Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  Resigned, he pushed away from the wall and started back along the ledge. The snow coated his clothing and he had to wipe off his goggles as he marched toward the cave entrance, tempted to go back to the shelter he shared with Meryam and try to fall asleep before she came to bed, put the confrontation off until morning. He told himself it wouldn’t be cowardice but practicality. They needed sleep.

  But, no. The stew of guilt and anger boiled inside him and he knew he had to face her. His thoughts flickered back through the past few months and he wondered why he had never seen it. She had been in constant touch with Feyiz since their first trip here. Even as they planned their marriage, Meryam must have been carrying on with him at a distance. No wonder she had been so withdrawn, so disinterested in helping him make wedding plans. The day she had been so late to view a wedding venue and she had shown up with word from Feyiz of the landslide, of the cave, of the ark … no wonder she had been so determined to get back here as fast as they could travel, to push off plans for the wedding.

  It had never been about the ark at all.

  Snow crunched underfoot. The wind pushed at his back as if the storm itself wanted him to hurry toward the ugliness that awaited. He felt worst of all for Calliope. Their friendship shouldn’t have to suffer from this but it would, and so would their professional relationship. He supposed there was a chance that somewhere down the line they would dig their friendship out of the wreckage that was about to occur, but Adam wouldn’t have bet on it.

  A gust of wind knocked him two steps to the left—toward the edge—and he bent forward, fighting the storm. Wiping the snow from his goggles again, he was surprised to see a figure emerging from the cave, backlit by the dull glow from within. The figure paused and glanced around, scanning for someone—looking for me? Adam wondered if it might be Meryam, or even Calliope. But as the figure spotted him and started toward him and their steps brought them closer together, he realized it was Feyiz.

  His fists clenched. He could barely feel his fingers inside his gloves, but the bones ached when the anger tightened them together. His guilt muddied his feelings toward Meryam tonight, but what he felt for Feyiz … that was crystal clear.

  “Thank goodness,” Feyiz said, shivering and stamping his feet as he paused in front of Adam. “I couldn’t find you and then Calliope told me you were on sentry duty and I thought ‘tonight?’ But then when I came out and didn’t see you I thought … well, never mind. It doesn’t matter. I need to talk to you.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Adam said quietly.

  Feyiz barely seemed to hear. Adam wanted to smash him into the ground, to hammer at his face and make him bleed into the snow, to pitch him right over the edge.

  “It’s about Meryam,” Feyiz said.

  The words knocked the breath out of Adam. This son of a bitch dared to face him here, in the middle of this project, on the side of a fucking mountain, in a goddamn blizzard? He wanted to talk about the woman Adam had planned to marry? Just the look on Feyiz’s face, that sanctimoniously earnest expression that suggested he knew Meryam better than Adam did was enough to earn him broken bones.

  “Go on,” Adam heard himself say, teeth gritted. Wanting to hear him say it, now. Wanting Feyiz to confess his sins before receiving the beating that was coming his way.

  “I almost didn’t seek you out,” Feyiz admitted. “I promised her I wouldn’t say anything, but I can’t keep it to myself. I don’t think it’s right that I should know the secrets a woman keeps from the man she intends to marry.”

  Intends to marry, Adam thought. Meryam still thinks we’re getting married?

  Adam hadn’t been in a fistfight since the eighth grade. As a boy, he’d struggled with a difficult temper and been in trouble more than once, gone home with scrapes and bruises and swollen knuckles. He had taught himself to be more civilized, to find another path in his life. But tonight he did not want to be civilized. He didn’t want another path. His guilt over having sex with Calliope fell away as if it had been the one thing chaining down his rage.

  “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that,” he muttered.

  The wind swept the words away. Feyiz frowned and studied him. He’d heard Adam speak but hadn’t made out what he’d said.

