by David Payne
“You made a vow to me in church before Almighty God. You are not released. I do not release you. God does not release you.”
“I made a human vow based on human understanding, Harlan. That was our marriage. But with Jarry, God spoke and He corrected me. It was He who told me, love and live. I am under His command, and I will follow it, unto death if need be. But if I die today, if you kill me now, and He asks me to justify my hours, it is to this love that I shall point, and I trust He’ll have mercy on me then, even if you, now, cannot.”
With this, she leaves and goes upstairs, and Harlan sits there starkly for a while. Then he gets up. He takes the gun. He carries it and goes toward the swamp, the opening in the trees.
Outside the house, he stops and calls. “Clarisse?”
The door opens. Backlit, she holds the little boy.
“You did this, didn’t you?” he says. “You did this to bring me back to you…. Well, here I am.”
“Ya no me importa,” she says. “I no longer care. You cut the heart right out of me. But this—this—is your son. She is carrying Jarry’s.”
“I want him dead,” he says. “I want Jarry dead, Clarisse. I want you to give me back my wife. Do this for me, and name your price.”
She frowns into the dark and doesn’t answer right away. Then his sister stands aside, and Harlan goes to the last place he has left.
FIFTY-NINE
Sitting by the cabin, Ran stares up into the branches of an oak, and it seems to him the whole of human wisdom is small and negligible beside that tree. Not the peak…no, not the peak… Something from a prior chapter of the book, which he remembers to forget, or has forgotten to remember. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Beyond, the sky, so blue. So blue.
Years go by while Ransom is away, before he thinks, It’s time, before he remembers, It’s that day. That day. And Ran gets up.
The house, which previously receded, is coming toward him now, coming with relentless motion, relentless speed. He’s on the journey once again, he’s written several chapters more. But already he’s forgetting them. He’s on the porch now, the “piazza”—he had to learn to call it that, like pants and trousers, like so many things. A surge of ugly bitterness. Claire was ever free of that. Was this what Ran resented most? Time, now, to be done with all of it.
As promised, here then, at the end, a door. No man. No matter, though. Beyond the door, a room of books, and Ran, returning, knows the book he seeks is there, and maybe it is up to every man to open up the Book of Life and write his own name there, and where else should the story end? There will be no further chapters or adventures after this. How sad that is. It’s time, though. It’s that day. He puts his hand on the glass knob. Whole worlds, in the facets, are eclipsed. He bows his head against the wood. He feels so tired, so tired.
That’s right, open it, says Nemo. A single step is all it takes. You’re out of it for good and never coming back.
“Is that what I want?”
What’s the option? Starting over?
“So true. Too true.” The futility requires no comment.
There are voices from within. The knob is turning in his hand. There is a whoosh, an undertow, a roaring wind, not blowing out, but in….
“I’ve been waiting for you….” She starts across the room toward him. Who is she? Ran wonders, feels he ought to know, but doesn’t. She knows him, though, this woman with blond hair, in her dress of white and purple calico.
She takes his hand. She says, “I can’t live this way, do you understand?” Ran feels the warmth and pressure of her flesh, her living flesh, against his flesh. “I can’t,” she tells him, “this is death, and I’ve consented to be dead, but now I want to live….”
The undertow is sucking, sucking Ran—but who is Ransom now?—down into the vortex, down into the past….
“I want to live,” she says, “to live….”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I didn’t,” Addie says, “but now I do. I looked into the pool and saw only myself; then I looked through, and I saw you—do you understand? Now I do. I do see you. And it was you, Jarry, you alone, who ever made me feel this way.”
“Jarry,” she calls him, “Jarry…” Ransom, thinking there is some mistake, looks down at Addie’s hand, white, on his black arm.
This is a dream, he tells himself. How can this be?
But Ransom can’t wake up, and it’s too late for questions now. The door the door is swinging open. The tall, gaunt, bearded stranger enters with the gun. The first shot comes. Addie blinks her startled eyes. She looks down at her dress. It’s torn and ragged. Smoke is rising from the bloody hole.
Addie tries to speak and something leaves her mouth, hovers near the ceiling like a bird trapped in a room, frantic, seeking the way out. Outside on the river, the boat horn blows. The chittering of ricebirds fills the air.
“The parakeets,” she whispers. “Do you hear them? Jarry, are you there?”
“I’m here,” says Ransom, shaken, shaking, praying, Let me wake up, please, God, if You’re there, let me not have killed my wife, let this not be Claire.
Addie sees him now. Jarry’s sitting on the floor. Her head is in his lap. He’s weeping.
“Dearest…”
“Shhh,” Ran whispers. “Don’t talk. Please.”
“I’m dying, aren’t I?”
“No,” he tells her. “No.” His tone is warm and fierce.
And now Addie knows she is.
Against the window, Jarry’s silhouette is black against the sun, which resembles a steel disc. Addie can see the edge, not blurred with radiance, but definite, serrated, like a coin. There’s black soil in the crenellations, and she can’t remember why her aunt said not to look at it, why humans should be afraid of such a common thing. Addie, now, can stare straight into it.
