by Owen Thomas
“Toward the end of one of these trips, in the very early morning hours, the man lay in his tent next to his wife, unable to sleep. The sound of her soft snoring filled his head and while it did nothing to make him drowsy, it did coax him to feel a deepening contentment; a contentment that might just belong to a virtuous man living a virtuous life.
“That was the thought that kept him awake.
“And that was when, for the first time in so many years, he heard lions roaring off in the distance. The sound was a deep, ragged bellowing that seemed to grab hold of the very bones of his ribcage and shake it. Those old feelings began to resurface like a rising water table that floods through the pores and portals of the earth and begins to subsume the land. The man quietly crawled out of his tent and stood outside in the quiet, torch-lit dark and listened. The camp was still except for the muffled snores of his friends. They slept like babies. After all, they were, like babies, like his former children, innocents. They heard nothing of what he heard. The lions called him and him alone. His was the name they knew and it was him that they wanted.
“The man squinted his eyes in the direction of the low fearsome sound, but could see nothing beyond the torches. It did not matter. He knew where they were. On their way to the campsite that afternoon, about two kilometers from where he stood, they had passed a stand of old acacia trees. They were taller and broader than most in the area. He had scrutinized them as they approached – they all had, cameras and guns at the ready. To everyone’s disappointment but his, and probably his wife’s, there had been no lions. But the man knew for a certainty as he stood in the early morning dark listening, that that was where they had been congregating all night, since the sun had dropped below the horizon and the baked grasslands slowly let go of the day.
“The man did not think. He did not turn back for one last look at the tent in which his wife, his second wife, the wife he loved more than the first, lay sleeping. He simply put one foot in front of the other and began to walk.
“He walked at a steady pace through the dark over a kilometer and a half of dry tawny grass toward the stand of acacias. For most of the trek, his eyes were of little use in the moonless night and he relied entirely on his ears and the feeling in his chest. With every step, the sound grew louder and the feeling in his chest grew more intense. The feeling was not fear, which strangely subsided the farther he went. The feeling was an unctuous kind of dread that was much closer to loathing than fright.
“When he was only a quarter of a kilometer away, he was able to make out the group of trees as a single dark shape, like an enormous black cauliflower rising out of the savanna. The roaring increased, quickening and deepening. Another few hundred meters and he could smell their feral musk, their fetid breath boiling up from their sanguineous gullets, and he began to weep.
“He was soon able to individuate the trees, their thick trunks like a flowering upturned ribcage. Spectral shadows leapt from one dark spire to another and restlessly back again, stopping, turning, and then dropping ominously to the ground out of sight beneath the intervening horizon of tattered grass.”
Colonel Ivanova fell silent. Miller looked up cautiously from the crook of his arm where he had been resting his head.
“And?” he asked.
“And what, Lieutenant?”
“What happened? If you’re going to make me sit through it…”
If she was enjoying his torment she showed no sign of it. He would have preferred enjoyment. He would have preferred anything but her icy inscrutability.
“You tell me how it ends,” she said, looking at him with remote interest.
“I’m not playing your games Elena.”
“Good bye, Lieutenant,” she said.
She turned and began walking in that way of hers for the barracks. Miller stood to follow, convulsed and collapsed back down onto the bench, the distance of meters between them already like an ocean.
“Alright!” he shouted. “Alright.”
Ivanova stopped. Turned. Slowly returned to the table. Waited.
“The bad man is punished.” He spoke, chin angled sharply upwards, with a tone of angry self-evidence. “His sin is purged by the blood of self-sacrifice. Is that what you want me to say? I understand that I am the bad man. I understand that. I know what you think of me. I know you think I deserve death.”
He thought he saw a look of sadness cross her features. Or pity. But surely it was imagined. She had no pity. No heart for sadness.
“You haven’t been listening,” she said. “What I think of you is beside the point. It’s what you think of yourself that concerns me. It’s what you think of yourself that affects me.”
All he could do was look up at her in bafflement. Affects her? Nothing affected her. She was impervious. She seemed to hover above him as the sky beyond the far wall of the dome darkened to near blackness above her shoulders. He felt like he should be able to see the soles of her boots. She spoke slowly, as if leading him by the hand.
“A man, believing in his mid-life hubris that he deserves the spoils of betrayal, suffers a great loss. A traumatic loss. In the aftermath, he believes he has been unjustly spared. The deserving man becomes the undeserving man. Undeserving of life. Undeserving of love. And this becomes his understanding with the world; his self-imposed sentence which only he has the power to commute. So the undeserving man tells himself one night that he deserves to die. And yet, he remains the undeserving man, for that is now the very fabric of his identity. And while death would relieve his suffering, he does not believe, in his marrow, that he deserves any such relief. That would feel too much like forgiveness. Death would be a blessing. The undeserving man does not deserve death. He has spent his life at every turn and opportunity reaffirming his undeserving self, recognizing that undeserving self in the mirror, practicing his new name. He moves through the world skewing every event, every relationship towards confirmation, all the while…”
Ivanova paused, perhaps for effect, perhaps to make sure he was listening.
