Read Flux for Free Online Page B

exactly the same words to him since, and it had sounded just as maudlin, just as unpleasantly uninteresting every time. The difference was that when the others said it, Charlie felt himself insulated with a thousand layers of unconcern. But when Rachel said it to his memory, he stood naked in the middle of his room, a cold wind drying the parchment of his ancient skin.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” asked Jock.
    Oh, yes, dear computer, a change in the routine of the habitbound old man, and you suspect what, a heart attack? Incipient death? Extreme disorientation?
    â€œA name,” Charlie said. “Rachel Carpenter.”
    â€œLiving or dead?”
    Charlie winced again, as he winced every time Jock asked that question; yet it was an important one, and far too often the answer these days was Dead. “I don’t know.”
    â€œLiving and dead, I have two thousand four hundred eighty in the company archives alone.”
    â€œShe was twelve when I was—twenty. Yes, twenty. And she lived then in Provo, Utah. Her father was a pianist. Maybe she became an actress when she grew up. She wanted to.”
    â€œRachel Carpenter. Born 1959. Provo, Utah. Attended—”
    â€œDon’t show off, Jock. Was she ever married?”
    â€œThrice.”
    â€œAnd don’t imitate my mannerisms. Is she still alive?”
    â€œDied ten years ago.”
    Of course. Dead, of course. He tried to imagine her—where? “Where did she die?”
    â€œNot pleasant.”
    â€œTell me anyway. I’m feeling suicidal tonight.”
    â€œIn a home for the mentally incapable.”
    It was not shocking; people often outlived their minds these days. But sad. For she had always been bright. Strange perhaps, but her thoughts always led to something worth the sometimes-convoluted path. He smiled even before he remembered what he was smiling at. Yes. Seeing through your knees. She had been playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker , and she told him how she had finally come to understand blindness. “It isn’t seeing the red insides of your eyelids, I knew that. I knew it isn’t even seeing black. It’s like trying to see where you never had eyes at all. Seeing through your knees. No matter how hard you try, there just isn’t any vision there.” And she had liked him because he hadn’t laughed. “I told my brother, and he laughed,” she said. But Charlie had not laughed.
    Charlie’s affection for her had begun then, with a twelve-year-old girl who could never stay on the normal, intelligible track, but rather had to stumble her own way through a confusing underbrush that was thick and bright with flowers. “I think God stopped paying attention long ago.” she said. “Any more than Michelangelo would want to watch them whitewash the Sistine Chapel.”
    And he knew that he would do it even before he knew what it was that he would do. She had ended in an institution, and he, with the best medical care that money could buy, stood naked in his room and remembered when passion still lurked behind the lattices of chastity and was more likely to lead to poems than to coitus.
    You overtold story, he said to the wizened man who despised him from the mirror. You are only tempted because you’re bored. Making excuses because you’re cruel. Lustful because your dim old dong is long past the exercise.
    And he heard the old bastard answer silently, You will do it, because you can. Of all the people in the world, you can.
    And he thought he saw Rachel look back at him, bright with finding herself beautiful at fourteen, laughing at the vast joke of knowing she was admired by the very man whom she, too, wanted. Laugh all you like, Charlie said to his vision of her. I was too kind to you then. I’m afraid I’ll undo my youthful goodness now.
    â€œI’m going back,” he said aloud. “Find me a day.”
    â€œFor what purpose?” Jock