“We are sinking to the sea!” she shouted, and with an aplomb she scarcely noticed stepped past and over mangled bodies all the way down to the others, never once slipping on blood or nicking herself on the scattered broken glass. To her utter delight, Chang was on his hands and knees, coughing onto the floor. The spray around his lips was no longer red but blue.
“It is working …” said Svenson.
Miss Temple could not speak, just glimpsing in the prospect of Chang alive the true depths of her grief at Chang being dead. She looked up to see the Doctor watching her face, his expression both marking her pleasure and vaguely wan.
“The Contessa?” he asked.
“She is bringing us down. We will hit the water at any moment!”
“We shall help Chang—Elöise, if you could take the bottle—while you attend to him.” Svenson looked over his shoulder at Roger Bascombe, sitting patiently on a settee.
“Attend to him how?” asked Miss Temple.
“However you like,” replied the Doctor. “Wake him or put a bullet through his brain. No one will protest. Or leave him—but I suggest choosing, my dear. I have learned it is best to be haunted by one’s actions rather than one’s lack of them.” He re-opened the hatch in the floor and sucked his teeth with concern. Miss Temple could smell the sea. Svenson slammed the hatch shut. “There is no time—we must get to the roof at once—Elöise!”
Between them they caught Chang’s arms and helped him up the stairs. Miss Temple turned to Roger. The dirigible shuddered, a gentle kick as the cabin struck a wave.
“Celeste—forget him!” shouted Elöise. “Come now!”
The airship shuddered again, settling fully onto the water.
“Wake up, Roger,” Miss Temple called, her voice hoarse.
He blinked and his expression sharpened, looking around him, taking in the empty room without comprehension.
“We are sinking in the sea,” she said.
“Celeste!” Svenson’s shout echoed down the stairs.
Roger’s eyes went to the pistol in her hand. She stood between him and the only exit. He licked his lips. The airship was rocking with the motion of the water.
“Celeste—” he whispered.
“So much has happened, Roger,” Miss Temple began. “I find … I cannot contain it …” She sniffed, and looked into his eyes—fearful, wary, pleading—and felt the tears begin in her own. “The Contessa advised me, just now, against regret—”
“Please—Celeste, the water—”
“—but I am not like her. I am not even like myself, perhaps my character has changed … for I am awash in regret for everything, it seems—for what has stained my heart, for how I am no longer a child …” She gestured helplessly at the carnage around them. “For so many dead … for Lydia … even poor Caroline—”
“Caroline?” asked Roger, a bit too suddenly, the words followed by an immediate awareness that perhaps this wasn’t the proper subject, given the circumstances, and the pistol. Miss Temple read the hesitation on his face, still grappling in her heart with the fact she had been found wanting twice in Roger’s rejection—first as a matter of course to his ambition, and then as a companion—and a lover!—to Caroline Stearne. This was not what she intended to talk about. She met his eyes with hesitations of her own.
“She is dead, Roger. She is as dead as you and I.”
Miss Temple watched Roger Bascombe take in this news, and understood that his next words were spoken not out of cruelty or revenge, but merely because she now stood for everything in his life that had thwarted him.
“She is the only one I ever loved,” said Roger.
“Then it is good that you found her,” said Miss Temple, biting her lip.
“You have no idea. You cannot understand,” he said, his voice bitter and hollow with grief.
“But I believe I do—” she began softly.
“How could you?” he shouted. “You never could understand—not me, nor any other, not in your pride—your very insufferable pride—”
She desperately wished Roger would stop speaking, but he went on, his emotions surging like the waves that slapped against the cabin walls.
“The wonders I have seen—the heights of sensation—of possibility!” He scoffed at her savagely, even as she saw tears in his eyes, tears rolling down his cheeks. “She pledged herself to me, Celeste—without even knowing who I was—without a care that we must die! That all is dust! That our love would lead to this! She knew even then!”
His hands shot out and shoved her hard, knocking her back into the cabinet. He stepped after her, arms flailing as he continued to yell.
“Roger, please—”
“And who are you, Celeste? How are you alive—so cold, so small of heart, so absent of feeling, without surrender!”
He caught her hard by the arm and shook her.
“Roger—”
“Caroline gave herself—gave everything! You have murdered her—murdered me—murdered the entire world—”
His groping hand found her hair and yanked her close—she felt his breath—and then his other hand was on her throat. He was sobbing. They stared into each other’s eyes. She could not breathe.
Miss Temple pulled the trigger and Roger Bascombe reared back. His face was confused, and instead of snapping forward again he merely faded, like a dissipating curl of smoke, a shapeless figure in a black coat, falling onto the settee and then slipping with an easy movement to the floor. Miss Temple dropped the gun and sobbed aloud, no longer knowing who she was.
“Celeste!”