  “She’s going to be furious,” Feyiz went on. “But you deserve to know, Adam. She thinks she’s protecting you or something, but I can see the way it’s pushing the two of you apart.” He threw his hands up. “Listen to me, talking in circles. I’m sorry. I hate breaking her trust, but you have to know she’s sick. You must have noticed, right? Maybe you just don’t see how sick.”

  It took several seconds for the words to sink in, to sift down through the fugue of his anger. When they did, the heat of his rage faded and the icy teeth of the wind bit deep. Frozen, freezing, Adam stared numbly at Feyiz.

  “What did you just say?”

  “She’s sick, Adam. Meryam’s been hiding it from you because she’s afraid of how it will change things. She confided in me because I lost my father and my sister the same way and I’ve let her lean on me, but now—with all that’s going on, all that she’s been carrying on her shoulders—it just isn’t fair for her to—”

  “Sick how?”

  “—keep it from you. I tried to get her to tell you, but she—”

  Adam’s hands moved on their own. Shot out and grabbed Feyiz by the front of his coat, dragged him forward so they were eye to eye, close enough to establish their own new and terrible intimacy.

  “What is wrong with her?” he demanded.

  Feyiz didn’t try to push him away, didn’t even fight the grip on his coat. It was that more than anything that told Adam just how bad the news would be. Full of sorrow, Feyiz only exhaled.

  “She has cancer, Adam. Meryam is dying.”

  * * *

  Trudging into the cave—into the ark—Adam felt like a sort of ghost himself, like a revenant in an old film, appearing from the maelstrom accompanied by an ominous clamor of chords. Somehow outside his own body, he watched powerless as the Adam Holzer he’d always seen in the mirror made his way past the staff encampment, where the warmth inside of plastic shelters caused the snow blown against the tarps to melt and run in small icy trickles.

  He watched himself and saw only a kind of marionette. The human body was a puppet, wasn’t it, with the mind—perhaps even the soul—pulling the strings? Adam didn’t know who was pulling his strings now. His feet moved but he barely felt them. When he reached up and tugged off his goggles, drew down the scarf to bare his face to the cold emanating from the rock and timber and snow, he hardly recognized the motions as his own.

  Numb, he came to stand outside the stall Meryam called her office. The heater rattled inside and the bright light created two Meryams, one who sat at the plastic table and a shadow Meryam, a dark twin whose silhouette seemed strangely misshapen. Inhuman. It occurred to him that neither of them was the woman he’d thought he knew.

  His boots shuffled in snow, scuffed the timber beneath it.

  Meryam looked up from her work with an air of impatience, almost consternation. Then she saw who it was, must have read the expression on his face, and she knew. Her lower lip trembled and for a moment she looked angry, as if she might have been nurturing some private reserve of rage that she would now unleash on him, or on Feyiz for telling her secret. Then the moment passed and she shuddered as she lowered her head.

  “Damn it,” she rasped.

  The wind gusted in the passage behind Adam, almost shoving him into the stall with her. Snow cascaded from his clothes as he stumbled.

  “It’s true?” Two words. They were all he could manage.

  Meryam met his gaze, spine stiffening with bravado, and she nodded. It was that moment of mustering her courage that broke him. Adam took three steps toward her and went to his knees. Meryam reached for him and he dragged her from her chair into an embrace that had them both on their knees. Body wracked with ragged breaths, sobs that could not seem to drag tears from
his eyes, he cried out.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Adam inhaled sharply, the smell of Calliope still in his nose. Horror spread through him. He was still angry with himself and with Meryam, but the most terrible poison infecting him now was the truth he’d discovered. All his life, he had held himself up as one of the good guys. In old Western movies, he’d have worn a white hat. Now he was just as broken as everyone else, just as tainted. Not a bad guy, maybe, but not a good guy in the end.

  What have I done?

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She met his gaze firmly, chin high. Confronted, she would not shrink from it now. “It’s a special brand. Acute myelogenous leukemia. They tried a couple of things, but even from the start I never saw a glimmer of hope in their eyes. I’ve been told to get my affairs in order.”

  Adam lifted a trembling hand to cover his mouth, grief hollowing him out.

