Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  Thirty seconds now.

  Michael wept. He clung to her, moaning wishes that made no sense. She could have pulled away easily, but it was no use. No more than if she leaped, or holed herself in the lighthouse with his weapons. She would not die.

  She twisted in his arms and gripped him. Over his shoulder she saw the last of the moon, holding the light by its fingernails. She spoke with an awful tenderness as she wiped the tears from his shining cheeks.

  “Michael—it’s time now. Take the spell away.”

  He nodded his head and began to sob. It seemed he had expected this.

  She stroked his shoulders to calm him down, murmuring encouragement. “It’s better this way,” she whispered, and smiled at him so knowingly that he felt no fear at all.

  He thought his heart would burst. He stumbled back till he stood four feet away, then pointed at her openmouthed, like a lost explorer sighting land. Nothing appeared to happen, but she laughed and clapped her hands as if some kind of pain had stopped. Delirious and shivering, she stood not a stone’s throw in from the edge. She hugged herself. So rich was the air with musk that she seemed not to notice where the time had flown. He watched her as if he’d seen through a chink in a wall into heaven.

  “Now you,” said Iris thrillingly.

  Her voice was irresistible and throbbing with complicity. Michael smiled in a shy, coquettish way. He shrugged and showed his empty palms, like a sorcerer who’d gone through all his tricks. Right off, she knew what he wanted. He meant her to point as he had and speak the command that would finally release him. He begged to be mortal like she was.

  “But I can’t,” she protested. “I don’t—”

  Believe was what she almost said. The prophet frowned ironically, as if to say that all faiths were overwrought and imprecise. Then he made a kind of beckoning motion, begging her to try.

  You would have had to know the moon was there, to see it now. A blip of shadow rode one edge of the disk, but the brightness was too vast to have an edge, so it hardly counted. The park at the top of the cliff, the meadows, the firs, the lifting hills—everything fairly quivered. Six long centuries lay ahead, with nothing to prove but day and night.

  Fifteen seconds. Ten. This far away, she couldn’t be exact.

  It was true he was just a child. She didn’t know why she ever found him threatening. More and more she understood it was she who threatened him. She raised her finger and pointed at him. She felt nothing.

  Yet almost as if to mimic her, Michael laughed and clapped his hands—as if he’d learned to do it in a mirror. There wasn’t a thing in his head just then, beyond his sight of her.

  He reached across the daylight, dream to dream. She grabbed his hand—clutched it as if he were drowning—and then they ran. He didn’t resist, but Iris led the way. She could feel he was the barest beat behind, so she took him in a circle. Not that she had the time: she didn’t look up anymore, for fear she’d break the thread. A hairline flaw of shadow shimmered still at the heart of things. Somehow the moon had held its breath. It wasn’t over yet.

  She led him across the lawn and through the holy ring of stones. Then under the swaying firs to the brook and on across to the fields where the lean-tos dotted the slopes and faced the lonely sea. Though here and there a cookfire smoldered, though her own horse grazed the crest above, she didn’t for an instant focus on her people. They might have all been away in the woods, or down in the harbor fishing. She only knew that this was her land.

  They darted among the lean-tos, laughing, all her senses tuned to the tug of Michael’s hand. No matter what anyone thought, the intruder beside her was flesh and blood. He grew surer with every step. They passed her own place, high on the brow of the hill. Through the doorway Iris saw the votive objects left by a string of captains. Gods and golden coins littered the earthen floor.

  They ran away through a glut of summer flowers. How the moon held on, she never knew. That final kiss of stone and fire was like a dream she used to have where everything stood still. When had she made her choice to end it here? She couldn’t say, and no one cared, but she had a terrible certainty she’d seen the last of dreams. Suddenly there was a moment—purple flowers on every side, groaning under the weight of bees—when Michael wasn’t holding back at all. He was with her. The road had given out. The journey was all inside them now, and wherever they went, they went as one.

