Everything Beautiful Began After

by Simon Van Booy

  Henry imagined a life growing inside her.

  He knew things like this could be taken care of in a few hours—like a tiny candle blown out with a puff. He wondered if it was what she wanted.

  A moment before leaving the apartment, he hoped Rebecca would wake up so he could reassure her they would work it out together. But she was motionless and Henry let her sleep. George held the door. His face was slightly burned.

  “Is Rebecca not coming?”

  “She’s still sleeping.”

  Nobody talked on the drive up, so Professor Peterson turned on the radio. The sky was very bright. George rolled down his window.

  If they had the child, where would they live? Would she give birth in France? And what if the child were born dead? What if the child came out in a tangle?

  It would all take place within a single year.

  Unsolvable questions swirled in Henry’s mind.

  A mile or so from the dig, the professor started whistling. Then he skidded to a stop in the dust.

  “Which one of you boys is going to find the bricks?”

  George volunteered. Once the bricks were under the wheels. Henry got out and walked over to his Vespa. There was condensation on the inside of the dials. He tapped the glass.

  A dog had barked once, and his brother’s eyes opened for the last time.

  For most of the morning, Henry worked quietly in his excavation pit, scratching the ground with little enthusiasm.

  He knew that he would see her later. That a decision had to be made somehow, and that they would both stick to it.

  And then, not long before lunch, another side of Henry began to emerge—a part of him that was just a little further ahead in his life than where he was now. And in his mind, he saw himself in a tweed jacket in Regent’s Park, pushing a stroller along some beautiful Sunday path, the child giggling with joy. He imagined packing up the car for summers in Wales. Skipping through meadows of tall grass, and the light, bubbling laughter of a child trying to keep up. Learning to swim in the cool water of Bala Lake. The wobble of first steps. He sensed closeness too. Rebecca in some heavy pocketless coat, with snow falling. A weekend in Paris. The happiness of afternoons.

  He would give up his search for the dead and live for the living.

  Love is like life but longer.

  END OF BOOK ONE

  In my end is my beginning.

  —T. S. Eliot

  The final moments of her life Rebecca lay crushed under tons of rubble.

  The fruit she had been eating was still in her mouth.

  Her eyes would not open.

  She could sense the darkness that encapsulated her.

  She could not feel her arms.

  Then her life, like a cloud, split open, and she lay motionless in a rain of moments.

  The green telephone at her grandfather’s house next to the plant.

  She could feel the cool plastic of the handle and the sensation of cupping it under her ear. She could hear a voice at the other end of the line that she recognized as her own.

  The weight of her mother’s shoes as she carried them around the house, wondering when she would come home.

  The idea that she’d grow up and have to wear such things.

  Running through the forest of owls with her sister.

  Their white faces.

  A twin.

  The strangeness of a living mirror.

  And then the rain of her life stopped, and she was in darkness, her heart pushing against her ribs.

  Muted noise as though she were underwater.

  Then the rain of moments began again until she was drenched by single esoteric details:

  Morning light behind the curtain.

  The smell of classrooms.

  A glass of milk.

  The hope for her mother and the imagined pressure of her arms against her.

  Passengers’ faces.

  Quietly beating hearts.

  Wings held steady by moonlight.

  Market stalls.

  Orange trees.

  Sandals.

  Laying her head upon Henry’s cool back in the morning.

  It was as important as being born.

  George and the street children.

  Clogs.

  Sweets.

  Her grandfather again, but a character in his own dream—walking barefoot by the lake calling out to someone far away.

  A bungalow in France.

  A daughter.

  Granddaughters.

  His elbows as he drove them in the rain to the shops.

  And then two very small hands growing inside her belly.

  A small head.

  Thumb body, surging.

  Life knitting something in her womb.

  Then Rebecca realized she could not feel her body and was unable to shout.

  There was no sound. Nothing stirred but the silent movies projected on the inside of her skull.

  She was not so much aware that she was dying as she was that she was still alive.

  Had she more time, she might have nurtured a hope of being rescued by George and Henry. Instead, memory leaked out around her.

  Mother.

  This memory was not painful to her now. Her life was an open window and she a butterfly.

  If not for her intermittent returns to darkness—the body’s insistence on life—she could have been on vacation, swimming in the sea, each stroke of her arms a complete philosophy.

  Henry.

  The morning he came back from Cambridge.

  And then she smelled her grandfather’s coat, hanging behind the kitchen door with a bag of bags and a broom.

  On the back of Henry’s Vespa.

  She wondered if she had lived her entire life from under the collapsed building. That life is imagined by a self we can never fully know.

  The softness of hands. A child’s hands. A small house somewhere. Gloves on a cold day.

  And then with the expediency of the dying, she fell in love with the darkness and the eight seconds she had left in it—each second like a mouthful of food to someone starving.

  At that moment, a French girl living in Paris called Natalie fainted in the supermarket.

