by Huss, JA
This has popped into my thoughts in a sudden wave of memory as I walk along, staring up at the bracing blue sky above.
The sun is starting to set on the day. This day that I have waited for for so long. This day that I always believed would come.
This day, if it’s the last day I ever have, will have been worth it.
The lone sound I hear—that of brittle leaves crunching under my feet—reminds me how secluded we are. I’ve only ever been here once before, when it was summer. I came to see the finished product. I was struck by how lush and green the area around the house was. Now it’s gold. Brown. Rust.
Not unlike me, Danny, and Christine.
We started out fresh, green, new. Once upon a time. We must have. I’m sure we did.
But over the years we’ve become stained. Stained by the passage of time. Stained by the blood of those whose blue hearts we’ve taken from them. Stained by the lives we’ve lived. And now we are rust. We are brittle. But we are still beautiful.
Or at least we are to each other. And that’s all I really care about.
More memories tumble through my head as I continue walking, feeling the sharp sting of the late afternoon air filling my lungs.
Speaking of memory…
“Hey,” Christine’s voice comes from behind.
I turn around to see her half-skipping toward me through the kaleidoscope of leaves on the ground. I grin. She’s done that ever since I’ve known her. Even when in the midst of a moment freighted with danger, she’s always maintained a bouncing lope in her gait. It’s in her bones. Embedded deep into her DNA, I suppose. That buoyancy. That life.
Fokken hell, I love her so.
“Hey,” I say back.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to make a call. There’s no reception in the house.”
“By design?”
“Yes and no. It’s ballistic, wire-mesh glass. Which no one bothered to mention would play havoc with mobile reception. Shame. But you rarely get one thing you want in this world without sacrificing another.”
A puff of frosty breath leaves her lungs. She’s wearing the same clothes she had on when we arrived. She hugs Danny’s pea coat to her body and her shoulders tense up in the direction of her ears. Her hair is still a bit damp. I stroke a strand of it from her cheek.
“You should go back in. You’ll catch cold.”
“I want to walk with you. Can I?”
“Where’s Danny?”
“Shower.” She nods over her shoulder back toward the house.
I look at my glass castle. One of approximately seventy homes around the world that I currently own. Right now, it is by far my favorite. All the others could disappear with the wave of a magic wand and I wouldn’t care. In fact, everything I own in this world could disappear right now and I don’t think I would care.
Which is the first time in my life I have ever thought something even remotely resembling that. And suddenly, a notion occurs to me. An idea. A fantasy. One that makes me laugh.
“What’s funny?” she asks, also smiling.
“Nothing. Yes, let’s walk. I want to show you something. You should see this.”
She takes me by the crook of the arm as I stick my hands in the pockets of my topcoat and we amble off in the direction I was heading. To see us now, one might think we were simply two lovers out for a stroll. I am reminded of a time I sat on a bench in the Central Park Mall in autumn and watched people walk along, amidst the falling leaves, carefree and content with their understanding of the world.
I recollect thinking how nice it must be to live a small life. Not ‘small’ in a pejorative sense. ‘Small’ in the way of easy. Worry-free. Simple. A life that wasn’t about chasing the rush of adrenaline that comes of escaping barely alive.
I imagine that this… now…. walking along with Christine’s hand on my arm, and Danny inside, taking his morning ablutions… feels like that.
If you take away the added element of the gun in my pocket.
And the bullet hole in my top coat.
And the borrowed clothes Christine is wearing that we retrieved as we made our escape from a military-style tactical assault on the three of us launched by an as-yet-unknown enemy.
And the seventeen stitches in Christine’s head.
“Nunu?”
“Hmm?” she replies.
“Talk to me about what you remember.”
She breathes out through her nose and says, “I remember pretty much everything, I think.”
“Do you?”
She nods. “Yes. You. Danny. I remember.”
“Yes. But do you remember what caused this?” I reach and touch, gently, the stitches on her skull.
She champs at her lower lip and says, “I was doing the job—”
“The Jimmy Sotoro job?”
She stares at me for a second, “Yeah. The Jimmy Sotoro job.”
Gaan naai ’n boom. Either she’s lying to me or she still doesn’t recall what happened. Lars made it plain that she was off on some other endeavor. And Danny is convinced that it has something to do with some oke called David.
Although I suppose it’s entirely possible that either one of them could be lying as well. Fokken hell, man.
“OK, yeah, and then what happened?” I ask.
She looks pained. It’s a look that lets me know one thing, at least. She’s not lying to me by choice. She’s not voluntarily trying to mislead me. She doesn’t know. Christine is a good enough liar that she has no tells when obfuscation is called for. Her skill at lying is, in fact, unparalleled.
Except by me. Which is appropriate. As I’m the one who taught her how to do it.
She shakes her head and says, “Someone… pushed me.”
“That part seems clear, luv.” I smile, trying to put her at ease. “Any idea who?”
She looks at me again with a face I’ve seen once or twice before. It’s a face she takes on when she doesn’t want to disappoint me. It breaks my otherwise unbreakable heart.
