WILLIAM R. EAKIN

MONOGAMY

I waited for her, tasting her: almonds, a faint bitterness, coffee-tastes from
the earlier morning, the biting peppermints of toothpaste. Finally she came into
the room with the silver tray of espressos and cream, kissed me before she set
it down with the gentle aloofness of our marriage, then served. There were
clouds of coffee aromas in the room now: the midmorning ritual had its own
proper incense, strong like chocolate.

She said, "You've been distant again, these past several days." And instead of
sitting down as she almost always did, she went to stand at the open window,
pushing even further back the heavy, Tyrian purple curtains of my library. A
thin light streamed down on her face from the east.

I didn't say anything. I knew if I responded, we would start into it. I didn't
even want to like her anymore.

She said, "You've been seeing a lot more of the other women lately."

I fought against a squirm, watched her with the Stoic expression of a seasoned
poker player, chose a spoon and stirred. I saw her in profile and was amazed at
how just ten years could age someone who had been so young. She looked a great
deal like her father. It figured: the old man dominated our lives; our whole
situation was his fault anyway, the fault of the wedding gifts: the property and
money, the other gift. I never really even thought I would use it: I was
enamored of the girl, wrapped up in the lace and flowers of the wedding and the
honeymoon and seven truly good months.

And then, after months when I admittedly grew a little tired of it and her
breath seemed stale and things settled into everyday weariness without the magic
I married her for, I used his gift and started thinking of him as my best bet at
salvation, the old bastard; we really did belong together to some fraternity
that bound married man to married man. "I don't want to get into it tonight."

"You have been with them," she said gently, more to herself than to me.

I thought of them as other lives, lives not consecutive but simultaneous.

"You grow more and more distant and however many bright moments we've had
together over these ten years, most of them are gray and dull, and it's because
you've stopped having feeling for me."

It was true. I replied with banality: "But I do love you."

She shrugged. I knew she would. We'd had lots of conversations like this and
frankly I didn't care anymore, and I didn't care if she cared. There were much
better things to do, much more exciting people to be with, who didn't go stale,
like bread left out in the air, in only seven months. There were people out
there who were interesting for years and maybe forever; who met my needs. She
walked to her chair and sat to drink coffee. We looked out across the dusky
library through the window and watched the stillness of the birch grove.

A blue flash: the blue of sky, and of the ocean rushing by. The salt wind
blasted over the windshield. I put on sunglasses and shifted gear. The
Austin-Healey rumbled, then purred like a kitten into overdrive. It was winter
in southern Florida, but the place knows no seasons. It was hot enough for
muscle-shirts.

Now I saw oranges; I handed one to Madhur. She giggled; she always giggled,
something I would never have expected from someone with a wasted Ph.D. in
physics or a penchant for knife fights. Oranges were all we could afford for
lunch, with the Glenlivet scotch. I rammed the gas pedal and the bug-eyed Sprite
danced through the traffic of Oceanside Drive. Some old woman honked and I
refrained from flipping her the bird, but when she honked again, I fingered the
double-barreled sawed-off at my feet, my head raging, until Madhur squeezed me
right where I was most likely to respond, and my head cleared, and I made the
car lurch forward and leave the woman, so close to her own road killing, far
behind in the maze of traffic.

"You get wrangled up about everything, ole Jack. You need to learn to control
it."

"To hell with it," I told her, and I took the bottle and fueled rage with
burning water. I didn't look at her. The bruises I'd given her were almost gone,
almost imperceptible against her dark skin; the worst were hidden under the
shades anyway, but I could see them too well. No remorse, of course, but I could
see them all the same.

She giggled and said, "All we need are the pigs to come down on us now with all
that cash and paraphernalia and crap; ole Jack, if you get us knocked up just
because you can't drive, then I'll slice your throat, okay? While you sleep." I
sneered at her, knowing she was only half-serious, and rammed up the volume of
the stereo. The techno-strains pumped into the roar of wind. We exited the
freeway without changing speed, and hurtled through the mass of housing projects
to the dilapidated, whore-infested pit of a neighborhood where people like us
lived. The shiny, spoked wheels of the Austin-Healey screeched and we were in
front of the white, two-room plank house on Elm Street.

