Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  Daniel closed his eyes. He was floating. The membrane of the moment ruptured, time revealed a capacity hitherto undisclosed to him and only breathed in. Time filled him up, and he was falling asleep for once inside rather than beside himself. Daniel made an effort; he roused himself. He said, “Jacques’s family knew about the drugs.”

  The drugs were no big deal, the stylist said, only the usual—party drugs. They didn’t suit Jacques, though, who was always down between parties. Depressed.

  “Were these people—Jacques’s spooky friends—something to do with the drugs?”

  The stylist said Daniel was on the same false trail as the police. Jacques had left the spa five months before. The last time the stylist had seen him, Jacques had been less depressed, perhaps, but smug and secretive. “And he was with that woman, his client ….”

  The woman—Jacques’s client—had come in every two weeks to have her roots touched up. Red. She was prematurely gray, in her twenties, but silver, like Richard Gere, or perhaps white, like Steve Martin. “There’s a gene for that,” the stylist said. “Premature gray.” Jacques had touched up her hair, tinted her eyebrows and eyelashes.

  The stylist turbaned Daniel’s head in a towel and got him up, led him to a station before a triptych of mirrors, each a Gothic arch. On the granite-topped bench before the mirrors stood a white dish full of tea lights. By their radiance Daniel saw himself, his face boyish and unused, younger than his years, and poorly ornamented by his mother’s cold, shy, inscrutable eyes. The stylist slipped the spike of a comb into Daniel’s hairline and began to separate his hair into sections. He asked Daniel if he had thought yet what he wanted done.

  “Nothing flamboyant.”

  “No? Well, it’s too short to offer much scope, not without color. And it’s good hair, a great color, true Tropic of Cancer black.”

  The stylist called out to an apprentice. He asked her to go find last year’s appointment book. “There’ll be a name and contact number for that woman,” he told Daniel.

  “Did you give all this to the police?” Daniel asked—and blinked as a fall of wet cut hair splattered down, brushed his eyelashes, and settled like scattered stamens on the backs of his hands.

  “This was Jacques’s last place of employment. He gave up his apartment shortly after he left his job. The police wanted to know where he’d been living, who with, and what on. They wanted to know about his drug taking. We”—the stylist indicated the serpentine line of mirrored stations and hairdressers busy with scissors, razors, foils, dye-covered brushes—“we weren’t going to give them names.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I talked about Jacques. How he seemed when I last saw him. Smug and secretive.”

  Daniel waited. He watched the stylist in the mirror. The man was frowning, testing the hair above Daniel’s temple for length, running it up between his fingers. “Shorter,” he said. Then, “Jacques looked really good. He said he was better off out of this—the spa—and that he shouldn’t have followed his folks into the beauty industry. He said that he’d once imagined he was better than that. I found this remark a little insulting, and I told him, ‘Jesus, it’s only a job!’ Then he said—and I remember his exact words, because they were weird—‘But I’m not better, because my miracle was only a case of mistaken identity.’” The stylist lifted his scissors. “Stay still,” he said, alarmed. He got a cloth and dabbed at the tip of Daniel’s left ear—the pointed one, distorted by a bad forceps delivery. “You jumped and I cut you.”

  Daniel ignored this. He asked if the man knew what Jacques had meant by “his miracle.”

  The stylist shook his head.

  Daniel told him about the flood in ’92, the fourteen-year-old schoolboy who went missing, and his answered prayers. Then he asked the stylist if this story threw any light on things Jacques had said about himself.

  “There must be light, because now I’m seeing shadows that weren’t there before,” the stylist said. He sprayed Daniel’s hair with water and went back to work on it. He said he was sorry that Jacques hadn’t ever spoken about his miracle. “Perhaps he thought we’d contaminate it,” he said. He looked sad. “I didn’t even know he was religious. And I suppose things can seem different to someone who is. I thought Jacques had become secretive. But I guess he always was.”

  “Did he seem ashamed?” Daniel asked.

  “No, smug—I told you.”

  “Smug,” Daniel mused. “And his miracle was only mistaken identity.”

