At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  She covered his eyes with her free hand. “Sleep.”

  “You can only work with what we bring you. If we don’t bring you the men who know . . . who knew . . . ” The darkness of her touch seeped through him.

  “Sleep.”

  “Will you still be here?”

  “Yes. Now sleep.”

  Three times told, he slept.

  She had to be pure to work her craft, a virgin in the heart of army intelligence. He never knew if this loving would compromise her with her superiors. She swore it would not touch her power, and he did not ask her more. He just took her with his hands, his tongue, his skin, and if sometimes the forbidden depths of her had him aching with need, that only made the moment when she slid her mouth around him more potent, explosive as a shell bursting in the bore of a gun. And he laughed sometimes when she twisted against him, growling, her teeth sharp on his neck: virgin. He laughed, and forgot for a time the smell of long-dead men.

  “Finest military intelligence in the world,” Colonel Tibbit-Noyse said, “and we can’t find their blasted army from one day to the next.” His black mustache was crisp in the wilting heat of the briefing room.

  Neil sat with half a dozen officers scribbling in notebooks balanced on their knees. Like the others, he let his pencil rest when the colonel began his familiar tirade.

  “We know the Fuhrer’s entrail-readers are prone to inaccuracy and internal strife. We know who his spies are and have been feeding them tripe for months.” (There was a dutiful chuckle.) “We know the desert tribesmen who have been guiding his armored divisions are weary almost to death with the Superior Man. For God’s sake, our desert johnnies have been meeting them for tea among the dunes! So why the hell—” the colonel’s hand slashed at a passing fly “—can’t we find them before they drop their bloody shells into our bloody laps?”

  Two captains and three lieutenants, all the company officers not in the field, tapped pencil ends on their notebooks and thumbed the sweat from their brows. Major Healy sitting behind the map table coughed into his hand. Neil, eyes fixed on the wall over the major’s shoulder, heard again the rattle of gunfire, saw again the carnage shaded by vulture wings. His notebook slid through his fingers to the floor. The small sound in the colonel’s silence made everyone jump. He bent to pick it up.

  “Now, I have dared to suggest,” Tibbit-Noyse continued, “that the fault may not lie with our intel at all, but rather with the use to which it has been put. This little notion of mine has not been greeted with enthusiasm.” (Again, a dry chuckle from the men.) “In fact, I’m afraid the general got rather testy about the quantity and quality of fodder we’ve scavenged for his necromancer in recent weeks. Therefore.” The colonel sighed. His voice was subdued when he continued. “Therefore, all squads will henceforth make it their sole mission to find and retrieve enemy dead, be they abandoned or buried, with an urgent priority on those of officer rank. I’m afraid this will entail a fair bit of dodging about on the wrong side of the battle line, but you’ll be delighted to know that the general has agreed to an increase in leave time between missions from two days to four.” He looked at Neil. “Beginning immediately, captain, so you have another three days’ rest coming to you.”

  “I’m fit to go tomorrow, sir,” Neil said.

  Tibbit-Noyse gave him a bleak smile. “Take your time, captain. There’s plenty of death to go ’round.”

  There was another moment of silence, this one long enough for the men to start to fidget. Healy coughed. Neil sketched the outlines of birds. Then the colonel went on with his briefing.

  She had duties during the day, and in any event he could not spend all his leave in her company. He had learned from the nomads not to drink until he must. So he found a café not too near headquarters, one with an awning and a boy to whisk the flies, and drank small cups of syrupy coffee until his heart raced and sleep no longer tempted him.

  A large body dropped into the seat opposite him. “Christ. How can you drink coffee in this heat?”

  Neil blinked the other’s face into focus: Montrose, a second-string journalist with a beefy face and a bloodhound’s eyes. The boy brought the reporter a bottle of lemon squash, half of which he poured down his throat without seeming to swallow. “Whew!”

  “We have orders,” Neil said, his voice neutral, “not to speak with the press.”