Madhur giggled and looked at me and I knew excitement flashed through her brown
eyes even though they were hidden behind dark plastic; I felt the adrenaline
pulsing from her pores. I could smell it, simultaneously clean and dirty like
the sweat she worked up when we ripped off a place, when we were criminals
together, when we came home to sex and violence and a warped love on piles of
green paper. That we'd done earlier. This time we were a little more cautious,
until now, when there no longer seemed any sense in it.

"Okay, let's go see it," I said. She smiled like a girl. It had been only the
second time in our two-year marriage we'd had real money, made a real haul, and
we'd kept each other from it for a day to let the steam dissipate. She pulled
the keys from the ignition and was on her way up to the concrete front steps. I
came after her, pulling my sawed off after me, and carrying it mechanically
against my leg.

The piece felt warm to me, warm because it had rested on the warm floorboard.
But the warmth was the same as when it was fired pointblank against the
pulsating chest of the old security guard of the Branch Bank at 1st and
Oceanside. And my fingers against the double triggers had the sensation of
having just pulled and released. I tried not to think about it, tried to think
about the money. But even before I reached the door I was feeling the sensation
again, looking down and realizing I hadn't cleaned the old man's blood from the
barrels.

She managed the working plantation and I taught part-time at a local college. In
the quiet mornings together we drank espresso and sometimes did business. Now
when she handed me the plantation's monthly financial report, her hand quivered.
The quiver startled me. She never did that.

"Are you all right?" I asked her.

She looked at me stonily with her gray eyes.

"Things aren't all that bad, are they, Laura?"

She didn't respond.

"Is it money?" I looked down at the report and saw that things had never been
better. It was us. "Do we have to? Do we have to fight? Can't we just -- just
once have a nice cup of coffee and relax and go over the business and -- and not
fight? Does everything between us have to be so damned dramatic?" I closed my
eyes: I really meant so boring. And surely she felt that, too.

I opened my eyes and she said, "Did you do it just then? I mean just now?"

"No, I didn't do it, just now." I couldn't help sneering.

"You closed your eyes like --"

"I'm still here, right?" I found this kind of interrogation increasingly
irritating.

"It's hard to tell, sometimes."

That was the beauty of the technology, of course. I smiled at her, almost
involuntarily, with a taunt. Over the years, our very bodies had learned to irk
each other; little digs were so much a part of us that they were unconscious,
second nature. Irritability, too much caffeine, too many years.

"You know we're skating our way to a divorce."

I looked at her and shrugged. "Things aren't that bad between us. Really. It's
not like we have knock-down-drag-out fights, right? I mean, we're hospitable,
right? Even if we bicker continuously. It's not me, you know, who's always so
gray and --"

"Stop being so nervous and defensive."

"I'm not being defensive."

"Look at you -- guilty, that's what it is."

"I'm not feeling guilty," I protested. I heard something in me say to get the
hell out of the place.

"You are. It's written all over your face." I tried to make my face innocently
smooth.

"I'm not. Really. Not a fuckin' guilty bone in my body."

She grasped my arm. "Don't do it. Stop doing it -- so much."

"Doing what."

"Damn it, Will, you've got to stop it."

"What, will I go blind or something? Have I ever neglected you? Ever not been
attentive to your needs.?"

"Damn it, you're married to four other women."

"Just fantasy -- nothing wrong with fantasy."

"Four other women. It's not just fantasy."

Get the hell outta here. And I did.

GREEN: It was a summer night but green neon spilt onto wet pavement from the
icon above the Green Garuda Lounge: a man holding a martini glass alternating
with a bent pink bird that was supposed to look like an eagle, transforming from
mortal into eagle, I supposed. An immigrant Kasmiri family owned the place; at
least they could fix a good drink. I shook the water from my feet and passed
underneath into the dark bar and sat at our booth; forest green naugahyde seats
squeaked against my slacks, and I ordered a stiff Salty Dog. I waited, it seemed
for hours, and finally she came, covered in a trench coat. I was on my third
then, and bought her one.

"So Lily, how was the show?" I asked. She did not remove the overcoat. Not
enough underneath to do so.

"You need to drop the perturbation in your voice," she said. Hers was husky,
deep for a woman's.

