Twisted Fate

By Linda Boroff

Keeping love alive as a new pandemic rages.

 

Where are the boundaries of love in a time of exploding violence and disease? A young woman must find her inner strength and self-reliance—torn between two men who hate each other as much as they desire her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Champagne Book Group
• Release date: Mar 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781957228334

Book preview

A group of people posing for the camera Description automatically generated

Twisted Fate

LINDA BOROFF

CHAMPAGNE BOOK GROUP

Twisted Fate

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

Published by Champagne Book Group

2373 NE Evergreen Avenue, Albany OR 97321 U.S.A.

~~~

First Edition 2022

eISBN: 978-1-957228-33-4

Copyright © 2022 Linda Boroff All rights reserved.

Cover Art by Sevannah Storm

Champagne Book Group supports copyright which encourages creativity and diverse voices, creates a rich culture, and promotes free speech. Thank you by complying by not scanning, uploading, and distributing this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher. Your purchase of an authorized electronic edition supports the author’s rights and hard work and allows Champagne Book Group to continue to bring readers fiction at its finest.

www.champagnebooks.com

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To my talented daughter, Nicole, whose belief in me

has encouraged and immeasurably enriched

my life and my writing.

Chapter One

A weak, agonized awareness emerges as I struggle to raise my eyelids. I’m face down, restrained and immobilized on some stiff, stinking fabric like vinyl or pleather. All is black, whether my eyes are open or shut. Thin, coarse ropes encircle and restrain me like a spider’s prey. The combined stench of gasoline, rust, mildew, sweat, and blood—mine?—is overwhelming. I gag up a bitter fluid and spit.

Suffusing everything is pain: in my head, behind my eyes, within my ears, traveling through my torso and every limb. I turn my head to breathe easier, trying to cry out, but manage only a moaning hiss of air that I struggle to replace. At last I draw a rasping breath into my tortured lungs. I feel my face contort into a rictus—the reflexive grimace of death. My heart pounds, and I kick feebly, which starts me coughing. Agony floods my skull, drawing a dark cape across my consciousness as my head spins into the void.

My eyes blink open. Time must have passed, though my surroundings remain pitch black. I’m cold to the core and shuddering, but the confinement has diminished. Curled into the fetal position, my body, though cramped and aching, is no longer tied up. I flex my toes and fingers, unfold and extend my legs. How can a numb limb be so painful?

Lying here, I wait until my vision adjusts to the dark. I’m in the back seat of a mammoth older car filled with dirty clothes, tools, and fast-food wrappers. I spot the jarring yellow cover of a porn magazine whose type I can’t focus on to read. A photo collage displays huge breasts, asses, snatches, black and white cocks. Women’s faces dripping with cum stare back at me. I clench my teeth.

Help! The sound is a thin, unrecognizable croak. Where is Brian? Is he alive? The car’s side and rear windows are tinted dark, though the windshield now admits light from the starry sky and a full moon, pasted in place like a sequin.

The car is slightly tilted, hood upwards. I can discern vague silhouettes of land features: scrubby bushes, dry weeds, and rocky outcroppings. This must still be the Mojave, the general area I last remember. Shivering, I draw my legs closer. Perhaps, since I can move, I’m not too badly injured. The irony is not lost on me that even at this dreadful pass, I’m better off than I’d been moments—or was it hours?—before. The temperature feels like the mid-fifties: not cold enough to kill, but sufficient to torment.

I draw a deep, burning breath, searching back in time. My last memory is of walking down the rutted desert road with Brian. He’d put his arm around me. I gazed at the darkening sky and noted the moon emerging, wan and listless. I’ve always loved the moon, rejoicing in her ever-changing moods, sizes, and colors, but this was like a premonition, a warning. Now, something has happened to me, but what? If this is retrograde amnesia, I must have been struck on the head, which explains the vicious ache. Who has done this to me, and why?

I move my arm to touch my head, where the pain seems localized on the left side. There it is, a raised, tender lump behind my ear. My fingertips come away wet and sticky, smelling, then tasting of blood, thick and metallic. Nausea hits me like a bolt, flooding through me. I turn my head and vomit thin bile and mucus, coughing and spitting to avoid aspirating the fluid.

Have I been raped? Groping between my legs, I feel horror presaging massive panic. My mouth grows drier. My heart misses beats. Despite the cold, I break into a sweat. Am I suppressing memories too terrible to recall? Shaking, I try to reassure myself. You’re alive. Hang on.