  People rushed over.

  In order to possess what you do not possess

  You must go by the way of dispossession.

  —T. S. Eliot

  BOOK TWO

  NIGHT CAME WITH

  MANY STARS

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  You couldn’t wait for the day to end. She would be delighted with your change of heart. There would be practical things to sort out, like hospitals and names, a house to live in with a garden.

  But just before lunchtime it came. George was at the entrance to the tent, holding up a pitcher of water. George fell over. The water spilled.

  And then it came and just battered everything.

  You tried to cover your ears, but you were soon on the ground too. No one could see because of the dust. You had no conscious thoughts. If you had died, your last feeling would have been pure terror.

  It seemed like hours; thought lay in a mess at your feet. Below the mountain, buildings were crumbling. People’s lives were ending within a few seconds.

  And when it stopped, the silence on the mountainside was deafening. You remember sprinting to the top—toward the tent—through the dust. George was standing again, but very still. His face seemed grotesque, as though it were hung upon his skull the wrong way. Then you felt each other as if to physically confirm what your eyes saw. You remember being at the edge, looking for Athens in the distance.

  “Stop! Stop! Stand where you are!” screamed the professor. “Don’t move, the ledge may be unstable—there’s been an earthquake and there may be another any second.”

  But from where you were standing you could see enough.

  Athens had disappeared under a cloud of dust.

  The professor was shouting.

  “I have to secure the artifacts. I have to sec
ure the artifacts.”

  He turned to you and George.

  “Go and get Rebecca—bring her up here where it’s safe.”

  The Renault had rolled backward into the rock face. The entire back end was smashed in.

  The professor said to abandon the car if you got to something you couldn’t drive around. He also told you to steal whatever you needed in order to survive. Then he handed you a small gun.

  “For emergencies,” he said, shoving it into your hands. “Use it if you must.”

  Then he disappeared.

  “Try and start the engine,” George said. “I’ll push it off the rock.”

  It started after a few attempts. George jumped into the passenger seat.

  “The whole back end is smashed in,” he said. “Totally smashed in.”

  Approaching Athens, you saw that the stream of cars leaving the city had become a stationary line of vehicles on both sides of the road. There were at least thirty helicopters in the sky. You drove most of the way along the steep grass embankment, stopping only to steer around steaming cars packed with panic-stricken Athenians.

  For a two-mile stretch you drove along a sidewalk, blasting the horn. People scattered like insects. Entire houses had slid onto the road and there were small fires everywhere. You passed two men having a fist fight.

  When you arrived at your apartment, it was intact, with only a few cracks up the walls. You both rushed around calling Rebecca’s name. Then you glanced at something on the kitchen table.

  Dear Henry,

  I am going home for a bit to think about all this. If you can, come over when you get back. I want you to know you can tell me anything about your life. I could never hate you for anything you’ve done. We should also talk about what we’re going to do. I want it to be our decision. I care about your happiness, so please be honest, Henry.

  I love you.

  See you for dinner.

  R

  P.S. Maybe don’t tell George yet.

  It took a further four hours to reach Rebecca’s apartment. You stopped twice. Once to change a flat tire, and the other to help lift a section of roof off a family who were having lunch. The mother had managed to crawl out—but the others were trapped. When there were enough people to lift the roof, it was clear the children were dead. They were still in their seats like dolls.

  It was hard to find Rebecca’s road. Everything looked different. The air smelled of sewage and burning plastic.

  Young men were directing traffic and trying to keep lanes open for troops now coming in by the truckload. Army helicopters patrolled the city in menacing formations.

  You and George ditched the car a few blocks from Rebecca’s house and ran the rest of the way. You hugged and shouted when—from a distance—her building looked perfectly intact. You even looked for her among the faces on the street. As you ran toward the entrance, a young boy called out to you and pointed up. Somehow you had missed seeing it. The walls of the building were standing, but the building had collapsed in on itself.

  You just stood there.

  Then you looked into the crowd for anyone who didn’t seem to be doing anything. You grabbed a teenage boy and asked him something.

  “Answer me!” you screamed, but then he pushed you off and ran away.

  “We have to go in,” you said to George. “She might be trapped.”

  The only way to get in was through a broken window in the first-floor lobby. The entrance was blocked with rubble—but strangely, the glass in the front doors wasn’t even cracked. George pulled his shirt over his mouth because the dust had not settled. You could smell electricity and steered George around a live cable dangling from beneath the staircase. The elevator shaft was open and filled with bricks, pieces of marble, and books. There was a hammer on the floor and George picked it up.

  You found what remained of the staircase and, before ascending, looked at one another, knowing that the building could collapse at any time. A cold, logical voice kept telling you that she probably hadn’t survived and that you should get out, but the impulse to save drove you blindly on.