I looked at her and tried to see through the darkness into her eyes: hazel,
sometimes green like the bar; I thought once we married, I'd be able to see
directly into them, but I never could. I thought marrying her would be rescuing
her, me with the shining armor. Another dead end. This was my place, this Green
Garuda. I never went to hers: at least, I had not been there since we started
dating, and finally married. I could not believe I allowed her to continue to
dance. I hated her for it.

She sipped the Salty Dog.

"Why don't you skip the next show --" I started. I'd asked her thus numerous
times. I'd pleaded with her. I already knew the answer.

"What, and get booted out of the Kit-Club? Don, let's don't get into it. If you
don't stop this heavy-handed stuff when we meet, I --"

I shrugged her comment away and she sat back against the overstuffed bench.
"Look, honey, we used to have such a good time meeting like this --"

Now it was mechanical. Now it was pure form. I met her after work, between her
shows, had a drink, went home alone, drank myself to sleep. Why had I come back
to this lifetime? Why?

"I know you don't want me to work anymore, you know I'm going to work forever,
and so there's no reason to talk about it, so why not just relax and have fun
like we used to --"

"I thought once we married, eventually, it would change -- "God, why had I come
here? I had the choice of frequencies, why this one. today? Maybe -- to call it
quits.

"I'm an erotic dancer, Don. You married a friggin' erotic dancer. You didn't
marry Annette Funi-Mickey-Mouse-cello, or Donna-Wax-the-floor-Reed. And I'm sure
as hell not gonna ever be that, got it, Don? I'm my own person, and you can't
strip my personhood away, got it? Maybe you could do that with all your other
girlfriends or whoever the hell you were dating before we got hitched. But,
damn, you married an erotic dancer, someone whose very existence is that, you
see? It's my profession. And I told you, I don't want to get into it tonight."

Something in her tone startled me. I tried to see into her eyes: I'd said the
same thing, a few moments and a lifetime ago: I did not want to get into it. Was
she smiling? Was she taunting me? I turned away from her' and pulled the Salty
Dog to my lips. I'd been attracted to her in this seedy part of town precisely
because she was an "erotic dancer." Now I couldn't stand the idea. I couldn't
stand it.

shook my head finally and said, "I'm sorry Lily, I don't know what's going on
with me. I don't even know why I'm here. Really." I was so damned wrapped up in
her. That was the irony. I think I'd really fallen in love with her. But I
couldn't say it: when I tried, I could only see visions of half-drunk lonely men
gaping at her, watching her gentle breasts sway with a wild vulgarity that did
not seem consonant with the nature she had when we were alone. I tried to tell
her I loved her and could not say it.

"You should never have let me love you," I told her. I ached for her. I wanted
her, I wanted her changed.

She read my thoughts: "You're doing it, blaming me. Your discontent is your own
damned creation. And I'm not going to change to fit it."

She's pushed me to this! I told myself. Over the years, she made me love her,
she lured me to it, to marriage, to totally enfolding myself in her, to
dedicating everything I was to her, to finally being nothing except in relation
to her-- and then to be faced with this contradiction of who I had wanted and
who I now wanted.

"You're an ass, you know, not accepting me as I am, as you loved me. You're not
ever going to do it, are you?" She was mad now. She slugged down her drink. She
left. Something was critical in the air of the bar; as if the universe itself
could snap in two. Why had I come back to this lifetime? I wanted out. I wanted
to end it. To shut oft the frequency, close down the world, end it. At our
apartment with Jack Daniels at my elbow and my face hovering in the mirror of
the medicine cabinet, I did precisely that.

She slapped me across the cheek and I was startled back into consciousness.
"Now." She said sternly. "Now is the critical time. Be with me."

"What..'" I shook myself and realized I'd brought myself back to Laura. She was
animated now, standing over me. She'd been pacing back and forth in front of me.
I saw life in her face, even if it was angry life. It amused me. I'd seen life
in that same face at our wedding, when she lifted that veil, and I kissed those
lips -- even then, she tasted of almonds, but then it was a sweetness. We'd gone
too far together to be happy.

"Stop it," she said at me. "Be here, with me, now."

"I am here."

She took me by the shoulders, something she never did; she was rarely physical.
She shook me. I was utterly amazed. She said, "Damn it. It's critical. Now.
After all these years. Be here now!"