  “Careful,” the stylist said. “I don’t want to let any more of your blood. Why did that shock you? That’s what made you jump.”

  “Jacques’s testimony is part of history.”

  “Oh … history.” The stylist was dismissive, as if, to him, history was only hearsay. Then he said, “There.” He put his scissors back in their cylinder of disinfectant and showed Daniel a tube labeled “Polish.” He squeezed a clear, bubble-jeweled drop into his palm, rubbed his hands together, and ran them through Daniel’s hair. Then he held up a mirror so Daniel could inspect the back of his own head. Daniel looked—and felt alarm and embarrassment. It was the best haircut he’d ever had, and it had the effect of making his face look, to him, interesting and attractive.

  “Do you like it?” the stylist asked.

  “I think I look very handsome,” Daniel said, unable to hide his dismay.

  The stylist laughed. “It’ll wear off,” he said. He conducted Daniel to the salon receptionist, the cash register, and the appointment book. The apprentice had found last year’s book and had left it there for the stylist. Daniel counted out cash, gave it to the girl, and then bent over the book. The stylist was looking at pages, stroking the columns, the different hands, crossings out, mended entries. His fingers stopped and tapped the book. He gave Daniel a piece of paper and a pen. He said, “She always paid in cash. Like you.”

  Daniel wrote down the name: “Grazide,” and the number of a mobile phone.

  There was a yacht between the horizon and the shadow of the mountains that lay like a net slung between Cap Martin and Capo Mortola. The vessel wasn’t new, one of those sculpted white yachts, topped by whipping aerials. It was of an older vintage and had a black steel hull and single raked-back funnel. Even at a distance, its varnished deck and rails were aglow.

  Daniel watched the yacht’s progress with the same expectant attention he might give to a shot in a film. He waited as though for the story to begin. He waited for the arrival of a protagonist. At that moment Daniel felt that he was not, himself, a protagonist. He felt that the view from the top terrace of the old cemetery in Menton was something he was being shown, that he was as passive as any other member of the audience and didn’t have to say what he thought or to turn in his copy. He felt that there wasn’t a thing he had to attend to after the lights came up.

  These were not feelings Daniel normally had. He wasn’t usually this detached or this self-conscious. He was, he had always thought, a busy, interested creature, burrowing his way through the world, deeper than some (because, as a priest, it was his business to consider morals and mysteries) and more myopic than others (because he had renounced the world, except where the Company asked him to involve himself on behalf of the Church). Yet as Daniel sat on the raised lip of a dry drain, beside a tap, on the top terrace of the old cemetery in Menton, he felt that he was waiting for a word—for something from someone. As he waited—in reality for the caretaker to come past and roust out the last visitors before closing the gates—Daniel scraped up a few marble chips from the freshly strewn path and tossed them from hand to hand, winnowing stone from stone. His hands were dirty. He was listening with all his fluent, viscous attention to the clack and splatter of the pebbles and looking at everything before him—the town, its sunny kindness, even with the sun gone; and the bay of Garavan, its vivid water streaked and cape haloed with smooth patches of current. Opposite Daniel, among the rank of graves at the edge of the tall terrace, was a tomb sealed by a statu
e. The statue was a little bigger than life-size. It was of a coffin—lid springing up as though lifted by a gale—and a woman, whose white marble limbs were wrapped in wind-whipped, billowing marble draperies. The woman was sailing forth from the coffin with her face turned to the heavens. She was great and buoyant and didn’t have a glance to spare for the lovely hospitable landscape that lay below her, seeming to dare her to look down.

