by Paul Monette
“This is all a dream. You know that, don’t you?”
Turning and glancing across their faces, he avoided every eye. He had learned long since to look into the middle distance, riveting on a point above their heads, so it seemed he was in a spirit state. He didn’t really feel safe. They could turn at any time. He wasn’t even sure how fast he ought to go.
“You can’t escape it,” he declared with smug conviction. “Not until you rid yourselves of everything that’s trapped you here.”
They sat there perfectly silent—not exactly hostile, not exactly scared. For a moment they had the air of paying customers. They seemed to want more of a show.
“We must embrace the darkness, you and I,” Michael said. He’d reached a point where he had to have some help. He’d run out of preacherly drive. He almost wished he had a Bible—except he thought he’d better try to court them first without the thunder.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.
“What are your powers?” called a voice to his right. Before he could fix on which of the stony faces had asked, there came yet another, a few rows back on the left. Like an accusation: “What did you bring us?”
“Peace,” he replied, with a dignified lift of his chin. It wasn’t clear which question he was answering. He fell back a couple of steps, till he felt the rim of the altar behind him, touching the knob of a vertebra. If only he could crouch, he thought, and find the door where the money was. Didn’t they understand? It was they who had to bring to him.
They looked at him patiently. None made a sign to his neighbor, or whispered a word behind the hand. All they needed was a little mumbo jumbo and a wafer. At the least sign of a ritual, the whole congregation would have lined up single file, ready to take a dose. Eyes all shut. Tongues hanging.
Instinctively Michael patted his pockets, like he’d lost a set of keys. He had never felt such a want of magic, nor so much yearning for a world beyond him. The yearning was in him more than them. He seized on the hunk of pitch in his left side pocket. His body heat had melted the drug so it felt like the sop of an open wound. He slicked his fingers nicely. As he moved toward them again, drawing forth his shiny hand and holding it high in a priestly blessing, he wished more than anything else to be rid of them.
The man with the kids was in the front row. Michael dropped his hand and held it out, as if he had a ring he wanted kissed. The man leaned forward and licked the tip of one finger, very very dryly. Michael could have demanded more, but the will to power had abated some. He sidled left to the children. The first, a girl maybe twelve years old, took the whole forefinger into her mouth, as matter-of-factly as if she were licking clean a chocolate spoon. The two little ones beside her, boys in shorts, snickered as if it were a game. They both crouched over at the same time, sucking two fingers apiece, and grinned at each other.
As he moved to the old folk, Michael rooted in his pocket again and scooped out a double spoonful. It was like pudding, iridescent, liver-colored. Though he’d floated all night long on a dram of it, Michael had no craving of his own now. He preferred to put them under—thus to build a wall of glass, with him on the outside looking in. Their ravening astonished him. A bald and jowling man gripped his arm to the elbow, slavering at the custard like a dog. His wife made a sudden seething sound. She pulled him back by the collar and lunged to take his place, for fear he hadn’t left her any.
They would have eaten poison, just as willy-nilly. This knowledge calmed him and made him almost gentle. By the time he reached the next two, he was balling bits of it up in his hand like pellets of bread. Now he bent down and actually fed them. Already the children lilted about the room, enamored of their shadows. Judith Quinn fell to her knees, tipped her head back, let her mouth go slack. Michael, as he rubbed it on her gums, began to mumble words he didn’t even know.
They were all so ready, he was done in a few short minutes. He ended up at the bell-woman, who shrank a little back as if she wasn’t worthy. Her he gave a whole mouthful, and she nearly gagged trying to get it down. Then Michael went to the open door and breathed a little air. The church was full of an awful smell, like a burned sweet cake. His tolerance was fairly high, but he was determined to be icy-clear and avoid all traces of the phantom life. He felt superior, convinced he had found the regimen that would let him go on forever. He was hard as the sun on the winter meadow.
