And found I’d been cruising an empty seat.
* * *
The next day, I picked Carra up at the Clarke, signed her out and took her for lunch at the College/Yonge Fran’s, as promised. She looked frail, so drained the only color in her face came from her freckles. I bought her coffee, and watched her drink it.
“Met this guy at Tetsuo III,” I said. “Well . . . met is probably too strong a way to put it.”
She looked at me over the rim of her glasses, raising one white-blonde smudge of brow. Her eyes were grey today, with that moonstone opacity which meant she was not only drugged, but also consciously trying not to read my mind—so whatever they had her on couldn’t really be working all that well.
“I thought you were taken,” she said.
I snorted. “Ed? He says I broke his heart.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
I shrugged. I could never quite picture anyone’s soft little musclebox as brittle enough to break, myself; it’s an image that smacks of drama, and Ed (though sweet) is not exactly the world’s most dramatic guy. But be that as it may.
“Dumb gweilo told me I had something missing,” I told her, laughing. “You fucking believe that?”
Now it was her turn to shrug.
“Well, you do, Jude,” she replied, reasonably enough. Adding, as she took another sip: “I personally find it quite . . . restful.”
* * *
Carra Devize, my one and only incursion into enemy territory—lured by the web that haloes her, the shining, clinging psychic filaments of her Gift. The quenchless hum of her innate glory. Most people want to find someone who’ll touch their hearts, enter them at some intimate point and lodge there, mainlining instinct back and forth, in a haze of utter sympathy. And Carra, of course—congenitally incapable of any other kind of real human contact—just wants to be alone; enforced proximity, emotional or otherwise, only serves to make her nauseous. So she bears my enduring, inappropriate love for her like some unhealed internal injury, with painful patience. Which is why I try not trouble her with it, any more often than I have to.
That calamitous December of 1989, when I knew the Hark family money tree had finally dried up for good—after I came out, a half-semester into my first year at RTA, and the relatives I was staying with informed my ultra-trad Baba that he had a rebellious faggot son to disinherit—I moved in with Carra for some melted mass of time or so, into the rotting Annex town-house she then shared with her mother Geillis, known as Gala: Gala Carraclough Devize, after whose family Carra was named. We’d sit around the kitchen in our bare feet, the TV our only light, casting each other’s horoscopes and drinking peach liqueur until we passed out, as Gala moved restlessly around upstairs, knocking on the floor with her cane whenever she wanted Carra to come up. I never saw her face, never heard her voice; I guess it was sort of like being Carra, for a while. In that I was living with at least one ghost.
And this went on until one particular night, she turned to me and said, abruptly: “So maybe I’m like that chick, that Tarot-reading chick from Live And Let Die. What do you think?”
“Jane Seymour.”
“Was it?” We both tried to remember, then gave up. “Well?”
“Have sex, and the powers go away?”
“It’s the one thing I never tried.”
In a way, we were both virgins; I think it’s also pretty safe to say we were probably both also thinking of somebody else. But when I finally came, I could feel her sifting me, riding my orgasm from the inside out, instead of having one of her own.
The next time I saw her, I’d been supporting myself for over a month. And she still had an I.V. jack stuck in the crook of her elbow, anchored with fresh hospital tape.
* * *
There were a couple of movies playing that Carra was interested in, so we ended up at the Carlton—but none of their 2:00-ish shows got out early enough for her to be able to keep her 6:00 curfew.
“So what happens if we stay out later?” I asked, idly.
Another shrug. “Nothing much. Except they might put me back on suicide watch.”
That pale grey day, and her grey gaze. The plastic I.D. bracelet riding up on one thin-skinned wrist, barely covering a shallow red thread of fresh scar tissue where she’d tried to scrub some phantom’s love-note from her flesh with a not-so-safety razor. No reason not to wear long sleeves, cold as it was. But she just wouldn’t. She wouldn’t give her ghosts the satisfaction.
I looked away. Looked at anything else. Which she couldn’t help but notice, of course.
Being psychic.
“This guy you met,” she said, studying the curb, as we stood waiting for the light to change. “He made an impression.”