Again, I return to the last moment I remember. Had Brian spotted somebody sneaking up on us in the dark or waiting in ambush? Right now, there is no point in calling for help; in fact, I could attract danger by making noise. My voice is weak and hoarse. Exhausted, I can only lie quiet, breathing through the staccato of my chattering teeth.

After about ten minutes, brisk steps crunch toward me in the dirt. My stomach leaps, and I hunker down to conceal myself. This is it, then, my last moment. Through the tinted side window, a man’s form approaches. Now he stands beside the car, covering the window. Above him glows the Milky Way, a far river of light I will soon join. Farewell to all.

Chapter Two

One year earlier…

Happy, compliant worker bees, Brian and I reported for our blood tests even before they became mandatory. His employer blasted an email offering two-for-one discounts at local restaurants by showing a test receipt, reminding us that getting tested was our patriotic duty. We must stand like an army to conquer our common enemy, the Prion. The message was standard drivel we’d come to expect. After all, the world was not too worried yet. Hadn’t we conquered Covid-19 years before, emerging stronger, wiser, and more united? We now knew not to panic at the internet’s inflated rumors, didn’t we?

I met Brian after work at the Mountain View Post Office. By now, the white testing vans always open for your convenience were a familiar sight. You spotted them at supermarkets, drugstores, and post offices, vinyl American flags flapping above each headlight, with Red Cross emblems pasted across the hood. A giant decal on the side displayed a diverse, joyous crowd sporting red buttons or bill hats with white letters proclaiming, I Got Mine. Kids waved red and white lollipops.

It oughta say ‘I Got Stuck.’ Brian was in a jovial mood. I noticed his hair was growing long again. I always tried to dissuade him from cutting it, loving how the caramel-colored waves fell across his forehead—how soft it was, and how good it smelled.

How ʼbout ‘I Got Poked?’

Hey Zoe, you’re giving me ideas. He put his arm around my waist and nuzzled my neck. We mounted the steps laughing, and the nurses gave us an odd look. I tried to compose myself while completing the paperwork.

A quick stick in the ring finger was covered with a round, red bandage sporting the inescapable logo. For some reason, my eyes started filling with tears, so Brian hustled me out, making excuses to the nurses. She’s a little hungry.

Go feed that girl. A nurse grinned, handing him the discount coupon.

We went straight to a Mexican restaurant, where we ate ourselves silly, strolled home, and fucked. Eating, strolling, fucking, we did those very well together.

This was my last carefree, precious memory.

Two days later, I received a text message declaring me negative for disease. Brian hadn’t gotten his results yet, but we weren’t concerned. In fact, we’d almost forgotten the test. Weren’t delays to be expected with all those notifications to send out?

When I came home from work the following day, he was sitting on the floor in the entryway, leaning back against the wall, legs spraddled out, blocking the door. He was in his office casual sport coat, tie loosened, shirt untucked, holding a bottle of rye whiskey by the neck. We’d bought it to make Manhattans in happier times.

I had to push hard to squeeze through the door because he refused to move. What’s wrong, baby? What happened?

But I knew.

He shifted at last to let me by, avoiding my eyes while he tipped the bottle to his mouth, and swallowed. I’ve been trying to knock myself out, but even this nasty shit doesn’t work. The liquor trickled down his chin onto his pale blue shirtfront, swelling dark through the cotton weave like a thundercloud. I dropped the mail and sat beside him on the chilly beige tile. I took the bottle away, making the requisite skeptical face, even while panic, grief, and nausea flooded through me.

This is ridiculous. I set my jaw. There’s been a mistake. You’re fine. Show me the text.

"No, they were here." His reddened gaze sought mine, begging me to undo this—make it go away. I pushed the hair back from his damp forehead.

The doctor comes in person?

He blurted a short, bitter laugh. He wasn’t a doctor. It was a couple of cops and some jerk in a blue lab coat. He got out his chip gun and nailed me while I was standing here, right in the doorway. The fuck?

"He what?"

That’s the part they don’t tell you. They shoot a microchip into you, so they can swipe you anytime and tell you’re positive. The machine gives this… scream. Like a rabbit when a hawk hits it. He shuddered, and I frowned, trying to imagine that. He gave me a weak smile. Never mind. You’re not exactly the wilderness type. It was our standing joke, his teasing over my citified background.

Never mind is right. Let’s get this thing out. Where did they shoot it?

He shook his head. Forget it, Zoe. They’ve got it knocked. It’s a nanochip, smaller than a pinhead, injected deep into your gut. You can’t find it even under surgery, the jerk told me. Pursing his lips, Brian mimicked a prissy, soulless flunky, ‘We try to nest it differently with each application.’ They call it ‘nesting,’ you see.