And the meadow rose in a gentle slope to a line of houses along the crescent. The site of things was as fine as he remembered. He suddenly realized: nothing prevented him staying here. Once the others were gone, and the town was leveled and the boats sunk, he could live on the cliffs in splendid isolation. Maybe come in here when it rained.
He turned around with an easy smile, like a man playing hide-and-seek with his kids. In the moment that he was focused out the door, they’d all left their seats. They strolled about the aisles in a queer slow motion. Whenever the flow of traffic brought them face to face, they laughed in a tight-cheeked, soundless way. It was as if they’d escaped some awful danger. The high-beamed church, with the deep-set pointed windows and seats in rows, suddenly seemed alive with bustle, rather like a depot. These people were on the move. They were only waiting to make connections.
“Listen now,” he announced, in the singsong tone of a keeper. “Here is what you do: go home and throw out everything. If you can, try to get a fire going. Burn every scrap of paper with your name. Then the personal things—you’re to bury them out in the yard. Or even better, take them into the woods. Make sure you get lost coming home. That way, you won’t be tempted to dig anything up.”
Lost was no problem at all. They had only the faintest notion who they were. If they could have put it into words, they would have said they were people in a story they once heard.
They required no further prodding. They broke the ranks of the promenade and quickly moved to evacuate the building. Michael followed behind, one hand raised waist-high in a sort of herding motion. He stopped to watch from the door as they fanned out on their separate missions. The task he’d assigned was only a warm-up. The thing was to get inside their houses and see them one by one. He had darker business to transact.
The next hour he spent in the graveyard. He wandered beneath the wind-racked firs, peering about at the graves. They cluttered the cliffside grove at every turn, receding deeper and deeper, year by violent year. As Michael groped his way, he began to get quite agitated. It was as if he could not tolerate any link to the past beyond himself. The unbroken line of stones mocked his own brief presence here, as if to say he was only one of hundreds, all lost.
He crouched and began to scratch the moss from the surface of a faded square of marble. The stone was grainy, like a slice of bread, but the date was visible still. He traced it with a finger: 1895. Then he hooked his fingernails along one edge and rocked the stone in the spongy earth till he could pry it up. It was only a couple of inches thick. He lifted it out like a trapdoor, as if there were some kind of treasure there. Then he heaved it up in his arms as he stood, and the last cling of weeds fell away. It was heavier than he’d bargained for. As he staggered left toward the cliff edge, it almost seemed he carried the year itself.
He stood in a clump of purple daisies and tossed it over the side. He watched it plummet a hundred feet, then break on a jagged outcrop halfway down. The stone flew into smithereens, and the cliff face blew like a hand grenade. The shower of rubble went spraying down till it hit the water in a sudden splash. For half a second, the noise tore the air like a swarm of bees. Then silence.
Michael was sweating buckets. He had a pain dead center in his lower back from lifting wrong. The whole enterprise was futile. It would take him most of a day to clear out all these graves. In an hour he had to begin his visits. So what was the point? He’d have done much better to pass the time in the shade of his empty head. After all, a prophet had to have a little space to keep his vigil. He could not go on forever knowing nothing.
Oh, but th
e sheer physical work was such a joy! It brought him back to the certainty that had spurred him all night long. He kept to a square of stony soil, where perhaps a dozen years were laid edge to edge in ordered ranks. He found that if he twirled in a circle, holding the slab like a discus, he could lob it far enough out from the cliff so it dropped unbroken to the foaming sea. He dispatched a whole decade before he was through. As he traced his steps to the church again, he swore he would finish the rest as soon as he was alone.
The village street was still as death. Though of course he couldn’t say who lived where, he knew from the billowing chimneys which were his. He sauntered up a grassy lane to where a line of linen hung between a whitewashed cottage and a peeling shed. It touched him to think that they kept to a daily life, when they hadn’t the ghost of a chance. He ducked beneath a pale striped towel and up three wooden steps.
