Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “There is no more time!” He stood up and kicked the blankets to the side, spraying the dust that had gathered as a film on the floor into the air to choke us. “Look at us! We’ve been stuck here going over the same things for months! Months! And I can’t do it anymore – I can’t look for someone who we’ll never find, and I can’t see the point in trying when I know that they’ll just say it was me in the end!”

  “They won’t think that if we get proof –”

  “There is no proof! There never has been! And you don’t – you don’t know what it’s been like being stuck in France in that stupid farm, pretending that I’m Canadian and knowing that I’ll never be Jack Hadler again, because Jack Hadler killed Miss Mercier and chopped her into pieces!”

  He looked at me with a crazed expression, and all at once I was aware that he had been every bit as trapped and mistaken as I had been, and that people would look at him the same way that they had looked at me since the events on the cliffs, and that he was as tired and tormented by this as I was, too, but for one thing: he hadn’t done it, and I had, and he would never be as broken and useless as I was doomed to be for the rest of my existence.

  “I can’t not solve this,” I told him, my voice low and trembling. “I can’t – I can’t let this go.”

  It was all that I had left. It was the thing – the only thing – that would ever bring me peace again, and no matter how little or how slight, it was all that I had and all that would keep me from the worst of who I was, and if he didn’t help me – if he didn’t realize not what I had done, but what I had done for him – then everything about him that I had thought that I had known when everyone told me otherwise would vanish, and I really would be alone in the world with no one but myself and fleeting hallucinations of people who told me what I knew but didn’t want to know anymore for company.

  “We have to let this go,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  He turned and walked from the house, and I didn’t move to follow him. My leg was throbbing horribly, but even if it had been uninjured and I had had all of the pain medication in the world, I wouldn’t have moved anyhow. And as the house grew silent but for the shrieking air coming from the ocean like cries from all of the people who had been pulled under the blue, never to resurface again, it occurred to me that maybe we were both really dead – maybe he had died trying to cross the ocean, and I had died falling into it, and we were just stuck reliving this murder that we couldn't solve, trapped in purgatory for our wrongdoings and unable to move out of them for any reason or any feat that we achieved. Maybe when we stepped through the duff the imprints in the dirt were nothing more than specks against our vision, and our slight communications were no more than the conversations I had had with Cabail Ibbot. Maybe we were more than dead. Maybe we had always been dead, and life had never happened, and this was some reverse, some nonexistence that ripped at the world and made us separate and would never allow us to be whole – because this couldn't be living, I was certain. This couldn't be real.

  He returned to the house late that night and slipped beneath a blanket that covered his face from my view. Ants were scratching beneath the floorboards, the only sign of life within the deadened walls, and soon they would come up and creep beneath our skin to pick us apart and drain our already-empty insides to carry us away, and our only use would be to serve as food for them when the winter came and crashed down over their home. And I didn’t want it to be like that – I didn’t want it to end that way – but if he wouldn’t change his mind and if I couldn’t tell him what I had done to persuade him to do so, then there would be no going forward from where we were, and we would be more separate than we had been when we had resided in our private prisons on either side of the ocean, and this time we would never find one another again.

  I pushed my hands in my pockets and wandered off down the street early the next morning. The sun had barely risen yet, just a sliver over the deep blue horizon, and the air was crisp and cut against my face. In the chill, the veins in my hands had protruded like thin rivers that crisscrossed over my skin that were the same shade of blue as the sky above the ocean.

  Albertson was sitting in a chair on the porch when I arrived, a blanket draped around his shoulders and the last of a cigarette clutched between two crooked fingers. He smiled upon seeing me at the gate, and I limped up the steps to where he was.

  “You're here early,” he said, reaching over to put the cigarette out in the tray on the windowsill.

  I nodded and swept my hair from my eyes; it needed to be cut.

  “I was wondering if you'd want to take a walk,” I said. I couldn’t step into the house again; it was so worn and dirty, and I couldn’t look upon the place where I knew that he would die alone with his old texts and chipped mug of tea. “You know … get out of the house for a bit.”

  “That would be nice.”

  He stood and hobbled down the steps with me, and we set off in the direction of the water. The sight of the ocean was still as unpleasant as ever, but idea of walking through the woods was worse. As we made our way towards the rocky beaches, each as slow as the next, the only sound came from the shuffling of our feet on the stones.

  “Do you want to stop?” I asked as he slowed down.

  “No, no, I'm fine.” He aimed a kind smile at me and continued on. “But what about you, Enim? Would you like to rest your leg?”

  “No, it's fine.” The pain in it had died down considerably in the past few weeks, and though it still throbbed incessantly, it was really more of a nuisance now than anything.

  We reached the beach and took seats atop the boulders that sat off to the left-hand side of it. The sun had risen almost fully by then, and the water glistened peacefully beneath it. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought that it was a different body than the one that had carried all of those girls away; and I wished more than ever that it wasn't the one that had taken Beringer away.

  “It must be difficult,” Albertson said quietly, “to look at it.”