This was Chang, roaring out from the rooftop despite his pain. She looked up. Miss Temple felt an icy stab at her feet and saw that water was seeping through the floor. She stumbled to the iron staircase, blind with tears, and groped her way, gasping with unspent grief. Doctor Svenson crouched in the wheelhouse and hauled her up. She wanted to curl into a corner and drown. He lifted her high and more hands—Elöise and Chang—helped her onto the roof. What did it matter? They would die in the cabin or die above—either way they would sink. Why had she done it? What did it change? The Doctor followed her out, pushing her legs from below.
“Take her,” Svenson said, and she felt Chang’s arm around her shaking shoulders. The gasbag above was slackening, carried to the side with the wind, still enormous but sagging into the water—as opposed to collapsing on top of them—and tipping the roof at an angle. The spray slopped over the cabin, spattering Miss Temple’s face, as waves rocked their precarious platform. Chang’s other hand held on to a metal strut, as did the Doctor and Elöise. Miss Temple looked around her.
“Where is the Contessa?” She sniffed.
“She was not here,” called Svenson.
“Perhaps she jumped,” said Elöise.
“Then she is dead,” said Svenson. “The water is too cold—her dress too heavy, it would pull her down—even if she survived the fall …”
Chang coughed, his lungs audibly clearer.
“I am in debt to you, Doctor, and your orange elixir. I feel quite well enough to drown.”
“I am honored to have been useful,” answered Svenson, smiling tightly.
Miss Temple shivered. What clothes she wore did nothing to cut the wind or the chilling water that splashed onto her trembling body. She could not bear it, no matter how the others tried to joke, she did not want to die, not after all this, and more than anything she did not care to drown. She knew it for an awful death—slow and mournful. She was mournful enough. She looked at her green boots and bare legs, wondering how long it would take. She had traveled so far in such a small amount of time. It was as if her rooms at the Boniface were as far away, and as much a part of the past, as her island home. She sniffed. At least she was back to the sea.
* * *
Miss Temple felt her flesh going numb, and yet when she looked down again the water had not climbed. She craned her head toward the open hatch to find the wheelhouse awash with rising water, with the sodden dress of Ca
roline Stearne swirling just under the surface. Yet why were they not sinking? She turned to the others.
“Is it possible we are aground?” she asked, through chattering teeth.
As one the other three echoed her look into the wheelhouse, and then all four searched around them for some clue. The water was too dark to reveal its depth. Ahead and to either side they could only find the open sea, while the view behind was blocked by the dirigible’s billowing, sagging gasbag. With a sudden burst of energy Cardinal Chang hoisted himself over the metal strut and clambered onto the canvas bag itself, each step across it pushing out gouts of trapped blue smoke. He dropped from Miss Temple’s view at the trough of each wave that passed beneath, and then she lost him altogether.
“We could be anywhere,” said Doctor Svenson, adding after a silence where neither woman spoke, “speaking cartographically …”
A moment later they heard Chang’s whooping cry. He was bounding back toward them, soaked to his waist, the canvas significantly flattened by his efforts.
“There is land!” he shouted. “God help us, it’s land!”
Doctor Svenson averted his eyes as he lifted Miss Temple over the metal struts, and then did the same for Elöise, Miss Temple taking the other woman’s hands. They helped each other over the dying gasbag, not halfway across before they were wet to their knees, but by then they could see it—a scumbled line of white breaking waves and a darker stripe of trees beyond.
Chang was waiting for her in the water and Miss Temple jumped into his arms. The sea was freezing, but she laughed aloud as it splashed against her face. She could not touch the sand with her toes and so she pushed herself away from Chang, took one look at the shore for a target, and then ducked herself under, the cold tingling the roots of her hair. Miss Temple swam, kicking her legs, unable to see in the dark water, the tears and sweat on her body dissolving in the sea, knowing she must hurry, that the cold would take her otherwise, that she would be even colder once outside the water, soaked and in the wind, and that from all of these things she still might perish.
She did not care about any of it. She smiled again, certain for the first time in so long exactly where she was, and where she was going to be. She felt like she was swimming home.
Time spent in an imaginary city calls forth a startling array of generosity and patience. To these people, places, and events this book is indebted, and to each I offer my thanks, grateful for the opportunity to do so.
Liz Duffy Adams, Danny Baror, Karen Bornarth, Venetia Butterfield, CiNE, Shannon Dailey, the Dailey family, Bart DeLorenzo, Mindy Elliott, Evidence Room, Exquisite Realms, Laura Flanagan, Joseph Goodrich, Allen Hahn, Karen Hartman, David Levine, Beth Lincks, Todd London, the Lower East Oval, Honor Molloy, Bill Massey, John McAdams, E. J. McCarthy, Patricia McLaughlin, Messalina, David Millman, Emily Morse, New Dramatists, Octocorp@30th & 9th [RIP], Suki O’Kane, Tim Paulson, Molly Powell, Jim and Jill Pratzon, Kate Wittenberg, Mark Worthington, Margaret Young.
My father, my sister, my cousin Michael.
About the Author
Playwright Gordon Dahlquist was born in the Pacific Northwest and lives in New York City. His second novel, The Dark Volume, will be available from Bantam Books in spring 2009.
Gordon Dahlquist Page 44