A Certain Existence
by Quentin Lucas
The knocking was relentless and might’ve woken his dog. Gene activated the auto-seal on the bag of dog food and hustled from his kitchen to his living room, palming his couch with his right hand and working his way around its left side. He reached and opened the front door. “Who are you?” he said to the woman standing in his doorway.
He saw something approach his face and blinked. A hot pain scorched the length of his nose. Tears chilled the corners of his eyes. His hands sprung to his face to catch the blood while his gaze caught the woman’s fist, retreating. While trying to recall if he heard a crunch, he gave way to the palm nudging the center of his chest, pushing him back into his apartment. He backpedaled, until his calves spread against the front of his couch, and sat.
He watched the woman look around the room. She held her gaze on the yellow water stain on his white ceiling. She lowered her eyes and pointed at the cardboard box in the corner, full of empty beer cans and bottles which had begun to spill onto the floor. “You’re FiteDirty88, right? Read the Mighty Music Review online? Comment every now and then?”
Everything from his lower jaw to bowels shook. His heart felt like it could explode. His face felt like it already had. He thought of his young Siberian Husky, Nya, sleeping in his bedroom, knocked out by her medication. He looked over his right shoulder at the closed bedroom door. “I don’t understand. I’m peaceful. Just take what you want.”
He swiped at the blood sliding into his mouth. She looked down at him through sunglasses, half smiling. She’d left her white solarcycle helmet by the front door. It was losing its glow as its solar panel shell deactivated. She shook her head and coaxed her afro to a fuller volume with her hands. Her hair was big, dark, and round like an eclipsed sun. He was surprised she’d gotten it all to fit inside the helmet. She wore a black, V-neck halter top and dark blue jeans, torn at the knees and spotted with flecks of red paint. Her sneakers were as white.
“You’re adorable,” she said. He thought she was pointing at the painting of the seven moons on the wall behind him, fixed between the door to his bedroom by his right shoulder and the opening to his kitchen by his left shoulder. Each moon in the painting was accompanied with its own table of elements. “And a fan of science. I like that.” She looked around the sparsely furnished room and paused when she faced the trio of baseball caps hanging on the wall to her right and his left. “No bookshelf, though.”
“In my bedroom.” He glanced toward his kitchen and the window in the back that led to his fire escape.
She clasped her hands and held them by her sternum. Her teeth sparkled: white and silver. She was wearing jewel-encrusted grills that were shaped as fangs. “Boyish face. You looked 33 in your picture but, in person, I’d put you under 30. I didn’t expect that.” She removed the sunglasses and tossed them at her helmet. “You look … well, you look like someone who's easy to like.”
He’d never told anyone how much he appreciated inheriting his mother’s soft skin and chin dimple and his father’s dark hair and round jaw. But nobody could say who gave him his green eyes and hawk nose. And he’d never been told that he looked like someone who was easy to like.
“Just don’t hurt my dog,” he said. “I’m all she has and she’s dying. What do you want?” He tilted his head back. “My face is throbbing.”
“Do you read the Review?”
“Yes! How did you even find me? What are you, a hacker?”
“No. Not a hacker. I just know a few,” she said. “I’m the woman you had so much fun with in the comment section. A few nights ago.”
“What? I trolled you? I was drunk and bored. Take a joke.” He touched his nose. The pain in his face was joined by a headache.
“Yeah, you had jokes, but ….” She raised a fist and shook her head. “But they weren’t good.
And I wanted you to know that.” She lowered the fist and sighed. “Though, honestly, I’m not impressed with the results.”
“Results? I hurt your feelings,” he said. “You broke into my home and broke my face!” “I knocked.”
“You ‘knocked.’” She obviously worked out. Her arms were well toned. But they were slim. There wasn’t much meat on her shoulders either. He looked at her bare hands and thought she had to have been wearing rings or padded gloves when she hit him. He thought about the night she referenced and looked at the cardboard box overrun with empty beer containers.
