Part 3, Chapter 23
Chapter 23
I was getting kind of used to her patterns. Even after I told her it was counterproductive, we’d still lose a day here or there talking philosophy or politics or religion. She didn’t seem to believe in God but did respect spirituality in others, and her take on politics was always wild. Then sometimes she’d just abruptly tell me to get lost for a few days because she wanted a break.
Once, she was out of touch for a whole week, then called me one morning out of the blue and asked me to come meet her for breakfast the next day at eight in the morning. So I was kind of confused when there was no answer to repeated knocks on her door.
Suddenly, the door burst open. She leaned against the doorjamb, rubbing her head and running her hand through her hair, which was a complete mess. She was in her bare feet and wearing nothing but an enormous blue and gold football jersey.
“Morning,” she mumbled, her eyes half lidded and a dreamy smile on her lips. “Forgot you were coming, sorry,” she mumbled, rubbing and scratching her head.
“Wow,” I said, involuntarily.
She grinned sleepily, turned, and said, “Come on in.” Then she looked at the clock on the wall and yelled. “Yo Beef! It’s after eight!”
I heard a thump from her suite’s bedroom and a deep grunt. I looked around the suite and said, “Dear Jesus.” There was at least a case of beer cans, several empty whisky bottles, and some empty Chinese food and pizza boxes, along with what looked like mostly her clothes strewn all over the place. Some of the furniture was on its side and the coffee table was obviously broken. I just stared at her while she made her way to the kitchenette and poured out some juice.
“Thirsty?” she asked.
Suddenly a giant slab of football player came lumbering out of her bedroom wearing nothing but workout pants and hopping on one foot as it tried to put on its socks. “Hey, baby, I got a test this morning. If I’m gonna stay on the team I gotta get the hell out of here!” it rumbled.
“Oh don’t you worry yourself too much darlin’,” she said. I did a double-take as she spoke. “You’re gonna be just fine. We’re right near the campus and I’ll talk to that little old teacher of yours if he gives you too much trouble. I have my ways you know.” Her “r”s had all disappeared and she said “ah” instead of “I.” She sounded like she’d fallen off the back of a honeysuckle wagon.
“Thanks baby, but I’m getting out of here,” the stud said, slipping on his sneakers. “Am I gonna see you again?” he asked, lumbering up to her. He was more than a foot taller than she and looked like he could crumple her like a rag doll. But she smiled, stood on tiptoe, put her hands on his shoulders, and he reached down so she could kiss him.
“Now, Beef, you’re just the sweetest thing, but y’all know I won’t be here in
He laughed and said, “Man you’re the greatest, Louise. I wish more girls were like you.” Then he looked at me. “Uh, hi,” he said. Then, “Uh, bye.”
She closed the door behind him, leaned against it and looked at me. Then she laughed.
I just stared at her until I found my voice. “Beef? You found a football player named Beef?”
“He was a veritable Adonis, wasn’t he? He’d be worth keeping a harem for. My God they grow them big these days,” she said. I did a double take again as I noticed she’d lost the Georgia Peach accent and was back to her usual vaguely aristocratic lilt.
Suddenly, the door banged behind her. Startled, she whirled and opened it. Beef was standing there, naked from the waist up.
“Uh, baby, can I get my shirt back?” She grinned, flipped off the
Embarrassed, I looked away. “Hey I’m not a prude or anything but….” I began.
She just laughed again and walked into the suite bedroom. “I’ll be out directly. Why don’t you phone room service for some breakfast and we’ll talk? Just order lots of coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon for me,” she called out. So I did.
After breakfast I pulled out the manuscript I’d been working on. It was the first draft of the first section of the book. She was eager to see it, and we spent most of the morning poring over it and discussing it. Finally, after a few hours, we decided to take a break.
“I spoke with Joshua last night,” she mentioned casually. I paused and focused on her carefully. She usually had a pretty roundabout way of asking for opinions, but I could tell she wanted to bounce something off me.
“Good news, I hope?” I asked, cautiously. She’d been sweating the drama in
“He is… not entirely convinced of my story, but is enough so that he is treating it as real. That is the best I could reasonably hope for under the circumstances. It was somewhat of a relief.”
“I’m sure. What happens now? Are you going back?”
“Eventually, yes.” She paused then and looked at me almost quizzically before grinning. “You want me to go?”
“Hell, I want to go. There’s an awful lot of your story right there.” As I said it, I watched her eyes sink a little, the way they always did whenever I probed too close to that part of her life. That was another reason I wanted to go. This woman she kept talking about, Edna, was definitely someone I needed to talk to.
“Joshua has an odd notion he’s rather excited about,” she said, sounding uncertain.
“Oh?”
“He suggested that if I could find solid proof of my age I could avoid legal problems regarding my identity, but otherwise my best protection would be to form a corporation.”
“Corporation? For what?”
