The Horses of the Night

by Michael Cadnum

  “You are right about angels,” said Nona.

  Her words startled me.

  She read my expression, and added, “You said once that if an angel came to talk to someone, it would be in a place like this.”

  “But you didn’t mean to say that there are such things?”

  Nona settled back in her chair, with an expression that said: I won’t talk about them anymore.

  She sipped from a blue cup. I had asked Collie to bring Nona whatever she wanted, and Nona ate a selection of cakes, biscuits, meringues, and sorbets, all accompanied by a beverage of milk and honey, laced with an underflavoring of black tea.

  “We could live like this forever,” said Nona.

  Given world enough, I wanted to say, and time. I worked hard, laboring in the garden to put Rick to rest, to lay my father even deeper into the past, where he belonged. Earthworms spasmed. Roots struggled, and gave way under the plunge of my spade.

  “We’ll have breakfast every day over there, under that—what is it called?”

  “The camperdown elm,” I said. “You can have breakfast anywhere you want.”

  She gazed at me from under her hat, the straw brim sprinkling her face with light and shadow. “With you,” she said.

  The gingko tree shaded the back garden. All of its branches were full of leaf. There was something about this that continued to trouble me. The presence of this resurrected tree reminded me of something I wanted to forget.

  I worked in the hothouse, too, and Nona enjoyed the smell of the place, and the new small jungle that erupted around her. I showed her how to savor a ginger blossom like honeysuckle, and there were many flowers to pick, both white and yellow ginger, because that plant, a lovely tropical weed, was as yet the most prominent in the hothouse, although the heliconia and the anthuriums were in full leaf. They promised to blossom soon.

  “Does your mother know about your brother?” asked Nona one morning as I opened a new bag of potting soil.

  I breathed the fragrance of the mulch. I knew that, in a gentle way, Nona was testing me. She wanted to see what I was able to talk about. “It’s hard to know what she understands. I went up while you were in the hospital and told her.”

  Anticipating the visit had been very grim, but the actual telling, aided by Dr. Ahn, had been a peculiar experience. My mother had insisted that Rick had died years ago, in an accident on the way home from a party. I did not have to suggest to anyone that, in a sense, she was right.

  Nona had prescribed medication for me, and I took it. It had a striking effect on me at first, slowing me down and making my hands tremble. Nona remained out of touch with events at the hospital, although daily she was plainly closer to going back to work. She cut pictures out of magazines, and read storybooks, marking favorite pages, anticipating her return.

  One Sunday afternoon Nona called to me. I leaned on my shovel and looked back to see her pointing.

  “An old friend,” she said.

  The white cat paused at the edge of Nona’s shadow, looking across the green lawn. It was happy to stay near Nona for the moment, accepting a caress. But when it began stalking a squirrel, creeping toward the gingko tree, I laughed and told it that we had already rescued it from that very tree once before.

  The tree.

  It was fully alive, and wore the deep green of a tree in its prime.

  The day Nona returned to work at the hospital, I was in the hothouse, rolling up the hose. The brass nozzle trailed along the gravel and the moss-edged steppingstones.

  The hose was wound into circles, and hung on its frame, when I stopped moving.

  The air in the hothouse is warm, but it is also thick, a world apart from the other, thin-aired diaspora. No kitchen, no desk, only shelves of plants, those remorseless stalks and leaves. Sometimes when I was in that artificial environment I would be certain that someone was approaching, and I would cock my head to listen.

  The glazed windows of the place played tricks on me, I knew. But I had the sensation that I was about to have a visitor, and I prayed that it might be a human, ordinary everyday sort of messenger, and not the other kind.

  65

  There was a tap at the hothouse door, and a cool wind from outside. The broad leaves around me stirred, with a pattering like rain.

  “It’s lovely here. A world within the world,” said a familiar voice.

  Valfort moved a glistening leaf to one side, and it painted his cheek with water as it fell back into place.

  Nona stood behind him. There was a strange expression in her eyes.

  I was surprised at how happy I was to see him.

  “Please accept my condolences,” he said.

  I nodded, clearing my throat, unable to speak for a moment. “You knew.”

  “You told me a great deal during our session in Paris. I did not know what was true, and what was not.”

  “You thought I was the killer?”

  “Because you thought you were. I was wrong. And, jealous.” He smiled. “I still am.”

  “In a way, I wish I had been. My brother would be alive.”

  “Instead, you are innocent.”

  There was something of the charming opponent about Valfort even now. “No, I’m anything but innocent. I was wrong to be so ambitious,” I said.

  “Ambitious! You wanted more life,” Valfort said. “You were hungry for it. You were one of those people. I’ve seen them before. Hungry people create the world. You were hungry.”

  “I’m not well.”

  “You know the truth, now.”

  I looked away. “I’m taking a maintenance dose of Molindone. I haven’t, thanks to the drug, had any hallucinations for weeks.”

  “But you feel that you have lost something. We see the horrors of heaven and earth open wide before us and we fix it. We take a pill. We get on with our lives, aided by chemicals with gigantic names. Do you have any idea how many well-known minds cannot function without some kind of help? Americans are a practical people. A medicine for any evil.”

