Waiting for the Blues

by Philip J. Lees

“The best thing,” Teena said, “is if we go on just as we are.” She popped a sugar cube between her teeth, picked up the glass by the handle of its stainless steel frame and sucked noisily at the strong, black, Russian tea.

The tea was a newly acquired habit of hers. Or at least, I thought it was. These days I couldn’t really be sure. Her eyes were focused on mine, but I knew that in this mood she wouldn’t care whether I responded or not.

Rows of angry pinpricks marked the spoor of the vanished facial jewellery that, until yesterday, had adorned her lips, eyebrows and the full circumference of both ears. Since then her eyebrows had been shaved and replaced by elaborately scrolling tattoos in shades of mauve and violet that began in a whorl above the bridge of her nose and spread in two wings across her forehead until the pattern degenerated into random ticks on her temples, like the tracks of some demented bird.

She had cropped her hair close to the skull and dyed it neon pink, except for two starched black tufts that sprouted obliquely and asymmetrically from high on the slopes of her cranium and had been lacquered into twisted, spiral cones.

Coiled around these gargoyle antennae, a hair-thin wire dangled beside her pale throat and disappeared below her neckline. On the other side, the wire led to a bulbous protrusion just behind her left ear, a rounded conglomeration of small spheres like a bunch of multicoloured grapes. A blue grape was fading and another was starting to glow a dull red.

“Oh no!” I thought.

Teena glanced down, then smiled. The rainbow watch on her wrist said 17.30.

The red grape glowed brighter, then began to pulsate. Teena giggled and her voice rose by an octave. She looked at me archly.

“Hey!” she squealed. “Can we go to a party?” Her expression was that of a precocious 14-year-old, just beginning to learn about womanhood.

My own esther implant burned steadily, sending a constant trickle of current to the same bunch of cells deep within my neocortex. I knew who I was. But Teena had changed hers for one with a random programming option, one that spewed the electrons from different points along its electrode spike, stimulating a different layer of the cerebral tissue each time in a maddeningly unpredictable sequence.

It made her more interesting, she said.

But which was the real Teena? Was it the frantically sad Teena, searching obsessively while not knowing what she had lost? Was it the sophisticate, the charming hostess? Was it the seductress, the Cleopatra, the Delilah? Or was it the spoilt child who now sat before me?

Teena pouted. “You’re no fun,” she said petulantly.

I had seen all these Teenas during the last twenty-four hours, but which was the real one? Which was the Teena that I loved?

“I’m going to change,” she said suddenly. Then she stood up and ran upstairs.

That turned out to be a difficult, frustrating, exhilarating evening; later, she lay in my arms. I could feel the warmth of her body down my side and a faint, aromatic yet bitter odour rose from her, a potpourri of musk, peppermint and sage. When I changed my position slightly to shift the weight from one buttock to another she stirred in her sleep and made a small sound between a cough and a whimper. Behind her ear one of the grapes glowed a soft ice blue.

Blue was good, I had learned. When she was awake that ice blue meant calm and sweet. A deeper blue on the other side of the bunch was funny and incisive. I liked that.

Green was passion: pale grass green a lascivious tease; the darker shade a fierce, insatiable yearning. Both greens had gone just before and I was exhausted.

But I could not sleep. I stroked her head and my fingers strayed towards her esther, to the tiny dials at the base that set the programming. Dared I change it?

We had talked earlier, in bed, while the grape glowed dark blue.

“Just for a while,” I said. “Just to see how it is.”

“Don’t you like me?” She squirmed her fingers around beneath my middle, feeling for the ticklish spot, but I turned my body to thwart her.

“I love you, you know that. You needn’t have it removed. Just turn it off for a while.”

“Ah, Dy, you’re so naïve.” She rolled on top of me and raised herself on her elbows. “Besides,” her lips twitched in the way I found so irresistible, “most men have only one lover. You have how many is it?” She started counting on her fingers, tapping on my chest, but I was in no mood for this.

“I only want one lover,” I said, hating myself for sounding so feeble.

“Then tell me which one. Pick a colour.” The fingers again. “Red, orange, yellow .”

But that wouldn’t do, either. “I want the real you,” I said. “Okay, white.”

“Silly Dy. You know it doesn’t work like that.” She frowned, scrunching her tattoo into new patterns. “I’ll make you a deal.” Her smile was bland, innocent, and I was instantly suspicious.

“What’s that?”

“You turn off yours, I’ll turn off mine.”

She knew I would never agree. I would stop loving her and I couldn’t bear that. I glanced at the clock by the bed and saw it was approaching the half hour. It was almost a relief when the blue faded and the grass green began to glow.

I wore my implant at Teena’s behest. She had been in a fey mood that day and, bewitched, I went along. I sat in the chair while the man shaved the spot and froze it with a spray. I held still while he positioned the stereotactic clamps and winced when the drill touched my skull. But finally it was no worse than a visit to the dentist.

“It will make you love me,” she said, and so it did. We had only been together a week but already I could not imagine life without her.

