'Fuck you,' said Julian.
'I'm sorry,' Lowenthal said, anything but. 'I shouldn't joke. It's just funny to me that you think you're in a position to negotiate. You sound like some of the guys we had to deal with here, all polished brass, as if military protocol was some kind of natural law like gravity. They couldn't tell which way the wind was blowing until it blew them away. It was really sad. Lucky for me, I guess. But you're just like them-you think you're privileged to hold on to your illusions, exempt from anything that doesn't suit you. Haven't you learned anything by now? Maybe they let you get away with this on the sub, but if so, I don't know why you're demanding to have that jackass Coombs be put back in charge. Captain Lulu is more like it.'
'If you think you're intimidating me, you're wrong,' I said. 'I know how important what I have is to you. You and your Moguls. Well, tell them they'll never get it without me, not until you set us free.'
'Ooooh. Listen to her. Hey, it may be true we'll never find it, lady, but at this point I seriously doubt you know anything helpful. I personally think your papa destroyed it, if it ever really existed, but I'll keep searching every inch of that sub until I know for sure, even if it takes a year. Either way I'm not cutting any more deals. All you're doing now is grasping at straws, trying to buy time. I respect that-it's what I would do in your position-but unless you have something real to offer, it has to end now.'
'It is real. I could take you to it right now, right this second, but I guarantee you'll never find it if anything happens to us or anyone else from the boat.'
'You're such a baby. Even if that were true, don't you realize your best bet is to accept what you've been so generously offered? Full citizenship in MoCo, security, a halfway-decent future? Life, goddammit! It's the most anyone can hope for now, and you're throwing it away because somebody changed the rules on you, and your feelings are hurt? I don't think so; you're not that dumb. And if you are… well, honey, we no longer have the luxury of being able to save people like you from themselves, I'm sorry.'
Julian said, 'It's you we need to be saved from, asshole.'
Lowenthal suddenly seemed to lose all interest. 'I'm sure we're all in dire need of a savior. In the meantime, we have to manage as best we can. Without Miska's data we'll have to beef up our own research, which means we need a lot of test subjects. Fortunately we've just received a big shipment by U-boat: You three will participate in the first clinical trial, starting right now.'
'Good!' yelled Jake, losing it. 'Bring it on, motherfucker!'
'I will.'
'You do that!'
'I am.'
'We don't give a shit!'
'You got it.'
'Then do it, if you got the stones! Bust a move!'
'Jake, be quiet.'
'It's done,' said the colonel. 'Just a few seconds now…' There was a slithering noise outside the tank, getting louder. 'Well, it's been fun.'
'You're out of your mind,' I said.
'That's what they said about Masters and Johnson.' From a row of chrome spouts high up the wall, ice-cold water began gushing in.
I thought I knew what cold water was. I had spent plenty of time mucking around in tide pools, foraging oysters, clams, and periwinkles in the dead of winter, with my numbed fingers getting all cut up by mussel shells as I dug. But this was colder. Cold was the wrong word for this. This burned. Burned like it was peeling off skin as it rose over feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, crotch, hips, waist, nipples, shoulders. The boys and I pressed together as tightly as we could, our shouts and moans lost in the deafening torrent:
'Oh my God, it's so cold!' 'Turn it off!' 'Hang on!' 'Get closer!' 'Away from the spray, right here!' 'Let us out!'
As the lapping tide threatened to rise over my head I had to swim, meaning I was forced to surrender my precious upraised arms to that searing flood, the last warmth I could give without going under completely.
Then the boys were lifting me from either side, boosting me above the swirling, Coke-bottle green pool. My white flesh was rubbery as a half-thawed turkey, but not so dead I couldn't feel the vivid pleasure of warm air.
'No!' I shrieked, fighting the intense relief. 'You can't!'
'Shut up, we're taller,' said Julian.
'Pretend you're on Girls Gone Wild,' Jake said.
I didn't try to resist as they propped me up on their shoulders, cradling my hips between their still-warm heads. My own head was jammed up against a caged light fixture in the ceiling, basking in its slight heat, while my submerged legs were sheathed in a fragile pocket of less-freezing water between the boys' bodies. If they moved at all, colder eddies swirled in like biting drafts. Violently shivering, I watched from my perch as Jake and Julian became immersed, standing on tiptoes and craning their necks until only their gulping, disembodied faces broke the surface like floating masks.
Pounding the intercom in front of my face, I screamed, 'Stop! Stop it! Turn it off! Stop!'
The water stopped.
All of a sudden it was so quiet-the only sound was my teeth chattering in that shallow pocket of air, and I was miserably aware that the boys couldn't hear anything with their ears underwater. Nobody spoke. I searched their faces for some sign of what to do, but their eyes stared straight up, unblinking, all thoughts turned inward as warmth and life ebbed from their bodies. They hardly seemed aware of me.
She's bluffing, dude.
If you hand it over we got nothing.
Chick is ice-cold.
'I know where it is,' I said.
'Where?' asked Lowenthal.
'Let us out first.'
'No.'
'Please!'
'No.'
Sitting hunched there on the faltering shoulders of my friends was so precarious I expected it to be mercifully short, yet the moment stretched on and on like a detour in time, a missed off-ramp with no U-turn in sight, receding into eternity: all the loneliness, pointlessness, emptiness of it. The waiting. I realized it was not death, but death's delay that was the ultimate cruelty.
To the intercom, I said, 'D-d-don't you realize you're d-doing us a f-f-favor?' Lowenthal didn't reply.
As Jake and Julian succumbed, I begged them to hold on, not because I was so afraid of the end but because I was afraid of being left alone. I resented them going first. And yet I continued to struggle: As Jake went under I clung to Julian, and even as Julian's upturned mouth filled with water I tried to climb his sinking body to keep my own head above. In the end I stood upon them both as the cold took its sweet time stealing over me.
Actually, I wasn't getting colder. A deep warmth had started to bloom, and with it a dreamy calm. I knew what this was, this welcome, enfolding dark. I knew these were precursors to the end, and the gratitude I felt was indescribable. Thank you thank you thank you thank you…
But even as I slipped beneath the surface, trailing a string of mirrored bubbles, my alien hand found the necklace, snapped the chain, and held the locket up above the water. Up where the gold would catch the light.
I could feel cool grass against my cheek, and desert wind riffling my clothes. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. I was heavy, immovable, a lizard sunning on a rock. In the hazy distance, I could see our old house in Oxnard, white as a milk carton on the grass, with the peeling eucalyptus trees and the laundry line. At first I sensed the presence of my mother inside and was overjoyed, wild to tell her something. Then I began to notice something wasn't right-the focus was peculiar-and as I reached my hand out, the illusion collapsed: It was a
