* * *
“Are you happy then?” the builder asked her. It was Wednesday. They were sitting at the pub, him leaning against the bar with a pint of bitter and her balanced on a stool, not talking to him, not listening to him. He was a big man, his body seemed to be stacked from successive layers. He reminded her of the mudcastles that Comfort built, only in reverse. “You look happy,” he said, spreading his fingers. “You look dead happy.” The question caught Mercy like a hammer blow between the dull eyes of a bull. She thought about the range of possible answers: “I make do” and “No more than anyone else” and was afraid to admit the truth: she was happy. It was easier with things as they were, with her tiny world, with her daughter present but not permanent, her husband regretful but never angry.
“If you’re willing,” Noah would say to her as he slipped into their narrow bed together, him already pressed against her. Afterwards, his mouth would tickle her ear: “How I love you,” he would tell her, “my bright star, my darling.” She could not imagine that all he ever wanted was her: slim-waisted, flat-chested, almost boyish in the coarseness of her hair. But Noah loved her. She saw it in the way he longed to sink himself into her so deeply that direction would reverse itself, like a tidal flow, and he would come back to himself: but complete this time. She could not tell him that she felt incomplete. She was not capable of holding that much love, of returning it unspoilt. It slipped out of her like water through a drain. Now there was a quiet space in the middle of the day when nothing was required of her. It was during these hours she took to the streets, looking for the strangers. Hoping they would stop her. “You could take me home,” Mercy said to the thick-handed man beside her. She imagined him crawling through the tunnels that Comfort had made, on his hands and knees, surrounded by the smell of creeping damp. “Nah,” he said. “A happy woman is no woman for me.”
When Mercy left the bar it was on tottering feet. She felt unwell. She couldn’t see the stars. The city blotted them out. There were towers where there used to be stars, and clouds, and a dull glow of silver from the streetlights, atoms of light bouncing between cloud and sodden sidewalk. But the stars. She had owned a telescope when she was younger. She loved the fierce red of Mars, gleaming like desert rock or a newly minted penny. She had read recently about the moon of Mars, Phobos: named for fear, son of Venus and Mars. She had read that tidal forces were ripping the moon apart. Its lifespan was now predicted to be 40 million years, a long time, no doubt, but finite. It was not forever. Above Mercy, the moon was shredding itself, its center a pile of rubble, shallow stress grooves lining its skin. She would be long dead by the time it fell apart, but it made her sad anyway, and strangely frightened, to think about what was happening. It was all invisible anyway, out beyond the lambent atmosphere, but it was happening and it was terrible. Like a premonition. “You should have come home with me,” she whispered into the darkness. “See, I’m sad and I’m tired and I’m frightened. Just like you are.”
In the distance she heard the sound of glass bursting. The terrible fraying of metal. She did not stop. She did not turn around. Three days later she learned the builder had been struck down in the street. It was an accident. She did not go to the funeral. The papers did not mention where he was buried.
* * *
Two weeks later, Mercy saw the builder. He was standing at an intersection of Potato Wharf and Liverpool Road with a dazed expression on his face. His jaw hung slightly slack, as if death had loosed the muscles that had formerly hinged it together. Normally Comfort was anxious, almost shy, when they walked the streets together. The city, she had been told, was different than Hindmoor Green, more dangerous. She would dog Mercy’s footsteps, fitting comfortably into the space her shadow carved in the sunlight. But today she was eager. She had skipped on ahead, never once glancing back to be sure Mercy was following.
When Mercy saw that awful figure slouched against the terracotta facing of an old canal warehouse, she reached for her daughter. But Comfort had already passed beyond the range of potential interception. “Are you drunk?” she exclaimed, a mixture of delight and skepticism. Indeed, he smelled of something faintly boozy, dark and yeasty-sweet. But the builder did not speak to her daughter. His eyes raked upwards, met Mercy’s, and a sharp spark of light leaped up into the pupils. “Please,” he said desperately, “I don’t know the way.” Mercy’s tongue was thick, it plugged the cave of her mouth like a rockslide. “Come with me now,” she said. “Let me show you.” His hand was clammy but unexpectedly warm. She squeezed it gently.