“I must tell you something….”
“Please, don’t talk.” Ransom, weeping, strokes her hair.
She puts her finger to his lips. “No, please, listen, Jarry, please. I loved my life. I loved my family, my friends, I loved this place, my work, I loved it all, more than I ever loved myself, but you were my true happiness. You were the only one who ever looked at me and saw me as I truly was, not even who I was but who I wished to be. The joy you took in me made me take joy in myself. I had forgotten who I was. I needed you to show me. You loved me as I hope God may love me now. I was just that person once, with you. I’m not sad. Jarry, don’t you be.”
Ransom shakes his head, agreeing. His face his face is streaked with tears. “No, I won’t.”
Footsteps approach over the carpet now. The shadow falls over the lovers. Ran looks up at the silhouette against the light. He knows the bearded stranger now.
“Harlan.”
“Yes, it’s me.” Harlan’s voice is soft, but his ginger eyes are red with weeping, and besotted.
I dreamed that I was you and you were me, Ran thinks, but I was wrong as wrong could be, as you were wrong before me, so who was I, and who were we? Through the window, he can see the oaks and the magnolias in the park…Not the peak, no, not the peak…So this is how the story ends, and how else should it be? Now Harlan puts the Purdey to his brow, and Ransom gazes down at his black arm and understands. I feared and hated what I envied and could never be; I thought I was the killer, but the thing I killed was me. Ransom, seeing through himself, is going, going, gone, and Jarry bows his head to it, and Harlan fires the gun.
The second shot rings out. The birds disperse. Their twittering fills the skies, and he is with them now, Jarry’s with them. Far below, the boat horn blows, and Jarry hears the clank of metal pots, the musical thunk-tink of bones. “Hu eh eh! Hu eh eh!” the children cry in an ancestral tongue his mother’s mother had already forgotten how to speak. There’s a tremendous fluttering of wings, and all around them are the birds, a great invisible flock, hemming them in on every side, guiding him, guiding them, away over the roof, over the trees in the old park, and Jarry, with Addie
now, flying with the parakeets into the checkered sun, is free.
Like spindrift from a breaking wave, the birds hang a moment, a curtain of bright green high in the air, and then they veer and vanish as though never there. A green feather falls. A wind blows through the park, and it is blown, that feather…under the old oaks and the magnolias, through the dappled sunlight, onto the piazza, into the pages of a book, and in that book a poem, and in that poem, a man, the old leech-gatherer, staring down into a pool of water he stirs with his staff and he is gone…and, at the bottom, finally, when his self is shattered, overcome, there, he sees…so long longed for, finally so small…
“Ransom!…Ransom!”
Still standing on the threshold, he comes to with the Purdey trained on Marcel Jones…. All this is a dream, thinks Ran, I dreamed that I was you, and you were me. But who am I? And who is he?
Nothing exists but empty space and you, says Nemo. Go on and pull the trigger, Ran. Life, death, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
But the woman who was once upon a time and is no more no more his wifewifewife, says, “You aren’t going to do this.”
And Ransom, having died already, says, “You’re right,” and puts the gun beneath his chin.
“No, Ran…”
A denial is the final thing he hears before he pulls the trigger and his blood and brains jet up against the chandelier and drop back down in bloody drips, and Hope and Charlie see their father there, they scream and scream and grow to man- and womanhood and have children of their own and pass it down, the bitter, bloody wounds, as Percival passed his, on and on, and round and round, the carousel spits out the same black bag and starts the same sad trip again….
But, no, Ran merely sees this in advance. When he opens his eyes, his finger on the trigger, Shanté is in front of him.
“I understand it now,” he says, and he is weeping now, and wild. “I know why he agreed to go into the pot, Shanté.”
“Why, Ran?”
“He wanted to atone. And so do I. I want to be a tree,” he says, “I want to be clean and do no harm and turn sunlight into life. I’m tired of all the mess, Shanté, tired of all the mess I’ve caused, and all the mess I am. I’m tired of being me. I’m not afraid to die.”
“I know you’re not,” she answers him. “You have a brave heart, Ran. But not like this. Think of Hope and Charlie. You’ll wound them in a place so deep they’ll never be the same.”
“I already have.”
“Then stay and make it up.”
“How can I, Shan? I tried, and look at me.”
“Close your eyes and ask him.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
And Ransom does, he turns into the roaring wind and holds the raw and undiluted thing, and the ghost whispers him the answer Ran already knows, like everyone, and has forgotten to remember, and remembered to forget….
And Ransom drops the gun and sets them free.
EPILOGUE
…there was always, deep in the background, the feeling that something other than myself was involved.
—Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
In the turnaround before the house, the Odyssey is packed to go. Ran slams the hatch and turns, brushing off his hands. “I guess that’s it.”
It’s difficult to meet Cell’s stare, and yet he does. When the big man offers him a hand, Ran takes it. “Marcel,” he says, not Cell, not Cell Phone.
