Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  The sky in the window reached unpigmented perfection and was disconnected, leaving a glow of artificial light. Something was pressing down on him, white-kissing his lips. One shock after another. He gave a little electrical dance, his last loose-limbed movements. What was her message? Tell him I’ll kiss him goodnight. She would have been numb when she died. He tumbled and stared up at the ceiling: a good place to watch the frost accrue. Then later, after the light went out, she would join him, and they’d lie there together, knowing how carcasses hang in the dark.

  Down by the River

  H.V. Chao

  By this, and this only, we have existed

  Which is not to be found in our obituaries

  Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

  — T.S. Eliot

  They started out at eleven—late for him, early for her. The sun in that run-up to summer was lordly, lolling at the zenith. Noon sprawled over hours.

  At the trailhead, she turned to look back at him, shading her eyes.

  “I’m sorry.” She knew how he felt about apologies, but it just came out. “I know you wanted to get an earlier start.”

  At twenty-four, she still had the knack of sleeping in; there was something spoiled, even lewd about it. Awake and alone he had watched her, sunk in wrecked sheets as if on the sea floor, her dark hair the storm that had drowned her. In this and other things he envied her abandon. It was cool in the room, but when he stepped into the courtyard, he’d felt the heat of the coming day.

  He bent now, in the shade of a pine, to shoulder the daypack. The air was cool against his shins but thick already between his shirt and back. “Well, we’re here now.”

  It was something she might have said—but more brightly, meaning it.

  He straightened, walking past her into the tunnel of woods. She caught his elbow. “Look!”

  High and to the right a hummingbird fluttered, with its iridescent breast and a beak like a line of pencil lead, pointing this way and that. They stood watching for a moment.

  “Do they ever stop?”

  He looked puzzled.

  “You know...going?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never seen one alight.” Such a life flitted now through his imagination—one unbroken nervous hover, perishing heroically from sheer exhaustion.

  “They must.”

  For a while the only sound was their footfalls. The trail was of beaten dirt that did not rise when scuffed, and clay that held each pebble embedded.

  “See these?” He patted a tree marked by a patch of white like the rear of a fleeing deer. “If you get lost, keep going till you see another one.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then turn around.”

  They came to a low stone bridge. The railing was crooked and rust-red, but smooth to the touch. Below lay a sheer creek over a dark bed, its burble barely audible. From the shallows rose a few thin beeches.

  “It’s okay, you know,” he said then. “I was up anyway. You know me.”

  It was not so much waking as ceasing to sleep, or having it taken from him. His eyes were dry and his hands and feet cold. The aimless hours stretched before him, a cell. That morning, he had wandered barefoot over chill stone floors. The chambre d’hôte where they were staying was less of a B&B than a vacation rental—more rooms than they knew what to do with. On counter, table, couch, and rug lay their things, strewn for convenience. These scant belongings seemed greedy to domesticate the emptiness. But they had brought too little. The house seemed not so much inhabited as full of things left behind. In the stillness and gray light, he felt like a man perched on a suitcase in a train station, someone else’s photograph of loneliness.

  “It’s true, old people need less sleep.”

  He snorted.

  It’s a start, she thought.

  The woods had come alive around them, or they were just deeper in: ticking insects, bird chatter, scamper amplified by the rustle of dry brush. To the right, uphill, opened frequent clearings of dust and butterflies, low scrub laid bare to the blinding sun.

  “Is it really just lizards?” It was hard to credit such racket to something so small.

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  After a moment she said, “Tell me again why you hate apologies so much?”

  He could be brusque, even dismissive about them. “I used to apologize a lot when I was young. I guess I just don’t see the point anymore. It’s all water under the bridge.”

  “But clearly it’s not.”

  He clung to some core of the unforgiven, like a man who discards the fruit and gnaws the stone. “I just mean, they don’t fix anything.”

  “They’re not about fixing. They’re about moving on.”

  “Yes, but they sort of force the point, don’t they? Moving on is all you can do; eventually everyone gets around to it. I just don’t like…being rushed.”

  “You’d rather stew?” She smiled. Small surprise, really. He hung on to so much else.

  “Let’s be clear: if the choice is between being happy with less, or completely unhappy, it’s not really a choice. No sane person would choose unhappiness. And apologies remind me of that—how powerless I am to choose, or to change things.”

  “Is that how you feel about getting old?”

  He stopped and turned. And smiled crookedly, despite himself. “Very good.”

  “And death?”

  The question took him by surprise. The thing he professed never to worry about—had he spent his whole life fleeing it? Had his whole life been one of denial? Well yes, life was by definition death’s very opposite, a refusal.

  “What about death?” There, he had said the word. Younger, he had worried his unconcern over death made him a shallow person. He worried less now, he would have said, though she would not. “I’ve always detested simple things.”

  “Like the truth?”

  “Rarely simple.” Hated, too, the obvious, the irrefutable; there always had to be more to it. Take love, for example—the constant flux of desire and regret, selflessness and privacy—he loved in constant uncertainty. Or was it just that when you pared everything back, got down to the hard, obdurate kernel, he wanted there to be something to soften the blow?