So now she slept beside me, trusting me so far. Could I betray that trust? I could switch off her esther while she slept, or even turn one of the dials, alter the programming. Had any man ever had such power over the object of his love? But to betray her like that would be like betraying one’s own child. My fingers grazed the dials, then withdrew.

We sat over breakfast the next morning. Teena was glowing fiery orange and was distant and preoccupied. She had seen her new face in the mirror that morning and hated it. She looked down at the table and slurped her cornflakes. Anything I said was met with a grunt.

“We could walk down to the pier today.”

“Uhunnh.”

When she was like this I felt it would almost be possible for me to switch off my own esther, switch off my love for her, stand up and leave. Never see her again, whoever she was.

This morning she had switched her rainbow watch for a plain, old-fashioned, round clock face with a black, imitation leather strap. It was an antique, one I had bought for her on our second date. You had to rotate the knurled wheel on the side periodically to recharge the engine that drove it. The second hand was sweeping up to twelve.

The orange faded and the ice blue came to life. Teena sighed. That was better. She looked up at me and smiled.

“Did you say something, love?”

“The pier.”

“Oh, right. That sounds nice.”

I thought that if I could get her down there, down to the parlour that did the tattoos, the piercing, the implants, perhaps I could change her mind.

We walked down to the shore hand in hand. The sun was not yet high in the sky and still reflected pink off the fluffy cirrus. The sea breeze blew foam off the tops of the waves and gulls shrieked as they dove for sprats. By the time we stepped on to the pier, Teena’s esther was pulsing red and she had started to skip along, humming to herself.

“Look, there’s the parlour,” I said. “Hey! I’ve got a fun idea. Why don’t we switch?”

She squinted up at me. “Switch?”

“You take my esther, I’ll take yours. Just for today. Then we can swap back again. I want to see what it’s like. We can share. It’ll be great.”

She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay.”

There was a strain in my guts as if I had spent the night vomiting, but I made myself lead her to the entrance, up the two wooden steps, through the glass swing door. Teena was looking around with rapt interest, as if she had never been there before.

The man was not in sight, but a receptionist sat at her desk, touching a stylus to her nails. She looked up as we entered.

“He’s doing somebody,” she said in a nasal voice. “You’ll have to wait.”

We sat down. Teena picked up a comic from the table and started thumbing through it avidly, while I sat looking at nothing, counting the seconds.

Eventually the inner door opened and a young man came out. His hair was a mass of green, corrugated spikes. His nostrils had been slit and fastened back to his cheeks with studs, exposing the soft membranes inside. Heavy brass gram weights hung from his earlobes. He walked unsteadily and his eyes were wide and bloodshot.

Is this what we’ve come to? I wondered. Do we hate ourselves so much?

I led Teena into the back room and sat her down in the chair. It was a small room, with a greenish light that illuminated the wall-charts displaying diagrams of the human head and body mapped with solid and dotted lines representing I knew not what. There was a faint smell of unidentifiable chemicals. I explained why we had come, feeling my face flush with the lie. The man lowered the stereotactic cage over Teena’s head. She was still calm, and grinned at me as he fixed the clamps. He walked around behind her and bent down to attach the extractor slide.

Then her expression changed and I knew we had waited too long. When the man moved his hand I could see her esther starting to glow yellow.

Teena’s eyes flickered. She looked wildly from side to side, as if just realising where she was. Then her mouth opened and she began to scream, a scream so sudden and so shrill that the extractor tool slipped from the man’s hand and he stepped back in alarm. She screamed again and looked at me in horror as her hands scrabbled at the stereotactic frame.

I gestured to the man urgently and he reached nervously to release the clamps, to lift the cage off Teena’s head, his hands clumsy with shock. She flung herself from the chair and hurled herself at me, her face buried in my chest, her arms squeezing me so hard I could barely catch my breath.

Once outside she thrust me away from her and glared at me with hate. The yellow grape was still pulsating.

“You bastard, Dy!” Her voice was thick and sibilant. She turned on her heel and strode away. Over her shoulder she threw at me “I never want to see you again”. But her mood would change, of that I was sure. Even at that moment I didn’t believe that she meant it.

Still numb, not really knowing what I was doing, I walked back into the parlour, into the back room. I nodded to the man and sat down in the chair. I sat there motionless as he lowered the cage, fitted the clamps, manipulated the extractor. There was no sensation, but all the same, I felt I was losing something precious.

She called me that evening, and when I heard her voice I knew that her esther must be glowing blue.

“Dy?” she said, “I’m sorry.”

And the miracle of it was, I still loved her. I told her so. The rest could wait until later.

“I don’t want to lose you,” I said. “Either way. It’s all right.” I was not being very coherent, but I knew she understood.

She would come over, she said. We could fix things up. I put the phone down on the table in relief.

Was it all, then, just a ruse? Was Teena’s esther, like mine, just jewellery, just a psychoinert light show? I could not be sure if this capricious creature that I loved was the real Teena or not, but from now on I would not care. I would stay with her, be with her, waiting for the good times. Waiting for the blues.

Waiting for the Blues

by Philip J. Lees

- End -