The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [80]
“And his mouth fell open. Then he said, ‘Asleep.’ And I closed my eyes, and I thought Asleep asleep asleep, go negative, all the crappy things about awake—alarm clocks, jackhammers, traffic jams, fat boss yelling at you, bills in the mail, politicians on TV. And I said, ‘Experience Freedom. Experience Asleep.’
“His mouth fell open even wider. And I thought, Wow, I’m right: I really do have computer chips. I really have been to the future. I got out of bed, and they kept coming to me. I stood up and I said, ‘Standing: The world at your feet.’ I knocked on the wall and I said, ‘Walls: Giving you some space.’ I took off my T-shirt and saw him staring at me, and I said, ‘Erections: Feel your power.’ And he felt his power. And I felt my power. You get the picture.”
She falls silent, shaking her head sadly.
“He told me I was brilliant,” she adds softly, biting her lip at the memory. “I said, What if I’m just crazy? But he said no, he said I saw things almost no one else saw. He said I was the most lucid, clearheaded person he’d ever met. His eyes were on fire when he said it. He meant it. No one ever believed that about me before.”
She stares down plaintively at the split-open bagel on her plate. The two fat rings stare back up at her like eyes.
She loves him, Ursula suddenly sees, the recollection of her own night with Chas forming a jagged crystal of shame in her chest.
“After that I started to get confused,” Ivy says. “I kept seeing weird things and hearing weird voices, so many things and voices I couldn’t keep track of them all. Sometimes I saw millions of tiny streets squiggling around like worms, like I was flying above them, and I heard deep voices whispering. Other times I saw millions of tiny trees, swaying like underwater grass, and I heard high voices kind of singing. The deep voices and the high voices were both trying to tell me who I was, but I couldn’t make out the words. And then one day I finally figured it all out, and I felt so relieved because it actually made sense then, kind of.”
As she talks, she spreads a thin, very even layer of soy cream cheese across a bagel slice, as carefully as a workman plastering a ceiling, trying to get the surface absolutely smooth. Once this is accomplished, she wets the corner of her napkin with her tongue and uses it to wipe away the excess from the perimeter and the hole. She sets down the napkin and examines her work.
“That night I decided to tell Chas,” she goes on. “We were in a bar. We were usually in a bar. I said, Chas, I’m not really sure, and I don’t think I’m crazy or anything, but I think there’s a reasonable chance that I’m a cavewoman who was taken to the future and brainwashed, and that I’ve been sent back in time to sell things. I think it’s possible that people in this time watch me and buy things, and people in the future watch my life here and buy things also.
“He asked me what the hell I was on. I said I didn’t know what hell I was on. He asked me where the cavewoman thing came from. And I said, I dream of trees. And he said, Maybe you’re a tree, then. And I said, I think I’d rather be a tree. And he said, What would you do if you were a tree? And I said, I’d grow rings. And he said I was outa my tree. He got up to go to the bathroom, and a man came up to me, a skinny man with pockmarked skin in a beautiful gray silk suit. He told me that he’d made a very profitable transaction earlier that day and he was out celebrating, and the thing he wanted most in the world at that moment was to suck my toes, and he’d give me a hundred dollars if I let him. He had a Russian accent. I was pretty sure he was an agent from the resistance and that this was his way of contacting me. I said OK. I reached up under my skirt and took my stockings off. And the man’s friends cheered from their table, and he pulled up a chair and looked at me sitting on the barstool and he took my foot and dunked my toes in a rocks glass filled with champagne. It made my toes cold, and then he put them in his warm mouth and I