The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [82]
“Chas came to see me in the hospital,” she says. “He said he’d do anything for me. I knew he’d been surgically implanted with surveillance technology; I could see the time-warp auras buzzing all around him. I screamed until he left. It brought back too much pain to see him. But it was nice that he said he’d do anything for me. I thought about that later, and it made me feel better.”
When Ursula works up the courage to look at her again, she finds that Ivy is no longer staring at her. The wide-open look in her eyes is gone, and her attention has returned to the various items on the table. She picks up the bagel but sets it down again in favor of another cigarette, torching the air with the jet of flame, then regarding the lighter with idle curiosity, turning it in her fingers as the smoke leaks from her mouth.
“So what does he say in the notes he sends you?” Ursula asks.
Ivy shrugs, reaches into her rhinestone purse, pulls out a small, square piece of paper, and lays it on the table. The note is laser-printed and centered on the page:
TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT.
NAME IT.
I’LL KILL IF NECESSARY.
“Tell him to make me famous,” Ivy says. “That’s what I want.”
“He did that, Ivy. You’re famous.”
“No, no. I mean famous famous. Famous famous famous. So people have to watch me. You ask me why people have to watch me, and I tell you I don’t know. But once they’re watching me—I mean really, really watching me—I’ll know, Ursula. I’ll know what it’s for. Tell him to make me famous, Ursula.”
“Why don’t you tell him?” Ursula says.
“Why don’t you tell him?” Ivy replies evenly.
Ursula freezes. If Ivy’s implying anything, it’s impossible to tell. She picks up Chas’s note and folds it lengthwise. She stares at it intently, then carefully tucks in the corners and folds it again and again along a number of invisible axes. She works through the series of folds by rote, the cigarette held between her lips, her mind wandering off into geometry. Ursula has almost forgotten this talent of her sister’s. Within a few minutes the object takes shape: a Viking ship, replete with a couple of oars on each side and a dragon-headed prow. Ivy sets the vessel down on the tabletop in front of her and stares at it wonderingly.
“Happy birthday, me,” she says.
Invisigoths
The circular stairwell in the statue’s copper hull is as hot as a skillet and so tightly coiled that every step requires a pivot. Ursula dislikes the climb, but so do the tourists, which is why the statue of Felix Rodriguez failed as a tourist attraction, which is why the teenagers started to come, which is why Chas, as he told her over the phone, considers it a place worth visiting. She emerges on the observation deck damp with sweat. No Chas, no teenagers, no one at all. She walks to the balustrade and peers down through the bronze licks of thinning, matted hair, tousled to the left by an imagined breeze, while her own hair blows to the right. The jacket of the statue’s cheapish-looking bronze suit is blown open by the same false, easterly wind, revealing a bronze shoulder-holstered sidearm the size of a late-seventies Buick.
“I saw a cabbie arranging marigolds in a plastic cup in his drink tray.”
The voice belongs to Chas. Suddenly he is right beside her, staring down at the city circuitry stretching down the mountain.
“I saw a shop owner reading a pocket edition of Purgatorio,” she replies.
Chas fingers the promontory of his chin. “I saw a woman with her hair in a bun and a Pekinese on a leash stop to sign a ‘Legalize Marijuana’ petition.”
“I saw a woman in a cashmere turtleneck apologize for the sins of humanity to a bank machine.”
Chas is impressed. “Not bad. Like a confessional.” He nods, clucks his tongue three times. “Pathetic.” He turns and looks at her, through her, behind her.
“Invisigoths,” he says.
She turns and looks. A group of kids are squatting on their haunches at the other end of the observation deck.