The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  She told Elias she didn’t give a toss for such men. At any rate, these soldiers ought not to be in Cyprus. The island should reunify and the Greek and Turkish Cypriots share power. She was writing a major article—she smiled, finger-quoting “major,” an irony that seemed at odds with the fervent way she was talking about her work—and was impatient to finish her research in this angry, backward outpost and fly back to Istanbul.

  A month ago Elias would have been sweatingly conscious of the men, his whole being limbering up for some inevitable friction. Now it seems he can’t even acknowledge the possibility of conflict. Conflict exists only in the flow of time, and Elias—sedated and drunk since they flew him into Cyprus two weeks ago—has come to inhabit a blurred, dreamy present, night and day.

  She glanced back over her shoulder as they left the bar.

  Now, as he takes a drag on one of her cigarettes (there’s no sort of drug he would decline right now), she asks, “What would your Larnaca relatives think of you—your fraternizing with a Turkish?”

  His ears still throb from the hip hop. The ringing seems to amplify the unearthly silence welling from the dead zone behind where they’re sitting.

  “I know what my aunt’s mother would say. She’s almost a hundred. She’s got what we call Greek Alzheimer’s. You forget everything but the grudges.”

  “If only,” she says, “that were only Greek.”

  “Anyway, I’m Canadian. And my father was born in New York. My mother was half-Mexican, which means part Spanish, part Indian. My stepmother is Pakistani. I don’t even speak Greek properly.”

  “Canadian men are very polite.”

  He feels his mouth stretch, as if in a smile. “More so when we’re at home, I think. With neighbours around, and cops.”

  “If only that were only Canadian.”

  He nods.

  “You’ve been a perfect gentleman,” she says, as though to reassure him. “But I know something upsets you.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No. Before.”

  Taurus is rearing star by star out of the sea. He cranes his head way back. The firmament whirls. Usually it’s on standing up that you notice how drunk you are, but now it hits him: he’s deeply, comprehensively drunk. All right. He wants to be nowhere now but in his floating body. He wants to do nothing anymore but tender, gentle things, except for those moments when he wants to do nothing but savage things—to lunge and slash at the face of an attacker, an accuser, in a heart-stalling dream.

  “At what point can I start being less of a gentleman?”

  She pulls her hand free of his and while lifting her bare knees reaches her hands down, slips off her black flats and sets them beside her in the sand—almost the same devastating sequence of motions she might use to peel off underwear. She takes his hand again. His whole arm hums, from the marrow out.

  “Now,” she says, and her face turns up toward his. Her breath has the pleasant tartness of white wine, the faint scorch of Scotch and tobacco. In her perfume a lemony sweetness, like the scent of water lilies in summer lakes. You would tread water to smell them, or lean over a canoe’s cedar gunwale. God, another life! Her lips open for the kiss but she withholds her tongue and for him that absence brings on a sort of vertigo, as if he’s tumbling forward into an abyss when he expected solidity, resistance.

  A breeze flows up the beach and cools his damp face as the kiss deepens.

  —

  Sometime later, he asks if he is too heavy, the sand too hard.

  “You could be heavier,” she says. “It’s very good.”

  “You mean, heavier would be—”

  “Hush.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  She laughs. “Like this? So gentle?”

  His torpor and sedation do slow him down—he’s not very hard, either—so he and Eylül seem to float on and on in a languid, suspended, narcotic rhythm. “Hush,” she says again, “it’s good.” Beneath him she keeps her eyes shut tight, as if striving to remember some crucial thing. She’s far quieter than he would have expected. He grates his hips side to side as well as thrusting, very slowly. On and on in this stoned reverie until some impulse makes him speed up, push into her with a new urgency, and finally she tenses and sinks him deeper in, her hands clutching his hips, her sharp-boned ankles and calves gritty with sand. A quiet, mild crescendo of sighs. She lifts her face to his and now he tastes her thrusting tongue.

