by Guran, Paula
“I have to leave,” Kohler said, turning back toward the lobby. “Now.”
Campion stood in front of the closed doors, and she was pointing a small black automatic pistol at him—it looked like .22 or .25 caliber. “It was so kind of you to come!” she cried merrily. “And you are very nice!”
Kohler was peripherally aware that what she had said was a quote from something, but all his attention was focused on the gun muzzle. Campion’s finger was inside the trigger guard. He stopped moving, then slowly extended his empty hands out to the side, his fingers twitching in time to his heartbeat.
Mr. Bump shook his head and smiled ruefully at Kohler. “Campion is so theatrical! We just, we’d be very grateful if you’d participate in a—memorial service.”
The people on the balconies must have been able to see the situation, but the counterpoint racket never faltered—clearly there would be no help from them, whoever they were. “Then,” said Kohler hoarsely, “I can go?”
“You might very well prefer to stay,” said Campion. “It’s a leisurely life.”
Stay? Kohler thought.
“What,” he asked, “do I do?”
“You were his closest friend,” said Mr. Bump, “so you should—”
“I hardly knew him! Since college, at least. Maybe once or twice a year—”
“You’re who he nominated. You should step over the cats, into the open space there, and after everybody has recited Jack’s Letter Testamentary, you simply break the urn. At your feet.”
Mr. Bump pressed the urn into Kohler’s right hand, and Kohler closed his fingers around the glassy neck of it.
“And then I—can leave.”
Campion nodded brightly. “Yours will be a journey only of two paces into view of the stars again,” she said.
Kohler recognized what she had said as lines from a Walter de la Mare poem, and he recalled how the sentence in the poem ended—but you will not make it.
And belatedly he recognized what she had said a few moments ago: It was so kind of you to come! And you are very nice!—that was from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” spoken by the Walrus just before he and the Carpenter began devouring the gullible oysters.
Kohler was grasping the urn in both hands, and now he had to force his arms not to shake in time to the percussive rhythm of all the rattling hands. He glanced at Campion, but she was still holding the gun pointed directly at the middle of him.
“You really should have had more to drink,” she called.
God only knew who these people were, or what weird ritual this was, and Kohler was considering causing some kind of diversion and just diving over some plants and rolling through one of the ground-floor French doors, and then just running. Out of this building, over the wall, and away.
It seemed unrealistic.
He obediently stepped over the cats into the clear triangle of pavement.
“Now wait till they’ve recited it all,” said Mr. Bump loudly.
With her free hand Campion dug the peculiar Letter Testamentary out of her purse and flapped it in the still air to unfold it.
And then a young woman on one of the balconies whispered, “Having . . . ” and a man on a balcony on the other side of the atrium whispered, “ . . . been . . . ” and another followed with “ . . . appointed . . . ”
The hoarse whispers undercut the shrill finger-snapping and echoed clearly around the walled space. They were reciting the text of Jack’s letter, and each was enunciating only one word of it, letting a pause fall between each word.
The glassy bulge of the urn was slippery in Kohler’s sweating hands, and he assembled some of the disjointed phrases in his mind: enactor of the will of John Carpenter Ranald . . . Arthur Lewis Kohler . . . to consummate possession . . .
And he recognized this technique—in first century Kabbalistic mysticism, certain truths could be spoken only in whispers, and the writing of certain magical texts required that a different scribe write each separate word.
As clearly as if she were speaking now, Campion’s words at lunch came back to him: But it’s about transmigration of souls, isn’t it? and I can already see him in you.
And he recalled saying, After his father died, he just wasn’t the same guy anymore.
Jack Ranald had been executor of his father’s will.
“To,” whispered one of the black-or-white-clad people on the balconies. “Consummate,” whispered another. “Possession,” breathed one more, and then they stopped, and the finger-snapping stopped too. The silence that followed seemed to spring up from the paving stones, and the cats sitting in a triangle around Kohler shifted in place.
Mr. Bump nodded to Kohler and raised the kitten in both hands.
“Where do you want to go, from here?” whispered Campion. “Is there anything you want to wait for?”
Kohler sighed, a long exhalation that relaxed all his muscles and seemed to empty him. Go? he thought. Back to my studio apartment in Culver City . . . Wait for? No. I could do this—I could stay here, hidden from everything, even from myself, it seems.
He could hear the cats around the triangle purring. It’s a leisurely life, Campion had said.
“What have you got to lose?” whispered Campion.
Lose? he thought. Nothing—nothing but memories I don’t seem to have room for anymore.
And he remembered again what his wife had said about Jack—He forgets me when he’s not looking right at me. Kohler couldn’t look at her anymore—
—but to do this, whatever it was, would pretty clearly be to join Jack.
Kohler took a deep breath, and he felt as if he were stepping back out of a warm doorway, back into the useless tensions of a cold night.
And he flung the urn as hard as he could straight up. Everyone’s eyes followed it, and Kohler stepped out of the triangle and, in a sudden moment of inspiration, picked up one of the cats and leaned forward to set it down in the clear triangular patch before hurrying toward a door away from Campion.
