Solitaire, p.15
Solitaire, page 15
Day 752
It took a long time to understand what she had to do, but when she did it made such sense. The way to endure was to have nothing that could be taken away. And for that she needed control. The crocodile had gotten to her because she was undisciplined and soft; but now she would be tough. She programmed each moment. She was relentless about keeping a meal schedule, but she no longer noticed what she ate. It didn't matter. She exercised once every day, and reined in her restlessness at other times.
She planned it as Neill had taught her at Ko, one step at a time, and when she was ready, when her discipline had hardened, she began to make herself unbreakable. She went about it precisely and with great purpose. First she made a white board in her mind. Then she let a thought draw itself in colored ink on the clean surface, and erased it, and it was simply gone. No longer anything to do with her. Some things were harder to wipe away, but she persisted. It was like a mental fast; she cleaned the impurities from herself until her mind ran like stream water, shallow and cold.
It took a long time. She worked hard. She cut away the grief of the company's betrayal. She burned out the image of her parents, the way her father's shoulders had bowed when he turned away from her the last time, her mother on the net. She stripped the web away, the living and the dead, one person at a time. She cauterized all her memories of Ko Island: the long pebbled beaches; the solid silence of the wood that would grow now without her; the enormous, lucid sky. She put away her dreams and her fears of being a Hope. That was gone.
Then it was time for the last deep surgery. It was time for Snow. Jackal wrote it on her white board. Snow. She considered it for a time. Snow. Wiped it slowly away. And there it was again: Snow, still shining bright, barely smudged, stubborn like Snow herself. Behind it, within the glossy surface of the board, the reflection of Snow's face as Jackal had last seen it the night before her sentence began, wet with tears, puffy with pain. Snow's mouth was open, as if she might speak at any moment: perhaps she would say don't, Jackal, don't. But Jackal did: she erased Snow's pleading face stroke by stroke, over and over and over and over again. And even when Snow was completely gone, Jackal kept rubbing the place in her mind where Snow had been, like polishing one spot on a silver globe until it was shining and smooth. Then she was clean and empty. When she looked inside, nothing looked back.
Day 900
She was stone.
She no longer counted to four thousand. She no longer folded her clothes right side over left. She did not hear voices anymore. She was sea glass, opaque, utterly smoothed by a battering tide.
No, not quite smooth; as she sat on the floor of her cell with the remains of a meal scattered around her, as she thought of being a seashell, the image of the ocean brought her the memory of swimming laps, furious exhausting laps in Ko gymnasium's hundred-meter indoor pool, where the air smelled of chlorine and human bodies, and the noise of people echoed like the music of soft drums; swimming hard in the middle lane and riding the surges made by other bodies. She found herself rocking slightly on her crossed legs on the floor of her cell, her neck stretched as if she were about to turn her head to come up for air before lunging forward into the next stroke. And yet even the small amount of energy to stand and replace her used plate in the cupboard suddenly seemed too much to spare. She sat lotus-legged with her arms loose and her hands cupped beside her knees, her head bent so that her hair hung before her like a curtain almost closed.
Oh, fuck, she thought, with infinite sadness: Jackal, this just won't do.
It was too much for her. There were too many memories. The lightest touch of her former life, the faintest breath of the Jackal that was, could crumble the rock from her and expose the flesh that hurt, that missed, that mourned. No matter how many times she rebuilt, there would be another memory ready like a typhoon to bring it all down. She would have to wash all her self away if she wanted to stand like stone through the next five and a half years.
She began to breathe harder and faster. Wash it all away. Her chest felt tight. What had she done? She had scrubbed out her home, her family, her lover, her life, like rubbing grease from her hands. She had tried to wash herself away, but here she was, still clinging to herself like a stubborn stain. She had tried to wash herself away. Now she was trembling. How could she have done that? It was like killing herself, or something close to it. It was like finding a dark pit inside herself and pitching headfirst into it, when what waited at the bottom was not that much different from the teeth of the crocodile. She began to weep. I didn't mean it! But she had meant it and it was done. Ko and the Earth Court had taken most of her life away and Jackal had given them the rest, like an earnest child trying to be good.
I am in prison. She reached out and touched the wall nearest her. This is my cell. She touched her fingers to her breastbone. This is my cell. She thumped herself once, hard. This is my cell. Then she stood, looking around her, breathing, turning, looking, breathing, touching herself, for a long time.
Day 1105
She was learning to be alone.
It was not at all what she had expected. She had time; and now she was spending a great deal of it studying each piece of her experience and how it fit into the whole of her. She paced the perimeter of her cell for hours while she reconstructed the year of the crocodile, stopping to stretch, or eat, or rest in front of pastel Mandelbrot sets on the screen. She lay in bed in the dark and recalled her time of stone, and the terrible way that she had flensed her life from her. It was the most difficult work she had ever done; to wrap her mind around those dreadful moments and try to see them clearly. She was not sure she even knew what clear was; but she knew it was important to find out.
She imagined a window into herself, and through the window she looked at Jackal Segura.