  “I’m so sorry,” Meryam said again, amid her own shuddering tears. “I’m sorry I can’t give you the life you wanted.”

  Adam held her at arm’s length, studying her, as if he could see the cancer inside of her. “That’s why you’re sorry? Not because you didn’t tell me? Not because you let me think you didn’t care anymore, that you didn’t want to get married? You’re not sorry for that?”

  Meryam waved her head back and forth, her whole body rocking. “I’m sorry for it all. But it wouldn’t have been fair, love. Tying you to a dying woman. I prayed the diagnosis was wrong, and when the doctors confirmed it, I just prayed for another adventure, and then another. Adam and Eve conquer the world. I didn’t know how many more adventures we’d have.”

  Adam stared at the dark, heavy circles beneath her eyes. He saw, at last, how prominent the bones in her cheeks had become, how thin even her neck seemed now. It’s not altitude sickness, she had told him when she’d become ill that first morning, just before discovering the ark. He’d sensed something then but there had already been tension in their relationship and he hadn’t wanted to press. Memories cascaded through his mind, moments when she’d stumbled or gotten sick or seemed so exhausted, and he had chalked it up to the stress of the project.

  How could I not have seen it? How could I not have pressed for the truth?

  “We’re partners,” he said, taking her face in his gloved hands, forcing her to meet his gaze. “This should’ve been us together.”

  Meryam scowled. “How does that work, Adam? How do we have cancer together? You’re not the one who’s going to die.”

  “Fuck’s sake! I know I can’t share your goddamn cancer! But you don’t have to deal with this alone. That’s always been the problem, hasn’t it? You never really understood what it meant to be in love, to share your life—”

  She ripped his hands away from her face and shoved him backward with such force that he fell on his ass. Shaking, she rose to her feet and retreated a step, glaring down at him.

  “If you mean I never understood why people vanish into their relationships, you’re right about that much. You knew that about me long before we were engaged. I wanted a partner, an ally, not the kind of romantic, fanciful bullshit spun by schoolgirls and women raised to cook your bloody dinner. I’m not looking for my other half, someone to complete my fucking puzzle. I’m whole unto myself, Adam. I wanted someone who was just as whole.”

  Adam heaved a shuddering sigh, anger seeping back into him. He pushed off the ground and rose to his feet.

  “You want me to apologize for needing you? For loving you? For wanting to help you deal with this diagnosis?”

  “And what would you have done?” Meryam demanded, shouting now.

  She marched toward him and he stepped back out of the stall. The wind crashed along the passage, blasting snow around him. Heads poked out of the camp shelters and he saw the faces of some of the archaeology grad students, and then Mr. Avci. Silhouetted in the dark passage, he saw Feyiz standing and watching like some silent monitor, a dark angel sent by God to record but not intervene.

  Record, he thought. His camera was in his jacket pocket. Calliope was nowhere to be seen. There would be no film of this moment and for once Adam was grateful for the lack of footage.

  “What the hell would you have done?” Meryam shouted, following him into the passage. “You’d have treated me like fine China, locked me up in a cabinet somewhere to protect me, and that would’ve killed me much faster than this damned mountain.”

  Adam couldn’t argue against the truth. “I’d never have agreed to this project, that’s for sure.”

  Wiping at her tears, almost sneering, Meryam nodded. “My point.” She glanced at those who were watching them, then spotted the silhouette further up the passage. “Damn you, Feyiz. You see what you’ve done?”

  The whole of the ark seemed to shimmer with bitterness and sorrow, to vibrate with hostility.

  “Stop,” Adam said.

  Meryam wiped at her tears again, face red with anger. “It wasn’t his secret to tell! It’s my life. Not his, and not yours!”

  Adam had been feeling for a while that they had all been slowly infected with a poison of the soul, and that it had been spreading. But now it seemed so much worse, as if every time he exhaled, a little more of him was leaving, and every breath he took was replacing him with something else. Some other, angrier, uglier Adam.

