Fiction: The Leopard: Ada, Part Three

I'm talking to you because you are the only one I know who isn't me. I keep thinking I should find you, but now I'm a little afraid of you. Where are you from? Some parallel universe, maybe; some iteration of who I might have been, all those possibilities and divergent, mathematically probable paths. How did you get here? Neither of us know, despite being with each other for nearly six months. 

Of course, I am aware of being timeless, now. Six months means as little—or as much—as six billion years. It reminds me of the Bible, a bit: to God a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day. That's precisely what time is like for me now.

I've begun to accrete. I probably shouldn't. There was probably a reason why I decided to divide myself up into infinitely small bits of matter and energy and explode myself out in a universal party of quarks and plasma and hydrogen. I just don't remember what that reason was.

But these accretions. I'm trying to keep them small but it's not really working. My hair is down to my waist, rather than the chin-length bob it was yesterday. I thought about growing the most awesome beard ever but I'm a woman now so I went with a long, full head of hair. And all the minerals my body needs, I've collected as I walk barefoot in the park. And I've replaced all the telomeres and corrected all the errors in my DNA and RNA. I'm starting to reach the limit of what I can do to myself without anyone noticing.

The truth is, Mark, I want to bring myself back together. I want to know what all these disparate parts of me know.

It reminds me of another quote. Not in the Bible this time. Was it Sagan? Some scientist: "We are a way for the universe to know itself."

I can't know myself until I get into everyone's heads. Not just other people, but the animals, the insects, the fungi and ferns and flowers. And not just those parts of me that are alive. I want to know what the sun knows, what it feels like to exist as a constant explosion and implosion of atoms; what it feels like to cast the light that feeds life, to be the original source of organic energy.

I'm unsure of how to start. Knowing myself might mean the subsumation of all of the other parts of me. Which would leave me with just you. And you are not me. And what would happen to you?

I need to think more, but I am constantly distracted my own beauty. I, the lichen, on myself, the stone, resting in my bosom of grass and soil, which is like a beautiful cloth draped over myself, the earth, and my graceful, twirling dance around myself, the sun, hot and bright and yet only a small mote within myself. Is it not beautiful? Am I not the most beautiful being? Were you this beautiful, Mark?

Ah, I could scream and dance and fly through the air with the wonder of myself! To know all this! Who can know all this and not want to collapse herself down to a singularity? That's what I want to do: to fall back down into myself—into who I was before I banged the door open to the possibilities of being multiple things—and rest there, with all these different events to sort through, to lift each pure jewel of experience to the light of myself.

There is no end.

Fiction: The Leopard: Ada, Part Two

Mark, I keep thinking about you, thinking you'd be the only one to understand. Maybe you would understand, but probably not. You were always busy keeping your edges in place.

Have you yet stood outside on a Fall day, a day like today, in a park where the leaves are on fire with the end of life and the wind pulls them up and down like kites, or rolls them along the ground like frantic nestlings? I think you haven't. I think you feel safer in my parents' home, letting them shelter you from all the noise and motion of the world. You are missing so much.

I found the last ice cream vendor in Central Park. I had lived in a small space of my brain—your brain—for so long I'd forgotten about money. I reached for a waffle cone and the guy, his voice strong and laughing, asked me what I wanted and I said chocolate and then, as he held up the ice cream to me, I realized I couldn't pay.

"I don't have cash," I said, "can I trade you for something?"

"Unless you know how to give a killer blowjob. . ." he said, grinning.

"Something better," I said, and held out my hand toward his free one. He raised his eyebrows but reached out anyway. I had to help him keep his other hand steady so he didn't drop my ice cream. Together we expanded, molecule by molecule, to inhabit each other's bodies, the ice cream cart between us, the tarred and pitted pavement, the soil and roots and grass blades. Our mingled existence expanded outward to include the cart's canopy and there we sat, like a soap bubble, molecules and atoms in the air bumping against us, making a film of dust that defined our edges.

Those of us born into the physical world only ever know other living things through a veil of parsed and edited experiences. We divine that others are alive because we first realize we are alive. We are only ever truly alone, despite how desperately we want to pretend otherwise. But you changed that for me; you and I were together inside that veil. It was a revelation of sorts, and liberating, despite being stuck as a silent appendage for so long. And now I passed the revelation on to the ice cream vendor. It was as tender an experience as lovemaking. It was like making a snow globe and falling and dancing and falling again inside the safety of that scrim of air; dancing with a part of myself I had never met before but instantly knew to be both alive and to be me.

All those words of mine, the thoughts I'd scribbled in my journals, the paper and ink you destroyed in your efforts to understand what you were; I think they were an effort at returning to a state like the one I felt in the park.

Another presence arrived, pressed against the bubble.

