The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [86]
“What is?”
“Postirony,” he says.
She waits for him to explain. He doesn’t.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Against the children.”
“Javier, what the hell are you talking about?”
He takes a shallow breath, as though summoning the effort to speak.
“We’re eating our young, Ursula,” he says at last.
“Javier,” she whispers. “You’re starting to creep me out a little here.”
“We’re converting them into revenue streams,” he says fixedly. “We’re starving them of love so they’ll buy more of what we sell them. They think they’re buying love, but it isn’t love. It’s . . . it’s this.” He points at the screen. “We’re eating our young. And they know it. That’s the most terrible thing: they know it.”
“Stop it, Javier!”
He closes his eyes.
“You know,” she says, “you walk around with this ridiculous rosy picture of life in your head for months, and the next thing I know you’re preaching Armageddon. You’re so self-indulgent. You fucking fly off to la-la land, and then you wallow in self-pity. Well, it’s just not that bad, Javier. It wasn’t that good before, and it’s not that bad now.”
Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.
“Listen to me,” she says. “I’m finally starting to get my life into some kind of order. I’ve finally resolved to make a way for myself in the world. Don’t try to take that away from me now.”
“I’m so sorry I led you astray,” he says, his tone determined, his eyes still firmly shut. “But it’s not too late for you to go back to painting, Ursula. So what your work wasn’t marketable? I’m sure it was beaut—”
“Shut up! I’m sick of this! I can’t take any more. You go back, Javier. Go back on your lithium. Get yourself on antidepressants. Stop making me feel guilty. Stop manipulating me. It’s not going to work.”
“Please, just go,” he says. “I can’t take this . . . torture.”
“ ‘Torture’?” she shouts. “The whole time you were sleeping with me, you were fantasizing about my sister—”
He turns to face her, his eyes wounded and shocked. “That’s not true!”
“—filling your notebooks with drawings of her in little hide skirts—”
“No . . . that’s—”
“—and you lie there accusing me of torturing you?”
The blanket slips from its mooring at the foot of the bed, collapsing over the screen, which is visible now only as a faint radiance on the horizon where the blanket meets their knees.
He tries to speak, but his voice breaks, forcing him to whisper: “You were my only fantasy.”
“Spare me the sales pitch,” she says.
If he reached over and touched her now, she might even start to crack, might even start to believe him. But he turns away and hugs himself protectively instead.
“I can’t fight this darkness,” he whispers.
“All right,” she says. “I’m leaving. You got your wish. You can go back to running your little mazes now.”
He says nothing, makes no move to stop her, just stares at the fabric in front of his eyes.
Venusians
Ursula wends her way down a steep and curving section of Lansdale Street, staggering a little in the heels that she likes to imagine make her height seem like an exceptional feature rather than merely a peculiar one. Her eyes to the sidewalk, she almost runs into a couple of pay phones, and she considers taking this as a sign—a sign to call Javier and tell him about the kind of day it is. It’s the kind of day he would like, there’s something whimsical about the sky today—the way the blimps and helicopters and early moon all hang suspended in it like lint caught in a sweater; the way it seems to suck that one slender line of ash from the volcano peak straight up, as though through a straw; the way it’s stratified like a candy corn almost, an abstract expressionist triptych of yellow and orange and white.
The last time they walked this beat together, they spotted a line of graffiti, “Just Remember: you live For Ever,” scrawled across a paste-up poster ad for a cable-TV movie about astronauts. He stopped to examine it and then remarked how incredible it was that the rocket in the background had not been grafittied into a giant penis squirting jism out the nose cone; no, instead