and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

“Absolutely not.” She plunked her knitting down on the table and turned her chair to face her patient.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “I can ask the doctor to write you something for that.”

  “I don’t want pills Clare, I want exercise.”

  “So you propose to just trot about my corridors?”

  “Until I’m tired enough to drop.”

  “I cannot allow that.”

  Dominic leaned wearily against the cold, tile wall, closed his eyes, and listened to the little lounge refrigerator’s dull, mechanical keening. He waited. Frail and nervous though she was, Clare had clearly chosen nursing out of a genuine care for others. Dominic felt her eyes touch his face and he sagged deliberately, making his best play for her compassion.

  “Clare,” he said, meeting her eyes at last, “I’m exhausted. There has been a constant parade of visitors and doctors through my room since I regained consciousness. And I’m certain that I loved my friends and family, but they all feel like strangers to me now.”

  “I never thought of that. It must be like entertaining guests for you, rather than visiting with family.”

  Dominic nodded. “And the doctors…”

  “I understand.” Clare stood up. “You go back to your room now and relax. No running, but take a shower. Go to bed. I won’t let anyone disturb you. Not even the doctors. Not for a couple of hours, anyway.”

  “Can you really do that?”

  Clare’s dark eyes glinted with determination. “Aye, I can do that,” she said. “You get some rest, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”

  Dominic smiled wearily and walked to the door. “Why won’t you use my first name, Clare?”

  “I remember who you were, Doctor.”

  “And you use my title to remind me, is that it?”

  Clare regarded him unblinking. “Go to bed, Doctor.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You have my personal guarantee of at least an hour to yourself. But I can only keep the doctors away for so long. They begin last rounds at nine. I can stall them, but I can’t stop them.”

  “Thanks for taking me under your wing this way, Clare.”

  “Never you mind. I hope it helps.”

  Dominic glanced back at the nurse, but she had resumed her knitting and did not meet his eyes. He retreated to his room, to find Gaehod there, dressed for safari in white linen, already engrossed in his mysterious work. Dominic closed the door.

  The old innkeeper had laid out an array of strange supplies on the striped plane of Dominic’s hospital bed. A slender Chinese calligraphy brush and an ancient carved bone flask waited beside seven neat piles of vellum, hide, clay, and paper. Gaehod was crouched over the red leather-clad diary when Dominic came in. He looked up, but seeing Dominic, gestured for him to sit, and began leafing through a clearly decades-older, yellowing, blue-lined notepad spidered in rough semi-literate scrawl. Gaehod made a final notation and looked up.

  “Very well. I think we’re ready.”

  “Okay.” Dominic squared his shoulders. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Nothing, right now. I need to prepare the window.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Gaehod opened the hinged brass lid of the squat, bone pot and dipped the brush’s unevenly colored hairs into it. With careful strokes, he began painting the hospital window in minute, swooping red symbols.

  “What does that mean?” Dominic asked.

  “It’s a name,” Gaehod answered, preoccupied. Beneath it, he drew another symbol. Then, taking a step to his left, he made another sign a little lower on the glass. “Another name,” he explained without turning around. He drew four figures directly beneath the name, and moved left again and farther down again. Dominic was surprised by how beautiful each symbol was, and the way the deep red ink stayed completely opaque and glistening, but did not run or harden.

  Gaehod worked counterclockwise, creating a circle of stacked symbols on the window. Each stack was crowned with a unique name, but in the columns below, Dominic began to notice a few repeated motifs, a pattern in the incomprehensible signs.

  “What does that symbol mean?” he asked, as Gaehod finished drawing one of the more frequent symbols on the glass.

  “It’s the sigil ‘heartbreak.’ ”

  Dominic snorted. “I seem to have had more than my share.”

  Gaehod consulted the next stack of papers on the bed and shook his roan head. “No. Below each name is a list of pivots, the points where a life turns.” He dipped the brush into the bone pot again and returned to the window. Dominic watched the stabbing liquid lines.

  “They all look painful,” he said.

