by Anthology
“Something warm,” she told the bartender, and afterwards, cupping Irish coffee as they stood by the fire pit, “Peter’s not sick and you know it.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been married twice, love. He’s sulking. Sulking this morning and sulking at dinner, making it worse for himself every moment because he can’t stay in that room forever, and he knows it. Stupid male pride. Whatever in the world has gone wrong with you two?”
“I don’t know,” Gwyneth said.
Down below, in the darkness beyond the tree-studded escarpment, something roared on the savannah. She wondered what it was—something big, no doubt—but nothing she could shape inside her head. And that was how it was with Peter, too, wasn’t it? Something big had happened to them somewhere along the way, but she couldn’t put her finger on when, or what.
She couldn’t find the shape of it inside her head.
“I don’t know.”
She swiped at tears with one hand.
“You must think I’m an idiot.”
“I think you’re confused. It’s okay to be confused.”
“But there’s nothing wrong. There shouldn’t be anything wrong. He’s a good man, he’s kind and he’s gentle and he’s handsome—anyone could see that he’s a good man.”
Angela wrapped an arm around Gwyneth’s shoulder and pulled her close.
“I know. I—”
“He said—” Gwyneth sobbed discreetly.
The lovers had departed.
The barman found something pressing to do at the far end of the bar.
“He said that what was wrong with us wasn’t in the Caymans or in Paris or in the Cretaceous. He said it was inside us.”
“He’s probably right about that.”
“I thought that I could save us by coming here. I really did. I risked everything on it, everything we had.” She sniffed and met the other woman’s gaze. “Somehow I thought that I could save us. I don’t know how.”
“Do you love him, Gwyneth?”
“I don’t know. We just drifted away from each other,” she said, and that image came to her once again: continental drift: landmasses on the move, so slow you didn’t even notice it until an ocean lay between you.
It would have been easier if one of them had cheated.
“Shhhh,” Angela said.
Gradually, the sobs subsided.
The barman brought them another coffee. The night had turned cool, and the moon had just started to slide over the massif to their back, laying down a patchwork of shadows on the ridge below them. Once again, Gwyneth felt that new knowledge take shape inside her: that some things could not be spoken, that truth could equal beauty, that pain was sometimes necessary, and real.
“Why on earth did you ever come here?” Angela said.
They caught up with Frank at the party, but soon after, he and Angela departed—another shot at Kronosaurs had been promised for the morning, and Angela had shamed him into going along this time. “We didn’t come here to play tennis,” she said. “Besides you’ll be wearing a lifesuit. It’s not like you can drown.”
Afterwards, Gwyneth floated ghost-like through the party, waiting for Peter. She had resolved to kiss him on the stairs when he came, but he did not come, and at last it was late. The moon had risen high into the alien sky. The fires had dwindled to coals. Even the hard-core drinkers were pouring themselves one by one into their rooms.
Somehow—afterward Gwyneth could never quite figure out precisely how it happened, how the decision came to her or if it had been a decision at all and not some foreordained conclusion—she found herself at the concierge’s desk. Inquiries were made. The concierge responded without lifting an eyebrow. Apparently such inquiries were not uncommon.
The corridor was in the basement of the hotel.
She knocked on the door.
Robert Wilson opened it.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m sure.”
His hands were callused. They felt real against her flesh.
Later—it must have been three or after—Gwyneth slipped through the door of her room. Peter stirred in the depths of the eggshell bower.
“What time is it, Gwen?” he said in the darkness, as though he didn’t know, as though his voice wasn’t wide awake, and waiting.
“It’s late, Peter.”
He was silent for a long time. Gwyneth stood by the door until her eyes adjusted. She made her way across the shadowy room. She stood by the window, staring out into the Cretaceous night. It had grown darker, but the moon in its long descent still frosted the leaves outside the window. If she squinted, she could see—or imagined that she could see—something moving out there near the forest floor. A low-slung night grazer, maybe, or maybe just the wind-drift fronds of some ground-hugging fern.
