When she looks up from the amorphous stanza she realizes she’s walked out of the area backstage and into the wings. Red curtain legs hang ranked alongside her, and she peers around them to see the grand drapes drawn shut behind a false proscenium. This device, she recalls, is called a tormentor.
Is there an audience out there? Of whom or what would it be composed? She almost doesn’t want to look, but her father would admonish her for willful blindness. Aniridia thinks of his poetry books and goofy legerdemain, and pulls the velvet apart to step out onto the apron.
His finger aches as he dyes the vellum crimson.
Paper sucks blood away, a capillary hunger he finds it somehow hard to watch, but soon the model is finished. He sets it in place and the light flares green and purple, colors of greed. It’s lapping at him. It is pulling him down.
The auditorium.
He crouches in the aisle, nauseated, feeling like a rough stone in a tumbler from his own graceless travel. But he’s back. He stumbles to his seat to find his notebook, a battered little thing covered in strata of ink.
A sound makes him look up.
They’re tourists, in Tasmania.
Ashlock flicks fragments of Twistie at the emus under the sign that says not to flick fragments of Twistie at the emus. Her new finger is clumsy, but she likes it. Nobody’s going to confiscate this brass knuckle.
“So,” she says finally, “any holes in your brain?”
“The first illegal number I ever memorized,” Tach says, “was set down in haiku. A clever form of transcoding. It unlocked certain rights for the management of digital media.”
“I’m sorry I did it,” says Ashlock.
“You did all right. One has to know something before one can forget it.”
They’re hard to kill, but oh, they do age. Â Slow, but they do.
Yarrow hasn’t had his own teeth in decades. Â He finds ways, though: his old-fashioned razor, his tongue, and the subtle Band-Aid. Â His eyes and voice still work their old glamor, and if the nurses and aides seem a bit pale and sickly, well, you know how things go around.
It’s a flexible facility, and if he wants to take his meals in his room and draw the blinds, well, it’s his money. Â Mr. Yarrow’s been here a long time. Â He deserves respect.
And on Saturday nights, there’s Bingo.