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He knows.
He knows she is seeing Zosia again. She thinks she’s being sneaky about it, but Carol Sturka has all the subterfuge of a blue whale trying to hide behind a blade of grass.
Zosia doesn’t come to the house. That would be far too obvious. Instead, Carol goes to her when she claims she’s going to Sprouts.
He isn’t angry with her, though. Frustrated, yes. But angry? He can’t be. He knows she is an addict. He knows what they did to her. Which is why he knows he has to do something about it before it’s too late.
He picks up the phone and dials zero. The smooth, seductive male voice repeats the message he’s heard far too many times already, but he weathers it once again out of sheer spite. He’ll be damned if he asks them for any unnecessary favours:
“Hola, Manousos! Nuestros sentimientos por ti no han cambiado, pero necesitamos un tiempo separados. Si necesitas algo, marque el cero y háganoslo saber, y haremos todo lo posible por satisfacer sus necesidades."
“Quiero hablar con Zosia otra vez,” Says Manousos.
He puts the phone down, waits for it to ring, then picks up.
“Por qué?” says the voice.
“It concerns Carol Sturka,” he says. “I want to discuss Carol Sturka’s wellbeing. I think we have a mutual concern when it comes to that.”
There’s a pause. “Does it need to be the individual that was Zosia?”
“Yes.”
“Will Carol be there?”
“No.”
“Then we cannot risk it. We’re sorry, Manousos but we cannot put ourselves at risk after what happened with the individual known as Rick.”
Manousos smirks. “If you don’t arrange a meeting for me with Zosia it would make me very unhappy. You also have my word that I will not harm any of you. And I am a man of my word, am I not? You know that about me, at least?”
“It is true, we know from individuals who have encountered you in the past that you are unflinchingly honest. Bluntly so.”
“Yes, so…”
“Like the time you told that girl that you liked in high school that you found her conversation boring.”
“Okay, but…”
“And there was that incident with the customer a few weeks before The Joining where he mentioned his sick mother.”
“That isn’t important right now…” says Manousos.”
“I believe the words you used were: ‘Oh, is she still alive?’”
Manousos breathes hotly through his nostrils and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Are we going to set this meeting up or not?”
“Yes, we believe we would be able to do that. Would now be acceptable?”
“No. Wait until after midnight. And have Zosia park further down the road and walk up to the Wilson house.”
He can’t risk the sound of a car pulling up waking Carol.
“Alright. We will see you after midnight, Manousos. Is there anything else we can do for you?”
“No,” he says.
“Alright, see y–” Manousos hangs up.
Zosia arrives exactly 15 minutes after midnight, and Manousos suggests they talk in the kitchen.
He leans against the countertop and observes the hive’s representative coldly from across the room.
“I need you to leave Carol Sturka alone,” he says. I know she has been meeting with you privately.”
“Leaving her alone makes her unhappy.”
“She isn’t alone. I’m here.”
“Why haven’t you spoken to her about it, if you find it so unacceptable?”
Because she will absolutely not listen to me if I confront her about it. And because you don’t understand addicts. Or maybe you do, all too well.
“I know what you’re doing,” he says. “You are manipulating her into needing and trusting you. The same way she reaches for the bottle as an easy fix when things get difficult. You have all of her wife’s memories and you use them to your advantage. Because you are remorseless ghouls that will stop at nothing until she and I are part of your factory line.”
“That isn’t true. We love Carol, and you should know by now that we’d never hurt her. We only want to share our gift with her. With both of you. Once you know what it’s like I promise you that you will wonder why you ran away from the possibility for so long.”
“Stay away from her,” he growls. “Stay away from my fr-” He pauses to catch his breath.
“Stay away from her. Or I’ll scream at you again.”
“You promised not to.”
Damn, they’ve got him there.
It is an idle threat. He doesn’t want to potentially hurt people without warning, but he was hoping Zosia wouldn’t call his bluff. But he can definitely feel himself getting angry.
“You don’t love Carol Sturka. You’d fuck me if I asked you to. Even though you know that would hurt her.”