There was a night last week, a Thursday, when he had nobody to call and a lot on his mind. It was the first time he’d been kicked out of a place. A dive. No virtual reality rooms. No holovisions. No hallucinogenic drinks. Just a space a little bigger than his apartment, with three wooden walls, one brick wall at the back, and standard booze. One of the customers had told him that the freckled woman behind the bar, standing in front of shelves that were holding the bottles and glowing with Christmas lights, was the owner. She took his drink out of his hand and pointed to the door. He might have said something but he wasn’t sure. She didn’t seem mad, just convinced that he was unfit. He went back home, finished his beers, and apparently wandered the supernet for the rest of the night.
He quietly counted five steps between him and the door. Not having a coffee table in the center of the living room might have made for an easy escape. But he couldn’t leave Nya. “I’m not sexist, or whatever,” he said. “I’ve just been under a lot of … And I didn’t even know you were ….”
He decided not to bring it up.
She looked at him from the corners of her eyes as though he had brought it up.
“You’re right. You did hurt my feelings.” She rolled her eyes and smiled, as if she were laughing at herself. “I hate admitting that. I want to think that I’m more than that. But your jokes were about me, an actual person, not just code on your screen and ... well, now that I’ve met you, I think maybe it wasn’t even the jokes.”
He never had a great talent for humor and he knew it. Remembering the night was like trying to pull apart a molecule with his fingers. The moment was too small now, shrunken by time and alcohol. But he could understand someone being unamused by his attempt at humor—not offended, though.
Years ago, a professor giving a lecture on the intersection between biology and culture had said that primal urges, rooted in evolutionary conditioning, resulted in the irrational choices that cost humanity Earth. Gene interrupted the lecture, raising his hand and saying, somewhat as a joke, that those same urges had cost him his virginity, which he thought was a silver lining. Nobody laughed. A few classmates instantly messaged him and said he sounded like a rapist. Others said he sounded like a virgin. He didn’t agree with his classmates. But he sat quietly for the rest of the lecture and listened to the professor explain how terraforming changed the soil of the seven moons from gray and dry to dark and fertile and why scientists couldn’t terraform the planet around which the moons revolved.
His nose was still bleeding but felt less pained. He gently wiped at it with his sleeve.
“I think I was angry about your certainty.” She scowled with the right side of her mouth. “As if there was no way you could be wrong about who I am. It’s frightening, how unburdened by
other people’s realities you seem to be.” She cocked her head. “It’s an erasure of my humanity. It’s like I wasn’t even there.”
She wasn’t there, as far as he was concerned. The supernet was. “You got that post-fight clarity yet?” she asked. “Know what that is?”
He was frightened by the oddness of the question and wondered if she was insane. “Wasn’t much of a fight,” he said.
“True. And I’m not sure we’re in the post- part yet.” She stood in front of him and her chest heaved with a deep breath. Her hands kept folding into fists and unfolding. “Nose still hurt?”
He shrugged. “I’ll live.”
“You were kind of a baby about it.” She waved a hand at him. “Broken noses don’t hurt that bad. They just rain blood. A nurse’ll crack it back in place.”
He grunted. His heartbeat felt steadier.
He watched her turn her face toward a picture on the end table to the right of his couch. It was a photo from a fishing trip with three of his friends. Each of them was smiling and holding up a catch.
“And you’re not even alone with your unburdened mind, are you?” she said.
“Huh?”
She looked at him. “Your certainty.”
“That again?”
“I know. I’m not usually so scatterbrained.” She paused and arched her eyebrows. “But this is personal, not business. And I’m trying to calm down. It’s best for both of us if I do.” She turned her face toward the picture again. “Having people who are like you, think like you, that would make it hard to change, huh? You risk loneliness.”
He remembered the beginning of the joke. Her supernet avatar was a picture of a rapper. A terrible rapper. A terrible rapper who was a woman. He had told her that her picture was of a “terrible female rapper” that no one should support. He said there were no good female rappers. Then he apologized for using the word terrible because it was redundant. But that was only the beginning of the joke, he thought.
She smiled again. Despite the circumstances, he had to admit she was attractive, sexy even.