  She put her hand on his shoulder, raising one foot to her knee. “Can we stop? I think there’s a rock in my shoe.”

  It was meant to be a hike of five hours or so; the kilometers made it hard for them, Americans, to tell. They were headed, following the river Méouge, for a hilltop village; there were several in the area: Antonaves, Upaix, Le Poët...“Which one again?”

  “The one with the historic sundial.” He folded the map—more of a brochure, really—and tapped the photo of a fresco on the back: a faded goddess beside radiating, Roman-numbered lines. They were to arrive just in time for a cool drink on a café terrace. The bounded European wilderness: civilized comforts were always in reach. Even lost without vista in a thicket, you were never far from a town that had been settled for ages. “We’ll watch the old men play pétanque.”

  It cheered her, the thought of cobblestones, a stray cat, the steady trickle of water into a stone basin from a lion’s mouth. She felt a rush of affection for these irrigating guardians and their fierce, cartoonish scowls. “How far are we?”

  He watched her fiddling with her boot. “Well, back at that boulder where we turned left—how long ago was that? I think that was about a fifth of the way in, so…” After a certain point—probably a third—fractions ceased making sense to him as estimates. He could imagine having yet to go the stretch he’d come, or half again; imagining it four times over defeated him. Besides, it gave way to imprecisions, introduced too many variables. Half the journey ahead, and you were likely to cover it in the same time it had taken so far; but who knew how much your pace could vary from fifth to fifth?

  “Say...a third?” He wanted to be encouraging.

  She had laced up her boot. “Let’s go.�
�

  It was hot now even in the shade. Gnats danced about their heads. They were like lunatics, plagued by the unseen. At one point he walked into a spiderweb and stopped, flummoxed by silk.

  “What is it?”

  He had blundered into one earlier that morning, strung across the courtyard. Had it been there yesterday, when they’d walked through, stopping to marvel at the peonies? Unconscionable, how quickly they surfaced, these signs of neglect and decay, emerging from closet and corner to bind the vibrant and the thriving. The bathroom that morning was cold as the grave. From the skylight fell a baleful shaft of gray. Alert after the courtyard, he’d found another spider just under the toilet seat, its web spanning the bowl, and in the tub, the tiny gnarled carcass of a third, like a hand clutching after fled life.

  “I guess not many people pass this way.”

  “No—didn’t you know about webs?” She liked telling him things, with a prickle of vanity; she could help it no more than her apologies. Perhaps it was because he told her so much, or discounted so much that she told him. “They put them up every night and take them down every morning.”

  So it was everyday, and not accrued disrepair. He felt some meaning had been lost. He said, “Or forget to.”

  Slowly they had risen through the layers of vegetation, and emerged now on a ledge above the gorge. The other side was clearly visible, barer still at the same elevation, scrub in sparse clumps studding the scree slope or clinging to the limestone tiers.

  “Reminds me of...chest hair.” She was flushed—from effort, not reticence. “This one ex.”

  He took her by the shoulders, turned her around. “Look.”

  His nose was close now to a few damp strands pasted flat against her nape, which smelled of soap and sweat. Touching thumb to forefinger before her face, he framed the scene. Back the way they had come, clouds saddled rounded hills with shadows, a dappling at odds with the greenery overlying gray escarp. Three hot air balloons dawdled in the blue above.

  “Oh right,” she said. “I always forget.”

  “To look behind?”

  “I guess I figure I’ll catch it on the way back.”

  “We’re not coming back this way.”

  “Next time, then.”

  The next times, the somedays of which her life was so full, simply because so much of it still lay before her. No: life was fickle and difficult. Full of friends you never saw, that restaurant—unforgettable! What was it called again? I can’t believe it’s been so long! We have to go back! Long after the rare call from an old friend was over, promises hung ghostly in the air.

  “Do you always think there’ll be a next time?”

  “Do you never?”

  “I used to be like that.”

  It was one of the more condescending things he said. The funny thing was he didn’t mean to condescend.

  “No, not all the time,” she agreed.

  The terrain was constantly shifting, up and down, never a harsh grade but a broken wave. It was not hard going but she was just breathless enough. She tried humming, but the rhythm of her footfalls on the rutted dirt was uneven and jostled the melody, like a vase from a table on a train.

  “So you’ve really never...broken up with anyone before?” He took the water bottle from his pack and handed it to her.

  She took a sip and passed it back. “I’ve never had to: does that sound pathetic?”

  “You mean they’ve always left you?”

  “No, it just sort of happens...falls apart, I guess. Unravels.”

  “You both walk away from the wreckage.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, there’s never any wreckage, just...less, one day.”

  She was bashful about hurt and surprised by pettiness, resentment. She always wanted to be on the folksong side of a breakup: serene and moving on, beyond bitterness if not regret, beyond her years, looking back with an aerial wisdom compounded of tears and clear sight, having let go and forgiven. A safe place from which to contemplate the beauty of what had been.

  It was a nice idea. The end of love, for him, was always bound up in anger and blame. The time and generosity, at worst wasted, at best simply spent.