  Even as the thought struck him, he felt a tug inside him. The strings of the marionette he’d imagined himself to be.

  “It is my life,” he said, but it wasn’t him. His voice and his lips, but not him. “How could you be so selfish?”

  One of the staffers swore, shocked by the exchange. From somewhere outside of himself, a sickness and horror spreading in his mind, Adam could only watch and listen.

  Meryam laughed. “Me? I’m the selfish one?”

  Feyiz called his name. Adam heard the caution there, but could not respond.

  His legs moved. His body turned. His arm cocked back.

  He slapped Meryam so hard that she spun halfway round, the echo of the blow ricocheting off the walls up and down the passage. Moments of silence followed, filled only by the howl of the storm.

  The ark itself seemed to hold its breath.

  Something inside Adam began to laugh.

  FOURTEEN

  Walker woke to his name. Hands shook him roughly. His foot went astray, out from under the thick covering of the sleeping bag, the zipper scraping his shin. The cold air slithered inside and gooseflesh rippled across his naked flesh.

  “Jesus, what?” he groaned, opening his eyes.

  Father Cornelius knelt beside him, angry and urgent as he gave Walker one last shake. Polly stood behind him, just outside the tent. But her presence wasn’t the problem. Walker glanced around, the past few hours coming back to him all at once. The tent did not belong to him and the heavy-duty sleeping bag was warm and soft but also not his own. Kim lay against him, her bare leg draped across him, and only now did her eyes begin to open.

  The moment she saw the priest, she closed her eyes again and muttered something in Korean that Walker assumed was either a curse or a prayer. Then she slid down inside the sleeping bag, pulling it up over her head.

  “Stop,” Father Cornelius said, grabbing the corner of the sleeping bag and yanking it down to expose Kim’s face and the upper part of her chest.

  She cried out in alarm.

  “Father, what the hell?” Walker snapped. “I know how this looks—”

  “We don’t care how it looks,” Polly said, tugging the tent flap open further, staring in at the three of them.

  “She’s right.” Father Cornelius patted his shoulder. “You two screwing is the least of my concerns. Get some clothes on and do it fast.”

  The priest reached up a hand and Polly helped him to his feet, rubbing one arthritic knee as he stood. When he’d left the tent and Polly had cinched the flaps closed behind him, Walker dragged his scattered clothes over to the sleeping bag and hurriedly dressed. Kim gazed at him in abject
horror and then hid herself again.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “I’m Catholic,” her muffled voice explained from beneath the heavy sleeping bag.

  “Didn’t you see the look on his face? That wasn’t about us.”

  Walker tossed Kim her clothes. She nodded and slipped into her bra, quickening her pace until—moments later—she pulled him toward her and kissed him so deeply that Walker had to break away to catch his breath.

  “What—”

  Kim smiled. “It’s going to take a dark turn, now. Yes, I saw that look in the Father’s eyes. So I wanted to let you know, right now, that this part, at least—this was good.”

  He took her hand, kissed her fingers, and she smiled again as she drew them back so she could finish dressing. Once they’d pulled their boots on, they left the tent and found Father Cornelius and Polly waiting in the stall, in front of the tent Ben had been sharing with the priest. Polly glanced out into the passage, glanced in either direction, and then nodded.

  “I’m guessing whatever you translated from the bottom of the coffin, it doesn’t bode well,” Walker said.

  Father Cornelius looked as if he might be sick. He ran a hand over the gray stubble that had appeared on his chin in the past two days.

  “Some of it is a warning, like the writings on the lid and the encasement,” the priest said. His pallor had turned gray and suddenly he looked very old to Walker. “And I won’t claim I’ve cracked it completely.”

  “You’ve cracked it enough,” Polly put in. “Just tell them.”

  The priest cleared his throat with a dry rattle. “Most of what’s there—what was beneath the cadaver—is a history. An Apocrypha. In the era before Noah built the ark—”

  “His name was really Noah?” Walker asked.