The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [11]
Today it’s the East Slope. Haloed in sunlight, he holds out his hands and pulls her up the last few steps, his long fingers enveloping her forearms, his spindly frame somehow supporting her with ease, making her feel strangely weightless. For the first time since they sat on her stoop while she put on her skates and he downed a baggie of vitamins and other more mysterious prescription-type pills with his grandissimo frozen coffee drink, Javier is not talking, and the consequent emptiness of Ursula’s brain is a little terrifying. His voice has been a constant, there has been no escaping it, she can’t even plug her ears, occupied as they already are by earphones that broadcast his giddy whisperings stereophonically in either ear. There’s no microphone on her headset, only on his. The tactics of brainwashing.
He pulls her out of the pedestrian traffic, and they stand facing each other on the cement plaza of the Angleton Banking Center, then he lets go of her hands, letting her wobble in place while he skates perfect circles around her, rotating forward and backward as he revolves. Her confidence in these things is already badly shaken from the subway platforms, where she got knocked around and had to wrap her arms and legs around urine-corroded metal beams to keep from pitching into the tracks. If only she’d brought along a pair of normal shoes—but of course out of all the ten thousand things Javier considered worth mentioning, the fact that they’d be getting on a subway and traveling all the way upslope wasn’t one of them.
He begins to float away from her backward, beckoning her forward. A bald man in a pastel-yellow suit scatters from his path. Gritting her teeth, she kicks out after Javier across the plaza. He slaloms around the columns of the Angleton building, sails across Colby Street, and spins through a revolving door and into the rainbowed glass atrium of the Hilton. Whereas it takes Ursula’s complete attention to keep up with him and not fall down, Javier, for his part, seems to look everywhere but where he’s going, all the while mouthing his ongoing quasidialectic of style into the microphone, postulating that rustic-brown tie, worrying however that slate-gray tie with ebony clip, realizing that perhaps—yes, irrefutably—amaranth tie, umber tie, jade-and-sapphire-stippled tie . . .
They skate through Maheu Square and past the Museum of Postmodern Art, with its sculptures of water oaks, weeping hemlocks, and sweetbay magnolias along the curb. He is saying bolero jacket, tunic dress, bee-striped skirt, kid with the bubblepipe, the look in the chauffeur’s eyes, sparkly, wistful hint of tear, yes, just cut it and print it and there’s your ad for obscurantists—plastics, mutual funds, health care, and sky-blue pipe must match mother’s shirt, none of that sepia, must be vibrant, the trend is colorful, not just any colors, shimmery yet guileless, oh, the kind of colors they wear in Heaven.
“The Light Age,” he whispers ecstatically as they float over the Snepp Viaduct. He presses his palms together, like a pope on wheels, blessing the flea-market crowd below. “It’s all falling into place.”
“The Light Age?” she shouts. Startled, he snaps his head toward her and consequently loses his balance, has to wheel his arms wildly to keep from spilling out. Apparently he forgot she could hear him talking. Maybe he forgot she was there at all. He stops himself over the back of a mailbox, then gestures her over. She joins him, grateful for something to hold on to.
“It’s the megatrend me and Chas are tracking,” he says. At this range his amplified voice feeds back, searing her eardrums. Cursing, she pulls off the headset.
“Oh. Sorry,”