“She owns everyone.”
“It’s a big world outside these walls, Electra. The Head may appear to be all powerful in here, but I assure you, she does not own everyone.”
“How big is the world?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean literally, how big is it?”
“I don’t know off-hand, but it is large. There are many cities and countries and several continents. Almost eight billion people.”
“EIGHT BILLION!” She stares at me. “That’s a stupid number of people. That’s not possible. I think I’ve met maybe a hundred people in my entire life. There’s no way there are eight billion. Do you know how many people that is?”
“It is possible, though I’ll give you it being a stupid number of people.”
“Eight billion. That’s more than seven billion too many people. Wow. Eight billion.”
That number keeps her quiet for a good while. It even distracts her from the question she asked me. Why am I doing this? It’s become clear that out of almost nowhere, my life has been hijacked. I am one of the few people in this place who leaves and goes home practically every day. I have a normal house on the outskirts of the city, and I go there and I do normal things. I come here to work and patch up the wounded, then I go home.
But I’m not going home tonight. I can’t leave her on her own. I don’t have backup, and I suspect she’d kill them if I did. Why did I agree to this so quickly and so easily? I know her well enough to know she is dangerous, but not well enough to be sure that she won’t turn on me. There’s just something about this woman. A strength in her soul. I have high hopes for her, and if I’m honest… for us.
Electra
Eight billion people. I can’t even begin to conceptualize that many people.
“So are people just, everywhere, out there? Are they on top of each other?”
“Some of them sometimes,” the doctor says, smiling one of those smiles that his dimples dimp.
He wrings out the sponge in the sink, which is a place where dirty water goes and also dirty plates, and somehow they come out clean, and this is already all very tedious. I feel as though my captive world has been opened up just a sliver, and out of the crack is coming cooking and cleaning, and also eight billion people. I wonder if I will meet all of them. Probably not. I’ll probably never get out of here. No matter what Tom does, I’m still the thing grown inside the plastic bag.
I never knew the inside of a woman. Apparently, according to things I have heard in my life, most people grow inside the flesh of another person, which sounds pretty disgusting to me. How does that even work? Does the baby stand up inside the woman? How does it get out?
“What are you thinking about?”
“I was wondering how babies come out of women.”
“You were? What made you think about that?”
“I don’t know. I think about a lot of things. I don’t know a lot of things, but I do think about them.”
“Uh huh,” he says, smiling. “Well, that’s something we can talk about another time, probably.”
“Not now?”
“Do you really want a lecture on the dilation of the cervix now?”
“I don’t think anyone has ever wanted that lecture. Not one of the eight billion people on the planet.”
He chuckles at what I guess was a joke I just made. Have I done that before? I’m not sure. I don’t know what a cervix is, but its sounds boring. Most of the time when I’m laughing, someone else is bleeding.
“I think we’re done cleaning,” he says. “What would you like to do now, take a shower, maybe?”
I do know what a shower is. I feel a rush of pride, which is ridiculous and might just be relief at not having to guess what he means from context for two minutes.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a shower.”
The shower room is amazing. It is not a concrete box with a nozzle sticking out of the wall. It is a big tile bay with multiple shower heads and when I turn the water handle, warm liquid flows out of all the heads at once.
I have died. I have gone to heaven. That is the only explanation for how amazing this feels. Bottles of smelly things are all around me. I suppose they’re to be used on your body. I’m used to a bar of soap, but there are no bars. Not knowing which of the bottles does what, I decide to make an in-hand concoction of all of the smelly liquids and then smear it over my hair and body.
When I emerge, I am pink and happy. I am also naked.
I pad out to the main area, where Tom glances at me, double takes and then stares. “You’re wet,” he says.