“I shouldn’t be, because it means things didn’t go well for you, but I’m vraiment pleased to see you again.”
Ophelia smiled at him, conscious of not feeling what she should have felt.
Later. She would feel later.
She slowed down when she noticed that Thorn was trailing. He was limping. His leg brace had suffered from the journey, but he didn’t seem particularly concerned. He was studying the surrounding vineyards with such intensity, he seemed to be converting each bunch of grapes into a bunch of statistics.
“Something’s not normal,” he said to Ophelia.
She agreed. She sensed it, too, without being able to define what it was exactly. It wasn’t easy for her to be objective, however, since her own body no longer had anything normal about it; or perhaps, on the contrary, it had become too normal, no longer tripping on every bump, or banging into the first obstacle, or damaging objects as soon as her attention wandered. Once, picking fruit demanded her full concentration; now it had become simplicity itself. The beetle woman had told the truth on one count, at least: the disjointedness was already disappearing. The crystallization had succeeded where years of physiotherapy had failed.
The sun was at its zenith when they finally arrived at the edge of the village. There were enthusiastic cries at the sight of stone buildings, paved paths, terraces full of pots, but then the euphoria died down.
There wasn’t a villager to be seen anywhere.
The Brats of Babel rang several doorbells, but no one opened to them. They proceeded to swear furiously while kicking the closed shutters of stores.
“Very smart,” sniped Professor Wolf. “If the people here are hiding from us, that’s bound to fill them with confidence.”
He was resting on a bench, his black jacket over his arm, wiping his forehead, which the sun had turned scarlet. Sitting with his back to him, Blaise was sniffing the air with his big pointed nose. His forever anxious face creased up even more in disgust.
“There’s the smell of rotting food. Everywhere.”
Ophelia looked around at the streets’ shop signs. They had nothing written on them, no “Haberdashery & Hosiery,” or “Surgeon-Barber.” A tin basket was lazily swaying above what must be the grocer’s store. Ambrose went closer, as far as his chair allowed, to the folding grille protecting the shop window from intruders. He looked forlornly at the displays of decaying fruit and vegetables.
“They’re not hiding,” he said, with disappointment. “They’ve gone.”
“Maybe they, too, were fleeing from the landslides?”
This hypothesis, spoken in a raucous whisper, had been put forward by Elizabeth. Ophelia had completely lost sight of her onboard the airship. And for good reason: with face gaunt with exhaustion, arms stiff against body, and hair stuck to frock coat, she had flattened herself so much that, soon, she would be nothing but a line merging into the background. In the space of one day, the model citizen had lost her best-of-all-worlds, and Ophelia hadn’t the slightest idea what she could say to her to make this loss acceptable.
Later. She would express herself later.
Thorn decided to knock, methodically, on every door, even though he no longer seemed to expect to come across anyone at all. His way of walking, like a broken automaton, resounded lugubriously around the deserted streets. Ophelia silently followed him. Through some half-closed shutters, she glimpsed parlors with wilted flowers, flies swarming around forgotten plates, and furniture stripped bare. There was plenty of pottery, but no posters, no photographs, no newspapers, no plaques, no names. The villagers had left their homes, but left nothing of their past.
After a meaningful look from Thorn, Ophelia took her gloves off. She didn’t like to read an object without permission, but she understood that these were exceptional circumstances. She burnt her fingers on the door handles, made white-hot by the sun. They all conveyed the same bitterness, which, if it had to be put into words, would have been something like: “I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to leave . . .” The door handles bore witness to nothing else, no other layer of lives lived, as if the fateful intensity of that final moment had erased all those that had come before.
Ophelia picked up a sign of denial. Thorn’s eyes seemed more questioning, from under his eyebrows, but he left it at that, and decided to give up on his door-knocking.
They rejoined the others, who had all gathered on the village square, to quench their thirst at the drinking fountain, and gorge on grapes. Here, the late-afternoon light was filtered by the plane trees. Garlands of flags, left over from some celebration, danced from one roof to another. An awkward silence had descended, with each person staring warily at their neighbor. They were souls without homes among homes without a soul. As the daylight faded, a musician took out his saxophone and played a little. Voices joined in with him. Finally, a burst of laughter. More animation. Soon there was singing, waltzing, whistling: they were alive, here and now.
Sitting on the edge of the fountain, Thorn declined two invitations to dance, and consulted his watch seven times. His index finger scratched his bottom lip, which was so thin as to be almost invisible, while his forehead dropped lower and lower. All that concerned him was tomorrow.
“The villagers didn’t plan to return,” he muttered, between his teeth. “Not for a long while, at any rate. I’m not convinced that this ark is LandmArk. The question is: wherever we are, how do we leave here?”
Beside him, Ophelia was mindlessly chewing a grape. She looked at all the former Babelians around them who had no idea where they were, and yet were celebrating their new haven. She looked at Ambrose, whose wheelchair was spinning in the midst of the dancers. She looked at Blaise and Wolf, whose shoulders, forever weighed down by worry, were gradually lifting. She looked at Elizabeth, who had withdrawn miserably to a corner, turning her back on the party. Finally, she looked at herself, looking.
