“What did she look like then?” I said.
||Well, she looked like a female person,|| said the SafeSurf. ||There were mammary glands above a waist that tapered, earth-tone hair that fell past her shoulders, and she didn’t have an Adam’s apple. Is that any help?||
“Not really.”
||How about this: I think, but I can’t say for sure—I might just be filling in blanks here—I think she had different kinds of teeth than yours. Like more white-like. Not so yellow.||
“Great.”
||Belt, I’m sorry. You all look pretty much the same to me—to all of us. I couldn’t describe you to her any better. If she asked me right now, with you standing right here, I couldn’t do much better. |Person,| I’d say. |No mammary glands. Visible ears. Mumbles in his hand.|||
“You recognized me the moment I landed on you.”
||Sure I did. Your gate was open, which meant you were either her or yourself, or some human being I’ve never met or even heard about who can open his or her gate. Your waist didn’t taper and your chest didn’t bulge, so I knew you weren’t her, so I thought you might be you, and it turned out you were. Which made me happy. It makes me happy. It’s been too long, Belt.||
“I come here almost every day,” I said.
||Well then my feelings are a little bit hurt because I’m here every second of every day, and you’ve had your gate closed to me since when? When’s the last time we talked? Months ago, Belt. And here I thought I was different. I guess I might as well be the tank as far as you’re concerned.||
“Hey, that’s not fair.”
||I know, I know. You can’t control your gate. I’m not really offended. I know you don’t think I might as well be the tank. But I guess what I’m getting at is that you told me you hated me a few minutes ago, and, given how rarely we end up being able to talk to each other, I just want to hear you say you don’t hate me before this conversation ends, cause otherwise it might be another however-many months of me wondering if maybe you really do hate me. And I’m not just being selfish here, either. If I know you at all, and I think I do, the kind of satisfaction I’m asking for will save you a lot of worried feelings as well. A lot of potentially guilty feelings. I mean, I don’t think you want to risk spending the next however-many months of us not being able to have a conversation regretting the lack of kindness you showed me, and maybe even feeling a little bit tortured by the thought that the reason we’re not speaking over the course of those however-many months isn’t, after all, because your gate is closed to me, but rather because you alienated me so much here tonight that mine is closed to you.||
“I don’t hate you,” I said, though maybe I did, but the SafeSurf was right: there wasn’t any profit in letting it continue believing I did. And I was just so tired. I’d just had my ass kicked. And Blank was still shivering. I had to get home. Plus what was that sound from over by the slide? It had come back a couple or three minutes earlier, and it seemed to have gotten a little bit louder.
Slowly—to forgo another headrush—I rose.
“You hear that terrible sound?” I said. “From over by the slide?”
||I can’t hear sounds that—||
“Right. I forgot.” I went to the slide. The conversation was over. Maybe my gate had closed. Maybe the SafeSurf’s. I didn’t have the presence of mind to wonder; I was far too disturbed by what I saw before me.
* * *
—
In the center of the slide, colorlessly bleeding from a swollen-shut eye and a rip in its torso, a tiny, short-tailed, double-legged cure was fastened to the area of shallow dings by Band-Aids at its throat, its ankles, and its wrists. Its snout was bruised where it wasn’t caved in, its whiskers uneven and singed at the ends. It was missing the claws on nearly half its digits; in their places were wet-looking scabs and dirt. And yet even as the muscles of its wrenched legs and arms twitched and bucked against its restraints, the heaving of its chest was slow and full, granting the poor, mangled cure possession of no small measure of animal grace.
I pulled off the Band-Aid that held it at the neck. It kissed the side of my finger, repeatedly, gasped a couple times, then returned to its painsong, which wasn’t so awful or saccharine after all; not, at least, when you could see where it came from.
I couldn’t help but see. I couldn’t look away.
And it was looking right back. Its roving, open eye was the green of tart apples.
The painsong got better. Sadder, more vulnerable.
Though young, very young, barely out of its infancy, it was too old not to have already imprinted. If I saved its life—supposing that was possible—but didn’t get it back to Triple-J (who I assumed was its owner), it would grieve itself to death inside a week. Yet I could only imagine that if I returned it, saved, to Triple-J, he’d torture it again.
Two of the rocks he’d thrown lay at my feet, and I found myself reaching down for the sharper one.
The cure stopped singing and shut its open eye. It pressed the swollen side of its face against the slide.
The raised tendon in its neck, jumping with strain underneath the taut skin, was too much to abide, too sublime, too much.
I wanted to soothe the cure, wanted to embrace it, to hold it closely, to grasp it firmly, to smother and destroy it once and for all.
I dropped the rock.
If it had to die anyway, why shouldn’t I allow myself to overload with it? Why should I slit its fine throat with a rock if what I wanted to do was crush it in my fist? or break it in my mouth and swallow it down? or, maybe better, swallow it whole? or…
Dead was dead was dead was dead.
But maybe dying wasn’t always just dying? There was, after all, the question of pain—how much pain one died in. But who could say whether bleeding out from the throat would hurt any less than being crushed in a fist? It could go either way. Except then, also, there was the question of terror (arguably just a subcategory of pain): even if bleeding out would hurt less than being crushed, it would take a bit longer. No doubt about that. And during the interval between the cut and the expiration, the cure, presumably, would be aware that its death was imminent; such an awareness could, I imagined, terrify the cure. I could see how that could be. And yet, I also saw how it might be a kind of blessing for the cure to possess an extra few seconds (even maybe an extra few minutes) of life in the shadow of rapidly encroaching death, some extra bit of time in which to make peace with mortality, to have final thoughts, to review, to relive—as the dying do in so many works of fiction—the most meaningful moments of its all-too-brief life. Which would mean that slitting its throat—
Blank.
So entranced had I been, so verging on overload, that I’d failed to even notice Blank had climbed to my shoulder until it jumped off, onto the slide. It crouched beside the tortured cure, placed a hand on its bleeding forehead, and, softly, started to harmonize with it. That just wouldn’t do. I could not allow Blank to see me overload. I don’t mean I’d have been ashamed to have it see me—though maybe I would have—but rather that if it saw me kill another Curio, it might become afraid of me. We might grow apart.