Though, he’d never had much interest in Black women. She should have used a picture of herself for her avatar. He thought about offering her his bicycle if she’d leave. It was new and leaning against the wall behind her. Its AI came with surround sound and 360-degree holographic imaging. He’d given his coffee table away so he could lock the bike’s back wheel into its treadmill and set it in the middle of his living room at his leisure. With the imaging feature, he could roll out of bed and ride the Silk Road of 14 century Earth or the purple mountains of today’s third moon. Its inclement weather shield had a lifetime warranty. And its security system was equipped with a stun device to knock out would-be thieves. But he knew she must have seen it already.
A sudden anger overtook him. Weeks ago, someone had stolen his old bicycle, a classic fit for the days of Earth. It had a basket that was the perfect size for Nya and one of her few joys since spending most of her days zonked on medication. Her black and white fur would dance in the wind. Most times she’d curl up in the basket and enjoy being out of the house. Sometimes, she’d lift her head and roll her sky-blue eyes around, gazing at the passing neighborhood. Rarely, she’d let her tongue hang over her black lip and flap in the breeze. But the basket was gone now and he hadn’t had the will to buy another.
Nya wasn’t getting better. It was unfair. Dogs had always eaten turds. Not their most charming quality, but it was no reason for them to die. She’d contracted a strain of parvo that had slipped past her vaccination. The medication had worked well for a while but now she had more bad days than good. The bike rides had become too much for her. The vet had said it was time to put her down. But, with the medicine, she wasn’t suffering, just weakening. His parents had said he was being stubborn.
After purchasing the bike, he bought a jackknife with a silver blade and a black handle. The knife was a stopgap until his shooter license was approved. Then he adopted the username FiteDirty88, which he used mostly to cruise survivalist and self-defense supersites. Nobody was going to steal from him again.
She pulled the grills out of her mouth. "I wonder how much of who we are is just a product of who we’re around.” Her teeth glistened white. She looked at him and held up the sparkling grills. “Something made me think that these would be good for scaring you. Especially the fangs. As if I’m not scary enough all on my own.”
He strummed his thumbnail against his couch, covered in brown corduroy, and imagined looking through her waist and at his front door. He almost stood up to speak in his defense. His leg muscles tensed. But his body wouldn’t rise.
“I think I misread this situation.” She raised an open hand as a kind of nonverbal apology. She turned her face toward the picture again. “You’ve got friends, and that’s not nothing, FiteDirty88. Stupid jokes and all. And maybe none of you would have that if you didn’t comfort each other with a forced laugh every now and then.”
“My name is ….”
“You haven’t figured out yet that I don’t care what your name is?” “Why do you keep looking at that picture?”
She turned her gaze toward him. “Tool of my trade,” she said. “You don’t kill people you don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m trying to understand you.”
She bent toward him at the waist and squeezed his left shoulder. The pain was like he had pulled a muscle. He winced and tried to shrink away.
“This ain’t exactly a battle between good and evil, you know.” She shook the grills in her closed hand like dice. “Maybe I’m on a crusade. But it ain’t a righteous one. Though, I do, just this minute actually, realize you don’t do empathy very well.”
“What?” He wished he could remember the rest of the joke. He had a feeling that it was, at least, a little funny.
“And though some people think empathy means being nice, or that it’s submission—empathy is actually essential to my work.” She clicked her tongue. “It’s just being able to understand someone else’s position. To see through their eyes. Don’t even have to like the person you empathize with."
“What’s your business?”
She squeezed a little harder. Her fingernails drilled his shoulder and he groaned. He could feel her breath on his face.
“My business is my business,” she said. “But use your imagination. I tracked you down and broke your nose on sight. And then kicked back in your home like I ain’t worried about a goddamn thang.”
He nodded. “So, you want revenge? I get that. I didn’t do anything wrong but I know that feeling.”
“I thought I did.” She shook her head. “But revenge is useless.”
“Any chance you’re being a little …?”
