Imprisonment

Sara ran at him, arm upraised to hit him, to hit him hard. She really wanted to hurt him, to make him feel some of the pain she suffered. He was used to it, even appreciated it. Vicariously he enjoyed her pain, it made him feel real, something he had been having genuine difficulty with recently.

He flinched but didn't move and she collapsed onto his shoulders. He helped her over to his buffalo-hide sofa and sat her down with his arms around her. He squeezed her firmly, hugging her to him as if trying to become permanently attached, mixed up with her plasticene.

"It's alright," he told her. He started rocking her gently back and forth, loving her fragile form.

She pushed away from him and looked at the floor between her legs. "Don't do that, Mike. I don't like that. My mother used to do that."

He said nothing and she looked up at him. "I'm sorry," she told him, "It's just I don't like to think about it all."

He nodded sympathetically. They were all here trying to escape, some more desperately than others. In the ever-changing rooms of the complex they massed, sharing their simulated humanity, celebrating their mutual shrugging-off of reality.

He looked through the glass wall at the rugged coast with its over-dramatic high cliffs and rock stacks. Nobody in their right mind would build a house up here, he thought, the wind would be awful. He thought of his childhood home, nestled in a beautiful valley, far from the destructive chaos of the cities.

He looked back at her, she was now staring sightlessly at the same view he had been looking at. He stroked her smooth and perfect cheek with a finger and wished for wrinkles. If only there was some roughness, some imperfection, he thought, this bloody place is so clean, so antiseptic. When he looked back on his childhood it seemed to consist entirely of touch sensations, the scraping of wood and the bite of a splinter, the gristle in a piece of meat, the soft tickling of hairy arms.

Sara sighed. "I've got to go," she said and stood up.

As she walked to the door he shrunk in on himself, letting his shoulders slump. She paused and looked round. "I ... I like being with you." She waited for a response but he gave none. "Will you be here again?"

He nodded, expressionless.

Her face furrowed into a frown and she put her head on one side. "Do you ever leave, Mike?"

"Not often. I ..." he choked on his words, not able to look at her, "I like it here."

She relaxed and smiled. "So do I."

When she had gone his face lost its animation and became repossessed by old tics that knew his face well. His teeth toyed with the edge of his bottom lip on one side, his eyebrows lay strung above unfocussed eyes.

Sara had walked towards a discreet bulge on the wall and put her hand on it. A tingle ran all over her and everything went black. She waited as the hardware retracted from her face and body, freeing her to stand up. Blinking her dry eyes back into moistness she checked her credit rating at the terminal by the door and then left, expressionless as the machine told her that she was running out of money.