  “Look at you, you bastard. Not even sweating.” Montrose had a flat Australian accent and salt-rimmed patches of sweat underneath his arms. “Or have you just had the juice scared out of you?”

  Neil gave a thin smile and brushed flies away from the rim of his cup.

  “Listen.” Montrose hunkered over the table. “There’ve been rumors of a major cock-up. Somebody let some secrets slip into the wrong ears. Somebody in intelligence. Somebody high up. Ring any bells?”

  Neil covered a yawn. He didn’t have to fake one. The coastal heat was a blanket that could smother even the caffeine. He drank the last swallow, leaving a sludge of sugar in the bottom of the cup, and flagged the boy.

  “According to this rumor,” Montrose said, undaunted, “at least one of the secrets had to do with the field maneuvers of the Dead Squad—pardon me—the Special Desert Reconnaissance Group. Which, come to think of it, is your outfit, isn’t it, Neil?” Montrose blinked with false concern. “Didn’t have any trouble your last time out, did you, mate? No unpleasant surprises? No nasty Jerries hiding among the dunes?”

  The boy came back, set a fresh coffee down by Neil’s elbow, gave him a fleeting glance from thickly-lashed eyes. Neil dropped a couple of coins on the tray.

  “How’s your wife?” Neil said.

  Montrose sighed and leaned back to finish his lemonade. “God knows. Jerries went and sank the mail ship, didn’t they? She could be dead and I’d never even know.”

  “You could be dead,” Neil said, “and she would never know. Isn’t that a bit more likely given your relative circumstances?”

  Montrose grunted in morose agreement, and whistled for the boy.

  He stalled as long as he could, through the afternoon and into the cook-fire haze of dusk, and even so he waited nearly an hour outside her door. When she came home, limp and pale, she gave him a weary smile and unlocked her door. He knew better than to touch her before she’d had a chance to bathe. He followed her through the stuffy entrance hall to the airier gloom of her room. She stepped out of her shoes on her way into the bathroom. He heard water splat in the empty tub. Then she came back and began to take off her clothes.

  He said, “I have three more days’ leave.”

  She unbuttoned her blouse and peeled it off. “I heard.” She tossed the blouse into a hamper by the bathroom door. “I’m glad.”

  He sat in a creaking wicker chair, set his cap on the floor. “There’s a rumor going around about some misplaced intel.”

  She frowned slightly as she unfastened her skirt. “I haven’t heard about that.”

  “I had it from a reporter. Not the most reliable source.”

  The skirt followed the blouse, then her slip, her brassiere, her pants. Naked, she lifted her arms to take down her hair. Shadows defined her ribs, her taut belly, the divide of her loins. She walked over to drop hairpins into his hand.

  “Who is supposed to have said what to whom?”

  “There were no characters in the drama,” he said. “But if it’s true . . . ”

  “If it’s true, then your men never had a chance.”

  This close she smelled of woman-sweat and death. His throat tightened. “They had no chance, regardless. Neither do the men in the field now. They’ve sent the whole damn company out chasing dead men.” He dropped his head against the chair and closed his eyes. “This bloody war.”

  “It’s probably just a rumor,” she said, and he heard her move away. The rumble from the bathroom tap stopped. Water sloshed as she stepped into the tub. Neil rolled her hairpins against his palm.

  Her scent faded with the last of the light.


  He wished she had a name he could call her by. Like her intact hymen, her namelessness was meant to protect her from the forces she wrestled in her work, but it seemed a grievous thing. She was so specific a woman, so unique, so much herself; he knew so intimately her looks, her textures, her voice; he could even guess, sometimes, at her thoughts; and yet she was anonymous. The general’s necromancer. The witch. The girl. His endearments came unraveled in the empty space where her name should be, so he took refuge in silence, wishing, as much for his sake as for hers, that she had not been born and raised to her grisly vocation. From childhood she had known nothing other than death.

  “How can you bear it?” he asked her once.

  “How can you?” A glance of mockery. “But maybe no one told you. We all live with death. We all begin to die the instant we are born. Even you.”

