Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  “Don’t you know?” he replied, surprised. He wasn’t disparaging her. It filled him with pleasure to be the one to tell. “In the winter—in a real bad storm—the waves come as high as the light. The tide shoots through those caves like a broken dam. That’s how they got hollowed out in the first place.”

  “But how can that be?” she asked in disbelief, turning to look at the lighthouse, far out on the point. In the morning light, it was safe as a postcard. “It’s two hundred feet from the water.”

  “Two hundred and nine,” he corrected her, shrugging with total unconcern. “The ocean makes the rules. You know how deep it is out there?”

  “No.”

  “Deep.” He stood, went to the railing, put up an arm against the fluted pillar, and leaned with an athlete’s pure repose. “I only saw it once—one February,” he said. His voice was full of a brooding fascination. “Finally it got so bad that we all went up to the top of the ridge to wait it out. The funny thing is, I wasn’t scared. I was sure it was going to come all the way—wash the whole town right off the cliff.” He made a quick sweeping motion with his free hand, as if to mow down everything in sight. “I wanted it,” he said with fierce precision. “I wasn’t the only one. I thought, ‘If it happens now, we can all go home.’”

  “So that’s why the bones are gone,” said Iris lamely, a step behind.

  “That’s why they buried them there,” he corrected. “Just so the sea would take them”

  She felt stupid, not knowing this part till now. It was hard to align with the previous vision, of the dead curled up and dreaming. She realized she was tied, somehow, to the way she had embroidered it. The past now seemed a shifting thing, like the sight of some glittering treasure under water. The force of the winter sea drove the whole notion out of her mind—of a chamber still as a temple, where no god walked but the passing time. It showed her just how alone she was, to think her kind had had no fear of the reaches of the sea. She wished she could have it all done with, and go and lay in the churchyard under the blasted pines.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him suddenly, groping to keep it going.

  “Nothing,” he said. Then, after a little silence: “You.”

  “Look, why don’t we go to bed?”

  He laughed. “You mean you’ve forgotten? You’ve got the whole town about to arrive.”

  “They’ll wait,” she retorted, blunt and plain, though it hung there most ironically.

  She wouldn’t have even pursued it, except she could not help but notice how he tensed. She had worked too long in her other life with men who kept entirely to themselves. She could not recall them—mixed up 1588 with Connecticut, in fact. But she understood the delusion, down to the picture in his head: a woman was someone who wanted to find him out.

  “You’d rather not?” she prompted, hoping to make him face her. Looking in people’s eyes was how she got her bearings.

  “I don’t mind,” he said at last, turning a quarter turn and speaking half in profile.

  Iris stood. Why had she always stayed behind her table? All it required was a short walk forward. She touched his arm and stepped up close to the railing, as if she meant to show him something small as a speck on the planet’s rim. He stood his ground and watched her out of the corner of one eye, till all at once her upturned face was only a foot from his. There was nothing to do but kiss her.

  “Is there someone here in the village?” she asked him after a time, putting it so delicately that his face fell into a puzzled frown. She couldn’t help it. It just might be his holding back was connected up with faithfulness. She had a sudden caution, lest she take some other’s place.

  But he shook his head. “We don’t go in for it much,” he said mildly. “Even those that come here already married. That part’s given up.”

  “Forbidden?”

  “Not at all,” scoffed Roy, as if to say she had overreacted. “It’s just not in the cards.”

  “You mean you don’t miss it?”

  “I don’t mind,” he repeated, with perhaps a trace of warning now.

  He didn’t scare her. To make him stop talking, she took his hand and turned to go inside. As she led him past the table, he plucked up his skull like a souvenir. They went through the screen door into the house, coming face to face with Maybeth as the landlady clumped downstairs. She stared at the joined hands so intently that Iris let him go. At least he didn’t bolt and try to flee.

  She exchanged a neutral glance with Maybeth, in which she accepted every consequence. For the first time in several minutes she could hear the church bell chiming up the street. How many times now? After each volley, when the tolling stopped, did another person step inside his circle? What was the code, she wondered. Meanwhile, she and Roy sidled to the right and walked up single file. As they passed the older woman, Iris touched her hand where it gripped at the front of her robe. Maybeth nodded gamely, but a thorn was in her side.

