Chapter 2
It takes a while for me to calm down. Johar holds me tight and finally explains what happened to me.
The virus, which I must have caught during our visit to the bordello, was transmitted by an insect. This insect worked its way through all of the blood vessels in my body, and every artery where it passed, became visible on my body within a day or two. My skin will look white and see-through, and I will have a tattoo of veins. It starts in the face and neck area, Johar explains to me. He has found a mirror somewhere, but still refuses to hand it to me. First, he wants to explain where he disappeared to so suddenly.
“When you started scratching, I saw the small, blue spots on your skin,” he says apologetically. “It was important for you to be put under a doctor’s care as soon as possible, but” he shrugs, “I know you. You would have argued with me for hours, and by then it would have been too late to save your life. So I found the space port physician and brought him to you, instead.”
“Am I really that bad?” I ask him. Strange that how I see myself is so different than how Johar sees me. I am thoroughly ashamed. He has been more than nice to me, and how have I thanked him? By erasing his memory.
“Are you ready?” he asks and hands me the mirror, with the dull side facing me. I reach for it, and turn it around with shaking hands. The first look at my face is shocking. I see nothing but a complex tangle of blue lines, starting on my forehead and going down to my cheeks. I lower the mirror, because I don’t want to look at myself. How will I dare go out from now on? With a hood over my head?
“You will get used to it,” Johar assures me. It was meant to be comforting, but all it does is make me feel worse. I don’t want to look like Sherri! Everything is spinning in my head, but I cling to one thought: I must have been infected by the whore. I ball my fists and imagine killing her with my own hands, and the madam of the house, too. Shouldn’t a whore house be subjected to regular inspections from the board of health? The two of them will suffer for this!
“Mara,” Johar interrupts my thoughts, “did you hear anything I said?” It is not easy to push the thoughts about revenge to the back of my mind.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I said that your face is still very beautiful.” He traces a line with his index finger, but I push his hand away.
“Don’t lie to me,” I blurt out, half-sobbing and half-croaking.
“Cyborgs cannot lie. Have you forgotten that?”
It’s true. A cyborg is programmed to always tell the truth. “Even worse,” I snarl at him. “That only shows how twisted your sense of beauty is.” I know that I am not being fair, but he is the only one I can take my anger out on right now. His next words still prove his patience, but I can tell that I crossed a line.
“Look at your face, Mara. The lines run parallel towards each other on either side of your face. They look like creeping flowers, like gorgeous ornamentation. They emphasize your caramel- colored eyes and make your red lips glow. How can you hate something that is so beautiful?”
Against my will, I hold the mirror up to my face again. He is right, both halves of my face have been changed in the same way. “But anyone can see that I caught this virus,” I say, although I am more gentle.
“And that is bad?” Johar shakes his head and laughs. “What do bureaucrats and accountants know about real life? Every single line is proof that you dared to live. They are like scars, or like the metal plate on my face – a sign that you showed courage.”
I put my hand on metal surface of his face. I would have never thought that he could be proud to be a cyborg, but he is. When I tell him that, he looks at me wordlessly. We are quiet for quite some time, until he interrupts the silence with a whisper. “Nobody asked me if I wanted to be what I am. But what is done, is done. I can do things no human can do. I am stronger than you and your father, and have lived a hundred lives.”
“What do you mean by that?” I frown, because I am not sure where this is going.
“I only mean that I experience enough adventure to last a human life time with every assignment,” he explains. I think about my game of “what-ifs” – and have some sense of what he means. While I have been imagining things, he has been living them.
I still haven’t come to terms with my new appearance, but it is a start. Just when I have decided that I need to accept my blue lines, Johar puts my hands in his. His thumbs stroke my skin absentmindedly. Already, my skin seems to be one or two shades lighter. His head jerks up, and I suspect that he has not told me everything. I pull my hands away, so I can put them around his and squeeze gently. He understands what I am trying to tell him, and now he shares the rest of the information about the virus.
It cannot be healed, meaning, I will have the lines for the rest of my life. I can infect others with it, but the results that I have just been admiring in the mirror only appear in women. “It is a sexually transmitted disease,” Johar says and gives me a look I cannot interpret. But then I understand and fall back onto the pillows, suddenly weak. Johar must have given me the virus. I haven’t slept with any man, other than him, in months, in years.
And now he thinks that I fooled around with another man during his absence in the bordello. He cannot remember that we were together, after all. I saw to that.
I don’t know what is worse: the irony that I, not Sherri, am responsible for my disfiguration, or the fact that now every man and every woman – starting with the crew members on the space ship – will know that I slept with someone. I can just hear the men’s jokes and the women’s whispering.
Everyone will know that I had sex, here, on Betania. And each one will wonder whom I infected myself with. Johar looks over at me, and I sigh inside. What else does he have to tell me? Isn’t it enough that my transgressions are written all over my face?
“The doctor said that the virus can have a few other less annoying side effects, but that it may not.”
“What kind?” I don’t have the strength to speak in complete sentences.
“Migraine-like headaches and uncontrollable appetite,” Johar lists them.
I make a face. “I can live with eating binges,” I remark, relieved. “Headaches are not so great, but it could be worse.”
“Hhhm,” Johar agrees. “It is also possible that you will have hallucinations, accompanied by a fever. Some infected women have developed strange abilities.”
“Strange abilities,” I repeat, like I am paralyzed. The thought occurs to me that it is more than unfair, that the virus affects women exclusively, but that it is only dormant in men.
“But that happens extremely rarely,” Johar tries to assure me, while I try to imagine how I am supposed to continue my work. My life is passing me by, as it was and as it will be. An occasionally hallucinating scientist, who also suffers from headaches and binge eating, is an impossible combination. I grow cold when I realize that my father knows about it.
Will he still love me, or will I just be useless baggage to him from now on?