She squeezed his shoulder again. The pain was sharp and he felt lightheaded. He stared at the off-white hue of his living room walls before looking back at her.
Her eyes narrowed. “I dare you to finish that sentence.”
He wondered why she was so strong and, if she was taking enhancers, how she was able to still look so feminine. His face and shoulder ached. To distract himself from the pain, he tried to focus on how disturbed she was, on how all of this was happening to him because of a joke.
“Any chance you’re being a little irrational?”
She eased her grip and gaped. “Nice. So, it’s not just stupid jokes that make your friends like you. You’ve got force.”
One of his favorite defense supersites shared a lot of content about not showing fear, not giving an opponent fear to feed on. Another advocated impassive body language and maintaining consistent eye contact with an attacker. Maintaining eye contact was an effective way of communicating your power and distracting an attacker from noticing your hands.
“Or maybe I’m just certain,” he said.
She shook her head. "Call your friends, or something. Tell them about this mad bitty who, I guess, actually, did stalk you. They’ll buy you a drink for that kind of story.”
She released his shoulder, stood straight, and turned her back to him.
He wondered if she was going to leave and craved the return of normalcy, of an apartment that didn’t feel polluted. He considered the possibility that she was right, that he deserved to be sucker punched for what he had said. There had been times when he wanted to hit people. He wanted to hit the vet when he suggested putting Nya down. His shoulder immediately felt a little better after she released it. But the pain was still a nuisance. He shook his head at the idea that the attack was deserved. It was a ridiculous thought.
He looked at her nude, brown upper back and thought about shoving her. His dog was dying. His home had been invaded by a lucid lunatic. And something else was agitating him. His right hand slid into his pocket. He tried to shout but, instead, squawked as he rose from his seat. He was holding his jackknife.
“Intruder!” He hoped he was loud enough for his neighbors to hear him.
After two quick steps, his chest was flush against her back. He held her by the arm with his left hand and, with the other, slung the blade over her shoulder and stabbed. Stomach. Neck. Chest. His eyes shut as he continued. He heard her shirt rip. He pictured a sticky, red puddle splashing against his hand and gathering on his blue carpet. Staining his shoes. Dripping through the floorboards and into the apartment below.
“You’re gonna die! You’re gonna die!”
He stabbed twice more with a tired arm. He looked at his spotless blade and realized he had done no more damage than a finger pressing a pillow.
She turned around and nodded. “You’re right. I should apologize. I was trying to get the words together but … my pride.” She picked at one of the holes his knife had poked into her shirt. The largest one exposed her stomach and its dark, unblemished skin. “Along with bothering to find and hit you—which I should not have done because fists don’t fix stupid—I was also wrong for not telling you that retaliation would be a waste. Because I’m scary enough all on my own.”
He felt a thump against his shoe and realized the knife had slipped from his fingers. “You’re what?”
“That’s a whole other story.” She waved a hand over the absence of wounds. “It’s a new development. It wasn’t my choice. But it was like being poor your whole life and then winning the lottery. It’s supposed to be a blessing, I guess, but ….” She shrugged. “I have no frame of
reference for this. In a way, my humanity had already been erased before you tried to erase it.” She patted her hair like she was making sure it was still round. “You ever think the French word for wound is blesser because a blessing is always, on some level, going to wound? Maybe even supposed to? A blessing usually means some sort of change. But change means that something you have is going to die.”
He looked past her and at his front door. “I don’t know French.”
“Then pardon my French,” she said. “I just think if I was used to being this way, knew what, exactly, I should be doing with a body like this, I wouldn’t be here. With you.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Fists really don’t fix stupid.” She looked like she was thinking her way through a complicated math problem. “But they can erase stupid. I suppose that’s the nature of what I’ve become. An eraser.” She brushed her jaw with the back of her fingers. “Maybe that’s why what you did bothers me so much. And maybe that’s why you did it.” She stared into his eyes the way the supersites had taught him to. He thought she was better at it than he was. “It’s a power that’s hard to resist, right?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “People always say violence isn’t the answer. But I’m uniquely qualified to leverage violence as an answer.”