  Now she began to close the circle, heading downwind to the point again. An ancient courage, mad and blind, glowed in Michael’s face as he flew along. He smiled in a gay, conspiratorial way as they reached the last long slope to the park. She let go his hand and shouted: “I’ll race you!”

  Neck and neck they thundered down the hill. She had every intention of going over. She wasn’t crazy to die, but it seemed the only way to rid the world of him, and anyway she wasn’t scared. She caught a last glimpse of the perfect arc of the cliff between here and the point.

  Only now did she understand that nothing had to change.

  The fire on the point had burned for a hundred generations. Its roots were as deep as the trees, fast in the jagged rocks. The way to stay forever was to dive into the wilderness till it swallowed her up and left no rags. No heirs. No relics. Look: the mossy stumps, the rain-smooth rocks, the smut of leaves beneath their feet. Dead was the way to connect.

  They went over the brook, full-out running. “Iris!” he shouted.

  “What?”

  “Next time, get here early!”

  They burst through the trees and ran for the sharpest edge, where the drop was sheer and a body wouldn’t break halfway. Michael began to overtake. They had reached the past so perfectly, she could no longer speak the tongue. This man beside her had never said a word she understood.

  Laughing, he passed her. She poured on speed. She had a terrible stitch in her side, but figured she could beat him. Death, she guessed, would be more or less another cliff on the edge of things. She would live there as here, beside some other fire, waiting to see what came across the water. Nothing would ever go away again.

  Then like a bolt the present struck.

  Twenty feet from the edge she remembered the crew still trapped in the cave. She stopped mid-stride and stumbled to a halt. She flung out a hand to make him wait. It was all wrong. She didn’t love them anymore. But if somebody didn’t go free them now, they’d never get out.

  It took no more than a moment’s indecision. He must have known she wasn’t right beside him, but it made no difference now. He’d already left the ground. With a great heroic leap, he hurled out into the sunlit air, twisting round with a radiant grin to welcome her across.

  And there in that one instant, just before he plummeted, he stared into her strange bewildered eyes. It was the final mark of his courage, perhaps, that he showed no trace of having been betrayed. He managed half a smile, though time wasn’t on his side anymore. He said—but only the first word took, the rest was lost in his fall—he said: “It doesn’t matter.”

  Even as he spoke, the sun was the same as ever. It was 7:18 on a Tuesday morning, and nothing whatever to hide.

  The clenched look left her face, though at first it seemed that she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t, for instance, blink at the sun or search for the moon in the cloudless blue beside it. After a moment she stepped to the edge. When she looked down, there was only the moiling bay below, with the boulders groping the surface, the wrinkled tide, the random flash of foam. No carnage. No wreckage. Perhaps—though this would have been her imagination—the faintest after-image of a ship, where the sun hit full on the water. Phantom as a dream, and gone before she saw the figures at the rail. What filled her eyes with tears was the sight of the bay empty, where nothing had ever changed since anyone remembered.

  Memory, of course, was the key.

  How else would she have heard them, weeping in the tower? She turned and went toward it now, knowing she had no words to still their grief. Knowing she was the cause of it, though she
knew not how. She took the key from her pocket and entered the light. She knelt to the trapdoor, clicked the lock, and the door fell in with a sigh.

  They were huddled below, sobbing in one another’s arms. She thought at first they wouldn’t come out while she was there, but even as she stood to leave—she certainly wasn’t going to beg—they scrambled up. First came the ones she barely knew, a man and a woman with a baby. They choked on bitter tears and staggered out to the park. Then Mrs. Jeremy, then the Griersons. No one glanced at Iris, but perhaps it had more to do with how she shrank against the stairs. They emerged from the cave in a kind of daze, like all survivors everywhere, clinging and lost and wincing at the light.

  Then came the doctor, leading his wife. She was no longer naked—he’d bundled her up in his tweed jacket—but yet she still appeared disturbed. She twitched and whimpered as she floated by. Felix shot a grateful look at Iris, but he was too overcome to speak. Iris was growing impatient. She didn’t wish to be thanked, but it would have been nice to hear that they were happy to survive.

