The Doll 34（文稿）

英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

Chapter 34
In the low light coming from the bathroom, both women stared at each other: Neeva at what had been added, Munroe at what had been taken away.
“You look different,” Neeva said.
“So do you.” Younger. More helpless. Tinier, if such a thing was possible.
“Trying to wash out the curls only gave me a clown wig,” Neeva said. “I figured this was better than being reminded of them every time I looked in a mirror.”
She lowered her eyes. “What do you think?”
“Kind of gives you an emaciated concentration-camp-survivor look,” Munroe said. “Or maybe chemo.”
Neeva half smiled and her cheeks flushed. “It’s sort of a disguise.”
Munroe stood, secured the weapon in her waistband. Ran her palm over Neeva’s shaved head. “I’ll help you with the spots you missed,” she said.
Munroe put Neeva’s head over the sink and, with razor in hand, worked over the stubbled patches.
Said, “Why’d you do the identity change before heading to Hollywood? You have a good relationship with your parents, so it’s not like you were running away or anything.”
Munroe shut off the water, handed Neeva a towel. Neeva rubbed a hand over her head and smiled. “It’s smooth,” she said,
and then her expression changed. “My mom was always really good about keeping me out of the limelight, not using us kids as chips in her politics.”
Neeva dropped the towel into the sink. “We weren’t part of the whole stage, stumping for votes as part of the wholesome family image, but I still saw what happens when people know your name and your face.
“They constantly twisted what my mom said or did to turn opinions and projections into truths,
“but where it got totally crazy was how they did it to the rest of my family, who didn’t even have anything to do with anything.”
Neeva slid down the wall and stretched her legs out so that her feet nearly touched Munroe’s.
“There’s no such thing as truth, that’s what I learned,” she said. “Only opinions people want you to believe as truth.”
She ran a hand against her scalp once more and smiled again. “I knew that once I got work in Hollywood, everything about me would become public property and I’d have to deal with that same issue.
“I didn’t want the movies and the roles I took to impact my mother’s career— didn’t want to worry that my potty mouth or late-night partying would become her politics or that my own talent would be smothered by her shadow.
“I just wanted to be me without the baggage, so I changed my name, invented a past, and started clean.”
Munroe said, “Funny how that decision came full circle.”
“What do you mean?”
Munroe stood and, hand outstretched for Neeva to follow, led her back to the bedroom and out of the confining space, where it had been harder to keep attuned to the sounds in the hallway and the street.
She listened and, certain that things were still as they should be, said, “The same baggage you tried to save yourself and your family from is pretty much what saved you now— all the media attention, the speculation, put your face on every TV in the world.”
Neeva sat on the floor beside the mattress. “I guess,” she said, and Munroe tossed a package of cookies and a bottle of juice in her direction.
Neeva touched the mattress. “Why is this here?”
“So when the shooting starts and I shove you into the bathroom, I can put another layer of protection between you and the bullets.”
“I thought I was here to help.”
“You won’t be much help if you’re dead.”
“But what about you?”
Munroe joined Neeva on the floor. Placed herself so that the room’s one window was ahead on the opposite wall and the hallway door between her and Neeva.
Unlike American construction, which relied heavily on drywall to partition rooms and often used hollow doors, this hotel was European and old,
which meant stone and solid wood— meant that unless Lumani or Arben Number Two, or anyone else who might be with them, intended to blow the place up, they’d be coming through one of those two openings.
Munroe put the Jericho on the floor, took a cookie out of Neeva’s package.
“Like I told you, if I don’t get them first, then I’m dead either way, so it doesn’t much matter.”
“Who did that to you?” Neeva said, and she moved to touch Munroe’s torso but stopped with her hand hovering in the air above the jacket.
Those who dared to ask about the scars inevitably used questions framed in the context of what and how, but Neeva had cut to the heart of the question with who.
Munroe glanced at her, one victim of violence to another. Neeva withdrew her hand and, like a wounded child, went back to the cookies.
“It was a long time ago,” Munroe said. “Done over the course of a few years by a man quite similar to the one who put the purchase price out for you.”
“Do you ever think about trying to get even?”
“He’s dead now.”
Neeva stopped chewing and very slowly swallowed. “Did you kill him?”
“Yes,” Munroe said, mimicking the slow speech, “I did.”
“Was it difficult to get away with it?”
Munroe shifted, shoulder to the wall, so that she stared fully at the girl.
Measured and deliberate, she said, “It was a long time ago, in a place most people don’t know exists. Why all the questions, Neeva?”
Neeva shrugged. “Sometimes I think about how it would feel.”
“Revenge is best left to fantasy,” Munroe said. “It feels better there.
“In real life you can eventually learn to deal with the pain and trauma, learn to cope on some level, you know?
“But you can never undo death, and even if you think they deserve it, killing doesn’t take away your pain, just puts you on dangerous ground that can collapse out from beneath you at any time.”
