The Age of Perpetual Light

by Josh Weil

  He was glad when she came out through the front door and surprised by how quickly she had managed it. He called to her and warned her of the animals and she held up the gun to show she knew. He swung the door and got out. Standing on his good leg, with his bad one hurting just from touching the ground, he hurled the bloody jeans at the eyes in the woods. They crashed into the brush. The eyes scattered. He stood for a moment, watching them slink back, until he heard them snarling at each other over his offering. Then he limped as fast as he could to her coming through the scrub to meet him.

  Inside, he found a couch and hauled his leg up onto the arm and lay there and told her he was not moving again until mirror-rise. She explored. He dozed off and woke to the sound of her rummaging in a desk and dozed and woke again to her talking excitedly to him while she held up a brick-sized bottle of white glue. When he woke next it was full morning and she was sitting naked on his chest. She had drawn all the shades and they were glowing green. Slivers of sunlight sliced in and found the books and dust motes and one lay slantwise across her body. She had filled her hair with the glue. It was pasted to the sides of her head and in the middle spiked up in a two-foot mohawk so thick with the stuff it had only dried crusty at he tips; the clammy rest flopped to a side. She reached up and straightened it while she talked, and each time she did her breast rose and tightened against her chest and then relaxed again and he smiled.

  “I’ve been shot,” he said.

  “Poor baby,” she said.

  “I can’t move enough.”

  “For what?”

  “For anything.”

  “Then don’t.” She got up off him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” she said again, and came back holding an old lime green tape dispenser full of yellowed tape in one hand. In the other she held heavy metal-handled scissors with blades like hedge shears. He lay there while she taped his wrists together and then his ankles, wondering the whole time if he was actually going to let her, and a little awed by the fact that he did.

  When she was done she put the tape aside and opened the scissors and, quick, so fast he couldn’t do anything but say her name, she slashed them across the top of her thigh. She did it three times, pressing hard. He lay there, not knowing what to say, watching the blood well up on her in the gashed lines.

  “You don’t know what I’m capable of,” she said.

  They did things with each other then that they had not known existed before they did them and yet once done seemed like things they had been wanting to do since they had first met and when they were finished it was midday and they were both clammy and spent and more tired than they had ever been and neither of them could sleep.

  He lay there and watched her while she browsed the books. Her mohawk had mostly dried and her hair was strangely translucent in the light. She pulled books and looked at them and put them back and between each one she picked at the dried glue on her palms.

  “You’re pretty messed up,” she said.

  “You’re one to shrink my head.”

  She shrugged, pulled a book. “You ever been to one? A psychiatrist?” She looked up from it in her hands. “Oh, I forgot, I can’t ask you, um, anything.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve never been.”

  “You should,” she said.

  “You should.”

  “I have.”

  “If you’re gonna confess to me,” he said. “Don’t.”

  “It’s not like you think.”

  “I stopped thinking I could outthink it a while ago.”

  “I mean going to a psychiatrist. They don’t put you on a couch and ask you about your fucking mother or what. They know everything now. About the mind. They know—”

  “They don’t know everything.”

  “Sorry, but …”

  “You mean the brain.”

  “… they do. I mean the mind. They can tell you what chemical makes you like french fries.”

  “I don’t care to know.”

  “Or me.”

  “Good,” he said. “Then we’re—”

  “I mean or me. They can tell you what makes you like me. Or me like you.”

  “No they can’t,” he said.

  She shrugged. “They know what sadness is.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “And happiness, and hope and de-fucking-spair. They know what it is. They can point right to the part of your mind.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean the fucking soul,” she said. “They can tell you what brain transmitter fires what node to what receptor cell in what lobe, which you know what all of it means?”

  “That you’re crazy about french fries.” He smiled. “With a fuckload of ketchup.”

  “Love. That’s what love is. They know it. They can tell you exactly how it happens and why and they can—”

  “You know what?” he said. “Keep that shit to yourself.”

  “The fucking soul,” she said.

  “No, that’s not the—”

  “Then what the fuck is?”

  He could feel the pain throbbing up from his leg, and it seemed to him he could feel the very nerves, each one, and the blood running through him and each vein that carried it and he said, “You talk like we’re fucking machines.”

  “I’m just telling it how it is.”

  He watched her reach the end of a row and disappear. He could hear her running the back of her nails across the spines of the books in another row. “Do you believe that?” he said.

  “I don’t think it’s believe or not believe.” She came into view and gave him a smile that was the first time she had smiled at him that he wished she hadn’t. “They can tell you what belief is too.”

  “Well, fuck it,” he said. “I don’t want it.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  “Come here,” he told her.

  She came and lay down on top of him, careful of his leg, just lay there without him having to say a word.