  I brushed black flecks of leaf mold from my hands. “You don’t approve of drugs?”

  He chuckled. “‘Approve.’ What an American concept. You simplify so much into like/dislike, agree/disagree.”

  “We lack the famous French gift for intellectual purity.”

  “We could work together, Stratton. I wonder now how sick you really are.”

  “What did you see when you almost died?” I asked. “That event that changed your life?”

  Valfort had realized that the tear that ran down his cheek was water from a nearby leaf. He brushed at the trickle and moved away from the laua‘e fern. “It’s not what I saw—it’s what I learned.”

  I gestured: Go on.

  “I learned that there was not good, or evil, or Heaven or Hell. There were divinities, human qualities that endure. And we make them evil—or good—by our demands on them.”

  The effort of translating his experience into English seemed taxing. He lifted an eyebrow and smiled knowingly: You understand me.

  I did not have to answer.

  “I want you to come to Paris,” he said, “to speak to the conference.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Nona will not be able to address the committee. She is still recovering, although doing nicely. You have no choice. She needs you. The children need you.”

  The air was warm and felt nearly alive, closing around me. “If I knew that my visions are all over with. If I could trust myself. But I can’t.”

  He shook his head, a single sideways movement of his chin. “You’ll reconsider.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If you don’t, you’re a fool,” said Valfort. From such a man the word fool had the ring of an epithet. “I’m giving you the chance to make history. To move men and women to joy. To clothe and shelter your fellow human beings in things of beauty. Wake up, Stratton.”

  “You’re a good man,” I began.

  His voice was sharp. “What is this pre
occupation with being good? Who do you think you are?”

  I looked away, into the maze of plants around me.

  “Do forgive me for having yet another opinion that might displease you. It is simply that Americans think so much about themselves. Their own needs, their own feelings. Perhaps it is not an American characteristic so much as a characteristic of consumerism. In psychological terms we would call it ‘self-monitoring.’ How much time do you spend self-monitoring? Think about it.”

  “You make a graceful opponent,” I said. “Never out of position.”

  “You can help Nona. Better than anyone else alive.”

  “I’d like to believe you. But I can’t trust myself. I’m not sure what will happen to me.”

  “I’m flying to Paris in—I’m late.” He used the French pronunciation of that city’s name as though pleased to stop speaking English if only for a single word. There was a glint of Swiss timepiece at his wrist. “I want to meet you there tomorrow. Nona has the plan. She knows who’ll be there, and how important it is.”

  I touched a leaf, a pearl of water spilling into a trickle, falling into my hand.

  “Don’t think. Do. You really do need help, don’t you? Not the kind of help love or medicine or money or fame can bring.”

  I smiled sadly. He was right.

  Valfort puzzled me by not leaving. He looked at me with a kind expression, and then he said, “Something has happened. I want to prepare you for it.”

  I was mystified. Nona left, and Valfort and I were alone.

  “Some things you never get over,” said Valfort. “Some bad things. And maybe some good things. You don’t blame yourself for losing your brother, do you?”

  Valfort had a way of knowing what troubled me. “No. Not really.” There was a chill inside me. The Pacific had been so cold that night. “But he’s gone, nonetheless.”

  “Exactly,” said Valfort.

  His casual dismissal of my grief, my own considerations, irritated me. “Make your plans without me,” I said. “I can’t even begin to consider—”

  I stopped myself. Something was about to happen. I took a breath and parted my lips to ask what was happening, and there was a step at the door.

  Nona was there in the doorway, the fresh scent of the outdoors among the plants. “Come outside, Stratton,” she said.

  My eyes asked the question.

  “You have a visitor,” she said.

  Valfort’s eyes, and Nona’s, were alight. I brushed my hands again and found a place on the shelf for the trowel.

  I was wary, and at the same time hopeful, even excited. But I told myself: Don’t go.

  Don’t listen to them.

  You don’t want to see this.

  66

  The safe warmth of the hothouse mingled with the tide of air from the outside.

  “What is it?” I said. “What’s out there?”

  His voice was gentle. “The world we live in does not make much sense to us,” said Valfort. “But there is no reason to be afraid.”

  Here, surrounded by my tropical plants, I was safe—I knew what was real.

  He motioned with his hand—hurry.

  The sun outside was bright, and the air was cool.

  There was a boy I did not recognize sitting on the grass, holding a large pair of shears. He was toying with them, distracted from the workings of the tool by the sound of my step.

  He leaped to his feet, and ran with the shears dangling from one hand, and I could not move.

  You’ll hurt yourself.

  Think about this, I told myself. Think hard. This is just another trick.

  I turned back to see Nona, for some guidance from her. The sunlight was too bright, and I could not make her out.

  He was a child perhaps seven years old wearing ordinary children’s clothing, jeans, a bright green T-shirt emblazoned with an alligator, a smiling, cartoonish character.

  What was happening was both clear and disjointed.

  He tugged my hand. He wanted to lead me somewhere.

