The street was empty. The air was truly foul with grit now, and even the spectacle of a Borderer and a European having an argument wouldn’t have been enough to draw people out. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. They were dry and ached in the wind. He was sick of life, sick of memories.
“And please will you tell me some time,” Laurie said, “what it is that you’re planning to do when you stay in the Endless City? What skill do you have? What is it that makes you think any of us would ever want you here?”
The doors clunked as she pushed the card into the van. He stepped back as the fans roared. There was a brief warm rush around his feet as the van pulled up and away, rattling down the street, taking the corner so fast that the skirts screeched, and disappearing.
There was no trace of red left now in the sky above the pipe-threaded buildings. Just black, gray, and the flicker of colorless light. He let the wind push him as it chose; it had the weight and presence of the whole angry earth. It couldn’t just have been satellite-made. A metal shutter flapped off its hinges and twirled not that far from his head, on through the fractured images of the houses until it buried itself into something solid. The child-guard had gone from Mokifa’s scalloped archway. Even the beggars had taken shelter.
Outside, in the real Endless City, the cables swayed uselessly down the lanes towards Kushiel. There was even a junction box on the wall above a boarded-up shop, still intact and bearing an ancient version of the Halcycon logo. John wandered for hours, unthinking and at random, through alleys and wide, empty squares, across dry bridges, past buildings of gaunt brick and concrete, or between shuddering clusters of shanty dwellings that threatened to detonate in the wind. The few people who were out made the sign against the evil eye when they saw him, pausing as they hurried home or hammered back loosened flaps of sheeting.
The sky had a dimensionless texture. The air seemed to be growing darker. He walked on. Cars and vans occasionally sped by, their bodies tilted half-sideways to counteract the force of the wind. He had to turn away from them as the dirt swirled in his face. When he finally looked around to see where he was, he saw that there were lights and signs along the street here, a grainy fog of reds and yellows. He sensed movement and heard voices—figures were sheltering in doorways and crowded at the windows nearby. A woman stepped out, smiling against the billowing grit, opening her robe to display the roped scars that crisscrossed her breasts. A boy, sitting on a ledge, grinned and made a lewd motion. Shaking his head, walking on, John saw that many of what he’d taken for brightly lit windows were in fact screens designed to entice customers. As he watched—it was quite impossible not to—and the twisting naked figures threw out funnels of flickering pink light into the dust, it was hard to imagine that the flesh ever ended, that the spirit ever truly began. But this evening he seemed to be the only pedestrian in Agouna, and most of the cars were going by too fast to consider stopping. Cries, suggestions, and shouts followed him as he pushed against the wind, but no one bothered to come close. This odd change in the climate was like a cold bath—a good sexual anesthetic.
Another car came down the street now, its wide lights blazing through the haze. It stopped before reaching him, and the doors of the nearest buildings flew open. Discords of light and music blew by as several adolescent boys, all elbows and yells, clustered around it. It was a long car, too clean and ornate to be from anywhere other than the Zone, but it was only when John saw the doors rise like beetle wings that he could be sure that it really was Tim Purdoe’s red Corona.
After the brakelights had vanished and the boys who’d been left standing had gone back inside, John walked on. Out of Agouna. The day’s incipient darkness had finally given way to near-night. He pressed into it, pushing through the stabbing pain in his back, filled with a sense of urgency that, by its very suddenness, made him stop, turn into the lee of an abandoned truck, and look at his watch.
Hovering above the shimmering quaternary lines, the numerical time display read 6:30. He leaned against the truck’s rusted metal surface, clanging his head. He’d missed Mass. It was hard to imagine more than a handful of his usual two or three dozen worshipers turning out for church on a night like this, but that wasn’t the point. He walked on, the wind tearing at his clothing, bowing his back, furrowing his hair. He looked again at his watch, deciding that he should try to work out where exactly he was, find and climb the right hill, go to Santa Cristina. See, at the very least, how the roof was faring…
The night was deceptive; he was nearer Santa Cristina than he’d imagined. He soon saw it rising over the rooftops, black, wintry, and solid, backlit by an opalescence that was either the moon or an electromagnetic effect from the racing clouds. The roof was holding, although even the caroni birds had left it tonight to find better shelter, and he could tell from the screech of the swinging door that his congregation had gone. Whirlpools of leaves and discarded cards hovered over the graffiti-corroded pews. Glittering with lights, little bells, and the call of many tiny misactivated voices, the Inmaculada stretched out her arms towards him. Tonight, shamed by missing Mass and by the pettiness and finality of his argument with Laurie, John found it harder than ever to meet her brown eyes.
