Marriage is a battlefield: Jonathan and you have known this for all your lives, you were like Napoleon and Joséphine, he and you, in love, yes, definitely in love, but never at the same time, not with one another. You have wandered in and out of love, as if it were a room in a house, as if you could only occupy it for a moment, on your way to more pressing matters.
But you always returned to one another. That is the point. Equal forces oppose one another, always. They strive for mastery, but no mastery is possible. You hated Jonathan, there were entire years when you hated him, when you stood across the trenches from one another with blood on your hands, unwilling to bend. You took petty vengeances on him, sank your claws into him deeply, but there were sweet moments as well, when he might take your hand and call you his precious, old thing—as he did that night, after the dinner. And yet you have the feeling that you have been sleepwalking all this time. Is that possible? That perhaps this is a dream? But, of course, it is not a dream. The details are too exquisite, the colour of Jonathan’s blood on the carpet, the deformed lump of his flesh, it would repulse her, wouldn’t it? Give her such nightmares?
The world does not work by ordinary logic, the ground moves strangely. . . .
You cannot stay here. The danger is too great for you.
Now that the thought is in your head it is positively urgent, there is no stopping the force of it. The hole in the window has swollen, but you can resist it, you are strong, you have always been known as such—Jonathan could never prevail against you, could never score a victory without suffering for it, that’s the truth of it.
And yet it is attractive. You see the appeal of the emptiness beyond the window.
We have always found such wretched ways to fill the gaps, you think: with idle conversation, or sex, or power, or money—but these are diversions. You recall a story, told to you by your father, that Winston Churchill upon his visit to New York, awoke the day after Black Tuesday, to the noise of a crowd outside the famed Savoy Hotel; there he discovered the body of a banker who had dashed himself to pieces after a fifteen-storey flight. This was before you were born, but the story has always moved you, you don’t know why. Yours is a generation of ruined skies. When you gaze up into the dazzling blue, you are as likely to see the billowing white plumes of the Challenger—how hopeful you were back then, how proud!—or the flutter of a hailstorm of burning papers and bodies, yes, bodies too, plummeting from the broken towers as you are to see the angels of previous generations. You have filled the skies with the bleak wreckage of your hopes.
And Jonathan has wrecked himself.
You loved him.
Did he not understand that? Did he not understand why you would not let him go from you, not after these many years? How could you survive it? He begged you. He pleaded with you, but it was nonsense, how many times have you pleaded before to be set free and he would not do it? Jonathan would have hated her, young and pretty though she was. He would have hated her for her youth, for her charms, he would have resented her bitterly for all she had that he had lost to old age. It would not have been the hatred you shared for each other, a survivable hatred.
“France, armée, tête d’armée, Joséphine,” Napoleon said at the last. He had loved her.
And you loved Jonathan, even though he made such a mess of it. He cracked a hole in the centre of that love, and now every evil thing is rushing in to fill the space. He always promised you would outlive him. Sheer spite, he said, would preserve you forever, but you believe you might have been eternal, the two of you, circling one another, you exerted such a force, repellent and yet magnetic: it would have taken the collapse of the solar system, the collapse of the universe, to free you of each other.
And yet.
You are exhausted.
The night pours into the room, blackness, desperate and inexhaustible. You are tired of fighting; you let it coax you into sleep.
“Are you all right in there?”
The sound of knocking startles you out of your slumber, insistent, urgent. You stumble from the chair, and as you do, the glass tumbler you have been holding slips from your numbed fingers. It breaks into several bright, jagged pieces.
“Hello?”
You blink, and your eyes focus on the pieces of crystal glittering at your feet. You feel effervescent, drowsy, drunk.
You walk carefully from the chair, minding the glass, and open the door a crack.
“Hello? What’s happened?”
The face that appears before yours is young, and very handsome: smooth cheeks, eyes as blue as cornflowers. You cannot remember his name, though you have seen him many times. A neighbour from downstairs? Harry—or Henry?
“I heard a noise,” he says in that thick Chicago accent, lovely and raw.
Through the open door, you can see the warm lights of the hallway, and it occurs to you, right then, only then, you could leave. You could get out. You could walk through that door, and leave behind this battleground: the memories and torments, scars, loves, the reconciliations and romances, the feel of his hand upon your hip, coffee on his breath in the morning, the rustle of his newspaper expertly folded, the lilt of a New England accent when he was drunk, the thousand recollections upon which you have built a life for the two of you.
You could take the elevator, take the stairs. You could be on the ground floor in no time. No time at all. You could do it. Then it wouldn’t matter. It would just be a hole in a window, a crack in the glass—pedestrian, harmless. You would be so far away, you couldn’t fall. You couldn’t fall then, and it couldn’t take you.
And before you can think what you are doing you lurch toward the door.
But he is there.
“Oh, God,” he says, “what’s happened to you? What’s happened? There’s blood!”
The young man grabs your arms. Though you struggle against him, he is far stronger than you are. His hands are like vices around your wrists.
