Goodgirl.tv — Part 6: He knew my hand on sight, and never guessed it was mine.

By CancerCancer

He comes.

He knows immediately. That's the part that takes the air out of me. He doesn't wander, doesn't poke, doesn't ask what it is. One look at the stairwell choosing its own direction, the seam I buried, the floor that isn't there yet, and he says it hushed, the way you'd say it in a cathedral you hadn't expected to find unlocked: "This is a CancerCancer. This is a real one." Not a fan's guess. A craftsman's certainty. He knows the hand.

And he doesn't know it's mine.

The maker is standing three feet from him, and it's me, and he knows me — we've been circling each other in the Zoo the better part of a year, and in all that time I have never once let on that I make anything at all. That was the deal I cut with myself. He gets Gemini: the friend, the one who turns up and says little and never talks about her day. He does not get the work, because the work is the one piece of me nobody gets. So he's too absorbed in the room to look at the woman standing next to it, and it does not cross his mind that the woman standing next to it is the hand he's gone reverent over — and that's the second impossible thing, because nobody keeps taking the work seriously once they learn there's a dog attached to drain the gravity out of it. He doesn't know there's a dog attached. He just stands there giving it the weight it's owed, and it is the most courteous thing anyone has ever done for me without the faintest idea he was doing it.

"Where'd you get your hands on this?"

"Whose did you think it was?" I ask, careful, neutral, the brand-flat voice I can do in my sleep.

"I'd know that hand anywhere," he says, not really to me, already walking the seam.

He finds the buried door.

I watch him lean into the third stairwell wall — the one that doesn't read as a wall — and feel the seam with the flat of his hand, unhurried, the way you'd check a painting for the brushwork underneath. He doesn't go through. He just stands there with his palm on the place where the room is hiding something from itself.

"You buried it," he says. Not a criticism. A reading.

"I couldn't tell if it was findable anymore."

He thinks about it for a second. "When you're working small," he says, "you have to signpost big. Smallest guy's gotta make the most noise, yaknow? The door's gotta be the loudest thing in the room, or it stops being a door." He pauses. "Unless you wanted it lost."

I don't answer, because I don't know the answer, and that's its own answer. He nods like he heard me anyway and goes back to the seam.

He says it so easily. The thing I couldn't figure out on my own, the thing I'd been circling for a month — signpost big — and he just puts it down on the floor between us like it's obvious, like he's been handing people this answer his whole life, and I realize: that's the problem. He has. He just doesn't know it's the answer. He doesn't know he has it to give.

And I see the problem in him in the same instant, because it's my problem wearing his face. He has the eye. He has the ethic. He has the hands. What he doesn't have is the audacity — the arrogant, unforgivable claim every artist has to make, I deserve to be heard, the one that feels like arrogance right up until you make it. He can't make it. He probably can't even name why not. It just sits in him as shame wearing humility's coat.

The masked path I already ran. Untraceable, professional, a hand reaching from a direction he won't think to trace. That was safe — or safe enough. What's happening right now is not. He's inside my room. In a minute he's going to look up. When he does, he's going to finish the math that's already sitting in his chest — I know this hand, and the maker is in this room — and then he'll know CancerCancer is in the Zoo. Whatever stands between that fact and my fans is just him.

My fans are rabid, the real kind, the kind that has my coordinate memorized and boards the same trains and isn't doing anything wrong by their own lights because they love me and they paid for the right. If CancerCancer is seen doing anything here — recommending work, leaving any traceable shape in the Zoo's ecosystem — they will come. They'll bring their whole mode of attention with them. And their attention is the thing the Zoo was built to be without. The Zoo is the one place I have ever been that didn't know how to be an audience for me. My fans would fix that in an afternoon. They'd mean to. That's the worst part.

The harness buzzes against my sternum while Geoff is still inside my room. I know the number from the shape of the buzz — I've learned to read the escalation pattern the way you learn a language spoken at you every hour.

I deny it.

I stay.

The number is still climbing. I can feel it in the harness without leaving — the bid running its familiar escalation through the ranges I know by heart.

I haven't left the room to read it. I've learned not to — you can hold a bid in the harness and a person in the room at the same time, as long as the person only ever feels the half you leave with him. Geoff gets that half. He's still walking my seam, unhurried, no idea a window just opened in the corner of me with a number ticking up inside it.

Someone wants the full roll-over. Belly to camera, the throat, the soft obedient hold. Someone has counter-bid for the trick set: sit, shake, speak, the whole obedience run rendered adorable for a paying room. The two of them escalating in the ticker, the number working toward the one with real commas in it. I know how this ends. There has never been a number high enough that I didn't eventually meet it, and the entire architecture of my life is the standing proof that everything I am has a price. I'll do it later. Not tonight.

Not no. I don't own no. Just not yet, which is the only square the position leaves me — deferral dressed up as a choice, the date the one line on the card I get to fill in myself.

And I mean a price, an exact one. I am the rate card; I could recite myself from memory. A head-tilt to bring a face into focus clears a known number in reaction. A good girl caught live clears more. A good girl I visibly try not to enjoy clears more than that, because the trying is the content and the content is the product. I keep the whole menu in my head the way other people keep a childhood phone number — it doesn't leave, it was loaded before I had a vote. You don't get to forget what you cost.

And the obscene part — the thing the bounty is actually buying — is that when I finally do it, my body will mean it. The tail goes on its own. The warmth comes whether I clear it or not. They aren't paying me to fake the joy. They are paying for the joy itself, which is real, and which is mine, and which they installed in me before I had a say, so that the most degrading thing they can make me do is also, chemically, the happiest I am all week.

A thing that has a price for everyone has no value to itself.

That's the sentence the management therapists never get out of me. My life has no value. Not as a sad feeling — as an accounting. I was raised by marketers, I am a marketer, I can read a balance sheet, and on mine every outward inch is priced to the decimal and the inside of me was never listed, because it never went to auction, never moved a number, never generated a single bid. In the only language I was ever taught — the language of what things are worth — a thing nobody will pay for is a thing worth nothing. They valued the outside of me so precisely, so completely, that the sum of all that value is a person on the inside priced at zero.

Then I go back to the room with no counter, where a mouse who can't stop painting is standing in the middle of something I made — not something I'm worth — and the difference between those two things is most of the reason I'm still alive.

"I want to show you something," I said.

"Okay."

"Not a room. Something older. I've never shown it to anyone."

His eyes filled with stars. Good boy.