Outside, the smell of kerosene oddly prevailed. But it was a car that made her halt. It was rolling up through the gate, following the path that went around the field and then led in front of the buildings. It was too late to be Reverend Kim. The glare of the headlamps swept across her like a harbor light as she stood in Hector’s doorway and the car imperceptibly slowed, as if the driver momentarily had taken his foot off the gas, before resuming speed again. Sylvie stepped off the stoop and onto the ground but she didn’t move. The car had turned and was tracking straight for her and for a second Hector was certain it was going to run her over. But it stopped just short of her and when the driver came out it was too dark behind the bright beams to see but of course he knew it was Tanner.
“Sylvie,” Tanner said, his voice throaty, beseeching. “What is this? What’s going on? There was a message you were hurt. I drove myself back all night. Why are you out here?”
Sylvie stood barefoot in her white robe directly in front of the car, the stars above them gone out for her brightness. She was clearly naked beneath. She drifted toward him, her hand outstretched, but Tanner slapped it away. When she tried to get close to him he hit her, once, quite hard, and she fell beside the wheel of the car. “What are you doing to us?” Tanner shouted down at her. “What are you doing?”
Hector made a short sprint and rammed him, knocking him to the ground. Tanner lay gasping for wind. Hector was kneeling and checking on Sylvie when a sound like a mortar round, a plosive, metallic thump, went off from the direction of the dormitory. As he craned to see what had happened a dead, sheer weight struck him, this broad, leaden plate meeting the back of his head, his shoulder blades, like the angry hand of a god. Hector crumpled from the blow, his mind momentarily emptied as he fell forward on his face. He couldn’t quite move. He could see but not yet speak. The cold ground tasted almost good to him, clean and flinty, like a freshly etched stone. And he could hear Sylvie shouting at her husband, who loomed tall above them; Tanner had walloped him from behind with the heavy sedan door. Hector got up on his knees and would have been struck again but for the sudden bright dawning of firelight, sharp licks of flame spearing up around the chimney pipe on the roof above the chapel.
“My God,” Sylvie said, getting to her feet. “The children!” Though faltering, she ran to the chapel. Tanner went after her. Some of the children were already fleeing the building, smoke billowing from the top of the chapel door, oozing out from under the eaves. None of them could see it yet but the flames inside were spreading quickly, flying through the parched wood of the old structure, and by the time Sylvie reached the main door others were climbing out of the windows from the dorm rooms on either side. Sylvie frantically counted the children, making sure the youngest ones were out. Tanner was asking everyone to check for his bunkmate, each calling out a name and waiting for a reply, when Sylvie said, “Where’s June? Where is she?”
“She’s not here!” one of the children said. “Neither is Min!”
“Where are they?”
“They were in the chapel,” Byong-Ok said.
“But why?”
“They were bunking there together.”
“Oh, my June!”
Sylvie was headed in but Tanner grabbed her. She fought him but he commanded her, “Stay here! Stay here with them!” Tanner took off his suit jacket and used it to cover his mouth and nose. He took a few quick breaths and then held the last and rushed inside the door. Although his skull felt smashed Hector was now on his feet, and he could see Sylvie drifting toward the door. She was calling for them to come out. She was calling their names. But before he could gather himself enough to try to dissuade her she stepped inside and disappeared.
Hector went in after her. The vestibule was choked with smoke. He bent down so he could breathe and when he pushed through to the chapel there was a blast of heat. The roof timbers were aflame. The front pews were on fire, as were the altar table and the cross, which had fallen to the floor. The back wall of the chapel was burning, part of it fallen away or blown out where the woodstove had been, and nearby were Sylvie and Tanner, huddling over a child. A fierce draft was being drawn in from the gap in the wall, feeding the conflagration. Hector felt his own hair begin to singe, the skin on his shoulders begin to prickle and burn. The heat was turning, it was on the verge, as though a sun were just about to push into the room. And in a flash a plumed beast of flame leaped up from the flooring to enfold the couple and child, for a moment cradling them in an almost placid repose before swallowing them whole. Hector gave a bloody cry. The walls gave a shearing squeal and a terrible crack and then the chapel roof fell in. There was a great burning pile where there had been a room, the black sky exposed. He was trapped at the edge of the pile by burning beams across his legs, shattered clay roof tiles searing his arms, his chest. He was in the bonfire now. The adjoining walls of the dorms would collapse next. Yet he didn’t try to move. He was more than ready to pass; maybe at last transmogrify. But a hand gripped his wrist, another lifting the beam from his back. The girl was inordinately strong. And she dragged him through the collapsed back wall and out into the cold, quenching night.
