“Thank you for seeing me.”
The voice was close behind him. Lauterbach had climbed the steps so stealthily that Sabry had not heard his approach. Whatever else had changed, the American was still furtive.
Sabry turned and saw that the man’s skin was stretched tissue-thin over the bones of his skull.
Do I look that old? Sabry wondered. He thought not. The same fat face stared back at him in the morning mirror.
Lauterbach is ill, Sabry realized.
No. He is dying.
“The women went up to the house,” Lauterbach said, at a loss. He paused, awaiting an invitation. On the gnarled hands, on the insides of the man’s bony elbows, Sabry could see the angry pinpricks of a doctor’s needles.
The bald dome of the American’s head had already turned pink from the heat, and he was sweating. He looked utterly miserable. Grudgingly, Sabry waved to the covered patio. “Come. Sit,” he said.
Lauterbach followed, his pace slower than Sabry’s own limp. They sat in wicker chairs under the blue-tinted shade. Sabry watched afternoon clouds build over the ocean.
“Beautiful spot you’ve picked,” Lauterbach said. “It’s more stark, of course, but it reminds me of our farm in the Texas hill country. Why Lebanon, general?”
“Too many memories in Egypt. People should change their lives as they change clothes, I think,” he replied.
Had Lauterbach changed his clothes? Sabry wondered. Or had memory stitched itself to him? He wondered if the needle marks on Lauterbach’s arms were the ice-pick scars of history.
“Your wife is gracious,” Lauterbach told him. “And very attractive.”
Sabry shrugged. “She is young. I am surprised to see you, too, have married again.”
Irací had been ten when the war ended, and knew it only from retrospectives on TV. Sabry wondered if Lauterbach had met his wife during wartime. And if so, what sad, nostalgic prison marriage had become for them both.
Lauterbach said softly, “Four Americans were captured by the aliens. Two stayed with them. One committed suicide soon after his return. My wife was the only survivor.”
Sabry shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with the mention of aliens. For a short time even he had believed, but then the Parisi books were revealed as fakes, and the blue lights found to be a Greenhouse phenomenon.
“They covered it up,” the American said ruefully. “Amazing what care they took. Did you know the reporters even accused me of sleeping with the Parisi woman? Jesus Christ.” His laughter died in a strangled cough. “But I know for certain that someone else’s body is buried in Sergeant Gordon Means’s grave.” Lauterbach’s ruined face was alight with the same conspiracy-theory glow Sabry remembered from the TV interviews. “And how else do you explain Lieutenant Justin Searles’s last words before he jumped: ‘The light was better than this’?”
Wishing the American would change the subject, Sabry looked off into the sun-shot clouds, the distant gray veils of falling rain.
“No matter how dangerous it was, I wanted the aliens to find me interesting, too,” Lauterbach said. “I wanted them to talk to me. Wanted the war to end. I wanted so many things that my need probably overwhelmed them. Maybe cooling the sun and ending the Greenhouse heat was what they thought I had asked for.”
With a pang of compassion Sabry realized how much Lauterbach had paid. First Parisi and the blue lights, then the news of the aborted bombing of Warsaw had leaked. No one had stood by him, not the President, no one. Even Sabry, in his Red Cross deposition, had added to the chorus that the man was insane.
“You should have been made a five-star general,” Sabry told him. “You deserved better.” Right or wrong, he thought. The man deserved more than ridicule. Lifting his head to the freshening breeze, he drank in the smell of coming rain. In the west the clouds were swelling, their pregnant bellies gray.
“Thank you,” Lauterbach whispered.
Allah manipulated fate in strange ways. Lauterbach had won the war; Sabry the peace. While Lauterbach was still struggling for exoneration, Sabry had negotiated a quiet armistice here in Lebanon with Irací, with his flowers.
“You will stay for dinner, of course,” he said. Rummaging through the dark closet of the past, he found the old clothes of his humiliation. They didn’t fit anymore, and it was time to throw them away.
In a hoarse and halting voice, Lauterbach said, “I would like that very much.”
The afternoon darkened, clouds drifting over the new, cooler sun. The first fat drops of rain pattered on the Fiberglas.
“You know? Before people die, they try to put things in perspective.” The American’s tone was so intimate that Sabry felt he was privy to the man’s most pitiful, most terrible secrets. “I mean—I wish—I’ve questioned my life a lot. But whether I was right, whether or not it was even worthwhile, I’d have to repeat it all. Every order, every mistaken belief, every damnable lie. I would betray the aliens’ trust again. I would teach them more about war than they wanted to know. And no matter how much I longed to keep them here, I would again frighten them away.”
“We did our best,” Sabry told him. “It is all we could do. There is no guilt in that, remember? Remember preaching so to me?”
But Lauterbach wasn’t listening. “Wishes, you see. My wife says the lesson the aliens taught her is that wishes suck you dry. But, my God, isn’t there more? All that wisdom. A universe full of knowledge. Why did Justin Searles die screaming that the light was better? What could Sergeant Means have discovered that made him want to stay? I can’t begin to imagine what miracles ...”
When the sentence broke, Sabry turned. Lauterbach was weeping, his face lifted to the blue roof and the incessant clatter of the rain.
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