Even Thieves And Scoundrels

In her dream the fingers are her father's fingers, rising from the white surface of the bed where he lies, the hand that anchors them palm up, as if cupping an invisible object, or the essence of a question his raspy voice is no longer capable of forming. 'Mija' is the only word that slips from his dry lips in these final days: my daughter. It is followed by a pause. Eventually he sighs and shakes his head, resigned to his inability to go on.

Light grazes the fingertips, tinting them a pale, indefinable color in the dark. They seem oddly distant now, cold and unmoving. Gradually Marita realizes that her eyes are open. She stirs, props herself up on one elbow, then slips carefully toward the edge of the bed and sits up in the close darkness. A long, irregular puddle of moonlight stains the carpet and crawls up the front of the dresser, softly lighting the objects on top: the side of a folded sweater, a small glass bottle shaped like a bird, the curved fingers of Alex's prosthesis. Behind it, in shadow, sits the jumble of harness he wears with it.

Marita stands, intending to approach the window, but drifts past it and finds herself in front of the artificial arm. Smooth and spare, the forearm section isn't much wider than the area that would take up essential bone on a living limb. The hand is covered with a pseudo-skin glove that mimics reality down to the occasional hair. It's nothing like the first hand, of too-smooth plastic that resembled a lab glove, with a surface that stained and fingertips that eventually cracked with wear.

So much has changed.

A muffled snort comes from the shadows on the bed, Alex missing a breath--undoubtedly in a dream--then pulling in air. After a moment he groans, rolls onto his side and falls into soft snoring.

She smiles ruefully. They aren't lovers in the normal sense. They're refugees, invisible survivors of a disaster that has yet to occur. Fate and circumstance have been their Cupid.

She crosses her arms and hugs herself against the chill of cool satin. After a moment she reaches for a shawl spread over the back of the room's only chair and pulls it around her. It is her grandmother's, one of her few personal mementos, a placeholder for the life that evaporated when she was fifteen and her father was unexpectedly sucked into the work of the consortium.

It is the second night.

It's become a predictable pattern: Alex flies in after weeks or months out of the country and they go through a wary dance, like dogs with their ears pressed back, testing each other's trustworthiness. If the concerns of the moment weigh particularly heavily--if there's been a glitch in the production of the secret vaccine; if a threat of exposure has come from some unexpected quarter; if he arrives bearing news of yet another puzzling abduction in Kazakhstan--then Alex retires to his hotel and she to her apartment.

But by the end of the second day the need to let down--to drink, to laugh in spite of the madness, to loosen burdens and clothing--gets the better of them and they end up in this secluded attic apartment.

A completely forgettable, ordinary garret, it sometimes seems to whisper to her of scenarios that can never be: a world where the planet is not an upturned hourglass counting down its last few minutes worth of sand; where life could be looked at as a ripening fruit to be tended and anticipated. A place where relationships are nothing more complicated than two people who meet and find themselves drawn to each other.

She turns away from the dresser, gathers the shawl more closely around her and forces a grim smile into the darkness. There are people who live by those simple dreams, but she knows what their fate will be.

She pauses at the window, considers for a moment her colorless, almost gaunt reflection--a ghost of herself, just as she has become a ghost of Martin Covarrubias' daughter, flitting behind the scenes, slipping in and out of board rooms, of alliances, trading personas and truths in the pursuit of a fragile plan for survival. She shivers suddenly from the chill coming through the glass and returns to the bed where Alex is sprawled almost diagonally. After a moment she sits down on the edge.

The bed sags beneath her and warm fingers creep out to touch the shawl's fringe, then tangle in it, exploring. She sits up straighter, instinctively on alert. In spite of their growing intimacy, their interaction is complex, a dance of scorpions whose stingers cannot safely be ignored.

"Whaddizit?" he mumbles thickly. One eye opens, fixes on her and immediately closes again.

But this is night. He's half-asleep, maybe more, and still jet-lagged.

"A shawl. My grandmother's." She clears her throat.

"You cold?"

"A little."

"Can't sleep?"

She shakes her head knowing full well he can't see the gesture. She gazes at him in the shadows: on his stomach now, a fine line of stubble accentuating cheek and jawbone, the stump of his missing arm lost in a jumble of blankets and darkness, giving the illusion of a man perfectly whole. She glances up at the close, sloping roof and back and imagines him an ordinary man--a Felipe to her Paloma, Mikhail to her Katya--a man with a commonplace job delivering packages or selling stock or climbing power poles for a utility company. And herself a girl working in an office, or arranging flowers at a florist's.

