Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille
Page 20
Once, when I was a child, I’d gone on a cave tour with my father. The guide stopped us in a curved hallway, and then he turned out the lights. He said, “This is what a blind man sees every day of his life.” Delighted at first, I wiggled my fingers in front of my face, but the guide kept the lights off for too long. I pressed against the wall, trying to grow small, too afraid to reach for my father. My heart stuttered. Then, something touched the back of my neck.
Later, they told me I had had a seizure.
I don’t know. I don’t remember that part, but it seemed to me, in the instant before all memory fled, something whispered in my ear, its talon on my neck, sharp nail against my skin, teeth clicking together, an airy whisper saying things I didn’t want to understand.
Now, in the room’s darkness, I lay still for a minute, an hour, a night. Who could guess how long? It seemed, bizarrely, as if the bed were slowly spinning. I tried counting breaths, and wondered if I would be able to tell the difference between being awake in the lightless room or asleep in a lightless dream.
Then, I did hear a noise, a slippery creep that could have been nothing, the sound of a single hair in my ear brushing against another, or the near undetectable rush of a lone drop of water running down the wall, but it repeated. Something was in my room. I became a child again as the steps approached my bed, singular, each, and loud now that came toward me, until they must be at my bed’s side. Then, a touch against the quilt. A silky swish of something brushing toward my face.
My heart, my chest, the muscles of my neck, tensed so I thought I would burst. My back arched slightly as my body clenched. I couldn’t scream or voluntarily move. Maybe I whimpered. I’m not proud of it, but the darkness like that, and the sound in the black. Then, a warm caress on my face, a warm breath of air against my lips. Lips on my lips. It took me a second to react, to realize the tongue seeking mine was real and human. I reached out from under the quilt to find an arm, and my fingers moved up to wrap in long hair. The lips pulled away. Cloth rustled. Soft clothes dropped to the floor. The quilt lifted to let in a cool draft, and the bed rocked. Knees bumped knees. The kiss again. I caressed her, slid down to the hip’s fine curve and pulled her toward me.
In that total dark, only the baby seal feel of her skin on mine existed. Only her exhalations, warm and explosive against my neck. Only the taste of her mouth, the sweat on her face. Only her fertile smell. We could have been floating above a desert or marooned at sea or on an arena’s wide-open floor.
Some time later, her leg still draped over my stomach, her head on my shoulder and my hand on the small of her back, my breath at last slowed to normal. I broke the peace. “After all these years, why now?”
She kissed the underside of my chin, then moved her hand between her thigh and my stomach, down until she held me again, and soon, much sooner than I would have believed possible, I stirred. She levered herself back into position, supple as an eel, but this time my senses expanded beyond the languid cavort beneath the quilt, beyond my hands gliding from sweat-slick shoulder blades to curving back, beyond our consuming mouths, to the room’s stone walls, as if our gasping breath served as a bat’s sonar, sending signals back to me. I sensed the room and the halls and the moisture trapped in the rocks, and a liquid, mineral sentience around us, listening and urging, greedily absorbing, until, behind that, I felt a brooding overwhelming possessiveness. The walls of Rick’s rock house became quiveringly alive, dampness flushed, as if the mountain was reaching into the room, guiding us, huge limestone fingers holding us together, connecting us so firmly and deeply and singly that I thought we had become just one orgasmic being. For an instant I tried to slide out from under Lynn, from under the mountain, but the feeling was too strong, too good, too frightening, and the second time with her it was if my skull emptied out along with everything else.
When it ended, Lynn stroked my chest. Her damp hair stuck to the side of my face. She spoke. “You ask why now?” I listened to the empty room, just as sightless, but the mountain had retreated, and I felt we were alone. She said, “Nostalgia, maybe.” Her palm lay still on my heart. “I needed a change.” As quietly as she had entered, she left, navigating from the black room by feel or memory.
She’d said, “nostalgia,” but we’d never been lovers before. Nostalgia for what? I wondered. But I didn’t think about it long; I could still feel her skin against my hand, the touch of her lips under my chin. The sheets were clingy with our sweat.