  “Pain is a catalyst for change.” Gaehod bent to draw an abbreviated column at the lowest point on the window.

  “Not all changes are good,” Dominic said, his lingering eyes on the brilliant red knife-lines of heartbreak.

  “No,” Gaehod agreed, consulting the next stack of papers on the bed, “but even good change can be painful.”

  Dominic watched the red ink clinging to the motley bristles of the brush. The cord binding them looked new, although the handle was ancient.

  “Did you make that brush yourself, Gaehod?”

  “Yes.”

  “Especially for tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  Gaehod glanced at Dominic and turned to the hospital window again.

  “Gaehod, is that my hair?” Dominic asked.

  Gaehod dipped the brush in the ink and drew another name with another line of symbols. He worked swiftly, with complete concentration, and Dominic didn’t interrupt again, watching the red circle close, searching for patterns in the columns and letter shapes.

  “There’s the symbol for heartbreak again,” Dominic noted.

  “Heartbreak is necessary to a complete life. You can’t fall in love until your heart’s been broken. You must stand on the splintered pieces to reach the first rung. Come here, Dominic.”

  Dominic walked to the glyph-crowded window, his heart thundering. Every animal part of him, brain-stem to fingertip, was alight with danger.

  “It’s time.” Gaehod said. His face was deeply lined with fatigue or anguish, but he did not ask Dominic if he was certain he wanted to proceed, despite clearly wishing that he would not. “Look at your eyes in the glass,” he said.

  Dominic looked at his reflection. He looked ragged, unshaven, and weary. Then he met his own eyes and gazed into their unfamiliarity.

  “Now look out the window,” Gaehod said.

  Dominic toggled his focus and saw the rain-polished roofs and streets of Dublin.

  “Put your left hand on the top symbol.” Gaehod’s voice was soft, a subtle whisper, almost more in Dominic’s thoughts than hearing. He touched hesitant fingers to the cold glass.

  “See your eyes.”

  They were darker somehow, and his nose longer and strong. His face, lashes, and brows, where they bordered his vision, seemed younger, but unfamiliar still.

  “Look through the window.”

  The city’s spires and depressions, shades of darkness, profiles of commerce, swam into focus.

  “Look in your eyes.”

  Dominic’s focus switched, blurring for a moment, the red circle at the periphery of vision, but he did not blink, and black eyes met his gaze again.

  “Look through the window.”

  His raised hand on the glass kept him from falling into the night outside, where buildings, like trees, stretched endlessly up.

  “Look through your eyes.”

  The whirling red circle rimmed his vision and the glass, like water, rippling, showed him himself reflected, deep eyes, almost green, beneath long lashes, still unblinking.

  “See through the window.”

  Back again, the switching focus, dizzying, the lights shining, city smoking, shivering.

  “See through your eyes.”

  “The window.”

  “Your eyes.”

 
“The window.”

  Gaehod’s voice commanded. Dominic’s focus shifted. The red ring around him blurred. The night, his vision, his open eyes, the glass between them, everything began to dissolve and whisper, blur and seep. Dominic caught glimpses of different eyes, none of them—and all of them—his own, reflected back and across nights of cities and forests and towns.

  “Sweep your hand in a circle across the glass.”

  Dominic obeyed, his stiff arm twisting in the socket.

  “Again.”

  It was easier the second time, although he still did not blink his eyes. His palm slid frictionless across the cool glass. “Again.”

  His arm flooded with the heat of movement returning, tingling up from his fingers, smearing the glass. He blinked. Staggered. Shambhu, Bel-nirari, Gnith Cas.

  Brother! Priestess!

  Gaehod’s arms came around his violently convulsing shoulders. Leaning against Gaehod’s maternal softness, Dominic backed numbly from the window. His arm fell heavily away from generation after generation. He stumbled against the edge of his metal hospital bed and let Gaehod ease his exhausted body down. Antonius Musa, Huáng Z?ngx?, Venerio lo Grato.

  Mother! Ghita!