"I'm all yours --"

"Will, Dad gave me one of them, too."

"What?"

"Dad gave me --" She let go. "He gave me one, too."

All I could spout was: "You -- you didn't use it, of course."

"I didn't use it until you started doing it so much. Until you started drifting
so far from me --"

"But, he shouldn't have --"

"Certainly if the husband can, the wife can, too."

"But --"

I couldn't believe my ears. I closed my eyes. I saw the wedding reception. Sure,
it had smelled like half-mummified flowers, but it had been beautiful, and she
had been beautiful, and I cried to look into those loving, gentle eyes of hers,
cried to sense everyone listening as I spoke vows I truly meant, sealing
something deep in the heart of the universe. And when her father pulled me
aside, I couldn't believe what he said about men and women, and I couldn't
believe I would ever use his gift.

"A certificate --" he'd said. "Take it down for a simple implant. It'll work
something like the old insulin pumps some diabetics used to wear. Of course,
it'll be under the skin, no one will know you have it; the buttons are so tiny
they feel like pimples --"

"I don't think I'll ever need --" I was young, awash with champagne, giddy in a
cricket suit, stupid.

"Sisyphus condemned to roll a rock up a hill, perpetually: that's marriage."

"Not mine. I love your daughter --"

"So a man who's going to grow, who's going to become a whole man, or higher than
a man, has to stuff as much experience as possible into each moment looking at
that boulder. And some men-- well, we wish we could be married to a lot of other
women, know what we're missing. Sometimes we wish it so much that we can't even
be where we are."

"Really, I won't need that --" I protested. "Besides, I like to be fully
conscious --"

"You don't lose consciousness; you just wake up after the shift, as if you've
suddenly caught yourself drifting while reading a book. Your body, most of your
mind, everything works on automatic: like driving a car on familiar streets.
It's just that the little pinpoint part of your consciousness you call 'I' will
be -- on vacation."

"Honestly, I don't think that's appropriate for a marriage. It's cheating -- I
won't use --"

"You'll use it; someday, you'll need a getaway. Believe me, I know my daughter
very well. Lived with her these twenty-odd years, you know."

The stalwart old gentleman had a presence that was hard to resist. He spoke
softly, but firmly, as if he knew nothing else except to stand as an authority.
It was the way of the world, he told me patiently. Men had found adventures
outside their marriages for centuries. And with this little device, a moment's
infusion of nanotech receptors, men could do so in the privacy of their own
consciousness. Shift frequencies and a man was a user tuned into an entire
world, a new location, a new time, a new person, meeting other users,
interacting, having, as he called them, "adventures." It was like virtual
reality only much more real, much more powerful. "These little receivers, each
one for a separate frequency--your choice of worlds -- see, will put your 'I' in
another world. Do I need to say more?"

"I like marriage too much, marriage to your daughter too much, to think about it
-- Surely...surely it's too expensive a gift."

"I own stock in the company. Own outright the broadcast transmitters down in
Omaha. Major investment in the comsats that make it possible worldwide. And I
wrote the programs for two of our four alternate planes."

I had heard about him even before meeting Laura; some sort of technowizard with
old money and esoteric roots in a merely rumored mythic Illuminati tradition. I
didn't trust him. I started to ask him about himself when he pressed the
certificate into my palm, nodded wisely at me, and was lost in the crowded
reception.

And now I looked into my young bride's eyes, older, but still her eyes.
Something cracked. I was too overwhelmed and confused to speak, and could only
retreat.

Her dress was yellow and she looked at me with admiration, and, of course, I did
not look at her but gazed out the window of my library at the dripping leaves of
the magnolias that lined the road to the Big House. Horses ran on the track
beyond -- my horses.

She was obviously, painfully Southern -- charming graceful in the slow motions
of an Old South etiquette that had not quite died even after two hundred years,
appropriately modest and always naive. Naive. And that was what I wanted in herr
the naivete and the inability to do anything, anything except adore me. Talk
about fantasy. Grace Prud'Homme: she was pale against the yellow dress, which
was simply a pull-over and not the formal gown of a debutante -- but it seemed
that way. I had always thought this world too painfully close to Laura's, but
this girl was nothing like her at least. This world was mine. So what if I'd
projected into a plantation environment?