The urn shattered on the pavement behind him with a noise like a gunshot as Kohler was grabbing the doorknob, but two sounds stopped him—the cat yowled two syllables and, in perfect synchronization, a voice in his head said, in anguish, Jimmy.
It was Jack’s voice. Even the cat’s cry had seemed to be Jack’s voice.
Helplessly Kohler let go of the doorknob and turned around.
The rest of the cats had scattered. Campion had had hurried into the triangular space, the gun falling from her fingers and skittering across the paving stones, and she was cradling the cat Kohler had put there. Mr. Bump had let the kitten jump down from his arms now and was just staring open-mouthed, and the people on the balconies were leaning forward and whispering in agitation—but their whispers now weren’t audible.
“Jack!” Campion said hitchingly through tears, “Jack, darling, what has he done, what has he done?”
The cat was staring over Campion’s shoulder directly at Kohler, and Kohler shivered at its intense amber glare.
But he nodded and said softly, “So long, Jack.” Then he recalled that it was probably Jack’s father, and looked away.
He took two steps forward across the tiles and picked up the little automatic pistol that Campion had dropped. There seemed to be no reason now not to leave by the way he’d come in.
Mr. Bump was shaking his head in evident amazement. “It was supposed to be you,” he said, standing well back as he held the lobby door open, “into the kitten, to make room for Jack. That cat’s already got somebody—I don’t know how that’ll work out.” He stepped quickly to keep up with Kohler’s stride across the dim lobby toward the front doors. “No use, anyway, they can’t even write. Just not enough brain in their heads!” He laughed nervously, watching the gun in Kohler’s hand. “You’re—actually going to leave then?”
At the front doors, with his hand on one of the old iron handles, Kohler stopped. “I don’t think anybody would want me to stay.”
Mr. Bump shrugged. “I think Campion likes you. Likes you, I mean, too.” He smiled. “‘Despair to get in,’ and I think you’ve paid the entry fee. Stay for dinner, at least? I’m making a huge cioppino, plenty for everybody, even the cats.”
Kohler found that he was not sure enough about what had happened, not quite sure enough, to make the impossible denunciations that he wanted to make. It might help to read some of the books in his stock, but at this moment he was resolved never to open one again except to catalogue it.
“Give Jack mine,” was all he said, as he pulled the door open; and then he hurried down the steps into the sunlight, reaching into his pocket for his car keys and bleakly eyeing the lane that would lead him back down to the old, old, terribly familiar freeway.
Some say it is still a good idea to avoid the moors near Zennor . . .
Near Zennor
Elizabeth Hand
He found the letters inside a round metal candy tin, at the bottom of a plastic storage box in the garage, alongside strings of outdoor Christmas lights and various oddments his wife had saved for the yard sale she’d never managed to organize in almost thirty years of marriage. She’d died suddenly, shockingly, of a brain aneurysm, while planting daffodil bulbs the previous September.
Now everything was going to Goodwill. The house in New Canaan had been listed with a realtor; despite the terrible market, she’d reassured Jeffrey that it should sell relatively quickly, and for something close to his asking price.
“It’s a beautiful house, Jeffrey,” she said, “not that I’m surprised.” Jeffrey was a noted architect: she glanced at him as she stepped carefully along a flagstone path in her Louboutin heels. “And these gardens are incredible.”
“That was all Anthea.” He paused beside a stone wall, surveying an emerald swathe of new grass, small exposed hillocks of black earth, piles of neatly raked leaves left by the crew he’d hired to do the work that Anthea had always done on her own. In the distance, birch trees glowed spectral white against a leaden February sky that gave a twilit cast to midday. “She always said that if I’d had to pay her for all this, I wouldn’t have been able to afford her. She was right.”
He signed off on the final sheaf of contracts and returned them to the realtor. “You’re in Brooklyn now?” she asked, turning back toward the house.
“Yes. Green Park. A colleague of mine is in Singapore for a few months, he’s letting me stay there till I get my bearings.”
“Well, good luck. I’ll be in touch soon.” She opened the door of her Prius and hesitated. “I know how hard this is for you. I lost my father two years ago. Nothing helps, really.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Thanks. I know.”
He’d spent the last five months cycling through wordless, imageless night terrors from which he awoke gasping; dreams in which Anthea lay beside him, breathing softly then smiling as he touched her face; nightmares in which the neuroelectrical storm that had killed her raged inside his own head, a flaring nova that engulfed the world around him and left him floating in an endless black space, the stars expiring one by one as he drifted past them.
He knew that grief had no target demographic, that all around him versions of this cosmic reshuffling took place every day. He and Anthea had their own shared experience years before, when they had lost their first and only daughter to sudden infant death syndrome. They were both in their late thirties at the time. They never tried to have another child, on their own or through adoption. It was as though some psychic house fire had consumed them both: it was a year before Jeffrey could enter the room that had been Julia’s, and for months after her death neither he nor Anthea could bear to sit at the dining table and finish a meal together, or sleep in the same bed. The thought of being that close to another human being, of having one’s hand or foot graze another’s and wake however fleetingly to the realization that this too could be lost—it left both of them with a terror that they had never been able to articulate, even to each other.
