Daniel asked Martine’s friend how long she’d been telling him these things.
“Five years. Since she first found what she’d always imagined was there. Since she proved her hypothesis. She had always looked at the places on her body where the pigment was wholly gone, looked, and wondered, because they appeared where she’d been injured. Martine was once a chemist, so she was equipped by habit to ask the right questions.”
“No,” said Daniel, distressed. “I hope you didn’t just listen to her. I hope that—as a friend—you did more than listen.”
“I did what she told me to do. What she did,” the man said. He said that Martine had hoped to remain herself. She’d tried to retard the parasite’s progress. She’d resolved not to feed it. Or to feed it as little and as seldom as possible.
Daniel covered his own mouth, stifling something. He looked at the floor, its undulating tiles, and pushed his knuckles against the seam of his clenched teeth. He thought, She didn’t eat. The poor, deluded woman saw her illness as an invader and had tried to starve it out.
The man was still talking, telling Daniel about his dead friend. His light, hoarse voice wasn’t wholly unemotional, but the emotion was wrong. He was enthusiastic about his friend’s thinking and full of praise. He told Daniel about another thing that had interested Martine: the treatment of diabetics before the discovery of insulin. In the early part of the twentieth century diabetics were kept alive on a high-fat diet. The diet prolonged their lives. There were sanatoriums full of hyperglycemic patients, kept conscious and living by their total avoidance of carbohydrates. They ate fat and starved more slowly. They and their families, and their doctors, knew that a cure would come, and so they existed, in big, silent spas, where they crept about like ghosts, supporting themselves on rails rigged around the walls, while only their doctors and nurses walked through rooms, in the middle of the floor, in their fall vigor.
“Martine would talk about that,” the man said, “and how she hoped to keep herself—an essential tissue of herself—alive, till science was able to save her. She was afraid that while the parasite could copy her human capacity to learn, it couldn’t reproduce what she had learned, her memories. She was concerned for her soul. Would the parasite replace her soul with its own? Would her soul simply steam away with each cell the parasite replaced? Martine had a grandmother who’d been paralyzed, then struck speechless, by strokes. She’d think about her grandmother and wonder whether it was possible that a soul could go to God piecemeal. She was a little girl when her grandmother first fell ill. She’d watched her grandmother and had wondered if God already had her grandmother’s voice and gestures with Him in Heaven. She’d say to me that she hoped her own soul was going to God like a slow vapor, like the mist lifting as daylight comes.”
Martine Dardo had never been very thin, only bleached and sere, like this man. He didn’t look starved, Daniel thought, only ill, prematurely aged, damaged. Daniel asked the man whether he had the same illness—or allergy—as Martine. He asked, “Were you in Martine’s support group?”
The man laughed. “No. She was in mine.”
Daniel frowned. “Meaning?”
“Martine was my nestling,” the man said.
Daniel didn’t understand. For a moment he imagined that this was what it was like for non-Catholic laity on first hearing a term, doctrinal or otherwise, used by the Society of Jesus. Daniel felt that he was in the presence of a member of some other order, whose names, terms, and rules he didn’t know. He wanted to ask questions: What’s a nestling? To what extent did you humor poor Martine?
The man said, again, “I’m wondering what you’re thinking,” his former surprise replaced by wistfulness. “But it’s all rather a lot for you to digest, Father Octave.”
“You know me,” Daniel said, “but who are you?”
“Lou Ila.”
Lou Ila. In Provençal: the Island. A dust devil who dances forever.
“Wait,” said Daniel.
“I can do that,” said Ila.
Daniel had to sit. He turned around and fumbled for the end of a pew—swung himself into it. He fanned his face, waved away the questions he was too confused to ask. Ila squatted beside him and asked for a pen. “You should visit Eve,” he said. He took Daniel’s wrist in one dry hand, unbuttoned a cuff, and pushed up Daniel’s sleeve. He twisted Daniel’s wrist over to expose the paler blue-veined surface of his inner arm. There Ila wrote three phone numbers. He said, “Eve moves about, between three houses she has.” He released Daniel’s wrist and slipped the pen back into Daniel’s pocket.
Ila stood up and moved away. The candle flames flowed, flickering in the breeze he made passing quickly out of their air—before settling again, motionless and stretched on their black wicks.