  It was like some force had heard her. Jeff and Simon bounded up the stairs, laughing and clambering through to the light. They cheered when they saw the sun, then sank to the grass and rolled like dogs. If Iris thought it would make her glad, she was wrong. The laughter only knifed her till she gasped. And when she turned to block it out, the sight of Polly coming up the steps, with a radiant smile and a trill of recognition, only made it worse. She backed away to the wall as the spinster moved toward her, opening her arms. The loving embrace, the whispered name—all of it fell like a curse.

  She must not care. She must not stay.

  Over Polly’s shoulder she saw Maybeth. The landlady stepped from the cave undaunted, as if she’d never doubted anything and never shed a tear. Just behind her was Roy, with his barrel chest and his massive arms. The hair above one ear was sticky with dried blood, but he wore a crooked grin as if to say it didn’t hurt.

  She knew that nobody wished her harm. They only meant to start over again and include her. How could she tell them she had all this? She didn’t need a man, or a mother or sister either. She remembered now.

  Luckily, she was accustomed to doing things by stealth. She touched her cheek to Polly’s, smiling all the while. Then she moved on to the landlady, who gripped her hands and gave her a blazing look. Then Roy. Iris sank into his arms and lifted her open mouth to his. They kissed till the women had walked outside. By the time they followed, arm in arm, the survivors were almost home.

  For the village was quite the same as ever. The church bell chimed the half hour. The houses ran in a line up Polly’s lane and clustered at the bases of the hills. The stores along the main street weren’t open yet, but they never did till nine o’clock. The flag in front of the town hall lazed in the morning breeze.

  “First thing I’m going to do,” said Roy, as they passed through the circle of stones, “is buy me a car. I got the money all saved. See, I’ll probably just keep going. I’m sure as hell not coming back.”

  What? He was leaving? But then, he didn’t mean to stay with her at all. There wasn’t the whisper of bad feeling. It was just over. She couldn’t have asked for a cleaner break. If he hadn’t said it first, all the good-byes would have fallen to her. No question about it, she wanted out.

  So why was she feeling abandoned?

  She gazed down at the lichen-splattered rocks beside the path. The thick-grown grass. The swells and hollows of the rolling ground, dreaming away in the tonic seaside air. It was not so much the losing of the land. She didn’t much care to possess it—it was more that she wanted to be it. And nothing could give her that anymore, not in this world.

  As they came up the street to the boardinghouse, she saw her car was parked in the grassy yard beside the barn. She had simply misread the signals. They were perfectly willing-eager, even—for her to go. Why did it make her so sad? Would it have been easier if they’d begged her to stay and she’d had to slip off under cover of dark? She couldn’t say, and there wasn’t time, but it seemed she was hoping for some kind of prize. A crown and a deed of land, perhaps. Her name cut into the cliffs.

  Maybeth and Polly stood by the car, the older woman holding a basket packed with lunch. She reached this in to the passenger’s seat. Neither she nor Polly looked stricken with grief. Roy let Iris go as they reached the car door. The motor was already running.

  “Come back sometime,” said Polly warmly. “It’s really nice in the summer.”

  “Now don’t forget,” said Maybeth tartly, eschewing all taste of sentiment, “if you want a perfect crust, you use a little orange juice instead of water. That’s the secret.”

  Iris nodded. She thought if she spoke she would start to cry. If she cried she’d ask to stay, which wouldn’t do at all. She couldn’t even hold them in her arms, for they had been through all the physical part at the entrance to the cave. Twice would be unseemly.

  Roy opened the door, and Iris slid in. Her suitcase was stowed on the back seat. Her purse was propped up front beside her lunch. As she gripped the wheel, Roy crouched to the windowsill, leaning on his forearms.

  “Maybe we’ll meet in Singapore or something,” he said with a grin. “Someplace neither of us has ever been.”

  “I doubt it,” retorted Iris, trying to catch his breezy tone.

  “You never know,” he drawled with a playful wink.