  The man’s tender hands pulled the blankets up, and Dominic closed his smoking eyes. The metal door whispered closed.

  Dominic looked through the wiped-clean glass, ready to continue, learning nothing but the unique lines of cityscapes and faces. His searching eyes closed against the unending night, willing to keep solving nothing, fighting and building, with his stubborn strength against the vast and constant void of love and loss repeating. It had been so much, so distant and enduring. Heartbreaking. And yes, magnificent.

  13

  LEGEND

  The heiress’s godchild is divine. At least that’s what my tattoo says. Okay, if I’m honest, it just suggests it. But true twenty-first-century girl that I am, literal is my only metaphor.

  Dublin’s tattoo parlors cluster into a few square blocks like American churches in a one-stoplight town. I began my pilgrimage late on a southwest corner and was turned away from the first four doors I entered. But Dani has tattooed over surgery scars before and only warns me about the pain. “You’ll wish you were dead,” he tells me. “The nerves are closer to the surface in scars.”

  He tells me to break the work into sessions, but I offer him twice his posted rate to finish tonight. It takes nine hours. We don’t talk. He’s grudgingly impressed that I don’t make a sound while the needle drills scar tissue and bone, and he stops only to pee. He doesn’t hit on me. I’m not his type.

  It’s early morning when Dani finishes. He offers me a pint, but I say I need to get on the road, and he understands. I had wanted to go to Glendalough, to see its famous bell tower pictured on the tourist guides, but I’m following the hand-drawn map instead, driving into the heart of Ireland on the small roads—unnamed on map or sign—that vein the land. Several times I stop and get out of the car to look around or just listen. I am absurd, as more of the landscape unfurls, hopping in and out of the car to stare at each new convolute and coil, somewhere between inspiration and idiocy. It seems impossible that the vampire bars of New York that I left behind so recently could belong to the same world I now inhabit.

  I am waylaid again and again by the glory of this strange land. For miles, as far as I can see in any direction, the road I’m driving is the only sign of human work. I leave the rental in the road; there is no shoulder to pull over onto. In fact, there are no lanes—but there are also no cars. I’m staggered by the indefinite expanse and silence and beauty. This landscape could be anytime—the earth before mankind, the Garden before the fall. And yet, I feel at home inside it.

  The Rock of Cashel is a geologically drastic stone outcrop burst from Tipperary’s lush and gentle landscape. I imagine people have lived or worshiped from its lofty vantage as long as there have been people, but I’m just glad you can see it from a long way off. This is where my map delivers me.

  I spend an hour and a half systematically following every road that radiates from the rock. On the fourth of five roads, I chance upon a ruined abbey, late in the afternoon, a little off the road and across a field of grazing cows, dull and placid in the un-mystic sun. Behind the church, I discover two headstones, and stretch out in the soft grass to watch the prototypical spring clouds in the bright blue sky. Tomorrow will be May. There are more cold days to come, but right now, the sun is low and warm. I’m deeply relaxed, almost slipping into sleep, when it occurs to me that interred beneath me are men who buried their lust beneath their desire for union with a perfect god and so managed, their whole lives, to avoid sleeping with a woman. It seems cruel of me to lie above them now, so I get up. “May you sleep ever with the angels,” I pray.

  I am climbing the abbey’s interrupted walls again, when I see a man across the field. Something in his confident stride suggests urgency. He is not wandering or exploring. He is pursuing. His shoulders are broad, and his hands ball into taut fists. He will not be brooked, whatever his search. I put my head over the parapet to watch him.

  He’s handsome, hair glinting red in the sunset’s bloody light. There’s something of the warrior in his lithe body, and he jumps the low stone wall easily. He stops at the ruined threshold. His eyes, blue as a sword’s edge, run across the edifice, but he doesn’t see me above it. He walks through the doorless opening in the wall I sit atop, into the grass-carpeted nave. He looks up, gazing through an empty stone window toward the cloudless, blue sky. I walk soundlessly down the spiraling stair.