There’s got to be a—

Woman, don’t you get it? The chip’s nothing. I’ve got the prion. I’m gonna lose my mind. I’m gonna die. He yanked up his shirt, jabbing a shaky finger at a spot under his rib cage. Here. You want to stare death in the eye?

I ran for a magnifying glass, and there it was, the tiny, livid pinprick marking him a bearer of disease and yes, possibly death.

As if my gasp had opened a spigot, he erupted in deep sobs, wrenched from a throat unaccustomed to them. I put my arms around him, adding my soprano wails. Our relationship was still so new and happy I’d never seen him cry. I myself had cried just twice since we met. Once when I remembered my father, and again when I had PMS and imagined Brian was tiring of me.

Later, in the bathroom, I searched my purse for the black kohl pencil I always carry, and re-drew the dark, defiant line around my eyes the tears had washed away. This border has become a part of me. It strengthens and comforts, linking me to countless others across the miles and millennia, all those women—and men too—with their own pencil or candle wick or charcoal bit. Look here first, commands the black border. Only then can you drop your gaze to what lies beneath. To me, a naked eye is merely a wet spheroid, rolling in its white, egglike matrix. Yet, that simple, dark line circumscribes and focuses the eye’s powerful magic. We needed that magic now.

For the next hour, we passed the rye, speaking in murmurs, keeping our darkest fears to ourselves. At last, I ran a hot bath and got in with him. I wanted to use my body to help him escape his pain—to forget everything except pleasure—and for a short while, I’m sure I did. I told him I didn’t care what he had or what they did to him. I would never leave him. We fell into bed then and made intense love, studying our eyes and mouths and skin, holding back nothing. At last, we slept in each other’s arms, exhausted and comforted.

It didn’t last. Deep in the night, my eyes popped open and full awareness assaulted me. I lay still, heart pounding, sensing beneath my lover’s even breathing the odious, alien implant, pumped into him indifferently, like tagging an animal. I pictured a tiny disc buried amid tissues and cells, seething with rivers of data, radiating his disease status. When I tried to dismiss it from my mind, the disc thrummed and pulsated, spreading across my consciousness, obliterating all but itself.

How could a prion, a misfolded protein, not even alive, an enemy without enmity, bring a mighty nation to a helpless state of panic and dread? To where we abandon our hard-won rights, warp and deform our values, splinter our ethics, and turn on each other enraged, all against all?

After an hour, I dashed to the bathroom and vomited. Sleepily, Brian padded after me and held back my long, dark hair, sponged my face, and kissed my reeking mouth.

I’d never lived with a doomed person. Now, I would be taking that journey at his side as hope shrank, impaled on the fangs of despair. I wondered what malign force gifts us with consciousness, with awareness of our mortality to intensify our suffering. Only we humans can comprehend losing ourselves, disintegrating into microscopic matter. Riding the empty, stony planet until the whole universe dwindles into a few isolated hydrogen atoms drifting without aim, without plan, toward oblivion.

Chapter Three

I’m Zoe Ohrbach, twenty-eight, five feet ten, and slim, thanks to my mother’s ruthless oversight. While I was growing, she would size me up with narrowed eyes and wrinkled nose, sniffing for deviant chromosomes. You’re big enough already, she’d say. "Don’t you dare get heavy." The word thundered in my ears like a brontosaurus stride.

My older sister Amelia was her unequivocal favorite, although it was I who inherited Mom’s hazel-green eyes and full mouth I remember curling and contorting with drunken rage, pouring forth hot curses unrestrained by love’s cautionary boundaries.

My childhood was tough. Like many people, I radiated the pick-on-me pheromone. Any bully within ten miles was sure to seek me out and reach new heights of clever cruelty, fueling the fates I wished on them.

Growing taller, I became disgusted with my bulk and the extra space my body appropriated. It shamed me with its size, its rude sounds and smells, its protrusions and excretions, the pain it inflicted, and the coarse cravings. Everything I wanted was harmful: food, sex, pills, liquor. I tried to starve and purge it into submission; to deprive, drug or even poison myself, but I rebounded, robust and alert, demanding more.

I gorged on novels, my escape and lonely feast, the only indulgence that didn’t threaten or disfigure me. I nursed a foolish, secret notion that someday love would arrive and cure me. Momentary love, sequential love, sick love, forbidden love—it didn’t matter. But love of any kind retreated further from my grasp.

