sorrow, but in between those two phases her whole body shakes with anger. Anger at whom, at what? Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she’s here for a reason — to bear witness, to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can’t.
It’s wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There’s nothing to be accomplished by it.
During the heat of the day, she naps. Trying to stay awake through the noontime steambath is a waste of energy.
She sleeps on a massage table in one of the cubicles where the Spa clients took their organic-botanic treatments. There are pink sheets and pink pillows, and pink blankets too — soft cuddly colours, pampering infant colours — though she doesn’t need the blankets, not in this weather.
She’s been having some difficulty waking up. She must fight against lethargy. It’s a strong desire — to sleep. To sleep and sleep. To sleep forever. She can’t live only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can’t see any future. Maybe she’ll go on from day to day and year to year until she simply withers, folds in on herself, shrivels up like an old spider.
Or she could take a shortcut. There’s always the Poppy in its red bottle, there are always the lethal amanita mushrooms, the little Death Angels. How soon before she sets them loose inside herself and lets them fly away with her on their white, white wings?
To cheer herself up, she opens her jar of honey. It’s the last one remaining from the honey she extracted so long ago — she and Pilar — up on the Edencliff Rooftop. She’s been saving it all these years as if it’s a protective charm. Honey doesn’t decay, said Pilar, as long as you keep water out of it: that’s why the ancients called it the food of immortality.
She swallows one fragrant spoonful, then another. It was hard work collecting that honey: the smoking of the hives, the painstaking removal of the combs, the extracting. It took delicacy and tact. The bees had to be spoken to and persuaded, not to mention temporarily gassed, and sometimes they’d sting, but in her memory the whole experience is one of unblemished happiness. She knows she’s deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.
19
Gradually, Toby stopped thinking she should leave the Gardeners. She didn’t really believe in their creed, but she no longer disbelieved. One season blended into the next — rainy, stormy, hot and dry, cooler and dry, rainy and warm — and then one year into another. She wasn’t quite a Gardener, yet she wasn’t a pleeblander any more. She was neither the one nor the other.
She’d venture out onto the street now, though she didn’t go far from the Garden, and she’d cover herself well and wear a nose cone and a wide sunhat. She still had nightmares about Blanco — the snakes on his arms, the headless women chained to his back, his skinless-looking blue-veined hands coming for her neck. Say you love me! Say it, bitch! During the worst times with him, during the most terror, the most pain, she’d focus on those hands coming off at the wrists. The hands, other parts of him. Grey blood gushing out. She’d picture him stuffed into a garboil boiler, alive. Those had been violent thoughts, and since joining the Gardeners she’d sincerely tried to erase them from her brain. But they kept coming back. She was told by those in nearby sleeping cubicles that she sometimes made what they called “signals of distress” in her sleep.
Adam One was aware of these signals. She had come, over time, to realize it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Though his beard had now turned an innocent feathery white and his blue eyes were round and guileless as a baby’s, though he seemed so trusting and vulnerable, Toby felt she would never encounter anyone as strong in purpose. He didn’t wield this purpose like a weapon, he simply floated along inside it and let it carry him. That would be hard to attack: like attacking the tide.
“He’s in Painball now, my dear,” he told her one fine