Aphrodite

35

They were outside walking down the path that led to the gate. The girl kept twirling around in delight and amazement.

"I've never been outside without supervision," she said.

Justin nearly began to cry. He couldn't help himself. He wished he hadn't sent Deena away now. He wanted her to be there so he could grab on to her arm, needing an anchor to a different reality from the one he was suddenly confronting.

They stepped over the broken gate and Aphrodite crossed the property line. She turned back to him and smiled hesitantly.

"I've never been here before. Never been outside these walls." She reached out to take Justin's hand. "It's frightening."

"Everybody's got walls that keep them somewhere they don't want to be," Justin said. "And it's always frightening to go someplace you've never been before."

She let go of his hand now, bent down to pick a yellow wildflower from alongside the road. "I don't want to go in," she said. "Ever."

He let her wander and gawk and touch. She kept reaching out and stroking tree trunks, picking up rocks and fondling them in her palm, kneeling down and stroking the grass. Justin knew she'd talk when she was ready, and soon she was. She stood in the middle of the road, turned and lifted her face toward the sun, and he listened while she told him her story. As he watched her, Justin had to tell himself over and over again that she wasn't what she appeared to be. He was not looking at a fragile eight-year-old girl. He was looking at a woman. A woman who was born in 1974, who had been kept locked away, an unholy experiment, for her entire life.

"It was my mother's idea," she told him as they strolled. "She'd read Skinner back in the sixties. He was the psychologist who talked about raising his children in a cage so he could control their environment and study the effects. My mother liked that concept. I think she gave birth to me so she would have someone to put into a cage.

"My father started his experiments in 'seventy-two. You said you know about them, the ones in New York. When they began to come to fruition, they needed someone they could study from a very early age. He's told me often how they used to long to experiment on a newborn baby, how they thought they could double the human life span if they only had the opportunity to get someone early enough. He's always told me that no one ever wanted a child more than he and my mother wanted me. He says that no child in the history of the world has ever been loved so much or been so valued by her parents."

"What about friends?" Justin asked. "Did you ever have any friends?"

"Not allowed. At first, I was too young to know what I was saying so they couldn't take a chance that I might reveal something without realizing the consequences. Eventually I was old enough to understand what they were doing to me and, of course, then they really couldn't let me in a room with strangers. I might say something knowing the consequences. I've seen the doctors and scientists, of course. The house was filled with them up until a month or so ago. And I've had caretakers over the years. Those two women, the ones you locked in the bathroom, they're the latest. One of them's been there eight years. They keep me company but mostly they're there to make sure I stay behind locked doors. I've been locked inside that house since I was born."

"Jesus…"

"I've got almost everything I could possibly need," Aphrodite said matter-of-factly. "I'll bet I'm the best-read person you've ever met. And I've probably seen more films than anyone my age in the whole world. I can speak four languages, too. Well, five, counting English: French, Italian, Russian, and German. I spend a lot of time on the Internet, although always under supervision. They can't take a chance that I'd contact someone or get into a chat room that might expose them."

"Why did they leave?" he asked her. "You said the house was filled with doctors and scientists until a month ago. What happened a month ago?"

"They finished."

"Finished?"

"With the experiments. The formula."

"What do you mean, finished?"

"They're all done. The treatments they started administering thirty years ago. They've come to fruition. They don't need to do anything else. They've got what they've always wanted."

"And that is…?"

"They can do to other people what they've done to me. They can provide a fountain of youth for anyone who wants it."

The sun had moved along in the sky now, and she walked slowly to the far side of the road so she could remain in its warm stream of light. "I'm almost thirty years old," she said now. "Mentally and emotionally, I'm an adult. Physically, outwardly, I'm a child. I can't talk to anyone who looks like me because we're not remotely on the same level. And I can't talk to anyone my own age because they'd view me as a freak and a monster. I see the way you look at me while I'm talking. You think I'm a freak too."

"I'm sorry," Justin said. "I don't mean to. I just can't reconcile what I'm hearing with what I'm seeing."

"It's all right. I am a freak. I've never been in love, I've never had sex. I'm probably twenty years away from even menstruating. I have no pleasure in my life and none to look forward to. I think about almost nothing but killing myself, but I have never even been given that opportunity. If I keep taking the drugs and supplements and hormones I've been given my whole life, I will probably live another hundred and thirty years.

"That's why I want you to kill them. So I can finally escape from what almost every other person on earth would pay millions of dollars for."

"What happens if you stop taking the treatments?" he asked quietly.

"I don't know," she said. "That's the one thing no one knows. I could go on as I am or…"

"Or what?" Justin said, when she didn't finish her sentence.