  They reached the bedroom just at ten o’clock. By chance, the last ten chimes in the Methodist tower coincided with the regular work of keeping the village alert.

  They did not succumb to a wave of passion. She drew him down on the bed beside her and faced him eye to eye. Their two heads lay on a single pillow, yet she left him an inch of breathing room, to acclimatize himself. There wasn’t any rush.

  “Will you come to dinner?” she asked him, as if to start a few steps back.

  “I don’t think she’ll have me,” Roy replied with a rueful smile. “She’s never really liked me.”

  “Not here. At Emery’s. There’s a party.”

  “If you like,” he said quietly, not appearing to care one way or the other. “Is that the way we’re going to go? Stiff upper lip and tuxedoes? It sounds like a ship.”

  She reached over and began to undo the buttons on his shirt. He did not pull back, but a certain look of gravity had come to steel his eyes. Between them on the bed, curled in his hand like a ball, he still kept hold of the skull. Iris smiled carefully, so as not to seem to mock him. Just enough to make him see that nobody here was guilty. He made no move of his own, but she saw what an act of courage it was that had brought him all this way. The room could still explode.

  He’s practically a kid, she thought, as she parted his shirt to stroke his chest.

  Gently now, he reached to unbutton her sweater. He caressed each breast till the nipple quivered. He pressed his open mouth against her throat and toyed at the pulse with the tip of his tongue. He was whispering something savage by the time he breathed her hair. Pressing her tight. Crazy for it.

  His innocence broke like a bout of amnesia. He came to himself in a riot of need. As he rolled on top of her, Iris struggled a moment longer to hold to what she’d meant to say, but the philosophical niceties had slipped her mind like everything else. He edged between her legs, and she gripped his shoulders and arched against him. They pumped their hips in a sudden rhythm, catching each other like a fever. He pulled back to strip off his pants. She hissed in her breath expectantly. The only word she could think was now.

  As if to increase their nakedness, the sun flooded in and bathed them both in sweat. From now till almost noon, the arc of its passing swathed her bed with a veil of undimmed light. Once or twice besides, across his muscled back, she caught a random glimpse of ocean—fourteen colors in a single stroke, from jade to aquamarine. For a while, it seemed she had never been anywhere else but here. This present life struck down all the signs that pointed back.

  They moaned and then cried out. The air grew still. The curtains ceased to billow. The whole town stopped to listen: people cocked their ears in the street, as if to distant thunder. The animals froze mid-stride. A hunger that nothing could satisfy seized at the core of everything, like a bee in the smut of a flower. Let it stay like this, thought Iris, holding tight when they were done. Forever was what she meant, but of course she knew better than that. They had only the next four days. Between now and then, there wasn’t any exit but
themselves.

  VI

  FLIGHT 86 TOOK OFF from JFK twenty minutes late. A bald and bug-eyed group of cultists had insisted on kneeling in prayer before they boarded. They were thirty-five strong, and for a while gate 11 looked like a shrine, with a circle of prostrate figures chanting and beating their fists on the indoor-outdoor carpet. The airline thought it prudent to let them have their way, so as not to chance the loss of all that revenue. Besides, as the flight crew did their best to assure the other passengers, a little intercession with higher powers would only bring them luck.

  Best of all, they required no amenities. Once they were seated aft of the wing, in silent ranks like a raft of pilgrims, they rejected every offer of drink or food. Three hours out, over Iowa, not a single one had even used the bathroom. The attendants began to be glad of them, for cutting their work by half.

  The movie had just begun. With tail winds, they had picked up all the lost time. They would be in L.A. at 10:09, on target. The overhead lights were off, and the aft attendants were chatting in the galley, smoking cigarettes. It wasn’t till the man in the robe had slipped through the curtain into first class that anyone turned to notice him. Here, a certain territorial imperative obtained. The hostess, in her dinner smock, was folding crepes suzette and flaming them with curaçao. The last thing she needed right now was a nut.

