Novelties & Souvenirs by John Crowley Page B

face made for no one but herself, that was actually quite unlike her. The mirror Georgie.
    RESET .
    ACCESS . By a bizarre coincidence here she is looking in another mirror. I think the Wasp could be confused by mirrors. She turns away, the Wasp adjusts; there is someone asleep, tangled in bedclothes on a big hotel bed, morning, a room-service cart. Oh: the Algonquin: myself. Winter. Snow is falling outside the tall window. She searches her handbag, takes out a small vial, swallows a pill with coffee, holding the cup by its body and not its handle. I stir, show a tousled head of hair. Conversation—unintelligible. Gray room, whitish snow light, color degraded. Would I now (I thought, watching us) reach out for her? Would I in the next hour take her, or she me, push aside the bedclothes, open her pale pajamas? She goes into the john, shuts the door. The Wasp watches stupidly, excluded, transmitting the door.
    RESET , finally.
    But what (I would wonder) if I had been patient, what if I had watched and waited?
    Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport. Whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon, there is no fun in replaying it. The waiting is excruciating. How often, in five years, in eight thousand hours of daylight or lamplight, might we have coupled, how much time expended in lovemaking? A hundred hours, two hundred? Odds were not high of my coming on such a scene; darkness swallowed most of them, and the others were lost in the interstices of endless hours spent shopping, reading, on planes and in cars, asleep, apart. Hopeless.
    ACCESS . She has turned on a bedside lamp. Alone. She hunts amid the Kleenex and magazines on the bedside table, finds a watch, looks at it dully, turns it right side up, looks again, and puts it down. Cold. She burrows in the blankets, yawning, staring, then puts out a hand for the phone but only rests her hand on it, thinking. Thinking at 4:00 A.M . She withdraws her hand, shivers a child’sdeep, sleepy shiver, and shuts off the light. A bad dream. In an instant it’s morning, dawn; the Wasp slept, too. She sleeps soundly, unmoving, only the top of her blond head showing out of the quilt—and will no doubt sleep so for hours, watched over more attentively, more fixedly, than any peeping Tom could ever have watched over her.
    RESET .
    ACCESS .
    “I can’t hear as well as I did at first,” I told the director. “And the definition is getting softer.”
    “Oh sure,” the director said. “That’s really in the literature. We have to explain that carefully. That this might be a problem.”
    “It isn’t just my monitor?” I asked. “I thought it was probably only the monitor.”
    “No, no, not really, no,” he said. He gave me coffee. We’d gotten to be friendly over the months. I think, as well as being afraid of me, he was glad I came around now and then; at least one of the living came here, one at least was using the services. “There’s a slight degeneration that does occur.”
    “Everything seems to be getting gray.”
    His face had shifted into intense concern, no belittling this problem. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, see, at the molecular level where we’re at, there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose—you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got, but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off.”
    “It does?”
    “We think it does. Sure it does, we promise it does. We predict that it will.”
    “But you don’t know.”
    “Well, well you see we’ve only been in this business a short while. This concept is new. There were things we couldn’t know.” He still looked at me, but seemed at the same time to have forgotten me. Tired. He seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition. “You might start getting some snow,” he said softly.
    ACCESS RESET