“Where are we going?” I asked. Again, she remained silent.
The darkness lit with the sparkle of a million stars and the rain fell gently, yet I stayed dry. Sr. Mary Anne sat near the garden fountain, her tears melding with the rain.
“Why is she crying?”
Sr. Veronica pointed to the woman, her habit heavily soiled. Her veil lay in the mud before her, her cropped red ringlets now soaked. She clutched a crucifix as she knelt praying. She spoke perfect Latin, screaming her words to the Heavens. Several sisters came, took her frail body in their arms and carried her inside. She lay on the stone floor, gasping for breath.
We watched in silence – part of the universe but not part of this time – as she succumbed to pneumonia.
“Please,” I begged, “stop this. I can no longer bear it.”
Sr. Veronica led me down the garden path, past the roses and oleander, past the herbs and root vegetables, and as I looked back, the world melted away into the starlit sky. Reaching my hand toward it, the colors slipped through my wanting fingers. I could not hold on to this time. I could not go back.
Forward we went, color blurring into a surrounding mist. Wind rushed through my hair, knotting the curls. My dress flapped; my necklace struggled to remain on its chain.
Slowly, the world came into focus once again. A fire consumed a tiny fireplace, the one in my room. Aleksandra stood in the fire and candle light; her hair pulled back, a tear staining her cheek. She removed clothing from my wardrobe, packing them away in my sating-lined trunk. She cautiously removed my jewelry from their maple case, putting everything in a velvet bag that she tucked into the trunk with my favorite gowns.
Wesley entered, hugged her, and added a bundle of framed art to the trunk. He said something to her, something so faint I could not hear it. She scowled at him. She yelled. She threw a paper into the fire, the flames instantly consuming it. He grabbed the trunk, slamming its heavy lid shut, and toted it from the room as she fell to her knees sobbing, clutching onto my ruby necklace. The one her father had given me.
“Is this happening now?” I asked. “Where are they going?”
Sr. Veronica looked to her left and I watched as Aksel gathered Aleksandra and the rest of my belongings. They left the estate, their shoes clicking on the yellow stoned pathway.
A carriage was loaded; they embarked, and as the horses took off down the path the world around me melted with them.
Silence followed.
Sr. Veronica and I were all that existed, swimming in a vague nothingness. The frigid air stung at my cheeks, the wind twisted and gnarled my hair, and her eyes burned with the ferocity of a white star as she glared at me. Time was hollow and magnificent. Nothing mattered, and it felt as if nothing would ever matter again.
Then the whiz of gunfire awoke my eyes to a smoke-filled lawn, men in grey clutching bleeding wounds. Soldiers cried out in agony. Men in red coats, riding great horses, rifles clutched to their sides, passed through surveying the carnage.
We walked through the dead and dying, my feet treading over foreign soil. This land and its people were unfamiliar. She directed me toward a huddle of white tents perched at the top of a large hill. Soldiers busied themselves, rearming and recharging weapons for tomorrows skirmish. The painful screams of the injured men pierced through the chaotic hum.
Women in dresses with bloodstained aprons tended to the maimed. They bandaged and cleaned wounds; they administered medicines and fed the hungry. They knelt and prayed by cots as men died before their innocent eyes.
Amongst the men and gun smoke clouds, Aleksandra sat tending to the wounded. Her angelic face pierced through the muddled mess of humanity, clawing its way to the top. She glanced in my direction and I thought she recognized me there, in the middle of the lantern-lit battlefield – the blood stained earth beneath me feet.
I later learned this was Yorktown, Virginia, and the British, our people, would soon surrender to the American troops. Soon a treaty would follow and the new land would get its sovereignty. But, in that moment as we stood surveying the violence, it was just war. Man pitted against man: a tale older than me.
As I turned toward Sr. Veronica, the tall grass below bled into a blur of greens and browns, grays, and reds. The breeze picked up and the white tents clouded my view. Aleksandra’s face faded into the consuming grey shadow.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked Sr. Veronica. “Have I not suffered enough?” Still, she did not answer. “What are these places you are showing me?”
