At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  And as a writer, I would not do it gently. If Ryan were an invention of mine I would be cruel to him, even savage. His layers of humor, temper, affection, fear would be stripped away—I would strip them away—like layers of skin. I would pare him down to the delicate framework of bone, all the vulnerable leverage points of his being exposed. God, it’s too easy to think of ways to torture a human being. I can come up with dozens without effort, it’s as if they wait, a noisome crowd of tallow-sweated men, leaning against some unmarked door in the mind. Why is it so easy? Is it only my own fear, the inevitable recognition of my own body’s mortal tenderness? Or do we all have a storeroom of horrors in our minds? Perhaps it is only a part of our human legacy, a psychic equivalent to the rusted iron maidens they display in the museums here. Ryan and I saw several of these displays when he played the tourist with me before he was called away. He, too, will have a store of horrors pressing against the doors of his mind. If he were a character of mine, we would share those horrors, neither of us truly alone in the dark as I wrote the story of his ideal. At least he would have me, even if I were the author of his pain.

  At least I would have my victim, him.

  Alain arrived with a smile hung across the face of his worry and took me to a restaurant so quiet and civilized it was like a Victorian library. The waiters whispered in French and Alain answered in his earthy Gaspesian drawl, which made me smile. We really are all hicks beneath the wool. We are the children of loggers and trappers and cowboys, the grandchildren of the intrepid or disgraceful younger sons, and we are sometimes childlike, I think, in this subtle and sinister ancient world. We are all explorers here. We are voyageurs, and we are Iroquois in the royal court, where the racks are kept well-oiled and ready for use. We’ll get them back, Alain said, but I can’t help but wonder if this is another case of arrows vs. guns.

  This morning the telephone did not ring.

  I feel as though I have become a character in a novel—or less even than that: a painted icon traced out in tarnished gold. I am Woman Who Waits By Phone. Did I sleep through the ring? I wasn’t asleep, I could chart for you the course of my night hour by hour, tell you to the minute the time the garbage truck rumbled by, to the minute when the natural light first overtook the light from the streetlamp outside. I did not sleep—yet, did I dream I was awake? I know I did not, but somehow the knowledge cannot touch my doubt. And then getting up—did the jangling springs of this antique bed drown the electronic burble of the modern phone? did the water thundering into the sink? the growl of the kettle working itself up to a boil? On every other day since Ryan left, the telephone’s ring has burst into the house and rummaged through the air of every room, invasive as a policeman or a thief, yet this morning it might have been drowned by the windy rush of air into my lungs.

  I did all the predictable things: checked the dial tone twice, checked that the handset was in its cradle three times, started to call the embassy and stopped. How many times? I don’t remember. Don’t tie up the line joined forces with Don’t ask for news if you are afraid of what you might hear to weigh me down with chains. I wanted to call. I wanted to shower and dress and go out for coffee as if this were just another day of waiting. How is this different? Because I have not been told that I am still in suspense. I am in suspension about my own suspense. I might be falling and not even know. I find that this is perhaps not unendurable—and is this the real human tragedy, that so little is unendurable? Or is it that we so often have no choice but to endure?—nevertheless, I also find I cannot do anything but endure. It is I who have been stripped to the bone. Without skin I am cold, without muscles I am immobile, without nerves I am numb. I sit in this last, smallest, darkest cell, this cell without a window or a door, this cell without even cracks in its walls, and I am at the end of my inventions. They sit outside the door, powerless and mute. I have carried myself into the dead heart of the maze, and here I sit still alone, waiting to become so small, so light, so close to nothing that I can evaporate into the air. Waiting. The only sound is the sound my blood makes as it marches past my ears. Waiting.

  When the telephone finally rings, it clamors like a bugle, loud enough to shake down the walls. This house is two hundred and eighty years old, and bricks and timbers, floorboards and chimneypots that have stood for longer than my country has had a name are crumbling around my ears. Dust stops up my throat and burns my eyes so that I am blind with tears. There is light, but I cannot see; air, but I cannot breathe. I grope through the crumbs of brick and splinters of oak until I touch the smooth anachronistic plastic of the phone.