“THERE YOU ARE,” June said softly when he finally returned to the room. Nearly two hours had passed. He could tell by her eyes that she had not quite expected to see him again. Somehow she had managed to move a stuffed chair to face the vista of the church on the hill, and she was sitting in it before the now opened window. Though it was nearing dusk the breeze was still quite warm, faintly fragrant with pine and earth. She repositioned herself now and sat up, as if to try to demonstrate that she still had a measure of control. But even this tiny exertion was too much for her and her head lolled over the chair back at an unnatural angle, her mouth hanging open. “Did you bring me something?”
He had: the proprietor had arranged a few cookies and bite-sized café pastries in a basket, as well as a pink plastic parfait cup with a scoop of lemon ice. Hector put the basket on her lap and she beheld it like a girl at Easter. She picked up the spoon and was about to take some ice when she paused and asked if he would like some. He shook his head. She dug out a dollop and placed it upside down on her tongue, holding the spoon there as she closed her eyes, her drawn cheeks clenching with the tartness, or the sweetness, or both. He couldn’t help but watch her swallow, the mechanism ponderous, wholly voluntary now, and he imagined the melting ice finding the besiegement of her insides, how utterly thronged she was with disease, that there was nowhere to go. She didn’t take another taste, just clutching the spoon at her belly as she sat for a moment with her eyes closed, as if she were counting the seconds before the first kind swells of a drug washed over her. He asked her if she wanted a shot and though her face had gone suddenly ragged and chalky she firmly said no.
“Do you remember when we first met?” she said, gazing again out the window. “On the road?”
He said he did.
“I was thinking about that day while you were gone. It was such a hot day.”
“It might have been a hundred degrees.”
“I was so thirsty. The days before I saw you, I was searching less for food than for water. It hadn’t rained for some time. The one well I found had gone dry.”
“Didn’t I give you some water?”
“You did, but your canteen was almost empty,” she said. “You had chewing gum. To this day, I think that was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever tasted. But mostly I was dying of thirst. I was truly close to death. There was only thick, stinking mud in the paddies, and I was so thirsty that I tried it. I scooped some with my fingers and put it in my mouth. It was terrible, but it was wet. So I ate it, two full handfuls.”
“You kept it down?”
“For a little while. In the middle of the night I woke up with a terrible stomachache and threw up about a dozen times, right up until morning. I thought I was going to die from that. But if I hadn’t eaten it, I doubt I would have lived to see you. You would have walked past my body on the road.
Perhaps that would have been better for you.”
He didn’t answer her, though maybe less out of decency or compassion than to shield himself, such that he wouldn’t have to consider a timeline that featured him alone, in sole steer of a likely unaltered fate. Like everyone else, he was at the helm, whether he wished it or not. Very soon he would be on his own again, and he thought about what June had said earlier, that he was the only person in the world who knew anything about her, or at least anything significant, which made him realize, now quite obtusely, that in this case the opposite was true, too.