Finally, as we flew through the darkness, she replied in a whisper, “These are thing you must see.”
“Why?” I begged. “I do not understand any of this!”
“You will understand. Soon,” she replied as the blackness gave way to a building and an approaching roar. The large beast raged along a metal path, smoke billowing from its head. Its circular feet moved with great swiftness as the hulk of it drilled past us. The sound it made deafened my ears.
“That is a train,” she told me.
“It is a beast!” I exclaimed.
“No,” she explained, “it is a machine.”
As I watched the train ease into the countryside, its tail slipping into the valley below and out of my view, I felt myself tugged backwards. Once again, the world went dark and quiet.
Suddenly, the void edged into a lit room, music wafted from a piano, people danced on the ballroom floor. Glowing orbs of glass, that Sr. Veronica called electric light bulbs, replaced candlelight. The Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, intimate one-on-one dances had replaced the elegantly refined country waltzes. Industrialization had changed not only the landscape, but also the minds of the people who worked and lived amongst the giant machine-driven factories.
“The world has changed so much,” I whispered, watching the men and women pair off, twirling on the dance floor.
“Has it really?” she asked, surprised. “This is not the first time you have witnessed progress.”
“But it has always been slow,” I told her. “Not like this. Not so much in so little time.”
Then the dance hall swirled as the people faded from sight. Darkness replaced the electric light bulbs, and silence invaded the energetic piano notes. The wind tossed my hair, the loose strands stinging my eyes as they whipped freely about. Sr. Veronica held out her hand to me, and I took it. She smiled.
“You have not seen anything yet, my friend!”
We traveled in and out of the void, in and out of reality. She showed me Swing music and automobiles, buildings rising into the sky, television, and the telephone. She showed me Internet Cafés, and grand public universities, and women, robed in the religious cloth, preaching as men would in our time.
Then she showed the room I was in and I saw my body lying on the bed. I saw the dust of time blanketing me. The candles had long gone out and I was alone. I was sleeping and peaceful.
“This is where I leave you,” she said, as we stood by the door.
“I cannot be alone,” I told her. “You promised you would not leave me.”
“But I must, Bree,” she said. “It is time for you to wake. They will be here soon.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Wesley and Aleksandra,” she told me.
“And Aksel?” I asked, but she faced me, sadness swimming in her eyes.
“Good-bye, Bree,” she whispered and faded into the darkness.
“Veronica!” I reached for her, but she was nearly gone.
The peaceful calm that comes with solitude again descended, and then I felt his hand on my shoulder. His cologne was pungent and musky, his fingers soft. His voice, though, was the same.
“Wake up, Bree,” Wesley said. “Wake up.”
As my eyes opened, I saw him and Aleksandra standing beside the bed.
“You were there, in the war,” I told her. “You were helping the Americans.”
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Hush, sister.” He helped me to sit up.
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“What year is it?”
“2005,” Aleksandra whispered as she drew the covers back.
“You will need to feed right away,” Wesley remarked, clearing the cobwebs from my hair.
“2005?” I said in disbelief. “How could I sleep through so much?”
“You needed rest, mother.” Aleksandra said as she helped ease me from the bed. My stiff limbs ached.
“How did you know to wake me?” I asked.
“We just knew,” Wesley told me. He flashed his eyes at Aleksandra, who quickly returned his glance before helping me to the door.
“Where is Aksel,” I asked. My eyes strained in the candlelight, but I could not see him. “Wesley? Where is Aksel?”
Aleksandra hesitated at the door. “Let us go, mother,” she said, then pushed me forward. “We have a long way to travel.”
TWENTY-TWO
Aksel once told me he would go wherever I went. He would never leave me. So where was he now? The television gave me endless mornings, its backdrop a burning, golden sun. The telephone gave me access to global communication, but I had no desire to talk. The computer, the internet, showed me a world now vastly connected, yet I still felt desperately alone. Without Aksel here, without my family whole, I was still lost.