  Her spasms, which he can feel, tip him over at last. His climax is muted and yet oddly prolonged, and when finally it starts to subside, along with his wounded moaning and panting, he’s conscious of a faint, dispersed rustling in the sand. He looks up and around. In their density the stars, like bioluminescence in a calm sea, give actual light. Everything wheels around him: somehow the beach is moving, landsliding slowly past them toward the waterline, or else he and Eylül are gliding up the beach toward the chain-link fence, the barbed wire and the ruins. It’s his head spinning with drink, he guesses—then realizes that hundreds of small creatures, solidly covering the beach to his left, are crawling past. He squints, recoils: tarantulas scuttling seaward like a mass of tiny battle tanks. His eyes adjust. They’re sea-turtle hatchlings, the starlight dim on their camouflage-pattern shells, scrabbling flippers, bobbing heads, a mob of them spilling out of the darkness up by the fence. Somehow their arrival triggers in him a surge of tenderness toward Eylül. His throat aches. For some moments he watches them. Again her face looms up. She bites him on his turned cheek. He says, “Look,” but she is already looking.

  “Goodness!”—he has never heard a woman of her age say this word—“they frightened me.”

  “Must have just hatched,” he says.

  “Of course they have.”

  As he closes her eyes with a kiss, she whispers, “Arkadash.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Faint splashes of light appear among the turtles—some dozen last stragglers with impassive, prehistoric little faces, flippers spastically rowing in the sand. The light shifts. Elias stares stupidly. Heat lightning? He looks over his right shoulder, northward up the beach. A flashlight, sweeping from side to side, is bearing down on them.

  “Eylül?”

  “I see it. Get off me.”

  “We’d better—”

  She hisses something in Turkish, yet he seems to hear the word in clear English, Hurry. Hurrying seems beyond him, but his body, a step ahead, lifts and pulls out of her, the uncoupling even more of a shock than usual. She’s muttering in Turkish, sitting up, scrambling in a darkness now strobed by the approaching flashlight. She seems to be crossing herself—a Christian?—then he sees: she’s pulling closed and buttoning the lime silk blouse she never fully removed. He is on his feet, hiking up his black jeans, buckling his belt, looking for his shoes, remembering he tossed them under a lamppost hours ago in the sand outside the bar. She stands and slips something into her handbag, smoothes down her skirt. From up the beach a squabble of voices conferring, then a hoarse voice projecting—words cutting out of the dark toward them like shrapnel. The light beam freezes her, blanching her face—her mouth a tight, stricken line—though now, with what seems an almost casual calmness, she fits her stylish glasses back on.

  “Should we run?” he asks, and the light swings toward him.

  “Don’t move. Let me answer them.”

  The flashlight stops about ten paces away and he senses more than sees the figures bunching up behind it. Four, maybe five. There’s something haphazard, unofficial about the party: their lone flashlight, disordered voices, the way they’ve faltered and stopped short of the couple, who now stand a few metres apart, like two strangers out walking the beach who’ve been surprised in accidental proximity. The men behind the flashlight are drunk, he hears it in their voices. “It’s the guys from the bar,” he says, but she’s speaking over him, addressing the men in a thin tremolo that sounds scornful, indignant, and scared. A beat of silence, then the men jabber back. Along the edge of
the flashlight beam an arm extends, pointing at Elias. He doesn’t know whether to move toward Eylül or away from her.

  The Cyclopean eye of the flashlight focuses on her but keeps flitting over to Elias’s face, as if the men think he means to bolt. He would love to bolt. Despite his sedation he could run full out, he thinks, the blood sluicing inside him, his heart punching up against his palate. These men—off-duty, some of them maybe not even soldiers—might be unarmed. Likely unarmed. He’s about to tell Eylül that he and she can run from this posse of drunkards when one of them shouts something and Eylül flinches as if struck—and this flinch, this tiny retreat, is decisive. The men smell blood. The light surges forward, the dim figures bunched behind it. Numbly, Elias steps sideways toward her into the circle of light, trying to make himself look big. He’s bigger than these yammering silhouettes. You are a big guy. He coaches himself bigger, the way he used to before rugby scrums, nothing serious at stake. A hand shoves the flashlight under their noses and Elias raises a hand to parry it, blocking out the beam. Unblinded momentarily, he makes out four men—three clustered close around the flashlight bearer, who grips a pistol in his other hand, holding it beside his cheek, aiming the barrel straight upward. The men’s fatigues show a camouflage motif. Their faces, except for the flashlight man’s, look young.