I don’t know how long I was awake after that sleep before I realized it. What I noticed was a swelling of passing candlelight under my door, spreading long yellow fingers that crept across the floor before vanishing, and I felt as if I had slept for some time. I didn’t stir at first. The stately wash of light crossing the stone produced a strong déjà vu, like this wasn’t the first passing of the light, as if this was a routine for me.
Turning the light on, I got out of bed. Goosebumps prickled my legs as I pulled on my socks, but even with them, a cool draft I hadn’t noticed the night before crossed my ankles. Fully dressed, wearing both my sweatshirts, I followed the draft to one of the tapestries. The heavy fabric pulled aside reluctantly, the bottom edge of the cloth no longer cloth at all, but solid rock. At the base of the wall, a ragged hole a foot across blew a steady breeze. The room light didn’t reveal anything past the first foot, but the small tunnel sloped down from the floor. Roomy for a rat; too small for a person.
My watch truly had died. I wondered about the time.
Rick sat in the kitchen with a candle next to his plate. “Nothing tastes good to me anymore.” He pushed a spoonful of eggs from one side to the other. “But I’m never hungry, anyway.” I took a chair on the other side. He looked at me for a long time. “My tastes have grown too sensitive, perhaps. All my senses feel acute.”
I asked him about the hole in my room, but he shrugged his shoulders once, as if to say there was nothing he could do about it.
He dropped his fork onto the table. “Do you remember how we used to talk about living in castles?”
I nodded. “Great stories in castles.”
“It’s the stone. The people are impermanent, but the stone lasts. That’s why they were given names. There were other features too.”
“Drafts.”
“People hiding behind the arras.”
I thought about the tapestries hanging in my room. With the lights out, a voyeur wouldn’t need to hide behind them. He could stand right beside my bed. “Poor Polonius,” I ventured, uncertainly.
“Noises, too. No conspiracy would be safe in a castle. The quietist breath around a corner, down the hall, behind a closed door, might echo to the king’s ears. The acoustics can be unpredictable.”
Maybe he had a point he was trying to make with this conversation, but with the memory of my and Lynn’s throaty gasps so fresh in my ear, I didn’t want to know. I left the table and opened a cupboard beside the sink. “Do you have any bread?”
“It’s gone bad. Canned goods or the refrigerator are all I have to offer.”
Lynn drifted into the kitchen, her white dress brushing against the floor. In the candlelight, I couldn’t tell if she looked at me or not as she sat. Rick took her hand, kissed her knuckles, “You’re wasting.”
“Aren’t we all?” She took a pinch of Rick’s eggs from his plate and put it in her mouth.
An orange in the bottom refrigerator drawer would do for a breakfast. “I’m chilled. I think I’ll eat by the fireplace.”
“We’ll join you.” Rick stood, still holding Lynn’s hand.
The fire had died, but soon a couple good sized logs were blazing, warming my shins and face. Ruddy light illuminated the room better than the table lamps. Medieval images decorated the tapestries: knights, castles, banquets, stylized dragons, horses, grain tied in vertical bundles, and the images continued onto the ceiling, etched deeply, but they were black on black, so only the contrast of the fire-lit surfaces to the unlit grooves revealed them at all.
Rick nodded, as if this were a continued conversation. “I like Lot’s wife. That was a fitting reward.”
I ventured, “Didn’t she turn into a salt pillar?”
Lynn sniffed. “Too bad about that. The first rain must have dissolved her into a puddle. Tokien’s stone trolls. Rain and wind wouldn’t touch them.”
“Ah, yes, and Ozmandias, King of kings. Time consumed his kingdom, but his statue remained.”
Lynn closed her eyes. “The Easter Island heads. I love a good megalith.”
“They’re everywhere.” Rick pushed his chair closer to Lynn so he could put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him, and his fingers wrapped around her upper arm. It was not a brotherly embrace. “Stonehenge, Carnac, over 50,000 megaliths in Europe alone.”