  I looked over and realized that he had been watching me, but for once I didn't bother to try and rearrange my expression.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you regret it now? Jumping.”

  “No, I don't know,” I said, my voice rather dull. “I don't really remember doing it. But I … I regret what happened to Dr. Beringer.”

  “Yes, I had heard about that,” he said with a nod. “I hadn't realized that there was a therapist who came here. That was good of him.”

  My throat was too tight to speak, and my neck had stiffened too much to nod. Albertson lowered his voice.

  “He must have meant a lot to you,” he said.

  “I didn't mean to kill him,” I said, only able to raise my voice to a whisper.

  “No, I know that, Enim – I think we all do. Including him.”

  I bit down on the insides of my cheeks and squeezed my eyes shut as the image of him sitting by me in the hotel room in Nice returned, but the words that I had imagined that he had spoken were too far away to hear again. I shook my head.

  “It was a mistake, Enim. People are allowed to make mistakes.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Of course we are,” Albertson said, his voice gentle as he countered me. “I often think that the things we do – the things we've done – aren't the worst of who we are. But living with them … that's the difficult part.”

  His voice wheezed and he turned away to clear his throat. The blanket was still draped around his shoulders, but the breeze coming from the water got beneath it and sent it billowing outwards.

  “And you have an excuse,” he continued a moment later. “Your mother was ill. You were ill.”

  “That doesn't make it right.”

  “No, I suppose it doesn't,” he agreed. “But it makes it understandable.”

  He adjusted the blanket so that it covered his arms and neck again, and I pulled my feet up from the ground so that I was sitt
ing cross-legged on the rock. There was something calm about sitting there with him – a peacefulness that I hadn't felt in a long while – and I wished that it wasn’t broken by the thoughts going through my head.

  “I should have brought Metamorphoses,” he said. “I think you'd enjoy it – it's one of my favorites. I often think that it should be taught in place of The Aeneid, but I could never persuade the school to change the curriculum.”

  “What's it about?” I said, my voice dry and crackling in the air. I had been told too many stories, it seemed, and not enough of what was real, but just one more, one last time, from someone like him seemed to be alright.

  “Well, it's about existence, I suppose,” Albertson said. “It tells of how the world was made, and the destruction that was caused to it when men were created. After seeing the chaos that they had caused, the gods decided to drown humanity except for the only two virtuous people, thus forming a new race of men. But then the book delves into the sins of the gods themselves, and of how they are no better than the humans were – manipulating mankind for their own entertainment and raping women as they saw fit. They judge humans for their wrongs, but there's no one to judge them.”

  I stared into the water with a hollow feeling, imagining that it rose up and drowned humanity all over again. I wondered if there would be anyone left the second time around, or if there was no one who deserved to be saved.

  “That sounds … depressing, Mr. Albertson,” I said.

  “Well, it's a bit disheartening, yes,” he agreed. “But Ovid also tells of the heroes and all that they did to protect the world from monsters.”

  “So they're the virtuous people?”

  “No, certainly not,” Albertson said. “They are every bit as flawed as the rest of us. But they … overcome their own demons, in a way. They move past their own faults and make more along the way, but they balance their lives with what they do for the rest of us, and this – I believe – is what makes them great.”

  He looked at me kindly and I shifted in my spot.

  “I don't think I'm very much like that, Mr. Albertson.”

  “No, me neither,” he said. “But you can be anyone you want to be, Enim. And you don't have to be … what you've done, or even who you were.”

  I shrugged.

  “I don't know.”

  “And you don't have to know. You have time to decide.”

  “Who would you want to be?” I asked, unable to keep the conversation centered on ideals that I would never amount to. “Did you – I mean, did you want to be one of the heroes?”

  “No, no, that was never my yearning.” He smiled slightly. “I always wanted to be the poet – the one who told the tales. I suppose that's why I became a teacher.”

  He turned and coughed again, the sound harsh in the cold air and cracking against the rocks around us. I wished that I had spoken to him months ago, but I wished that I had spoken to many people months ago. It felt as though I always reached people just moments too late.

  “What was the part about the sibyl?” I asked. “You were going to tell me about her.”

  “Ah, the Sibyl of Cumae,” he said with a nod. “Her story is my favorite.”

  He cleared his throat and pulled the blanket up again, and I helped him fix it so that there was no chance of cold air escaping beneath it. As he smiled in thanks, he sat back and stared up at the sky.

  “She was a mortal with whom Apollo fell in love,” he said. “He offered her anything that she wanted in exchange for her love, and she – being young – pointed to a pile of sand and wished for as many years of life as there were grains of sand. He obliged and gave her the longevity of life. But she – seeing that she had already been given the gift and knowing that it couldn't be taken back – shunned him and backed out of her part of the bargain. Apollo was furious, as the gods often are. He couldn't cut her life back to what it was, so instead he failed to give her the eternal youth that she had forgotten to ask for. She realized her mistake immediately. She began to age and wither, and eventually her body shriveled into near-nothingness and only her voice remained.”

