The City of Your Final Destination

by Peter Cameron

  “I would, in fact,” said Omar.

  “And that doesn’t seem strange to you?”

  “What?”

  “That you feel you have the right to read the letters my husband wrote me?”

  “I don’t think it’s a right,” said Omar. “It would be a privilege.”

  “Well, you shan’t have that privilege,” said Caroline.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Omar. “And actually, your aversion to the biography concerns me more than Jules’s.”

  “Because Jules is dead, and I am an executor.”

  “No,” said Omar. “You always think the worst of me, don’t you?”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I care about what you think. Of course I don’t want to write this biography without your blessing.”

  “Then don’t write it.”

  “I won’t. I can’t. But I think that is a shame. I think it’s an important story, and deserves to be told. And Adam and Arden agree with me.”

  “In matters of morality, the majority does not rule.”

  “Why must you make this a moral issue?”

  “Because it is,” said Caroline. “I don’t believe that you cannot, or will not, see that.”

  Omar said nothing for a moment, and then he said, “Is it only this letter from Jules, or are there other reasons?”

  “The letter is the primary, and I feel, a more than sufficient reason.”

  “But you have other reasons?”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “Of course I do.”

  “Would you share them with me?”

  “I don’t want to seem unkind. Although I suppose, in your eyes, I already do. How sad. I am not an unkind person.”

  “I don’t think you are,” said Omar.

  She smiled at him.

  “You seem very young to me,” she said.

  He did not refute her perception.

  “Beyond my feelings concerning Jules’s letter, I feel you are not well suited to the task. I would not authorize any biography of Jules, but a biography written by you gives me especial pause.”

  “Why?” asked Omar.

  “You are too unlike him. You won’t understand his life. You won’t understand me. You are not Catholic. You are young. You are callow. And I think you will get it all wrong.”

  “But with your cooperation I will not get it wrong. It is only if you fail to help me that I will get things wrong.”

  “You don’t understand what I mean. I don’t mean wrong about fact. I realize you are an academic, and it is a factual life you intend to write, but nevertheless, it is a life. A life. Everyone seems to keep forgetting that. And a miserable life. He suffered enough in it.”

  “But good biographers are often unlike their subjects,” said Omar. “In fact, I think it is preferable. It allows for dispassion and clarity.”

  “Dispassion? Yesterday you told me something quite different! Yesterday you said you wanted to write a subjective, passionate biography. Omar, you’re floundering. You don’t know what you’re saying, or doing. Admit it: there’s no shame in it. The shame is in doing the wrong thing.”

  Omar said nothing.

  Caroline reached out and touched her hand to his. “You don’t need to write this biography,” she said. “I know you think you do, but you don’t. You can not write it. You have that option.”

  “But I don’t,” said Omar. “You don’t understand. Everything depends upon my writing it.”

  “What is everything?”

  “My job. My career. Perhaps my relationship with my girlfriend.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry, you find yourself in this predicament. I can believe that from where you sit it does appear that everything depends upon your writing this biography. But I assure you everything does not. Whatever holds you to writing this biography is not important. Now is your chance to let that all go. This is an opportunity to change your life, Omar. You must take advantage of it.”

  “I don’t want to change my life,” said Omar. “My life may be difficult, but I like it how it is.”

  “Well, I cannot compromise myself simply to make life easier for you.”

  “I know,” said Omar. “I’m not asking you to do that.”

  “I thought you were,” said Caroline. “What is it, then, that you are asking me?”

  Omar looked at her. It should not be this difficult, he thought. The fact that it was this difficult meant that there was something wrong, something inherently and fundamentally wrong. He should have sensed that earlier, and never come here. He was wrong to have come. He should have returned the fellowship money. Deirdre had been wrong. It was not the right thing to do. Nothing really depended upon it. Nothing that really mattered.

  “I ask nothing of you,” he said.

  Caroline looked at him. He felt his face shaking, but then he felt it harden, a sudden hardness surged through him, an odd, foreign strength. And he looked back at her with this strength in his eyes. Caroline shrugged. She stood up from the table and crossed the room to the sink and rinsed her teacup beneath the tap and then overturned it in the dish drainer. Then, without looking again at Omar, she opened the door. Omar watched her walk across the courtyard and disappear into the door that led to the tower.

  She is right, thought Omar. I don’t agree with everything she says and I don’t really understand her, but fundamentally she is right. Perhaps she is right morally. But I am not a bad person, Omar told himself. I have no ill intentions. What I want to do is perfectly acceptable and morally innocuous. He put his face in his hands. But why did God invent Caroline?

  Arden found him sitting at the kitchen table that way when she returned from town. “Good,” she said, “you’re up. Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes,” said Omar. He did not look up at her.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Arden. “You look—is something wrong?”

  “No” said Omar. He looked up and tried to smile. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m sorry. I’m just a bit hungover, I think. I’m not used to drinking so much.”

  “Neither am I,” said Arden. “Although it doesn’t seem to have—”

  “And perhaps it’s the traveling too,” said Omar. “I just feel a little strange.”

