The Silver Metal Lover (13 page)

I had a terrible feeling. As if I’d been walking in my sleep, and woken up in the middle of an unknown and deserted plain.

In a daze, I showered and dressed, and took up my purse with the credit card, and wandered out into the city. I had a kind of need for the proof of money. I had a need, too, to be out of the apartment. Maybe when I went back, my arms full of fruit and soap, Silver would be home and everything would be as it had been. Yes, this must be the way to break the spell.

It was raining in the city. As I crossed over from the elevated, robot ambulances screamed past me. Someone had been run over outside the Hot-Bake Shop. I felt a dreary depression and fear.

I went into one of the large stores off the boulevard, because I’d seen a crimson glass jar there that I wanted to buy for the bathroom. It was purely ornamental, and I see now I was still basically acting just like someone rich. I hoped the jar would stop me from feeling the incredible sense of dread, and when they gave it to me and I put it in the wire basket with the crackers and the nectarines, it almost did. I picked up some bath towels, too, and a paper knife from the second-owner counter. Then one of the ambulances went by the windows. I remembered the man who had been stabbed at the visual, and how it hadn’t bothered me, except somewhere inside, some sort of mental bottom drawer, where it had obviously bothered me a lot. I stood in the queue to pay. I was thinking, My mother taught me about self-analysis and so I should be able to analyze why I’m suddenly so scared of death or injury. And then I thought: When I get back, he’ll be there. He’ll be sitting on the couch playing the guitar. I had a picture of the winter, and the snow coming; of being snowed up in the apartment block with him, a sort of glorious hibernation. And then I had a picture of going home and finding him not there.

Then it was my turn at the checkout. It was automatic, in this store, but sometimes got cranky, and so there was a bored girl supervisor sitting nearby, painting her nails.

My goods ran through and the total rang up, and I put my card into the card slot. Instead of the bell sounding and the groceries card, and change coming out of the other end of the machine, a buzzer went sharply. A red light appeared over the card slot, and my card was regurgitated. As I stood there, the bored girl glanced over, got off her stool and walked up.

“Your card must be overdue.”

“No. It’s an indefinite monthly.”

She picked it out of the slot and looked at it.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

A thousand I.M.U. indefinite was probably unusual in this area, and I hoped she wouldn’t say the amount aloud. She didn’t.

“Let’s try again,” she said, and pushed my card back into the slot. And once more the buzzer went and the card was vomited out.

People were piling up behind me. They muttered, unfriendly, and I blushed like fire. Even though my heart was growing cold, I already knew what had happened.

“Well,” said the girl, “looks like someone’s blocked your account at the other end. Anyone have authority to do that?”

I reached for the card, blinded by shame and fright.

“Do you want to pay for your things in cash?” she asked lazily. She seemed to be holding the card just out of my reach. In a moment I might leave it with her and run away.

“I haven’t got enough money on me.”

“No,” she said. She gave me the card. She thought the people I worked for, since in this part of town generally only firms issue credit cards to employees, had fired me, and I’d been trying it on to get free groceries.

I walked out of the shop, guilt blazoned on my face, trembling. In the street I literally didn’t know which way to turn, and went randomly leftward, and so into another raining street, and so into another, without knowing or looking or caring where I was going.

Demeta, of course, had stopped my card as soon as she could, on the first of the month. Why not? She had every reason. I’d run away from home with scarcely a goodbye. I couldn’t expect to go on taking her money. I could see that now as clearly as I could see nothing else. How could I have reckoned to get away with it? It was some silly childhood thing that had prevented me from guessing. Some part of me had still believed the implication she’d always given me that, because I was her daughter, her money was mine. Stupid. Of course it wasn’t.

Why then was I hesitating at this phone kiosk, standing in the rain until the woman came out, and then moving in myself and closing the door. Altogether I had ten units left in cash. Not enough to pay my rent. More than enough to call my mother’s house.