Chapter 13
ANEMIA
After a time Bad noticed that whenever he talked about his family Dawn would leave the room. He’d find himself turning to her sister to finish his sentence. He and Dawn didn’t talk much when they were alone, or if they did she’d tell him stories. He would lie, groggy, watching her face, if she had left the lamp on, or, if not, staring at the tiny orange running light on the plug-in insect repellent, its citronella a catch in the throat of the night that had swallowed him.
When he bought the plug-in, Bad said to Dawn that he’d let her have him but not the mosquitoes. He would lie in her arms, looking over her shoulder at the light, which moved in and out of focus, so that sometimes it was a blob of crosshatched orange, sometimes a proper tiny, bright point. Bad would think about mosquitoes as Dawn paused in her story to make grazes on his chest—to taste, not feed. He thought about the thin fiber in a mosquito’s mouth pumping anticoagulants into capillaries a millimeter under his skin. Then he might provoke Dawn to bite him. “Deeper,” he’d say, his hand on the back of her neck, like a man more normally greedy, directing some obliging woman. But Bad wanted Dawn to pump something into him. Her venom was a neurotoxin, Eve had explained, a local anesthetic, and a neurotoxin loaded with endorphins. Eve said, “Whenever I have to go to the dentist I get Dawn to bite me.”
Under the venom’s influence Bad would feel exultant, then soothed and sleepy. But no matter how much water he drank before retiring he’d wake up in a dry fever with his lips stuck to his teeth, the lining of his cheeks patchy with pinhead ulcers and transparent tatters of peeling skin.
He and Dawn were always in bed before sunrise. Bad would take his watch off and put it under his pillow. Time was excluded from the room. Dawn would fall asleep when Bad was ready to be awake. Bad would listen to the traffic swell on the Avenue Sospel as the people who slept in Italy but worked in France arrived for the day. Or—a step up—those who slept in Menton but worked in Monaco got into their cars and made their way onto the autoroute.
At night there were infrequent trains, and Bad had time between them to wonder and fantasize about their destinations, particularly those that crossed the rail bridge with no alteration in speed, the long-distance trains that only stopped at the principal stations.
Once, when Dawn had subsided into silence, Bad turned to her to wonder. “Where is that one headed? There are so many possibilities,” he said. “I keep thinking that—if I had time—I could walk from here to Capetown, or Finland, or Manchuria. The trains cross the bridge and I hear all those land miles. It’s a different kind of distance. It’s not what I’m used to. It’s not an impossible distance. If Capetown was home, I could walk home.” Then he said, “Of course I’m forgetting money and food and shoe leather. But a vampire could do it.”
“If the vampire were old and wise enough to have mapped out every cave or old cellar along the way,” Dawn said. “But Ila says that dynamite put an end to all that. Explosives and earth-moving machines. A vampire can no longer rely on anything dug in to stay put. And I can remember Martine saying that, for her, one of the few tolerable things about her sainthood was that it might generate one or two protection orders from historical societies. Then Ila said
that sanctity itself wasn’t much guarantee of things staying put. And he talked about the churches destroyed during the Revolution.” Dawn laughed as she did when she was slowing up, a sound between growl and gurgle.
Ila’s memories, reported by Dawn, were for Bad a kind of equivalent to Europe’s land miles. They were so different from what he knew and treasured, the stories handed down through his family in a generational relay, stories that were journeys because—ultimately—they contained journeys and great chances taken. Bad’s aunt was “doing the family tree,” searching genealogical databases and hiring researchers in Kent or Jersey or County Cork to look at the parish records—marriage and birth certificates—or passenger manifests on ships that sailed from London or Southampton or Galway. Sea miles. Ships like cocoons. Lives transformed.
Dawn said that Ila had kept a face, a face smacked off a statue of Saint Benezet the bridge builder by some anticlerical vandals, during the Revolution. The face had been knocked off whole, a marble flake with a forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and most of a chin. The statue had stood in a roadside shrine on the island of Barthelasse. It was stained green up to the lower rims of its eyes by the waters of the flood of ’21. “Seventeen twenty-one,” Dawn said. “The flood that was slowest to fall. Eve wants Ila to restore it to its body,” Dawn said, “which is now in the museum attached to the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Ila was born on Barthelasse, the island in the stream of the Rhône. He hasn’t used his real name for a long time. He’s ‘the Island.’ If you want to know why he took me to Corsica, Bad, then ask him why he’s called the ‘the Island.’”
