The Infinite Sea(87)

            I pick up the tray and hurl it onto the floor. His lips tighten, but he doesn’t say anything. Silently, he cleans up the mess while I lie panting, exhausted from the effort, sweat pouring off me.

            “Yeah, pick that up. Make yourself useful.”

            When my fever shoots up, something in my mind loosens, and I imagine I can feel the forty-four thousand microbots swarming in my bloodstream and the hub with its delicate lace of tendrils burrowed into every lobe, and I understand what my father felt in his dying hours as he clawed at himself to subdue the imaginary insects crawling beneath his skin.

            “Bitch,” I gasp. From the floor, Razor looks up at me, startled. “Leave me, bitch.”

            “No problem,” he mutters. On his hands and knees, using a wet rag to mop up the mess, and the tart smell of disinfectant. “Fast as I can.”

            He stands up. His ivory cheeks are flushed. Deliriously, I think the color brings out the auburn highlights in his blond hair. “It won’t work,” he tells me. “Starving yourself. So you better think of something else.”

            I’ve tried. But there’s no alternative. I can barely lift my head. You belong to them now. Vosch the sculptor, my body the clay, but not my spirit, never my soul. Unconquered. Uncrushed. Uncontained.

            I am not bound; they are. Languish, die, or recover, the game’s over, the grand master Vosch mated.

            “My father had a favorite saying,” I tell Razor. “We call chess the game of kings because, through chess, we learn how to rule kings.”

            “Again with the chess.”

            He drops the dirty rag into the sink and slams out the door. When he returns with the next meal, there’s a familiar wooden box beside the tray. Without a word, Razor picks up the food and dumps it into the trash, tosses the metal tray into the sink, where it lands with a loud clang. The bed hums, maneuvering my body into a sitting position, and he slides the box in front of me.

            “You said you didn’t play,” I whisper.

            “So teach me.”

            I shake my head and say to the camera behind him, “Nice try. But stuff it up your ass.”

            Razor laughs. “Not their idea. But speaking of asses, you can bet yours I got permission first.”

            He opens the box, pulls out the board, fumbles with the pieces. “You got your queens and kings and the prawns and these guard-tower-looking things. How come every piece is like a person except those?”

            “Pawns, not prawns. A prawn is a big shrimp.”

            He nods. “That’s the name of a guy in my unit.”

            “Shrimp?”

            “Prawn. Never knew what the hell it meant.”

            “You’re setting it up wrong.”

            “That could be because I don’t know how to freaking play. You do it.”

            “I don’t want to do it.”

            “Then you’re conceding defeat?”

            “Resigning. It’s called resigning.”

            “That’s good to know. I have a feeling that’ll come in handy.” Smiling. Not the Zombie high-voltage type. Smaller, subtler, more ironic. He sits beside the bed and I catch a whiff of bubble gum. “White or black?”

            “Razor, I’m too weak to even lift—”

            “Then you point where you want to go and I’ll move you.”