The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [85]
The Light Age
The long worktable, the room’s only piece of furniture, has been turned on its side, and the tabletop now forms the side wall of a kind of tent Javier has made by draping a comforter from the upper edge diagonally down over a twin mattress laid on the floor alongside it. A faint, musical murmur emanates from beneath the blanket, as well as a modulating glow. Outside the tent, strewn among the remnants of the chart, lie several torn-open mail-order envelopes and computer-game boxes; dozens of empty cans that once contained soup, Spaghetti-Os, and franks and beans; and an equal number of plastic bowls and plastic spoons encrusted with the dried residue of his meals, which were cooked, evidently, on the hot plate sitting beside an electrical outlet in the corner by the door. The room is windowless, and the air, while not quite foul, is heady and sickly sweet.
“Maybe I spoke too soon about that Board of Health thing,” she says, desperate to keep things light. But Javier remains expressionless. Without looking at her he takes a breath, then slowly gets down on his hands and knees and crawls inside his tent through a flap at the foot of the mattress.
Ursula looks around the room helplessly for a moment.
“Javier,” she says, dropping to her knees. “Can I come in?”
He doesn’t respond. She pokes her head through the flap and finds him on his back, with his head propped on a couple of pillows and his long, unshaven face angled toward a computer monitor propped on more pillows beside her at his feet. There’s just enough space to squeeze inside between the monitor and the tabletop wall. She kicks off her shoes and maneuvers herself in alongside him, moving a joystick out of the way and claiming an unused corner of his pillow for her head. On the screen at the other end the computer plays with itself, running a three-dimensional maze to the tinny sound of an endlessly repeating action-adventure sound track. Every so often an enemy soldier appears, at which point the top of a shotgun barrel rises from the bottom of the screen, a ragged red hole appears in the falling soldier’s chest, and the maze-running resumes. Ursula’s stockinged feet charge with the static electricity of the screen, and her heart fills with the palpable misery emanating from each of Javier’s slightly labored exhalations. She can barely bring herself to speak, but she feels that if she doesn’t, the misery will suffocate them both.
“You took down your chart,” she says.
Javier attempts a horizontal shrug, bony shoulders bunching.
“Why?” she asks.
He stares at the screen, furrowing his brow. “Tried to . . . just . . . work backward. . . . Figure out where I went wrong.”
He speaks with difficulty, as though each word has to be unlocked from its own cabinet. She can feel the warmth of his arm against hers and the low straining of his voice resonating in her spine.
“Did you figure it out?”
He nods faintly. The smell of his sweat is slightly acrid, slightly sweet, and not unpleasant. Being this close to him is an almost unbearable reminder of the physical intimacy they used to have. She resists the urge to press herself against him, to rub the life back into him any way she can.
“So? Where did you go wrong?” she asks.
The screenlight illuminates the cords of his stubbled neck, his Adam’s apple climbing into his chin and falling back as he swallows.
“It’s a