  “Not the things you did with someone,” he tried to explain, “but the things you did for them.”

  “Those are the only things you can’t regret,” she said.

  It was her eyes that made him wonder. Pale, brilliant, like light in ice, a lens for any meaning. Aloof from her face, they were its most riveting feature—ageless, unlike her lined hands, which were the oldest part of her.

  They picked their way along the ledge, one hand on the beige, crumbling flank from which it had been cut. Sometimes a yellow flowering of furze relieved the arid drab.

  “It’s part of why I picked you. Of the two of us, you seemed likelier to hold on.” Lest it make him feel weak, she added, “I feel safe with you.”

  He snorted. “Funny. It’s usually women who go in thinking it’ll last forever.”

  They climbed in silence, breathless, sweating. The exposure was brutal. The limestone mesmerized, a history of force in the undulant lines, like wood grain on a larger, coarser scale. Then the forest received them again, their sunstruck eyes failing in the new gloom.

  He said, “I think we’re past the peak.”

  “Oh, so soon?”

  “It’s good to have it done with.” He heard the flirt in her voice a minute late.

  “Women take longer, you know.” She plopped down on a rock. In a grove off the trail, a massive trunk lay in the ferns, fallen to splinters.

  Still sitting, she bent forward, reaching for her ankles. She had taken her hair down, and now it slid bit by bit from her nape, like a curtain with a weighted hem. Her boots were dusty.

  With the back of his hand he smeared sweat from his brow, then stood watching her, thumbs tucked under the straps of his pack. “If we were crossing the desert, we’d be sleeping off the burning hours and marching later when it was cool.”

  She sat up, slowly, luxuriantly. Her smile was dazzling. “Why don’t we do it in the woods?”

  Time passed differently for the two of them. Take this trip, for him: each day felt long enough while light lasted, but by evening seemed abruptly fled, like a favorite song that comes on the radio and ends before the traffic light has changed. In the silence broken only by raindrops he would realize he had not really been listening, and now it was too late. There was dwelling in the moment, and dwelling on it—dwelling on, she pointed out, always happened after.

  “You’re always so...happy, afterwards.” What he meant was self-sustaining, contained. Unto herself. Dreamy and harboring secrets, as if she took whatever he gave and held it suspended inside, a honeyed lozenge under her tongue.

  They were not yet past that early fascination with each other’s bodies: groping, ingenuous, instinctive. That movie moment, always from overhead, when two people chastely draped in sheets fall away from each other sweating, pleasantly surprised...She rolled over, slowly, onto her back. “Aren’t you?”

  The trip to France had been his idea—a gamble, but not really. Once on the ground it seemed hers in its fullness; it seemed to spring from her. She gave it life. “Are you glad we came?”

  Solemnly she nodded, a rustle of leaves against her hair.

  “But you always say yes,” he sighed.

  It was her kind of company, uncomplicated, easy on him. Not that she was obedient, merely obliging. She went along freely with things, with the smile of someone nodding to a song—private, enticing. Her complaisance was compelling, replete with its own reasons. As if in agreeing, she were the one leading him along.

  “Hey, I started it,” she said.

  The world was coming back to him now: patches of damp, nettle, needle, thatch. Nature was never as comfortable as it looked. The soil beneath them was probably teeming, swarming. On the shattered trunk beside them, a millipede performed its sluggish, gleaming roil. />
  There was afterglow, and afterhollow. After sex, he always felt chastened, reduced, settled without being clarified. How to explain that comedown, the littlest oblivion, a pinprick of loss in a sea of satiety? Or a drop of color spreading in water soon to recall it only as hue. A familiar heat like trapped wings blossomed in his upper back, faltering toward the extremities: a sign of exertion. “Ah, la petite mort…”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve told you before.”

  “Oh, right.” She raised an arm straight up at nothing in particular, sighting along it at the empty sky. “What about it?”

  He was up on one elbow, combing leaf debris from her hair. “Do you think you sleep better than I do because you’re so young?”

  The important thing was she was younger, or that was the least important, once he got over it, and in these early days, he had to get over it again and again, alternately guilty and amazed. He had felt compelled to beg from total strangers, the world at large, understanding if not forgiveness for the difference in their ages. She had taken it in stride. These things happen, she said equably. They were to be enjoyed, or refused, but not worried over. It was just part of them now, who they were together. How had he managed to live so long, fretting so much about what people thought?

  “I mean, I’m old enough—”

  “Don’t say it!” She crossed her arms over her head to ward it off.

  “—to be your father.”

  “My who?”

  They both laughed.

  “But seriously,” he said.

  She was up on her elbows now too. “Well, if you’re so worried, there’s always the campsite rule.”

  “...only you can prevent forest fires?”

  Who, me? she mouthed, eyes moon-huge. “No, doofus. Leave it better than you found it.”

  He studied her: her startling eyes, her smooth body, her strange hands, years older than the rest of her. The vaunted honesty of nudity—if only. Bare flesh was the best liar; it had the most innocent face.