Green Mars(185)
And so it might be with this news of Frank and John.
She tried to remember. She tried with all her might to remember Frank Chalmers, to really remember him. She had spoken with him that night in Nicosia, in an encounter unremarkable for its awkwardness and tension, Frank as always acting aggrieved and rejected. . . . They had been together at the very moment John was being knocked unconscious, and dragged into the farm and left to die. Frank couldn’t have . . .
But of course there were surrogates. You could always pay people to act for you. Not that the Arabs would have been interested in money per se. But pride, honor— paid in honor, or in some political quid pro quo, the kind of currency Frank had been so expert at printing. . . .
But she could remember so little of those years, so little of the specifics. When she put her mind to it, and forced herself to remember, to recollect, it was frightening how little came up. Fragments; moments, potsherds of an entire civilization. Once she had been so angry she had knocked a coffee cup off a table, the broken handle bare like a half-eaten bagel on a table. But where had that been, and when, and with whom? She couldn’t be sure! “Aahh,” she cried involuntarily, and the haggard antediluvian face in the mirror suddenly disgusted her with its pathetic reptile pain. So ugly. And once upon a time she had been a beauty, she had been proud of that, she had used it like a scalpel. Now . . . her hair had gone from pure white to a dull gray in recent years, changed somehow in the last treatment. And now it was thinning, for God’s sake, and only in some places while not in others. Disgusting. And once a beauty, once upon a time. That hawkish regal face— and now— As if the Baroness Blixen, also a rare beauty in her youth, had crumbled into the syphilitic witch Isak Dinesen and then lived on for centuries after that, like a vampire or a zombie— a ravaged living lizard of a corpse, 130 years old, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. . . .
She strode to the sink and yanked on the side of the mirror, revealing a crowded medicine cabinet. Nail scissors on the top shelf. Somewhere on Mars they made nail scissors, of magnesium no doubt. She took them down and pulled a hank of hair out from her head till it hurt, and cut it off right against her scalp. The blades were dull, but if she pulled hard enough they worked. She had to be careful not to cut her scalp, some tiny remnant of her vanity would not allow that. So it was a long, tedious, painstaking and pain-giving job. But a comfort, somehow, to be so distracted, so methodical, so destructive.
The initial cut was ragged enough to require a great deal of trimming, which took a long time. An hour. But she could not make the hairs come to the same length, and finally she got out the razor from the shower, and finished by shaving, patting with toilet paper the cuts that bled copiously, ignoring the old scars revealed, the awful bumps and hollows of the bare skull, so close under the skin. It was hard to do it all without ever looking at the monstrous face hanging from the front of the skull.
When she was done she stared ruthlessly at the freak in the mirror— androgynous, withered, insane. The eagle become vulture: skin head, wattled neck, beady eyes, hook nose, and the lipless downturned little mouth. Staring at this hideous face, there were long, long moments when she could not remember a single thing about Maya Toitovna. She stood frozen in the present, a stranger to everything.
• • •
A knock at the door made her jump, and released her. She hesitated, suddenly ashamed, even frightened. Another part of her croaked, “Come in.”
The door opened. It was Michel. He saw her and stopped in the doorway. “Well?” she said, staring at him and feeling naked.
He swallowed, cocked his head. “Beautiful as ever.” With a crooked grin.
She had to laugh. She sat on her bed and began to weep. She sniffed and sniffed. “Sometimes,” she said, wiping her eyes, “sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get so tired of it, of everything that I’ve done.”
Michel sat beside her. “We’re locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be— convict, or idiot?”
Maya shook her head. “I was down in the park with Vlad and Ursula and Marina and Sax who hates me, and looking at them all, and we have to do something, we really do, but looking at them and remembering everything— trying to remember— we suddenly all seemed such damaged people.”
“A lot has happened,” Michel said, and put his hand on hers.
“Do you have trouble remembering?” Maya shivered, and clasped his hand like a life raft. “Sometimes I get so scared that I’ll forget everything.” She sniffed a laugh. “I guess that means I’d rather be a convict than an idiot, to answer your question. If you forget, you’re free of the past, but nothing means anything. So there’s no escape”— she started to cry again—”remember or forget, it hurts just as bad.”