“All the while unconsciously manipulating events to reenact the moment in which the undeserving self was born.”
She let the words fall around him. Miller’s eyes widened. He sat bolt upright, like he had become briefly electric. He saw himself in her eyes. She blinked like a leaden door that might never reopen. She saw that he finally understood the story, even if not its relevance or application. That would take a very long time. Still, he marveled with his soft gray eyes like a child in the throes of discovery.
Because he saw that there were no lions. When the man had at last reached the trees, there were no lions. They were gone, slinking away through the grasses. He must have thought them ghosts or that he was slowly going insane.
Until he heard them roaring again, mere minutes later, two kilometers away, savagely bringing the undeserving man right back to the point of his origin. Reaffirming his undeserving nature with every unjust gnash and claw and cartilaginous snap.
The crop sprinklers sputtered and spat to life, arching thin streams of endlessly recycled water in every direction through the still air. The picnic table was quickly a flat rectangular puddle hovering above the ground. Neither of them seemed to notice or care.
Ivanova, her beautiful face dripping, looked down on him with those uncompromising eyes, darkness thickening between them. Miller wiped the water from his face. He felt as though he needed to squint and cock his head and crane his neck to see the other features of her face that were now fading with the light and washing away in the rain that was not really rain.
But her eyes alone told him everything.
He could see that she did not believe him capable of change. That she was unwilling to be an actor, the next in a string of actors, in his production; a character in a script he had written for himself to follow in unending circles.
For he was the leaving man. The preemptive man. And that would never change.
And yet, somehow, incredibly, there was hope. For she was also u
nwilling to end it all for him, stopping the circular production for good, with a quick injection to the heart. She could not deliver him unto the abruptness of a death that he may have deserved but that he did not understand. And that, one day, would feel something like forgiveness. Her mercy was in allowing him to live, for a long, long time, according to his own conscience.
And, because she did love him so very deeply, her mercy would become her sacrifice.
She turned, water droplets spinning away from the tips of her hair, and in that instant, she was born someone new. Everyday from then on would be about this day. And she too would be here a long, long time.
“Goodbye, Lieutenant.”
CHAPTER 75 – Tilly
“Neither of us actually saw the door open.”
Angus’ words reverberated with the echoes of old shock. He was reliving more than retelling.
He sat silently for a moment, staring into the dim, empty air of my living room watching history unfold itself from his memory like some nightmarish insect stretching its sticky legs, one by one, out of the egg sack. My heart, which had felt as though it were trying to drill its way out of my body through the wound in my forehead, set down its tools and held its breath. I know the throbbing must have continued, but I was not conscious of it. I sat still on my couch. Waiting.
“It was just … open. We would have had no idea had it not been for the rush of air bursting through the open window, pushing the flames in their cell toward the new opening in the cottage. That, and the sound of the ferocious rain, suddenly louder and all around us.
“There was an interminable pile-up of seconds in which we could only look at each other, Julia at us and we at her in the open doorway with a waterfall at her back like a silver curtain. She stood there soaking, a smile frozen on her face that slowly dissolved in the water.
“Iris was the first to move, reaching sideways for her discarded blouse and jeans. Julia took a single step inside the doorway, prompting me to cover my nudity with a pillow and to speak, exclaiming her name as though making some kind of accusation. I felt as though the ground beneath me had turned to liquid and I was sinking.
“Julia’s lips moved. I felt the words more than heard them. She said she thought I would be alone. That was the gist of it. She thought I would be alone. I sputtered incomprehensibly about needing supplies in Cleveland and happening upon an old college friend, lying out of panic and without any purpose.
“Iris stopped in the flurry of buttoning her waistband. I sensed her go rigid and cold. She looked down at me severely and then at Julia.
“‘I’m not a friend from college,’ she said. ‘I’m Angus’ editor. From Knopf. From New York.’
“Julia could only repeat the words. ‘From Knopf. From New York.’ Stunned. As if from the bottom of a well. Her brow furrowed as she dripped into a puddle around her shoes. She looked at me when she spoke the name. ‘You’re Iris Rutton. From Knopf. From New York. You’re the one he always goes to see.’
“‘Rutton.’ It was the pronunciation I had always used for Julia’s sake. It sounded somehow lower class. Less threatening with its immediate declension into the guttural family of unctuous and onion. A close cousin of rutting, love’s uncouth imposter. I suppose it was just one of a hundred little ways in which I had casually misrepresented Iris as a publisher’s functionary when she was anything but that.
“My entire vocal apparatus had seized. I could not answer her. But Iris could and did. ‘Rhuton,’ she said, proudly pronouncing the nasal vowel. ‘Iris Rhuton. Can I ask how you know Angus?’
“Julia did not answer. She didn’t need to answer. The wet gold band on her finger testified from across the room.