When I was in my darkest of days, he had promised to guide me through.
Oddly, in a way, he had. He had forced me to take refuge in the Lofotens. He had forced me to sleep. The last image of him, though, still breaks my heart. Tears dripped from his downcast eyes onto Aleksandra’s fiery locks as he held her from me. He realized then, as he watched Wesley walk me to the door that he could not go there with me. His promise would be broken.
As I cautiously discovered the changed world, I felt removed from it. I was but a museum exhibit walking amongst the living. Gone were the elegant gowns and customary manners. Gone were the candlelit nights, mellowed by the mirage of time passing slowly. Electric lights brightened a room with the light of midday. Buildings stretched to the clouds, lit with colored lights all night, bringing fire to a darkened sky.
Madness consumed the world. People ran through the streets, eager to get to places they had no desire to be. Cars roared down dirty highways. Buses honked and jerked behind them. People were plugged in and logged on; tapping into the twenty-four hour culture stream, obsessed with celebrity babies, haute couture, the 2012 apocalypse, and living through other people’s lives. The whole of humanity had gone mad.
This society bustled about under the illusion of control, as if they had a choice in anything. While I sat on my Chicago balcony overlooking the chaos of State Street, watching them scurry like rats in a rainstorm. They were oblivious as to just how little they did control in their puny lives.
Sleep had concentrated the madness percolating beneath the layers of age and time that made up who I was. Waking in an age that encouraged madness was nothing short of dangerous, but they had not known this. Any peace my past had afforded me was gone now, and Aksel carried a piece of any remaining sanity wherever he had gone.
“When did he leave?” I asked Aleksandra one night. We were watching the eleven o’clock news, a piece on Middle Eastern violence played to my deaf ears. War was war. It never ends.
“Five years after,” Aleksandra remarked as she flipped the channels to a travel show. Vivid images of a Hawaiian beach, placid crystal blue seas and white sands stretched before us on the screen. All bathed in the youthful glow of sunlight.
“Have you heard from him?”
“Every ten years. He writes wanting to know if you’re awake,” she said, flipping the television off and tossing the remote onto the side table. The firelight and a small tabletop lamp now lit the room in a soft glow, and I felt more comfortable with this. “And no matter where we are,” she continued, “he finds us.”
“Have you found him?”
“No such luck.” She stood, walked to the corner desk, unlocked a drawer and pulled out a stack of letters. These were the most recent. She handed them to me. “Look through them yourself, if you wish. You know him better than we do.”
“Why did you wake me up now?” I asked her. “After all this time?”
“He has stopped writing,” she replied. “We always received a letter on June 9th, every ten years.”
“Sigursdsblot,” I recalled, a smile spreading on my lips and then quickly fading. “But not this year?”
“No. Nothing came.” She moved to the window, the cars whizzed into a blur of color outside. The heavy metro traffic weaved its way around the downtown construction zones.
“He is still with us,” I told her. “He does not have the courage to end it himself.”
“How do you know?”
“I made him, Aleksandra. I know everything about him,” I remarked. “And I know where he is.”
“Are you going to him?” Wesley asked, entering the room and sauntering over to a corner chair. He plopped down, put his feet up, and laid the Chicago Tribune in his lap.
“Why should I?” Moving to the fire, I relit the dying embers. The quarry-stone fireplace encapsulated the vermilion aura, only the fire’s warmth escaping its embrace. “Because you will,” he replied opening the paper to the business section and discarding the rest into a pile on the floor. “You cannot just leave people to themselves.” “Maybe I will this time,” I told him, “Maybe I do not want him back after he helped shut me away.”
“It was for your own good, mother,” said Aleksandra.
“Who were you to decide what was for my own good?” My voice boomed over the subtle roar of the traffic below. “You stood there; you let him take me away!” I glanced toward Wesley, his paper now in his lap, his eyes focused on me. “And Aksel stood there too, holding you back!”