He heard something flapping. Unmistakably separate from a sudden booming increase in the wind outside, it seemed to be coming from the sleeping stone crusader. John began to walk around the pews towards it, imagining at first that a piece of jelt had fallen, then that it was perhaps a rat or trapped sparrow or pigeon; even, as the sound began to heave and scrape like the claws of something bigger, a caroni bird.
He rounded the last pew and saw the thing squatting by the ancient pediment that supported the dead knight. Not a bird, but a human, clothed in ragged black and flashing stripes of gold and silver. It began to hiss and chatter, waving long hands, shrinking away from him. John surprised himself by taking a step forward. The dimly golden light from the Inmaculada and the altar fell on the witchwoman’s face, showing her bulging eyes, the shifting slit of her mouth. Her hands danced again, a white blur as she drew herself up and away from him. Something black dripped on the floor between them. Then she turned and ran.
He ran after her, but she was quick, slamming open the doors, leaping, half-flying over the rough grass and fallen gravestones, blown and disappearing through rags of darkness into the streets below, swallowed up by the cackling wind. He went back inside the church and saw the crisscrossed outline of her palm where she’d pushed back the wooden door, the dribbles on the floor, the circles and stripes that she had smeared over the stone crusader. He could smell salt and wet stone. The knight’s hollowed face now had the shocked animation of a child’s painting: round eyes, a grinning slit for a mouth. The stumps of his hands had fingers of a kind again—two on one, three on the other, a bird’s hooked claw for a thumb, still beaded and gleaming as the blood formed tiny bubbles and sank into the spongy stone. She’d drawn a phallus too, although, like the knight, that was also slumbering. Staring down, he decided that taking a bucket and washing it all off would be more of a desecration than leaving the figure as it was. He removed a glove and touched the blood, already sticky and fibrous, and sniffed and studied the spot it left on his fingertip. Then he pulled the glove back on and crossed himself.
He closed the church and walked the rest of the way back to the presbytery, his head bowed in the wind. Just before he reached Gran Vía, the clouds broke, and, beating in heavy droplets like fists, it began to rain.
THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN the River Ocean was at one with the sky. Entering one element, you broke the surface of the other.
Omega’s prow scattered constellations and billowing nebulae of jellyfish drifting on the tide. Here, sometimes, it was just possible to catch a clear glint and a flash of something so high, that it could only be the solar wings of a satellite. The cloud-pickers were far away, anyway, and the night was warm enough to touch. There were no clouds.
John sat at the stern of the boat with the throttle of
the outboard alive in his hands as they skimmed the outer harbor, away from the hills that cupped the lights of Ley. The engine went chuck, chuck as they steered out between the last of the shining yachts and the undersea bubbles, and he imagined the people in their beds, in hotels and in holiday homes, in cabin rooms or tangled together in love, sinking half asleep as this sound rocked by them, soothing them, it and the tinkle of spars and the beat of the sea. He was proud of this engine, of the way it puffed and clucked, the way it broke the deep black water, shattering the stars. Yesterday, it wouldn’t even start, and this very morning he took tools from the house’s small cellar and walked along the cool early streets past the cottage with the yellow windows to the stretch of sand in the inner harbor. There he unbolted Omega’s engine, wiped it, drained it, and stripped it down, laying it out on a canvas sheet amid the wormcasts in the seagull-wheeling sunlight as the sky blued and brightened. When it was readjusted, made fresh and new, he pieced it all together again. He did it just as he’d watched Hal do it every summer before—always believing, until now, that the task was difficult, complex, arcane, and probably permanently beyond him. But from the time he opened his eyes and gazed up at the pine beams of the cabin this morning, everything had clicked. There was only here, only now, only pure and intense certainty as the bolts unslid and the two polished pistons began to gleam.