Even as I put the coins in and pressed the buttons, I thought, But she’s so busy, she might not be there—and then I thought:
She’ll
be there. She’ll be sitting there waiting for this call. Waiting for my voice, for my frantic weeping words: Mother, Mother—help me!

And then I didn’t feel afraid anymore, only dreary and small and very tired. It was true, after all, wasn’t it? I’d rung her for help, for forgiveness, to plead with her, or beg her.

I leaned my forehead on the cold dank glass that someone had cracked on the outside with a stone. There was no video in this part of the city. She couldn’t see me. Was that good or bad? I counted the signals. She made me wait through twelve of them before she turned on the autoanswer that, left to itself, replies after two.

“Good morning. Who is calling, please?”

“Jane,” I said. Rain had fallen on my lips, and I tasted it for the first time as I spoke. Jane. A pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender pale chain—

“Please wait, Jane. I will connect you with Demeta’s studio.”

My humiliation had sunk, and I was hollow. I heard her voice presently. It was politely warm, almost approachable. It said: “Hallo, Jane.” Like the lift.

I clenched my hand so hard on the speaker of the phone it seemed to melt like wax in my grip.

Jain, Mother.
Jain
.

“Hallo, Mother,” I said. “Isn’t it lovely weather?”

An interval.

“I’m sure, dear,” she said, “you didn’t call me to discuss the weather.”

I smiled bitterly at my dim reflection, bisected by the crack.

“Oh, but I did. And to say hallo, Mother. Hallo, Mother.”

“Jane. Try to be sensible. Your recent actions have been rather unusual, and very unlike you. I’m hoping that this will be an adult exchange.”

“Mother,” I said, “I’m sixteen. Not twenty-six. Not ninety-six. Sixteen.”

“Indeed? Then why have you acted like a child of six?”

I shuddered. I’d drawn her. She’d lashed back at me, neatly and calmly—and decidedly. The rain drizzled. I could smell onions frying and wet pavements, and…
La Verte. La Verte
filled up the kiosk.

“I really just called you,” I said, “to tell you how happy I am.”

My eyes filled with tears, but I held them inside me, and they drained away.

“I’m sure you actually phoned me, dear, to ask why your monthly I.M.U. credit has been stopped.”

I felt a surge of awful triumph.

“Oh,” I said. “Has it?”

She wouldn’t believe me. She knew she spoke the truth and I was the liar. But still, she’d had to say it, and not me.

“Yes, Jane,” she said patiently. “Your account has been frozen. Permanently. Or until such time as I unfreeze it.”

I stood and watched the rain. My hand had left the speaker, and I was drawing a rabbit on the steamy flawed glass.

“Jane?” she said firmly.

“Mother, why did you call me ‘Jane’? I mean, why not Proserpina? That was Demeta’s daughter in the legend, wasn’t it? Didn’t you think I’d be glamorous enough to be called Proserpina, Mother?”

“Where are you?” asked my mother suddenly. It was a trick. I was meant to blurt out a location.

“In,” I said, “a phone kiosk.”

“And where is the kiosk?”

Too late, Mother.

“The kiosk is on a street, and the street is in a city.”

“Jane,” she said, “have you been taking an illegal drug of some kind?”

“No, Mother.”

“I don’t think, dear, that you quite understand your situation. Your card is inoperable. There is no other lawful way you can obtain money. I think I had better explain to you, in case you’re thinking of it, that finding a job of any sort will be next to impossible for you. To begin with, you will have to possess a labor card. Before any employment bureau will give you one, they will take a body print reading. They will then check you out and see that you are the daughter of a rich woman. Accordingly, they will ask me if I am prepared to support you. There’s a serious shortage of work, Jane, which I’ve no doubt even you are partially aware of. No one who doesn’t need to work is even considered. And when they ask me if I will support you, I will reply that of course I will, you are my chosen child. You have only to return home, and everything you need will be supplied, including money.”

“You once said,” I murmured, “that I ought to get a job in the city, to appreciate the struggle the poor go through.”