  “You look pale,” said Arden. She came close to him and put her hand on his forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”

  “I’m sure I’m fine,” said Omar. “The coffee will wake me up.”

  “Do you still want to go—or perhaps, if you aren’t feeling well, we shouldn’t walk up to the gondola this morning.”

  “No, I want to,” said Omar. “It will be good to get some exercise. It’s what I need, I think.”

  “Are you hungry?” asked Arden. She sat down at the table.

  “No,” said Omar.

  “Would you like some bread and jam? Or eggs?”

  “No, thank you,” said Omar. “The coffee is fine.”

  Arden stood up. She had brought a bag of groceries back with her and she began to empty it, stowing its contents in the cupboards and ancient refrigerator. “Portia is angry with us,” she said. “She wanted us to wait till she came home from school, so she could join us.”

  “We can wait, if you’d like,” said Omar.

  “No,” said Arden. “She’ll only slow us down.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They passed through the courtyard arch, down the gravel path across the formal garden, through the oleander hedge, around the garden, through an orchard of fruit trees, and then climbed up a small ridge into a forest of mostly deciduous trees. It was quiet and hot; there was no breeze and the trees only obscured and filtered the warm sunlight, they did not seem to mitigate it. There was no sign of a path; in fact, there was no indication that anyone had ever set foot thereabouts before, but Arden walked purposefully, switching back and forth among the trees.

  “I thought there was a path,” said Omar.

  “There is a kind of a path later,” said Arden. “Not through here
.”

  “Is this your land?” asked Omar.

  “Yes,” said Arden. “We’ve tried to sell it but no one will buy it.”

  “How many acres do you have?”

  “I don’t know. A lot, I think. Hundreds. And there was more before, when they still owned the mine.”

  “When did they sell the mine?”

  “I don’t know. I think in the fifties, but I’m not sure.”

  “Is the mine still operating?”

  “No,” said Arden. “It’s been shut for ages.”

  “What did they mine?”

  “Bauxite,” said Arden.

  “What is bauxite?”

  “An ore, I think. It’s used to make aluminum.”

  “I don’t understand how all that works,” said Omar.

  “Neither do I,” said Arden. She paused, glanced around, and then headed in a slightly different direction. She was walking more quickly than Omar had imagined they would walk. As far as he knew, there was no hurry, but Arden moved as if there was.

  After a moment Omar said: “May I ask you a question?”

  “Yes,” said Arden. She slowed her pace a little.

  “I just wondered if you knew—do you think there’s some reason Caroline doesn’t want the biography to be written? I mean some reason other than the letter from Jules?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Arden.

  “I mean, do you think there’s something, something about herself or Jules that she does not want written about?”

  “Oh,” said Arden. “Something shameful? No, I don’t think that. Although of course it’s possible, but it had not occurred to me. Do you think that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Omar. “I don’t know her. I just don’t understand her recalcitrance.”

  “Perhaps it is not to be understood,” said Arden.

  “But don’t you think everything can be understood? If you look at it closely and carefully enough?”

  “No,” said Arden. “That has not been my experience. Although it seems a practical approach for a biographer to take. A necessary approach, in fact.”

  “I don’t just mean about the biography. And I’m not a biographer. At least not yet. And at this rate, never. No, I mean about life in general, and people. I mean, people often behave mysteriously or inexplicably, but if you know them well enough, and know enough about them, you understand why they do what they do.”

  “I’m not sure people are as rational as all that,” said Arden.

  “Do you understand Caroline’s opposition?”

  “Yes,” said Arden. “But not in a rational way. I can’t explain it to you, but it makes sense to me. It’s complicated, I think. It’s not just one thing, or two things. It’s the whole world, her whole world, being how it is.”

  “Oh,” said Omar. Then: “She told me this morning—or she implied—that I was immoral. That it was immoral of me to write the biography.”

  “Did she?” asked Arden. “I’m not surprised, though. It’s always her last resort: the moral high ground. Caroline in her tower looking down on us all.”

  “Do you think biographies are immoral? I mean essentially, intrinsically immoral?”

  “No,” said Arden. “But perhaps I’m too stupid to understand how they are. But you mustn’t let Caroline’s arrogance affect you. It’s how she bears her loneliness, by convincing herself she’s better than everyone. She’s very proud. It’s why she stopped painting, I’m sure. She couldn’t bear the idea of being a mediocre painter, so she stopped. She thinks it’s better to not paint than to paint something mediocre. It’s very sad, and stupid. She’s thwarted, and so now she likes to thwart others. She does it all the time with me, but I don’t mind it. Or I try not to mind it. Neither should you. Really.”

  They emerged from the woods onto a derelict dirt road that rose through denser and more varied forest. Arden explained this was the road to the lake that had been washed out, and they followed it upward; it hugged the side of the hill and when the woods fell away Omar could see the house at Ochos Rios below them. They had come farther and higher than he had thought.

  They stood for a moment, looking down at the house.

  “Do you know why it’s called Ochos Rios?” he asked Arden.