John looked now at his brother’s silhouette as Hal sat gazing out from the prow across a moonlight-skimmed patch of water and, although he knew the night at Seagates would not happen for many years, he was reminded of Felipe. He blinked and frowned, looking back at the dark of the harbor. Even here, his memories were compromised by other memories. Time had become disordered, but he knew that if he tried to explain this, it would only distract and confuse Hal. Omega began to buck and rise when they hit open water. He sensed that Hal was annoyed because of his servicing and fixing Omega’s outboard this morning, or at least a little distant—and puzzled, and strained. But then he’d been waiting for Hal to do something about it for weeks. He couldn’t wait forever. The holiday would end. What else was he supposed to do?
“You know, Hal,” he said, trying a slightly different tack, “I don’t feel as though I’ve ever really left here. I don’t mean this particular night. I mean here—I mean Ley. I mean those—these summers that we spent together.”
Hal grunts and keeps looking forward, out across the water. Perhaps John has said the wrong thing. It has to be admitted that this summer at Ley isn’t Hal’s finest hour. Even the mackerel in the outer harbor haven’t been biting as they usually do. Last year, when Annie came along, was better. Far better. John now even entertains the heretical thought that Annie’s company—or at least Annie-with-Hal’s company—is better than Hal on his own. They’ve walked their usual walks over the clifftops this year mostly in silence, and found their secret coves and wrecks and drowned houses, but they have all been frozen, spectacularly unchanged. Now, he misses Annie’s laughter and her scent. And he misses, although the moment will always be with him, the nights when she stooped to undress close beside him in the cabin. Although this summer separation was apparently agreed on without rancor between the two of them, he senses that Hal misses Annie too.
They were beyond the headland now, and the water dropped and rose around them, throwing waves against the side of the boat in easy sucking blows. Hal and Annie, he supposed, were less of an item than they used to be. After all, he could understand that himself now. Better, at least, than he did. People come apart. They drift together. And briefly, not that you’d ever understand it, there’s the possibility of love. You must never look for it, but you know that somewhere, over your shoulder and fleeing even as the thought occurs, it’s there.
“It’s like that moment,” he said to Hal, “when you reach out to take something—say, a cup, just a cup from a table. And you know, even as your arm extends and your hand opens, that your grip isn’t right, there’s something about the whole movement that you’ve misjudged. You’re already certain that the thing will drop from your fingers, yet you can’t stop reaching and pull back. You can’t simply pause and give up, or try again. You take the cup in your hand, and it falls even as you take it. Do you understand what I’m saying by that, Hal? To you, does that make any kind of sense?”
Hal grunted. At least this time John got a grunt out of him. The whole coastline stretched in darkness behind them now, and there was a gantry up in the hills that linked with the satellites, and the pale lights of a car. He ran his hand along the boat’s thick, paint-slick gunwale and shifted his feet to keep them out of the oily slop of water that gleamed on the floor. An old lobsterpot lay there too. Most summers, they’d have charged it up long ago and tossed it over the side. And the receiver, lost as usual in one of house’s back drawers, would have started to bleep at some wildly inappropriate time, and they’d pile into the boat anyway to trace it and set the flotation ring to draw the thing up. And later in the kitchen, feelers still waving, the lobster would crawl drunkenly around the counter until Hal, laughing at everyone’s squeamishness, tossed it into the boiling water and the shell began to scream.