  “Hi,” I say quietly, not to startle him.

  ———

  “Olivia,” Dominic whispered. He turned from the window and found her dressed for roaming the Irish countryside in jeans and a sweatshirt, wearing running shoes in the soft grass.

  “Hi,” she said again. She was slender and pale, beautiful in an unexplainable way, but almost shy, looking at him and then down. He took a step to put his arms around her again—at last, but she stepped away.

  “Do I know you?” she said.

  For the first time since he woke up in the hospital almost a week ago, Dominic felt afraid. How, after everything, could she be lost to him now?

  “I’m sorry. I have a terrible memory,” she said. “Please don’t take it personally. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” She shrugged prettily. “Too many drugs,” she smiled.

  “Olivia—” He searched her flawless face.

  She smiled gently—warm, but a little sad. “Tell me how we know each other?”

  “You…” he whispered, unable to meet her oceanic eyes. “You’re my angel.”

  She laughed, clear and brilliant. “Not at all. Just a concerned stranger.”

  Rage welled through Dominic. If he could believe in God, he would hate Him for this. “No,” he ground out, striding away from her, away from the no-longer-moonlit abbey, away from idiocy, idealism, and undying love. He would have killed Gaehod in that moment, for convincing him to hope. Or Dysart for cautioning him against it.

  “Wait!” She followed him to the boundary of ancient edifice and present pasture. “Let’s sit down. You can tell me everything, okay?” She patted the rough stones of the wall beside her. “The cows won’t hurt us, will they?”

  “No. Olivia…” How could he tell her anything at all?

  Dominic could not make himself obey her, and stayed standing, silent, twisting a small rock from the low wall between his fingers. “When I was fourteen,” he said at last, “I dug up two million dollars in Civil War-era gold on my grandparents’ ranch.”

  “Wow! Weren’t you the lucky kid?”

  “Maybe.” Dominic threw the stone hard away from himself. It bounded off the church wall and vanished into the grass. “Or maybe I remembered where I had buried it a hundred and fifty years before, afraid to be hung as a thief if anyone found that kind of gold with a black man.”

  “Past-life memories?”

  “Maybe. Maybe c
oincidence.”

  “Which?”

  He looked at her. The setting sun burned the sky above her, staining the clouds, and even the air between them, a honeyed red. Utterly beautiful, black wisps of hair blowing in silken shadows across her heavenly pale skin. She was asking him for more than his opinion.

  “Both,” he answered.

  Her smile reached into Dominic’s torment, and quieted a seething place.

  “That’s not a very scientific answer,” he admitted, looking down from her soft beauty to his hard hands. He couldn’t bear her right now.

  “And I’m a scientist. I’ve spent my adult life and most of the proceeds from that gold I found searching for testable, concrete answers to simpler questions, and all I can tell you is that the infinite reaches of outer space are well-mapped compared to what we know about the human mind. Each of us carries a vast and disobedient terra incognita inside our own skulls.”

  Her bubbling laugh released something in the deep muscles of his shoulder. “Yeah,” she said, meeting his eyes frankly, “it’s unruly inside my head, too.”

  The spectra of the setting sun framed her like a halo, making Dominic squint against the apocalyptic red. He sat down beside her, so that looking at her no longer blinded him.

  “But we’ll figure it out eventually, right?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s possible our brains are wired in such a way that we aren’t capable of understanding how our brains are wired.”

  “There’s something magical in that.”

  “And even…” Dominic pressed on. “Even if science gets to the place where we know, on a molecular level, the mechanics of thought, it won’t tell us anything definitive about the purpose of thinking, or why, abstractly, we are capable of abstraction. Science is good with fact, but it’s useless with meaning.” He glanced at her uncertainly.

  “Look,” he tried again, “it’s a fact I found a rotting box of stamped gold bricks. But what did it mean? Hell if I know.”

  Olivia smiled. “It meant”—she poked him playfully on the arm—“that you’d never have to work again.”

  “I gave most of the money to the place I went to grad school.”