“It’s all right,” I say as I kiss her almost dry hair. “It’s all right. We’ll figure it all out. Over here. We’re almost there.” I speed up my step and she follows suit, the sound leading us in the direction we’re headed growing louder as we approach.
“What is that?” she asks.
And then she sees.
As we round the edge of a grove of trees, the earth falls away and in front of us looms endless, boundless horizon. The ground disappears and drops into a seemingly bottomless gorge hundreds of feet below. The sound she heard is that of a waterfall. Emanating from a mountain stream off to our left, it cascades down the side of the sheer rock wall, crashing to the depths below with exquisite, pulverizing power.
Her breath catches in her throat and I feel the tug of her hand on my arm as her knees go weak. It is an apt reaction to witnessing the majesty of nature’s force.
“Wow,” she says.
“Indeed.”
“Do you own all this?” she asks, moving her head around to suggest the breadth of the panorama before us. “Is all this yours?”
“No, my sweet,” I say, withdrawing her hand from my arm and turning to face her. “All of this is ours.”
She tilts her head as though she doesn’t understand.
“All of this,” I continue, fanning my hands out, “all of this. This world. All of it. Is ours. Yours, mine, and Danny’s. It is if we want it to be.”
“I don’t—”
“I’m saying that we can stay. If we want.”
“What? Stay where? Here?”
“Yes. Here. No one knows where we are. No one can find us. We can stay here. Our own universe. Our own ecosystem. We can escape all the bullshit that’s out there, beyond, and we can have a utopia here. We can stop the chase and just… be.”
Her eyes get watery. She blinks. She swallows.
“What do you think, nunu? Would you like that?”
Her chin quivers and then she starts laughing
hysterically.
“You,” she says, “want to stop the chase. You, Alec van den Berg, want to just… be.”
“I—”
“Sweetheart,” she says, taking my face in her hands like I’m a daft five-year-old, “I fuckin’ adore you, but there is no way in a million years that you will ever be satisfied just ‘being.’”
For some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, I am reminded of being slapped by my father when I was a boy.
I start, “But what I’m saying is—”
“And how would we eat?” she asks. “How would we get food? Supplies? Get them brought in from somewhere? Kind of defeats the idea of escaping and being hidden away from everything, doesn’t it?”
She looks at me earnestly. Like she can’t believe what a dullard I am.
She’s right.
Of course, she’s right. And of course, it was a foolish thing to think, much less say aloud. But I’ve never before felt the way I feel this morning and I don’t quite know how to engage with it. My father instilled in me the value of strength and the cost of vulnerability to such a degree that I don’t even know if what I’m experiencing is actually the sensation of being vulnerable, but it’s most definitely unwelcome.
“I was just making a metaphor, Christine.” It is the best, and maybe only, response I can think of that will quash this moment of shameful weakness I have just displayed, and right our bearings.
“Oh,” she says, nodding.
I kiss her again on the head. “Just go sit over there for a second and let me make this call, yeah?”
She keeps nodding. “Who are you calling?”
“Lars. Since we’re clearly not going to stay here forever”—I wink, back on form—“we need to decipher exactly what might be waiting for us when we depart.”
I can’t grasp a handle on her expression. It’s not quite disappointment. Not entirely sorrow. Maybe confusion? I can’t be sure.
I take her around the waist, press my lips to hers, and then allow my tongue to slip into her mouth. She breathes into the kiss, her hands sliding under my coat to grab for my belt. I laugh and pull back, kissing her on the forehead as I do.
“You’ll catch cold,” I say.
“It’ll be worth it,” she responds, reaching for me again.
I continue laughing as I attempt to compel her to keep her hands to herself. Although I don’t particularly want to.
“As soon as we get back inside,” I say. “We’ll warm up. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Danny’ll still be in the shower. We can get clean together.”
“I don’t wanna get clean,” she says.
“Another metaphor, luv.”
“I know.” She draws out the words and sticks her tongue out at me.
Fok, man. I know it’s not real, not possible, and can’t happen that we could all just fade away into our own, private world…
But it certainly would be nice.
She turns her back on me, sassily shoving her hip toward me as she walks away, giving me a moment’s distraction, thinking about her ass, and perhaps she’s right. Maybe it would be worth the pneumonia. Oh, it most definitely would, but the world keeps spinning whether I want it to or not. And I have to try to keep us all a part of it.
As she plants herself on a bit of rock, I pull out my mobile and check to see if I have a signal. Enough. I make the call.
“Lars,” I say, as he answers.
“Fok, man. Where are you? I’ve tried to call and can’t get through.”
“Did you get that camera footage?” I ask, ignoring his question.
“Yeah, we have it.”
“And?”
“Can’t make it out, bru. Too grainy.”
“Fok do you mean, ‘too grainy,’ man?” I’m trying to keep my voice low, but the frustration of the things I want to know not being supplied to me in an expedient fashion is starting to weigh.
“I’ll show you directly. Where are you? Maybe if we get together, we can—”
“No, man. No. Here’s what I need you to do. You ever hear of an oke called Brasil Lynch?”
There’s a pause as though he’s mulling it over. “No. Why? Who is he?”