"Or my body will stop functioning on its own because it's forgotten how." She cocked her head now, and she looked across the horizon. She crossed back to his side of the road to stand directly in front of him. "Listen," she said. "Do you hear it?"

Justin cocked his head too. Heard a familiar whirring noise off in the distance.

"His helicopter," Aphrodite said. "They're back." She took Justin's hand now. "You should be in the house. It'll be easier if they're inside."

He let her lead him back toward her prison. Her hand felt warm inside his.

"They're going to offer you anything you want," she said. "I know them. And they've got a lot to offer."

"I'm not for sale," Justin said.

"My father has kept the scientists separate. They all know pieces. He thinks that no one has access to the final formula but him. He thinks that no one can really put it all together but him."

"But that's not true?"

"I know everything they've done to me. I've kept track of everything since I was fifteen years old. Every medication, every injection, every pill. I've read and studied the exact same materials and experiments my father's scientists have read and studied. They talk to me-they've explained things to me. I've had nothing to do my entire life but learn what it is I am and why."

Justin saw the helicopter now. It flew into view and headed for the landing strip several hundred yards behind the house.

"I can give you anything and everything that they offer," Aphrodite said. "Anything at all."

"There's only one thing I want," Justin said, and he told her what it was.

They were at the front door now. She told Justin how Kransten and Marshall would enter, where they would go. She told him exactly where to wait for them. Then she asked him to bend down.

When he did, she reached up and put her hands around the back of his neck. She stood on her toes and she kissed him. Her lips grazed his and lingered, pressing against him. Justin didn't move. Stood absolutely still until she released him.

"Thank you," she said. "I've been dreaming about a kiss for almost twenty years."

Justin watched her go into the room to the left of the foyer. She came out a minute later and handed him a floppy disk.

"I have a friend," he told her. "She's in her car, parked, half a mile down the road. Her name's Deena. I'd like you to go to her and wait for me."

"Leave here on my own?" she asked.

"Yes. Can you do that?"

Aphrodite nodded. "I've dreamed about leaving here on my own. I've dreamed about it my whole life."

"Did you dream about what you'd do when you left?"

She smiled a deep, inward smile. "Yes," she said. "I definitely dreamed about that."

"You go wait with Deena. Then we'll help you do whatever you dreamed about. Okay?"

She smiled again, nodded, turned, and walked out the front door and headed back toward the gate. Justin watched as she walked the path that would take Aphrodite outside the walls that had so long imprisoned her.

Aphrodite never looked back. Justin saw her step past the wall. He saw her smile brilliantly right before she turned, heading toward Deena, and then she disappeared from view.

Five minutes later, waiting exactly where Aphrodite had told him to, he came face-to-face with Douglas Kransten and Louise Marshall. Kransten was tall and rigid, with long, wavy silver hair and deep crags in his tanned face. His fingers were long and elegant. Justin was surprised to notice such beautiful hands on an old and despicable man. Louise was younger, but the years didn't really matter because her age no longer was discernible. She had had too many face-lifts. Her skin was unnaturally smooth and wrinkle free. Her breasts were too large and firm under her sweater. Her hair was too dark and her features seemed frozen, cast in something that only resembled human flesh. Neither of them made a sound when they saw him.

Justin didn't say anything either. There was no point. Words meant nothing now. The only thing that had any meaning was that now he could finish what he'd come halfway around the world to do.

Ten minutes later, it was done.

Louise Marshall didn't utter a word before she died. Douglas Kransten said only one thing. He looked straight into Justin's eyes and whispered, "Aphrodite?"

Justin understood the question. The old man was asking if his experiment had survived. Would continue to survive.

Justin let him die without ever finding out the answer. When he reached Deena, she was sitting in the car, parked off the narrow dirt shoulder of the road. She was sitting there alone.

"Is it over?" she asked as he walked over to her side of the car.

"It's over," he said. He peered into the car, checked out the backseat. Then he glanced around at the quiet countryside. "Where's the girl?"

Deena looked at him questioningly. "What girl?"

He didn't know how to tell her, couldn't begin to explain, so he just said, "A little eight-year-old girl. Dark hair. Very pretty. Didn't she come find you?"

Deena shook her head, said, "Who is she?"

Justin shrugged, his eyes focused down the road, half expecting Aphrodite to appear. "The daughter of one of the servants, I guess."

"And she just left on her own? Will she be all right?"

Now Justin nodded. "I think she will. She seemed to have some kind of plan."

"An eight-year-old girl with a plan?" Deena said. "Should we go look for her?"

"No," Justin said. "We should let her be." He smiled, opened the car door, and slid in behind the wheel as Deena moved over to the passenger side. "And we should go home," he said.