  I said his name. He looked at me, smiling and squinting against the light.

  Could I trust this? Was this happening?

  He had gained weight, and he looked more three-dimensional than he had in the past, more real.

  My hands, my body, belonged to someone else. Finally, I found myself able to talk once more. “I thought you were gone.”

  Gone. The word was a gasp, a solid door.

  I couldn’t believe. He was going to vanish in another heartbeat, I knew. He slipped something folded up, a piece of paper, into my hand.

  Then, abruptly, as though shy, or unsure of his surroundings, “Are you still sick?”

  “No,” I said. “I take medicine.” Then, my voice breathless, I said, “You aren’t sick, either.”

  Stuart did not answer.

  “I trim trees with those,” I said. “They’re very sharp.” I uttered the words with a feeling of incredulity, someone experimenting in a foreign place with a strange language.

  I wanted to hear his voice again. I wanted to believe it was possible.

  “They’re big,” he said.

  I saw how large and ancient this house must seem to him, and this garden, these shears.

  He spoke before I could respond. “It might come back,” he said.

  I must have looked confused.

  “My sickness,” he said.

  It might. That was the weight of our lives.

  “He was in remission,” said Nona, “that night you tried to find him. He had already begun to recover well enough to be sent home.”

  And then I believed it. The heft of the shears as I took them from Stuart, worried that he might cut himself, reminded me that this was happening. This was actual—the blades were gray, glazed with years of green. I let the shears fall onto the grass. I knew: This was real.

  And I allowed myself joy. I put my arms around him.

  Then he released himself and pried open my hand. The paper horses in my hand unfolded just a little, as though coming to life, or perhaps the tension in the paper from being folded allowed them to re-erect themselves.

  “These are old,” I said. “I’ll make you some new ones.”

  He smiled, pleased at the thought, but took the old ones back, as though to protect them against harm.

  “I like the old ones,” he said.

  I made him other horses, and frogs that jumped, and a paper airliner, one that flew, gliding in a way that delighted him, and he unfolded it carefully, and refolded it in a new way so he could keep that, too, in his pocket.

  We clipped a hedge so he could see how the big shears worked, and he raked the leaves and the stems, piling the cuttings using a tool that was too long for him, and when we were done he ran to get the bicycle I mentioned was in one of the buildings bordering the garden.

  It took awhile, and there must have been a moment in which I told myself that this was not happening. This was not real. You see, some voice in me must have murmured—he’s gone.

  He came back again steering a bicycle that cast ripples of sunlight on the grass from its bright, slowly spinning wheels.

  67

  Nona had insisted. We could get out of the cab and walk across the Pont-Neuf.

  “I don’t want you getting too tired,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  So we were holding hands, gazing down at the river, figures stepping quickly past, people walking small dogs. It had stopped raining. The clouds broke into dozens of fragments, like flagstone flung down into bits.

  The plane trees had grilles around their trunks, ironwork that does not constrict the tree so much as give it definition, like the lace collars in a Flemish portrait. The quays along the Seine were pocked and dimpled with fossil shells.

  “Why did I bring an umbrella? It’s totally unnecessary,” said Nona. She wore an overcoat Anna Wick had designed, and a beret that had arrived in a box with a note from Anna herself.

  The note had displayed th
e quick, dashed-off look of a message that has been carefully considered: “You deserve every good thing from now on.” I had thought the note, in its fortune-cookie rhythm, betrayed either jealousy or a stylistic clumsiness.

  Notre Dame shivered in the Seine. The city was suspended, upside down, an imperfect memory of itself. A barge, as long as a black building, approached the bridge. The coal glittered.

  “Dr. Valfort doesn’t think you’re coming,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t know you the way I do.”

  “He’ll be surprised.”

  “And pleased.”

  We leaned on the railing of the bridge. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  The feeling kept returning: This was all about to end.

  I reassured her. No, I saw nothing, heard nothing, only Paris around us. Except—perhaps they would come for me now, at this moment of happiness. Maybe this is the hour they would select to seize me.

  Seeing Stuart again had been a cause for joy, but afterward I had felt a strange combination of happiness and dread. Before Stuart’s return I had begun to believe that the visions were a symptom of mental illness, that there were no Powers, no soul.

  Now I was not sure of anything.

  I understood, now, how little I had known about my father. I had kept myself from truths I must have known, in one part of my mind. Now I fully possessed my memories, but I had, at the same time, lost the fiction of a wise, loving father.

  I could not shake the feeling that the night of my good fortune was over.

  The barge passed under us, on its way south.

  I insisted on taking a taxi at last. There was a disagreement. The distance was too short, said the driver, but Nona reassured him, and the man drove without further complaint. I paid him what must have been quite a bit, forgetting to even count the money, not caring. He was cheered by the amount. In English, speaking carefully, he wished us good luck.

  The reception was a hive of people accustomed to power. I recognized two foreign secretaries and a number of people whose wealth was legendary. Security people circulated, mixing with the crowd.

  The thought kept repeating: all about to end.

  “You’ll never be able to sell your ideas to a group like this.”