She saw only Jackal; and that was the first new thing. She had never before seen just herself. She had always painted herself against the backdrop of Ko, or the web, or the Hope. Was she still Jackal now that she was out of context? That was frightening enough to make her want to stop this nonsense. She cursed herself, and went on.
She found inside her things that shocked her. She was shamed by all her surrenders: the conflicts with Donatella, with Tiger, with Ko; with the crocodile, with the stone. All failures. She had pretended not to be alone, and then she had pretended that it did not matter. But it did. It mattered more than anything.
One night when she had been on her back in bed for hours, blinking up at the dim ceiling, she understood: she had always been alone. She had just never been alone all by herself before. Alone was the ending and beginning of everything she had been, everything she might be if she survived. The realization, the simplicity and the flowing beauty of it, brought her bolt upright.
She took a rest for a few days. She ate, and stretched her body gently. She told herself her favorite stories, slowly, making the telling as plump and round as she could. She sat back against the wall and let herself be overcome by remembered music. When it seemed time to open up the window again, she found all her failures of confidence, of honesty, of will, lined up to display themselves for her, like a blister that had risen within her and burst. She had so little to show for herself. She was so much less than she had ever thought.
Another break, this one less restful. She felt toxic, contaminated by self-discovery. She prowled her cell, measuring its limitations foot-length by foot-length from her heel at one end of a wall to her toe butted right up against the other, and then a right turn and do it again. She became irritated by the way her food lay in its dish, by her sheet's refusal to stay tucked in. Red and green patterns on her screen reminded her of Christmas, and made her sad and bitter and so enraged.
More lessons in letting go. It was harder this time. Her anger was utterly dependable, always on time, always loyal: a best friend with a loving smile and a butcher knife behind its back. She was tempted to wall up her anger without looking too closely at it, to put it in a cell like the one she was in now, with no way in or out. But she knew that it would only grow until it pushed down the walls.
No short cuts, she told herself grimly, and kept going.
There came a moment in a long line of formless hours when she despaired of ever feeling good about herself again. She was a bag of weakness, a half-empty glass. She had made a bad job of herself, and that was the worst of all.
She curled up in a miserable ball and drifted, not awake, not asleep, until a thought flared in her head, strong and compelling, like the second voice in an ongoing conversation that she had not been aware of until it said: So what? Do better this time.
She felt again as if she were standing at the edge of a very high place. But it was not Mirabile, not the long fatal fall. Do better this time. She didn't know what this place was, except it was not a place that she could just fall into like the mouth of the crocodile. She would have to step out, face forward, arms open wide. She would have to reach.
Her answer was instinctive and immediate. “I'll do better this time,” she said out loud. “I will do better.”
She smiled and fell instantly asleep.
When she woke, she felt curiously rested, and there was something else; something brief that washed through her and left her clean and open. She was astonished to find that she had forgiven herself. She was astonished to find joy. And that was the next new thing.
Day 1170
It was not that solitude was any easier to bear. In some ways, it was harder now than ever before, because there was no one to tell her that the work she was doing was good. She had no one to share those flashes of joy in just being Jackal, in being new and alive. Sometimes that joy made her terribly sad for lack of someone to pass it on to.
But being Jackal Segura was easier now, even convicted and abandoned and alone. It was better in some incomprehensible way to be all those things if she was also still herself. She wasn't sure what it meant, and she decided it did not matter. What mattered was that some days she wept for grief, and some days for exultation, but it was never the crocodile or the stone who cried: it was always the human Jackal.
Day 1279
When she put her foot down in its last step of the heel-to-toe progression along the west wall, there was an inch of space between it and the facing north wall.
That wasn't right. She stood rocking in her tightrope stance, left arm against the wall for balance, and frowned at the wall in front of her. It did not look any farther away; and she was sure that after almost four years of standing nose-to-brick with it, she would have noticed. But there was a difference.
She had an ugly thought, dropped down cross-legged, too hard, onto the floor, and pulled her foot up into her lap. It looked the same as it always had. It didn't seem crooked or suddenly shortened. That was a relief, and a puzzle. She poked the north wall experimentally with a foot, then a finger. Finally she lay flat on the floor and pushed her face as close to the uninvited inch of space as she could without losing focus.
The inch looked back at her, unhelpfully. After a while she stood up and went back to her pacing. The other walls were the same length they had always been. But the next time around, the west wall was still too long. And it stayed that way.
Day 1499
Something extraordinary happened.
She was thinking; measuring out the edges of the floor and remembering how it had felt to visit Al Iskandariyah when she was a Hope and the world still smiled upon her. She was there: the stone square scrubbed to the color of bone by millions of feet, the afternoon sun that made the air ripple and dance, the racket of the marketplace two streets over muted by the buildings of dense stone that squatted around the open plaza, the crooked lengths of date palms and the spiked cactus around them that flowered red and impossible vibrating shades of pink. And there was Jackal, boots and sun-glasses, walking tall with arms swinging loose and free, alive and buzzing with possibilities like a young bee hovering just over the cactus before dipping down to the first flower. She smiled and put out one hand to touch the wall of her cell; oh, she remembered how it was to step out strong, it was just like this—
And she pushed out her left foot, expecting it to slide the extra inch and thunk emphatically into the stone in front of it. Instead, it went right through the wall.
