Episode Eight: Venice
Part Seven: Almost Unscathed
My eyes open.
I feel strange.
There is a frozen moment wherein, if my consciousness is at all analogous as a pilot, I scan the bevy of metaphorical lights and switches and indicators, et cetera, which make up the control panels of this mech, that is mechanical body – whatever it is to describe getting comfortable once more with all the controls of and sense impressions of the body. My feel for what I am doing, retired from this life as I thought I was, comes slow. This is operator error, not a malfunctioning of the equipment.
I am, in a word, reticent.
If I do this, if I return fully to my body, I.... What, actually? Do I have to do as the gods who plague my dreams tell me I must? I'm staring at the ceiling, now, aware that it has been too long. If I do not engage with the body soon, it will die again and I will be back where I was. Would they send me back a second time? A third? How many times could I refuse to stay here in the Material Reality before they let me stay Over There?
The thought is absurd. As though the act were that of engaging the nuclear engines which power the body – and, really, the lungs are not dissimilar: they distribute Oxygen through the blood stream, where it fuses with sugars, releasing water, energy, and Carbon Dioxide, which the lungs also excrete as a waste product – I take the first breath of my second Life.
And then I understand what Wadjet meant by Don't forget to cough.
I choke. There is something blocking my air passage. I cough, only pulling my head back toward my body, aiming my face at the floor and away from me just in time to prevent ejecting a spume of vomit into the air and all over myself.
The experience of my return to life was like the feeling of being in a doze or light nap: aware of my waking surroundings to an extent – enough to understand nearby noise – only in reverse. Sort of. It's difficult to describe while I watch myself have perhaps the loudest, most unpleasant fit of spasms imaginable. My body is both retching, emptying my stomach of the grape-flavored poison I'd poured into it, and choking and coughing as my lungs work to clear my breathing ways of the vomit which drowned me.
I'd thought to skip over the... detail. I have decided that he, that me roiling in all the consequences of his choices, does not necessarily deserve this.
I've returned to consciousness, fully, now, a part of my body and all the agony and regret and sorrow that entails. But, as with the conscious sleeper, some part of my sensual awareness is still there. It's not like I hear anything I shouldn't, or feel anything especially unusual. It's like the moment you realize during a non-lucid dream that you are dreaming – the moment right before you are offered the choice, in a word, to make the dream lucid.
That's the long and short of it.
If my entire core were not cramping and I were not decidedly on my knees, on the floor of a strange inn, very real strings of spit and bile and snot and sour, opium-laced wine running in streamers from my lips and nose, tears freely flowing down my cheeks— If I were not praying, nay begging, for this particular torment to end, to no avail— If these things were not true, I might have been able to convince myself I were, maybe, in a very real simulation of Reality like those I'd experienced in the Void. By the time this is all over and I can think anything besides Why— Why did I agree to this, why is this happening to me, why did I come back, why didn't I just stay dead— Why am I doing this to myself? I've moved past the thought of bargaining for it all to end, and stand on the precipice of Acceptance.
I'm here. I may as jump.
The thoughts of a suicide from an accidental suicide.
Now I'm starting to think in the Yaldabaoth's voice. Great.
Who knows, maybe they'll leave me alone after this. If I don't splatter at the bottom of the pit I've jumped into.
I'm thinking that there's about as much chance that a rich man can enter the Kingdom as that they'll ever leave me alone after this as I'm picking myself up off the floor. My legs are wobbly, and my head feels like it's still about three-quarters submerged in wine, but I'm standing. And somehow Peitho is still asleep. Either miracles can happen, or I am in a simulation. I don't know how it's possible otherwise, but it crystalizes what I have to do next.
I need to get the Hell out of here.
I reach my hands into my pockets. All four-hundred twenty of them. Not only do I not have a single coin to my name, I don't have anything to get my hopes up, something coin-shaped, like – like a button. Worse, I don't have anything that anyone besides me would find valuable. Who is going to want to buy my bagh nakh? Or a terrycloth glove and some vials of highly explosive and dangerous liquid they won't even be able to enjoy as a street drug without danger of killing themselves? The same person who would be interested in buying the stack of chakram – wickedly sharp bladed rings of the Sikh people in the East – I keep. That is to say no one I know, and no one I have time to go looking for.
I only remember it when I see it.
The Statuette.
Feeling intensely whatever part of me is still On The Other Side, I bend down and pick it up. It's lying on its side in the floor. Just out. I don't think to wonder how it got out of my jacket – I can assume safely that user error was at fault there, as well. I pick it up.
Time is running out, Fulcrum.
Lamiya, I think in response, almost.... Well, glad isn't the right word, is it? Definitely not comforted. Whatever it is to be familiar with something trying to kill you and relaxed by it. The comfort of the boxer offered by the bell announcing the start of the round. I am involved. For now.
Am I trying to reassure her? And what is she? Some kind of high-priestess? A goddess in her own right?
There can be no backing out. All that remains now is to see how fleet are your feet.
The connection is dead. I feel her sever it. Whatever that might mean.
I stick the Statuette back into one of the pockets lining the interior of my jacket. Then I turn my attention to the problem of leaving Venice and where I'm going to go when I do.
