Chapter 8 - finale

      His greatest fear kept him from going anywhere near the ancient, wrecked starship – this terrible anomaly that he could learn nothing of, not in his hidden, locked book, nor in any other in which he’d searched.

      Within the house, Leni called his valet to him, a tall man, quick of hand and wit, whom he called Ebon.

      “Decant the 1842,” Leni commanded.

      “You mean the 1482, surely,” Ebon corrected.

      Leni caught himself and smiled. “Yes, for sure,” he answered, remembering the 1842 grapes that had made such exquisite vintage – but not for another three hundred plus years. “Bring it up to the atrium.”

      The 1482 was a fine year nevertheless, and it would do.

      Leni undressed afterwards, eating some of the fruit that had been laid out in his room. He washed his hands, his face and his feet; then he smoked a little from his pipe, humming all the while a half-remembered tune.

      An hour later, dressed in a maroon evening jacket and a scarlet scarf, Leni met Amos once more in the gardens she liked to grow atop their home. Here, many exotic birds were kept – more of her tests, her whims, her desires fulfilled by the magician.

      Amos had freshened up and changed as well. She now came to him along the flagstones padding softly in grey satin slippers, and a gown that matched, with silver bangles about her arms, and silver rings in her ears that flashed and dangled.

      “Such a creature!” Leni said, quoting from a not-yet-famous poem (in fact not-yet-written) which he'd used to woo her at the outset of their courtship. Sometimes, he would recite the whole thing in her presence, sometimes just a verse as he caressed her naked thigh as she fell into blissful post-coital sleep.

      Tonight, he withheld the rest, and Amos knew why. She knew all of his old tricks; but that did not make him any less charming when he wished to be.

      Now however he was being something else: devious.

      Amos took the glass of wine he poured her, but she chose not to sit with him. He in turn interpreted her move to remain on her feet. This was the dance of a married couple. Leni and Amos were still only engaged, but they knew one another's moves as well as any gray-haired duo that celebrates their fortieth anniversary in step.

      But as any man and woman that spend even a few moments paired up may do, they could also push each other's buttons, and Leni – although deft in hand – could sometimes be rushed out of rhythm by his desires; and so, early in the dance, he stepped squarely on his partner's poor, little toes.

      “Sometimes I do wonder if you really like yourself,” he said to Amos, and she winced, for the remark was heavy-handed, as well as crass. She had learned this of him: in private, Leni could be cruel, and he did not always hide his thoughts. His intellect, quite keen, cut sharp. He continued: “You seem to enjoy denying yourself pleasures, or the things you deserve. Why is that?”

      Amos, who had already had quite a bit to drink today, and not much food, for she had eaten only dainties in Colm's office, was still at the tail-end of her afternoon buzz; she found an easy reply for him waiting within her mouth. She uttered the words happily, for her defenses – after a year of verbal sparring with Leni – now proved formidable, and she the apt pupil.

      “Like myself?” she repeated. “I'll have you know, my love, that I find myself to be absolutely adorable. If ever you see me abstaining, it is only because I know my limits; or perhaps because I get more joy in letting you bring me finally what it is my heart desires.”

      As if to support this statement, a looloft bird – rarest of all her treasures, brought down from the highlands by fierce trappers – took to the wing, climbing aloft with heavy wing-beats. Pink and purple feathers glinted in the final embers of the setting sun.

      Leni was not convinced, and looking at him now she could see the primal hunter in him aroused. If she was the game, he would try to shoot her down; but Amos knew by now how to win this contest, too, and escape his grasp – although, admittedly, most of her efforts were thwarted, and she ended up his, with her ankles locked in the grip of her own hands. The possibility that she might get away from him only excited him more, and made him a greater menace. The key, Amos found, was to use this against him: to make him get over-excited and miss his shot by taking it too soon.

      Premeditated ejaculation, she liked to call this – her wiles growing as well as her wit.

      Leni argued: “But what you desire is for me to possess your heart. I know its desires as well as I know my own. That is why I can tell that you are now resisting, when it would be better for both of us if you yield.”

      “You insinuate that I should follow your lead – when in truth I am not even on the dance-floor,” Amos dictated.

      “That's exactly the problem! You think you have withdrawn, but you are here with me still, here with all of us – the entire Community of life dances with you in this garden, with your every breath!” Leni was inspired. He had this sort of zeal only in two states, as far as Amos had witnessed: when he was onto a brilliant idea that needed expression to take form, or when he had his face buried in her ass, lapping at her dripping pussy.

      The correlation, and the idea, made Amos a little wet, despite herself.

      Regardless, she answered as she must: “I can opt out. We all can. I know it.”

      “Ah! But what is this impulse within you that makes you wish to opt out? It is a dark thing, a scar, an old wound – am I right?”

      Leni liked to pick her apart. What he didn't always notice as he did so was that she could simultaneously pull at his loose thread: there was only ever one, and it was never hard to find, although it certainly got hard once she did.

