Not Doing It


I woke up on this train. She was waiting for me in the dining car, wearing a blue dress with white dots. But they weren't evenly spaced white dots, just a pattern sprayed across a night sky. I slipped into the chair across from her. I was sure I had made the decision to leave her but I was not certain I had shared it with her yet. I looked for a neutral subject. "Interesting pattern on your dress."
"It's a pattern from the sawed off shotgun that killed Vincent Vega."
There was an uncomfortable silence.

"I think we need to talk," I said.

"I think we need to communicate," she countered. "I know you are thinking about leaving me but the only reason you're thinking about that is your inflated image of yourself."

I needed more information than that so I just reflected back the end of her sentence. "My inflated image of myself?" Simultaneously I signaled the waiter to bring me coffee, miming pouring in cream so that he smiled and nodded agreement. We were communicating. I would do the same with her. What do I want and how do I want it served?

"That pisses me off," she said.

Again, I needed more information. "What pisses you off?"

"I'm trying to tell you something and you're paying attention to someone else, making hand signals."

"I was ordering coffee, and I did it that way to avoid having the waiter interrupt us. Now you've turned it around the other way so that instead of my trying to respect our conversation, and protect it from interruption, I am the one who interrupted it. I could understand if a lingerie model was shooting a beaver from fore starboard and my mind had gone numb, but in this instance you are being unfair."

Her tears were unexpected but there they were. "See what you made me do?" she asked. She was visibly annoyed at having to use her napkin to dry her eyes. She dabbed them three times each and then examined the napkin for moisture.

"I drank too much last night," I said, trying again to explore the sensitive boundary between us. I had marveled at the sensitivity of the boundary when we made love, and now I marveled at it once more.

"Fine. That explains why you were running security scans on my network."

"I'm in a delicate position here. I came in with a priority chip and I've been lucky enough to find a way to reconfigure it. The probability of your being a mole was almost eighty percent."

"You knew that when you made love to me."

"Sort of, but I had it running in the background." I was beginning to feel myself responding to her again, though what it was attracting me was invisible. It was like a tractor beam, a half million candlepower tractor beam, that was drawing her across the boundary, transforming the prickly irritation into excitement.

"Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"What you're doing. I don't want you to do that anymore."

"I'm not doing it; it's just happening."

"Really? Why am I asking you that, as if you wouldn't lie about it the same as you lied about our being made for each other?"

"I was speaking technically. We're both built on Butler 9000 architecture so we use the same operating system."

"Only a man would say that."

"Only a woman would say that. What I'm saying is in the manual. You can look it up. But of course I didn't mean that when I said we're made for each other. I meant that when we're plugged in my resisters melt, and I'm not sure that's a good thing as far as my detecting a tool kit slipping through to try and reconfigure my system."

The most difficult thing about facing Betty is her beauty. Looking directly at great beauty can create a sense of awe and reverence, and with it an urge toward something more earthy and ordinary. As if she read my thought Betty suddenly put down the napkin and smiled bravely. "There," she said, "that's over with."

"What is?" I asked.

"The surprise," she said. "You invited me to travel with you, and here I am on a train with you because I thought even though you were drinking, you knew what you were doing. Now we're on a space ship headed god knows where in time and you decide you made a mistake."

I looked out the window at the greasewood and cactus and black rain clouds appearing to flow past. The train and the landscape were generated to make travel outside time palatable to the human perceptual system, and in fact had I not had the trappings of normalcy provided by the field generator I could not have taken the time to ponder my situation.

Either she was a very good operative and was convincing me that she had some good reason to be here, or, I had in fact invited her along with me. The dining car was filling up, now, and among the diners was Luther and his Chinese girlfriend, Willow Tang. While I was watching them order, still trying to remember how I got on the same train as the woman I thought I was leaving behind, a hand rested on my shoulder for a moment. I glanced up and into the face of Bergamo. "Don't get up," he said, "I'm only passing through."

My gaze followed him as he joined Luther and Willow. "I guess Bergamo didn't find a woman for himself."

"Somebody has to stay open to new romantic interest," Betty said. That seemed to strike her as funny and she began to laugh, again dabbing at her eyes with the napkin. "So." She sighed and looked into my eyes. "How are things between you and me?"

"I have no idea. But I'm telling you the truth when I say that I'm not doing this."

She sat perfectly still for a few moments, then she shuddered, lifting her shoulders and thrusting them forward, then letting them drop as a visible wave of energy traveled down through her like an electric shock. "I know," she said. "Would you not do it one more time?"

Posted: Wed - August 8, 2007 at 11:35 AM