* * *
In Hindmoor Green, they burned the bodies of the dead. The ashes rose in a feathered bloom from the chimney of the crematorium and resettled upon the fields with the softness of snow. The dead became dust: comfortable, comforting, a velvet veil over sacred things, objects too precious for daily handling. The dead inhabited lungs, they etched themselves under fingernails. The dead were lifted gently from the inner canthus of the eye by tongue or tears. They did not come back. It was different in the city, Mercy realized. Perhaps it was that the buildings were settled too deeply, perhaps their towers soared too high. The city was small, yes, but it was expanding, colonizing those parts of heaven and earth that had since been left vacant. When Mercy took the hand of a stranger, she was never certain of where they had come from and where they were truly going.
Her own first train journey from Hindmoor Green had been a revelation. She had never imagined the size of the country she lived in, the glow of white chalk in the hillsides, the copper and tan waters of the ship canal snaking inland from the sea. There was terror too, yes, the sense of hurtling into the unknown like a silver arrow, but mostly it was the joy that Mercy remembered afterward. How her eyes devoured the sight of the men disembarking onto the platform in their crisp suits, briefcases in hand, slouched children, dainty women in sensible shoes, used to the journey. She did not know what the city would look like, and the tallness of the buildings was a shock. How could such things exist? Distantly she had always imagined the sky as a thin blue film but these things revealed that as a lie: they gave it depth, they were a measure stick for its enormity. She had not known what she would do when she arrived, only that she was empty, and the city would imprint some kind of shape upon her. She wondered if it was the same for the dead man. He had been a builder after all. He had known the city better, more intimately, than she ever would.
But it was the memory of the dead mother and her child that hurt Mercy the most. She had not known what to tell them, had not properly understood their questions. She had pointed blindly, and they had followed her directions. But where had she sent them? Once she had believed that one place was as good as another, but she was learning differently now. When she looked at the strangers she could tell: some of them were going to good places. There was a brightness in their eyes, a calmness, a sense that things would be easier when they got wherever they were going. But for others there was only exhaustion, an aching look that spoke of the miles behind and the miles ahead. When she woke from dreams of those two, she would go to her daughter’s bedroom and crawl into the narrow bed. Mercy had always thought her daughter was exactly as she was named: a comfort, somehow extraneous to Mercy’s existence, a delight, to be sure, but unnecessary, nothing to seal the gaps. But when she breathed in the smell of the sheets, which she refused to launder until the day before Comfort arrived, she knew this was not the case at all. Comfort had become her center, the smallest, purest part of her. The foundation stone of her entire life.
* * *
Now it was Friday morning. Mercy had walked to the train station to meet her daughter. Her eyes skimmed the eyes of those she passed, careful not to linger too long. Today was not a day she would give over to the strangers. Today would belong to Comfort. It was her birthday. In the kitchen sat a little sunken cake clothed in nets of sugar and glazed orange slices. Mercy had eaten the ones that hadn’t set properly so that only the best remained.
The train arrived. The door
s flung out a stream of people, men clutching briefcases, women clutching the hands of their children, children clutching at whatever caught their eye as they passed: sunshine on the rails, pigeons, flutters of paper. Mercy waited. She had become more at ease with the crowds. She knew they would part, and there would be Comfort looking sleepy and sensible and not at all uncertain of where she was. But as the platform cleared, Comfort did not emerge. A worm of panic crawled into Mercy’s heart. This had never happened before. She went to the platform attendant. He spoke in a slow drawl, “Perhaps she’s on the next train, Mum.”