  It rings again and lightning flashes through the bones of my hand. Dust glows blue and an ominous ruddy smoke-shadow hovers over the jackdaw piles of shattered beams. I lift the receiver to my ear.

  “Hello,” I say, my voice harsh with dust. “Hello?”

  An unfamiliar voice with a familiar accent says my name.

  “Yes,” I say, a husk of a word.

  “Please hold.”

  Hold? There is nothing beneath my feet, I am dangling over a void at the end of this telephone cord, of course I hold! The receiver clicks and hums, and then static bursts over me like a storm of bees.

  “Go ahead,” says a voice as distant as the moon.

  Thinking the voice is speaking to me, I say, “Hello?” and so I miss a word or two, perhaps my name.

  “Is this thing working? Hello? Are you there?”

  Ryan, rescued, is shouting at me from God knows where, a helicopter, a submarine, the far side of the moon.

  “I’m here,” I say. “I’m here. When are you coming home?”

  And suddenly the air is full, not of dust, but of wings.

  The Long, Cold Goodbye

  Berd was late and she knew Sele would not wait for her, not even if it weren’t cold enough to freeze a standing man’s feet in his shoes. She hurried anyway, head down, as if she hauled a sled heavy with anxiety. She did not look up from the icy pavement until she arrived at the esplanade, and was just in time to see the diver balanced atop the railing. Sele! she thought, her voice frozen in her throat. The diver was no more than a silhouette, faceless, anonymous in winter clothes. Stop, she thought. Don’t, she thought, still unable to speak. He spread his arms. He was an ink sketch, an albatross, a flying cross. Below him, the ice on the bay shone with the apricot-gold of the sunset, a gorgeous summer nectar of a color that lied in the face of the ferocious cold. The light erased the boundary between frozen sea and icy sky; from where Berd stood across the boulevard, there was no horizon but the black line of the railing, sky above and below, the cliff an edge on eternity. And the absence the diver made when he had flown was as bright as all the rest within the blazing death of the sun.

  Berd crossed the boulevard, huddled deep within the man’s overcoat she wore over all her winter clothes. Brightness brought tears to her eyes and the tears froze on her lashes. She was alone on the esplanade now. It was so quiet she could hear the groan of tide-locked ice floes, the tick and ping of the iron railing threatening to shatter in the cold. She looked over, careful not to touch the metal even with her sleeve, and saw the shape the suicide made against the ice. No longer a cross: an asterisk bent to angles on the frozen waves and ice-sheeted rocks. He was not alone there. There was a whole uneven line of corpses lying along the foot of the cliff, like a line of unreadable type, the final sentence in a historical tome, unburied until the next storm swept in with its erasure of snow. Berd’s diver steamed, giving up the last ghost of warmth to the blue shadow of the land. He was still faceless. He might have been anyone, dead. The shadow grew. The sun spread itself into a spindle, a line; dwindled to a green spark and was gone. It was all shadow now, luminous dusk the color of longing, a blue to break your heart, ice’s consolation for the blazing death of the sky. Berd’s breath steamed like the broken man, dusting her scarf with frost. She turned and picked her way across the boulevard, its pavement broken by frost heaves, her eyes still dazzled by the last of the day. It was
spring, the 30th of April, May Day Eve. The end.

  Sele. That was not, could never have been him, Berd decided. Suicide had become a commonplace this spring, this non-spring, but Sele would never think of it. He was too curious, perhaps too fatalistic, certainly too engaged in the new scramble for survival and bliss. (But if he did, if he did, he would call on Berd to witness it. There was no one left but her.) No. She shook her head to herself in the collar of her coat. Not Sele. She was late. He had come and gone. The diver had come and gone. Finally she felt the shock of it, witness to a man’s sudden death, and flinched to a stop in the empty street. Gaslights stood unlit in the blue dusk, and the windows of the buildings flanking the street were mostly dark, so that the few cracks of light struck a note of loneliness. Lonely Berd, witness to too much, standing with her feet freezing inside her shoes. She leaned forward, her sled of woe a little heavier now, and started walking. She would not go that way, not that way, she would not. She would find Sele, who had simply declined to wait for her in the cold, and get what he had promised her, and then she would be free.