  I thought of Rusalka and of how the opposite held true for her: she was immortal and ageless, and had even been given human love in return for speechlessness. But she didn't have a soul, and she never would, and after her rejection she was forced to lay in waiting in the river to lure men down to drown in its depths.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “She was put into a jar and hung from a tree like some spectacle,” he said. “It was a form of entertainment for the children in the town. They would come to look at her and gawk, and ask her what she wanted.”

  “And what was that?” I asked.

  “She said, 'I want to die.'”

  His pale eyes were shining in the light of the sun, and all at once it was evident how much he had aged in the past several months. I could only imagine how horrid it must have been for him to live alone in that decrepit house day after day, waiting for the inevitable but frightened of it all the same, because it was the same way that I had felt when I had watched my mother fall into nothingness for so long in the residence in Connecticut that was empty of everyone that I wished was there with me.

  “That's horrible,” I said.

  “Yes.” He shook his head, suddenly very quiet. “Some people don't live long enough, and some people … we live too long.”

  I pressed down on my fingernails as I shifted in place, knowing what I wanted to ask him but not knowing how. He was too old, and too sick, and too kind, and marring the last of his life with thoughts of what I had done – pulling him into a secret better left unsaid – seemed more unjust than I could possibly excuse myself for.

  I walked him back to his house and put on the kettle for tea, carefully filling his cup without spilling any water on the journal that was lying next to his mug. He seemed to be writing something down, but my eyes had blurred with unfelt pricks of tears and I couldn’t read what it was. Perhaps he had been a poet after all.

  “I'll come back tomorrow, Mr. Albertson,” I said. “If you'd like.”

  “That would be nice, Enim.”

  I wandered back to Miss Mercier's house the long way, walking by the ocean as I went. It was such a deep blue that it spread out like the night sky across the earth, the spume reminiscent of the pinpricks of stars, but without any hint of moonlight. I paused as I looked into it, still both drawn to it and yearning to pull away, and my chest tightened at the thought of where Beringer had fallen upon the rocks. I had tried to push the thought of him away for so long all the while that I had been in the treatment facility, but now that I had realized my fault and could admit what I had done, he felt further away than ever. In absentia, I thought, shutting my eyes on the image. That was all that he was now, and all that he would ever be – and it was because of what I had caused.

  And it occurred to me that I had thought that the world would be different by now. I had thought that if I could just find Jack, and return to the island to finish what we had started, that I would be offered some sort of reprieve from the diagnosis. But there was no reprieve, I realized, and I was doing the same thing that my mother had done – chasing riddle after riddle so that I could fill my mind with things to solve when the disorder became too much – and soon I would run out of actual mysteries to follow and would be forced to invent them on my own. I wouldn't do what I had done with Turandot, and I couldn't repeat what I had nearly done with Rusalka, but I didn't know what the other option was. I didn’t know who was left of me that I could be.

  Jack and I walked into town together the next morning in order to buy more cigarettes; he had successfully gone through a carton in the last week, and smoking them was the only thing keeping the bitterness in his tone at bay when we tried to force ourselves to speak rationally to one another. Keeping our heads low, we crossed to the corner store and slipped inside. It was the same place where we had discovered that another girl had gone missing after Barker's heart
-attack the winter before after thinking that it was finally over, and the thought made the place far more unlikable than it would have otherwise been.

  “I'll take some Parliaments,” Jack said, tossing the money on the counter.

  The man eyed the bills and wiped at his face.

  “We're out.”

  “Out of Parliaments?” Jack said before throwing a sigh. “Great. This week is getting better and better.”

  “Yup, last pack was just sold. I'll have more on Monday.”

  “What am I supposed to smoke until then?” Jack said.

  “Marlboros are cheaper.”

  “I don't buy them because they're cheap, I buy them because they're better,” he snapped, but took the pack anyhow.

  “Who the fuck is buying my cigarettes?” he said when we stepped outside, pausing so that he could light one. “No one likes Parliaments. I've single-handedly kept them in stock here for the past five years.”

  “Right. I don't know,” I said, looking off to my side.

  “Probably some fifteen-year-old who doesn't know any better,” he continued. “Thought the name sounded good or something. They'll probably toss them in a minute after a coughing fit.”

  “Well, feel free to search the dumpsters,” I said, too irritated to offer him any sympathy.

  “Or the alley – that's probably where they'd go to smoke.”

  He stepped off in the opposite direction and I limped to catch up to him.

  “Right,” I said, “except you shouldn't actually look for them. What if they recognize you?”

  “And do what? Think I'm a killer? It'd probably mean they'd drop the pack and run for their life.”

  He stopped at the first alley between buildings and looked down it, and I rushed to keep up with him.

  “Jack, they're just cigarettes. Smoke these until Monday.”

  “These suck,” he said crossly. “They taste like burnt coffee.”

  “But we're supposed to be staying out of sight,” I hissed, cringing as my leg protested to how quickly I was walking. “We can't just go around harassing people so that you can –”