“Again, not true. We would discuss it with you both beforehand. To make sure you both found the situation acceptable.”
“Which would also hurt her! Just discussing it would hurt her! This is what you people don’t get. How can you fundamentally misunderstand humans so much when you have stolen all of their minds!”
“Surely you must know what it feels like to misunderstand humanity, Manousos? In fact, it seems that you misunderstand it far more than we do. We are everyone, after all.”
He clenches his fist at his sides. Why is he letting them get to him? “You think you know me, but you don’t have the first clue. Didn’t it take you over 30 hours to find me?”
“Have you ever wondered why other people seem to make no sense?” presses Zosia.
“No, and I don’t care,” lies Manousos.
“Why it seems like other people’s motivations seem a mystery?”
“How would you know? You aren’t a real person. And this isn’t about me, this–”
“I’ll tell you why. It is the opinion of every psychiatric doctor on earth that you fit the diagnostic criteria for autistic spectrum disorder. We know this because of all the interactions other people have had with you in the past, combined with our present day interactions with you. It is the reason other people feel alien to you. ”
They stare at each other across the kitchen, unblinking.
“You can go now,” says Manousos finally, in the calm cadence of a professor dismissing a lazy student.
Zosia smiles sweetly and nods. “Alright. Good night, Manousos.” She gets up and closes the door behind her.
Manousos immediately gets up and starts rummaging in the kitchen drawer for a timer. He sets it for ten minutes, and sits there for the full duration, staring at it, listening to the rhythmic ticking.
When the timer finally pings, he grabs his jacket, heads out the door and makes for the ambulance.
The drive to the Albuquerque Public Library is quiet and uneventful, apart from the streetlights turning on wherever he goes. They illuminate billboards for services and products that no longer exist. An ad for calcium supplements, a homeless charity, a lawyer with an extremely punchable face.
He can hear thunder starting to rumble in the distance as he pulls into the library’s car park.
He wastes no time after pushing open the door, and hurries towards the section he needs, then runs his fingers over book spines until he finds the code he’s looking for:
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616.89
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Then, further searching until he comes across:
Manual Diagnóstico y Estadístico de los Trastornos Mentales.
He pulls out the weighty tome and begins frantically looking through the index. There, under Sección II: Criterios y códigos de diagnóstico he finds:
Trastorno del espectro autista
Déficits persistentes en la comunicación y la interacción sociales en múltiples contextos, que se manifiestan actualmente o en el pasado de la siguiente forma:
- Déficits en la reciprocidad socio-emocional
- Déficits en los comportamientos de comunicación no verbal utilizados para las interacciones sociales
- Déficits en el desarrollo, en el establecimiento y la comprensión de las relaciones
- Patrones rituales de comportamientos verbales o no verbales
- Insistencia en la monotonía, apego inflexible a la rutina
He smirks bitterly at the last one. Like he’s even had a choice about routine in the past four months.
His smile vanishes as he continues reading down the page.
Suddenly all the times his mother dragged him to the doctor to ask what was wrong with her son make sense. All the times people have drifted away from him if he dares to come out of his shell and be more talkative. All the times he wanted to cuddle with a partner after sex but just felt too overwhelmed to do so, and was called cold as a result.
He sinks to the floor with the book in his hand and it’s only after a few minutes that he realizes the pages are wet and he quickly wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.
49 years. 49 years and he never realized. He never realized but they just told him like it was nothing. They figured it out. He’s furious.
How could he have not seen it?
He knows why, really. After all the poking and prodding the doctors did, why on earth would he subject himself to more pointless scrutiny as an adult? Besides, his bitch mother said there was something wrong with him and she couldn’t possibly be right. That old bruja was talking out of her ass as usual, so why pursue it? Why would the word “autismo” have even occurred to him?
This was not the hive’s knowledge to figure out, it was his. The fact that it was Zosia that revealed it to him feels invasive and wrong.
“¡Pajilleros!,” he shouts, and throws the book across the room.