Comfort wasn’t on the next train. Nor the one after that. Nor the one after that. Mercy’s hands were shaking now. Noah had left her at the station in Hindmoor Green. He had kissed her on the cheek. He had watched her climb the stairs. Mercy spoke to the station master, a close-shaven man with weepy blue eyes. He was apologetic. He was baffled. He would do everything in his power to find out what had happened. Then there were the police, sure it had been a misunderstanding, a mistake. “Did you have problems with your daughter?” they asked. “Was she unhappy?” Mercy let them talk. At home, she remembered, was a labyrinth of old paper and a cake with perfect slivers of orange. They would dissolve on her tongue like snowflakes if she let them.
* * *
There was a comradery among the dead, Comfort discovered. She awakened in their city, a city of twisted glass lit by a warm, flaxen glow whose source she couldn’t see. The dead crowded around her. She knew they were dead immediately because they had no smell. When she kissed their cheeks, they had no taste. The dead insisted on touching her, on hugging her close to their chests. It reminded her of past birthday parties when her father’s family, a large and noisy crew, would descend upon her home to pinch her cheeks and exclaim over her height. It was not an unpleasant feeling. Comfort asked them questions, and they answered immediately. There was a joyfulness to their speech, even if it was strange to her. They remembered what it was like when they first arrived. They were frightened too. “I’m not frightened,” she told them, and she realized this was true. She was happy. She felt as if she had stumbled upon some marvelous secret, and, in many ways, she had.
Time lost its urgency. She was unhooked from its rhythms. She watched it flow past her the way one might sit on the banks of a river, watching the passage of boats. She grew older. She fell in love. She married. She had a daughter of her own. She named her Solace, for her mother. Solace Dwyer. Time passed. Comfort believed once that time would have no meaning after death, but this turned out not to be the case at all. To exist, she learned, was to be in time. But time was not the problem in the city of the dead. Space was the problem. The city was shrinking, moment by moment. Comfort could see the horizon approaching with the height and mass of a standing wave. Soon it would topple and pin her in place. She knew this. The dead stood together. They had lost their joyfulness. They smelled of nothing, they tasted of nothing, but even so, it was very bad. Perhaps it was the fear. The dead had learned to fear what was coming. She clutched her daughter’s hand.
There was a story Comfort’s father told her about a man named Jacob. She did not miss her father. She did not, if she was honest, remember her father. But she remembered the story. Jacob was favored by God. He was the father of many children. One night God sent him a dream. He dreamed of angels going up and down the sky on a vast ladder. Comfort imagined this would be how she would leave the city of the dead. But the way out of the city of the dead, Comfort discovered, was nothing like that at all. You couldn’t leave by regular methods. The city had no borders, or rather, its borders were turned in upon themselves. Walk as far as you could in one direction and at some point you would find yourself retracing your footsteps. There was only one way to leave. The city had a crack at the center of it. The road through the crack was very long, so long it seemed impossible. Comfort tugged at her daughter. They would begin at once.
They walked. Their shadows fell behind, always. Sometimes Comfort imagined dragging them like a weight. There were others walking too, but conversation was difficult to keep up. Although the dead couldn’t feel pain, they could still feel despair: the slow enclosing of hope. This did not break Comfort. For her despair was only a sort of pressurization. Her hope, made smaller, had become harder, sharper. Eventually she found herself in another city. It too was made of spires of glass, but these were frightening rather than familiar. “Where are we, Mum?” her daughter asked. But the glass confused her senses. It reminded her of how birds must feel when they see lights in the windows of tall towers and think they are the stars.
* * *
There was no news for Mercy in the days that followed. The loss of Comfort was a crack that ran down the center of her life. She felt as if it had cleaved time in two, before and after. Noah came to stay with her. The first night he slept in Comfort’s room, which made Mercy inexpressibly angry. She did not want him to have that. He was covering over one of the only things that remained of her daughter with his own male smell. At breakfast, she hurled a teacup at the wall. It broke into three pieces. Noah swept these up without comment. He cradled her in his arms. She fought him bitterly, but his arms were exactly as she had remembered them, strong, those hard square palms like shovels patting down the earth. He kissed her, and she let him do it. The second night he slept in her bed. He did not touch her, but she could feel him lying alongside her, taking up space that used to belong to her. He snored gently. She turned her back to him, but the heat of his limbs snaked over her anyway.
