share grief about Ralph. It was especially hard on Candi. I took on some of the fear and pain they had about their hearts. Nobody likes to face the possibility of a replacement, having a machine at the center of your life. They were likely candidates now.
When we unjacked, Candi held my hand very hard, actually just the forefinger, staring at me. “You hide your secrets better than anyone else,” she whispered.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Talk about what?” Karen said.
Candi shook her head. “Thanks,” I said, and she released my finger.
I backed out of the small room. “Be . . .,” Candi said, and didn’t complete the sentence. Maybe that was the sentence.
She had seen how profoundly I hadn’t wanted to wake up.
I called Amelia from the airport and said I’d be home in a few hours, and would explain later. It would be after midnight, but she said to come straight over to her place. That was a relief. Our relationship didn’t have any restrictions, but I always hoped she slept alone, waiting, the ten days I was away.
Of course she knew something was seriously wrong. When I got off the plane, she was there, and had a cab waiting outside.
The machine’s programming was stuck in a rush-hour pattern, so it took us twenty minutes to get home, via surface roads I never see except on bicycle. I was able to tell Amelia the basic story while we drove through the maze that avoided nonexistent traffic. When we got to the campus the guard looked at my uniform and waved us through, wonder of wonders.
I let her talk me into some reheated stir-fry. I wasn’t really hungry, but knew she liked to feed me.
“It’s hard for me to visualize,” she said, rummaging for bowls and chopsticks while the stuff warmed. “Of course it is. I’m just talking.” She stood behind me and massaged my neck. “Tell me you’re going to be all right.”
“I am all right.”
“Oh, bullshit.” She dug in. “You’re stiff as a board. You’re not halfway back from . . . wherever that was.”
She had nuked some sake. I poured a second cup. “Maybe. I . . . they let me go back and jack with Candi and Karen in the cardiac recovery unit. Candi’s in a pretty bad way.”
“Afraid of getting her heart pulled?”
“That’s more Karen’s problem. Candi’s going round and round about Ralph. She can’t handle losing him.”
She reached over me and poured herself a cup. “Isn’t she a grief counselor? Out of uniform.”
“Yeah, well, why does somebody take that up? She lost her father when she was twelve, an accident while she was in the car. That’s never buried very deep. He’s there in the background with every man she, she’s close to.”
“Loves? Like you?”
“Not love. It’s automatic. We’ve been through this.”
She crossed the kitchen to stir the pot, her back to me. “Maybe we should go through it again. Maybe every six months or so.”
I almost blew up at her, but held back. We were both tired and rattled. “It’s not at all like Carolyn. You just have to trust me. Candi’s more like a sister—”
“Oh sure.”
“Not like my sister, okay.” I hadn’t heard from her in more than a year. “I’m close to her, intimate, and I guess you could call it a kind of love. But it’s not like you and me.”
She nodded and measured the stuff into bowls. “I’m sorry. You go through hell there and get more hell here.”
“Hell and stir-fry.” I took the bowl. “Time of the month?”
She put her own bowl down a little hard. “That’s another goddamned thing. Sharing their periods. That’s more than ‘intimate.’ It’s just plain strange.”
“Well, count your blessings. You’ve got a couple of years’ peace.” The women in a platoon synchronize periods pretty quickly, and the men are of course affected. It’s a problem with the thirty-day rotation cycle: the first half of last year I came home every month crabby with PMS, proof that the brain is mightier than the gland.
“What was he like, Ralph? You never said much about him.”
“It was only his third cycle,” I said. “Still a neo. Never saw any real combat.”
“Just enough to kill him.”
“Yeah. He was a nervous guy, maybe oversensitive. Two months ago, when we were parallel-jacked, Scoville’s platoon was worse than usual, and he was bouncing around for days. We all had to hang on to him, keep him putting one foot in front of the other. Candi