  It’s difficult to explain what it was like inside because everything was smashed and topsy-turvy. You were able to climb to Rebecca’s floor because the nature of the collapse formed a sort of natural ladder. In the places that were too high, George piled up rubble or found some furniture to stand on that would take you both to the next level.

  When you reached what you thought was Rebecca’s floor, it was uneven, but largely horizontal. You realized there was going to be no quick way of getting to her room because of several collapsed beams. Your fingers were already pierced and bloody. The dust higher up was not as thick, otherwise it would have been impossible to breathe.

  You took turns smashing the beams with George’s hammer. You remember George saying he thought you were in her hallway. You were both sweating. George had taken his shirt off. His skin was covered in dust, and there were dark circles of blood, from where he’d torn his skin open. The path you made for yourselves from the hall was tiny. It was so dark you could hardly see what you were doing. There were pieces of broken marble everywhere. George hammered through a length of ceiling tiles, kicked through some drywall, and you found yourselves in her bedroom, which seemed to have escaped damage, except for the dust everywhere. Although you could smell gas, George kept lighting pieces of paper and bits of rag in order to see.

  A wall had fallen out, or been ripped out with her balcony. You remember looking out into Athens from a fourth-floor apartment now only two stories up. The air was very cool and there was something calm about being so open to the night. It felt good to breathe. You could hear the roar of traffic, endless police sirens, and the occasional scream.

  A bowl of oranges lay on the side table white with dust. Then you realized you were in Rebecca’s bedroom. A few inches from the bowl, a slab of ceiling lay where Rebecca’s bed should have been. Then you noticed a hand on the ground. It must have been severed by the impact. When you began screaming, George didn’t know what to do. Then you felt his weight on your back.

  You shook free and started smashing a block of rubble with the hammer.

  “Stop it,” George commanded in a low growl. “You’re going to kill us both, stop it, stop it.” He lunged for your swinging arm, but you stopped before he could grab on.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said.

  “Not without her,” you pleaded. “I’m not leaving without her.”

  “She’s dead,” George kept saying, and you then realized exactly what he meant—that Rebecca was no longer alive, that you would never have any contact with her again, that any child growing in her womb would never live, never be delivered, never run around the garden of your imaginary house.

  Her life would wear the mask of paradise.

  “We can’t leave her here,” you said desperately.

  “We have to get out,” George said.

  “Listen to me, George—we can’t leave her here. She’ll be trapped in here for days, maybe weeks. We can’t leave her body here like this.”

  “And if we dig her out, what then? Where are we going to take her?”

  “We’ll take her to my apartment.”

  “Henry, no, absolutely not.”

  You picked up the hammer, but George got hold of your arm. His strength was enormous. “Put it down,” he said. “We’ll take her to Aegina.”

  You imagined the secret beach glistening in moonlight, perfect and serene. And you knew without any doubt that George was doing this for you—not for Rebecca, nor for himself, but for you, only you.

  It was the greatest act of friendship you would ever witness.

  When it seemed impossible to move the block of marble, you found some knives from the kitchen and began slicing your way through the mattress. If you could cut open a path in the fabric, you could somehow wriggle her out.

  You mapped the position of her body and worked quietly. You lost your breath when blood poured through
the foam and springs and onto your arm. George said you must have nicked her body. And then the blood stopped and you both kept cutting.

  When you finally got to her, it was a relief to find that her body was in one piece. But it was very stiff, like a store mannequin, and it didn’t look anything like the Rebecca you knew. Her eyes were open and her face was a hard, pale wax. No trace of the woman you loved, just a body, just a shell from which all life had escaped.

  You went to the other side of the room and sobbed.

  George watched.

  Then he came over and tried to console you.

  “I killed him,” you said.

  George looked at you with no expression.

  “I killed him,” you said again. “I gave him a toy and it strangled him and he died.”

  “Who?” George said.

  “My baby brother.”

  George looked horrified. “You never told me.”

  “Because you would have hated me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “But it was my fault.”

  He let you sob for a while and then started wrapping Rebecca’s body in artist’s canvas.

  “Help me with this,” he said.

  You hadn’t actually thought how you were going to get her out. But there was only one way—so you tied the canvas at each end with clothes you found lying around. Then you checked to make sure there was no one standing in the rubble below. There was some movement, but George said it was a dog.

  The canvas landed with a thud. The dog began to rip at it with its teeth and then barked and barked. You felt a burst of panic, so you pulled the pistol from your trousers and cocked it. The dog must have sensed the impending gunshot, because it ran away before you could steady your arm.

  It took an hour to crawl back through the building and into the cool morning. George went to find the car and some water. The sky was beginning to lighten.

  Your throat was so dry, you could hardly breathe without coughing. You waited with the body. A man who said he was a cop came over and asked if you had been trapped in the building. Then he asked if it was a body wrapped up on the ground. You told him it was. He nodded and told you to wait with it until someone came to take it away. You just stared at him. You think he was lying about being a cop. And you think he knew that, which is why he disappeared before George got back.