The obvious answer is west. But it isn't that obvious to me that it's the right answer. There isn't time to think about that. Peitho could wake up any minute. And that could be terrible. I need money. That's my first problem. I could easily steal what I need, no doubt in the same plaza in which I could hire a ferry to the mainland. I was an accomplished pickpocket once, remember. I didn't like the thought of stealing all of someone's coin, though. Then they would be left without, and I would no doubt have more than I needed. I could solve that by robbing an obviously rich person giving what I have left over away to the needy like I had with Peitho's coin, but Peitho's coin was different – not only did I not need it, Peitho clearly doesn't. Not after the swanky inn she was staying in – that proved it to me for sure. Moreover, how could I know the rich man I'm stealing from doesn't only look rich and one coin less than what he has on his person is enough for him and his family to live on the streets?
What if I destituted someone? Couldn't risk that.
My eyes settle on Peitho's sleeping form.
Peitho's coin, however, is different.
I'll bet she's got more.
And she owes us.
We could even tell ourselves that she's trying to worm her way out of paying us at all--
I don't care whether she pays me.
But you do need to justify robbing her and running away with the money – not toward solving her problem, but from it.
That's fine. If life really is like gymnastics, and I'm being scored for everything, even personal taste, I can suffer that penalty. I'll just take what I need to be rid of her. Then I'll have it and I'll be free.
Peitho is lying on her back, head turned away from me, legs rather immodestly akimbo. The beat of her heart faintly pulses in her throat; her chest and shoulders subtly rising and falling as she breathes in sleep. There is only one place she could hide a coin purse – on her person, that is. If she has means of hiding things off her person, then I'm fucked. And not in a way I'd like. Her bodice is sleeveless and so tight I'm not sure how she breathes with it on. That must be some supple leather indeed.
Under her apron. That's the only place.
Creeping over to her, and feeling like one, knowing that the moment I reach my hand into her skirts she going to wake up, I do just that.
There was little to no chance I wouldn't touch her. If this were a game of Operation, then I got the buzzer almost immediately. What silly named part was I trying to remove? Her Pelvic Purse? Oh, God. That makes it worse.
My hand freezes when it makes contact with her thigh.
This thing I'm doing is funny to me, in hindsight. At the time, I may as well have felt like a sexual predator version of James Bond. Though instead of being neck deep in Cold War intrigue, I'm elbow deep in a sleeping woman's skirts. There could be tense music playing. A closeup of the sweat dripping down my face and neck.
Really, though, it is a thing of seconds, most of it spent trying not to think about the heat – or lack thereof – between Peitho's legs. And trying to touch nothing I shouldn't. I can't make that clear enough. I just want her purse. Which, as it turns out, is where I expected it would be: hanging from little clasps on the underside of her apron – and resting, naturally, right atop her pubis mons.
I take it, don't even bother to open it, and stuff it in my pocket. Then, careful not to step in vomit or on an empty bottle, I leave. When the door is quietly closed behind me, I breathe a perhaps overly dramatic sigh of relief.
Why am I so stupid?
I don't know, and I don't have time to think about it. I need to be gone before she wakes up.
Jac thinks he's funny when I return the key to him. He has ideas about how Peitho and I must have spent the night. I have neither patience nor much appreciation for these jokes. I'm probably rude about it, but I escape him without Peitho immediately on my heel.
I make it all the way to the northwest of the city unscathed. It's when I'm milling around waiting for a taxi that I hear it.
“Robert? Robert Longshore! What the Fuck?”
Peitho.
She's a head taller than nearly all the other women in the plaza, and no few of the men. I locate her in the milling throng almost immediately – not only because she's shouting my name and cursing at me like a lunatic, and even discounting her height: No one is keeping themselves in her path as she stalks toward me.
“Keep it down,” I hiss, when she is close enough to hear a stage whisper. “Are you trying to cause a scene?”
“Fuck you and your scene. What is your fucking problem?” She grabs me by the arm and I let her pull herself in close to me. At least now she's not shouting. “Why do you keep running from me?”
How are you so beautiful so soon after waking up?
Not an appropriate response.
“Because you're going to get me killed! Now, just... shut up. I've paid for a ferry. He's... doing whatever he's doing. Probably beating off and having a sandwich. I told you yesterday – I'm out.”
“No. You're not.”
“How do you figure?”
Peitho and I are standing very close together, our bodies almost touching, very much like lovers either about to go for a stroll or to initiate a public display of affection. This was very much not the case. Peitho's face is stern, sharp, moments away from lashing me with her tongue. Then her eyes soften, look to either side of her.
“Because,” she says, straightening her spine and smoothing her skirts with a regal sort of recollection of her dignity and composure, “I need you to come with me.”
Her gaze is the same as I saw it last night: Scared - unsure.
The Statuette is hot in my pocket.
I roll my eyes, but on the inside I'm not as certain as I was last night that she's playing games with me anymore. She might actually be frightened of Metus. She wouldn't want me to know it, would she? She doesn't strike me as the damsel in distress type. That's probably why I was so quick not to believe her when I first saw her.
“Why do you think you need me?”
“Because – I do not know Italy as you do. I am not as fluent in the dialects as you. And I am a woman. Alone. I will be in danger. Do you not feel any sense of duty to protect me?”
It's difficult not to roll my eyes at this.
“And also because,” she says, lowering her voice and putting her face very close to mine, “if you don't learn to cooperate, I will break one of your legs and drag you to Turin myself. But mostly because you stole my purse. I'll have it back now, thank you.”
She holds out her hand. I place the purse in her palm, then watch as she rather immodestly reaches her hands into her skirts to arrange herself.
“I bought that ferry we're waiting for. I will be crossing with you. And I will be purchasing our carriage west.”
“Fine,” I begrudgingly agree. “But Turin is as far as I go.”
“We will negotiate that at another time,” is her dismissal of the topic as the ferry I'd paid for pulls up.
Comments
Post a Comment