  Daniel scattered another handful of stones and stared at the statue. He thought, Look back. Look down. He put out a dusty hand to touch the faded tiles on the wall of the tomb beside him. They were still warm from the sun. He got up and dusted his hands, careful of his black suit, and turned from the view to the Moskelute tomb. It was imposing, dilapidated, exotically tiled and domed. Daniel had caught a train to Menton that morning—the day after the funeral—and had asked at La Conception where Martine Dardo was interred. The priest who had conducted the service told Daniel that Martine Dardo was in her friend Eve Moskelute’s family tomb. Daniel heard from the priest how, at the beginning of the previous century, a consumptive Moskelute, a countess, had lived in Menton, the warmest port on the Côte d’Azur, in order to prolong her life. Her family had purchased property—a villa, and an apartment in one of the speculative developments that sprang up shortly before World War I. The ailing countess built herself a mausoleum. She declined and died. The war came, then the revolution in Russia. The family dispersed or disappeared. The villa was sold, but the apartment was retained by the countess’s nephew, Eve Moskelute’s paternal grandfather. The tomb was real estate the family had in perpetuity, and Eve’s own twin sister was laid to rest there in 1969, the last interment before that of Martine Dardo. Eve had been the only mourner at her friend’s funeral, the priest told Daniel, but later the caretaker told him that Madame Moskelute and three handsome young people had visited the tomb on the evening after the funeral.

  Yesterday evening.

  Daniel put a hand on the stone frame of the bronze door. He leaned closer to look at a smear, a sooty flare on the bronze, a small mark in the shape of a black leaf, its stem excised.

  Daniel considered this mark. It wasn’t candle smoke, the plush soot of wax. He considered the mark with his eyes rather than his mind. To give himself more light, Daniel stepped back—then saw something glinting above him on the sill of the door’s marble lintel. It was a silver box, its seams sealed with gold. Daniel grabbed it and saw the broken crystal panel, the red velvet interior, the notch, empty, and the tiny square imprint of the missing match.

  Daniel stood for a long time, his thoughts circling, like Noah’s raven, looking for land and finding only a shifting mass of water.

  He was disturbed by the sound of footfalls on the peastone walk. He turned, expecting the caretaker. But it was a man with white hair, a fine-boned face, and dry, pale skin. The man wore aviator glasses, and Daniel couldn’t see his eyes. The man stopped before Daniel and held out a hand, palm up.

  Daniel looked down at his own hands, then offered the man the reliquary. “Careless to leave it,” Daniel said.

  The man’s parched fingertips brushed Daniel’s hand as he scooped the reliquary out of it.

  “The reliquary is quite valuable in itself,” Daniel said. He had recognized the man as the person he’d spoken to briefly on the mule track above Dardo.

  “I’ve undertaken to put it back,” the man said. Even his voice was dry, an atonal whisper.

  “Back in St. Barthelemy’s?”

  The man nodded. Then he moved past Daniel and inclined against the door of the tomb, pressed his ear to it, and stood still, as if he was listening.

  “All quiet?” Daniel said—against every civil instinct he had.

  The man didn’t answer him. He only turned his face and swapped ears.

  “Will you talk to me?” Daniel said.

  The man pushed himself off the tomb door. “I’m going to light a candle for her now,” he said.

  Daniel took that to mean he should go with the man—who was already walking away.

  The man went down the steps from the top terrace, two at a time. He was quiet and moved as if his body had volume but not mass. Daniel was hard put to keep up—except that the man stopped at the gates to give the caretaker a twenty-franc note.

  Daniel lost the man again on a curving downhill flight of shallow steps. He caught him up at La Conception, at the altar of the Virgin, where there were real candles—no art worth preserving from the smoke—instead of a coin slot and light-bulbs in the shape of flames.

  Daniel and the man lit a candle each, and Daniel said a prayer.

  The man removed his dark glasses and hung them by one earpiece from the perishing ribbed-cotton neck of his worn but clean long-sleeved T-shirt. Daniel looked him over, saw good running shoes, old Levi’s, white eyelashes, and eyes, in the candlelight, as pale as candle flames.

  “Martine was ill,” Daniel said. He waited. “I was told that she was in correspondence with people about it. A support network or—”

  “You’re just fishing,” the man said.

  “Yes,” Daniel said, then, “Martine had books on cellular biology. Medical texts with color plates. She told me that she even studied English in order to read some of them.” He was thinking of those patient, passionate self-taught scientists, the parents of Lorenzo Odone, who took up the study of chemistry to save their son.