He listened to himself breathe and wanted to scream. He thought screaming might help but he couldn’t. At a party, he’d shoved a woman he’d been flirting with into a pool. She was wearing a bikini so he thought she could swim. She couldn’t but it all ended fine. It was just a gag that didn’t work out. Nobody was hurt. She didn’t want to talk to him anymore. But nobody was hurt.
“It was j-j … a joke,” he said. “I know I’m not that funny but you can’t ….”
“No, stupid. I’m not,” she said. “Or, at least, that’s what I’m trying to talk myself out of.” She pointed to the couch. He sat. She also sat and turned toward him.
“When a baby shits his pants, FiteDirty88, people are generally patient because they know the baby just needs to learn,” she said. “But when an adult shits his pants, people laugh or mock, or express disgust. It’s hard to tolerate a healthy adult who can’t handle something so basic.
“‘Don’t shit your pants. Don’t demean people. These are silly things to do,’ someone might say.” She hmphed. “And you’re not a baby, FiteDirty88."
He tried to catch his breath and grimaced despite the pain it brought to the center of his face. He glimpsed one of the holes he’d pierced into her shirt, exposing skin between the lower parts of her breasts. He imagined a dark nipple slipping through the hole. He wanted to know why she wasn’t stabbed.
“But, if an adult who shits his pants found other people who shit themselves, the behavior can be normalized. After a while, maybe you don’t even notice the stink.”
She was talking about his friends again and he didn’t understand why. He had had a bad night. So, he went online and tried to find relief, tried to be funny. People liked funny. Normal people did, anyway. And even if he wasn’t funny, why not just appreciate the attempt?
“Are you listening to me, Gene?”
He flinched.
“I was immature, Gene—since you’re so comfortable with me knowing your name—and I apologize.” She leaned in toward him. “I don’t hate you. But I hated your stupid jokes. I think your mindset is harmful.”
He thought about how she was just openly contemplating murder. “Do you even hear yourself?”
She stood up straight. “But, from your perspective there’s some worth in these kinds of thoughts, right? Maybe a laugh? Validation? A community?”
He needed a distraction. He gazed at the holes in her shirt. “How much do you eat?” “What?”
“Your cells, they must be ….” He pointed at the holes. “I work in a lab. Regenerative
medicine and ….”
“I know where you work.” She sighed and shook her head. “And I see what you mean about my cells. A doctor told me that my telomeres just won’t quit which, you know, is why cancer cells don’t die.” She cocked her head. “I’m technically immortal. And I don’t count calories but I do eat a lot. More than I used to.”
He tried to put a thought together. “It’s not possible.” She almost grinned. “It’s not even new, Gene.”
He wished his friends were with him. He looked down at his couch and scratched at a loose thread.
“Maybe it’s best for everyone that I just let your stupidity be your problem,” she said. “Leave you and yours alone with your stink.”
“Not really.” He ripped the loose thread free and looked at her. “Because I’m not stupid. Or sexist. Or this awful person you think I am. And nobody’s truly alone.”
“What?”
He looked at the thread in his hand. “We’re all connected. If we weren’t, you never would’ve come here. My joke wouldn’t have mattered.”
She stood up and took a deep breath. “You do have a bookshelf.” He nodded and met her gaze with his. “It’s a good one.”
“Now I really want to hurt you. You’re not stupid. You’re indifferent.”
After humanity lost Earth and began its generations-long odyssey for a new home, veterinary research had mostly stopped. For long stretches of the journey, pets were prohibited. They consumed too many resources. Gene had joked with his vet that dogs weren’t allowed on the ships because they would’ve made the trip seven times longer. No reaction at all. Not even a chuckle.
“It was just a joke. Probably not a homerun.” He doubted he was as unfunny as she made him seem. Even his friends, who could sometimes laugh at him as much as with him, weren’t so critical. “But ….”
“Gene, let’s do this,” she said. “You don’t infect my space with your shit again and I never knock on your door again.”
“Your space? I was on the supernet. That’s your space?”
