fucking Thorazine I lost track.’
Clyde wrapped his arms around himself and shook his head vehemently. ‘No-no, never, I didn’t touch her, I didn’t, no-no, I wasn’t here.’
The chopped skidding language, the childlike exaggeration of gesture, that opaqueness in his eyes – it was plain as his face he was retarded. And from the why he’d collapsed into himself at the mention of Mia, I figured he was here instead of a ‘home’ because there’d been trouble with touching little girls. If I hadn’t been gauzed out, I would have seen it immediately. But I didn’t, and I felt like shit. I told him I was sure he hadn’t touched Mia, not to worry about it.
I started to walk away but he uncoiled out of himself and grabbed my hand with both of his – not hard, not snared – and said, ‘I’m Clyde. My name is Clyde Hibbard. Hi. Hi, how are you?’ He smiled uncertainly.
I let him hold my hand a moment, then gently slipped it free. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I said, ‘My name is Jennifer Raine, Goldie Hart, Serena del Rio, Belle Tinker, Annie Oakley, Lola Montez. Mia and I are new here. Just checked in. Glad to meet you, Clyde.’
He was nodding excitedly. ‘You-you-you are beautiful. You are. Just like the other men said. Beautiful.’
I tried to tell him as clearly as I could: ‘I’m not what anyone says, Clyde. Either are you. It’s complicated enough being who we are.’
It only bewildered him. He fastened his gaze back on the clock.
‘Nice talking to you, Clyde,’ I said. ‘I have to find my daughter now.’
He swung his eyes to mine, pleading a case I didn’t understand. ‘I’m thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three years old.’
‘Don’t watch the clock, Clyde,’ I said. ‘Clocks lie. Watch the sun and moon.’ I squeezed his shoulder quickly, and left him there.
And I didn’t see him again till he was on top of me tonight like some nightmare lover pecking my face with slobbery kisses. I think that’s all he really wanted to do, kiss me, because he had his clothes on and wasn’t choking me or anything, but just his weight had me pinned, my arms under the covers. But I didn’t know what he wanted, and I was terrified, so I yelled for Mia to crawl under the bed so she wouldn’t have to watch and then I tried to fight out from under him, twisting my face away from his mouth, finally squirming an arm loose, and when I turned to roll free my elbow caught him in the nose. The pain seemed to startle him, then scare him. He grabbed my bare shoulders hard, shaking his head as he looked at my face. ‘Please, please, please,’ he blubbered, each ragged breath spraying blood from his nose on my face, shoulders, breasts. He shut his eyes and lowered his head, moaning ‘Please, please, love, I love you, please.’
When he started sobbing he let go of my shoulders and I slapped him as hard as I could. He flinched and ducked as I swung again, and I know if I had a gun it would have meant nothing to me, nothing, to blow his stupid fucking brains out.
‘Love you,’ he cried, eyes closed, shaking his head.
‘No. You have to ask, Clyde. You need permission. This is rape, Clyde; you’re scaring me, hurting me.’
He opened his eyes then, looking at me, and his eyes just kept getting wider, as if he was trying to open them far enough to hold what he was seeing in my face. He worked his mouth, a gummy white string of spittle at the corner, a wet, strangled whimper rising from his throat.
I realized he was looking at his blood on my face. ‘You hurt me, Clyde,’ I hissed. ‘You did.’
He lifted his hands helplessly, beseechingly, his mouth trembling to speak what he found impossible to believe.
I helped him believe. ‘It hurts, goddamn you, Clyde, you motherfucker, it hurts!’
‘No,’ he begged me. ‘Love you. I do. I do. I do.’
It was too much pain and hopelessness and fear. I started crying.
‘I hurt you,’ Clyde said, amazed, destroyed, lost. He slid off me onto the floor and curled up in a ball, sobbing. I jumped naked from the bed, looking for something to club him with, or to scream for help, or run, but instead I knelt down beside him, stroked his shoulder, whispered it was all right, it was over.
I promised him I wouldn’t tell.
He promised he’d help me escape.
Daniel reappeared with the Diamond. He was sitting cross-legged, the Diamond before him, on a high desert somewhere in Arizona on a windless, starless night, with the moon close to the horizon. He was crying, but he couldn’t remember why. Not because he couldn’t see inside the Diamond-center flame. He would eventually. The Diamond needed to be seen as much as he needed to see it. He could feel the permission there, but not the way. He would just have to keep sitting at the gate, keep mapping the axis of light until it illuminated the way. He smiled at the memory of Wild Bill trying to hammer into him that the map was not the journey.
‘Okay, Wild Bill,’ he said aloud, ‘until it illuminates the territory.’
He looked at the Diamond in front of him and told Volta, ‘It’s not a metaphor. It’s not the seed of the next
