The other man was at the end of the corridor. Shred by shred Wade tore the clothes from his own body for the last time and left them in his trail; by the time he reached the stairs, he was naked again. He pulled the other man from the stairs, hurling him against the corridor wall, the glasses skidding the length of the hallway. Dazed, the man groped blindly around him, tumbling into some more profound, unspoken incapacitation. Wade beat him furiously. Blood splattered the corridor walls. The man took the beating without resistance, crumpling to the floor beneath the assault until in his incapacitation he finally groaned a single word. It was the only sound the man made.
“Sally.”
Wade tottered at the sound of it. If the man with the black hair had risen up and surprised Wade with a blow of retaliation, it couldn’t have struck with more force or shock. Wade lowered his hands and stood panting over the man, wondering if he believed his ears just as he’d wondered before when, with Mona, he’d said the same name. And then the man said it again, through the blood in his mouth, utterly unaware of Wade as though there was nothing and no one there in the corridor but blood and broken heart; and the reality from which Wade had fled into the Arboretum three years before floated in the hallway between the two men, in a word.
He turned to see Mona at the end of the hall. She had followed the trail of his clothes from the doorway of the Fleurs d’X. In this last moment he would ever actually lay eyes on her, she looked almost as she had the first time, naked but for her black stockings and high-heeled shoes; now in the dank light of the Arboretum corridor rather than the dark of her flat or the blush of the club, she seemed more frail, even as Wade was the more naked of the two. Mona didn’t look at Wade at all. She put her hands to her mouth, gazing at the beaten man beneath him. When Wade reached out to her, she turned and ran. He called out and started after her, then was jerked back to his victim as though the name the man had spoken was a web that bound them. It was the best Wade could do to reach down and pick up the man’s glasses and hand them back to him.
He trampled his own clothes underfoot as he ran after her. He was naked when he burst into the Fleurs d’X to find her. The women stopped dancing to look at him; Dee behind the bar stopped pouring drinks. He ran down the corridors of the Arboretum toward her flat; turning every corner he expected to run her down. People cowered before the sight of him; he took no notice of them. He couldn’t understand why, with every corner he turned, he hadn’t caught up with her; it wasn’t until he reached the flat that he knew she was gone for good. The door was open. The lock dangled from the outside. Inside nothing was amiss, but her departure hovered in the room, over the floor that was painted to look as though there were no floor, beneath the ceiling painted to look as though there were no ceiling, between the walls rendered to appear as though there were no walls. Her goodbye hovered like the explosion of his desire when she’d ripped him from inside her that first time she’d returned to find he had taken such possession of her world.
Wade sat in the flat by himself for a while. For some reason it occurred to him to look in the corner where he had kept his clothes that were now scattered throughout the Arboretum passageways. The stone with the graffiti, which he’d hidden there, was gone. Wade roared at the betrayal.
They heard it all over the neighborhood. They heard it in the distance, as the roar grew louder and closer. Soon it rushed through the corridors, preceding him as he ran up and down passageways, up and down stairs, through doors and chambers, as he swept the Arboretum from end to end, top to bottom, looking for her. The roar crashed through the Arboretum until the neighborhood was submerged in it, the torrent eventually trickling down the long black entryway and out the single door into the world outside. As the years passed, the roar slowly wound its way into the city. The months stretched into years, to whatever extent in the Arboretum years could be measured, and finally, after he’d prowled the corridors a long time, he came to accept that he’d never find her.
When he’d drunk the last of her cognac and smoked the last of her opium, his charge became a wayward stagger, stunned and endless. When he ceased to be the marauder of the Arboretum’s food and drink and flesh, he was left to scavenge its dread and rumor and panic, stalking the maze that grew wider and higher as its core grew deeper and darker. He wandered the Arboretum for sixteen years when a vision came to him, and it lasted only a moment.
He turned a corner of the long Arboretum night and saw Sally Hemings.
He stopped where he stood, slumped against whatever wall was behind him. She came from an unlit auditorium, looking around carelessly with two large gray dogs following at her heels; then she saw the apparition at the end of the hall. She’d heard about the naked giant who lurked in the Arboretum passages; there wasn’t much doubt this was he. And he was looking back at her, and she was younger and more fair than he’d remembered. Her dark hair had a touch of fire in it. “Sally?” he said.
Her mouth fell slightly. She watched him in wonder.
“Sally?” He started toward her. For a moment she was frozen, and then she shook herself free of the sight and sound of him, turning to vanish into the shadows.
In his last hour inside the Arboretum, lying in a heap in the transformed flat where he’d lived with Mona, from a stupor he saw three more visions. Even he knew the first wasn’t real.
It was Mona, standing before him, looking as she’d always looked. Site was naked as she’d always been naked, and wet, her golden hair in strands on her bare shoulders as though she’d just climbed from the bottom of the sea. She stood in a pool of water. Even in his stupor he remembered it had been many years since she’d gone. Her head tilted to the side and she smiled, of course, and even though he knew she wasn’t really there, when she held out the stone to him, he reached for it. He closed his eyes and then opened them again and she was gone and his hand was empty. Dimly he nodded to himself.