“Don’t know what to tell you, man. If life was fair, people wouldn’t lose their hair.” He held the tip of his tongue between his teeth. She was insane.
“What did you mean?” He pointed at her ruined shirt again. “That it’s not even new.”
She looked at him. He wondered if she was going to speak or attack. He grabbed the thread by both ends and pulled. He watched her studying him and waited for her to hurt him again. The thread broke and he wanted to tell her to leave.
“We,” she said, “humans, our boundaries on what gets called natural or normal have always been too narrow.” Her gaze fell to the floor for an instant before finding him again. “What ends up being called supernatural or paranormal are just things that frighten us beyond embracing them. I’m not certain, at all, of what a person is really capable of.”
He waited for her to say more.
“Ever cruise the social media archives? See what kind of content your ancestors posted?” He shook his head. “Never had the urge.”
She nodded. “Me neither. But I got a nephew—Or, at least, he calls me Auntie Onyx. He’s a love relation, not a blood relation.—and he wanted me to help him with his search. Then I got curious about my own bloodline,” she said. “This woman, my whole -lotta-greats grandma, she posted this story, it was one of her most popular ones. Thousands of shares and likes. It was about Fannie Lou Hamer.”
He felt like he was running out of patience. “Okay.” “You know Fannie Lou Hamer?”
“No.”
“She’s one of my favorite people from the old world now. She fought to get Black people the vote,” she said. “One day, she gets sexually assaulted and smashed to pulp by the patrollers. Back then, they called them police. Her vision was never the same. Permanent damage to her insides. It was barbaric. Know what she did? After?”
“Not a clue.”
“Went back to helping Black people get the vote,” she said. “If I’m supernatural then so’s that.
“She wanted to be a mama, too. But a surgeon stole her uterus. Ripped it right out of her during surgery. She had no say in the matter. Back then and back there, they called a piece of eugenics a ‘Mississippi appendectomy.’ So, she adopted. And her daughter died in the hospital without her there.” She shifted the weight of her body from her left foot to her right. “The hospital wouldn’t let her in because she had been trying to get Black people the vote. Know what she did? After?”
“I never even knew she existed, so ….”
“Went back to helping Black people get the vote,” she said. “If I’m paranormal then so’s that.” She went silent. “I sometimes wonder what made Fannie Lou feel less human. All that mistreatment? Or withstanding all that mistreatment? What’s your little blade compared to what she went through?”
“But it’s impossible. Your cells, they must be ….”
“Do you remember what you said to me? That night?” “I don’t.”
“I thought so,” she said. “Sometimes, I think those people forgot about what they did to Fannie Lou. That it was just another day for them.” She tossed her grills onto his couch. The crush of small diamonds looked like a skin cell under a microscope. “Proof, for when you tell your friends. Or the patrollers. My DNA’s all over them. But the patrollers ain’t a problem. They ain’t ever gonna smash me to pulp.” She walked to the door and opened it before crouching to grab her helmet and sunglasses. “Or sell the grills and get a proper funeral for your dog.”
She exited the apartment and stood in the hallway. “You like novels, Gene?” He stammered and blinked. “Nonfiction is my preference. But … some.”
She pointed at the grills, lying beside him on the couch. “The New Gilda Stories. It’s a series. Some really good vampire lit. That’s what inspired the fangs.” She lifted her chin toward his bedroom door. “Sorry about your dog, by the way. I bet she’s your best friend.”
She disappeared down the hall.
“Nya!” He rose, skittered around the couch, and opened his bedroom door. “Thank God.” She was curled up on his bed. Her mouth hung open. Her belly swelled and shrunk with her
sleeping breaths.
His legs grew weak and he felt nauseated. The adrenaline was waning. He slid against the doorframe, down to the floor, and sat while pondering the angry woman. He looked to his left and eyed the brown bookshelf posted in front of his bedroom’s blue wall. There was too much empty space on the shelves for his liking. An ache grew in the center of his chest over the certainty of Nya’s death. She really was his best friend.
“Don’t cry, stupid,” he said.