  “It means ‘eight rivers,’” said Arden.

  “I know. But there aren’t eight rivers, are there?”

  “No,” said Arden. “Perhaps there were, at some point. A lot of place-names here are names from Spain. Or elsewhere.”

  “Was it named by Jules’s parents?”

  “Oh, no,” said Arden. “At least I don’t think so. I’m sure it was named when they got here. Before they got here.”

  “Yet you said they built the house.”

  “I think there was a house there—the wing where the kitchen is now. They added the rest.” She turned around and pointed into the woods on the other side of the road. “There is the path, but come up here a ways, and you can see where the road is washed out.”

  He followed her up and around a corner to where the road abruptly ended. It was a scene of devastation, and it was hard to imagine that the little apathetic stream wandering through the bottom of the scarred chasm that divided the road had been responsible for the alteration of the landscape. They stood at the edge of the precipice and looked down into the ruin.

  “It was odd,” Arden said, after a moment, “the night the dam broke. We heard it first. Although of course we didn’t know what we were hearing: a strange noise in the distance. A sort of thundering, but not in the sky. It was frightening: hearing it coming closer and not knowing what it was. I never realized how little we control the earth until I moved here. Even at the house it’s evident. The way things grow, so unbelievably quickly; the way the house is constantly cracking and moldering and disintegrating. At night I hear the slates sliding off the roof and crashing in the courtyard.” She looked at him. “Do you believe in God?” she asked.

  He told her no.

  “Sometimes I think, or feel, the earth doesn’t want things to last; it wants everything to crumble and for all of us to go away. It wants to get back to where it was before it all started, back to the garden with the fruit and the animals, before God got ambitious and ruined it all. He should have left well enough alone. He should have rested on the sixth day, not the seventh.” She shuddered, and turned away from the abyss.

  They retraced their steps, and found the path, which climbed up the rocky forested slope. The path was narrow and they had to walk in single file, Arden in front of Omar. After a moment Omar said, “I don’t suppose I could see the other book—the manuscript—you mentioned last evening.”

  Arden paused for a moment but continued walking. She did not turn around. “No,” she said. “That is not possible. Adam should not have mentioned it.”

  “How many are there?”

  “One. Just one.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Yes,” said Arden.

  Talking to her back, not being able to see her face, emboldened Omar. “What is it about?” he asked.

  Arden was not looking at him. She was looking ahead of them. “It was about a man who lives in a large house in the middle of nowhere with his wife and mistress. He was not a particularly inventive writer, Jules.”

  “Most writers aren’t,” said Omar.

  Arden said nothing.

  “Was he still working on it when he died? Or had he finished it?”

  “It was finished,” said Arden.

  “And was it Jules who did not want it published? Or …”

  “Or us? No, it was Jules. Adam should not have mentioned it. I shouldn’t have said anything. You must forget it. It does not exist.”

  “You mean it has been destroyed? The manuscript?”

  “You must forget it,” said Arden. “Please don’t mention it again.”

  “Okay,” said Omar.

  They walked silently for a while then, climbing up through the woods. Presently the ground l
eveled and the woods thinned and they walked out into a large clearing of grass and reeds and thorny bushes.

  Arden paused at the edge of the clearing. “This was the lake,” she said. “It was large, but not very deep. Of course, it couldn’t be deep for the gondola. The pole needs to touch bottom.” She mimed a gondolier’s action.

  They stood there for a moment, looking out over the hot, bright expanse of low brush.

  “The boathouse is on the other side,” she said, pointing. “In those trees. Come.” She set off down the path, and Omar followed her. In the middle of the clearing was a shallow, muddy stream, which they both hopped over. In the trees on the far side of the clearing was a long, low wooden building, raised up on stilts, with two barnlike doors facing them. “The door is around back,” said Arden.

  “Wait,” said Omar. He felt suddenly odd. He felt as if he might faint. Was it the heat? The altitude, perhaps? The exertion of climbing with nothing but coffee in his stomach? Perhaps, he thought, but he knew it was something more than all that.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Arden.

  “Nothing,” said Omar. “I just feel a bit odd. Perhaps it’s the altitude.”

  “We aren’t very high up,” said Arden. “We aren’t high at all.” She laughed. “Come, sit in the shade over there.”

  She led him to what had been the bank of the lake, and they sat on the shaded ground next to the boathouse. Arden fished out the bottle of water she had packed in her bag and handed it to Omar. He drank some and then handed the bottle to her. She drank.

  “Do you feel better?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He stood up in attempt to illustrate his recovery, but Arden remained seated. Omar looked out over the emptied lake basin, trying to picture it otherwise, but he could not: he had a literal mind. “What was it like?” he asked.

  For a moment he thought Arden had not heard him, because she did not reply. He turned around and looked at her. She, too, was gazing out over the defunct lake.

  “It was a lake,” she said. “It looked artificial. You could tell it had been made by man, not God. It was too perfectly oval, or something. We swam in it, sometimes, although it was muddy and full of weeds. And snakes.”