At first, he didn’t think the second vision was real either.
It was Sally Hemings again, as he’d seen her in another part of the Arboretum. He closed his eyes and said her name, expecting she’d disappear as Mona had, and only the echo of her name would be left in the room with him; but when he opened his eyes, she was still there. “I’m not Sally,” she shook her head, “Sally was my mother.”
He narrowed his eyes and tried to think. “Was?”
“I’m looking for a man,” the girl went on, and now Wade could see she was indeed younger and fairer than Sally. “His name is Etcher. He wore thick glasses and had black hair…” and he laughed until the effort of laughing exhausted him, and he passed out.
He immediately knew the third vision was real. Three men stood before him; one had half a face. Where the other half had been, his mouth curled in a massive scar upward, the face having revolted against its own nature that it might grow back together. Through the hole in the middle of the face came a smudge of words. “Well well well,” he said.
It had taken so much effort before that Wade wasn’t sure he had it in him to laugh anymore. But he couldn’t help it. Stupefied, besotted and trapped like a rat, looking up at the man with the hole in his face, he figured he might as well let it rip from down deep. “You don’t look so good, Mallory,” he guffawed from the floor where there was no floor.
Mallory kicked him savagely in the head.
Wade came to in time to see the sky above him, bearing down on him like the wave of the world as the three cops dragged him to the car. “Only the night,” he cried, “damn the light!”
When Lauren was an old woman, she would stand on the Kansan desert and watch the leaves. They would dance in dark patterns across her feet, and disappear over the small white hills that filled the dead fields. It was several autumns before she actually walked from her porch to one of the small hills and, turning over a few handfuls of dirt, discovered the rail of a small bridge; she recognized it as a moonbridge, like the ones she’d seen in California years before, from which people had watched the trajectory of the moon acros
s the night sky. The nights that the young girl Kara came to visit Lauren for supper, it was Kara’s gaze that found those skies, a mass of starry light for which the adolescent had a thousand names. Lauren fixed a simple meal and they ate on a plain tablecloth in the main room of Lauren’s house. They talked of Kara’s parents, who lived in Chicago and had sent their daughter to the ranch for children possessed by deep disturbances, odd visions, strange talents. Kara’s talent was renaming every star in the sky and following them as they shifted from one quadrant of the night to another; but as she grew older Kara progressed beyond the ravages of her deep disturbances, beyond the grip of her odd visions, beyond the enthrallment of her strange talents, all of which manifested themselves one last time on the night she found the bottle.
She’d been waiting for the headlights of the brown bus that would take her back to the ranch, and had come across a star she couldn’t account for. When she ran from the porch it was not to the bus but the unaccountable light, which she soon realized wasn’t a star after all but the glint of something lodged in the white earth. Kara brushed away the sand and dug the object from the small hill; the bottle had been caught, it turned out, in the railing of one of the old buried bridges. She held up the bottle and, in the light of every star in the skies above, saw two blue eyes blinking at her.
The eyes in the bottle were old and sad and nearly blind. At first Kara thought she could speak to them and that somehow they understood her; in the same way that she could compute the language of stars, she might compute the language of eyes as they communicated in return. But she concluded they were useless, like blue fish in water, and she was only to be their keeper, and so over the years she kept the bottle wrapped in cloth that the blind eyes might be protected from the light. The bottle became a secret that Kara and Lauren withheld from each other, a pact of mutual betrayal maintained not by choice but because the secret was somehow too laden with meaning for either woman to divulge to the other. The only person Kara ever told about the bottle was the stranger who came down the road one afternoon as she was nearing her fifteenth birthday; Lauren invited him to share a meal and spend the night in the back room. Georgie was around twenty years old, good-looking, even pretty, it seemed to Kara. His head was completely shaved and there crept up around his neck, above the collar of his shirt, a dark growth. At first Kara thought he was horribly scarred, until later that night in his room when she saw the tattoo.
In the light of the small gas lamp by his bed Kara made her bargain, that if she could examine the nude woman with the bird’s head standing in a sea of fire on Georgie’s chest, if she could run her hands along the brilliant wings he wore on his shoulders, she would reveal something in return. In the light of the small gas lamp, she unwrapped from the cloth the bottle with the eyes, and the man and girl sat looking at them together. Georgie understood this secret was very important to Kara, and in the bottom of his backpack he searched for another forbidden thing of his own to show her: it was a stone, flat on one side and rough on the other, a little larger than Georgie’s hand. “But look,” Georgie said, when he could see the girl was disappointed, and turned the stone over; on the rough side was written pursuit of happiness. Kara nodded, trying to appear impressed. “It’s a nice rock,” she offered, without conviction, “but you have to admit it’s not as good as a bottle with eyes, or even wings on your back.”