He tried but failed to take a deep breath through his nose. The effort stung. His face felt like a ship reentering the atmosphere. His nose was still bleeding but more slowly. His yellow shirt sleeves were ruined with red streaks and blotches.
“Ugh … fine.” He looked at Nya before tilting his head back against the doorframe. He breathed through his mouth and felt cold water grow in his eyes. “Cry then … you precious, little girl.”
He wept. Frowning hurt his face but he didn’t care. His grief was earned. When the sadness passed, he felt like he’d coughed up a stone. He decided he would rise from the floor, ice his face, call his father, and then call the patrollers. He looked to his right.
The woman was standing by the end table next to his couch. She was watching him. He hadn’t heard her return.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
She was wearing the grills again and holding up a bullet, between her thumb and forefinger like the stem of a wine glass. Her blood red fingernails reflected the light from the ceiling. She turned her face away from him and toward his bedroom. Her lips parted. He waited for her to speak. He thought he heard her gasp.
“She died.” Her gaze fell back to him. “I’m so sorry, Gene.”
He wiped his tears away. “No, she didn’t.” He was staring at the bullet. “I said what are you doing here?”
“I was going to push this into your brain.” She lowered the bullet to his eye level. “Quick and painless.”
He wondered if she had finally achieved her goal. He knew he did nothing wrong. But the idea of ever joking around with a stranger on the supernet again felt nauseating. He tried to rise but felt too heavy.
“Have you considered talking to someone?” He wiped a new tear away. “Because you are crazy.”
He looked at the holes in her shirt. He thought that if her grills were as valuable as she suggested then she was able to afford proper solarcycle armor. She wanted to be fashionable, and show off her body, instead of safe. He imagined her racing to his apartment with her bike’s wheels pulled up into its undercarriage, flying through traffic at reckless speeds while fantasizing about violence.
She stepped toward the side of the doorway opposite where he was sitting. She put a hand on its frame. “This is your skull.” She set the front of the bullet at a waist-high spot on the frame
and held it in place with the tip of her forefinger. She shoved the bullet and her finger, knuckle-deep, into the wood of the frame with one smooth motion. She removed her finger and looked at him. “And that was my intention.”
“What did I say?” He was surprised that his voice was a whisper. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so tired. “Before you do it, just tell me what the joke was.”
“No.”
“Why!”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m not your mom, Gene. I’m not here as a lesson. I’m here as a consequence.”
He snorted. “At least you admit it’s about revenge.” She sat down and crossed her legs.
He leaned back into the doorframe as hard as he could.
“I already told you: Revenge is useless. It was going to be empathy. A walk in your shoes,” she said. “You’re certain about your role in this and my role in this even though you can’t remember what you said. Okay. That’s obnoxious but it’s interesting. I was in the elevator asking myself what I would look like if I were so certain.” She took a deep breath. “Because I’m full of doubts. Because of what I am now.” She fingered a hole in her shirt. “But, with your death, I’m guaranteed that what happened between us never happens again. I’m able to experience certainty the way you do.”
He sighed. “Go ahead then.”
“You’re in shock, huh?” She turned her face toward his bedroom. “You’re not just actively ignoring what I’m saying. And why haven’t you looked at Nya? I told you she’s dead.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Nevertheless.” She rose to her feet and looked down at him. “At least it wasn’t in vain. Her death saved your life. I came here to kill you because your certainty might help me understand my lack of certainty.” She looked into his bedroom. “But then I saw her body. Not the first time I seen a body, sure. But you loved her. I know how much hope you put into her staying alive. How much you spent on her medicine.” She pointed at something in his bedroom. “And I realized that that’s the only certainty.” She pulled out her grills, tossed them into his bedroom, and looked at him. “Everything else is just a performance.”
He watched her turn around, grab her helmet and sunglasses off his couch, and leave. She shut the door behind her. He stayed on the floor and looked at the hole in the doorframe. He couldn’t hear Nya breathing. But she was alive. Either she was alive or the woman killed her. He stared at the hole and waited for the truth to come.