"I'm goin' to be workin' on some sewin' projects," she was telling me. "Most of
the day."

I sipped tea. I smiled. To hell with anything else. Who needed a business woman
for a damned wife. Someone who could cook, sew, massage the tired back of the
patriarch: that was life. On Tuesday nights she went with me to the vestry
meetings for the church. Of course, she was on the flower guild and would hover
around in the sanctuary for a while, but then she came to the meetings to watch
from the sidelines, to watch and obviously adore her man, who was really a man,
and a fine upstanding model citizen, community leader, all that. Gag: Sometimes
when I thought about myself, I gagged with the perfection of it all. But I loved
it, ate it up; if these alternate worlds were fantasy, then let the fantasy run!

"Did you hear what I was saying, dear?" she asked. I looked into her eyes. Flat
character. Oh well, whoever she was in some other dimension, in some other
lifetime, here and now she served one function: to adore me. The identity of the
user, cloaked behind that shallow, witless character, did not matter. What
mattered was that here, in this world, the admiration and servitude were real,
as were the strength, the prowess, the authority I held here even if I could not
in that other life, the one that didn't matter squat. The one with Laura -- damn
it; damn her.

The beauty of the alternate lives was that I could forget the one I'd come from,
the dull one, the -- the real one. But I was finding it difficult today. What
had Laura meant, that this moment in our marriage was critical? I felt uneasy. I
tried to wash her from my mind.

"What about supper?" I asked Grace.

"Oh, I'll be sure to wrangle up somethin' you like. I won't let the fun and
games of the sewin' circle get in the way of takin' care of my baby." I felt a
twinge.

"All right, honey," I told her. She stood. She was shapely, sexy, for me. She
wiggled slightly in that yellow dress as she walked. For me. I closed my eyes as
she left. What was she saying earlier? I had to think back, I'd blanked out on
her, drifted off into another plane. I remembered with my body's memory, and
could hear her speak.

"Darlin', are you awake?"

"Uh, yeah, yeah; just daydreaming." I'd been looking out the window.

"I was saying, the Circle girls will be here. We're doin' a charity quilt.

I want you to get out, go riding, don't think about me for a while."

"Oh, I don't know --"

"Please, go. Enjoy it. I've already called down to have Agni saddled." Agni, my
favorite Arabian. A beauty.

Remembering now that that was what I was to do, I nodded to myself, and strode
like a horseman through the house, past the closed door of the massive chamber
she called her "sewing room," and down into the gaping Great Room, where we'd
married some seven years before. I could almost see all the guests, the room
full of old widows and the rarer old men, the air full of the smell of lavender
and potpourri and her dress smelling of cedar. She had wooed me; in this
lifetime, I was an entirely self-made man, but she built me up. It was as if she
expended all her time and all her energy -- to be my wife. And, God, I loved
getting married. To her, to the others, to -- it was just damned Romantic. And
it was too bad that the magic left, always left. Well, not here. The magic of
her absolute adoration, however I had won it, was worth all the other lives put
together.

I walked down to the stables to find Agni saddled and ready to go, but I wasn't
in the mood. I sat on the horse, stroked her shining hide, breathed in the aroma
of her pungent horseflesh, and could not get the now-seven pleasant years of
marriage to Grace from my head. How unlike Laura she was! Thank God.

I tried to shake the comparison, and rode, but Grace's image, surrounded by the
yellow flowers of our wedding bed, floated in front of me, and the more I
thought of her, the more I thought of that damned Laura and that first real
marriage, and I generated a desire for Grace to build up the contrast. I shook
my head and spurred Agni into a gallop, the green fields like a carpet in every
direction.

The thought of Grace back in that house called to me. I wanted her; I wanted her
as I wanted no one else, no other wife, no other possible wife. Certainly not
Laura.

I turned the horse's head unexpectedly and went back. The big house grew larger.
I rode through the gate and down the narrow old carriage lane below the moist
magnolias.

"Okay," I said to myself. "She is it. Not Laura, damn her, not anyone else. I'm
gonna stay, close off the other frequencies, never leave again. This is home,
her home and mine, because she lives for me."