“The party must have gone late.”
“I guess it did.”
“The T-Rex and everything. People must have been excited.”
“It’s all anyone could talk about.”
“I’m sorry I was ill. I wish I could have been there.”
She said nothing.
“What was it like?”
“The party or the T-Rex?”
He laughed in the gloom.
She had no words for it, no way to begin.
“There was something spiritual to it,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain.”
Now his laughter had a bitter edge.
“Spiritual? Seeing one giant animal tear another one to pieces?”
“It’s not that—”
But it was. The blood sport of the thing had excited her.
“—or not that alone, anyway. It was the thing’s purity of purpose, I think. So devoid of confusion or . . . or ambiguity. Just pure appetite. Every sinew of its body had evolved to serve it.”
She said, “It doesn’t make any sense. I know it doesn’t make any sense.”
In the silence that followed, she felt once again the distance between them: continental drift, something so big she couldn’t quite shape it in her mind.
“You weren’t ill,” she said.
“No.”
“You could have come.” Then: “What are we going to do?”
He was silent for a long time.
“Was it worth it, Gwyneth?”
She stared into the moon-silvered dark.
Peter turned on the bedside lamp.
Her face hovered in the glass, hollowed out and half transparent, ghost-like.
“Turn it off. Turn it off, Peter.”
He did, and the Cretaceous dark rose up to envelop her.
“Another shot at Kronosaurs, tomorrow,” he said, and she felt a doorway open between them.
Some things you could not speak of. Some wounds healed in silence.
“We should get some sleep,” he said.
Gwyneth stood in the threshold. Her body was wide awake. She felt like she might never sleep again. Peter swept back the veils of the eggshell bower and stood, tall in the darkness, and came to her. He put a hand to the small of her back and leaned over, brushing her ear with his lips.
“Come to bed, Gwen,” he said.
But she only stood there, his hand at her back, his breath at her ear. The night deepened. Even the moon was gone. Something huge and bright streaked across the sky. It erupted on the horizon, red and orange, a god-light towering into vacuum far above. Shockwaves followed, flattening the trees on the distant ridges in a broad expanding circle, as though a great fist had slammed down upon the planet, rocking them so that they had to clutch at one another to stay on their feet. The thick glass spider-webbed in its frame. Somewhere in the depths of the hotel, something crashed. Someone screamed. Then the fire, burning from horizon to horizon as it ate the dark. Some things could not be saved, Gwyneth thought. Some wounds did not heal. Then the yoke took her. It was just as Wilson had said: it was like being turned inside out.
MEMORIES OF LIGHT AND SOUND
Steven S
aus
“At least I get to wear a nice hat,” Monica laughed. She held its floofy rim down as a gust of fall wind threatened to pull it off her bobbed hair. “You know, baby, when I said I wanted to visit Manhattan someday, this isn’t quite what I meant.”
Anthony adjusted his bowler, shielding his dark eyes from a stray beam of late afternoon sunlight. “It’s an important time period,” he said. “The Roaring Twenties. Flappers, speakeasies, all that jazz. Besides, the Statue of Liberty isn’t wading in seawater like it would be if we came here in our time.”
Anthony grabbed the leather handle of the suitcase the Timeshares agent had provided for them. They had managed to buy one of the first unaccompanied tours. They wore period clothes for the trip and had an automatic recall trigger. Timeshares had arranged for a native to provide a packed suitcase, an itinerary, and lodgings. The reduced traveling mass and short length of their vacation reduced the price enough to let regular people like them afford the trip.
“The hotel is right across the street. Good for one night only.” The traffic only justified checking the street once, but the back part of Anthony’s brain twitched so he checked for cars again.
The hotel’s foyer spread out before them as Monica handed her fur coat to a doorman. Anthony pointed to the marble pillars along the walls. “See? I got you Roman columns.”