“To do research. To study me… to try to find out why I am the way I am. He feels that if I did that and found some investors, anything useful that was discovered the corporation could patent it and sell…”
It hit me like a load of bricks. “Holy shit!” I practically yelled. She jumped, then just stared at me. “I have to meet this guy, he’s a genius!” I said.
“You really think so?” she asked, looking doubtful.
“Of course! It’s so perfect. You’re worried about people treating you like a freak, locking you up, right? What better way to prevent that? And just think of the possibilities!”
Her eyes began turning flat. I sensed that she’d wanted me to shoot the idea down, but I didn’t know why. “Ridiculous,” she finally said.
The utter contempt in her voice really surprised me. “Well, no, it seems really smart to me, Zsallia,” I said. To my complete bewilderment, she actually looked betrayed. I was baffled. It was like she’d been hoping for my support on something and wasn’t getting it, but I didn’t know what “it” was.
“I believe you are frighteningly naïve,” she intoned. Her eyes fixed on me with an icy stare as she lifted her left arm and let her sleeve fall to reveal it, fully formed and almost indistinguishable from her right, except that the skin was somewhat paler. “Are you seriously suggesting that no one would be willing to bend, or even break the law in order to be able to do this, to discover how it is done, to control it? That does not even take into account what the lure of immortality might do to otherwise rational men and women.”
“Yeah, but this way you can help give people what they want without… without….” I groped for words, not sure where this was losing her. She went on before I could ask her anything else.
“I believe what you are suggesting,” she said, “is that I become a slave again. No. No, I will not put myself on an auction block again. I will never do that again.” Her voice was shaking. “Never. I am not that sort of creature anymore.”
“Well no, you don’t sell yourself. You sell knowledge about yourself. Well not really even about yourself, but about your physiology.”
“Money. Money. Why do I need more money? What good does it do me to sell myself?”
I just looked at her, lost for a minute. But then I thought I got it.
“No, listen, you’ve been worried that people would try to lock you up. Try to forcibly examine you… maybe even dissect you, right? And whether you could get the law to protect you? Well, hell, the law’s spotty when it comes to civil rights, but Princess, I gotta tell ya, intellectual property laws, all of
Now she looked angry, befuddled and stubborn all at once. “I don’t understand this at all. Now I’m just enslaved to everybody.”
“No you’re not!” I tried not to sound exasperated, but it all seemed so obvious to me. I took a breath and slowed down a bit. “No, look, the point is you’re getting studied, but you control it, you decide what you’ll put up with and what you won’t. If you want to give some knowledge away for free, that’s fine. If a company or the government wants something, they can’t relate to you if you just run and hide, but if you say, ‘Yes, we can negotiate,’ well everyone’s used to doing business that way.”
“I am not. I barely understand money. At times I think it’s an odd delusion you all have.”
I laughed. “Okay, but it’s functional. The point is this’ll work. Man, I’m telling you it would work.” She still looked doubtful and upset. So I said, “Besides, you could do a lot of good for mankind.”
I was shocked at her response. Her eyes turned into lumps of coal. “How would I help mankind?”
I was at a loss. “Well, I mean, you could help people.”
“Moreover, you are assuming that what I have is a gift. It is not.”
“I don’t know if that’s up to you to decide for everybody,” I said, then regretted the way it sounded. She stared at me and, if anything, just looked angrier. I kept trying. “I just mean… Look, I don’t know if the whole immortality thing is something they can figure out just looking at you, but I’m positive… I mean, I’ll bet they could spend years looking at your biology, finding ways to help people.”
She was still just staring at me, coldly. I was bewildered. “I thought you cared about people. Your friend Jackie who died last year…. What if you really could have helped save her? Maybe given her a few more years?”
“That is enough!” she snapped, “You… you are quite cavalier in your assumptions, young man. And I am being kind in that statement. You assume there is a secret to be discovered, one that can be understood… and you assume you have some right to it, that you have the right to demand my cooperation.” She looked disgusted and disappointed, and stared away from me. “You are no better than those I would fear.”
I was speechless. Of all the things she could have said, that was absolutely the last I expected. It made me angry. I took a couple of breaths, just forcing the quick comebacks to stay put.
Her eyes snapped back at me and she looked me up and down. “That’s right, keep your angry words to yourself. You don’t understand. You can’t understand. That is the gift of you and your ilk. You have the luxury of going to your graves and leaving your mistakes behind. I carry my misjudgments with me for centuries. You say I haven’t the right to make this decision? I say I am the only one who can!”
I drew a breath and tried to calm down. I wasn’t even sure why I was upset now, let alone her. “You’re right; I don’t understand how you can say something like that. So explain it to me.”
She sat back and regarded me and I could see her anger subsiding, but in her eyes… suddenly for the very first time since we met, she looked ancient.
“It is clear that to whatever extent you can understand, you won’t understand right now.” She stood up. “It’s time for you to leave,” she said, flatly.
Posted on October 8th, 2007 by Zsallia
Filed under: The Novel
Leave a Reply