“You did it.”
Munroe stared at her a moment longer, thoughts running in a melee that amounted to My point exactly, but she said, “I did.
“Partially out of revenge and partially to save my life and the lives of future victims, but even if it had been entirely to settle a score, that means I, of all people, should know.”
Without meeting Munroe’s eyes, Neeva nibbled on a cookie, said, “Would you take it back if you could?”
“I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t paid a price.”
Neeva huffed. “Well, I still think people like this doll guy and the Pretty Boy, people like them, will never learn or ever stop unless someone goes up against them, fight fire with fire, you know? Someone has to teach them.”
“The problem with fighting fire with fire is that you can get burned and you risk becoming like them.”
“Has that happened to you?”
“It has at times,” Munroe said, and shifted back against the wall, forearms resting on bent knees, and stared across the room at the curtained window.
Neeva tilted sideways and tipped her head so that she rested against Munroe’s shoulder.
“I like you, Michael,” she said, “even if sometimes you don’t like yourself a whole lot.”
Munroe smiled, leaned over, and kissed the smooth top of Neeva’s head.
“Thank you,” she said, and after a pause, “What happened to the one who hurt you?”
“Nobody knows,” Neeva said. “They never found him.”
Munroe understood, then, what had driven Neeva to leave the safety of the consulate.
The offer to give herself up as bait was more than just an exchange of one life for many lives.
Neeva’s actions were those of trauma victim refusing to be the victim again— revenge surrogacy, insistence on playing an active role in what happened next.
She rested her cheek where her kiss had met smooth skin.
“How do you know about the man with the dog?” Neeva asked. “Who he is and what he has planned?”
“I don’t know who he is,” Munroe said, “only what he represents.”
“So you’re guessing?”
Munroe shrugged Neeva off her shoulder and placed her hands, fingers splayed, across her abdomen.
“There are these. The man with the dog is just another version of the psychopath with the knife.”
She turned to Neeva. “He paid to have you kidnapped so he could own you as a slave. Do the details of why or what for make a difference?”
“Not really,” Neeva said. “I mean, sort of, in terms of physical pain and the idea of murder, they do.
“But people like the doll guy who sells women and the dog guy who buys women, and other guys who, say, rape women, or maybe don’t go as far as violent rape but treat women like objects instead of people—
“sure, there’s a difference in the level of crime, but it’s all the same thing, where women become a canvas for throwing emotional baggage, Jackson Pollock style.”
Munroe said, “Those are some pretty big thoughts for such a little person.”
Neeva’s face clouded. Her mouth shut, then opened again. “Was that a joke?”
Munroe flicked a finger against Neeva’s nose. “Yes,” she said. “It’s called dry humor. You should try it sometime.”
Neeva smiled. Slumped back against the wall. “This doll-guy situation is an extreme of what I deal with in everyday life,” she said.
“Where men believe that what they want I want, and they project that on to me and then blame me, curse me, when I don’t respond the way they’ve fantasized, like it’s some personal attack on them, like they’re entitled to something.
“Doll guy and dog guy and rape guy, the dangerous ones, they just go a step further and take it anyway.
“Then they blame you and the way you look for what they did. What’s worse is that a lot of the time, society blames you, too.”
Munroe put her arm around Neeva and moved the girl’s head back onto her shoulder.
“You are way too young and innocent to be forced to understand these types of things,” she said.
“I’m not as innocent as you think I am.”
“And apparently not quite as naive.”
Neeva pulled her head off Munroe’s shoulder and shifted to her knees, hands on her thighs, eyes happy and smile wide, then pumped a fist and whispered, “Yessss.”
The smile and simple joy were infectious to the point that Munroe, in spite of circumstances, couldn’t help but smile in return—
a smile that faded fast in the wake of a barely perceptible tap against the door handle.
Not the movement of the door being tried but a gentle rocking of the latch in its holder as if the wood had only been touched or brushed against.
Munroe’s hand moved to the weapon on the floor. Fight-or-flight instinct would have her unload the magazine into the door and push on after the hunter,
but the same wood and stone that protected her also protected him.
Focus never leaving the hallway door, she turned slightly so that her mouth was to Neeva’s ear and whispered, “Go to the bathroom. Lock yourself inside.
“I don’t care what you hear, or what you think is going on out here, don’t come out till I call for you.”
Neeva, who’d been oblivious, turned to follow Munroe’s line of sight and, staring wide-eyed, whispered, “Are they here? I want to help.”
“You’re here. That’s the help. I need you alive. Get your gun. Go.”
Neeva reached for the weapon that lay in the shadow between mattress and wall, low-crawled to the bathroom, and with a near silent click shut herself inside, taking the light with her.
Munroe closed her eyes, allowing fingers, hands, and senses to work where sight failed, and shifted the mattress so that it straddled the bathroom door.