“No no no no no,” You mumble. He pretends not to hear you. He pushes you into the room.
“What was the noise?”
“It was the glass,” you say wildly.
“What glass?” he says. But now he is staring at you. His testicular Adam’s apple bobs up and down nervously. You have seen that look before.
“I must look a mess,” you say. You finger the silk of your dressing gown plaintively, and pull it tighter around the waist. He shouldn’t see you in your dressing gown. You aren’t fit for company now. He takes a step forward, and you retreat toward the table. “The glass.”
“Where?”
You point, and he kneels down at your feet. He is so close, you can see the fine, golden hairs on the back of his neck. You can smell this fellow—Harry, or Henry—as he begins to pick up the largest of the pieces of broken glass. He smells good. He smells like Jonathan smelled. Perhaps it is the way all of these men smell. Is that possible? That perhaps all men smell the same?
“Be careful,” you say, “not to cut yourself. You might cut yourself.”
He places a long sliver of glass on the table next to the bottle of gin. The glass is beautiful and sharp, cut like a diamond. You shiver. Just a little bit, you shiver. He is such a handsome man. No more than twenty-five: gloriously twenty-five, all charm, all innocence, but here he is, and it is late, and he has seen you in your silk dressing gown.
You know what men are like when they see something. And he has not looked beyond the table, not beyond you in your silk dressing gown. He has not looked further than that. You touch his hair. You take a step, but the ground moves strangely beneath your feet, and you stumble. He catches you. His hand on your wrist again, but this time the touch is light, tentative, as if he were asking you to dance. He is very young. Such a confused look in those cornflower blue eyes of his. Your dressing gown is slipping open, and you move to close it again—but pause. “Will you take a look?” you say.
He nods again, uncomprehendi
ng, you think, but intrigued. Men are always like this. Jonathan was always like this.
Harry’s eyes are wide, very wide, as you step aside for him so he can see what has happened.
“Oh,” he says. It is a little noise. Such a little noise to come out of that beautiful little mouth of his. “Oh,” he says, and that’s how it starts, “oh God!”
“Harry,” you say. “Please.”
“Oh God! Oh God, fuck!”
“Fuck-a-duck,” you whisper, but so quietly he does not hear you. His hand tightens around your wrist. It is so tight that it hurts. You moan. You can’t help it. He stops hurting you then but he is pushing past you toward Jonathan.
And the hole.
The hole has become very large now. It has become greater than the window, its tendrils spidering out into the very architecture to devour the frame and the moulded settings, it has eaten up the curtains and the lacquered table. It is hungry for everything.
Harry. He takes a step toward it.
“No,” you tell him. “Please don’t.”
He is at the chair. Six feet four inches. You know that distance very well, but you can see clearly he is unaware.
Five feet.
Four feet.
He is crossing the distance like it is nothing.
“What have you done?” he demands. “What happened to him?”
You take a step toward him. Toward Henry. Toward Jonathan.
“Just tell me, okay?” he stammers. “I won’t do anything. Just tell me what happened. You’ve got to tell me what happened. Was there an accident? Was it an accident?”
He’s afraid. The poor little boy. Oh, but he is afraid. And you realize then that he is afraid of you, and isn’t that funny? Isn’t that just the funniest thing in the world? Because you did not do this, you did not shatter the world like this.
It isn’t you he ought to be afraid of.
You are coming to rescue him.
“Just stay there, Harry,” you say, “just stay there and I will come and get you.”
The world tilts around you, gravity twisting in the wake of those two bodies: one living, one dead. You can feel the wind fluttering at your dressing gown.
The hole has stretched open like an angry maw. It is big enough to take a man, and it has sharp, sharp edges. You can hear the noise from the street so loudly now, the honking of traffic, and the quiet hiss of the cars driving past.
“Take my hand, Henry,” you say.
You cannot move any closer toward him, you are too close already, and yet you take an involuntary step forward. Your whole body shakes.
“Take my hand.”
You reach toward him to bridge the gap.
And he reaches too.
But his hand is red with Jonathan’s blood, and so you shriek. Harry stumbles backward.
It is too late.
The hole has taken Harry.
It is has just lifted him straight off his feet. He is gone. He was here a moment ago but now he isn’t. If you were to look through the window you would see him floating. You would see him floating the way all those men floated off the buildings when the stock market crashed.
Drifting down.
Like sleepwalkers.
Harry won’t feel the ground.
That gives you a little peace of mind.
Poor Henry.
But you are here. You are still here.
But the question is.
The question is. Is it still hungry?
You are two feet away. You can feel the night breathing against your skin, tugging at your dressing gown. You can imagine the wind whipping out so fast that it grabs you. Grabs you the way it grabbed poor Henry.
You can feel the touch of the wind against you, and you moan. Just a little sound, like someone sleeping.
It still wants you. You know it still wants you: the way Jonathan still wanted you even if he would not admit it, even when he scorned you, even when he hated you. He would still come to you. Jonathan was never filled up with anything, never.