For a time Mercy became a shut-in. She was afraid to leave the house. She kept imagining the look on Comfort’s face if she returned to find her mother missing. Noah folded up the maps. Her living room became a living room again, ordinary, thick with dust in the corners where she had not bothered to look. In Hindmoor Green, she might have discovered a piece of Comfort tucked away there, but in the city she knew the dust was simply dust. Comfort had been buried elsewhere, in a basement, perhaps, or the foundations of the new bank: her tiny bones curdling in cement. Mercy did not like the dust. She was appalled by the open space of her living room. She had become so used to following the paths that Comfort made: here, along the sofa, two feet, three feet, then over the chair, then a rest, perhaps, under the old oak table whose tablecloth formed a perfect shelter. But Noah set it right. The chairs were placed neatly where they ought to be so the two of them could sit together over a breakfast of eggs on toast, coffee with sugar or cream. Simple kindnesses to help her cope.
And just like that Mercy realized it was not that she didn’t love Noah. She did. She loved his kindness, the hot snort of his breath as he slept, the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. It was just that she had traveled so far in one direction that she hated the feeling of having returned home, just like that, just that easily. So one morning, while he was sleeping, she levered herself from beneath him, put on her winter coat, and left. She did not know where she was going. Mercy took to the streets, circling the waterfront piazzas, and following, apparently at will, the paths that lined the canals. There was a smell in the air, something heavy and brooding. She knew the streets by name though many she had never visited before: Market Street, Bridge Street, Oldham Road, Stockport Road, New Street. They were what they were. They said what they were, where they were going. Nothing else in her life had ever been so straightforward.
She did not know what she expected to see until all at once, she did know, because there was Comfort. She looked older than Mercy remembered, taller. She had cut her hair at some point, and now it hung short and feathery beneath her ears. There were lines on her face. She clutched the hand of a tiny girl, three years old. “Comfort,” she cried, “please!” But the look her daughter gave her was uncertain, confused, exhausted. There was no recognition. “Sorry,” she muttered. Her voice was deeper now too, robbed of its sing-song quality. “I seem to have lost the way. How many streets are there in the city?” she asked. “Only twelve,” Mercy said, “but the glass is like a mirror here
so it seems like there are many more.” They stared at each other like strangers. But then the girl smiled. Her lips were soft and delicate, she had her grandfather’s chin, her grandfather’s blunt nose. “Where do they lead?” the girl asked. Mercy touched the girl’s hand. It was cold and clammy, but Mercy could feel the pulse of something—new life—beneath her skin. It stretched the fabric of her, but she did not crack. She felt her heart expanding, she felt herself growing larger. She had anchored herself so firmly in heartache, and now the heartache was dissolving like sugar on the tongue. The touch was all she needed. Calmness washed over her. “I don’t know,” Mercy said, “I’ve never known, not for certain. But come with me, both of you. Let me take you home.”
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
by
M.R. CAREY
I will take the trouble to set this out for you, because I feel it’s important that you understand. I must ask you to listen and to refrain from raising questions while I speak. I believe the most pertinent issues between us will be very clearly explained in the course of my story. If at the end of it you still find yourself puzzled, unclear as to why you are about to die, then in that respect and that respect alone you will have good reason to reproach me.
* * *
In the 14th arrondissement of the city, close to the Brooklyn Bridge and the Alhambra, there is or used to be (it is hard to be categorical) a patisserie whose terrace looks out directly onto the Seine. It had been my custom ever since I found the place to have a breakfast croissant there, watching the lazily ambling waters of the river while the particulars of the cases on which I was currently working flowed through my brain with a similar lack of haste or direction. This ritual had afforded me many valuable insights, and I had come to rely on it more and more in these recent times of turbulence and irreplaceable loss.
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