A log popped loudly, shooting a spark onto the floor. It pulsed a deep heart red for a minute before winking out, and it made me sad. “What time is it?”
Rick laughed, as if I’d finally asked the right question. “It’s our time, of course.”
Lynn nodded. “Our time, yes. The stone age.”
With the firelight on their white faces, on Lynn’s white dress, they looked more like statuary than people.
“No, I mean time of day.”
Lynn sighed in disappointment. “Oh, I thought you meant…” She disentangled Rick’s arm from her shoulder. “We don’t open the door. Sun, moon, stars and clocks don’t matter anymore. That’s the beauty of Rock House. That and the books. I don’t know what season it is.” She yawned. “I woke too soon. I’m going back to bed.”
“It’s late spring.” Suddenly it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember if I’d slept only once in their house, of if I’d slept several times. It was disorienting. “Do you know now long I’ve been here?”
Lynn looked at me from the doorway, her face a pale wisp in the shadow. “You have always been here in a way.”
Rick stared into the fire until the top log burned through and fell in two pieces, scattering a dozen glowing coals across the stone. He started, as if out of deep thought. “Let’s go look at the tunnel you discovered.”
He picked up a flashlight in the kitchen and soon crouched on the floor behind my room’s tapestry. “I never visit in here. Really, with the way things are, I should inspect every day.”
“What do you think is happening?”
He shined the light down the hole. “A thing of beauty, surely.”
I fell to my knees beside him. The light didn’t reach the tunnel’s end.
“I thought you said it was too small to go through.” Rick scrunched his shoulders together and squeezed part of his body into the hole. “I’ll bet I could skinny down this.”
My hand fit in the gap between his back and the top of the hole. “It was smaller earlier.”
He wiggled out, then turned so he rested against the wall. “I’ll stay here for a while. If I sit quietly long enough, I hear things. Maybe I’ll hear the mountain changing.” He smiled. “I’m feeling a bit tired anyway.”
Rick placed his hands flat on the cool floor and leaned his head back. I realized he wore the thinnest of shirts, the collar open to mid- chest. How could he not be cold? His eyes were shut, and he looked nearly asleep already.
“I’ll peruse your library for a bit.”
Rick nodded.
I took a candle with me down the hall and through the library’s arched door. After some searching, I found a copy of an old favorite, Lud in the Mist. The chairs were as comfortable as they looked. The candle cast a bright light from the table. Soon I was deep into the book, reading each page by yellow glow, holding my finger under the next, ready to turn. From the other chamber, the gentle chime of water dripping into the pool provided a jeweled rhythm, steady and clean. From time to time, I caught myself nodding before reading on.
When the candle burnt down to the nub, I lit another, and after what seemed like no time at all, another one. Page after page turned weightlessly, and it seemed as if I’d been reading Lud in the Mist all my life, as if I’d reached the last page just to flip back to the beginning again. Somewhere in there, I slept, then woke to the library’s total blackness, but the weight of the book was comforting on my lap, and water dripping from stone onto stone didn’t sound intimidating at all. When I lit the next candle, I saw many stubs on the table top, their burnt wicks caught in the last smears of wax. I brought my hand before my face. My fingernails were longer than I ever remembered seeing them.
I put the book aside. My back cracked a dozen times when I stood, and both knees popped on their first steps. The candle cast a globe around me, wavering in Rock House’s drafts. A few clicks of the hallway switch on the moisture-coated wall were futile. A drip fell on my wrist. I held the candle high. On the ceiling above the light switch, a stalactite several inches long glistened; beyond that, droplets clung to the ceiling as far as the light reached. The floor felt as if it had a slight tilt to the left, and the corners that had looked so square and keenly hewed from the rock in my memory seemed rougher. The hallway didn’t look as much like a hallway now as it looked like a passageway.
The light switch in my room was no good either.
The tough parts of walking with a bare candle for illumination are that every little breath threatens to puff it out, and that the light shines directly back into the eyes. I cupped my free hand behind the flame to protect it and to shield myself. A breeze flowed from the hole in my wall, where the tapestry had flopped back into position, although the air pressure held it away from the wall. Rick’s legs stuck out from under it.
