Elvissey Read Free Page B

fullbodied ifemptyfaced, circled round-
rosied, their dance forever macabring.
    "Years, making," Tanya said, responding to another's
question. "I despaired, sometimes."
    "How'd you bleach the bones?" I asked.
    "China White," she explained. "After beetling."
    Her little girl's face lit as if it, too, generated its own glow, reflecting much more than her mother's glory. "She loves
her brothers and sisters," Tanya said, stroking her daughter's perfect hair and hands. "When you're old enough,
sweetie."

    "Cost?" I inquired.
    Tanya shrugged; smiled. "If you have to ask-"
    I thought myself no artist; imagined I could have been a
good mother, but our marriage's anesthetic was unmarred
by creativity. When I wed John I was awared at moment one
that we were to remain childless. Though insistent guards,
such asJohn, were allowed conjunction, Dryco's concern for
familial stability demanded that from Security unions no
progeny might spring, to be too early orphaned. By directive, not even seed could be gathered in advance to later
plant, pre- or post-retirement; all guards were clipped
before being diplomaed, the vasect required before they
could receive Jake's book. Often before learning there was
one I dreamt of a parallel world, where John was a good
father and I, a good mother.
    "Iz," he said, with stiff fingers touching my arm with fly's
lightness; as had his old overseer, he avoided my eyes, as if
undesiring to see what was lost. "Homeaway now. Age befalls the legs. I beg."
    "Moment."
    In that other world, would our counterparts be birthed? If
they were, and if they married, would they create? Or, once
joined, would they live as we had, sans art, a cozy couple
separate yet equal, sharing an isotope's halflife, clinging to
madness to which they'd most familiared, shielding themselves against vaster insanities whirling without?
    Was that love? What was its cost? If you have to ask ...
Before homing I charged up an exhibit disk that I could
review later at leisure, discerning what I'd overlooked; finding those unintended truths artists so well as critics failed to
see even when shown, the ones most meaningful, because
most disturbing.

    "Love you," I told my husband, "overmuch." He nodded;
he knew.
    Aiming Bronxward up Broadway our car carried us home;
through smoked windows we eyed tripleshifters deconstructing the walls between Harlem and Washington Heights as
the northern, higher parts of Manhattan underwent their
own regooding. So few still lived on either side of the walls
that such security had for years been so superfluous as those
who'd once lived there; I'd lived there, as a child. We'd
grown together in Washington Heights, me and Judy and
poor lost Lola, inloading info, streetsmarting, grasping our
world's way in a moment's breath if and when essentialled;
I regooded myself, once I left.
    Looking upward through the roof I gazed toward Godness; saw no spark, no sign, no flare of St. Elmo's fire.
Mundanities blotted the night: clouds aglow with searchlight-shine coagulated on high, no sooner taking the shape
intended by those directing groundbound than breezes conspired to deface the fog-scrawled designs. Environads, when
successed, allowed Dryco to emboss its logo upon land, sky
and sea; that if tongues stilled, and screens blanked, the
rocks themselves would forever sing a song of Dryco. Airtrav-
elers descending through the yellow zone into the apparent
clear vizzed highwayside forests grown on demand, controlling erosion while, in engraven greenery, foliating the corporate sign; streams raced along rechanneled courses that
from far vistas the interested might glimpse our name writ
in water; knolls were shaved and shifted into the familiar
face's leer, eyed with boulders, smiled with a shrubbery curl,
and spelling out in hedges circled round our company's
rephrased ethos: Do Good. Feel Real. The word was too much
with us, too soon: Dryco was the word, and our world was of
the