  But where, in all the dying city, would he be?

  Sele had never held one address for long. Even when they were children Berd could never be sure of finding him in the same park or alley or briefly favored dock for more than a week or two. Then she would have to hunt him down, her search spirals widening as he grew older and dared to roam further afield. Sometimes she grew disheartened or angry that he never sought her out, that she was always the one who had to look for him, and then she refused. Abstained, as she came to think of it in more recent years. She had her own friends, her own curiosities, her own pursuits. But she found that even when she was pursuing them she would run across Sele following the same trail. Were they so much alike? It came of growing up together, she supposed. Each had come too much under the other’s influence. She had not seen him for more than a year when they found each other again at the lecture on ancient ways.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, as if it had been a week.

  “Hello.” She bumped shoulders with him, standing at the back of the crowded room—crowded, it must be said, only because the room was so small. And she had felt the currents of amusement, impatience, offense, disdain, running through him, as if together they had closed a circuit, because she felt the same things herself, listening to the distinguished professor talk about the “first inhabitants,” the “lost people,” as if there were not two of them standing in the very room.

  “We lost all right,” Sele had said, more rueful than bitter, and Berd had laughed. So that was where it had begun, with a shrug and a laugh—if it had not begun in their childhood, growing up poor and invisible in the city built on their native ground—if it had not begun long before they were born.

  Berd trudged on, worried now about the impending darkness. The spring dusk would linger for a long while, but there were no lamplighters out to spark the lamps. In this cold, if men didn’t lose fingers to the iron posts, the brass fittings shattered like rotten ice. So there would be no light but the stars already piercing the blue. Find Sele, find Sele. It was like spiraling back into childhood, spiraling through the city in search of him. Every spiral had a beginning point. Hers would be his apartment, a long way from the old neighborhood, not so far from the esplanade. He won’t be there, she warned herself, and as if she were tending a child, she turned her mind from the sight of the dead man lying with the others on the ice.

  Dear Berd,

  I cannot tell you how happy your news has made me. You are coming! You are coming at last! It seems as though I have been waiting for a lifetime, and now that I know I’ll only have to wait a few short weeks more they stretch out before me like an eternity. Your letters are all my consolation, and the memory I hold so vividly in my mind is better than any photograph: your sweet face and your eyes that smile when you look sad and yet hold such a melancholy when you smile. My heart knows you so well, and you are still mysterious to me, as if every thought, every emotion you share (and you are so open you shame me for my reserve) casts a shadow that keeps the inner Berd safely hidden from prying eyes. Oh, I won’t pry! But come soon, as soon as you can, because one lifetime of waiting is long enough for any man . . .

  Sele’s apartment was in a tall old wooden house that creaked and groaned even in lesser colds than this. Wooden houses had once been grand, back when the lumber was brought north in wooden ships and the natives lived in squat stone huts like ice-bound caves, and Sele’s building still showed a ghost of its old beauty in its ornate gables and window frames. But it had been a long time since it had seen paint, and the weathered siding looked like driftwood in the dying light. The porch steps groaned under Berd’s feet as she climbed to the door. An old bell pull hung there. She pulled it and heard the bell ring as if it were a ship’s bell a hundred miles out to sea. The house was empty, she needed no other sign. All the same she tried the handle, fingers wincing from the cold brass even inside her mitten. The handle fell away from its broken mechanism with a clunk on the stoop and the door sighed open a crack, as if the house inhaled. It was dark inside; there was no breath of warmth. All the same, thought Berd, all the same. She stepped, anxious and hopeful, inside.