“‘You’re very pretty, Iris Rhuton,’ Julia said, trying to smile, pulling her hand through her hair. ‘You don’t look like an Ivan to me at all.’ And then she turned and stepped back out into the rain, closing the door behind her.”
Angus was silent then. I remember feeling like an intruder. It was my living room, but I felt I should leave so that he could be alone with his past. I leaned forward.
“No,” he said, not looking at me. I leaned back.
“We stared at the flat wooden plane of that damned door … for what seemed minutes. Like we were expecting it to open again. Then, as if stung by a hornet, Iris broke free from her trance and began furiously buttoning her blouse. I said something, I do not remember what. Something intended to explain or to mitigate. More lies I’m sure.
“But Iris was not interested in hearing what I had to say. She scooped her still damp clothes off the hearth and stormed into the bedroom where I could hear her stuffing them into her bag. I put back on my own wet clothes, babbling on about the state of my marriage, telling her that I loved her. Iris, I love you, I love you. As if those words had some intrinsic magic to them that would produce the same glorious result, again and again, no matter the context.
“She reemerged, dropping one bag and kneeling to unfasten the other. She pulled out the galley proofs of Inglorious Sun and dropped them on the floor. ‘You’ll need to find yourself a new editor,’ she said. All I could do was plead with her. ‘I want to go back, Iris. I want to start over.’ But she was not having it. Her protective discipline was back in full control. She looked at me with those cold blue eyes and closed her lips around her words like a guillotine. ‘There is no starting over. You can’t go back to something that never existed in the first place. The only place you and I are going back to is Cleveland. Immediately. And then you will never see or speak to me again.’ And with that, she picked up her bags and marched out into the rain to the car.
“Oh Angus,” I said, truly stricken. “How awful. I’m so sorry. It must have been…” I stopped. He wasn’t hearing a word I was saying.
“What could I do? I followed her out. I didn’t have the keys and I had to go back in. She waited for me, fuming. I got the keys, closed up the cabin, and we set off.
“I confess that my mind was not on my driving. I was almost completely preoccupied with the silent seething that filled the car like a colony of angry wasps. There was no escaping the pain. I had tried to plead my case, such as it was, but the wasps seemed to sting all the harder with every syllable. So we rode in our quiet agonies under the pummeling of rain, Iris rotated like a marble stature towards her window, a chiseled study of form, giving me her back, and I looking forlornly at the slope of her neck.
“The bridge across the Tuscarawas River, where it passes beneath the 250, was only twenty minutes away from the cottage.
“I say was.
“The State of Ohio has long since replaced that bridge with something more reliable. Back then it was a wooden trestle structure that had seen better days and badly needed repair. That was the prevailing opinion even when the sun was out and the timbers were dry. When Iris and I came upon the bridge it was dark and the headlights through the driving rain seemed to reveal a contraption made of broken straw, or some tangle of debris that had floated to a choke point in the river and gotten stuck.
“We approached the Tuscarawas, which was on the other side of a nearly right angle bend in the road, much too quickly for the wet conditions. The bridge seemed to leap out of the gloom up into the headlights like an animal. Indeed, as I slammed on my brakes sending the Fairlane skidding sideways along the road, the image in my head was that of a frightened deer trying to leap for safety.
“But there was no deer. Just that damned bridge, disappearing from my vision as the car rotated away in its skid and the headlights swept the lumber beams and into the silver curtains of rain and the dark hardwood stanchions rising up on the banks of the swollen river.
“We were nearly backwards to the bridge when the car stopped. Iris and I looked at each other wildly in the terror of the moment, united again for that instant, one life seeking confirmation in the eyes of another. But when she realized what had happened and that she was still alive listening to the rain that had changed from charming to Dantean in the space of a
n hour, she lashed out, venting the fresh adrenaline in her veins by hitting at my face and shoulder. She did not utter a word; that much of her was still under control. Or perhaps, as I said, in matters of the heart there simply are no words that suffice. She just kept hitting and hitting, forcing me out of the car. She simply could not stand my physical presence next to her for another instant.
“I climbed out into the weather and she yanked the door closed, locking it. I shouted at her over the sound of the rain flattening my hands against the window, fearing, rightly I think, that she intended to drive off and leave me there to my own devices. But despite my pleas, she was still inside the car. The windows were nearly completely fogged. Only her yellow blouse glowed faintly through. I straightened and banged the flat of my hand against the top of the car in anger.
“I looked up. That was when I saw my father’s old 1949 saddle shoe pick-up, sitting quietly in the dark a hundred feet or so past the leading edge of the bridge. So dark and quiet that it seemed like it was part of the bridge itself and that it had been there for decades, since the very beginning. As if children in that county used it as a landmark; meet you by the old truck-bridge. Truckbridge River.
“I left the Fairlane and walked slowly along the bridge, trying to convince myself that I was translating the image incorrectly. Surely, the rain and the dark and the emotion of Iris and the near accident had all conspired to impair my perception.