  After a while he said, “I’ve been thinking about why I couldn’t shoot that man.” He could feel her breath on his chest and he knew she was listening. “It’s this clean slate.” She shifted on him so she could look at him and he felt her breath on the underside of his neck. “You don’t know shit about me except whatever’s been since we got together. And I don’t know hardly shit about you. And fuck if I’m gonna fuck that up, you know?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Fuck that up? No way. If there was a fucking rat over there”—he swept a hand at the whole place—“I wouldn’t kill it. I wouldn’t even fucking bother it. Not with you here. For all you know I’m a sweet, kind, good fucking man.”

  “Except for what you’ve done.”

  “Which you don’t know. That’s the beauty. That’s the beauty, Drema. For you, that’s here,” he touched her temple so gently he wasn’t even sure if his finger had actually made contact with her skin. “That’s exactly where it’s best.”

  “What about for you?” she said.

  “The same.”

  “I couldn’t shoot that man either.”

  “I know. That doesn’t change anything.”

  “I couldn’t leave you,” she said.

  “That’s what I mean. Neither of us could. It’d be the first bad thing.”

  She kissed the underside of his neck. “Sounds pretty good.”

  “Doesn’t it?” After a while he said to himself or to her or just plain said because it wanted saying, “It does.” He said it again, “It does.” And then they were asleep.

  Two days later they were at the border. Or close enough Minor wanted to stop. They had long ago passed out of the realm of cities and they had driven through forests of dark jack pine and black spruce and white slashes of birch trees with mirror-light on their bark, and the woods had thinned and dropped off and in places rose again, and road by road their options for pathways north had dwindled to just the one.

  It was well into daw
n and almost full-out morning and Minor sat there looking at her, waiting for her to stop.

  “It’s gonna be light when we get to the checkpoint,” he told her.

  She shrugged. Her hair had turned to plastic. It had pulled at her scalp and he’d shaved it off as best he could, which was patchy. The mohawk was too solid with the glue to do anything but hack off the top six inches so she could fit in the truck cab. While he was looking at her the first sunlight struck her face and lit it all and she looked beautiful. The sun came up fast. All around them the land was flat and wider than any land either of them had seen and on the stubbled moraine the tiny stunted spruce and twisted tamarack were for a moment aflame and they could see for miles and they knew they could be seen too.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can tell me. What your plan is. Go on. Lay it out.”

  There were no cigarettes left and she took a match and stuck it in her mouth and held it in her teeth and said something.

  “What?” he said.

  She took out the match and said, “That’s the bay.”

  He reached down and grabbed the emergency break and would have pulled it if she hadn’t taken her foot off the accelerator. They lurched and rolled to a stop. The bay was across the border; he didn’t know by how much. There was no river or anything. The only way you could tell, he’d heard, was at night when you could see the last verge of mirror-light, or in the day when you could see the change in growth, beyond the range of the reflected beams, where the land hardened again into tundra formed under long winters of darkness that it was rumored still remained. That, and the guardtower.

  They sat stopped in the middle of the black asphalt strip. No one came from anywhere.

  “You know something I don’t know?” he said.

  “Depends what you know.”

  “Let’s say I know nothing.”

  She rolled down the window and spat out the match. The air that came in was cold. She rolled it up again.

  “You were gonna just drive right up there,” he said.

  “Well.”

  “Well, fuck.”

  “Well, I’ve got ID.” He stared at her. “I wasn’t just gonna leave you. They’d let you through.”

  “Me?”

  “They don’t care about ID so much for people going out …”

  “Yeah.”

  “… just coming in.”

  “Unless you’re wanted.”

  A wind came out of nowhere and hit the truck and shook it and moved on.

  “Just saying,” he told her. “Just throwing that out there, thought I’d, you know, just fucking you know just mention it.”

  “What are you so worried about? You’re not the one that has to worry.”

  “I’m not worried about me,” he said, and shoved open the door and got out and slammed it.

  He stood slouched off his bad leg beside the truck looking at the sun coming up over the ocean somewhere out there too far to see, his hands wedged into his pockets and his neck drawn into his shoulders and the wind clawing at his hair. For a moment, with him turned away, she let her face do what it needed. She had known this was coming, this moment when he would find out the truth of her, and feared it, and now that it was here she knew it was going to be worse than she had thought. She ducked down so he wouldn’t see and unlaced her boot and took it off and reached into her sock and took out the money. Bent down beneath the dash she knew this was the end and her face worked until she got it quiet and she straightened up again. She held the wad of bills into the bright sunlight for him to see. He was still turned away. She meant to throw the boot at the door with a bang that would bring him around but it hit the window and went through. The glass crashed onto the road. He turned, his hair glittering with the chips of glass, and she started laughing. There was nothing funny about his face, but she couldn’t quit. She sat there laughing and holding the money up for him to see. Slowly, her laughing died down. He stood there. The wind was in his eyes.