She giggled, and Anthony wrapped his arms around her, the soft cotton of her dress thin under his arms.
“It’s our honeymoon,” she whispered in his ear, her pale fingers playing with the trace of gray at his temple. “I’m more interested in another kind of column.”
Anthony’s face grew hot. He only had a few years on her, but her forwardness still took him by surprise. “We’ll do something about that after I check in,” he said with a smile.
He walked to the counter and rang the bell while Monica examined the oil paintings on the wall. The other men in the lobby looked at her. Anthony’s smile got bigger as he leaned on the counter, watching the men watch her. It didn’t matter how much they looked. She had chosen him, the loser boy who had finally been successful. Now, on his honeymoon, he could finally make things right with—
The clerk’s rough voice stopped his daydreaming. “You a wop?”
The blunt question punched through Timeshare’s historical briefing. Their warnings echoed his grandfather’s stories of a time when his family was not considered white. Anthony’s heart beat faster as he turned to face the desk clerk, fingers pressed into the polished wood of the counter.
“What the hell did you say?”
Monica was at his side, her words cutting into the clerk’s reply. “We’re from Cleveland. Ohio. It’s our honeymoon!”
The clerk nodded to Anthony. “Sorry. Didn’t figure, but the owner doesn’t want no dagos staying here. Drives off real business, you know how it is. Gotta be careful with all the boats coming in.”
Monica tapped the counter. “We don’t have much of that in Cleveland, thank goodness. Husband, dear, why don’t you sign us in and pay the man?”
“Of course,” Anthony forced out, fumbling with the strange paper money.
He signed his name as Michael.
Anthony relaxed on the bed, pleasantly surprised at the comforting sensation of the thick quilt against his bare skin. He fluffed the pillow, pressing his head into the soft, real feathers. After years with bland foam, he found the prick of an occasional quill fascinating. The sweat from their lovemaking slowly dried on his skin while Monica rinsed off in the extravagant claw foot bathtub. Both of them had paid more attention to each other than the room, which was now littered with their clothes. He let his attention wander as she splashed, taking in the ornate gilded wallpaper, the swirled plaster ceiling, the gas lights and radiator. Eventually it rested on his trousers. On the small bulge of folded papers in the pocket.
The muscles in his stomach clenched. Anthony closed his eyes. “Monica, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“What, that racism is annoying? Or that you’ve rested enough?” She had gotten out of the tub and leaned against the doorway, dripping and naked. Monica grabbed her hat and plopped it on her head. “You like?”
“I wouldn’t have married you if I didn’t.”
Her gaze slid down his body, one corner of her mouth rising higher in a wicked grin. “Doesn’t look like you like it quite enough,” she said.
Anthony rolled his eyes. “I am older than you.”
Monica snorted. “It must be the hat.” She tossed it onto the bedpost, then jumped onto the bed in a slick wet heap.
“Even medical marvels have their limits, you know.”
“Modern medical marvels,” she said after kissing him. She rose up on one elbow. “You can’t worry about this stuff, baby. You’ve got to be practical about the past. You know how this all turns out, history. You can’t change it now, so let it go.” She ran a finger across the short hairs on his chest. “Maybe you should concentrate on right now.”
He sighed, feeling the topic get away from him. “But I need to—”
“Husband of mine,” she said, inching her way down the bed, “we can only afford one honeymoon. Get your mind off the past and on the present.”
And for a little while, he did.
The next morning, Monica snored softly as Anthony picked his trousers up from the floor and pulled the papers from his pocket. Golden light from the early sunrise shone through the window. The soft clank of the radiator echoed in the cool autumn morning. The folded sheets were bound with a scrap of string. One ragged edge showed where Anthony had removed them from the binding. He untied the string and unfolded the yellowed paper, smoothing the wrinkles against the floor. He put aside the copied record from Ellis Island and began to read.