Bad listened to Dawn grind her teeth, plucking at her spines with her lower incisors—a squeaky rustle. He dozed then and dreamed about the train he heard in his sleep belting across the bridge over the Avenue Sospel. In his dream he was on that train, which didn’t cradle him or rock like a train on tracks. Instead it quivered, like the tip of a flexible rod shaken in the air. Bad woke in his dream and put up the train’s—the plane’s—beige plastic blind to see the lavender smoke of ocean far below him and the orange of a sunrise that had chased them all night and was still chasing them as the sun came up and the plane descended toward the Hauraki Gulf.
Bad woke, his eyes stinging but tearless, a band of pain across the bridge of his nose, his face cut in two as though he were Ila’s stained saint. Dawn was comatose. The light of the plug-in insect repellent had shrunk back to its proper size and pallor, and there was a glow on the ceiling above the screen that stood between Dawn’s bed and the window, a curtained, double-glazed window, with a seal like an air lock, so that when Dawn closed it for the night Bad’s ears would pop. The light came through the external shutters, their slats sun-blasted and coated with flaking gray paint. The sun was fall on the front of the apartment. Behind the pall of citronella was the smell of morning coffee. Eve had been to the market and had put out coffee and pastries on the table on the terrace. In the sun. Where Bad would join her.
There were times when Bad went to bed in darkness, alone, fell asleep listening to the trains and thinking, Florence, Strasbourg, Lyon, Turin, Barcelona, and picturing the capable hands of an attendant making up a berth. Bad would fall asleep, Dawn’s saliva in his blood, stiffening his joints. Dawn would join him shortly before sunrise, smelling of someone else, of cologne and cigarette smoke, or stinking of the men who slept in the open air, on salvaged sofas, on the Chemin du Peyronet. The men who existed on stale baguettes and blistering rosé decanted from plastic flagons in the market under the rail bridge. “They’ll be gone by the high season,” Dawn would tell Bad. “The mayor of Menton has the police see them all off, up the line to Nice.” Dawn spoke as if she had to make the most of these tramps while they lasted. She sounded like Eve, unpacking her shopping and remarking that they’d best make the most of the fevettes, the baby fava beans, while they were in season. Dawn, sated and happy and missing Bad, would come to bed without having washed, her skin impregnated with a stink as thick as coal tar, of rancid sweat, piss, stale wine, and the greasy smoke of burning rubbish. She’d have wiped her mouth and chin so that she could be seen in the street, but her neck would be tattooed with blood splashes, her shoulders printed with bruises where the men had held her—not believing their luck or the severity of their sensations—down on her knees before them. The hair around her face was set in stiff quills, a glue of dried semen. Bad would know that, at the moment of crisis, her head had moved, had made another—illicit—outlet in the tramp’s body, one that spurted red. Bad had taken note of the white freckles—scars—that speckled Dawn’s inner thighs, as thick as scales along her branching arteries. And he’d had that attention, her tandem attack. First she’d tease him by numbing him, tease herself by grating his skin with her bristles as she sucked, so that the blood oozed. Then, when he came, finally, despite her venom numbing him, she’d turn her head to bite his thigh. He would feel one foot tingle and grow cold, feel her hunger drawing heat right out of his heart.
“Why don’t you wash?” Bad said once, and Dawn told him that she wanted him to know, wanted him to join her. “There’s no harm done. The man wakes with a thick head and finds his fly open. He says to himself, ‘The crazy bitch bit my prick.’ Ila used to go into the clubs carrying his needles, and cannula, and plastic flex, and a powerful Valium derivative used in dentistry—a pretty poor substitute for the drug in his mouth. He’d pick up people who would wake up in their own beds with no memory of the night before, feeling hammered and ill, and with a bruise and puncture mark in the crook of one arm. Imagine what they imagined, and what they feared.”
Bad repeated, “You should have washed.”
And Dawn: “Come on, enjoy it.” Inviting him. “I want you to know. I want you to join me.”
He joined her. But then he wouldn’t surface again till the late afternoon, so hungry he’d wake retching. He’d find Dawn fastened to his arm, her barbs in him and her tongue idly lapping to keep his wounds open and seeping.
