranes ossifying. Mineral deposits of stonelike hardness forming in the gall bladder, liver, the major arteries. Nails thickening, skin going scaly, hair thinning, graying, going all brittle. Nipples darkening, breasts sagging, ducts shrinking, glands puckering. The urogenital system, evolution’s canny trade-off of fertility for mortality, permanently bewildered. Deposits of rich bloody marrow dying out in their bony nooks and crannies, replaced by thick yellow pockets of inert fat. Loss of acuity in the retinas and in the weirdly complex machineries of the inner ear. The ancient gland that was the brain, tirelessly shifting its hormonal sediments until its reptilian backwaters filled with toxic deposits as tough to clean out as a childhood neurosis.
Mia wasn’t sick, and she certainly wasn’t dying, but she was very far from young. She had kept her brain quite clean, but the repeated neural scrubbings had caused serious wear on certain peripheral nerves. In the lower spine, and in the long-stretched nerves of the legs. Her vagus nerve was especially bad. Her weak vagus was not a lethal threat, but the skipped heartbeats were far from pleasant.
Mia’s lymph duct was an endless source of trouble, corroded and congealed with ancient bile. She had passing spasms of tinnitus in the left ear and had lost the higher pitches in the right. The synovial fluid in her knuckles and wrists had lost much of its viscosity. Cells in the human lenses didn’t grow back, so there wasn’t much to do about the loss of flexion and the resultant astigmatism.
And stress made everything worse. Stress made you grow when you were young, when you were young stress taught you lessons. But when you were old, then stress was the expressway to senility.
She could not sleep tonight. She wasn’t young. Sharing her house with a young woman, however briefly, had brought that truth home to her. She could sense Brett’s living presence in her house, Brett’s vital heartbeat and her easy breathing, like the presence of a wild animal.
Mia rose and went in to look after the girl. In the tranquil grip of sleep the girl had slid from beneath her blanket and achieved some primal state of delicious repose. She sprawled there on the patterned carpet like an odalisque, wrapped in the kind of deeply languid erotic slumber that women achieved only in the Oriental genre paintings of nineteenth-century Frenchmen. Envy rose in Mia like poisoned smoke. She walked back to her bed and sat in it, and thought bitterly about the tissue of events that she called her life.
She fell into a doze. At three in the morning the night cramps hit her. Her left leg jerked as if gaffed, and her calf knotted in a rock-hard spasm beneath the sheets. After a dreadful moment a secondary but even more agonizing cramp bit the sole of her left foot. Her toes bent like fishhooks and locked into place.
Mia cried out in smothered anguish. She pounded at the cramp, knuckles smacking knotted flesh. The pain grew more severe, her body’s living strength all short-circuited and turned against itself. It was potassium and it was catecholaminic pathways and it was a lot of other stupid terminologies and it was agony. She was having a cramp attack and she was in agony. She pounded on the treacherous muscle. With a sudden little spastic kick, her calf muscle went weak, all hot rubber and blood inside. She hastily massaged her pale and bloodless foot, whimpering to herself. The tendons creaked in her foot and ankle as the cramp fought back against her grip.
When she had tugged and eased her foot free of the evil seizure, Mia stood in her gown and limped methodically about the room. She leaned against the wall with both arms, propping herself at an angle, methodically stretching her Achilles tendons. Sleep was as far away as Stuttgart now. Her left leg felt like burnt rope.
There was nothing mysterious about these attacks. She knew their genesis exactly: potassium deficiencies, worn sheathing in the lower spine, diffusions of stress histamines through the somatic efferent fibers of a certain vertebra, a cellular metabolic cascade—but those words were just diagnosis. Stress brought the cramps on, or a little too much exercise, and every five weeks or so they would just spike right up on their own.
The truth was starker: she was old. Night cramps were a minor evil. People got very old, and strange new things went wrong with them, and they repaired what the racing and bursting technology allowed them to repair,