      “I am scarred all over,” Amos said, displaying her tattooed arms, and making a gesture at her marked face. “And there are some which are dark, others which shine bright. These scars I carry have saved me from death, just as you have – and perhaps more often.”

      “According to you,” Leni said, looking at the inky whorls upon her throat, “I am responsible for giving you these marks.”

      “And what does that say about you, Leni, and your darkness?” Amos said, playing unconsciously a winning stroke. “You have secrets blacker and greater than any of ours,” she retorted. She liked to equate herself with the masses during these altercations, as she knew it infuriated him. He wished her to be elevated, and she, daughter of the ruling class, liked it better in the muddy gutters with the rats and proles.

      “I tell you all I can,” Leni lied. “I give you what you need.”

      “Maybe that's your problem, Leni – you always think you know better than anyone what everyone around you needs. But ever since I was a young girl and I lost my home and my family, I have been seeking inwards, looking within myself to discover what are my needs, and where I must go to find them. Do not try to teach me lessons I learned long ago, thinking it a boon and benediction!”

      Leni was hurt by her words. She hadn't excited him at all, but had injured him. How had that happened? She had never experienced this before. Usually with him, it was all smoke and mirrors. She had learned the maze-like way out of the smoke; but this time she had somehow managed to redirect one of the mirrors; and seeing himself, Leni had faltered for the first time she had known him.

      Pain welled up within him, a hurt he could not control, and it seized him suddenly so that he let his goblet drop, shattering on the flagstones laid upon the roof. This startled some of the birds in roost nearby so that they took off, squawking, overhead.

      Amos went to him as he put his hand over his eyes to cover them and shield himself. She took his hand.

      “What is it?” she asked. “What harm have I done?”

      “None,” Leni managed to gasp as his passions moved him and he sobbed before her, though trying all the while to contain it, to keep it imprisoned within himself. His secrets now were swimming near the surface, like little minnows. Amos fancied that if she wanted to, she could with ease scoop any one of them out, cup them in her hand with a little water, and lift them up for her observation; but she knew doing this would hurt him even more, and that she would still never understand what it was she beheld in her hand.

      A few moments passed, and Leni – after a barrage of horrible, dreadful fears that he might lose his beloved – managed to compose himself. Amos felt awful as well, for she felt she had brought this about. After some time, Leni revealed himself again to her and smiled. It was a strange smile, and one she had seen on his face only once before; there was a great sadness revealed in it, and a happy resignation, as if he had admitted, at long last, that misery was as sweet as harmony.

      She pulled away from him then, for he resembled exactly the version of himself she had seen many years ago, as a girl that had fallen into the accursed caves.

      “What is it?” Leni asked.

      “I-I see you now as I saw you then!” she whispered. “In the cave!”

      Leni shook his head. “That was not me,” he said. “It was the trick of another. I never caught you in that cave.”

      Amos stood up, angry now. “I know that it was you and no other; and I know that you deny it now only out of spite. Don’t you think I'd know you, my love? If you cannot trust me in that, then your esteem of me is even lower than your perception of my own!”

      “Spite?” Leni said, his own ire irked. “I spit at all the ignorant fools until I have run out of words, and I am dry as a cockle-spar – but I spite no one, least of all you!”

      “You spite yourself, Leni,” Amos said now, seeing him clearly for the first time. She may have seen his sadness as a girl, but only now – as a woman – did she spot the mar upon his spirit. It showed itself – but what was it, and what did it mean?

      She would never know – not unless he one day opted to tell her.

      Before she turned away from him she said one final thing. Her parting words, like those that had come before, seemingly bidden, but unforeseen, went to his very core:

      “It is you, my love, who does not like yourself very much. It is time now that you admit that to yourself, and to allow me to forget this false projection which you have pushed upon me. I am proud, and I am fully in love with who I am. I don't need you; although I see now how you need me.”

      Leni sat motionless in the garden as Amos strode away from him toward the lift. He sat crumpled, totally without will, drained and depleted.

      He was back in Tonphe Square and Mara was running with him hand in hand moments before she was struck by a plasma blast which incinerated most of her body. Leni dove for cover, and it was only once he was safely out of sight did he realize he was now holding a dismembered arm.

      Travesty pressed upon him, sent him from his seat onto the garden floor. As Amos descended in the lift to the bedroom, wishing she could somehow, with words or with her body, find a way to alleviate his pain, Leni went into howls and spasms.

      He had kept the tragedy at bay; he had leapt so far away from it, and reinvented himself so many times that the man who had lost his first love was another world away, someone in a story, a forgotten soldier of fortune.

      Now, somehow, a crack had formed.

      Leni cried and cried, with his forehead pressed into the flagstones, until he had gotten most of it out; then he began hitting himself, and went on like this until he was utter spent and through his tears all the stars above had seemingly slurred into one.

      The truth was that he really did not like himself at all; in fact, he hated himself.