“That’s what I want to know, bru. Find out who he is. What he’s all about. And find out who a fokker called David is too.”
“David?”
“Yeah.”
“David who?”
“Fok if I know, man.”
“Just some oke called David?”
“Fok, man!” I whisper-yell to the best of my ability. “Some naaier called David who has something to do with this Brasil fokker. Start with the one, work to the next. Christ, man, this isn’t that hard!”
There’s silence on the other end of the line. But, as usual, I’ll not be the one to fokken speak next.
Finally, “Yeah. OK. And what do I do when I find them? How do I call you?”
“I’ll call you,” I say, and tab end.
Shoving the mobile back into my pocket, I turn to see Christine. She looks like a portrait, sitting there, the glory of creation behind her, the water crashing down below her perch. I wish I had a talent like painting. If I did, I’d paint this. I’d call it something like “The Edge of Always.”
Which is fokken terrible, but I ain’t got a talent for poetry either.
I’m really only good at one thing in this world. And that’s making sure I come out ahead. Seeing to it that my hand is the one that’s raised in the middle of the ring when the fight is done.
But today… when I look at her and I think about Danny, and how much I feel about them… for the first time in my blessed, foolish life, I might—might—be willing to come in second.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - CHRISTINE
Back inside Alec disappears into the office and I follow him, but don’t enter. Just lean against the doorjamb for a moment, watching him take off his coat and unbutton his shirtsleeves, thinking as I stare down at my feet.
Something feels off and I can’t put my finger on it. Like I’m still very much missing something.
Which I know is true because I do not remember what happened that night I got hurt. I know parts of it. I was sent to kill someone, but it wasn’t Jimmy Sotoro because I have no idea who this Jimmy guy is.
At least I don’t remember him right now.
God, am I insane? What’s wrong with me?
You got pushed off a building, Christine. Hit your head, went unconscious, seventeen stitches.
My hand goes up to feel them again. Like there are answers underneath the skin and the sutures are holding them hostage.
Alec lets out a long sigh and when I look up at him, he’s facing me, holding the little metal box. His eyes meet mine as he snaps open the lid and turns it in his hand so I can see the diamond.
Funny thing about diamonds. The more carats they have the heavier they get. But they don’t get proportionally bigger in size. So this seven-carat diamond could conceivably be mounted in a ring or a pendant and not look much bigger than one that’s four carats.
To be sure, four carats set in a ring is pretentious. Unless you’re married to a billionaire or an actual reigning monarch, no one will believe it’s real.
“When?” Alec asks.
I shrug. “Right after you hid it away.”
“How come?”
“I dunno.” I say automatically, but I actually don’t know. “Ask Danny.”
“Because you don’t remember?” Alec asks.
“I… I guess not,” I admit.
“Do you remember why?”
I do. Very clearly. “No,” I lie.
“Nunu,” he says, snapping the lid closed. My eyes track to the etched triangle on the lid. Funny thing about triangles. They always have three sides, but they are not always equal. Yet the interior angles always add up to the same one hundred and eighty degrees, no matter what.
They can be balanced, but small changes throw the whole dynamic out of equilibrium.
A circle is always three
hundred and sixty degrees, so you think, well, that adds up to something predictable too. True. But there’s no sides in a circle unless you cut it up into triangles. And a square has angles, and sides, and all those angles are always ninety degrees. And even though a square can never be a circle, the parts always equal the whole three hundred and sixty degrees.
A triangle is only ever one half of the whole. It’s inherently missing something.
“What?” I say.
It’s a question begging to be answered. An emptiness begging to be filled.
“Are you keeping something from me?”
Yes.
“No,” I say.
I just don’t know what it is.
“Are you sure?” Alec asks, setting the box down on the desk and walking towards me.
No.
“Yes,” I say.
I’m not really sure about anything right now.
“Because you look troubled. Are you troubled?”
I huff out a laugh. He takes both my hands in his and looks down on me with a small smile.
“I was born troubled.”
His smile grows a little bigger. “Yes, weren’t we all? But that’s not what I’m asking.”
“What’s going on?”
We both turn to find Danny coming down the glass hallway towards us. Wearing jeans, but shirtless. Skull tattoos on his chest still glistening with random drops of water. His blond hair wet and dark, making his blue eyes that much bluer.
“I think Christine needs to see a doctor.”
“What?” Danny and I say at the same time.
“What’s wrong? Are you OK?” Now Danny is worried. And when he reaches me his hands stretch out and pull me into him.
“I’m fine,” I say, wriggling a little in his embrace. Because Alec is still holding my hands and the whole moment suddenly feels… stifling.
“She’s still missing memories,” Alec says.
Danny looks up at Alec, frowns, then back down at me.
“I’m fine,” I insist. “I swear. I mean, shit. I just woke up from a major head injury a couple days ago. And most of my memory is back, it’s totally normal for parts to still be missing.”
But inside I know this is wrong. I feel like the triangle. The sides are unequal, the dynamic is out of equilibrium. There are questions begging to be answered, and an emptiness begging to be filled.