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She was prepared to be afraid of Marec, because she was already afraid of everyone; she’d had practice. What more did he have to offer her in the night market of fear, when she was the richest woman in the world and already owned it all?
He wanted to please them and he wanted to hurt them, a not unusual combination for Marec.
“Don’t you usually find that it’s the best of you that distracts from your work? Your moral doubts. Your maddening sense that as you get older, people get more complex. Confusion about what’s right. Self-hatred, when you disappoint yourself. Knowing your limits. God, knowing your limits, the edges of what you’re capable of seeing. As if a person can be a scientist after they’ve touched the edge of the universe and felt that it’s only paint. When you get older, your imagination stops being limitless, and then that’s it for your magic. That’s the whole kit. Roll it up and go home.”
“What makes people magnetic? As a man who has always been an inert lump of lead, I’d love to know.” “It’s ego,” said Annae immediately.
I’m telling you, people are drawn to egoists because they seem weak. They seem so damn full of themselves that you don’t need to worry that they’ll swallow you too, and they’re such simple people—you think you can manage them, can handle them, because you’ve got their number. Only pretty soon, you learn that once you’ve got theirs, they’ve got yours. And then you’re taking calls every hour of the day or night. And then this isn’t a metaphor anymore. You’re really doing it, and you’re thinking about them all the time.”
Annae had once been a small, obviously autistic child who chewed her hair and avoided people’s eyes and talked maniacally about whatever fascinated her most at the moment. She’d known no one liked her shrill voice, the keening sounds she made when she ran. She knew they didn’t like how smart she knew she was. And so she had studied style, studied whimsy, studied poise. Style, because it was a shield; whimsy, because it was a sword; poise, because it was a suit of armor.
“Small talk is the most important talk,” said Ariel, cupping his drink between his hands as if to warm either it or them. “It’s when we tell people everything. What we think is polite to ask. What we think they might like to hear. By extension, what our family is like, and our town, and our country. I don’t mean to load too much meaning onto what you think of Starbucks, of course. Small talk says more about the asker than the askee.”
“I was always proud of it,” said Annae. “Ignoring the directions. I felt like I’d passed a special test. Like I was the only girl smart enough to see it: you don’t have to believe what people say. I knew that if I disobeyed just right, I’d get a special stamp of approval from a hidden authority, just for me.” “Oh,” said Ariel, and winced a little. “I know.” “Marec and I were just like that.” Ariel finally put his drink down and sat there looking at her with a face of blank distress. “It opens us up to all sorts of exploitation—not that the exploitation is your fault.”
“What a pig.” “I should’ve known it,” said Annae. “If you’d known, you’d be just like me—not a human being.” Ariel gave a soft cough. “People like that are only transparent when you look back. Like one-way mirrors.”
His teeth were so white and his jaw was so large. Among graduate students and postdocs, permanently poor, those medieval signs of good health were sexy and kingly.
She leaned forward, into him, wishing she could get inside him, into his skin, his soul. But there was no getting in; she had not yet learned the art of reading. That, she had picked up later, when she had resolved not to let anything like him happen again.
“They bring them in to ‘collaborate’ and they steal their ideas. They tell them they’re brilliant, and then, once they’ve moved in and have gotten used to not having to live like graduate students, they tell them they’re stupid. They marry them, sometimes, in the worst cases.”
“You read minds regularly, don’t you?” “Yes,” she said, defeated; was there no one here who couldn’t tell? He nodded. “I thought so. It was just a guess. Many of my clients do, if they’ve got the capacity—it’s endemic for OCD sufferers particularly, they can’t resist checking things. Well—there’s something I always tell them.” He aimed his eyes at her, dropped his hot palm to her shoulder. “I’m not here to tell you whether it’s legal or moral. And I’m not here to judge you at all. But it’s awfully bad for most of us. You may benefit in the short term from knowing what people really think of
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All that wasted energy, spent on Modcloth dresses and vintage jewelry, on knitting and blocking complex lace.
The barista had a knitting pattern spread over the surface of the bar and was passing drumming fingers over its crisply unfolded surface, his bag of yarn close at hand with two wooden needles protruding like chopsticks. He regarded the bag as if it were a delicious meal he was about to eat.
“If you don’t forgive yourself, you will do it again. Not that thing, perhaps, but something as bad. And you must not stop there. You must forgive yourself for all of it, for everything that happened before you did this, both the things that were your fault and the things that were not. You must forgive yourself and do it again, until the very limit of your forgiveness is reached. It will hurt. People don’t understand that it hurts. When you have forgiven, you will be able to look at yourself, and then you will be able to change. Not before.”
