The Scioneer by Peter Bouvier

near shouted and let out a shrill uncontrollable
laugh. Many of the mourners stared and Crystal realised that her
new acquaintance was, in fact, stoned.
    ‘Are you
high? At a funeral?’
    ‘It helps me
think straight,’ Lek explained, suddenly serious, ‘besides, I’m
here to work.’
    ‘How’s
that?’
    ‘I work
with human emotions. When they let me out of my lab, I like to seek
out human behaviour and just watch .
Not only funerals of course. Marriages too. I used to spend a lot
of time at the airports, before they closed them all down. Great
places to watch people. Lots of joy. Lots of sadness. Real raw
emotion.’
    ‘You make
it sound so clinical. ’
    ‘It is. I
am.’
    ‘Do you have a
card?’
    ‘No. They don’t
let me have cards. Why?’
    ‘Would
you like to have a drink with me some time?’
    Lek look
perplexed, and took his glasses off to squint at her. ‘Are you
asking me out? On a date?’
    ‘I don’t know.
Maybe.’
    ‘Shouldn’t I be the one asking for your number?’
    ‘They
don’t let me have cards either. Besides, I don’t give my number out
to anybody. Company policy, I’m afraid. You’d have to ask my
boss.’
    If the
penny dropped for Lek at that moment, Crystal didn’t notice any
change in his expression. Instead, he continued to look at her, not
in the way that all men had looked at her since she was twelve, but
rather like a young boy trying to work out a Rubik’s Dodecca for
the first time.
    ‘How will
we arrange to see each other again then?’ he asked
innocently.
    ‘I’ll
find you, Lek Gorski,’ she said enigmatically, before disappearing
into the crowd.
    Lek
smiled at this strange turn of events, took another napkin off the
stack, pulled out his pen and began writing chemical symbols all over it, pretending
nothing had happened.
    Crystal
did indeed find Lek. She had connections. It didn’t even come as a
surprise to her to find out that there were so few degrees of
separation between her boss and his. In this city, where crime had
its roots deep in business and pleasure, the same names cropped up
time and again. And so it was that Lek and Crystal began seeing
each other, meeting furtively on her free evenings to drink gin and
smoke shisha and chat before electricurfew and occasionally after
it.
    A strange
relationsh ip blossomed
between the two of them, a love affair founded on loneliness and a
shared understanding of the difficulty of the other’s life. Lek
found he could forget the crime and violence surrounding his work
when he was with Crystal, and for her part, she felt herself drawn
to a man who was happy to simply be in her company, a man who had
no expectations of her, a man for whom she didn’t have to put on a
show. For the first time in her life, Crystal felt she could truly
be herself. She saw a kindred spirit in the lost scientist, trapped
in a world of shadows and deceit which had been drawn around him
against his will. She talked about her own background, growing up
in the Lewisham ghetto, tears spilling down her cheeks when she
spoke of her abusive father who, high on crack one January
afternoon in The Shangri-La, Danny Calabas’ day-club, had gambled
her life away on a game of stab-finger with the owner. Since then,
she had only known the way of the club-geisha, dancing inside a
bulletproof plexiglass cage for money she never saw, and
occasionally taking clients upstairs to the cells of The Swinging
Hammocks if Calabas insisted, once they had been cleared for
disease by the medi-bouncers on the door.
    In spite
of it all, Crystal remained sanguine about her sad existence, sure
that one day she would make it out alive. ‘I can’t stay pretty
forever Lek,’ she said, ‘they’ll just have to put me out to pasture
sooner or later’. The truth was, she was more than pretty, with
dark almond eyes and cocoa-skin, full lips and curves in all the
right places. What’s more, it was all hers, she was still 100%
human: there wasn’t a trace of gazelle,