When the young girl saw the old woman standing in the doorway of her house gazing out at the sand and muttering a strange man’s name. Kara knew this was the moment Lauren began to die. A week of uncollected mail sitting in the box by the road greeted Kara’s next visit; inside the house she found Lauren slumped in her rocking chair. After Lauren had been buried among the white hills of the plains where she lived. Kara examined the mail and discovered a letter sent to the old woman many years before when she lived in California. How the letter finally found its way to Kansas, how it had taken so many years to get there, was nearly as mystifying as the contents of the envelope itself, one letter enclosed inside another which in turn enclosed another, until the answer at the core simply said I’m waiting. But whoever was out there waiting for Lauren would now wait forever, and for Kara it was something like a child’s first understanding that everyone dies, this lesson of how love can wait in the heart unanswered.
Kara left Kansas and traveled west. Because her gaze had been fixed so long on the stars, she barely noticed the strange shimmer of everything that passed her, how as she headed west everything was blurred around the edges in its rush to an abysmal moment. She continued traveling until she came to a river, where she took a boat navigated by a young man with white hair growing on his arms like fur. The man had been sailing the boat for fifteen years, the length of her own life, back and forth between the shore and an island less than a mile away; from the deck of the boat she looked for the stars in the sky. They were gone. For a moment, between the island and the shore, there was nothing except the boat in the fog on the water. “But why have you come?” the boatman asked when they reached the island and she was about to step ashore; unseen in her coat, she cradled the bottle with the eyes, “To bury something,” she murmured.
The answer was still on her lips when she woke. It was still in her ears when she sat up in bed in the dark of the strange motel. She stared in alarm at the strange man sleeping next to her with the white hair on his body that grew like fur; she had no idea who he was or what she was doing in this motel room. She only knew that whatever her life had been before now was consumed by this night’s dream, and that the only remaining trace of that dream was some forgotten thing peering out at her from behind glass, twin blue ghosts joined at the soul by the last thread of memory. Immediately she rose from the bed to check her coat, which lay on a chair, as though it protected something. But nothing was there. Before dawn she slipped from the room and caught a bus at the side of the road.
The bus drove through an endless forest. Watching from the window she couldn’t remember having ever seen, on the ground and in the trees and hovering in the sky, so much ice. On a far hillside four days west. Kara lived in an observatory as caretaker and chief stargazer. If it was now beyond her waking consciousness to name any stars, she accepted that beneath that consciousness lurked the names that didn’t need to be remembered in order to be known. In the isolation of the observatory she felt safe enough in her exposure to the heavens to walk the dark nightlit cavern of the concrete bubble naked, the bright pink of her bare body the only violation of the black-blue sky and its gray outpost. In this way she felt the freedom of loving something that couldn’t be expected to love her back, until—after nearly ten years had passed—she met a man who insisted on loving her more than she could stand.
He lived on the outskirts of the village below the observatory. During the week he worked odd jobs in the village, delivering groceries for his mother’s store and building doors with his carpenter father. On the foothill trails that he had walked all his life, his path crossed Kara’s one dusk; the trees were sheathed by the glistening silver webs of the iceflies, which emerged from their cold white cocoons every year when the winter melted. The young man had been thinking about a wedding some years before that had taken place beneath these same trees, not far from this particular trail. It was a harsh, wincing memory. He’d been the wedding’s best man, a particularly bad best man, ignorant of the rituals of best men, of obligatory dances with the bride and toasts to the happy couple. No one had told him about being a best man; and in the oblivious anguish of his own love for one of the bridesmaids, a girl he would never see again after that wedding, he’d taken her down this same foothill trail as the wedding party awaited his presence in growing confusion and fury. His dereliction of duties as best man became for him, years later, the evidence in his life of his own destructive innocence. He never cared much for weddings after that. Years later, when he had left the village after his disastrous affair with Kara, in a white seaside city far away on the morning of his own wedding, the only thing
about his pending marriage for which he felt some relief was that at least he wouldn’t have to worry about his transgressions as a best man, being merely the groom instead.
Between Amanda, the bridesmaid with whom he’d walked on the foothill trail, and Kara whom he met on the same trail eight years later, there was Synthia. Beautiful and shattered, cruel and totalitarian. Synthia was the woman that divided his romanticism in two because, of all those he loved, she was least worthy of it. Prostrate in her adoration of an iron fist, and for the way it might piece her together according to its own design after smashing her to bits, Synthia despised the young man for the way there was no iron in his fist, no iron in his heart. Rather his heart was soft for her: she couldn’t tolerate it. Rather his hands were gentle on her body: she held them in contempt for how they were respectful of her, for the way they refused to violate the most fragile of orifices, refused to draw with exquisite brutality the starting line of his pleasure at the line where hers never began. That he was the only man who ever gave her an orgasm was something she only hated him for all the more; it was something that only made him all the weaker in her eyes. Synthia was the beginning of the end of his idealism about love, though that idealism would be another fifteen years in dying. She was the end of the division in him between love and sex, and of his naïve conviction that the two—the protests of philosophers notwithstanding—didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. It was the end of his idealistic supposition that freedom wasn’t the price of love, and that slavery wasn’t ever the choice of those who had the freedom to choose.
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