Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [100]
Run, my mind said. Just turn around and run.
I crept forward another couple of yards, blinking my eyes rapidly against the coming darkness. Vinaldi was still alive; his head was jerking slightly. Either he was trying to clear it, or he was reeling from Rapt rush. Almost certainly both—my mind was already about as clear as sewage and getting more tangled all the time. I couldn’t see anyone nearby, and I briefly considered simply running toward him and trying to get him free. Then something made me turn my head and look down the path toward the center of the village.
There was nothing there. But the clearing looked ruffled as though seen through a heat haze. Whichever way I turned my head, the haze stayed in the same place. It was flickering very slightly too, like a bad quality film print, but the flecks weren’t white, they were dark. I rubbed my eyes hard and blinked, but after I stopped seeing stars the effect was still there. The flecks seemed to organize into broken and shifting vertical lines as I watched, as if something was hidden behind a curtain of rain, rain so colored as to make up an image of that patch of the path.
I realized what I was seeing just an instant before the image settled enough for my eyes to tell me. It was Yhandim and Ghuaji, and they were running along the path straight at me. They’d been taken up by The Gap enough to slip into it almost like natives. Ghuaji’s injuries weren’t holding him up any, and Yhandim looked like he’d never been injured in his life. He probably hadn’t. People like Yhandim didn’t get injured: The traffic’s all the other way.
Both looked like a condensed pack of wild animals, bludgeoned into a human state and howling with happy lust.
I did what I’d been trained to do. I ran like hell.
I ran, and eventually I was Gone Away. I cannot tell you where I went. I can only say this:
Henna used to tell me the names of flowers; their names, what they liked in terms of water and sunlight, and where they were originally from. Whether we walked the corridors of 72, or made an excursion out into Virginia, there would be a constant background hum of information, a datastream from Henna’s internal world. At first I feigned interest, and then I ignored her, and now I’ll never know. She would also tell me things which had happened in her day, because she loved me. But because I couldn’t fit them into my life I let these too slide past me and fade away.
All those parts which I could have saved have slipped between my fingers and disappeared.
I don’t know how many people I slept with while I was married to Henna. I don’t mean there were that many, simply that I didn’t keep track, which in some ways seems worse. I didn’t start for three years, but once I began I just couldn’t seem to stop. Sometimes I was drunk, sometimes I was Rapt, sometimes I was stone-cold sober. I can’t really blame any mitigating substance, unless it’s one I produce in my own mind. Unfaithfulness was coded in.
I’m not trying to excuse it. It’s inexcusable. That’s the whole point of vices, of alcoholism, addictions, and eating disorders. They have to be inexcusable. The soul wages war on the self, making it do things it can’t respect—as a punishment for crimes it doesn’t even remember. What’s the point, unless it’s something bad? And what do you do about yourself when you know you can’t stop doing something you despise? You carry on doing it, that’s what. The merry-go-round never stops. The worst of it is that people will respect those addictions, legitimating your own private civil war. They’ll think you can’t help it, that your childhood’s to blame, or some cultural malaise. Anything but you. Sometimes that’s true, but often it just comes down to being an asshole.
It’s an easy thing to do, for a cop, finding someone new to fuck. There’d always be some lonely woman who needed comforting