"Did you like her?"

His voice startles her. She feels her face flush and turns away.

"What?"

"Your grandmother."

*I loved her*. The words sound maudlin, even in her mind. Or perhaps they simply reveal too much. When she ventures a look in his direction, she finds his eyes open and makes herself nod. "She was an exceptional woman. A strong woman." A good woman. Years ago, before this madness overtook her family, it would have seemed only right to say so. Now the sentiment seems naive and irrelevant.

Alex scoots back, rolls onto his side and lifts the covers. "You're shivering, milaya," he says matter-of-factly. "Come in."

Instead she stands and goes to the window, stops close and watches her breath make delicate fog on the small panes of glass. It's pointless-- potentially disastrous--to think about what can't be, to dream of a soft, illusory world when strength and toughness are critical to your survival--to the potential survival of countless human lives.

She pulls the shawl closer around her shoulders. Its soft, almost weightless fibers settle near her neck and throat, spreading welcome, gentle warmth, and she finds herself lured into childhood memories: her grandmother greeting her, a festive table set for a family dinner, a roomful of people clapping in time to the music of her uncle's lively guitar. She starts involuntarily when a hand closes over her shoulder.

"What is it, Mare?"

She shivers at his unexpected touch and stares at the darkened city shapes beyond the glass. Finally she notices the eyes of Alex's grayish image peering at her from behind her own pale reflection. She looks away. "Silly things." Childish things. Her lips part, then pause. "Ordinary people. Ordinary lives."

Alex grunts softly. The hand leaves her shoulder and she listens to him cross to the small bathroom, hears the sounds of splashing in the toilet followed by a flush. The squeaking of the door moments later announces his return.

"You know, it's the same for them," he says, coming up behind her. His voice is gritty, she can't tell if from grogginess or some emotion. "You don't have one crisis, you have another."

"Then there's no escape."

"There never was, milaya." His arm comes around her shoulders from behind; his body is warm at her back. "You need your rest," he says. His breath on the back of her neck sends a shiver down her arms. "Fatigue leads to slip-ups and you know we can't afford that."

I know, she thinks as he moves away, leaving her cold with his absence. She listens as he returns to the bed and crawls in between the covers, then reluctantly loosens her grip on the shawl and lets it slip from her shoulders. She returns it to the chair, spreading it carefully across the back. In bed, she plumps up the pillow and settles on her back, pulling the blankets high around her neck.

Marita closes her eyes, listens to the room's silence, to the sound of Alex's soft breathing. In her mind's eye she pictures her rigid position as if looking down on herself from above. Two allies in bed-- for now. Someday they could find themselves working at cross-purposes. There's no certainty--not in life nor in the links and relationships that form its fragile, patchwork surface. Though he could have used her opening just now to score a point in the ongoing thrust-and-parry that often characterizes them. That he didn't leaves her immensely grateful.

Alex shifts beside her, his chin coming to rest against her shoulder. A moment later he moves again, reaches out and she finds herself being turned and gathered in against him, enveloped in the simple comfort of skin on skin. She slips an arm around his waist, wraps her legs around one of his. He grunts in satisfaction.

"Sleep, krasavitsa," he murmurs into her hair.

Gradually she relaxes, lulled by the muffled thump-thump of his heart beneath her ear. In the morning they will once again be their daytime selves--sharp, wary strategists beset by the nagging tension of their shadow campaign. But night seems to bring with it a necessary, unspoken truce.

*Even thieves and scoundrels need shelter from the rain, hija*, her father used to say when she'd notice some ragged stranger being fed in the family's back kitchen. The words come to her now in her father's own inimitable voice, strange but comforting after his years of absence. Her arm tightens around Alex and she breathes in the close heat and soap scent of his body.

As the conscious world begins to dissolve around her, she feels light fingers trail through the hair above her temple, stroking the softness there. He's saying something in Russian, though she's too far-gone to grasp the words. His voice, low and mellow, seems to carry the cadence of poetry.

Notes on the Spanish:
hija: daughter (pronounced EE-ha)
mija: my daughter; what you get in colloquial pronunciation when the words involved (mi + hija) are slurred together, as they commonly are.

Notes on the Russian:
milaya: a common endearment that can either be casual or tender depending on its usage
krasavitsa: beautiful (referring to a woman)