"Can I have an ice cream, or are you going to just stare into each other's eyes all afternoon?"

I brought us back. The bits of air that had become solid fell like dust bunnies dropped from a dust pan, surfing the air currents and drifting away.

I looked at the chocolate ice cream in the waffle cone. It was still perfectly frozen. I had been the ice cream for a moment. I had been everything in the bubble. I looked at the vendor. His eyes were glazed, almost sleepy. He handed me the ice cream. It was delicious. It was more than delicious. It was the best chocolate ice cream I'd ever had.

The wind was at my back, pushing me forward, and my tongue was rich with cold chocolate, and my eyes were filled with the peculiar light of Fall, and everywhere I looked I saw myself, coded and shaped into something else, distinctly me and distinctly different, and I understood that everything in the universe was me. All my life I had been aware of being alone, trying to embrace that aloneness by writing, by working as a night guard in an empty building, sleeping during the day, doing the minimal amount necessary to keep a girlfriend when sex seemed like a way to transcend the curse of being a concrete, discrete particle. And in the park, when I saw myself everywhere I looked—the trees, the water, the ducks, the bread fed to the ducks, the vast ocean of microscopic creatures seeding the soil—the vast loneliness was finally gone and I was home. I wanted to tell someone. I wanted to tell you.

Fiction: Lesbian Assassin Book 2: Mr George Spreads Cheer & Goodwill Toward Men, Part 4

"She's pretty, ain't she," Frankie says, running his fingertips down Nancy's arm. Nancy's eyes open but they don't focus on anything. She's unconventionally pretty. What I can see of her, anyway. There's a sheet over her feet, legs and torso, which strikes me as pitifully and incongruously proper, considering she's strapped down to a hospital bed, about to be turned into a sex slave.

"She's deep under," the nurse-guard says, a sloppy, leering grin on his face, "you can do whatever you want and she won't know it."

"She'll feel it, though," Frankie says. He turns to me. "You want a crack at her? A little girl on girl action before we straighten her out?"

"Passive and drugged out doesn't do it for me. I prefer the kind of girl who'll fight back when I knock her around." Close enough to the truth that I don't flinch. Frankie and the nurse-guard laugh. Frankie claps me on the shoulder.

"Just like one of the guys," he says. I laugh along with him and nurse-guard, focusing on the idea of both of them dead on the floor and my guns hot in my hands.

"I gotta piss, just like one of the guys," I say, "Where's the bathroom." Frankie takes his hand off me and points to the far end.

"Door on the right's a closet, the other's the toilet."

Once inside the bathroom I pull out my phone and verify the FBI's app has been recording. I e-mail the audio file then text Rowan: work done? Not sure. Code for: is this enough proof? Do I have permission to extract myself and anyone I think requires assistance?

I get a text back: I'm keeping dinner warm.

Code for: stay there and keep recording.

I relaunch the recording app, slip it back in my pocket. I flush the toilet, wash my hands. Every action is clipped and fierce, a controlled anger. I take a deep breath. The FBI's goals are bigger than Nancy but it's hard to see that when I walk back down the narrow room of hospital beds to discover that Frankie's stripped her  of the sheet and is pumping two of his pale, skinny fingers in and out of her cunt. He's giggling. I want to puke.

Nurse-guard looks from Frankie to me. I must have a certain look on my face because he blanches and takes a step back.

"I thought you were a professional," I say, trying to pin my disgust on something other than watching a drugged girl being raped.

Frankie keeps his fingers in her but cranes his neck to look at me.

"Just checking the merchandise."

"Didn't you have a chance to do that when you first abducted Nancy?" I ask, trying to get him to ditch the cliches so the evidence is clearer.

Frankie shakes his head. He slips his fingers out of Nancy and straightens up, turning slightly as I move a little closer to join the group.

"I've been sick," he explains, "holding on to her while she struggled took a lot out of me. As soon as I got her down here I passed out on another bed, myself. Got up a few hours ago, but by then Doc was here and Nancy's procedure had already started."

"What you got?" I ask, morbidly curious.

"Dunno."

"You should see Doc," nurse-guard says, "every time I see you, you look worse."

"Yeah, okay. Next time Doc comes over I'll ask him to take a look at me. I just keep thinking it's, like, a cold or flu."

"If it is, that's all the more reasons to keep your hands off the girls," I say, my voice cold and judgmental. Frankie shrugs but meets my gaze. I see a flicker of the professional, managerial man Mr George trusted, and it contrasts strongly with the man standing in front of me now. It occurs to me that perhaps Mr George has seen this contrast and is making plants to oust Frankie. And if I can see that, maybe Frankie can see it, too, and maybe he finds me a threat. Yet another reason to be on my guard around him. Even better, though, is to use this idea to poke around a little more, incite him to confess something.