“Good luck, Ran.”
Ran nods curtly, once, and Cell, after a brief glance at Claire, turns and walks toward the house.
“Shan’s invited Hope and Charlie to Alafia,” he says. “I’d like to take them, Claire. I think it would be good for them.”
“And you.”
“And me.”
“I think so, too,” she says. “You get your levels straight, and then we’ll talk. Here.” She hands him something.
Ran opens a folded check: $11,460.32.
“What’s this?”
“Your sixty-five percent.”
“I don’t want this, Claire.”
“Yes, you do.”
Ran contemplates a crack, but lets it pass and speaks the true thought underneath. “I wanted you to have it all.”
“I know, but this is better, Ran. It’s more grown-up.”
“I didn’t want us to have to grow up, Claire, either one of us.”
“Neither did I. But we had to anyway.”
“You did.”
“So did you, Ran. Don’t take that from yourself. Or us.”
He puts the check into his shirt. “You’re sure?”
She reaches out and strokes his cheek, and Ransom takes her hand and presses it.
“I’m sure.”
“I guess I’ve been holding on to something that really wasn’t all that great.”
“But it was once.”
“It was, wasn’t it? I’m so sad, Claire.”
“So am I. You know what I lay awake thinking of last night?”
He shakes his head.
“Last winter when you took me to the Plaza for my birthday, and we didn’t have the rent, and you hired a limo and ordered oysters and champagne. I would never have done that for myself, Ran. And the next morning when we left, the ATM ate our card, remember?”
“I remember.”
“And we had barely enough change for two cups of coffee from the deli, and not even enough for the subway and we walked home all the way downtown, and I felt…I don’t know, like I’d jumped off some big cliff I’d always been afraid of…. And you gave that to me, Ran, a thousand times, a thousand different ways, and it made me better than I was, it made me bigger and less afraid. And I’ll always love you for it. Always.”
Ransom’s eyes are like rain-sheeted windowpanes. “When I boil it down to what really mattered, Claire, what made each day worth getting up to struggle through, it was you, and what kills me is that I realized it too late, after you’d already left.”
She holds his gaze, neither gloating nor denying the essential truth of what he’s said.
“Cell is a good man, though,” Ran continues, “probably the best I ever knew. If it can’t be me, Claire, he’s who I’d choose for you, and I guess if I was honest, I’d have to choose him over me. So, go, baby. Find your happiness.”
She kisses her fingertips, presses them to his lips. “Good-bye, Ran.”
And she is gone now, too, and Ransom stands, alone, before the closed front door, remembering nineteen years before, how badly he’d wanted it to open and admit him. Under the tumult of his feelings, it’s strange to find a thread of clear relief to be outside again. Overhead, the sky so wide and blue.
Going to find the children, he passes the excavation, where water has collected in the hole. As Ran stares down, he sees an image, just a flash, a man down in that hole digging, digging furiously, covering the bodies. There’s a woman standing over him, watching. When he sees her, he looks angry. “You deceived me….”
“You asked the pot to give you back your wife,” she says, and she holds out her hand…. And then…
And then? The image fades. The ghosts dissolve in sunlight. The curtain falls. Ran loses sight of them. The chapter they wrote has been forgotten. Aye, ages long ago…
And now the woman is Shanté. “You ready?”
“Ready as I’m ever going to be,” he says.
“How do you feel?”
He shrugs. “Calmer. Otherwise, about like you’d expect.”
“Any voices?”
“Not so far. I put the pot into the car. Claire doesn’t want it here.”
“That’s fine, Ran. We can take it. It’s just a pot now, though.”
“You think he’s gone.”
She nods. “Can’t you feel the difference?”
“I don’t know. Some.”
“He’s been released now, Ran. Percival wanted freedom for his children. You finally gave him what he asked. He’s in Mpemba, but he was there for you, ju
st as one day you’ll be there for them.” She nods toward Hope and Charlie in the yard.
“I hope so, Shan,” he says. “I hope I live that long.”
“You will. If not, you’ll come back from the dead and whisper to them from a song and put the truth into their hearts as he did yours, and this is simply how it is. The living and the dead are bound, and we, for all our knowledge, have forgotten what you paid this price to learn. Feel good about yourself. You turned your life around right here.”
As she walks toward the car, Ran thinks of Percival, and suddenly the words are there, the verse he never knew he knew till now:
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream
Or like a man from some far region sent
To give me human strength…
to give me human strength…
to give me human strength…
by apt admonishment.
“Daddy?”
When he turns, Hope is standing, tentative, in the checkered light that falls from the old trees.
“Hey, Pete.”
“Are you leaving?”
“In a bit.”
“Forever?”
Ransom kneels and stares into her solemn, worried eyes. “No, sweetie, just for a few days. I’m still a little sick now, but I’m getting better, and in a week or so, I’m going to take you and Charlie with me to Alafia, where Shanté lives.”
“You promise?”
Ransom smiles and draws an X across his heart. “I promise, Hope. And I’ll always come back for you and Charlie. Always.”