“You needed rest, Bree,” Wesley said as he moved the paper aside and stood, walking toward me. “You were losing yourself.”
“I had already lost myself, Wesley!” I boasted. “That happened the day you turned me.” I moved away from his outstretched arm and walked to the window. Hundreds of years had progressed around me as I slept. Now I lived in this fast-paced world, ignorant to its ways and terrified, as I knew I did not belong here.
I went into the kitchen with its vivid track lighting, its stainless steel accessories, and throngs of metal gadgets and things that whirred, purred, and came alive with the addition of electricity. The tangerine walls were too bright. The checkered floor with its shiny black and white tiles swam as I walked onto it, my feet causing an absurd rubbing noise in my new flip-flops. My toes were naked to the world, and the lighting and toxic color palette highlighted my feet’s brilliant whiteness, the blue Twilight Kiss nail polish only adding to insult.
This era of man hid nothing from the world. And there was a garishness to its honesty and open-book ways. Aleksandra followed me. “Why do we need all this stuff?” I asked her. I picked up a blender, pressed the buttons until the motor whirred to life, the sharp blades crushing the delicate air around it. “We have no need of these things!”
“It is part of the illusion,” she replied. “We had mortal fixtures before, mother.”
“Yes, but this is excessive.”
“Our status requires us to keep up appearances, more so than in the past,” she said, unplugging the blender. The motor stopped. The room was quiet again.
“You had Parisian rugs in Russia and fine China. And no expense was spared in England, why should our habits change now?” she continued.
“I do not like this time,” I told her.
“You will get used to it.”
“What if I do not?”
She walked out of the kitchen and I followed. “You will,” she replied.
Eventually, that is what I did. I became accustomed to the whizzing around me, but never got comfortable with it. Instead, the whizzing and the buzzing grew constant in my head until it pulsated and quaked my insides, and I felt the little peace sleep had afforded me was slowly eroding away.
Wint
er came to Chicago, and as the snow piled on State Street, I pondered Aksel’s absence. The making of our kind, that process of transferring blood and memories, creates a constant link between the maker and their kin. The blood made his thoughts mute to me, and I could not feel him nearby, but I could sense him in the universe.
On an early December evening, just shy of Christmas, I sailed through the city, the snow clinging to windows, collecting on the rooftops. Children skated merrily on Navy Pier, their parents frantically finishing their holiday shopping. As I touched down near the closed-up vendor booths, now covered in a rich dusting of powdery whiteness, a few of the children glanced my way. Their attention quickly returned to the icy rink and to catching snowflakes on their outstretched tongues.
The fountains leapt through the foliage, while lights cascaded onto the palm trees, their leaves glistening beneath the glass ceiling, as I walked through the Crystal Garden doors. A gust of heated air greeted me. The shops boasted holiday specials that hungry out-of-town shopping groups eagerly consumed. Shoppers pushed and shoved their ways through the busy corridors, in and out of crowded shops, and rested their weary feet in mediocre restaurants, placing too much trust in overworked waiters.
Something had lured me to the pier that night, to the bustling tourist epicenter. I thought it had been Aksel. I thought, for some bizarre reason, he was near. That he had returned to me, to face the wrath I was sure to release. But, I did not find him amongst the crowd, and near dawn, I abandoned my search. What lured me to that pier remained a mystery.
Sailboats returned in throngs once winter thawed into a temperate Chicago spring. Joggers trekked along the shore in droves, sweating in unison, their panting a celebration of renewal. Children walked hand-in-hand with their mothers or sprawled out on fleece blankets for picnic lunches in front of Buckingham Fountain.
But that was under the brilliance of day, and we saw this as a movie played out on the ten o’clock news. The mirage of a gorgeous spring day in downtown Chicago busted by the realism of a mugging on Michigan Avenue, and a reminder that with warmer weather comes an increase in crime.
Descent Into Madness Page 19
