Lur smelled like cocoa skin lotion. He floated on a balcony overlooking some trees. The sun had gone and left cool blue, heat fading, and a feeling of being unsqueezed. He sipped a limeade and patted himself on the head, testing the thinness of his hair. It had lasted him for several hundred years, but he was still worried about it. It might fall out at any moment, and then what would he do? He had spouses to bed. Well, he could change his appearance at will, even without machines, but even so. He knew his hair was in real danger, and it threw him off his poise.
“Maybe I should buy another eel,” he told himself. “Or stingray?”
Lur had a rather magnificent aquarium in his home in Mumbai. He liked rare and obscenely expensive tropical fish, because he himself was rare and obscenely expensive, a fact that was as obvious to casual passersby as it was to his numerous spouses, although he took different forms with each spouse to keep them hidden from each other, and he often took different forms in public, but even so, his demeanor did not change markedly, he was tired of acting, and plus in his sessions with his therapist he had learned that acting takes up quite a bit of cognitive strain, Lord doesn’t it just?
He felt metal heating rise from the land. It should have been grass and lavender, but it was twisted, factory melting. He imagined himself in a long corridor full of gray, pestered by red-eyed androids with lightning clubs. Maybe pestered wasn’t the word for it. Probably it was a memory from a party. He had a lot of those, a lot of curling smoke, a lot of tongue in the dark. He took an ancient coin from his pocket and looked at it. From the empire of Marcella X.
“Girl, you had some loud shoes, didn’t you, na?” he said.
He started crying for no reason, but that was a lie. He felt the corridor of history move in him, echoing and wide, tearing a hole through his memories and heart. It hurt his chest to sob like that, but he kept going, it was like your own personal waterfall to have a good cry like that, you should try it. He touched the mole on his cheek. He felt the dark hair on his arms. He touched his cotton pants and did a somersault in the air, still crying, and he kept flipping over and over until he laughed.
Imanzi came onto the balcony and pointed at him. She was wearing white pants and a purple jacket with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. She had on sunglasses, but she took them off.
“You wear those inside and not outside?” said Lur, upside-down, kicking his bare feet at the sun.
“I wear them where I want,” she said lightly, playful as she was with the ones who earned her trust. Lur had made sure to earn her trust, even as he broke it with all the poor common atman, the ones he loved in the bed and left with their diamonds during the day, the diamonds were their consolation prize for his absence and suspected cheating, which they never proved because he was a consummate professional, at this for over two centuries, thank you, but damn if they weren’t right every time.
“Let me have them,” he said, and put the shiny things on, moving back into his supine position two meters above the balcony floor. “I can’t see shit in these things. Don’t you have the lightbenders in your eyes?” he asked. “I do, but I always forget to turn them on.”
“We all have those, Lur,” she said. She leaned her arms on the railing next to him and looked out over the healthy woods, the windy green rolling. “Do you miss Terence?”
Lur scoffed, whipped the sunglasses off, tongue showing in his smile. “You love him! Still. Oh, how embarrassing for you. I’m going to tell everyone.”
Imanzi popped a lighter from her coat pocket and lit a cigarette. She put it to her purple-shaded lips. “You’re five years old and I hate you.”
“You love me almost as much as you love Terence. He does have a nice cock.”
She stared at him.
“What? I’ve seen it. We bathed in a lake once. Oh, not like that, it was in Mississippi somewhere, after a raid. We were both very sweaty. We took down one of the big ones, oh, I tricked him and Terry bricked him. Dangerous duo, you know. But so then we went in this lake and washed off all the sticky blood, and I saw his cock. Little mark on the head, right?”
Imanzi looked down at the railing and tried to stop smiling. “Why did I come out here.”
“Because you wanted some enlivening discourse that actually feeds your soul instead of bleeding it into a ditch.”
“Very vivid, Lur. You should write poetry so I can ignore your words in addition to your never-ending voice.”
“I once did meet/ A navy fleet/ So full of healthy sailors/ Upon the sea/ I bent my knee/ And turned them all to wailers/ For with my mouth/ I ventured south/ And swallowed all their pride/ And like a tune/ I ended soon/ And made them all my bride.”
Imanzi clapped, cigarette drooping to her chin. “You should get some kind of prize for that.”
“A prison sentence, maybe. I plagiarized that from this Trinidadan sailor in the British navy. And he learned it from a whore in Bristol.”
“Well, shit. It’s a goddamn daisy-chain of rhyming. I’ve been writing a song or two.”
“Oh, have you? You haven’t made enough shameful admissions for one day? Would you like to get onstage, too, so we can boo you off, sweetheart?”
“Ugh, I’m going to slap you. And then lock you in a crate and drop you into the ocean.”
“Rude.”