“With my sanction, that could have been arranged. Not, however, without it.”

It was warm in the kiosk, so warm the rabbit was running all down the glass.

“All you need to do,” said my mother, “is go into any bank, anywhere in the state, and identify yourself. You will then be able to draw the exact fare money to get you home.”

“Home,” I said.

“Home. I’ve already redesigned and refurnished your suite. You know me better than to think I would ever say anything about the state in which you left it.”

I burst out laughing.

“Jane. I must ask you, once more, to control yourself.”

“Mother, you’ve left me no choice but to become a thief. I’ll have to rob a store or take someone’s wallet.”

“Please don’t be silly, Jane. This sort of hysteria is distressing—however well I may be able to interpret your motivation, we are still mother and daughter. It’s my very concern for your inability to cope with real life that makes me insist you come back to the house. You know in your heart this is true, Jane, and that I’m only thinking of you.”

A cliché. Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say, Jane. The kiosk was hot and I couldn’t breathe. I put my hand inadvertently to my throat, and felt the policode, and I said: “Does my policode still work, Mother?”

“Yes, Jane,” she said. “For three more days. And then I’m withdrawing your print from the precinct computer.”

“That’s for my own good, too, is it?”

“You know the expression, Jane, I must be cruel only to be kind.”

“Yes,” I said. “Shakespeare. Hamlet.” I drew in a hard impossible breath. “Spoken by a lunatic who’s just killed an old man behind a curtain, and who has a deep-seated psychological desire to sleep with his
mother
.”

I slammed down the switch so violently I broke the skin and my hand started to bleed.

It was raining fiercely now. Vaguely through the rain I could see someone else was waiting outside to come in and use the phone.

It became a matter of enormous importance then, not to let them see my face or what sort of state I was in. Though I wasn’t even sure myself. So I pretended I hadn’t hit the switch, and went on listening, and talking to the receiver-speaker for a few moments. My face was burning, and my hands were cold. I couldn’t really think about what had just happened. “No, Mother,” I said to the dead phone.

“No, Mother. No.” I’d feel better when I got out of the stuffy kiosk. Better when I’d walked to the apartment, dodged the caretaker after the rent, gone, with my arms empty of packages, into the room empty of Silver. Of course, he wouldn’t be there. Perhaps he’d guessed. Perhaps robots picked up special telepathic communications from other machines. I wasn’t solvent. So he might be now with Egyptia, his rich legal owner. What was I going to do?

My head tucked down, I pushed open the door of the kiosk and almost fell out. The cold and the water hit me like a wave and I seemed to be drowning. Someone caught me, the person waiting for the phone, and a horrible embarrassment was added to my illness.

“I’m all right,” I insisted.

And then a scent, a texture, the touch itself—I looked up through the rain, and my head cleared and the world steadied—”
You
!”

“Me!”

Silver looked down at me, amused, compassionate, unalterable. His hair was nearly black with rain and plastered over his skull as if in the shower. Beads of rain hung and spilled from his lashes. His skin was
made
of rain.

“How did you—”

“I saw you come out of the store, when I was several blocks away. I could have caught you up, but I’d have had to run fast, and you want me to pretend I’m human, don’t you? So I walked after you, and waited till you finished your call.”

“Silver,” I said, “it’s all over. Everything’s hopeless. But I’m so glad you didn’t leave me.”

“Jane, if you need to cry, couldn’t you cry against me and not into that pillow?”

“Wh—Why?”

“Because the green stuff you covered it with obviously isn’t dye-proofed, and your face is acquiring a most abnormal green pattern.”

I started up and ran to the mirror. What I saw there made me laugh and weep together. I washed my face in the bathroom and came back. I sat down beside him.

“I don’t want to cry against you, or you to comfort me, or hold me anymore,” I said, “because soon I’ll have to do without you, won’t I?”

“Will you?”