  He had a vision of himself dead and in her hands, and understood it for a strange desire. He did not put it into words but he knew her intimacy with the dead, with death, went beyond this mere closeness of flesh. Skin slick with sweat-salt, speechless tongues and hands that sought the vulnerable center of being, touch dangerous and tender and never allowed inside the heart, the womb. He pressed her in the darkness, strove against her as if they fought, as if one or both might be consumed in this act without hope of consummation. She clung to him, spilled over with the liquor of desire and still he drank, his thirst for her unslaked, unslakable until she, wet and limber as an eel, turned in his arms, turned to him, turned against him, and swallowed him into sleep.

  The battle washed across the desert as freely as water unbounded by shores, the war’s tidal wrack of ruined bodies, tanks, and planes left like flotsam upon the dunes. The ancient, polluted city lay between the sea and that other, drier beach, and no one knew yet where the high tide line would be. Already the streets were full of the walking wounded.

  Neil had errands to run. His desert boots needed mending, he had a new dress tunic to collect from the tailor—trivial chores that, performed against the backdrop of conflict, reminded him in their surreality of lying with two other men under an overhang that was too small to shelter one, seeing men torn apart by machine gun fire and feeling the sand grit between his molars, feeling the tickle of some insect across his hand, feeling his sergeant’s boot heel drum against his kidney as the man shook, as they all shook, wanting to live, wanting not to die as the others died, wanting not to be eaten as the others were eaten by the vultures that wheeled down from an empty sky and that could not be trusted to report the enemy’s absence, as they were brave enough to face the living when there was a meal at stake. In the tailor’s shop he met a man he knew slightly, a major in another branch of Intelligence, and they went to a hotel bar for beer.

  The place looked cool, with white tile, potted palms, lazy ceiling fans, but the look was a lie. Strips of flypaper that hung inconspicuously behind the bar twisted under the weight of captured flies. The major paid for two pints and led the way to an unoccupied table.

  “Look at them all,” he said between quick swallows.

  Neil grunted acknowledgment, though he did not look around. He had already seen the scattered crowd of civilians, European refugees nervous as starlings under a hawk’s wings.

  “Terrified Jerry’s going to come along and send them all back where they came from.” The major sounded as if he rather liked the idea.

  The beer felt good going down.

  “As I see it,” said the major, “this haphazard retreat of ours is actually going to work in our favor before the end. Think of it. The more scattered our forces are, the more thinly Jerry has to spread his own line. Right now they may look like a scythe sweeping up from the south and west,” the major drew an arc in a puddle of spilled beer, “but they have to extend their line at every advance in order to keep any stragglers of ours from simply sitting tight until we’re at their backs. Any day now they’re going to find themselves overextended, and all we have to do is make a quick nip through a weak spot” he bisected the arc “and we’ll have them in two pieces, both of them surrounded.”

  “And how do we find the weak spot?”

  “Oh, well,” the major said complacently, “that’s a job for heroes like you, not desk wallahs like me.”

  Neil got up to buy the next round. When he came back to the table, the major had been joined by another man in uniform, a captain also wearing the “I” insignia. Neil set the glasses down and sat, and only then noticed the looks on their faces.

  “I say, old man,” the major said. “Rumor has it your section chief has just topped himself in his office.”

  “It’s not a rumor,” the captain said. “Colonel Tibbit-Noyse shot himself. I saw his desk. It was covered in his brains.” He reached for Neil’s beer and thirstily emptied the glass.

  Major Healy, the colonel’s aide, was impossible to find. Neil tracked him all over Headquarters, but although his progress allowed him to hear the evolving story of the colonel’s death, he never managed to meet up with Healy. Eventually he came to his senses and let himself into Healy’s cubbyhole of an office. The major kept a box of cigarettes on his desk. Neil seldom smoked, but, eaten by waiting, he lit one after another, the smoke dry and harsh as desert air flavored by gunpowder. When Healy came in, not long before sundown, he shouted “Bloody hell!” and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the window in its frame.