  “It’s enough,” she said. “For both of us. It doesn’t look like much but it’s all hundreds.”

  Behind him, the wind shook the tamarack.

  “What?” she said. “I couldn’t tell you, you know I couldn’t tell you. What, Minor, what the fuck? I’m sorry about the window but I mean, what?”

  He said something in the wind that she couldn’t hear and then he came into the truck and shut the door and the wind came in the busted window and he looked at the window, and said, “There wasn’t anyone, was there.”

  “Any who?”

  “Coming after you.”

  She peeled off a sliver of bills. “Why do you think I have extra then?” She said. “You think some fucking kid stuck up here on watch duty won’t turn an eye?”

  He looked at the money, then at her. “There are some things you can bribe away and those are the small things, the things only laws care about and people don’t, the things that don’t matter.”

  “Minor—”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He reached over and took the bribe money that she’d peeled off and sat there counting it. It didn’t take long. “You didn’t do anything,” he said again. Slowly he fanned the money and held it into the light.

  “Minor,” she said. “I wasn’t lying to you. You still don’t know what—”

  “I know it’s nothing.” He was looking at the light coming through the bills. He spoke very slowly. “You said it was strange how that Indian cop just started shooting. Not a word first. Just saw me and started shooting. You said it.”

  She watched him and said just as slowly. “It’s bad, isn’t it.”

  He didn’t move anything, not his jaw, not his eyes.

  “How bad?” she said.

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “What did you do, Minor?”

  He gave the bills back to her. “I thought you had a plan,” he said. “I thought we were going to get across.”

  “Minor—”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I’ll tell you. I stole—”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “I stole my dad’s truck.”

  He shut his eyes. “That’s nothing.”

  “It’s something.”

  “No, it’s nothing.” He was sitting there squeezing his eyes shut as if that could keep him from hearing. “It’s what you didn’t.”

  She watched him and she could feel the desperation climbing up her and she said, “Did you kill someone? Did you murder someone, Minor? What could you have done that was so bad? You have to tell me now. I’ve told you and you have to tell me or it won’t work.”

  “It won’t work,” he said.

  She grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head to her and he yanked it free and she brought her fist down as hard as she could on his thigh. He threw his head back and gritted his teeth. She hit him again.

  He sat there with his head thrown back and said through his teeth, “It won’t work.”

  “I’ll forgive you,” she said. “Whatever it is—”

  “You’ll know me. Like I know you now. Not knowing, Drema. It was always the not knowing that—”

  That was when she climbed on him and all the pain of her on his leg shot through his entire face and she could see it pulsing in his strained neck and she kissed him. She kissed him hard and for a long time. When she was done, she stayed with her face right on top of his and said with her lips touching his, “How bad was it, Minor?”

  He shook his head, his beard, against her face.

  “I’m going to think of the worst thing I can think of,” she said. “And I’m going to tell you and you’re—”

  “Double it,” he said.

  She sat there on him looking at his face so close it almost didn’t look like a face. She could see the creases in the landscape of his skin and the dirt and the oil of him and the hairs of his beard came from holes in his face as if his body was trying to rid itself of them, pushing
them forever through and them forever coming, black and enduring so long as he endured, and even after, when all other parts of him had gone still, they would be the last thing to move.

  She sat up away from him. His eyes stayed shut. Slowly, she climbed off and picked her way carefully across the road to where her boot lay like something they’d hit. She picked it up and put it on and laced it and came around to the driver’s side and got in and he had not opened his eyes.

  “Get out,” she said.

  She had left his door open and he just swung his good leg out. He put his weight on it and stood up into the sun and the wind and the huge sky stretching over it all.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Or I’ll leave you here. I’ll just drive to the border and give them the money and go across and never see you again and what good is it then? Not knowing? What’s the point in it then?”

  He had opened his eyes and he was looking at her. She thought he was looking at her as if he was trying to figure out who she was now that he knew she was not who he had imagined her to be, as if to see what she would become to him now.

  She could not know that he was thinking of how young she sounded. Younger than she had told him, maybe as young as he had been when he’d slapped out through the screen door into the summer’s long dusk and left them all lying in their blood behind him and run beneath the thick-leafed tulip trees and out into the open where the mirrors threw his shadow scrambling ahead as if in chase of his own life, of all the unknown rest of it that what he’d done that night had left for him. Nor could she know this: that through it all the image of her backing her father’s truck down a long steep drive kept coming at him. And all that that one thing had led to. And how unfathomable were the hours and days and years to come that would shape her into what he could not even guess. And him too. The past unraveling behind them and the future as unknowable as any dreamed-of dark.