Chapter 6 #3
I shrugged. It was something Ward did when people expressed sympathy about his spinal injury. “It’s over now,” I replied. It was one of the more banal things I could say.
Raj grimaced. “Now I feel like a jerk for asking,” he said, his mouth still a little twisted. “You probably don’t much want to talk about it.”
I shrugged again. “Talking isn’t the problem,” I said softly.
Thinking about it wasn’t pleasant, but it was what had happened to me.
I couldn’t not think about it—or I shouldn’t, anyway, at least according to the psychologist I’d seen for the first few years after being released.
It was healthy to think about it sometimes, to acknowledge that it had happened, to process, and then to return to the present.
Or so the psychologist had told me.
Most of the time, I could think about it in the abstract—like it had happened to someone else rather than to me.
But, sometimes, it snuck up on me. A slithery feeling like I’d sometimes gotten around some of the orderlies and doctors who reveled in their power over us, making us feel fear or driving us deeper into depressive episodes.
Sometimes far enough that patients took their own lives, either to end their personal torment or to escape the endless cycles of psychological, physical, sexual, and metaphysical torture inflicted on those of us who had natural or post-viral arcane abilities.
There were a handful of patients without magic—they didn’t last very long, either because their families would reclaim them or because they couldn’t withstand the onslaught.
None of this was exactly what you would call ‘dinner conversation,’ though, so I wasn’t sure what to say to Raj.
Across the table, he grimaced. “Sorry. It’s none of my business, anyway.” He cleared his throat. “And it’s not very pleasant, I’m sure, so we should talk about something else.”
I nodded, but I’d started down a spiraling mental pathway, and I wasn’t sure how to pull myself back up out of it, unable to think about anything else besides Tranquil Brook.
Raj coughed a little. “You don’t—play sports or anything?”
I looked up at him, blinking, as though I’d just stepped out into the light. “No?” I didn’t. I’d never, as far as I could remember, played any kind of sport.
“Do you watch?”
I shook my head.
He grimaced. “Me, neither, honestly,” he said. “Hart does—he’s obsessed with the Packers.”
I’d known that. You couldn’t work with Hart through a football season without knowing that.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” Raj apologized again. “We were doing good with books—what are you currently reading?”
It might have been awkward, but it was helping me to drag my focus back to the here and now. I swallowed, then answered him. “2312.”
“What’s with you and books with numbers for titles?” He was teasing, I could tell, but I just shrugged, smiling. “What’s it about?”
I let out a long breath, thinking. “A lot of things. But the futurism is interesting—using asteroids as means of conveyance, but sort of like solar-system cruise ships with vivariums inside. A city on Mercury that travels constantly at the edge of twilight. And it’s a mystery.”
“Who’s it by?” he asked, then sat back as the server appeared with a large plate of fries smothered in gooey pimento cheese, bacon, green onions, and jalapenos. Raj immediately grabbed two and stuck them in his mouth, making a low thrumming sound in his throat as he chewed.
“Kim Stanley Robinson,” I replied, then took a fry for myself.
The rich cheese, salt, and strong flavors of onion, jalapeno, and bacon flooded my mouth.
I’d not had the loaded ones before. If Hart got fries to bring to work to share, they never had bacon, since he, Ward, and Mason couldn’t eat it, and the preferences of the majority usually overruled the rest of us, which was only fair.
But now I’d know what I was missing. I took another fry.
“Have you read the Mars trilogy?” Raj asked me before taking more fries himself.
I shook my head.
“They were interesting,” he said. “A lot of climate and ecology stuff.” He took a couple more fries, then chewed. “The only other thing of his I’ve read is Years of Rice and Salt, but that’s alternate history.”
“What kind?” I asked.
“What might have happened if almost all of Europe was wiped out in the Black Death,” came the reply, then he grinned. “A lot fewer white people, for one thing.”
I felt my cheeks flush a little. “So less imperialism?” I suggested. It was something Mason talked about a lot—imperialism. The slave trade, European exploration and expansion. Genocide.
Raj chuckled. “You’d think so, but not really. Just different imperialism. It’s not like there weren’t non-white empires, after all.”
I thought about this. “China?” I guessed.
“And Indigenous North and South-central Americans, an Islamic empire—not surprising, given the prominence of the Ottomans—Japan, also not terribly surprising, and some other regions.” He smiled. “Humans are humans, no matter what color their skin is or where they come from, at least in that book.”
I smiled back, then ate another fry. “I’ll have to read them,” I said.
“I’ll trade you for IQ84.”