Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [141]
“If I get a chance, I’ll try it again,” she mouthed softly.
“But … with that thing in your head, you might die.”
“Maybe it’ll just wear out its batteries or whatever it runs on and give up. Use up the drug. I know a guy, Otis, who has a metal peg in his knee from Vietnam.”
“I think maybe something in the brain’s more dangerous … . But why not go down trying?”
“You’re going outside today.”
Skip grimaced. “Home with my loving parents. Back from the factory where they sent me for repairs, on a trial basis. Like if it’s broken, get it fixed. If it’s crooked, get it straightened out. If it’s kinky, iron it.”
“But you still got a will to fight them, I can feel it.”
“They won something. I don’t feel like fucking anybody. Or loving anybody. I don’t feel any love at all. I feel like a big block of ice.”
Tony walked by whistling, saw her sitting on the bed, and came in. To avoid his touch, she rose. “Take care, Skip.”
“I mean to take care.” He gave her a mirthless grin. Then he kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You keep trying.” His lips were cool and hard. Shyly she kissed him back.
Tony made obscene smacking noises. “Come on, break it up. No PC. They fixed you okay from being a faggot, but you’re crazy anyhow!”
As quickly as she could move on her heavy waterlogged legs, her dizzy body riding its private stormy weather, she lumbered back through the ward to her own bed.
Sunday night Skip did not return. By Monday the rumor crept through the ward as fast as patient could whisper to patient. Sunday morning early, Skip had slit his throat with an electric knife in the kitchen of his parents’ home. They had hidden the razor blades, the sleeping pills, the aspirin, but they had not thought of the electric carving knife.
Sybil murmured to Connie that she had heard that his father had been angry at Dr. Redding and called him a quack. They felt it was unacceptable for the hospital to send Skip home to kill himself in their kitchen.
She got up from her bed and moved wearily around the ward, with Sybil at her side. Drs. Redding and Morgan were right thinking they had cured Skip, she thought, fighting the tilting aisle. Before he had only been able to attempt suicide, cries for help carved on his body. They had cured him of fumbling, of indecision. They had taught him to act, they had taught him the value of a quick clean death.
FIFTEEN
“Sha! You’re the sharpest piper I ever gaped!” The woman was propped on the bed surrounded by mirrors—mirrors on the ceiling, the back of the bed, and one side.
Connie stood flatfooted in the center of the windowless room, staring. She had tried and tried to make contact with Luciente, but she had been unable to feel her presence all day. Finally, in a stubborn fury she had cast herself forward, demanding that Luciente receive her.
The woman’s hair, stippled mauve and platinum, was arranged in an intricate tower of curls and small gewgaws, dripping pearls like a wedding headdress. She wore a long dress of slippery substance that changed color as she moved and emitted a tinkling sound; it was slit away up the side and cut out here and there so that her breasts occasionally peeked out or her navel appeared and reappeared. When Connie had materialized, the woman had been lying back on a mound of ball-shaped pillows smoking a pipe and chewing what looked like orange marshmallows from a small bowl on the hairy coverlet. The room was air conditioned cool.
“Someone’s playing a joke on me, sending a private trans. I don’t think it’s even a slightly funny. When I find out, you’ll be sorry! Cash won’t put up with that! And he has means to find out, you dudfreak, whoever you suppose to be!” She popped off the bed and stood facing Connie, quivering with anger. They were about the same height and weight, although the woman was younger and her body seemed a cartoon of femininity, with a tiny waist, enormous sharp breasts that stuck out like the brassieres Connie herself had worn in the fifties—but the woman was not wearing a brassiere. Her