The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [189]
Now he was walking away, and I couldn’t call after him. He knew I couldn’t call. Now he was gone.
I felt a choking pressure around the heart. No, no, no, no, said a voice. Tears were running down my face.
But I’d said that out loud – too loudly, because Richard was awake now. He was standing right behind me. He was about to put his hand on my neck.
This was when I woke up really. I lay with my wet face, eyes open, staring at the grey blank of the ceiling, waiting for my heart to slow down. I don’t cry often any more, when awake; only a few dry tears now and then. It’s a surprise to find I’ve been doing it.
When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too – leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.
There really was a clinking sound, glass against glass. I climbed out of bed – out of my real, single bed – and made my way over to the window. Two raccoons were pawing through the neighbours’ Blue Box across the street, turning over the bottles and cans. Scavengers, at home in the junkyard. They looked up at me, alert, unalarmed, their small thieves’ masks black in the moonlight.
Good luck to you, I thought. Take what you can, while you can get it. Who cares if it belongs to you? Just don’t get caught.
I went back to bed and lay in the heavy darkness, listening to the sound of breathing I knew was not there.
X
The Blind Assassin: Lizard Men of Xenor
For weeks she trolls the racks. She goes to the nearest drugstore, buys some emery boards or an orange stick, something minor, then strolls past the magazines, not touching and careful not to be seen looking, but riffling through the titles with her eyes, on the lookout for his name. One of his names. She knows them by now, or most of them: she used to cash the cheques.
Wonder Stories. Weird Tales. Astounding. She scans them all.
At last she spots something. This must be it: Lizard Men of Xenor. First Thrilling Episode in the Annals of the Zycronian Wars. On the cover, a blonde in a quasi-Babylonian getup, a white robe tightly cinched under her unlikely breasts by a gold-link belt, her throat wound in lapis jewellery, a crescent moon in silver sprouting from her head. She’s wet-lipped, open-mouthed, big-eyed, in the grip of two creatures with three-fingered claws and eyes with vertical pupils. They’re wearing nothing but red shorts. Their faces are flattened disks, their skin is covered with scales, a pewtery teal in hue. They shine slickly, as if basted; under their grey-blue hide their muscles bulge and gleam. The teeth in their lipless mouths are numerous and needle-sharp.
She’d know them anywhere.
How to get hold of a copy? Not in this store, where she’s recognized. It would never do to start rumours, by strange behaviour of any kind at all. On her next shopping trip she makes a detour to the train station and locates the magazine at the newsstand there. One thin dime; she pays with her gloves on, rolls the magazine up quickly, caches it in her handbag. The newsie looks at her strangely, but then men do.
She hugs the magazine to her all the way back in the taxi, smuggles it up the stairs, locks herself in the bathroom with it. Her hands, she knows, will tremble turning the pages. It’s a story of the kind bums read on boxcars, or school-age boys by the light of a flashlight. Factory watchmen at midnight, to keep themselves awake; salesmen in their travellers’ hotels after a fruitless day, tie off, shirt open, feet up, whisky in the toothbrush glass. Police, on a dull evening. None of them will find the message that will surely be concealed