I tried to speak, but my voice croaked like a rusty pipe instead. I coughed, then tried again. “Have you heard the mountain changing?” The question didn’t have the feel of a joke.
Rick didn’t answer, and when I crouched beside him, my candle nearly guttered out. I put my hand on his leg. The hard surface cooled my hand. Already mourning, I pulled the tapestry away. Rick’s eyes were closed. His skin had taken on the same shade as the stone in his new library room, which meant, if anything, he had gained color. Reluctantly, I touched his face. As hard as the rock it had become, an incredibly detailed and expression-filled rendering of my old friend, his head leaning back, tilted just a touch to the side, as if he’d fallen asleep while sitting there. The wall behind him held him tight, and his legs had melded to the stone floor.
“Ah, Rick.” Suddenly exhausted, I sat at his feet, the heavy tapestry resting against my back. Soon, water drips soaked my sweatshirts. I could almost feel the hungry minerals looking for a way into my skin, to begin the molecule-by-molecule replacement. All I needed was to sit and let it happen. The thought of it was attractive, to sit, to gain respite, to put all things aside. This was the first of three temptations.
Beside him, the hole in the wall had widened to almost my height, peaked at the top like the library door. The tunnel sloped just as steeply, but now the candle illuminated a set of steps leading away. Rousing myself, I stood on the top stair. I had never felt an invitation more clearly. “Come down,” it said, and it would be so easy to slip from one step to the next, easing ever deeper into the earth, until the entrance behind would be long forgotten, and the journey in became all that there was. The voice called within me. I even took another step down, so that it seemed the rock trembled, while the limestone stairs became more slippery. In that sedimentary air, I smelled the fecundness of an ocean, the hidden underside of the bowl that held the sea, filled with seaweed and fish flesh. What waited at the bottom of that long descent? What lay at the root of the world? But I turned away from this second temptation to flee the room. The last I saw of Rick were his feet poking out from under the solid tapestry, never to move again.
Which brought me to Lynn’s room. I should have been
thinking of how she would respond to her brother’s fate, but I wasn’t sound anymore. Rock House felt like a drowsy hallucination with all the logic of a daydream. I thought of warm afternoons on the summer porch, drifting to sleep with bees in the background, where my imagination lifted anchor and anything could happen, except here was no sun other than the tiny one balanced on my candle’s wick, and no warmth to relax into. Instead, I was eager to see her so I could share her thoughts on stone that changed and on a brother who had joined it. Only Lynn and Lynn’s voice offered a counter to the mountain’s offer. She, who walked undaunted in the perpetual night, might help me to understand.
And she waited for me, awake on her bed, lying on her back, a nearly translucent sheet covering her. She didn’t blink against the light. “I hoped you would come, Allan.” Her low voice lingered in the air. “I knew you would be on time.”
“What time, Lynn? In time for what?”
“To make it complete. Immortality is possible, but loneliness would be certain if you were not here.”
Confused, I moved next to her on the bed. Candlelight penetrated her sheet, revealing her without uncovering. Here, too, the ceiling dripped. A drop hit the sheet, soaked in. Her skin, where it touched the wet fabric, showed through.
“Be with me,” she said, “and I will stay unafraid.” Other than her eyes and mouth, she hadn’t moved. “Did I ever tell you who my favorite characters in all of literature are?”
I put my hand on her arm. It was reassuringly soft. “Aren’t you cold?”
“This is my temperature, now. I have… grown accustomed to it.”
Her lips were colorless with chill. I wrapped my palm around the side of her face. Her jaw moved under my hand. Her gaze shifted to meet mine. I smiled. “No, you never told me your favorite characters.”
Then I noticed her hair. The candlelight revealed so little, but when I shifted to caress her face, the light fell on her hair spread across her pillow. They were one. The bed, the pillow, her hair had turned to stone. The side of her face, where my fingers rested, shifted. Skin grew solid. Below the syncopated patter of water dripping everywhere, I could hear her body changing, like ice crackling in a cup.