  “Excuse me, this section is closed,” she said nicely. When he smiled, she smiled in return and gave a little shrug, to show that it wasn’t her idea.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t stop but drifted by her, bound on an errand all his own. Fast as she could, she served the plate in her hand to a bored and puffy executive, murmured a word of apology to the people just behind, and turned to nab him. She thought, when she saw him trail to the front of the cabin, that he must want to use the bathroom. She pitied him; he seemed lost. When he reached and opened the cockpit door, she hurried forward as if to fold him in her arms. He clearly didn’t know where he was. As she grabbed him by the back of his dark serge garment, he was standing in the narrow walkway, riveted on the instruments.

  “It’s all right,” she called to the crew, as they turned in their chairs and pulled their earphones. “He’s harmless.”

  Oh, but he wasn’t. He spun around and bit her hand so hard that he nearly severed a finger. She grunted in pain and lurched against the oxygen. A blue button flashed, and out in the cabin, all the masks descended, dangling on their cords. The copilot, Jerry, sprang from his seat and smashed the intruder backward, cracking the plastic wall behind. In a flash he had pinched an artery and blacked the man out cold.

  Then the next one came—in the same dark robe, with the same crazed look of delight, like a kid in a fire engine. As Jerry seized him and threw him back into the cabin, lumbering after to finish him off, he could see they were too far gone to have a plan. Two more stood in the aisle, grinning in a rubbery way, and watched him stomp their fellow pilgrim. They almost seemed to be waiting their turn.

  The navigator came storming out of the cockpit, not sure who to stop, his mate or the gathering cultists. If only the other passengers had risen up as one. They were a hundred and eighteen nonreligious, against a mere thirty-five. In a pitched battle, they would have surely won, but they all put on their masks instead and dutifully followed rules. They breathed the sweet air in and shut their eyes and prayed they wouldn’t crash. The chaos in the aisles was just another hijacking.

  “Hey, Jerry, cool it,” the navigator warned him, trying to pull Jerry off as he strangled the unconscious monk.

  But things had gone too far. Jerry had already dispatched his second victim. Now he stood up panting and snarled at the half-dozen cultists clogging the aisle: “Stay back! We have orders to kill!”

  The navigator positioned himself between the two warring parties, thinking to talk them back to their seats. “Father—” he began, addressing the wizened street freak who stood at the front of the delegation. The monks all grinned delightedly, but it did no good. They just kept coming. The navigator managed to collar two, but they mauled at his face with a squiggle of fingers, poking his eyes till he let them go. Jerry had meanwhile wrestled another into an empty seat. He brained him with a bottle off the rolling bar.

  Three others broke through the line and hurried into the cockpit. The pilot was all alone, except for the sobbing stewardess. He was in radio contact with the FBI. As the three came forward toward the instrument panel, the agents were briefing him lightning-fast, rattling off the guidelines for dealing with terrorists.

  The first one lunged against the dials, both palms flat and slipping switches. The second cuffed the pilot’s head with his elbow and knocked him off course. The plane swayed left and tilted their stomachs. Then the monk reached down and took the wheel, playing it in and out so they bucked and lifted off their feet. The shell of the plane shrieked against its fastenings. The third monk grabbed the microphone and commenced to chant his mantra.

  For a moment things were poised, like a bomb at the end of the world. They were like kids, as they huddled there in a row and toyed at the controls. A horn went off. Then a red light two feet long above the windshield, flashing their arrival at the point of no return. Still, all they did was grin. It didn’t seem, with faces blank as that, they could have been touched by the slightest motive. They simply had a game to play.

  Des Moines, just below, couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Had the terrorists opened fire? An incendiary device, perhaps? The line was still open, spouting the fourth Upanishad, but they wouldn’t say if they wanted a runway. The tower could tell from the sweep of its scanner that the plane was losing height. Figures blipped on the screen: 29000, 29000, 26000. It was dropping a mile a minute.