The door was half a foot ajar. When he passed inside, he heard a woman crying before his eyes adjusted to the dim and shuttered light. It was Judith Quinn. She knelt on the hearth rug, sifting through a drawer she’d pulled from the desk in the corner. The fire was high and smoky, sizzling on the grate. She was burning pictures.
“Is it so hard?” he asked her quietly, coming to stand above her.
She held in her hand a fan of snapshots. Somebody’s wedding, in an ancient garden. He couldn’t say whose it was, her own or a laughing daughter’s. The only thing he knew for sure was that Judith Quinn had faded. He liked them younger or not at all.
“Why, no,” she said indifferently, and tossed the whole lot on the flames. As if to show how brazen she could be, she grabbed up a handful of other stuff—a passport, he noticed, and a deed of some kind—and flung them in. “It’s a relief, really.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“It’s my husband,” she said. Her voice was all clear of weeping now, and thus she could speak it coldly. Or perhaps she thought it wiser to hide the way she felt. “He’s gone over to her.”
“I see.”
“We came here eighteen years ago,” she said bitterly, leaning back so that her shoulder brushed his thigh. “I thought we’d agreed to wait for you. I never knew there was someone else.”
“Where is he?”
“In there,” she said, with a desultory nod at an inner door. “He’s getting it all set up like a hospital.” Here she gave a contemptuous snort. “As if there’s going to be wounded,” she said with a withering irony. Then shrugged: “He’s a very dull man. The only doctor I ever knew who never made a penny.”
She tilted her head back as if she would laugh, then lolled it against his crotch. Her mouth was slack. Her lids had drooped in a drowsy way. Michael despised the whole idea. He’d have liked to bring his knee up—knock her skull so hard as to snap the cord at the top of her spine. He saw things now for how they broke. But he also began to understand that he could use this rage. Could draw it out so they had it both ways, he and she.
He clenched his hand in her hair till she gasped. Then he heaved her aside so she sprawled on the floor, looking up with her face gone ashy white.
“Just get undressed,” he said huskily, not even trying to mask the disgust.
Even as she reached to unzip her skirt, he turned to kick at the fire, as if to show he had no truck with foreplay. Stooping down, he dumped the drawer wholesale on the crackling flames. He swept a line of books from the mantel—the doctor’s ledgers, it looked like—and tumbled them in like logs. He cast about for something more, as if he had to stoke an engine. A pile of second-class mail on the table. A sheaf of magazines.
She was naked now, with her clothes spread underneath her on the carpet. Propped on her elbows, she waited his pleasure. When he’d thrown in all the paper he could find, he turned to see how bad it was. Every line on her ivory skin stood out sharp as a scar. The pale of the veins below the nipples. The stretches at the abdomen.
“Over there,” he ordered, pointing at the door to the doctor’s office.
At first she didn’t get it. She thought perhaps he had changed his mind. She made as if to retrieve her bra and panties, folded neatly beside the woodbox. Michael took a single stride and kicked them out of her hand. She shrank away toward the office door. “I want him to hear it,” Michael seethed, as he loosed his belt and slipped his pants to his knees. His stubby tool stood up straight. “Beg for it, honey,” he sneered at the doctor’s wife.
And Judith started pleading. For the next four minutes, she slouched on the threshold, there in the heart of her tidy house. She moaned and grunted and shut her ears to the torrent of vile imaginings that spewed from Michael’s mouth. He pumped her, dumb as a teenage boy, all the while hurling babble on the full-blown flesh before him. When he was done he pulled out shooting, as if he would not deign to leave his seed. He caught it fast in his hand, then reached and grabbed her underwear and wiped it off like slime.
He rose to his feet without another look. He turned and lumbered out, not pausing even to hoist his pants till he stood in the yard by the billowing sheets. Then he shut his eyes and faced the sun. In half a minute, it dried to streaks the film of sweat that slicked him head to toe. By the time he strode back down the lane, he was bland as ever. In his face was no experience at all. He stood on the corner before his church, looking left and right as if he didn’t care which way he went.