In the third week of June Eve asked them all to go with her to Cap de Nice. She meant to make the most of Jean’s house before it opened to its summer public. Besides, she said, since Dawn and Ila were wide awake and hungry it was better to move nearer to Nice and its bigger population.
As usual, on waking, Bad went to find Eve. He closed every door behind him, left the darkened wing, and wandered downstairs and through the great rectangular rooms of the Musée Jean Ares. The marble was cold beneath his feet. He walked toward the light, through a final barrier of a floor-to-ceiling curtain—hung to protect the paintings in the room that gave onto the long, deep terrace of the house. The curtain was yellow silk, its hem weighted so that it would only billow open at its seams, the silk bulging and the corner weight raised an inch or two, before each gust let go and the weight dropped to the flagstones, connecting with a tiny clink. Bad went through the curtains and found Eve on the terrace, at a table under an umbrella, drinking coffee from a ceramic cup made to look like crumpled paper. Eve had been waiting for him. She had another cup and a brioche. She poured coffee and gave him the International Herald Tribune. She was reading Nice-Matin.
Bad ate, sipped coffee, and read a feature about lemon-cino—he daydreamed about lemon groves in Sicily, where he and his girlfriend, Gabrielle, had planned to go. Bad’s daydreams were exactly the same as his night ones—they began with land travel, some destination he could reach by train, but would jump their tracks and drop him somewhere distant and silent and wintry—home, on the green Whanganui River, his landing softened by a morning mist rising from its cold surface.
“I can’t seem to stay awake,” Bad told Eve. He finished his coffee and used his warmed tongue to groom the lacerated place on his arm.
“You should wash,” Eve said. “You smell of homeless men.”
Bad told Eve that Dawn was like a baby who dozes off with a bottle in its mouth. “You know—you see them, asleep, but giving an occasional slurp.” He recalled that his sister had told him that babies shoul
dn’t be put down to sleep with bottles. He told Eve, “It’s no good for their ears, apparently.”
“Hmmm?” Eve said. Her noise was casual but her expression engaged.
“My sister works in child care,” Bad explained, then looked aside, anxious. For a moment he had imagined Dawn was with them and that he’d driven her off, out of the room again, by mentioning his family.
“What’s your sister’s name?” Eve asked.
Eve’s interest primed Bad’s pump, and in the following forty minutes he told her about his family, about Pops, who had paid for his schooling, about his final year in high school, the outdoors adventure course, and Dart Ridge. Then he found himself trying to describe the Riwaka Resurgence. Bad was remembering its deceptive depth, the clarity that made it seem shallow. He was thinking about what it was that had hooked him on caves and had brought him to Dawn and to this moment, his conversation with Dawn’s sister on the sunny terrace of a villa on the Côte d’Azur.
Bad hadn’t ever been in a cave before he met his first potholers in the Yorkshire pub where he’d worked in the bar. But it wasn’t the potholers who turned him on to caves, not their charm, their conviviality, their games for rainy days—the “table traverse” they’d do around the pub’s pool table, going right around it without ever a putting a foot on the floor. It wasn’t even their stories about tight spots, heroic rescues, and unseen wonders. It was something Bad had seen before he met them, before he went to England. It was the Riwaka Resurgence.
After Dart Ridge, Bad went on the road trip with three other survivors to visit the families of their dead friends. When they were in Nelson, he and his friends took the minivan along the gravel road that ran around the base of the Takaka Hill to take a look at the Riwaka Resurgence, the place where the Riwaka River reappeared from underground. They left the van in the parking lot and went along the track, Bad and the boy who had jumped carrying the boy in the wheelchair and guiding the girl whose eyes had given her trouble ever since the accident. They reached the place and stood on the bank above the welling green water. It came up quietly but in volume—the river’s surface piled in pouring humps of water directly above the place it reappeared. It was beautiful, and none of them had seen anything like it. They stood there for a long time, long enough for something startling to happen. There appeared in the powerful, quiet, welling water a thread of bubbles. Then a gout of bubbles. A ray of light lanced up through the water, waving like a feeler, and a man slid out of the cave in the press of water. The man wore a wet suit, air tanks, a helmet, and a lamp. He was followed by another man. It was, to Bad, as if the mountain had given birth to twins. The cave divers surfaced, unmasked their eyes, unplugged their mouths, and said predictable things like “Hi” and how long they’d been down in the dark.
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