Bracing herself, she put her head under the spout of the fountain. The cold water would clear her thoughts.
This time was the right time.
“I must talk to you,” she said to Thorn.
He immediately put his watch away and got up, as if he had been waiting for those five words all day. They moved away from the village, climbing up a hill covered in olive trees until the raised voices were reduced to murmurs. From the top, they discovered new expanses of grass and water, glinting even further into the distance. A road cut though them, with its worn, cracked tar. At the foot of the hill, what looked like a bus stop had been invaded by stinging nettles.
Ophelia gazed at this mysterious ark that had almost killed them, and yet had saved their lives.
“I have done two really stupid things,” she announced.
She sat down in the tall grass, scorched yellow, and gazed up at the sky. It was a maelstrom of sunshine and clouds, changing appearance from one second to the next.
“I gave birth to an echo. Not only was I incapable of finding the Horn of Plenty, but, on top of that, I supplied the observatory with the final element they were missing to reproduce the same mistakes as Eulalia: a new Other. I sacrificed my mirror-visiting power there. The more I try to make my own choices, the more I’m playing their game.”
Thorn shared the almost stone-like stillness of the olive tree he was leaning against. True to himself, if he was surprised or shocked, he didn’t show it.
“And the second stupid thing?”
Ophelia rubbed her tongue on her palate, for the lingering sweetness of the grapes.
“I released the Other from the mirror. Deliberately. I finally remembered that confounded night. His voice, in particular, if one can call it a voice. It was so sad . . . The Other warned me that it would change me, and it would change the world. I didn’t know by how much, but I still acted knowing the facts. Basically, that was what I wanted: for things to be different.
If the arks are collapsing, if there were deaths, and if there are more to come, it’s because I didn’t want to become like my mother.”
Swallowed by the clouds, the sun went out like a lamp. The vivid colors of the landscape took on a pastel softness. Ophelia was amazed at her own calmness; the wind was making the whole hill tremble, apart from her. She suddenly noticed how itchy her wet hair on her shoulders felt; hair that should have been golden, and that, from one day to the next, centimeter by centimeter, had started to grow in a much darker color that wasn’t hers.
“All this time, I felt damaged by the intrusion of Eulalia’s echo in my body and my mind. It was my stain. When we began to understand that it was the Horn of Plenty, I . . . Let’s say that my motivation was more selfish than yours. Freeing us, me and the world, has always been your sole aspiration. You immediately thought of how this Horn of Plenty could turn Eulalia and the Other back into what they were originally. For myself, I mainly thought of how it could turn me back into the person I would have been without them. Except that now, I know that that change was my choice from the start.”
She went quiet, drained of breath.
With some tricky maneuvering, Thorn shifted over beside her. If his body wasn’t the right shape for most chairs, which were invariably too low, it was even less so for the ground. With an inscrutable expression, he stared at the water slowly dripping from Ophelia’s hair.
“You are totally unaware of it, aren’t you?” He waited until some shrill laughter from the party, carried by a gust of wind, faded. “Of our rivalry.”
Ophelia stared at him, not understanding.
“I, myself, became aware of it early on,” he continued, abruptly. “This determination that won’t stop growing in you, and is taking up more and more space. You want your independence. Even your obsession with the past—your object readings, your museum, your reminiscences—it has always, basically, been about being better able to free yourself from it. You want your independence,” he repeated, separating each syllable, “and I, myself, want to be indispensable to you.”
His pupils had dilated as his speech went on, as if some inner darkness were invading him, little by little. Ophelia curled up and hugged her knees, but Thorn allowed her no time to react.
“You mentioned my aspiration to free you, and the world. I aspire to nothing whatsoever. I need you to need me, it’s as basic as that. And I know full well that, in this conflict of interests between us, I’m doomed to be the loser. Because I am more possessive than you will ever be, and because there are things that I can’t replace.”
He took out his bottle of disinfectant and, after some tense hesitation, instead of opening it, he offered it to Ophelia, as if he were giving up using it.
“So much for my stain. If you can live with it, then I can, too.”
Ophelia took the bottle without the clumsiness she had been cured of, despite herself, but aware that there were many other ways of breaking what was precious. Remaining silent for any longer was one of them.
“I can’t have children.”
There, she had said it. She had said it, and she still felt just as calm. She didn’t even know why she had made such a big deal about it, no more than she understood why Thorn was now looking apprehensively at her.
“And it’s entirely my fault,” she added.
She pursed her lips to stop their inexplicable trembling, but it spread to her teeth, nostrils, eyelids, her whole body. The bottle of disinfectant slipped out of her hands and rolled on the grass, down the slope, to get lost among the stinging nettles, at the bus stop right at the bottom.
“I’m sorry.”
She no longer felt at all calm, and her stomach was hurting her. Living was hurting her. Octavio, Helen, and all the others should have all also had their place on this hill, facing this sky, under these olive trees.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered, not knowing what else to say. “I’m so . . .”
Her tearful voice drowned in Thorn’s shirt. With a creaking of metal, he had pressed Ophelia against him, hard, as if he wanted to contain her suffering with the same force as was needed to control his claws, but the apologies kept flooding out of her, in uncontrollable sobs, again and again and again.