An old couple came along, wheeling a garden barrow—very very carefully, as the thing was heaped with stuff. They gave him a cheery smile as they passed by. Michael saw an Irish linen tablecloth, a stack of blue bone China, vases, clocks, figurines. The plates all rattled as the wheel went rutting forward. Why did they bother to keep it whole, he wondered, if they were only going to bury it? Did they think their things would appear again, in some green glade on the other side?
He stepped out into their path. They stopped and set the barrow down, as if they expected a formal interrogation. The wife shied slightly back, and the grizzled man stood tall, prepared to give strict account. The pink of Michael’s tongue appeared between his lips, so he looked just then like a mischievous child. He crouched as if to root among the treasures. With a single finger he tipped the edge of the barrow. It was so top-heavy that it fell over in a flash. The plates went crazy and broke like crackers. The clockface burst, and the works flew haywire. A Dresden shepherdess split at the waist, her skirts all crushed by a candlestick.
The old couple didn’t move a muscle. They waited to see what words he’d speak to reveal his mystic purpose. The moment called for commandments. Yet when he looked up from his jewel of a ruin, Michael scarcely smiled before his face went vague again—as if he had a lot to think about. He scooted around the upturned barrow and sauntered off downtown, his hands in his pockets playing at his balls. The couple stooped in the road, the barrow righted, and filled it bit by bit with scoops of junk.
Across from the general store, in a patch of grass by a low stone basin, a group of children sat and laughed. He recognized two from the feeding at the church, but the others must have found the cakes he left on the grocer’s shelf. Their hands were grimed with chocolate paste, their faces smeared with cream. They stuck their tongues out, thick with a mangle of half-eaten matter, and whooped to see their mirror image in one another. They could have cared less about Michael. They certainly weren’t going home anymore. Soon they would make their way to the woods, the whole pack of them. There they would stalk the fallen trees for grubs and pee in the hollows where the bears made nests.
Michael passed contentedly. He did not require a formal recognition, not from them at least. He recalled his own fierce separation, ages and ages gone. For the next hundred yards or so, he indulged in sentiments no one who’d ever known him would have recognized. He wished the children three days’ perfect wilderness: caves and treetops, flights of deer, a steep descent to the whirling tide. That they should end up more like wolves than miniature people, thus to face the darkness open-eyed. He almost wished he could keep one.
Up ahead, the m
ayor stood dignified on the short front porch of his bungalow. Green shutters framed the deep-set windows left and right, and an arc of winter ivy groped the wall beside the door. More than anyone else so far, Arthur Huck stood at attention. Perhaps he had more expectation of a visit than the others. Yet as Michael approached along the street, what the prophet noticed first about Arthur Huck was his chimney. There wasn’t a breath of smoke.
“Don’t you think you’d better get started?” Michael asked politely. “Later you’ll have all the time you need to watch the sun on the water.”
“But I did it already,” retorted the mayor. “A month ago. I burned my papers and threw the ashes off the light. Perhaps you don’t know—I work there.”
“I know,” Michael said simply.
“Of course. Now as to the village records, I’ve gone in and marked the major items. I didn’t dare take things out, because of Polly. I don’t trust her. She—”
At that, a sudden wave of blankness washed across the mayor, and he shivered. He wasn’t as strong as he seemed at all. Though he spoke his lines quite cleanly, how could he ever explain the hours he’d spent at his shaving glass, getting the first few phrases right? He was just a little bureaucrat. When he took on the job as mayor, it was only because it went with being keeper of the light. He never even had a vision till six months ago.
“You did well, Arthur,” Michael said in a soothing voice. “We’ll do that part together. Tonight, perhaps.”
“But … why can’t we do it now?” he asked with a flutter of trepidation. “I’d just as soon get it over with, if it’s all the same to you.”