“I haven’t asked you,” she said to him, as if she were reading his thoughts, “what you’re going to do, afterward. Where you might go.”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. The car was broken down and he had no interest in or idea of how to be a tourist, and although she had already given him the rest of the money (enough to buy, she said, a couple around-the-world plane tickets), he had no thought of where else he might go. He had finally telephoned Smitty the other night to let him and the fellows know he was still breathing, and Smitty told him how broken up everyone was over what had happened to Dora. Scenes of the accident had been on the ten-o’clock news. They figured that’s why he’d been scarce, holed up someplace with his hurt. Hector didn’t bother to say where he was calling from, nor did Smitty ask. Smitty simply said, Well, stop in soon, we’ll be here, as though Hector were just across town, and Hector replied that at some point he would. They would go on in their inertial drag, more or less, hang around in the dimness until the time of the reckoning. Then have one last drink and shuffle into line. The question was again what he would do. Nobody in his right mind would want to be immortal, as he was in the mad dreams of his father. Still, Hector feared his own persistence. He flashed on her request of cremation and her suggestion that he do it himself; he could pull off on some rural road and find a clearing on which to build the pyre, and torch not just her body but douse the pile of brush and sticks with gasoline and, having filled his gut with fuel, climb atop the heap himself, before striking the match. He would make the hottest fire, burn up even their bones. Send them both far and nigh.
She said: “You could stay in this place for a while. You could live here for a long time with the money you have. Maybe you’d even find someone. Someone who would take care of you.”
“I wouldn’t want that.”
“Why not? Every person needs the love of a good woman. Don’t you think that’s true?”
Of course he didn’t dispute her. How could he? Think of a world in which we all had such succor. The problem was that succor bore the sentence of frailty, infirmity. It expired too soon. And then what were you? Lost. Bewildered. A sack of broken things. It was cruel, and he meant it to be, but he asked her, “I wonder if you would have taken care of me. If I was the one who was sick.”
She looked at him unwaveringly. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve never taken care of anyone.”
She took another spoonful of ice, but that was all. In the warmth of the breeze, the rest quickly melted in the bowl. The clouds were tinting amber and red with the falling light. This long day would soon be at its end. She rested the basket on the arm of the chair and tried to get up. He helped her to her feet. He asked if she wanted to change now into the special clothes.
“I want to bathe first. All of a sudden I feel very cold. Would you fill the tub for me? I tried to do it myself while you were out but it was too hard to bend down. And the hot tap seemed stuck. Do you mind?”
“No.”
“Don’t be afraid to make it hot, all right?”
He drew the bath for her, as hot as he thought she could bear. As the tub filled, he wondered if once she got in she would come out again-alive, that is. All this ferocious will and effort and now she might not make it up the hill. What did she think she was going to encounter? What does the pilgrim hope for at journey’s end? Her beliefs confirmed? Revelation? Or does she secretly wish that the destination never quite materializes, that it keeps receding, ever shrouded in the distance, all the more to feed an inextinguishable devotion.
June came into the bathroom and without shame took off her clothes. It was as if he weren’t there. She had trouble twisting her arm out of her blouse, and so he helped her with that. Her belly was distended but it appeared full and vital compared to the rest of her, her drawn shoulders and limbs, the blades of her hips. He turned off the water and dipped his hand in the tub but before he could warn her she had already put one foot in. She sharply inhaled, wincing, but she gripped the side of the tub and eased herself down into the water. He rose to leave but she grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go as she rested back against the tiled wall. She wasn’t going to take a last chance. Her eyes were shut and they didn’t speak for a long while and when her hand relaxed he was afraid she was gone. But the bathwater welled and sloshed over the edge and she was suddenly on her feet, wrapping herself in one of the towels from the rack. The hot water had pulled up a color in her legs. Yet her expression was sallow; she was only cheekbones and eyes, as though the flesh had melted away into the bathwater, and she said, “Please, Hector. Let’s be quick now.”
He sat her up on the bed as he helped her with the clothes, gently manipulating her limbs as if he were dressing a life-sized doll. The outfit consisted of very loose pajama-style pants and both a blouse and a vest, all made of the same coarse white linen. The shape of the papery clothing took on a boxy, formal allure, the whiteness making her look like a strange kind of bride; showing through the diaphanous fabric were the dark nipples of her breasts, the patch of hair between her legs, these final notations that she was still a woman, still alive. She tried to knot the waist-strings of the vest herself but she kept fumbling it, so he tied it for her in a double bow. He slipped a pair of his own large socks on her feet, not bothering with shoes for how swollen they were; and then, it was obvious now, he would have to carry her anyway.
