The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [42]
Their hands are the world.
The wind is chaos.
The cabs are order, orbiting moons.
He presses his palm into hers, and she returns the pressure. She parts her fingers, allowing his into the more intimate regions between. A warm shiver shoots from her opened fingers up through her arm and down her legs. Their fingers slide into each other’s, lock, clasp, and retreat, touching tip to tip. And then his hand passes around behind hers and cradles it from behind, and she can’t remember a time she ever felt so comforted by a man, so safe, so tended to, and she feels so much meaning in this little gesture that she’s afraid, and she has to pull her hand away, though the moment she does, the rest of her slides into his arms.
Suit
U is the axis of the woman in the man’s bed that is nothing but a bed.
i is the axis of the woman in the hospital bed that is also a bed of sand, that is also a bed of air, that is also the bed of a truck making its way through a sandstorm in a trackless desert.
Chart a vector in the U-axis and grid yourself into a city, a neighborhood, a house, a room, a side of a bed, the arms of a man. Slip into the i-axis and slip off the grid. The arms of a hospital chair are also the arms of a carnival ride, are also the arms of a meter measuring your proximity to the truth, are also the arms of a broad-bellied djinni gyrating in a sandstorm against an obscured horizon.
Ursula opens her eyes.
A new day, another sun, rising to the top of a tall window, tall curtains billowed by a breeze.
Life is tall that way, attenuated, longer than it is wide.
Maybe.
No, that makes no sense.
Not enough sense, anyway.
A tall window belongs to a tall man.
That much is true, but it doesn’t mean anything really, it’s just a coincidence.
A tall man.
Her musings gather into a solid wave of dread.
A tall, spinning, skating, gesticulating man. . . .
She closes her eyes again, not daring to look. They slapped together a romance overnight like some Hollywood Western set. Now, in the light of day, she knows she’ll be confronting all the telltale signs of fakery: hastily painted morning smiles, places marked with gaffer’s tape for a stiff parting hug. Stupid stupid stupid—
“You were dreaming something,” he says. “What?”
She turns over.
He is on his side, gazing at her, an arm folded beneath his pillow.
And she knows the taste of his skin now. The smell of his neck. The feel of his chest against hers. And the things he now knows about her . . . But his eyes are sleepy and calm, and his voice is casually solicitous. As though nothing too catastrophic has happened.
She relaxes into the bed, which is softer, actually, than anything she’s slept on in years.
She still can’t quite look at him.
“It’s hard to explain,” she answers. “Ivy was telling me things, kind of.”
He waits for her to go on. He is still. The room is silent.
“She wasn’t talking, really. She was thinking for me. She was lending me her thought patterns.”
“What was that like?”
“It was different. There was some math terminology.”
“She thinks in math?”
“I don’t know. We used to think so. For a while in high school she had all these math notebooks she kept. But when the doctor asked to see them, we discovered they were just page after page of weird symbols and equations that didn’t make sense. To anyone but her, I guess.”
The silence seeps back into the room.
“What was she telling you in the dream?”
It’s an antique of some kind, the bed, with posts of carved, stained wood. A galaxy of motes