Chapter 32

“There aren’t any sides anymore,” David said.

“No!’ Marita said. “And we didn’t try to make sides. It just happened.”

—Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

 

Sonja Bartlett undid the long French braid and brushed her blonde hair straight down over her breasts. Sometimes the brush flicked the top of a breast and sometimes a nipple, and by the time she was done the tops of her pale breasts glowed an angry red. She brought out the scissors while the bathtub filled with her lavender bubbles.

Sonja eased herself into the steaming bath and reached down the hand mirror from the back of the toilet. She soaped her hair, rinsed it and shut off the faucets. She propped the mirror across the faucets and lay back into the hot luxury. No matter how hot and humid this country got, Sonja still found a hot bath the only way she could unwind.

Her dead father’s comb lay in the soap dish, and when she cut off her hair she used his coarse comb to keep her work more or less even. He’d had springy, red hair and hers was straight blonde, nearly white, identical with her mother’s. After his death, she had picked a solitary red hair out of his comb and put it into an envelope. The envelope waited in the bottom of her underwear drawer for her to buy the proper locket she’d promised herself.

This is my mother’s hair, she thought.

Sonja piled her long, blonde hair neatly on the floor next to her tub and tried to ignore the fact that the Agency recorded her every move. She tried to ignore their prying eyes but, in fact, she was drunk for the first time in her sixteen years and she had discovered already an age-old truth: drinking to forget never works.

And for sixteen, she had so much she wanted to forget. Two planes had crashed while she sat at the controls, one while she fled a nightmare epidemic of a thousand bodies melting from their bones. The lavender of her bath helped cut the stink of her memory, but it didn’t cut the memory itself. She knew, now, what all combat vets learned, that death is the only complete perfume.

Two lagartos chattered from the wall above the toilet, then skittered together for a quick mating. The female accommodatingly moved her tail aside and when the male finished he performed a half-dozen triumphant push-ups. The female raced after a spider in the corner, and the male continued his push-ups.

Sonja piled a hatful of fragrant bubbles onto her head, then submerged herself to rinse them off.

“Sonja?”

Yes, her mother would be worried. Sonja was having trouble facing the woman who was and who was not her mother ever since she found out what she’d begun to call “The Clone’s Truth.” She had the same trouble facing Harry Toledo. In fact, she couldn’t seem to face anyone. She sipped another mezcal.

“Sonja? Are you all right?”

Sonja started to giggle uncontrollably.

“Sonja!”

“Yes, Mother, my twin?”

There was a pause, and Sonja could envision her mother’s sigh.

“I was afraid you’d drowned in there. Sergeant Trethewey is here to see you.”

Sonja placed two handfuls of bubbles onto her breasts and admired them in her mirror. Her first inclination was to tell her mother that she didn’t want to see Sergeant Trethewey, or anybody else, ever again. But then she thought of how much she’d wanted to talk with Harry—really talk, not just plan—the last couple of days even though his presence reminded her of the ViraVax horrors. Besides, now he was always working for Marte Chang, and he got disgustingly dewy-eyed when he talked about their work. Harry had been ignoring Sonja, too, so he hadn’t noticed how she had been avoiding him. And everyone else. She’d gone to the pour to see ViraVax buried in concrete and to steal a chopper, not to socialize.

“Sergeant Trethewey?”

Her mother must be desperate. She would never let Sonja talk with men, particularly enlisted men, unless she thought it was a last-ditch effort. Or maybe she saw that Trethewey was a nice guy who had helped Sonja get a lot of free flight-trainer time. Never once had he made a pass.

“Sonja?”

“Yes, okay,” Sonja said, raising her voice. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“That’s great, honey. We’ll be in the kitchen.”

Sonja let herself slip under the surface of the hot bath, then sat up and rinsed her close-cropped hair with the sprayer. The haircut made her look older, tougher. When she narrowed her eyes at the mirror, she imagined that she looked like Colonel Scholz.

Okay, Sergeant, she thought. Let’s see what you’re really made of.

Sonja drained the tub and toweled herself vigorously. The muggy Costa Bravan night overwhelmed the bathroom fan, and sweat replaced bathwater on her livid skin. Only a few rooms of Casa Canada were air-conditioned, and the bathroom was not one of those.

Sonja wrapped herself in a fresh towel, left her hair in blonde clumps on the floor and steadied herself on the door handle before facing her mother. She took three deep breaths, as her mother had taught, and listened to the clatter that filled her house.

I’ll sleep in the hangar from now on, she thought. Whether they like it or not

Casa Canada had become a homeless shelter for Agency Operations, and she bitterly resented this most recent violation of her life. Sonja Bartlett was an unhappy girl determined to spread this unhappiness like a deadly virus among these invaders that dogged her every move. She tucked her towel wrap tight, lifted her chin and threw open the bathroom door with a crash.

Nancy Bartlett stood in the hallway, massaging her temples with long, slender fingers. Her blue eyes were rimmed in red from crying and from exhaustion. She wore her long blonde hair gathered back in a loose braid, tied with a blue ribbon. As Nancy’s eyes widened in shock, Sonja ran her fingers through her hair stubble and giggled.

^“Oh, baby, what have you done to yourself?” her mother asked.

“It’s the new, streamlined me,” Sonja said. “Like the women in that Seattle band you like so much, Genital Puppets.”

“You know I hate that band,” Nancy said. “Why are you doing this now? We’ve been through so much. . . .” She stopped and rubbed her forehead again. “I feel so rotten, and they want me to go back to the States in the morning. . . .”

Nancy sniffed, stepped up to Sonja and sniffed again.

“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” she asked. “Where did you get it?”

Sonja shrugged.

Might as well admit it.

“Down at the hangar,” she said. “Mr. Marcoe always keeps a couple of bottles hidden down there.”

“Sonja, we still have a lot to do. . . .”

“You have a lot to do,” Sonja said. She put out a hand to steady herself against the wall. “I have nothing to do but wait for them to take more blood, more tissue and samples of everything that goes in and comes out. That’s my life, Mother, and I can’t stand it. . . .”

Just then, Nancy Bartlett gasped, clutching at her chest and throat. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and before Sonja could react her mother dropped to the floor in a heap. Sonja knelt down to help her mother, and felt the telltale heat radiating through her clothes.

“Oh, no!” she whispered.

Sonja didn’t dare call anyone because she didn’t want others exposed. Without hesitation she grabbed her mother under the armpits and dragged her into the bathroom.

It took two tries for Sonja to get her mother into the tub, and by that time tissue had already sloughed from Nancy’s arms and her face sagged in a way that betrayed more than exhaustion. Sonja opened the cold water faucet all the way and held her mother’s head as the tub filled.

Sonja began to cry when she saw it was hopeless: her mother leaked away from her bones, out of her clothing and formed a gray scum on the surface of the tub. At the worst, bubbles roiled through the water and Nancy’s scalp and right ear came off in Sonja’s hands as she tried to keep her mother’s head above water. Finally, she had to let her go.

Sonja sat on the floor with her back to the tub when Sergeant Trethewey appeared in the doorway.

“Sonja, my God!” was all he could say.

The tub water flowed over and spilled the stinking debris of Nancy Bartlett across the bathroom floor, mixing with the huge clumps of blonde hair that Sonja had left behind. Sergeant Trethewey became the bravest man Sonja knew when he stepped into the mess, reached past her and shut off the water.