“You know I will. I told you what happened. There’s no money. No food, no rent. No chance of work—even if I could
do
anything. I can’t stay here. And she—my mother—won’t let me bring you to the house, I’m sure of it. Even if she did, she’d sort of—what can I say?—dissect my feelings… She doesn’t mean to hurt me. Or—Oh, I don’t know anymore. The way I spoke to her was so odd. It wasn’t even like me, speaking. But I do know it’s hopeless.”

“I saw the caretaker,” Silver said. “I went down when you were crying your way through the shawls. He thinks we’re actors from a street company that’s folded. I didn’t tell him that, by the way, he told me. He was having a good day, no pain and no side-effects. He said we can sit on the rent for another week. Everyone else does, and at least you paid the first quarter.”

“But there won’t be any more money in a week.”

“There could be. And no need of a labor card, either.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

He drew the guitar to him, and reeled off a reeling wheel of a song, clever, funny, adroit, ridiculous, to the accompaniment of a whirling gallop of runs and chords. Breathless, I watched and listened. His eyes laughed at me. His mouth makes marvelous shapes when he sings and his hair flies about as if it’s gone mad.

“Throw me a coin, lady,” he said seductively, as he struck the last note.

“No. It must be illegal.”

“People do it all the time.”

“Yes,
people
. But you can do it better than people. It can’t be fair. Can it?”

“We won’t pitch where anyone else sings. We won’t ask for cash. We’ll just play around with some music and see what happens.”

“Supposing someone recognizes you—what you—are?”

“I have a suspicion,” he said, “that you’ll find it
is
legal. Look at it this way,” he stared at me seriously over the guitar, absurdist as only he could be. “You bought a performing seal that can do tricks no other performing seal can do. Then you run out of money. So you put the seal on the street with a ten-ton truck balanced on its nose, and you walk round with a hat.”

“You’re not a seal.”

“I don’t want a ten-ton truck on my nose, either.”

“It seems—I can’t imagine how it could work out.”

He put the guitar aside, took my hands and held them under his chin. He looked up into my face.

“Listen,” he said, “is it just that you’d prefer to go back to your house in the clouds? If I’ve stopped amusing you, if you’re no longer happy—”

“Happy?” I cried. “I was only ever happy with you. I was only ever alive with you!”

“Are you sure? Because you have a number of options. If you’re simply worrying about my side of things, let me remind you, for the hundredth time, that I’m a robot. My function is service, like any piece of metal junk you buy in a corner store to shell eggs.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“It’s true.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is.”

He lowered his head to rest it in my hands. His face was hidden, and my fingers were full of his hair. And suddenly, with a little still shock, I knew what had happened, was happening, only I couldn’t quite believe it, either, and I wondered if he knew and if he believed it. “Silver,” I said so softly I could hardly hear myself, but his hearing would pick up a whisper. Perhaps even a soundless whisper. “The first time you saw me, what did you think?”

“I thought: Here is another customer.”

“Silver, the awful way you looked at me when I said that terrible thing to you—because I was afraid and confused—that was the same look you turned on Jason and Medea last night.”

“Maybe. Perhaps you taught me the value of it, as a means of antisocial behavior.”

“You reacted against them and for me.”

“I told you why.”

“And I told
you
why, but that isn’t enough.”

“Jane, we went through this a number of times. My reactions aren’t human. I can’t object to playing human here, because you asked me to, and there are good reasons. But when I’m alone with you, you’re going to have to accept—”

“No,” I said, still softly, “you’re the one who’s going to have to accept that you are
not
acting like a robot, a machine. That you never really
have
.”

He let go of my hands, and walked by me and stood looking out of the window. The embroidered shirt showed new pleats and tensions in the fabric that described the tension in his shoulders. Human tension.

“And you find it disturbing,” I said. “But please don’t. It isn’t anything bad. How could it be?”

He said nothing, so I stopped talking. I took up my brush and began to brush my still-wet hair, in long crackling strokes. And at each stroke I said to myself: I don’t care if it’s against the law. He’ll sing and I’ll collect the cash, just like Medea. Because I can’t let this go. Not ever. Especially not now. Not
now
.

