The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [132]
Maybe they wanted their own martyr, their own one-man Sacco and Vanzetti. After he’s been hanged by the neck until Red, villainous face in all the papers, they’ll reveal some proof of his innocence – chalk up a few points of moral outrage. Look what the system does! Outright murder! No justice! They think like that, the comrades. Like a chess game. He’d be the pawn sacrifice.
He goes to the window, looks out. Icicles like brownish tusks depend outside the glass, taking their colour from the roofing. He thinks of her name, an electric aura circling it – a sexual buzz like blue neon. Where is she? She won’t take a taxi, not right to the spot, she’s too bright for that. He stares at the streetcar stop, willing her to materialize. Stepping down with a flash of leg, a high-heeled boot, best plush. Cunt on stilts. Why does he think like that, when if any other man said that about her he’d hit the bastard?
She’ll be wearing a fur coat. He’ll despise her for it, he’ll ask her to keep it on. Fur all the way through.
Last time he saw her there was a bruise on her thigh. He wished he’d made it himself. What’s this? I bumped into a door. He always knows when she’s lying. Or he thinks he knows. Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark.
Why does she keep arriving? Is he some private game she’s playing, is that it? He won’t let her pay for anything, he won’t be bought. She wants a love story out of him because girls do, or girls of her type who still expect something from life. But there must be another angle. The wish for revenge, or for punishment. Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off. Despite those eyes, the pure line of her throat, he catches a glimpse in her at times of something complex and smirched.
Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she’s actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
He has a bridge table, flea-market vintage, and one folding chair. He sits down at the typewriter, blows on his fingers, rolls in paper.
In a glacier located in the Swiss Alps (or the Rocky Mountains, better, or on Greenland, even better), some explorers have found – embedded in a flow of clear ice – a space vehicle. It’s shaped like a small dirigible, but pointed at the ends like an okra pod. An eerie glow comes from it, shining up through the ice. What colour is this glow? Green is best, with a yellow tinge to it, like absinthe.
The explorers melt the ice, using what? A blowtorch they happen to have with them? A large fire made from nearby trees? If trees, better to move it back to the Rocky Mountains. No trees in Greenland. Perhaps a huge crystal could be employed, which would magnify the rays of the sun. The Boy Scouts – of which he had briefly been one – were taught to use this method to start fires. Out of sight of the Scoutmaster, a jovial, mournful pink-faced man fond of sing-songs and hatchets, they’d held their magnifying glasses trained on their bare arms to see who could stand it longest. They’d set fire to pine needles that way, and scraps of toilet paper.