  Retreating from them while also moving away from him, Eylül says something that sounds urgently appeasing. Her hands fan open in front of her. A man advances into the circle of light and then clumsily springs forward. Elias sees it in stop-start, a sequence of vivid stills—Eylül stepping back, the man extending his arms and hands toward her like a sleepwalker. “Stop!” Elias orders, the word plosive and louder than any utterance so far, but no one turns toward him. He has become inaudible, invisible; they have forgotten him; he could still escape.

  She flails her handbag and it thuds into the side of the first man’s head. Two of the men join the attack while the one with the pistol aims the light. Elias grabs the arm holding the flashlight and pushes it up, sending the beam skyward. The man swings the pistol but Elias intercepts the blow and thrusts that hand upward too, then slips his calf behind the man’s leg and with his whole body, much larger than the Turk’s, topples him backward and pins him. The man keeps the small pistol in his grip but the flashlight falls loose, so now the scene is dimly underlit by the red glow of a lens half-buried in sand. Eylül is down on the beach a few steps away, struggling. For the second time tonight Elias lies on top of a stranger, this one smaller than Eylül but wiry, furiously strong, silent as though holding his breath while he fights.

  A flash and sharp popping as the gun in the soldier’s pinned hand fires. Butting the man in the face conclusively, Elias lifts and smashes down the hand and the pistol flips loose into the dark. He can’t see it. He reels to his feet and moves toward the struggle a few metres off, all in the embering glow of the half-buried flashlight, and brushes past a man hurrying in the other direction—to help the officer Elias just took down? He and this man could be commuters almost colliding on a sidewalk. He drags one soldier off Eylül, she lashing and scratching at the other, who now turns his head up toward Elias, the face a blur in the faint light. Elias shoves the heel of his palm into the face. He reaches down to Eylül but she’s already up. She takes his hand and they’re running, a slow-motion scramble, feet sinking in, no traction. Every few strides a cry is wrung out of her, as if his body is on top of hers again and pushing down hard and fast.

  Suddenly their shadows appear, stretched thin, flailing ahead of them up the beach. “The fence,” he says, and they’re angling toward it. The light reveals a helix of barbed wire on top of the fence, rusted, sagging. A shot follows the light beam and the sound ricochets off the facades of the hotels.

  Somehow he has been transported back to where he was two weeks ago, a place he thought he’d escaped, at least physically. More gunfire. He looks for a breach, wills a breach in the wire or the fence below it. Despite or because of intoxication, the shooter is squeezing off shots with robotic regularity, five, ten. Eylül slows for a moment, seeming to miss a step as if skipping, then runs on beside Elias. No more shots. A small opening appears where the bottom of the fence warps upward, clear of the sand. “Here. Get down.” They kneel and he reaches to push her flat but she’s already there. He heaves up on the rusted fence, widening the gap. “Go through. Crawl through.” In the wavering light, the flashlight juddering toward them, she lies on her front, her face twisted sideways in the sand, looking up at him. “Eylül,” he says. Her glasses are gone, her eyes unblinking. A stain opens at the small of her back. He presses his palm into the side of her neck, his fingers over the ear he spoke into, almost kissed, in the bar a few hours ago. He’s not so much checking for a pulse—hauled back into hell, he’s sure there will be none—as feeling the warmth of that sunburned ear and cheek. He sags onto his back beside her, as if giving up. Then, both hands pressing upward on the loose chain links, he wriggles through the gap into the dead zone.

  BLACK BOX

  Three men stand above the woman who lies in the sand by the fence in a circle of light. One of the three, groggy and teetering, leans on a subordinate, who has wrapped an arm around the hurt man’s shoulder. In other circumstances this intimacy might seem a slight impertinence, less because of rank (the older man is only a sergeant) than because of the difference in age.