She went down hard on her bottom and hip, her right knee bent and her left leg still stuck absurdly through a foot-sized hole. She sat that way for a very long time, blinking slowly and trying to imagine what she should possibly do next. It was inconceivable that there could be a hole in a virtual cell, where there had been none before. She sat for much too long thinking about how none of it could be true before she realized that her opinion didn't seem to matter at all to the hole. It was there, wrapped around her left ankle. She leaned forward and touched it with her left hand. It was ragged at the edges. It felt like a hole in a wall.
Idiot, she thought, and focused her attention on her left foot. There was nothing special about the way it felt; not hot or cold, no discernible texture difference. She drew it slowly back in. It looked fine, just like a virtual foot should look. She tucked it up under her, in a tailor's seat with the right foot for company, and regarded the hole. It was where the spare inch had previously been.
What the hell is going on? Suddenly she was frightened, almost as much as that sharp-toothed day of the crocodile. She hauled herself up and backed away from the corner and the light that shone faintly from someplace outside. Outside. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said aloud. She turned in a circle, making fists and pressing her fingers together hard enough to hurt. “Oh god I don't please what is going on GODDAMN IT!” and now she was yelling with her arms fisted out from her sides and trembling, shaking her head and yelling again, “STOP DOING THIS TO ME! STOP DOING THIS TO ME! LEAVE ME ALONE!”
And that was just absurd. Leave me alone, she thought, what a goddamn stupid thing to wish for right now. She didn't know whether she was going to cry or hit something, and then to her great surprise she found that the easiest thing to do was to lean over with her hands braced against her thighs and laugh quietly. Through it all the light went on shining from some place outside her prison cell.
Well, Jackal, what are you going to do now? she asked herself afterwards. Another stupid question: what else was there to do but to stretch herself on the floor, put her face up to the hole, and look out.
She had a good long look. When she finally lifted her head from the floor, she felt that she must move very, very slowly. She opened the cupboard and took out ham and butter and bread, constructed a careful sandwich, ate it with deliberation. She never took her eyes from the hole and the pale light that rippled across the stone floor and into the opposite corner. When the last methodical bite had dissolved down her throat, she put her plate aside and stripped off her clothes, carefully folding the soft trousers and loose shirt that showed no wear from their years of use. She worked her way through her entire exercise routine. She stretched every muscle and flexed every tendon she could. She was thorough. When she was done, she rubbed herself down with her blanket and put her clothes back on. After a moment's thought, she reached under the bed and pulled out the shoes that she had not worn in more than two years. They felt odd on her feet.
Then she took a deep breath, and began to kick down the wall.
It felt good to use her body like this, against something that resisted and then gave way; it was almost erotic, and she forgot for a while what she was doing and simply gave herself over to action and feeling. When she came back to herself, she had broken a hole big enough to crawl through, and her cell was full of a kind of light she had not seen in more than four years.
She looked around at the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the stone box that had absorbed fifteen hundred days of her without a trace. And now she was scared to leave it, scared of what she had seen beyond it; afraid of that final step out over this new edge. She suspected that once she took it, she would never get back to who she had been.
But she could never do that anyway. More than four years alone had changed her irrevocably. The people who put her here had as much as killed Jackal Segura the day they had dragged her screaming into her own head. She was someone new now, or at least she was starting to be. But she wouldn't stay new for long in this one small place in her mind. She would dry up, become stale, if she did not keep reaching. And that was the choice. She could put all the bricks and bits of stone back into place in the wall, and stay safe, and never know what was on the other side of herself. Or she could reach.
Whatever is out there, she thought, is a part of me. It's mine. She took a deep breath; and then she dropped to her hands and knees and pushed herself through.
On the other side of the hole was her bedroom on Ko Island.
She rose slowly. The room was full of morning light, and she could see through the open window that the sky was blue-gray and half-full of scudding clouds. She saw everything discretely, as if items presented themselves to her like a row of cadets lined up for inspection, stepping forward one at a time. There was a scattering of sand on the windowsill. A light, gusting breeze patted her cheek and caught in the folds of her shirt. The built-in book-shelves on the wall opposite the window held the printed books and the disks with all the stories she had told herself over and over in her cell. Her summer quilt covered the bed, bleached cotton with an intricate piecework mandala of sea blue and tidewater green. Small woven rugs lay in a random pattern on the pine floor, which glowed oily gold where the light striped it. When she finally remembered to breathe, the air smelled faintly of salt and lemon verbena. And there was her oldest friend, her Frankenbear, lying on his worn side on her dresser, stitched at his neck and tummy and legs after the neighbor's dog had chewed him to bits. He looked at her with the crooked button eyes that her father had sewn on so carefully.
