“Sure. Sounds good.”
“It’ll have to be instant,” I said, putting a pot of water on the stove.
“Do you always do that?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Write yourself notes?”
“It’s my to-do list. It’s the first thing I do every morning.”
She got two cups down and I excused myself, slipped out, and opened the envelope.
Dear Dave,
I don’t know how to write this. But I have to think about what’s happened, and figure out what I need to do. I don’t want to jump the gun if it’s not necessary. You understand.
I know this hasn’t been easy for you. But I’m glad you were there. Thanks.
Shel
PS. I’ve left most of my estate to the Leukemia Foundation. That will generate a half-dozen lawsuits from my relatives. But if any of those vultures show signs of winning, I’ll come back personally and deal with them.
I read it a half-dozen times. Then I crumpled it, tossed it, and went back to the kitchen.
She was looking out the window at the falling snow. Usually, my grounds were alive with bluejays and squirrels. But the critters were all tucked away now. “It’s lovely,” she said unexpectedly. And then: “So what’s the surprise?”
Startled, I tried laughing to gain time. “Son of a gun,” I said. “I went out to get it and came back without it.” We strolled into the living room, where she sat down on the sofa. I hurried upstairs in search of an idea.
I’ve mentioned that the wardrobe was also a small museum. There were items of inestimable value, but only if you knew their origin. We had scrolls from the library at Alexandria, a sextant designed and built by Leonardo, a silver bracelet that had once belonged to Calpurnia, a signed folio of Hamlet, a pocket watch that Leo Tolstoy had carried while writing War and Peace. There were photos of Martin Luther and Albert Schweitzer and Attila the Hun and Charles XII of Sweden. All more or less worthless.
I couldn’t bear to give away Calpurnia’s bracelet to someone who would not understand its true value. I settled instead for a gold medallion I’d bought from a merchant in Thebes during the fifth century, B.C. It carried a handsomely-wrought likeness of a serpent. The Apollonian priest who joined me later insisted I had acquired a steal. At one time, he said, it had belonged to Aesculapius, the divine doctor, who had been so good he cured the dead. He backed up his view by trying to buy it from me, offering six times what I’d paid for it.
I carried it downstairs and gave it to Helen, telling her that Shel had wanted me to be sure she got it in the event anything happened to him. She glowed, and turned it over and over, unable to get enough of it. “It’s exquisite,” she said. And the tears came again.
If that thing had possessed any curative powers, I could have used them at that moment.
Snow filled the world. The stand of oaks bordering the approach to the house faded out. As did the stone wall along Carmichael Drive, and the hedges on the west side of the property. Gradually a heavy white curtain was drawn across the middle of the lawn. “I think we’re going to get a foot before this is over,” I told Helen.
She stood by the curtains, enjoying a glass of chablis. I’d started the fire, and it cracked and pocked comfortably. We added Mozart, and I hoped the storm would continue.
“I think so too,” she said. A pair of headlights crept past, out beyond the stone wall. “I feel sorry for anybody out in this.”
I stood beside her, and we talked inconsequentials. She had recovered herself, and I began to realize that it was her proximity to me, with all the baggage I brought to any meeting, that had triggered the emotional display earlier. I was not happy that Shel was still in the field. But during that afternoon, I came to understood that even if Shel were safely in his grave, I might still be the embodiment of too many memories. The decent thing to do would be to fade out of her life, just as Carmichael Drive and the outer grounds were fading now. But I knew I could not bring myself to do that.
She talked about looking for a break in the weather so she could go home. But luck held and the break did not come. The snow piled up, and we stayed near the fire. I was alone at last with Helen Suchenko, and it was perhaps the most painful few hours of my life. Yet I would not have missed them, and I have replayed them countless times since, savoring every movement. Every word. I feel sorry for anybody out in this. I was out in it, and I believed I would never find shelter.
We watched the reports on the Weather Channel. It was a heavy system, moving down from Canada, low pressure and high pressure fronts colliding, eight inches predicted, which, on top of yesterday’s storm, was expected to shut down the entire east coast from Boston to Baltimore.
She talked a lot about Shel that day. Periodically, she’d shake her head as if she’d remembered something, and then dismiss it. And she’d veer off onto some other subject, a movie she’d seen, the latest political scandal, a medical advance that held hope for a breakthrough in this or that. There were a couple of patients she was worried about, and a few hypochondriacs whose lives were centered on their imagined illnesses. I told her how much I missed teaching, which wasn’t entirely true, but it’s the sort of thing people expect you to say. What I really missed was a sense of purpose, a reason to exist. I had that upstairs, in notes detailing conversations with Rachmaninoff and Robert E. Lee and Oliver Cromwell and Aristotle and H. G. Wells. Those conversations would make the damnedest book the world had ever seen, reports by the principal actors on their ingenuity, their dreams, their follies. But it would never get written.
We lost the cable at four o’clock, and with it the Weather Channel.
Gradually, the light faded out of the sky. I put on steaks and Helen made up a salad. Our timing was perfect because the power failed just as we put everything on the table. I lit a couple of candles, and she sat in the flickering light and looked happy. If the clouds had not dissipated, at least for these few hours they had receded.