I didn't bother to take the animal to the stable, but tied her to a post on the
veranda. A car had already arrived while I'd been riding. Sewing circle -- well,
they could leave. I wanted to make love with Grace as I'd never made love to
anyone. This moment and no other counted. This love. This life. I felt the
hormones rushing in a cloud through my taut muscles; the cupid-like desire
pulsing as lightning through me.

I leaped up the stairs to the door. I heard voices. A man's voice; it was ugly
and coarse to my ears, because I had expected the voices of lavender-smelly
grandmothers. It said, "You're beautiful. You --" And then there were noises,
animal, wet, unbridled, grotesque. I pushed the door, found it locked, then
kicked it open.

There she was, on the sewing table, on her back, her dress hiked up above her
thighs, and some man with his face buried between them.

"What the hell!" I cried at them and the yellow statue I'd been broke. Her head
whipped around with an ugly, alien stare; and the man, sloppy with their sex,
stood and pulled a gun.

I was unable to respond.

Then she said in a cavernous, distant, animal voice that "This wasn't the way we
planned it, but it'll do."

I realized the "we" did not include me but him, the co-conspirator. Then they
were on top of me, binding me, the Colt .45 -- something from my own collection
-- squeezed into my temple. It didn't seem possible.

"What the hell --" I grunted. I was too stunned to move.

"It has to look like an accident," she sneered at me. Inhuman.

"How long have you been --" I groaned as he kicked me in the gut. It didn't
matter how long she'd been conspiring against me: all the seven years or from
the moment her name was on my will or just this last moment. A single flash of
it was enough to bring me down.

They dragged me to the top of the stairs. I looked, I swooned, I felt deeply
empty. And I pushed against them, but only half-heartedly, then fell into a wide
expanse of blue.

I was looking at blue toilet paper. I was in the john at the house on Elm
Street. I heard Madhur singing to herself in the next room. What the hell was
she doing? Counting the money. She'd broken into the damned money.

I flushed the toilet. 1 couldn't believe she'd broken into the money without me.
She knew better than that. She knew better than to cross me. She knew better,
damn her.

The shotgun was at my feet. I jerked my underwear and my trousers up in a single
motion and grabbed the gun, too. I'd hit her with it before, many times, and
with many other things, too, mostly my fists, but obviously that was not enough.
It hadn't taught her jack. It hadn't taught her obedience or to respect me or to
love me. Never go to Vegas in a fast car with a lot of whiskey and a drug-wasted
physics student. Turns a man into a damned criminal, with no respect. Okay, so
it'd once been exciting. Bonnie and Clyde. Now she needed a real lesson. Damn
her, she needed something she would never forget.

The pulse in my tracked-up arms raged against the skin. I shouldered the gun and
burst in on her, and there she was surrounded with little slips of paper. "WHAT
THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" I leveled the barrels at her chest, pushed them against
her, pushed her with them across the room and up against the wall. My fingers
throbbed with a heartbeat.

She said, "Go ahead. It's all fake anyway."

"What?" I sneered into her face, my eyes and teeth rushing like a bull toward
hers.

"That old man," she said in a small, unemotional voice. "He gave us bags of
monopoly money, ole Jack. He didn't even give us real money. You wasted him for
monopoly money."

My fingers strained against the triggers, and rage burst out of the top of my
head like a furious, flaming bird. And then I was left, a vibrating mass barely
holding the gun. I looked into her eyes, and knew something more was going on
than what was happening on the surface. I said, "You want me to do this. You're
making me do this."

She shook her head at me. "Do you see our outcome, at least? I mean here, the
outcome of this? It comes to killing me, too?"

Who was me? The end of the gun quivered visibly. For some reason I thought of my
father-in-law, on a distant plane, on Laura's plane. He'd died there from
natural causes. There, at least. I sensed acutely the dried blood splattered
across the end of my gun. Then I tried to look deeper into her eyes. They were
brown, radically different from those of my other wives in my other lifetimes.
Or maybe not. Maybe not radically.

"Now," she was saying. Tears were streaming down her face. "Don't you see, that
our marriage needs this now, this moment?"

I looked at her bewildered, startled, awed. I said, "He gave you one, too? The
implant --"

"And why not? Do you think he believed in some sort of macho double standard? Do
you think he would have been so supportive of us and not believed in marriage?"