When I finished brushing my hair, he had come away from the window and was standing in the middle of the room, looking at me. His face was truly serious now, and very attentive, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

“Of course,” I said, “if I do stay, my mother may hire men to track me down and drag me to her house.” It was meant as a sort of joke.

He said, “Your mother would never do that. She doesn’t want to publicize the fact that she hasn’t got the totally balanced, perfect, well-adjusted, enamored, brainwashed mindless child she intended.”

“How cruel you can be,” I said, astonished. “Crueler than Clovis. I think because Clovis’s cruelty is based on untruths.”

Relinquishing the window mood, Silver: smiled at me. He sat down on the couch, and said, “Brush my hair.” So I went to him and did just that, and felt him relax against me, and I thought about every moment I had spent with him, through and through.

“You have a beautiful touch,” he said at last.

“So do you.”

“Mine is programmed.”

And I smiled, too, with a crazy leaping inside me, because now it seemed he was protesting far too much. But I let him get away with it, magnanimous and in awe.

“What’s the best way for me to persuade money from the crowd?” I asked.

“So the lady agrees.”

“Yes. Do I walk round the edge, or just stand there?”

“I thought it was wrong to take their money as I’m so much better than a human performer?”

Of course I had triggered the change in him. By admitting that I thought him a robot—even when, really, I never, never had… How cunning of me, how psychologically sound. And I’d never even figured out what I was doing.

“I don’t care anymore,” I strategically said.

“Whatever we use to collect the money will be on the ground. Don’t forget, you’ll be singing too.”

I almost dropped the brush.

“
I
will?”

“Of course you will.”

“I can’t sing.”

“You can sing. I’ve heard you.”

“No.”

“Think of the human element it will add,” he said. “You have a natural instinct for spontaneous harmony. Half the time you sing with me, you slip into effective and very original descants. Didn’t you know you were doing it?”

“That’s—because I can’t hold the tune—”

“Not if it’s perfectly in harmony it isn’t. You’re a natural.”

“I—those were just fun. I’m no good at—”

“Was it, by any chance,” he said to me quietly, “Demeta who told you you couldn’t sing?”

I paused, thinking. I couldn’t remember, and yet—

“I just never thought I could.”

“Take it from me you can.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“How do you know you don’t?”

I had lost my omnipotence for sure.

“I can’t,” I squeaked. “I can’t.”

He smiled.

“Okay.”

At midday the rain stopped. The world was wet and grey and luminous and complaining as we went out into it, he wrapped in the red-black cloak, with the guitar slung from his shoulder, I in my now very grubby fur jacket and my now very grubby jeans with bright pretty accidental paint dabbings all over them. At intervals, as we walked off Tolerance, along the boulevard, under the elevated, I said to him: “I can’t, Silver.”

And he replied lightly, “Okay.”

People passed us, splashing and slopping through the craters in the streets that had turned into ponds and lakes. Some of the flat roofs were reservoirs, with picturesque waterfalls down onto the pavements below. It was the kind of day to hurry home on, not to walk out into. And helplessly I remembered days at Chez Stratos, curled up in the warm library with a book, or in the Vista eating candies while music tapes played, the cold unfriendly sky furling and unfurling like metallic cream, the rain falling like spears, while I was safe from the weather, safe in my cocoon, while I waited for my mother to come home. And: “Mother, can we have hot buttered toast?” And Demeta, recognizing my childish foible for classic home comforts, agreeing. And one of the spacemen wobbling in with a tray of china tea and toast and strawberry-and-orange jam. And my mother would tell me what she’d done, and I’d laugh up at her, and she’d ask me what I’d done, and I’d tell her, but what I’d done was also so boring, and I knew it was, and I’d hurry over it so as not to bore her. I knew she was bored, you see. Not with me, exactly. And she camouflaged it very well, but I could sense the camouflage somehow. And I’d have vague daydreams about doing something astonishingly interesting, and interesting her—like going back to college and reading comparative religions and traveling to South America, or what was left of it, and returning with a thesis, which I’d then read in public, and she’d be proud of me. And when we’d eaten the toast, she’d kiss me and go away to her study to do something incredibly erudite and worthwhile. And I’d fall asleep on the soft carpet, with the rain and the wind swirling in the balcony-balloons unable to harm me.