Afterward, we retreated into the living room. The music had been silenced by the power outage, so we sat listening to the fire and the whisper of snow against the house. Occasionally, I glanced up at the door to the wardrobe, half-expecting it to open. I tried to plan what I would do if Shel suddenly appeared on the landing. I was caught in the ultimate eternal triangle.
It did not happen. We talked into the early hours, until finally she gave out and fell asleep. I moved her to the sofa and went upstairs for blankets. The heating system, of course, was not working, nor was anything else in the house. The second floor was already cooling off, but I had plenty of firewood.
I settled into a large armchair and drifted into sleep. Somewhere around two, I woke and lay for a time, listening to the silence. The fire was low. I poked at it, and tossed on another log. Helen stirred but did not waken.
The storm must have passed over. Usually, even during the early morning hours, there are sounds: a passing car, the wind in the trees, a dog barking somewhere. But the world was absolutely still.
It was also absolutely dark. No stars. No lights of any kind.
I pointed a flashlight out the window. The night had closed in, wrapped itself around the house so tightly that the beam seemed to plunge into a black wall. I felt internal switches go to alert. It looked like an effect out of a Dracula film.
I picked up the phone to call the 24-hour weather line. But it was dead.
“What is it, Dave?” Helen’s voice was soft in the dark.
“You awake?” I asked.
“Sort of.”
“Come take a look out the window.”
She padded over. And caught her breath. “Where’d that come from?”
“I don’t know.”
We went outside. It was the thickest, darkest fog I’d ever seen. We didn’t sleep well the rest of the night. At about six, Helen made toast over the fire, and I broke out some fruit juice. The lights were still off. More ominously, there was no sign of dawn.
I wondered about Ray Whi
te, my neighbor. Ray was a good guy, but he lived alone in a big house, and I thought of him over there wrapped in this goddamn black cloud with no power and maybe no food. He wasn’t young, and I thought it would be a good idea to go check on him.
“I’ll go with you,” Helen said.
I got an extra flashlight, and we let ourselves out through the sliding door. I locked up, and we stumbled around until we found the pathway that leads down to the front gate. The flashlights didn’t help much. The beams just got swallowed. There’s a hundred-year-old oak midway between the house and the stone wall. It’s only about ten feet off the walk, but we could not see it. In fact, I could barely see Helen.
We picked our way to the front gate. I opened it, and we eased out onto the sidewalk. “The entrance to Ray’s house is across the street, about twenty yards down,” I said. “Stay close.”
We stepped off the curb. Her hand tightened in mine. “Be careful,” she said. “Somebody might be trying to drive.”
Carmichael is two lanes wide. It is blacktop, and bordered by a single line of bricks on either side, just below the curb. We intended to cross it in a straight line, and I warned Helen about the curb on the other side which, under these conditions, would be easy to trip over.
But we kept walking and never came to a curb. No curb and no sidewalk. After a while I was sticking out my foot, trying to determine what lay ahead. And then I knelt down and held the flashlight close to the road surface. “This is rock,” I said, staring at the ground. Where the hell was there rock on the other side of Carmichael Drive? A patch of grass, yes, and some concrete. But not rock.
Something in my voice scared her. “You sure you know where we are?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
The rock was black. It almost looked like marble.
“Which way did we come?” she asked.
It was a bad moment. We stood in the street, on the sidewalk, wherever, and I had got turned around and had no idea.
“Stay,” she said. I tried to keep her from walking off, but she just repeated the word.
After a minute I heard her voice. “Talk to me.”
“I wish we weren’t lost.”
“That’s good. Keep talking.” Her voice came from my right, maybe ten yards away. I started chattering, and she said okay, don’t stop. But don’t move. She was circling me. Finally, in my rear, she said, “Okay, I’ve got it. Come this way.”
As nearly as I could make out, the blacktop ended near White’s side of Carmichael Drive. It just seemed to turn to rock. There was no distinct dividing line, but rather simply a gradual, uneven transformation from the one to the other.
I tried calling White’s name. But no one answered.
“Are you sure we came out the right way?” Helen asked.
4.
Saturday, November 26. Late morning.
I woke up in a room lit only by a low fire. The power was still off. “You okay?” Helen asked. Her voice was thin.
I looked at the clock on the mantel. It was almost noon.
She came over and sat down beside me. “I’ve never seen weather like this,” she said.
I got up, collected snow, and melted it to make water. (It’s amazing how much snow you have to melt to get a little water.) I went into the bathroom, and, with the help of a flashlight, brushed my teeth. I tried to draw the bathroom around me, as a kind of shield against what was happening outside the house. The shower. The medicine cabinet. A couple of bars of soap. It was familiar, my anchor to reality.
When I returned downstairs, Helen was putting the phone back in the cradle. She shook her head no. It was still out. We opened a can of meat, added some vegetables, and cooked them over the fire. No matter what happened, we were in no personal danger. That was good to know, but it did not ease my fears.
Helen said she wasn’t hungry, but she ate well anyhow. So did I.
