The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [115]
Javier ponders the response. Ursula laughs.
“Well, all right,” he says. “Point taken. I guess there really isn’t much difference. But there is one difference, I think. One big difference that makes all the difference. You don’t just consume a pomegranate, you know? You enter into a compact with it. You scatter its seed. You make its life a part of you, and it makes your life a part of it.”
As Eeven watches, Javier carefully picks the seeds off the table and puts them in his pocket. He looks at Ursula, offering her his old, crooked-toothed smile, his eyes cloudless, bright. He seems totally at peace. It strikes her that she’s never seen him like this, neither manic nor depressed but somehow perfectly balanced. He sees it all, she thinks; he sees all the sadness of the world, but he can take it, he can contain it, and realizing this, she feels the weight in her chest lift with buoyant, giddy, almost irrepressible hope.
“I wonder what they’ll be like, the next generation,” he says to Ursula. “The ones who’ll have no sublimity at all, only magic. What do you think they’ll be like?”
She thinks about this. “A lot like us, probably.”
“Like us,” he agrees. “Only more so.”
The three of them sit there side by side on the couch, saying nothing, staring at the opened, brightly jeweled fruit in Javier’s hand.
Fishy
James T. Couch leans back in his chair, his pale, naked arms folded over the white towel tied snugly around his rib cage. The two eyes tattooed on his nipples stare wide and crazed at Ursula, while his real eyes, from behind his thick lenses, regard her with a wide and crazed imitation of the tattoo. His festively toothy smile, equally wide and crazed, gives him the overall demeanor of a paper dragon in a Chinese circus.
“Your finest Chianti,” he announces to the crew-cut waiter. “And I think I feel fishy today. Bring me a fish. I don’t care what kind. You choose. And bring my lovely friend a great big, thick steak of some kind. She looks like she hasn’t had a decent meal in a while.”
The waiter nods his beefy head and spins away.
“So, Ursula,” Couch says. “Ursula, Ursula, Ursula.” He scratches his bare chest with his insectile fingers. “I’m so glad you agreed to come meet me. We’ve got some awfully serious business to discuss. You’ve seen the latest development on the webcast, I assume.”
Two salads float down to the tabletop. Couch is already chewing. Ursula can’t think on what until she sees for the first time the basket of bread. The world has become crisper and jumpier, moments falling through the cracks here and there in that way they always do when she hasn’t slept. Since Javier showed up yesterday she’s been too excited to sleep, too impatient, she feels like she’s been sleeping for years and now finally she has woken, and she doesn’t want to waste another moment. The minute he left to take Eeven home, she took a shower, redid her bandage, put on some clean clothes, and went shopping for furniture. She bought a new couch and a big pillowy chair, a couple of throw rugs, a new coffee table, a new kitchen table, a bed and a mattress and a box spring and new linen and many other things, little kitchen and bathroom items she’d been meaning to get forever, been putting off getting, dreading all the time it would take, but she actually got it all done in a matter of hours, and for a little extra money the store delivered everything that very night. She split the purchase between two credit cards and paid the delivery men an extra hundred to take her old furniture down to the curb, and once all the new items were in place she began cleaning up her apartment like she’d never cleaned it before, scrubbing the tops of cabinets and behind the toilet and all those other out-of-sight places she’d previously chosen to ignore. She cleaned one-handed, no less, keeping her left arm pressed close against her side to help the healing along. She worked all night long, kept company by a portable radio she