What a wreck he has made of himself! She would have scorned him! She would have scorned his mutilated flesh, a brainpan cracked open, a bullet that has continued its course through him and out, into the night air where perhaps it is travelling still. She would be repulsed to see what he has done to himself, and yet you feel something like love. It is too late, of course, but it is love. You have always been out of sync with one another.
You sit down heavily into the chair, mindful of the glass scattered at your feet. The night is spread out before you. When you look out, you do not see the bright lights of Chicago set in their jagged, familiar line; rather, you see the cosmos spiralling on and on, infinitely spacious, infinitely empty, the plumes of gas jettisoned from collapsed stars, the burning debris of inconsequential matter. At the heart of the glorious, perfect machine? A brutal cavity, fuelling the movement of the stars themselves . . .
Perhaps the sky has always been ruined.
And then it is coming for you, the darkness, that eternal, irresistible force, it is coming and coming.
Six feet. Then five feet. Then four feet.
Then three. Then two.
Then.
“I think, sometimes, that she used to be someone else before she came here. I think we were all someone else before we came here.”
IN THE MOONLIGHT,
THE SKIN OF YOU
I remember the winter that Dad brought home that blacktail buck tied to the hood of his car. I could smell the blood. Dad seemed like he was covered in it.
And here was this thing, this giant, beautiful thing with antlers branching out like forked rivers. The kind of thing you just wanted to touch, just wanted to tangle your fingers in. Do you remember the old nursery rhyme? Did you have it as a child?
I know so little about your childhood. Where you came from. Why you came here. Why you chose me.
But the rhyme. This is how it goes. Here is the church, here is the steeple. . . . I used to do that with Mom. That’s what the antlers made me think of. The way her fingers folded with mine when I was very young.
Dad loved hunting. They all do here. They all did, anyway, until Mads died.
For so long, I wanted to love it. I wanted to so badly, but there are some that can hunt and some that cannot. That’s what Dad told me, his mouth a thin line and something like anger on his face. I think it would have made things easier if I could have been more like him. I was a girl. That was the first strike against me. But there were so many ways I failed at being his daughter. Hunting was only one.
You came to know that about me. You who loved me best. I think you were maybe thankful for it, if thankfulness is a thing you can feel, but not Dad. Not Dad. You could see it in the way his mouth would crease like a badly used dollar bill as he was cleaning out the gun, getting his pack ready. He never asked me to go with him. Why would he? Me, a girl? A woman one day? But I knew he wanted to. I always got this sense when his eyes glanced over to me just before he’d leave. Me, curled up into the warmth of the chesterfield, reading one of Mom’s old books. He’d tense. It was the fact that he couldn’t ask that made him angry. That he knew before asking I wouldn’t go.
“Anna,” he would say. “I’m going out. Don’t let the fire burn low.”
“Okay, Dad,” I would say.
“You’ll freeze, Anna. You hear me? Pay attention, child.”
“Yes, Dad. I won’t let it burn low.”
I knew he wanted there to be something between us, just as I knew he’d always wished—just a little bit—that I had been born a different kind of person. One he could love better.
I saw sometimes the way he’d look at the boys. Baldwin, who drank gin on Fridays and could skin a hare no problem, and Mads. Mads was seventeen and he had been going to the camp for years. To haul wood or watch the ropes, fetch the older men their coffee. Mads had thick, muscled
arms. A quiet disposition. He spoke softly and not often, the same as I did, but Dad still loved him more than me. Those boys were the sons he should have had, their mothers the wives he should have had.
“Mads,” he would say. “There is a boy for you. A boy like that will take care of you, Anna. I seen him cut and haul like he has done this for a good long while. I seen him snare that fox begging round the camp. Just like that. Almost cut the beast a-two.”
Those boys would be men one day.
But there is another thing, I remember, and this one has stuck with me. It wasn’t a nursery rhyme, but it was something like a nursery rhyme, you know? The kind of thing Mom might have told me when she was telling me nursery rhymes. Her voice was so beautiful. It made me feel the way you told me that listening to rain makes you feel. Sad and happy. Peaceful. Like you’ve got so much space on the inside, in your ribcage, that you could never see the horizon.
The thing she told me—it must have been her, because who else, except you, would tell me that sort of thing?—that if you killed a buck then his wife would seduce you. Crazy, isn’t it? The kind of things she said to me.
But I remembered her voice and the thing she said when Dad came home that day.
The blacktail was strapped to the hood of the car, even though you’re not supposed to do that if you want to carry it home right. You taught me that. It looked broken. The deer, that is. His hind legs roped to the car, ropes fixed to each of the tips of the antlers, pulling its head up and away from the chest. I couldn’t see where the bullet entered. I knew it must have been near the shoulder, or maybe behind a bit where it would have struck the heart or the lung.
“Do you want to see the bullet hole?” Dad asked. He was proud. I could see he was proud. The deer was huge. It was massive. Mads would have been impressed.
“No, Dad,” I said.
“Mebbe I could show you.”
Gifts for the One Who Comes After Page 24