The days have all been different this year, although no matter how hard John tries, he cannot trace the reason back to any root. The sun is as hot, the sky is as blue. This afternoon, for example, on Chapel Beach: lying with Hal on a wide white space of sand, petals of sunlight and sails flecking the water and the drowning heat pressing down. And kids laughing from somewhere by the waves…
Leaning on his elbows, he’d seen their heat-quivering shapes move as they redirected the stream that ran from the apparently undrinkable well (although they’d all gulped it down with salt-hungry lips) at the promenade above the beach. Just figures stooping, carrying, digging, searching for stuff along the strand. Hal had his eyes closed, and his breathing was slow as he lay beside John on the towel, but John knew that he wouldn’t be asleep. He knew that if he gazed too long at the strong chest and arms, at the little coppery line of hair that ran from his navel into his trunks, that Hal’s eyes would open and he’d say, What is it, Skiddle? What would you like us to do? But that question would have been too much responsibility today, and John hoped, anyway, that they would take Omega out late this evening now that he’d fixed the engine. Just go where the water hung cool over the jellyfish and the stars, where you hovered between two worlds, where the sky was blackly bright. He closed his eyes on the beach, listened to the shouts of the kids and the pulling sigh of the tide, and let the afternoon slip by.
When he looked again, the sky had changed color, the wind had picked up, and he was almost within the extending shadow of the promenade wall. He sat up and saw Hal standing a little way off, hands on hips, elbows at right angles, the pink scar like a tightly closed mouth along his spine. The beach was empty now. The kids had gone. The ice-cream machine had gone. The surfers and pedalos had all been moored.
“What is it?”
John stood up. His feet scuttled across sand that was still warm on the surface, cooler beneath.
“Skiddle, look…”
He walked with Hal to the edge of the waves, where the children had been playing and an elaborate mandalalike complex of sandcastles and canals had been embroidered by the tide. Even now, with the stream left to its own whims and the walls picked at by waves, the canals functioned perfectly. Moats filled. Little pebble-banked falls frothed and cascaded. Elaborate windows and shell-scalloped arches still held. The walls of the bigger structures were embellished with seaweed and shells and other catchings from the strand. Polished glass, driftwood, and bones. A string of foil turned and flashed in the sun’s rays, and at the top of one mound higher than John’s waist there was an old beaker filled with something that could have been oil or blood but certainly wasn’t water from the spring or the sea. They stepped to the center of the complex, and found it enclosed by a high wall in such a way that, as the sea rose around and destroyed the city, the center would remain dry and be the last to fall. The
wide, scooped-out, and flattened hollow inside was ornamented with a mosaic of beads, scraps of sea-corroded circuitry, bottle caps, and pebbles. In the middle was a gull’s head. As John stared, he saw the eye twitch, and the black-tipped beak parted slightly.
He and Hal looked at the buried gull. The waves, warm and curdled with sand, broke around their feet. Up on the promenade, music was playing; a brass band. But they seemed to be alone here, separated in a frozen counterworld.
When Hal stepped over the bank, the sand slid and the beads and the pebbles were scattered. The spell was broken. Working together, the brothers dug the seagull out with their hands. It had been buried so that its wings were outstretched as if in flight, but both were broken, and the pecks it tried to aim at them were feeble. One of its eyes, John saw, had run out, and the sharp edge of a shell had been used to pierce its breast. Why, he thought, would anyone do this? But the question somehow seemed irrelevant. He hadn’t recognized the kids who were playing here, but, even if he had, it was the kind of act for which you could never know the real truth about. And the seagull had probably been injured in the first place. Otherwise, how could they have caught and buried it in the sand? He looked over at Hal, the bleached stubble and eyelashes and the falling blond shock of hair, and felt, as he always felt when he was troubled, an unworthy sense of release; of knowing that it was really his brother who bore the burden of all these questions, and that Hal would pass the answers on to John someday when he’d worked them out.
Hal lifted the bird. Its sand-clotted wings stirred and flapped. It mewed, turned, twisted its head. He stepped across the falling walls of sand to a nearby flat rock, and John looked away as his brother raised a stick of driftwood to smash its skull. But even so he heard the repeated sound that was made—hard at first, then soft—and when he looked again, he saw Hal standing with the stick raised and the bloody feathers clinging to it, his brow furrowed. And he knew then that he and Hal, as much as the kids who’d buried the gull, were a part of this thing that had happened.
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