The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [26]
Losers.
She turns, hearing a noise. Javier stands in the doorway.
“Hi, Ursula.”
On the computer screen at her feet, Middle City is rebuilt and then leveled under a mushroom cloud.
“I thought you were long gone,” he says. “Good thing I’m a snoop, too.”
She turns back to the window, hears him walking up to the desk, peripherally sees him sit on its edge, lean back against the window, and gaze up at her face. He reaches up and takes her hand.
“Sorry about that, Ursula. Sorry if I said the wrong thing.”
His hand feels surprisingly delicate and soft. The way it grips hers gently communicates something unexpected to her, an essential care that belies his frenetic behavior. She feels suddenly warm toward him, and embarrassed about the appearance of her own hand, with its ragged nails bitten almost down to the cuticles—not a proper businesswoman’s hand, she supposes. She remembers the military precision of Chas’s squarely manicured fingers, steepled between his eyes like a warship’s prow. She imagines them on Ivy’s face, pressing it from either side like vise grips, and feels a chill.
“Did you ever see my sister with Chas?” she asks.
“Just twice. Neither time for long.”
On the screen, Middle City is rebuilt and again destroyed, this time simultaneously by a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, a tsunami, and a tornado.
“He was crazy about her,” Javier adds. “Deeply in love. Still is.”
“What?” She scans his eyes for duplicity, deviousness, or mere idiocy, but all she sees is wide-open earnestness. “Did he tell you that?”
“No. It was obvious.”
He stares up at her moonily, the way he looked at the cookies in the store. She believes him.
“Why hasn’t he visited her?” she asks.
“He tried once. Her first day there. Before you got here. She screamed her head off.”
On the computer screen, Middle City is rebuilt and then flattened by the sandaled foot of God. Ursula crosses her arms and presses her forehead into the cool pane, wondering what Chas and Ivy were like together, wondering whether he could have done something to stop her from cutting herself and running through the park. But it doesn’t really matter. She knows Ivy’s schizophrenia isn’t something any boyfriend could be blamed for. It’s all in the genes. Ursula is probably prone to it herself. She, too, may wake up one day and believe that the entire world is an elaborate lie meant to mask an even more elaborate conspiracy.
She turns back to the city.
“It looks pretty from a height,” she says. “Like it’s nothing but light. Like it couldn’t hurt you if it tried.”
Javier reaches up and places his hand on her arm, firmly, then makes her lean back a few inches from the pane.
“Ursula,” he asks, “what do you see?”
“I see the world below the world.” She laughs, on the verge of crying. “I see a nightmare made of solid steel. I see a hundred square miles of compulsion, delusion, and death. Where does that fit into your philosophy of marketing?”
“No,” he says, “change your focal length. What do you see?”
She sees herself, in the ersatz space of the pane’s reflection.
“Oh.” She sighs. “Just some loser, looking out a window.”
“I see a beautiful woman who can be anything she wants,” he says. “Who never needs to touch the ground. Who can take off and fly. And the city will be as beautiful as you want it to be, as beautiful as you. I promise you.”
She looks at him, suspicious as always of compliments about her appearance, but his face is flushed with embarrassment,