Engineman - Eric Brown [164]
He crouched beside her. "What happened to you?" he asked gently.
She just smiled, shook her head. Her distant eyes relived the trauma of her accident.
"Why don't you join them?"
Her lips remained fixed in a smile and she shrugged artlessly.
Fuller shook his head to indicate that she mystified him. He wanted to find a question that she might answer, as if to establish her psychological reality within his frame of reference.
She rose and smiled uncertainly at him. The sound of her static-choked voice was sudden. "I really must be going," she said, and still smiling she moved off like a narcoleptic ballerina.
Over the next few weeks he saw less and less of the other patients. He made excuses when they called with invitations: he was working, he was thinking. Of course, he was doing none of these things. The patients frightened him with their personal certainty, their understanding. He felt inferior in their company.
In contrast, the woman seemed weak and lost, and Fuller resolved to spend more time with her.
He continued his long walks around the estate, hurrying until he came to the beach and there pausing to admire the view, perhaps hoping he might happen upon the woman again. He was confused, but no longer suicidal. He had even considered returning to the city, but something, some intimation that he was not yet ready, restrained him.
One morning as he walked along the beach he saw the woman approach him from the opposite direction, moving through the warm air as if wading along at the bottom of the sea.
She paused before him. The process of coming to a halt involved a gradual shut-down of her bodily movements: she settled into stasis like some machine.
As ever she was smiling, distant. "Jonathon, you remind me of my father..."
They walked side by side along the seashore, and although she was present physically, she was absent; it was more than just her silence - she seemed removed as if inhabiting a private universe of her own, a universe that earned the constant praise of her smile. Fuller wanted nothing more than to establish some means of contact with her, to take her in his arms and communicate. It was as if she were imprisoned within her perfect form, and only a show of affection on his part might provoke from her some reciprocal response.
At last she broke the silence. "Why are you here?"
He told her about the death of his daughter, and despite some inner urging said no more. Later, when they concluded their walk outside his chalet, and she said, "Perhaps we might meet again?" - a no-doubt sincere request made formal by the means of its delivery - he was torn between wanting to accede to her request, and wanting to shut her from his life forever.
Summer progressed and Fuller spent more time with the woman, and the other patients shunned them. No longer came the invitations to picnics and parties, and whenever he met a patient while out walking he was pointedly ignored. The dissociation did not bother him unduly; he supposed, in a way, that he had begun the rift when he sought the woman's company in preference to theirs.
They met every day and walked, lunched, sat on the balcony of his A-frame and drank, then dined and watched the sun set. They never discussed their tenuous relationship, or how it might continue; they simply met and passed the time of day together. She was always distant, present in body but rarely in mind, and when she spoke it was with an objectivity shorn of all emotion. He often had the urge to ask her how she felt, if she had plans and ambitions for the future, joyous memories and old loves. It was as if the accident through which she'd passed had traumatised her, made her loath to become the feeling human being she used to be.
Fuller never demanded from her a statement of commitment, or anything that might require from her an expenditure of the emotion she was unable to declare. Perhaps she saw in him someone who would accept her as she was, and perhaps he saw in her the same.
They spoke of their respective lives in terms of fact, sanitised of