  A third man holds both the flashlight and the sergeant’s semi-automatic pistol. He was holding neither when he and the others came shambling up the beach, searching for the couple. He would prefer to be empty-handed still—he doesn’t want to keep shining the light on the woman’s body. He fired the full clip without thinking, partly because in any action film or television drama he has seen, that’s what armed men do when people flee from them. He has never shot at anyone before. Firing haphazardly into the night seemed to him, in his drunken excitement, no more consequential an act than shooting off fireworks.

  Of all the men, he was the one least angered by the couple in the bar.

  While they discuss in loud whispers what to do with the woman’s body, a fourth man stands a short distance away at the waterline, the toes of his boots dimpling down into the wet sand. In either hand he grips a mobile phone. One of them he took from the handbag of the Turkish woman and the other was there on the beach near the handbag; it must have fallen out of the big foreigner’s pocket when he attacked the sergeant.

  It’s this man’s job to dispose of the phones.

  In the course of their uneventful patrols along the perimeter of the dead zone, the soldiers often compete by trying to pitch stones through gaping second-or third-storey embrasures that were once windows. Small wagers are sometimes involved. This man has by far the best arm. He hauls back and overhands the Turkish woman’s mobile out over the sea, toward a horizon softening with the glow of a late moon about to rise. Moments later there’s a faint, almost secretive splash. The splash comes too early. The throw was poor. These shallows extend a good distance out, and though few if any people ever swim here…In his stupor the man pursues the thought no further, but he does hurl the foreigner’s smaller, lighter phone with more follow-through and at a steeper angle. He listens for a splash. His head still thrums from the music in the bar and the gunshots and his own pulse, which clouts louder in his ears now.

  As he transferred the phone to his throwing hand he accidentally turned it on, and as it sails through the dark and arcs downward toward the sea, data pings into it from a remote server: a lone voicemail sent several hours ago, while it was turned off. The rim of the phone slices the surface with hardly a splash, but it’s enough to alarm the few last turtle hatchlings straggling nearby. The fish-silver thing plunges past them and then, a few feet down—as if noticing the turtles with predatory interest—it slows. The turtles veer in unison, swinging wide around the disturbance and paddling on.

  Through thickening black the phone sinks, its angle of entry taking it just beyond the drop-off where the s
hallows fall away into deeper water. Its circuits go on functioning, like an aircraft’s flight data recorder signalling on the drift down among fresh wreckage, though the phone is not watertight and will soon be dead.

  Message one was received from 357 594 9744 on Saturday, October 27 at 7:22 P.M. “Corporal—Elias? This is Dr. Boudreau, in Paphos. I do hope you are enjoying yourself with your relations there, and that you—uh—if you would return my call tonight, or tomorrow? Preferably tonight. We do meet on Tuesday, but we must discuss something now. The inquiry into, uh—into the events of which you continue to dream?—I learn now it has been postponed, possibly cancelled, and I wished to advise you before you learn of it, in case it should make you wish to, uh, to speak out. Let me urge again, say nothing, especially now that you are on leave, perhaps relaxing, perhaps drinking. I do hope you can relax! But were you—were you to speak now, the authorities would do their best to discredit you and disgrace. I’ve spoken again to Colonel McKay. He vows that an inquiry, if it occurs, will be full and impartial and, uh, uh, while you and I might…I will explain further when you call. Please. It’s unofficial. I should disconnect before the device cuts me off.”

  —

  From the gap in the fence to the line of buildings was only a few dozen steps. He ran, crouching low, expecting more shots at every moment. Ahead, a solid wall of black. Then the swath of the flashlight beam swept over him and the ruin of a building loomed out of the dark. The beam swung away but at the last moment revealed a gap—an alley opening between the pocked facades of the high-rise in front of him and the next one down. He made for the gap, guided by a dim glow seeping out of the mouth of the alley. Sand gave way to shattered concrete stabbing into his bare soles. He ducked into the opening. Starlight carpeted the floor of the alley. The slap of his steps echoed up between the walls to where the stars trembled in a long strip of sky.