When I was fourteen, my father, a sometime ally and defender, lost his contracting business and bought his exit pass from the resulting chaos with a convenient heart attack. The bank foreclosed our home in Santa Monica, leaving me, my sister, and mother to crowd into a grimy white stucco apartment facing smoggy, noisy Olympic Boulevard. The place even had a name, The Spafford, written with a flourish above the front door in once-silver glitter gone gray and dour like an aged starlet. Beneath the bathroom window, trails of rust descended into the weeds.

Within, we three simmered away in our alcohol-laced stew of grudges and gotchas. Men came and went, leaving pain and blame in their wake. The neighbors complained about our fighting and language. Somehow, though, I kept my grades high, with the desperation of a hostage. An obscure scholarship set me free at last.

At Berkeley, I discovered I’d packed my emotional scars along with my clothes and stuffed toys. Self-destructive, a sucker for dares, drugs, and flattery, I subordinated my education to late nights in bars and parties, anywhere I could find them. I almost lost my scholarship, yet struggled through, filled with remorse for my ingratitude.

After graduation, I wandered and drifted with whatever current caught me. I’d capsize in whirlpools and waves or run aground on the razor-edged shoal of a chance hookup. Somehow, I’d find my way home in the damp gray dawn to bathe, dress, and show up at a meaningless job, eyes burning, mind stinging with shame.

Brian changed everything. He found me where I huddled behind my cynicism, exhibitionism, and phony bravado. He made me laugh at myself, giving me time and hope. Slowly, I began to evolve into someone I cared for. Even now, though, love often feels like a package delivered to the wrong address. For months, I hid my feelings, until they grew so strong, I surrendered and went all in. That crazy risk has unified, perhaps healed me.

Happiness, I have read and believe, isn’t some natural state we deserve or a joy we have fallen away from. Rather, it is sporadic and conditional, fragile, and cruelly brief. Brian made me happy, and I’ll follow this path beside him, wherever it leads, because I can’t bear to do otherwise.

I realize he loves me the best he can. Stay faithful for a lifetime? Avoid temptation? Protect and accept me unconditionally through the passing years? Who thinks in such ways anymore?

Chapter Four

If you met us before this madness, you’d have assumed we were just another typical young techie couple, with our software jobs, iPhones, and jargon: Got the bandwidth for lunch today?

We used to tell each other we appeared to be Silicon Valley drones when we were actually creative rebels, bohemians incognito. It’s funny—the lifestyle we once branded cheap and soulless seems idyllic now, a golden age.

We’d met at a tedious, gaudy trade show in Las Vegas more than a year before the prion epidemic surfaced. Though my official job title was marketing associate, my employer asked me to walk the show floor dressed like a bimbo to raise awareness for the company’s latest product launch. I was to accost attendees with a short survey, then lure them to our booth to enter a drawing for a new phone.

My boss rolled his eyes like a mischievous boy while I stood in his office, wordless and confused. "You should feel, well, flattered. To be admired. I mean, like wow. He gave a small shrug. Me, I’d be stoked, frankly. If I were a woman, I mean."

I don’t believe you would, I said, keeping my gaze cold and voice flat. Unless you enjoy having horny men undress you with their eyes.

Now, now, he said, as if to a kicking mare.

I was trapped. Outraged. The pressure was disgusting, disrespectful, exploitative, and possibly illegal. But the company’s CEO was a penny-pincher, and professional models were costly.

A child like myself, loved conditionally—if my grades were good, if my room was clean—carries around an unslakable thirst for approval and acceptance, no matter how spurious. I have to admit, though, my vanity was piqued. I yearn for the heady, silly dance à la Bocaccio—feints and treachery, secrets and faux shyness and teasing. I craved to be lusted after and seduced, to yield and take back, game and be gamed. To seem out of control when I was actually controlling things, and then to yield control after all. These games intrigued me, despite the emotional hangovers they left in their wake.

Anyway, I caved. I couldn’t quit until I found another job. My savings were nonexistent, plus, I had no family to turn to if I went unemployed. After submitting resumes to other companies and insisting on a cash bonus in advance, I agreed to wear a red, gray, and aquamarine costume—the company’s colors—designed for the event and tailored to my body. The getup was cut high on the sides to show plenty of leg and ass, low in the front to maximize my cleavage. The waist was so tight it hurt to breathe.

I submitted to being photographed with hangdog company executives grinning like morons, then trudged the floor in painful stiletto heels which hoisted me above six feet. Face aflame,