It had to do with Shel. I knew that beyond any doubt. We were in the presence of the irrational. I wondered whether we had already done irreparable damage, whether the old world had already receded beyond recall? I was terrified.
When we’d finished eating, I went upstairs to the wardrobe. Shel would be easy to find.
He was standing where I knew he would be: on the slopes of Thermopylae watching the troops come in. He looked good. Tanned. Fit. Almost like a man on vacation. There were a few lines around the eyes, and I knew that, for him, several years had passed since the funeral.
“Shel,” I said. “We need you.”
“I know,” he said gently. Below us, the Thespians were examining the ground on which they would fight. Out on the plain, north of the pass, we could see the Persian army. They stretched to the horizon. “I will go back.”
“When?”
His eyes took on a hunted look. “When I’m ready. When I’m able. There’s no hurry, Dave. We both know that.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Something’s wrong. We can’t even find the rest of New Jersey.”
“I’m trying to live my life,” he said. “Be patient with me. I have a lot to do yet. But don’t worry. You can count on me.”
“When?”
“We have all the time in the world. Relax.”
“Okay, Shel. Help me relax. If you’re going to take care of everything, tell me what’s causing the weather conditions back home? Why the power is out? Why I can’t find my way across the street?”
“I know about all that,” he said.
“And—?”
“Look. Maybe it has nothing to do with me.”
The Hellenic squadrons were still filing in, their bright mail dusty from the journey north.
“I doubt it,” I said.
He nodded. “As do I. But I’ve promised to go back. What more do you want?”
“Maybe you should do it now.”
He glanced up at a promontory about a hundred feet over our heads. “What is now to you and me, Dave? What does the word mean?” When I did not respond, he knelt down and broke off a blade of grass. “Would you be willing to throw yourself from the top of that rock?”
“That has nothing to do with the business between us,” I said.
“Not even if I pleaded with you to do so? If the world depended on it?” I looked at him.
“What if it didn’t matter whether you did it today or tomorrow? Or next month? Or forty years from now?”
“We don’t have forty years.”
“I’m not asking for forty of your years. I’m asking for forty of mine. I’ll do it, Dave. God help me, I’ll do it. But on my own schedule. Not yours.”
I turned away from him, and he thought I was going to travel out. “Don’t,” he said. “Dave, try to understand. I’m scared of this.”
“I know,” I said.
“Good. I need you to know.”
We passed ourselves off as traveling law-givers. We moved among the Hellenic troops, wishing them well, assuring them that Hellas would never forget them. We first glimpsed Leonidas sitting with his captains around a campfire.
People accustomed to modern security precautions would be amazed at how easy it was to approach him. He accepted our good wishes and observed that, considering our physical size, we would both have made excellent soldiers had we chosen that line of work. In fact, both Shel and I towered over him.
He had dark eyes and was only in his thirties. He brimmed with confidence, as did his men. There was no sense here of a doomed force.
He knew about the road that circled behind the pass, and he had already dispatched troops to cover it. The Phocians, as I recalled. Who would run at the first onset.
He invited us to share a meal. This was the third day of the standoff, before any blood had yet been spilt. We talked with him about Sparta’s system of balancing the executive by crowning two kings. And whether democracy would really work in the long run. He thought not. “Athens cannot stay the course,” he said. “They have no discipline, and their philosophers encourage them to put themselves
before their country. God help us if the poison ever spreads to us.” Later, over wine, he asked where we were from, explaining that he could not place the accent.
“America,” I said.
He shook his head. “It must be far to the north. Or very small.”
We each posed with Leonidas, and took pictures, explaining that it was a ritual that would allow us to share his courage. Sparks crackled up from the campfires, and the soldiers talked about home and the future.
Later, I traded a gold coin to one of the Thespian archers for an arrow. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Shel said. “He may need the arrow before he’s done.”
I knew better. “One arrow more or less will make no difference. When the crunch comes, the Thespians will refuse to leave their Spartan allies. They’ll die too. All fifteen hundred of them.”
And history will remember only the Spartans.
We watched them, exercising and playing games in full view of their Persian enemies. Shel turned to me, and his face was cold and hard. “You know, David,” he said, “you are a monster.”
5.
Saturday, November 26. Mid-afternoon.
“This is not just heavy fog,” she said. “It’s midnight out there.” Helen bit down on a grape.
I sat staring at the window, wondering what lay across Carmichael Drive.
She was lovely in the candlelight. “My guess is that a volcano erupted somewhere,” she said. “I know that sounds crazy in South Jersey, but it’s all I can think of.” She was close to me. Warm and vulnerable and open. I reached out and touched her hair. Stroked it. She did not draw away. “I’m glad I was here when it happened, Dave. Whatever it is that’s happened.”
“So am I,” I said.
She smiled appreciatively. And after a moment: “So what do you think?”
I took a deep breath. “I think I know what it is.”
“I’m listening.”
“Helen, there’s a lot about Shel you don’t know. To put it mildly.” Her eyes widened. “Not other women,” I added hurriedly. “Or anything like that.”
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 62
