Green Eyes

  For the first time since Magnusson’s death, he had an intimate awareness of her unencumbered either by doubts about her motives or by the self-loathing he felt when he was brought up against the fact of his bizarre existence. Her face was impassive, beautiful, but beneath the calm facade he detected fear and confusion. By escaping with him, she had lost herself with him, and being lost, as she had rarely been before, she was at a greater remove from her natural place in the world than was he, to whom all places were unnatural.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘This and that,’ he said. He took back the ledger and read from the appendix. ‘“Mitochondria research has long put forward the idea that human beings are no more than motile colonies of bacteria, so why do I shudder and think of myself as a disease in a borrowed brain?” That, too.’

  The subject obviously distressed her. She looked away and ran her eye along the mosaic of dirt and faded pattern spanning the linoleum. “There wasn’t anyone at Shadows who’d subscribe to a purely biological definition of the patients,’ she said. And she sketched out Edman’s theories as an example, his fascination with the idea of spirit possession, how he had snapped up the things she had told him about the voodoo concept of the soul, the gros bon ange and the ti bon ange.

  ‘The part about your influence on me,’ he said. ‘Do you buy that?’

  A frail pulse stirred the air between them, as if their spirits had grown larger and were overlapping, exchanging urgent information.

  ‘I suppose it’s true to an extent,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think it means anything anymore.’

  Sleep did not come easily for Donnell. Lying on the cot, he was overwhelmed by the excitement of being away from Shadows, by the strange dissonance everything he saw caused in his memory, at first seeming unfamiliar but then wedding itself to other memories and settling into mental focus. Triggered by his excitement, he experienced a visual shift of an entirely new sort. The moonlight and the lights of the other cabins dimmed, the walls darkened, and every pattern in the room began to glow palely - the grain of the boards, the wallpaper, the spiderwebs, the shapes of the furniture - as if he were within a black cube upon whose walls a serpentine alphabet of silver smoke had been inlaid. It frightened him. He turned to Jocundra, wanting to tell her. Both she and Richmond were black figures, a deeper black than the backdrop, with fiery prisms darting inside them, merging, breaking apart; like the bodies of sleeping gods containing a speeded-up continuum of galaxies and nebulae. The screen mesh of the door was glowing silver, and the markings of the moths plastered against it gleamed coruscant red and blue. Even when he closed his eyes he saw them, but eventually he slept, mesmerized by their jewel-bright fluttering.

 He waked to the sound of running water, someone showering. Richmond was still snoring, and the sun glinted along spiderwebs, glowed molten in the window cracks. Bare feet slapped the linoleum, the floor creaked under a shifted weight. He rolled over, and looked through the gap in the bathroom door. Jocundra was standing at the window, lifting the heft of her hair, squeezing it into a sleek cable. Water droplets glittered on her shoulders, and she was wearing semi-transparent panties which clung to the hollows of her buttocks. She bent and toweled her calves; her small breasts barely quivered. A feeling of warm dissolution spread across Donnell’s chest and thighs. Her legs were incredibly long, almost an alien voluptuousness. She straightened and saw him. She said nothing, not moving to cover herself, then she lowered her eyes and stepped out of sight behind the door. A minute later she came out, tucking her blouse into a wraparound skirt. She pretended it had not happened and asked what they were going to do about breakfast.