“That was hard,” Miro said. “Cutting off the argument and coming in here.”
“I wanted to kill her,” said Jane. Her voice was almost unintelligible from the weeping, from the savage tension in her body. “I’ve never felt anything like it. I wanted to get out of the chair and tear her apart with my bare hands.”
“Welcome to the club,” said Miro.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I really wanted to do it. I felt my muscles flexing, I was ready to do it. I was going to do it.”
“As I said. Quara makes us all feel that way.”
“No,” said Jane. “Not like this. You all stay calm, you all stay in control.”
“And you will, too,” said Miro, “when you have a little more practice.”
Jane lifted her head, leaned it back, shook it. Her hair swung weightlessly free in the air. “Do you really feel this?”
“All of us do,” said Miro. “That’s why we have a childhood — to learn to get over our violent tendencies. But they’re in us all. Chimps and baboons do it. All the primates. We display. We have to express our rage physically.”
“But you don’t. You stay so calm. You let her spout off and say these horrible –”
“Because it’s not worth the trouble of stopping her,” said Miro. “She pays the price for it. She’s desperately lonely and nobody deliberately seeks an opportunity to spend time in her company.”
“Which is the only reason she isn’t dead.”
“That’s right,” said Miro. “That’s what civilized people do — they avoid the circumstance that enrages them. Or if they can’t avoid it, they detach. That’s what Ela and I do, mostly. We just detach. We just let her provocations roll over us.”
“I can’t do it,” said Jane. “It was so simple before I felt these things. I could tune her out.”
“That’s it,” said Miro. “That’s what we do. We tune her out.”
“It’s more complicated than I thought,” said Jane. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have much choice right now, do you,” he said.
“Miro, I’m so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and … now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement.”
“It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It’s the neighborly way to live.”
It took a moment — a sob, and then a hiccough — but then she did laugh. A sweet, soft chuckle that was such a welcome sound to Miro. Welcome because it was a voice he knew and loved, a laugh that he liked to hear. And it was his dear friend who was doing the laughing. His dear friend Jane. The laugh, the voice of his beloved Val. One person now. After all this time, he could reach out his hand and touch Jane, who had always been impossibly far away. Like having a friendship over the telephone and finally meeting face-to-face.
He touched her again, and she took his hand and held it.
“I’m sorry I let my own weakness get in the way of what we’re doing,” said Jane.
“You’re only human,” said Miro.
She looked at him, searched his face for irony, for bitterness.
“I mean it,” said Miro. “The price of having these emotions, these passions, is that you have to control them, you have to bear them when they’re too strong to bear. You’re only human now. You’ll never make these feelings go away. You just have to learn not to act on them.”
“Quara never learned.”
“Quara learned, all right,” said Miro. “It’s just my opinion, but Quara loved Marcгo, adored him, and when he died and the rest of us felt so liberated, she was lost. What she does now, this constant provocation — she’s asking somebody to abuse her. To hit her. The way Marcгo always hit Mother whenever he was provoked. I think in some perverse way Quara was always jealous of Mother when she got to go off alone with Papa, and even though she finally figured out that he was beating her up, when Quara wanted her papa back the only way she knew of to demand his attention was — this mouth of hers.” Miro laughed bitterly. “It reminds me of Mother, to tell the truth. You’ve never heard her, but in the old days, when she was trapped in marriage with Marcгo and having Libo’s babies — oh, she had a mouth on her. I’d sit there and listen to her provoking Marcгo, goading him, stabbing at him, until he’d hit her — and I’d think, Don’t you dare lay a hand on my mother, and at the same time I’d absolutely understand his impotent rage, because he could never, never, never say anything that would shut her up. Only his fist could do it. And Quara has that mouth, and needs that rage.”