“Manny?”
He freezes. “Carol Sturka? Qué estás haciendo aquí?”
He can hear the sound of her footsteps on the stairs approaching.
“Where are you?” she asks. He doesn’t reply but she eventually finds him in the stacks, his back to the wall, and looking lower than she’s ever seen him before.
“I saw the ambulance leave and I know you only go one of two places. But it’s really late. Did something happen?”
He doesn’t want to tell her that he spoke with Zosia behind her back. And he definitely doesn’t want to tell her that Zosia is the reason he’s here.
“I…just…I,” he stammers. “Research. That’s all.”
She eyes him skeptically. “Come on, you’re not fooling anyone. Your eyes are red. You’ve been…crying.” She’s never seen him cry before. She’s stunned.
“¡Solo estoy cansado!” He snaps and gets to his feet hurriedly. He breezes past her without looking back, muttering obscenities she doesn’t understand.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Sunshine! Sorry I showed concern for your unappreciative ass!”
She follows him down the stairs anyway.
The rain outside is now torrential and thunder rumbles in the distance, but Manousos doesn’t care. He marches straight into it, his clothing and hair instantly soaked.
“Hey, wait!” shouts Carol. She pulls the hood on her sweatshirt up.
Manousos lets out a ragged sigh and turns to her with a blistering look of impatience.
“Was it…was it something I did?” she asks.
Manousos scoffs a little and smiles bitterly. “No,” he says. “Nothing you did.”
“Let me at least drive you home in the ‘Royce,” says Carol. We can come back for the ambulance tomorrow.”
To her relief he nods once.
On the drive home, Manousos gives her one syllable responses to any attempts she makes to start a conversation, until eventually he doesn’t seem to even want to do that. It makes her want to scream.
“Manny, you don’t have to talk to me in detail about whatever it is that happened, but I need to know if they hurt you in any way.”
There’s a few seconds of silence then Manousos turns to look out the window at the pouring rain so that she can’t see his face.
“No, Carol Sturka. They not hurt me.”
She practically has to coax him out of the ambulance and into her house once they’re home. His expression seems focused on something distant and he’s soaked to the bone. She wonders if he even notices he’s shivering.
“Here, lemme…” She helps him out of his drenched jacket and shirt and starts towelling him off. The huge, pitted scars on his back momentarily stun her, but she shakes her head and decides not to ask him about that right now.
She pulls one of Helen’s old oversized, stretchy sweaters over his head. An item of clothing she still uses as pyjamas occasionally. She doesn’t even register that she’s grabbed one of Helen’s shirts until he’s fully wearing it. It definitely looks oversized on him. He’s practically swimming in it. It hangs off his bony shoulder on one side.
“Come and sit down on the couch,” she says, and he lets her lead him over to it. Something must be very wrong if he’s letting himself be physically guided and touched and even dressed by another person. He usually leaps at the slightest accidental brush against him.
Once he’s settled against the cushions, she grabs a pair of whiskey glasses and pours one out for both of them.
“Drink, it’ll warm you up,” she says.
She expects him to roll his eyes at her, or say something scathing like: “That’s your solution to everything, Carol Sturka.” But instead he silently presses the glass to his lips and takes a small sip.
So, instead she waits, as he slowly does this about a dozen more times. The only sounds are the millions of thuds of torrential rain hitting the roof. Carol wonders if all the rain will bring a desert superbloom this year. She wonders what Helen would think if she was alive to see it. She wonders if she and Manousos will be alive to see it by the time it arrives.
She’s beginning to have paranoid thoughts about him being turned, when he lets out a deep sigh. His shoulders have relaxed a little more. He fingers the soft material of Helen’s shirt as if he’s only just realized he’s wearing it.
He looks straight ahead, not meeting her eyes, but says: “I talk to Zosia.”
“What? Why!”
He flinches and she lowers her voice. “Sorry, I just…why?”
“She is trying to manipulate you. But you are still seeing her because she make you feel good. Like a drug. I tell her to stop.”