“Are you ready?” he asked her.
“Yes.” When he lifted her she groaned, so he paused, but she tapped at his arm to keep them moving. “We have to go,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We have to go right now.”
Hector carried her down the tight dark turns of the tower stairs, making sure of his footfalls on the slick, worn stone treads. He’d already half-tripped back on the threshold, just barely regaining his balance, though he’d accidentally bit his own tongue. He was stepping as lightly and carefully as he could and yet the descent for her seemed an agony, her hand gripping the hair at the back of his head, squeezing the strands between her fingers in time to each step. The bath had only sped her ruin. In his arms her body was warm and damp, but she didn’t smell quite right, not off or spoiled, but rather like she’d been mostly rendered away, or diluted, like the faintest trace of blood or flesh that lingered even after he’d disinfected and scrubbed and hosed off a canvas litter during the war, somebody’s clinging half-life. She was already a presence residual. When they reached the empty lobby the hotel proprietor put down the book he was reading and instinctively moved to aid them but he stopped at the end of the bar when he got a good look at her, his head solemnly dipping as they passed. Outside, they crossed the street and mounted the wide pea gravel path that led up the hill, the dark sentinels of the cypress trees marking either side.
“I can’t see,” she said.
He turned to walk sideways so she might have a better angle on the church but when he looked down into her eyes they were dull and black, inkier still for the soft, late daylight, her pupils straining to hold off a welling darkness that was not apparent to Hector but that was falling more swiftly than the evening.
“I can’t see.”
Hector quickened his pace. Her face was turning a watery shade. She felt heavier now, taking on that weight. All his life he was present at such ends and yet each time it filled him with a raw astonishment. He felt himself begin to cave with panic. And a realization: he did not want to watch her die. He did n
ot want to have to stoke her fire. He would stoke his own but no one else’s. Had he the power to save her he would do so, he would trade places with her, let her go on, if she wished, for the rest of time.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.”
He stopped. He had reached the plateau of ground before the shallow steps of the entrance. One of the double doors was open. But she was not addressing him. She was craning at the sky, her eyes unfixed. She was almost gone.
She murmured: “Not yet.”
“It’s okay,” he said, suddenly drawn forth. There was a strange gleam in the church. He took her inside. Between the entrance and the altar the space was completely open; there were no pews in this church. And somehow it was illuminated, somehow it was brighter than outside, the sunbeams stealing in through the side windows at a last, impossible angle. For the moment everything was awash in a light pewter shade, this rubbed, high-burnished grayness, a hue, he realized, long known to him. On top of the white marble altar stood an immense wooden cross, as severe and plain as the one he had once made, the vault above it rising more than twenty-five feet. How was he here again? And it was now that he recognized the patterning of the circular walls of the chancel, the odd mottle of its ornamentation. It was not fresco or fabric or artful intaglio. It was the most basic design. What Hector perhaps understood best in the end: an array of bones.
They were not entombed as he’d expected but rather on open display. Behind the altar, at a subterranean level, open to view, were built-in shelves stocked tight with the bones. They were arranged by kind-piles of femurs and tibias, nested pelvises and jaws. There were bins full of the smaller bones of the feet, of the hands, like countless pieces of chalk. Many bundles of ribs. Then, rising to the cornice of the vaulting, even stacked above it, were rows upon rows of skulls. There were hundreds of them, if not a thousand, all neatly lined up, one beside the next, like some vast, horrid hat shop. Some of the skulls had jagged holes punched out of their temples, blown out from their crowns; some were smashed through at the cheek, at the nose. Missing a brow. But he saw that most of them were touched only by time, their color bleached or tinged pink with rust or a moldering gray. He could not picture their pristine faces save by the distinctive set of their teeth, crooked and straight, protruding and curved. All the grinning, grimacing dead. Hector grimaced back, his own teeth tasting of iron and blood.
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