THE STRANGERS
Ophelia woke up surrounded by stars. Night was nearing its end. Her first thought, at the sight of all these constellations, was that she didn’t know the name of one of them, but that didn’t stop her from finding them amazing. She had never really approved of Artemis’s interest in them. Why would a family spirit prefer stars to her descendants? She understood it better now: the secrets of the sky were less terrifying than those of her own life. Ophelia found it hard to believe that she shared the blood of a person who had originally been an echo, and even harder to believe that she had herself given birth to an echo that could well become a person, too.
Impossible lives suddenly appeared from nothingness. Others were plunged into it, or would never get out of it.
Ophelia’s chest lurched with a mix of guilt, curiosity, and fear. Her tears had released her emotions, painful as splinters of glass, but necessary, too. She couldn’t claim she felt well, but at least she felt.
Beyond the hill of olive trees, where she had fallen asleep, exhausted from too much crying, the voices from the party were getting more raucous. The laughter had become coarser, the songs bawdier. The Brats must have found some wine in a villager’s cellar. And a firework, too: there was a whistling in the sky that exploded into a single shower of light and smoke, pretty disappointingly, it must be said, and then more laughter and songs.
“Those idiots are going to end up causing a fire.”
Ophelia turned her glasses toward the figure half-leaning over her, totally still amid the swaying grasses. All she could detect of Thorn were angular contours and watchful breathing. Of course he wasn’t sleeping; like his claws and his memory, he never rested.
“What are you thinking about?” she murmured.
There was no shortage of subject matter. Ophelia had told him, in great detail, all that had happened in the second protocol: the chapel, the parrot, the confessional, the Knight, the crystallization, the Shadow, her partial Mutilation, the beetle woman, that train, finally, that should have taken her to the third protocol, and that hadn’t . . .
There was enough there to make one go mad.
Thorn’s reply was practical:
“About how to get back to Babel. It won’t be easy, even aside from the fact that we’ve lost all means of transport. LUX has placed the entire city under surveillance, and we wouldn’t survive a second expulsion. Even more than Lady Septima, it’s the Genealogists I don’t trust; we’ll have to avoid crossing their path at all costs. As for the Deviations Observatory, in the eventuality that, defying every statistic, we access it, I doubt they would let us get our hands on their Horn of Plenty without a fight. There, in broad outline,” concluded Thorn, after this monotonous account, “is what I’m thinking abou—”
“We could stay here.”
Thorn’s breathing went silent. As soon as the impulsive words were out, Ophelia regretted them.
“But we mustn’t,” she hastily continued. “Me least of all. Now that I know that I released the Other of my own free will, I must face the consequences. If he finds us again, before we have found the Horn of Plenty, he won’t give as a chance to turn him back into a mere echo.”
Despite what she said, she was fully aware of how little she knew about the Other. The Shadow had revealed to her that she had already met him, several times, without ever recognizing him. Where? On Anima? In the Pole? In Babel? Was he someone she had spoken to? An echo with a new body, a new face, perhaps even a new reflection? If so, then it could be anyone. It could be Ambrose, the enigmatic Ambrose who wasn’t anything he seemed to be, neither adolescent nor the son of Lazarus. No. Unimaginable. It was impossible for Ophelia t
o associate Ambrose with the widening void. And hadn’t he himself believed, at one time, that she was the Other?
Back to square one.
Ophelia had thought of the Other as an invisible enemy, monstrous and ruthless, but the unlocking of her childhood memory had turned that upside down, too. That call for help from the mirror in her bedroom, and the sincerity of his warning, had made the Other harder to hate. Had he manipulated Ophelia, or was his distress sincere? That was no excuse. Never would she forgive him, any more than she would forgive herself, for what he had done to Octavio, and to the world. And was perhaps still doing at this very moment.
Above her, half of the stars disappeared. Thorn’s huge shadow had darkened them, like the sign of a storm.
“Don’t get the wrong culprit. It’s not you but Eulalia who is entirely responsible. Where is she, that woman who cares so much about the fate of humanity, while her chosen ones dispose of undesirables, and her reflection tears our world apart? She’s hiding on the other side of this vast chessboard she has created, on which all the pieces—LUX, Genealogists, observers—have long been playing their own game with their own rules.”
Her hair tangled with grass, Ophelia stared at the huge frame looming over her in the dark, and which, like the Shadow, was faceless.
“How can one win against them, then?”
“By being aware of the game. We will find the Horn of Plenty, we will reduce Eulalia and the Other to powerlessness, and then we will smash the chessboard.”
Although Thorn couldn’t see Ophelia any more than she could see him, she nodded her head. The indefatigability of this man swept away her doubts, and his determination touched her. A disparity persisted between them, however. Thorn was an arrow focused on its target. Ophelia couldn’t dispel the feeling that there was another target, far bigger than Eulalia and the Other, a truth far crazier and far more fundamental. The Deviations Observatory had revealed some astounding things to her, but she felt that she had missed the most important of all: a revelation she needed in order to free herself definitively from the past.
The Storm of Echoes Page 33