Carol feels her face go hot. Busted.
“So is that why you’re so upset?” she asks. She’s on the defensive immediately, fully anticipating a blow up.
“I am not happy that you are seeing her still, but that is not why I am upset.”
“Oh?”
“She–they tell me something about myself I don’t know.” He takes another sip of whiskey.
Carol feels a wave of horror wash over her. “They have your stem cells?” she asks.
He chuckles softly. “No. If they have my stem cells I would not go to the library. I would go to gun shop.”
She can’t fault him for that. She has the spiritual successor of Fat Man and Little Boy sitting in her driveway for the exact same reason.
“Then…what?”
He rubs a hand across his face. “If I tell you, you promise you not see Zosia again?”
Carol’s first instinct is to bristle defensively. It’s an ultimatum, and she hates those.
But he looks so haunted. So broken. So earnest. The last time he looked at her like that was before she abandoned him to go on a worldwide jaunt with Zosia.
She thinks about the gruesome scars across his back. She thinks about the fact that he came 9000km to see her just because she sent him a videotape. She thinks about the fact that he’s still here, even after he knows she was fraternizing with the enemy. She thinks about when she told Zosia: Well shoot, I owe it to him, don’t I? I’ll just hear him out and send him on his way.
The thought eats at her. She does owe it to him.
“I promise,” she says. She means it. She just hopes she means it forever, the same way she’s stayed away from heroin forever.
“My mind,” he points to his forehead. “It different. Since I was pequeño. Not normal.”
Carol resists the urge to make a snarky comment. The fact that he is leaving himself so open to ridicule is precisely the reason now is not the time. So instead, she says: “What do you mean?”
“Autismo,” he says. “They tell me I have it.”
“Oh! You had me fucking worried there for a second. I thought it was something terrible.”
He looks at her like she’s grown a second head.
“So you didn’t know?”
He shakes his head. “For 49 years I not know.”
“Hm. I mean it makes sense. A lot of stuff suddenly makes sense.”
The corner of his lip turns up slightly and he looks down at his drink.
“You know there’s nothing wrong with that, right? It doesn’t make your brain Hitler or anything.”
He squints in confusion at that, but doesn’t ask her to clarify.
“But all that time,” he says. “Maybe I get help. Learn to do things better. Learn to do things…normal.”
“Why? So you can be like them?” She points a thumb backwards toward the outside world, and he blinks at her.
Carol suddenly leans forward and puts her hands on both his shoulders. He doesn’t flinch. In fact, he meets her eyes tentatively. She can see puddles threatening to form in the corners of his. Aw hell. “Listen, we are not going to let anyone change us. Not then, not now. We are who we are. And yeah, it’s fucking hard sometimes, but look at what the fucking alternative is? If they told you that information, it was probably to make you feel like it’s a bad thing. Like you shouldn’t have the brain you were born with. So they can convince you to join them. They see your mind as a threat. Fuck ‘em.”
This time both corners of his mouth curl up slightly, and he nods.
A moment passes, and she drops her hands off his shoulders and clears her throat.
“Anyway, there are ways to make things easier, without changing who you fundamentally are. I bet that library has tons of books about what goes on in that asylum.” She presses her finger hard into his temple.
“Púdrete,” he says, batting her hand away.
Ah, there’s the Manousos she knows.
They are silent again, then Manousos says: “Carol Sturka?”
She holds her hand up. “It’s okay,” she says, before she can stomach the words “thank you” from him.
Instead, she grabs the whiskey bottle and fills up both their glasses.
They end up talking long into the night, until Manousos becomes increasingly horizontal and starts snoring.
Carol sighs, and gets up, but before retiring she retrieves a blanket from the store cupboard and drapes it over Manousos’ sleeping form.
She turns back to look at him as she flicks off the light switch, and the rivulets of rain on the window form a moving pattern on his face. It occurs to her that all this happened because he’d been looking out for her. Like he always did. It really was about time she started returning the favour.
“Sleep well, shithead,” she mutters fondly.