All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,59
that of a very solemn frog.
Dorothea dropped the figurine into Patricia’s palm, then closed Patricia’s fingers around him, for safekeeping.
“I can’t believe we didn’t kill that douchebag a long time ago.” Kawashima unlocked the Lexus and got in the driver’s seat. “Seriously, such a dick.”
Dorothea nodded and rolled her eyes.
On the drive back to San Francisco, Patricia tried to ask Kawashima about the thing Theodolphus had mentioned, the Unraveling—but of course, that sort of question was the worst possible Aggrandizement.
Patricia dozed, and in her dream she tried to figure out how Dorothea’s story ended. Then the answer came to her: the netsuke maker/assassin would have to take the frog back from his client, by force if necessary, and would sacrifice his own life in the process. The frog would have to claim someone’s life, in the end—if not the client, then the man who made it.
* * *
PATRICIA FELT ZERO closure from seeing Mr. Rose get what was coming to him. He’d seemed so pathetic, she even had to struggle to avoid feeling guilty. And she couldn’t let go of the notion that maybe Mr. Rose was telling the truth and she was doomed to become a war criminal. Kawashima kept insisting that visions of the future were worse than worthless, but then with the next breath he would tell Patricia again that her pride was dangerous. She ended up with an internal monologue that said she was a terrible, destructive person who should watch her every step.
Right after she got back from Sacramento, she had to rush to the Tenderloin to look in on Reginald, the AIDS patient she’d been assigned to as a Shanti Project volunteer. As usual, she tidied his apartment, cooked him a healthy breakfast, helped him shop. But then she paused, watching him in his unstained wooden rocking chair. And she thought, This time, I’m just going to do it. I’m going to cure him. Because why not? It would be so easy.
Except that she knew, for sure, what Kawashima and the others would say about that. You can’t just go around curing someone’s incurable disease, especially when everybody knows you were there. It would raise too many unanswerable questions. And maybe curing Reginald would be the first step toward her becoming some kind of monster, like Mr. Rose had warned.
“I hope it’s the good kind of dilemma.” Reginald broke Patricia’s reverie. “Whatever one you’re on the horns of.”
She went over and sat by Reginald, taking his hand. I’m just going to do it. She always reduced his viral load whenever she visited, anyway. Curing him outright wouldn’t be that much more of a big deal. Right?
Reginald’s studio smelled like cannabis and Nag Champa. He had a thin mustache, short gray hair and Elvis Costello glasses, and his neck had prominent tendons.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “There are so many crazy problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you’d cause another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature’s way of striking a balance? We humans don’t have any natural predators left, so nature has to find other ways to handle us.”
Reginald had tattoos all over his pale torso, one for each species of insect he had discovered across the Americas. These insect drawings resembled something out of a Victorian naturalist’s handbook, with just splashes of color here and there. As Reginald’s body had changed, his loose folds of skin and potbelly made it appear as though the locusts and butterflies were flexing their wings and twitching their heads. His pecs were all wasps, his arms sleeved with shiny chitinous beetles.
“I am, as you know, a fan of nature,” said Reginald. “And yet, nature doesn’t ‘find ways’ to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It’s more that nature’s playing field is full of traps.”
In the end, she stopped just short of curing Reginald outright. Just like always.
* * *
PATRICIA DREAMED SHE got lost in the woods, like she had when she was a girl. Stubbing her toes on roots, skidding on dead leaves, feeling