Anthony skimmed over the handwritten Italian of his grandfather’s diary. He remembered the translation, merely using the sheets as sentimental cues. The earliest entries began a few weeks from now, in the coalfields. His grandfather had stopped keeping the diary the day Anthony’s parents had died. The day Anthony began to live with the old man.
Anthony was glad of that. He replayed that part of his childhood again and again. So many fights with his grandfather. So many times his grandfather had tried to keep Anthony from screwing up his life. All the times when he caught Anthony smoking, stealing, or sneaking out at night. The times when he insisted Anthony stay in school.
Monica turned in her sleep. The bedsprings’ creak echoed the springs of his old bed in Grandfather’s house. That night he’d thrown himself on the bed in teenage melodrama, arguing over the sound of protesting springs. The last night.
“You cannot go out with them, Anthony. You are grounded. They are bad boys, and you cannot go with them.”
The ancient jazz from his grandfather’s record player was yet another way the old man was behind the times.
“You don’t understand! You can’t understand. You’re not even from this country. You don’t get it!”
He could not remember what any of it looked like. All he remembered were the sounds and silences of that night. The sudden silence of his grandfather—confused and unable to speak. The echoing wail of the ambulance siren. The beep-punctuated quiet of the hospital room as Anthony waited for the doctors to tell him it was a massive stroke. The total silence of the funeral home when his smart-ass teenage mouth could not say a thing.
“What’s that, baby?” Monica said.
Anthony mashed the pages back together. His hands twisted the string around them on autopilot. The radiator clanked again, louder, giving him a moment to stall. He held a fragment of the past, a relic of a memory older than himself. He could not take anyone else judging him about this.
“Nothing,” he said. She flinched at the flatness in his voice. “Just some notes about things to see in the city.” Anthony pushed the papers back into his pants pocket.
“Okay, baby.”
He watched her breasts rise and fall with a deep breath.
“Are you coming back to bed?”
Anthony put on his trousers. “No. Let’s get dressed. I want to get started on our tour.”
The lion did not roar.
Monica’s eyes were large. “How does it move around?”
Anthony closed the pocket watch in his hand and looked up at the lion. It stopped circling the cage—it had just enough room for that—then sank down and began chewing at the bald patches on its haunches. It ignored the stinking bowl of kibble and scraps in the far corner.
“I don’t think it can. These small cages in zoos were normal even when I was a kid.” He could smell the musk of the big cat over the metal of the cage; they were far closer to the lion than they would ever be in the naturalistic enclosures of a modern zoo.
“Is that why it’s chewing on itself? Because it has no room? Because it feels trapped?”
Anthony started to reply when a swarm of schoolchildren flowed around a corner and past them, a pushing, shoving, river of shouting youth. Behind them, a school-teacher in a muted floral dress prompted stragglers to keep up.
Monica pointed at the kids. “They’re so cute, Anthony.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I can’t afford kids. We’ve talked about this before.” Anthony looked at his watch again. “We’ve got to get going, anyway.”
“Fine.”
Anthony looked up; the hardness of her voice was also in her eyes.
“We won’t talk about it, Anthony. I’ll meet you at the front gate.”
He watched her walk away, her stride keeping pace with the students. A chuff from the lion got his attention. It had stopped gnawing at itself, its face instead turned straight toward him. Anthony understood how antelope felt.
“I can’t afford it,” he whispered. “I can’t afford to make another mistake.”
It was afternoon when they got to the docks, and even if the conversation was not forgotten, Anthony was not going to mention it. The early afternoon sunlight angled across the water as the ferry lowered its ramp. When it did, humanity poured out, swirling among the few people waiting nearby. The passengers’ brown clothing offset the sea of olive skin and dark hair. Pale manifest tags from the passenger ships were still pinned to their clothes. The sound of immigrant voices reached Anthony, a linguist’s stew of Europe, the words too fast in too many languages to understand. The smell of disinfectant came next, carried on their clothes from Ellis Island, pushing away the smell of the sea.