Now as then, he kept busy with work at his office in the city, and dutifully accepted invitations for lunch and dinner there and in New Canaan. Nights were a prolonged torment: he was haunted by the realization that Anthea had been extinguished, a spent match pinched between one’s fingers. He thought of Houdini, arch-rationalist of another century, who desired proof of a spirit world he desperately wanted to believe in. Jeffrey believed in nothing, yet if there had been a drug to twist his neurons into some synaptic impersonation of faith, he would have taken it.
For the past month he’d devoted most of his time to packing up the house, donating Anthea’s clothes to various charity shops, deciding what to store and what to sell, what to divvy up among nieces and nephews, Anthea’s sister, a few close friends. Throughout he experienced grief as a sort of low-grade flu, a persistent, inescapable ache that suffused not just his thoughts but his bones and tendons: a throbbing in his temples, black sparks that distorted his vision; an acrid chemical taste in the back of his throat, as though he’d bitten into one of the pills his doctor had given him to help him sleep.
He watched as the realtor drove off soundlessly, returned to the garage and transferred the plastic bin of Christmas lights into his own car, to drop off at a neighbor’s the following weekend. He put the tin box with the letters on the seat beside him. As he pulled out of the driveway, it began to snow.
That night, he sat at the dining table in the Brooklyn loft and opened the candy tin. Inside were five letters, each bearing the same stamp: RETURN TO SENDER. At the bottom of the tin was a locket on a chain, cheap gold-colored metal and chipped red enamel circled by tiny fake pearls. He opened it: it was empty. He examined it for an engraved inscription, initials, a name, but there was nothing. He set it aside and turned to the letters.
All were postmarked 1971—February, March, April, July, end of August—all addressed to the same person at the same address, carefully spelled out in Anthea’s swooping, schoolgirl’s hand.
Mr. Robert Bennington,
Golovenna Farm,
Padwithiel,
Cornwall
Love letters? He didn’t recognize the name Robert Bennington. Anthea would have been thirteen in February; her birthday was in May. He moved the envelopes across the table, as though performing a card trick. His heart pounded, which was ridiculous. He and Anthea had told each other about everything—three-ways at university, coke-fueled orgies during the 1980s, affairs and flirtations throughout their marriage.
None of that mattered now; little of it had mattered then. Still, his hands shook as he opened the first envelope. A single sheet of onionskin was inside. He unfolded it gingerly and smoothed it on the table.
His wife’s handwriting hadn’t changed much in forty years. The same cramped cursive, each i so heavily dotted in black ink that the pen had almost poked through the thin paper. Anthea had been English, born and raised in North London. They’d met at the University of London, where they were both studying, and moved to New Canaan after they’d married. It was an area that Anthea had often said reminded her of the English countryside, though Jeffrey had never ventured outside London, other than a few excursions to Kent and Brighton. Where was Padwithiel?
21 February, 1971
Dear Mr. Bennington,
My name is Anthea Ryson . . .
And would a thirteen-year-old girl address her boyfriend as “Mr.,” even forty years ago?
. . . I am thirteen-years-old and live in London. Last year my friend Evelyn let me read Still the Seasons for the first time and since then I have read it two more times, also Black Clouds Over Bragmoor and The Second Sun. They are my favorite books! I keep looking for more but the library here doesn’t have them. I have asked and they said I should try the shops but that is expensive. My teacher said that sometimes you come to schools and speak, I hope some day you’ll come to Islington Day School. Are you writing more books about Tisha and the great Battle? I hope so, please write back! My address is 42 Highbury Fields, London NW1.
&n
bsp; Very truly yours,
Anthea Ryson
Jeffrey set aside the letter and gazed at the remaining four envelopes. What a prick, he thought. He never even wrote her back. He turned to his laptop and googled Robert Bennington.
Robert Bennington (1932- ), British author of a popular series of children’s fantasy novels published during the 1960s known as “The Sun Battles.” Bennington’s books rode the literary tidal wave generated by J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, but his commercial and critical standing were irrevocably shaken in the late 1990s, when he became the center of a drawn-out court case involving charges of pedophilia and sexual assault, with accusations lodged against him by several girl fans, now adults. One of the alleged victims later changed her account, and the case was eventually dismissed amidst much controversy by child advocates and women’s rights groups. Bennington’s reputation never recovered: school libraries refused to keep his books on their shelves. All of his novels are now out of print, although digital editions (illegal) can be found, along with used copies of the four books in the “Battles” sequence . . .
Jeffrey’s neck prickled. The court case didn’t ring a bell, but the books did. Anthea had thrust one upon him shortly after they first met.
“These were my favorites.” She rolled over in bed and pulled a yellowed paperback from a shelf crowded with textbooks and Penguin editions of the mystery novels she loved. “I must have read this twenty times.”
“Twenty?” Jeffrey raised an eyebrow.
“Well, maybe seven. A lot. Did you ever read them?”
“I never even heard of them.”