  She shrugged as she slipped it into reverse. Roy stood back. When she pulled away, she waved in a dreamy fashion. All three returned the gesture in perfect syncopation—almost as though they were giving an all-clear. Now that she noticed, the others had stopped to bid her good-bye as well. They waved from the porches and the neat front yards. Iris smiled.

  She felt like a patient let out of a clinic.

  It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. The sooner she got it behind her, the better. Already, before she reached the top of the rise, with the village still in the rearview mirror, she began to weep for joy to think she was going home. As she crested the long green hill she looked back through noisy tears at the curious crook of the cliff. The grove of firs, like a secret forest, swayed in the offshore breeze. The tower light stood poised on the point above the quickened sea.

  The prophet had slipped her mind entirely the moment the moon was gone. The village was framed in her mind like a picture, and she tried with all her might to hold it. Then the car roared down the hill, and everything disappeared. She still saw faces—Roy, Maybeth, Polly, an old man like her father—but she couldn’t say what it was about them.

  She had no time to be sorry, because welling up inside of her she saw two children waiting. She trembled so at the sight of them, she skidded on the bridge. On the far side she nearly hit a gray dog that darted across the path. She climbed a winding road through a blasted copse of trees. They stood on either side of the road, mute and twisted and reaching out. Light came through the branches like a song.

  The sun and the moon were miles apart. The world was safe. Still, Iris was sharp with sorrow when she made the turn on the coastal road. All she could see of Pitt’s Landing was the barest tip of the light. Five more minutes, and that would go. In an hour or so, when she stopped to place the call long distance, she wouldn’t remember any of it. Tomorrow she’d be pulling up at a house in a valley white with snow, a house where nothing was missing at all.

  It wasn’t the crying—crying was good. She only wished she had a reason. The randomness was overwhelming. Just the way the sun fell on the seat of the car. The way the wind had shaped these trees. Iris looped the brutal headlands, letting it all unreel, and a growing pang of separateness shadowed her deepest heart. If only she remembered more. The figures in her dreams had answers.

  But even as she sped the sea-shot coast, they slipped through her fingers like sand in a glass, till only those she could not help but love were all she had. She clapped her hands and laughed, nearly veering off the road. Still the tears came down. She had no idea where she was. Sh
e tore at the sandwiches, cramming them into her mouth. She hadn’t eaten for days. She couldn’t say what time it was. She didn’t know if she had any money, or even if this was the way.

  All she could do was go.

  A Biography of Paul Monette

  Paul Monette (1945–1995) was a prolific, award-winning American author and prominent AIDS activist. His novels, memoirs, and poetry gave shape to a volatile era in which gay men forging their new identities confronted the unforeseeable and devastating AIDS epidemic. Late in life, Monette wrote, “AIDS is the great cleave in the world, and nothing will ever be the same again.” A winner of the National Book Award for his memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Monette helped establish the broad cultural significance of gay and AIDS literature.

  Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on October 16, 1945, to Paul Monette Sr. and Jacqueline Monette, Paul was considered by all accounts “perfect.” Attending the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as a “townie” on scholarship, he grew increasingly tormented by his suppressed homosexuality and the class divisions he observed all around him. In Becoming a Man, he describes those early years as a time in which he never lost his temper or raised his voice: “A bland insipid smile glazed my face instead, twin to the sexless vanilla of my body.”

  After graduating from Yale in 1967, Monette descended into a dispirited period. He reluctantly taught literature and writing at preparatory schools, such as Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, and a women’s liberal arts college outside Boston called Pine Manor. Around the time he published his first book of poems, The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975), Monette met a lawyer named Roger Horwitz at a dinner party. The two men fell in love and soon moved to Los Angeles. There, Monette left behind what he saw as the strictures of the East Coast establishment and came out unequivocally as a gay man. Over the next decade, he wrote several novels, such as Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978) and The Gold Diggers (1979), that were influenced by Hollywood and its lore. His early novels featured openly gay men as central characters. Monette’s second book of poems, No Witnesses (1981), also appeared in these years; mostly dramatic monologues of fictitious and historical figures, the book received high critical praise from the literary world.