Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [35]
Shaken and feeling sick, Charis closes her eyes, struggling to regain her body. My body, mine, she repeats. I am a good person. I exist. In the moonlit night of her head she can see an image: a tall structure, a building, something toppling from it, falling through the air, turning over and over. Coming apart.
11
The three of them stand outside the Toxique, saying goodbye. Charis isn’t entirely sure how she got out here. Her body has walked her out, all by itself, her body has taken care of it. She’s shivering, despite the sun, she’s cold, and she feels thinner – lighter and more porous. It’s as though energy has been drained out of her, energy and substance, in order for Zenia to materialize. Zenia has made it back across, back across the river; she’s here now, in a fresh body, and she’s taken a chunk of Charis’s own body and sucked it into herself.
That’s wrong though. Zenia must be alive, because other people saw her. She sat down in a chair, she ordered a drink, she smoked a cigarette. But none of these are necessarily signs of life.
Roz gives her a squeeze and says, “Take care of yourself, sweetie, I’ll call you, okay?” and goes off in the direction of her car. Tony has already smiled at her and is going, gone, off down the street, her short legs moving her steadily along, like a wind-up toy. For a moment Charis stands there in front of the Toxique, lost. She doesn’t know what to do next. She could turn around and march back in there, march up to Zenia, stand planted; but the things she was going to say to Zenia have evaporated, have flown up out of her head. All that’s left is a whirring sound.
She could go back to the store, back to Radiance, even though it’s her half-day and Shanita isn’t expecting her. She could tell Shanita what happened; Shanita is a teacher, maybe she can help. But possibly Shanita won’t be too sympathetic. A woman like that, she’ll say. She’s nothing. Why are you concerned about her? You are giving her the power, you know better than that! What colour is she? What colour is the pain? Wipe the tape!
Shanita has never had a dose of Zenia. She won’t realize, she can’t understand, that Zenia can’t be meditated out of existence. If she could be, Charis would have done it long ago.
She decides to go home. She’ll fill up the bathtub and put some orange peel into it, some rose oil, a few cloves; she’ll pin up her hair and get into the tub and let her arms float in the scented water. Steering herself towards this goal, she walks downhill, in the general direction of the lake and the ferry dock; but a block along she turns left and makes her way by a narrow alley to the next street, and then she turns left again, and now she’s back on Queen.
Her body doesn’t wish her to go home right now. Her body is urging her to have a cup of coffee; worse than that, a cup of espresso. This is so unusual – her body’s promptings of this kind are normally for fruit juice or glasses of water – that she feels obliged to do what it wants.
There’s a café, right across the street from the Toxique. It’s called the Kafay Nwar, and has a hot-pink neon sign in forties writing in the window. Charis goes into it and sits at one of the small round chrome-edged tables by the window, and takes off her cardigan, and when the waiter comes, wearing a pleated dress shirt, a black bow tie, and jeans, she orders an Espresso Esperanto – all the things on the menu have complicated names, Cappuccino Cappriccio, Tarte aux Tarts, Our Malicious Mudcake – and watches the door of the Toxique. It’s clear to her now that her body doesn’t want an espresso primarily. Her body wants her to spy on Zenia.
To make herself less obvious as a watcher she takes her notebook