  Neil put out his dog end in the overcrowded ashtray. Healy dropped into his desk chair and it tipped him back with a groan.

  “Go away, captain. I can’t tell you anything and if you stay I might shoot you and save Jerry the bother.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  Healy jumped up and slammed his fist on his desk. “Out!” The chair rolled back to bump the wall.

  “He sent the whole company to die on that slaughter ground and then he killed himself?” Neil shook his head.

  The major wiped his face with his palms and went to stand at the window. “God knows what’s in a man’s mind at a time like that.”

  “Rumor has it he was the one who spilled our movements to the enemy.” Neil was hoarse from cigarettes and thirst. “Rumor has him doing it for money, for sex, for loyalty to the other side. Because of blackmail, or stupidity, or threats.”

  “Rumor.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Healy turned from the window. The last brass bars of light streaked the dusty glass. “Don’t you?”

  “Whatever he’d done, I don’t believe he would have killed himself before he knew what had happened to the men.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “If he was a spy, he wouldn’t give a ha’penny damn about the men.”

  “Do you believe that, sir?”

  Healy coughed and went to the box on his desk for a cigarette. When he saw how few were left he gave Neil a sour look. He chose one, lit it with a silver lighter from his pocket, blew out the smoke in a long thin stream.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said quietly. “Now give me some peace, will you? I have work to do.”

  The sun was almost gone. Neil got up and fumbled for the door.

  Blackout enveloped the city. Even the stars were dim behind the scrim of cooking smoke that hazed the local sky. Though he might have wheedled a car and driver out of the motor pool, he decided to walk. Her compound was nearly a mile of crooked streets away, and it took all his concentration to recognize the turns in the darkness. Nearly all. He felt a kinship with the other men of his company, men who groped their way through the wind-built maze of dunes and sandstone desert bones, led by a chancy map into what could be, at every furtive step, a trap. He had seen how blood pooled on earth too dry to drink, how it dulled under a skiff of dust even before the flies came. Native eyes watched from dim doorways, and he touched the sidearm on his belt. With the war on the city’s threshold, everyone was nervous.

  Her doorway was as dim as all the rest. In the weak light that escaped her room her ey
es were only a liquid gleam. She said his name uncertainly and only when he answered did she step back to let him in.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “I’m still on leave.” A fatuous thing to say, but it was all he could think of.

  She led him into her room where, hidden by blinds, oil lamps added to the heat. The bare space was stifling, as if crowded by the invisible. On her bed, the blue shawl she used as a coverlet showed the wrinkles where she had lain.

  “It’s past curfew,” she said. “And . . . ” She stood with her elbows cupped in her palms, barefoot, her yellow cotton dress catching the light behind it. Neil went to her, put his arms about her, leaned his face against her hair. She smelled of tea leaves and cloves.

  “Of course you’ve heard,” he said.

  “Heard.”

  “About the colonel? Tibbit-Noyse’s suicide?”

  She drew in a staggered breath and pulled her arms from between them. “Yes.” She returned his embrace, tipped her head to put her cheek against his.

  He pulled her tighter, slight and strong with bone, and some pent emotion began to shake its way out of his body. As if to calm him, she kissed his neck, his mouth, her body alive against his. He could not discern if she also shook, or was only shaken by his tension. They stripped each other, clumsy, quick to reach the point of skin on skin. She began to kneel but he caught her arms and lifted her to the bed.

  He came closer than he ever had to ending it. Weighing her down, hard against the welling heat between her thighs, he wanted, he ached, he raged with some fury that was not anger nor lust but some need, some absence without a name. Hard between her thighs. Hands tight against her face. Eyes on hers bright with oil flames. No, she said, and he was shaking again with the convulsive shudders of a fever, he’d seen malaria and thought this was some illness as well, some disease of heat and anguish and war, and she said No! and scratched his face.

  He rolled onto his back and hardly had he moved but she was off the bed. Arms across his face, he heard her harsh breathing retreat across the room. The bathroom door slammed. Opened.