I adored my mother. But I was afraid of her. And I’d begun to see—just
what
exactly had I begun to see? See through the medium of my lover. My mechanical, not mechanical, my beautiful, my wonderful lover. Who said: Demeta is also afraid of you. Demeta has tried to cut you out like a pattern from a pattern book, only you didn’t quite fit. And so here I was with him, advancing along the wet chilly sidewalk, without any money. But I had only to go into any bank in the state to get my fare to my mother’s house. Think of that. Then think of how he had lain back against me as I brushed his hair, his eyes closed. He’d said, “You have a beautiful touch.” He’d said, “I like the taste of food.” He’d stared out of the window, unable or unwilling to reply, when I’d told him: You don’t act like a robot. You never really have.

Confused, almost happy, almost terrified, I saw my reflection go by with his in the glass fronts of shops. (Superstition. He doesn’t have a soul, therefore, he shouldn’t have a reflection, or cast a shadow.) My reflection was of a new Jane with barley blond hair, and slim, absurdly slim. My waist was now twenty-two inches. One of the many reasons why my jeans looked so awful was that I’d had to dart them—badly—to stop them from falling around my ankles.

So why shouldn’t I sing in the street? That was interesting, wasn’t it? More interesting than studying religions. Mother, I am a street singer.

I remembered dimly, singing as a child, sitting in the Chevrolet as my mother drove us somewhere. And after a while, she said, “Darling, I’m so glad you like that song. But try to hit the right notes, dear.” Sometimes I’d pick out tunes on the piano, and simple left-hand accompaniments, but only when she wasn’t able to hear them. My mother’s playing was brilliant. I’d known I was musically clumsy. No, when I’d sung with him I’d been so relaxed some quality came from me that wasn’t usually there. Sort of by mistake. But in public—in public I’d panic. I’d be dreadful. Rather than give us money they’d throw stones, or call the police.

We reached an arcade, warm-lit from the shops that lined it either side. A partly-roofed alley ran off through an arch between two stores. It was a wide alley, and people turned into it to avoid the cold, still-dripping sky. They also went up and down the arcade for the same reason. A good place for a pitch, even I could see that.

Silver strode into the entrance of the arch, as if he owned it and had come there every day for three hundred years.

As he brought the guitar around on its cord, I hissed nervously, “What do I do?”

He regarded me with astonishment.

“You mean you’re not going to sing?”

“Silver.”

“You can’t. All right. You stand by me and silently appeal to the heterosexual male element in the passersby. The cookie jar, by the way, goes on the ground. There will do.”

I put down the jar. I had a vision of myself standing there like a blancmange, and feeling even more embarrassed than if I’d sung. A grey rainy misery overcame me, after all. He’d been willing to do this alone, presumably. To earn money to keep me, my pet seal, my slave, my egg-shelling machine. I should have let him. Damn. How could I?

The first chord made me jump. It also alerted the attention of some of the people splashing about in the arcade. Not all, of course. Buskers are so common downtown.

Then he started to sing. It was a song I’d heard him sing before, about a train running somewhere, an old train that blew hot smoke and steam out of its stack. The melody rattled and bounded with the train. It was wild and cheering, a perfect song to diffuse the grey hapless day. (I found I wasn’t embarrassed, I was enjoying the song too much.)

I leaned on the alley wall, and partly shut my eyes. People might think I was just a hooked passerby. The song made me laugh inside, smile outside. Then I saw people stop. Four of them now, standing around the arch mouth. Someone came in from the grey end, and paused, too. When the first coin hit the inside of the jar, I jumped, and guiltily peered at it, trying to pretend I wasn’t. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a start.