  Meanwhile, up in the falling sky, everyone held on. Their lips were pulled back against their teeth. Their bags and books and liqueurs went flying free like shrapnel as the nose tipped down to thirty, forty, forty-five degrees. In the cockpit, one monk lay down on the instrument panel and rocked back and forth, throwing switches with every move he made. His two fellow monks had clawed their way to the forward door and clung there struggling to turn the lock.

  There was nothing wrong with the plane at all. Five seconds’ expert runaround—spinning the dials and righting the gyres—and they would have been fine. They’d have leveled off a couple of thousand feet above the Iowa grassland. The machine itself was sending every signal it knew how, to try to abort this change of plans. The pilot woke with a blinding pain in his head. Instinctively, he went for the wheel and pulled.

  It didn’t matter.

  Michael rang for half an hour before the first one came: a colorless woman, hungry-looking and with a stoop. She did not speak, just bowed her head, then stepped up to take the bell rope from him. He gladly gave it over, watching with a certain fascination as she crouched and rose to the rhythm of it. She looked about fifty-five. Though her knuckles were puffed and her fingers curled arthritically, she seemed to be steeled to the pain and tolled with a greater skill than he. It almost seemed like music.

  Michael didn’t realize she’d done such things for the Methodist church every Sunday for thirty years. Without fail, she brought in a basket of flowers for the altar. She stitched all the vestments by hand, dipped her own beeswax candles, and every day—as she had this morning—carried a tray of porridge and scones to the parsonage down the road. For years she had been the first to receive the minister’s blessing, as he woke up wheezing and checked the sea for weather. If the old stone church was her vocation, the rector was her ticket to heaven.

  Therefore, it was appropriate that she should find the body—with the covers tight under his chin, and his soul flown out the window like a parrot. She cleaned him up automatically, as if he’d been a baby. Then dressed him neat in his starchy whites and laid his hand on an open Bible, turned to the letters of Paul. After that, she waited two hours in her spotless kitchen, hoping for a sign. The sudden bell was the perfect thing. She washed her hair and ironed her pl
ainest dress. She ran to the church like a postulant, trying to think what she still had left to surrender.

  She was oddly unsurprised by Michael. Indifferent, he almost would have said, except he could feel the edge of deference in her, simpering and stoic. It filled him with rage. He suddenly wanted to test its limits; see how the meekness played when he put the pressure on. His contempt for the breed was enormous. Yet he had to give her credit: when he happened to look out the window, he was shocked to see a proper little crowd approaching, dressed in their Sunday best. A man and his three scrubbed kids. Then, two by two, various tottering husbands and wives, old as the hills and bearing each other along. Mr. Huck the mayor; beside him, Judith Quinn the doctor’s wife. With a thrill of anticipation, Michael turned again to watch her ring, as if to absorb her perfect timing. Whoever she was, she tolled it like a feast day.

  The doors opened, and the congregation entered. They made for their regular pews without so much as a glance at Michael. Abruptly, the woman let go of the rope. Now it got so quiet he could almost hear them think. The bell-woman padded across the floor to her usual seat, on the aisle in the final row. She sat like the rest, eyes front, and waited. Nobody spoke a word. They numbered just fifteen.

  Strange, how he wasn’t prepared. He’d never had a crowd quite like it. He had led them in tents and baseball parks—on acres of folding chairs, while they fanned themselves with the program. His church in Pittsburgh—used to be Catholic—was as big as Seville Cathedral, which it copied down to the coatracks. Still, he had never stood before a village parish, with everyone related far, far back—and not to the likes of him. Some of them had met in this building for longer than he’d been preaching.

  Michael had always been the focus for a much more rootless sort, who went from place to place with a horrible, growing longing. Walking up the center aisle, looking straight ahead, he experienced a queer and unexpected dislocation, as if he wasn’t really up to it. The feeling gnawed, like a loss of faith. They would all see through him the moment he opened his mouth. He remembered his mother in a gilded coach, off to a ball at a castle. He had stood left out with the crowd of servants, waving in a line on the white stone stairs. She was something sacred. He could not reach her. Only nine years old, and he thought: I have to run.