"But, I-"

"Do you know how hard I have worked to save our marriage..'" She was crying,
really crying, and I was, too.

"But, Laura," I couldn't help the tears; I wasn't even sure why. "Laura, what
are you saying --"

"Do you know how hard it was to find you in those other places? In all these
five worlds?"

I couldn't bear what she was telling me. I couldn't take it. With the stupid,
awesome, shaking sobs running through my body, cracking the shell so that the
vulnerable softness inside me could again meet the softness inside her, I
touched the implant just below the skin and was gone again.

Red. I had not been here for some time. It was the first of the four lifetimes
I'd visited beyond the real one with Laura, the first persona I'd created, and
the first to bore me, with deathly boredom. In the world of this city, other
users walked by-- users who would be strangers to me on any other frequency, in
any other world. A lot of strangers used the technology, shifting worlds, living
multiple lives simultaneously on different planes, interacting in fantasies that
were all too real. Strangers: but maybe they weren't all strangers.

I went to Becky's house. The proverbial red light was on outside, illuminating a
weathered peacock on the sign that said simply, "Becky's." I'd been such a
juvenile in these daydream worlds, in the marriages I felt I needed and wanted.
I couldn't believe now that I'd married a madame, or that at one time I'd found
purely physical lust to be a good reason to do it. What the hell: it was just
fantasy, right?

Becky no longer did tricks, so that was cool. She just did me; my persona in
this world lived with her on the top floor of the brothel, and lived off the
fruits of the labor of her girls. Had she sensed the absence of my consciousness
at all? I doubted it. Most of us walk around only semiconscious anyway; no one
seems too upset about it. I doubted she cared.

Now as I walked into the house, past the girls in the lobby, I wanted her again.
The "I" in me wanted her, her breast-flesh, the comfort of her scarlet womb-like
room and the warm embrace, the smell of deodorant under her slightly thick arms,
the moisture of her thighs. I wanted her.

I found myself in her room. She was writing bills at a little Queen Anne desk.
The room was scarlet. It smelled of her body, and of my own sweat.

"How's things, Tom?" she said. Her voice was gentle, motherly. I couldn't
believe how I'd seen her as through and through a simple mass of flesh, an
object to pound into, something to use. "Are you all right?"

A gentle voice! The tears streamed down my face. "Laura," I said. And she, too,
began to cry.

"He was a wise old fellow," she said. She'd turned again to the window. Only now
her stance was not like stone. A full light came into the study. I saw her hair
for the first time in years, how it sparkled with many colors in the light, and
how tender it seemed, curling and falling onto her shoulders. I saw her in
color, and not in the grays with which I'd imaged her for virtually the whole of
our marriage; I saw the ripe fullness of her, the red, blue, green, yellow and
beautiful white in her robes and hair and lips and skin and eyes. They weren't
so old and tired after all.

I couldn't respond to what she said. I didn't understand it. I was afraid I
would cry if I said anything at all.

She answered my silence. "Dad: he knew what marriage was like, you know, what
men and women can be like. And he knew how much I loved you, how many years and
how much I was willing to invest to make our marriage work, to help you be here
fully, with me. You asked a few moments ago if it was a conspiracy. Don't you
think --" She nearly choked with the gentle knots of the emotions. "Don't you
think a bride consults with her father about the future of a union? And when he
loves her, don't you think he senses how much she loves the new man -- and that
a father makes a kind of commitment to sacrifice himself if necessary for the
things for which she would sacrifice herself?"

"I--" I couldn't speak. The vibrating feelings were too deep for words: I'd been
like a shallow pool at the top of a reef that opens below the crusted coral into
startling depth, soft depth where two people could really meet. Amazing that it
took ten years sometimes for a marriage to begin to work, for a man to become
whole for just a moment.

She turned. I stood and was with her. The soft parts inside us met again, and
did not curl back into harsh shells. They were open and vibrated with warmth and
tears and the pulse of life. I felt new. And I saw into her eyes again, as if
she lifted a bridal veil; I saw the old man's wedding gift, and his daughter's
sacrifice and in the depths of those eyes, a sparkling, clear luminosity.