  The man was looking straight at Daniel, into his eyes, and, after a moment, Daniel realized he wasn’t shaken; he hadn’t shied away.

  “I’m wondering what you’re thinking,” the man said. He sounded surprised.

  “I’m thinking about the people who find medicine unprepared to save those they love, so learn everything medicine knows about their problems in order to solve those problems themselves.”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “Like Martine,” Daniel said.

  “Yes. But it wasn’t just medicine. Martine liked those stories. And other stories about how some things that science and rationality have made their own originally sprang from spiritual desire. Like Alan Turling’s heroic spiritual desire.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.” Daniel thought the man’s voice had taken on a familiar quality—he sounded like those people who testified about miracles to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

  “Alan Turling was a British mathematician. The father of the modern computer. He came up with differential calculus.” The man gave a small speedy flick of his head. “Martine liked to say, of inventions and discoveries, that people came up with them. ‘We bait our hooks,’ she’d say, ‘but it’s God Who brings fish to our lines.’ Turling made a machine that used differential calculus to break the Germans’ codes in the last war. He also thought about artificial intelligence. But he didn’t think about it first because he wanted to build machines that think and speak in math. He thought about it because a friend he loved died and he needed to understand what a mind was, apart from a body. He needed to know if mind was distinguishable, separate, separable, and might survive the death of the body.”

  Daniel stood, his mouth open, so amazed by this man’s oddity that he felt that the tiers of candles had curved up over him, as bright as stadium lights.

  “Martine liked her computer. And she’d say, ‘To think that computers are the children of lost love.’”

  Daniel wondered how he came to be hearing about souls when he’d wanted to ask about sickness.

  But Martine’s friend came around to Daniel’s subject himself. “Martine liked her computer,” he said. “And when she got the Internet she could search the sites of the big teaching hospitals in America. She searched libraries of images. Images of cell samples. She was finally able to distinguish what she saw through the eyepieces of her microscope from what she should be seeing. It was a process of elimination, she said to me.”

  Daniel tried to pay attention but was distracted by the man’s eyes, which must be a very pale blue, their coolness canceled by golden candlelight. The
y appeared colorless, like the eyes of a silver-coated weimaraner. Daniel felt that he wasn’t being seen, that the eyes were blind, wouldn’t absorb light, and couldn’t take in an image. Daniel thought, I’m invisible to him. But, of course, the man was in mourning and, despite his distracting oddities, wanted simply to talk about his friend. Daniel could be anyone, a handy ear.

  When Daniel had sufficiently soothed himself with these thoughts he found he was more prepared to hear what was being said to him.

  Which was this:

  Martine had identified a parasite in her body. It wasn’t a case of its cohabitation; it didn’t sleep, as some parasites do, in her gut or encapsulated in her reproductive organs. No, it was everywhere, percolating throughout her entire system. It was everywhere, and it looked exactly like the cells at each site, performed the same functions, acting in the liver as the liver, in the muscles as the muscles, in blood as blood. It was a mimic. Only its cells were immortalized, like cancer cells. But unlike cancer, its cells weren’t all-consuming or monstrous.

  “Immortal, but not monsters,” the man told Daniel, and smiled. He went on to say that Martine had surmised that the parasite had its factory in her gut. There it converted human genetic material—not its host’s, however, but what its host ate. Her stomach didn’t digest, she explained, but filed off engine numbers, changed license plates, and applied a coat of new paint—so to speak. The parasite’s aim—if the machineries of nature could be said to have aims—was to colonize its host by making a copy. Sooner or later the parasite would reach great enough concentrations in its host’s body and its host would become infectious. The parasite’s human host’s instinct for intimacy would carry it—the parasite—into other humans, further hosts. “‘Intimacy,’ Martine said, ‘is another thirst.’”

  This was mad stuff. Daniel’s mother had collected and organized data to shore up her sense of being failed, or abused, by the world. Daniel was familiar with that kind of thinking and wise to it. But this was different. These delusions required more than the misinterpretation of facts; they required invention—and an exercise of faith.