  Dark, and cold, and for an instant Berd had the illusion that she was stepping into one of the stone barrow-houses of her ancestors, windowless and buried deep under the winter’s snow. She wanted immediately to be out in the blue dusk again, out of this tomb-like confinement. Sele wasn’t here. And beyond that, with the suicide fresh in her mind and the line of death scribbled across her inner vision, Berd had the sense of dreadful discoveries waiting for her, as if the house really were a tomb. Go. Go before you see . . . But suppose she didn’t find Sele elsewhere and hadn’t checked here? Intuition was not infallible—her many searches for Sele had not always borne fruit—she had to be sure. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. She found the stairs and began to climb.

  There was more light upstairs, filtering down like a fine gray-blue dust from unshuttered windows. Ghost light. The stairs, the whole building, creaked and ticked and groaned like every ghost story every told. Yet she was not precisely afraid. Desolate, yes, and abandoned, as if she were haunted by the empty house itself; as if, having entered here, she would never regain the realm of the living; as if the entire world had become a tomb. As if.

  It was the enthusiasm she remembered, when memory took her like a sudden faint, a shaft of pain. They had been playing a game of make-believe, and the game had been all the more fun for being secreted within the sophisticated city. Like children constructing the elaborate edifice of Let’s Pretend in the interstices of the adult world, they had played under the noses of the conquerors who had long since forgotten they had ever conquered, the foreigners who considered themselves native born. Berd and Sele, and later Berd’s cousins and Sele’s half-sister, Isse. They had had everything to hide and had hidden nothing. The forgotten, the ignored, the perpetually overlooked. Like children, playing. And for a time Sele had been easy to find, always here, welcoming them in with their bits of research, their inventions, their portentous dreams. His apartment warm with lamplight, no modern gaslights for them, and voices weaving a spell in point and counterpoint. Why don’t we . . . ? Is there any way . . . ? What if . . . ?

  What if we could change the world?

  The upper landing was empty in the gloom that filtered through the icy window at the end of the hall. Berd’s boots thumped on the bare boards, her layered clothes rustled together, the wooden building went on complaining in the cold, and mysteriously, the tangible emptiness of the house was transmuted into an ominous kind of inhabitation. It was as if she had let the cold dusk in behind her, as if she had been followed by the wisp of steam rising from the suicide’s broken head. She moved in a final rush down the hall to Sele’s door, knocked inaudibly with her mittened fist, tried the handle. Unlocked. She pushed open the door.

  “Sele?” She might have been asking him to comfort her for some recent
hurt. Her voice broke, her chest ached, hot tears welled into her eyes. “Sele?”

  But he wasn’t there, dead or alive.

  Well, at least she was freed from this gruesome place. She made a fast tour of the three rooms, feeling neurotic for her diligence (but she did have to make sure all the same), and opened the hall door with all her momentum carrying her forward to a fast departure.

  And cried aloud with the shock of discovering herself no longer alone.

  They were oddly placed down the length of the hall, and oddly immobile, as if she had just yelled Freeze! in a game of statues. Yes, they stood like a frieze of statues: Three People Walking. Yet they must have been moving seconds before; she had not spent a full minute in Sele’s empty rooms. Berd stood in the doorway with her heart knocking against her breastbone, her eyes watering as she stared without blinking in the dead light. Soon they would laugh at the joke they had played on her. Soon they would move.

  Berd was all heartbeat and hollow fear as she crept down the hallway, hugging the wall for fear of brushing a sleeve. Her cousin Wael was first, one shoulder dropped lower than the other as if he was on the verge of turning to look back. His head was lowered, his uncut hair fell ragged across his face, his clothes were far too thin for the cold. The cold. Even through all her winter layers, Berd could feel the impossible chill emanating from her cousin’s still form. Cold, so cold. But as she passed she would have sworn he swayed, ever so slightly, keeping his balance, keeping still while she passed. Keeping still until her back was turned. Wael. Wael! It was wrong to be so afraid of him. She breathed his name as she crept by, and saw her breath as a cloud.