Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  They were only feet away from where he and Lauren had been minutes before; their bicycles lined the banks, dropped disconsolately by the wayside. They sat peering through the fog in exhausted confusion. When Michel walked up, several raised their heads at the sound of his steps, and then the rest began to stand. By the time he reached the bridge, they rushed him, only to step back and babble several languages at him. Michel looked from one to the other.

  Then he heard the voice from the back. Jason stepped through the crowd, staring at Michel, at his white hair and ancient eyes, and said, “Is it you?”

  “It’s me,” said Michel. “You’re lost.”

  “No shit.”

  “Haven’t you heard the helicopters, seen the torches? The whole city’s been looking for you.”

  “We haven’t heard or seen anyone,” said Jason. “We took a wrong turn at the beginning, I rode for hours up and down one canal, up and down another. It was like the city vanished.”

  “You’re in the middle of the Grand Canal, in the middle of the city,” Michel said. He pointed behind them. “San Marco Square is right up there, at the end—”

  “I told you,” said Jason, “we’ve been riding along this canal all day and night. Look, if you know where we are then let’s go.”

  They got their bicycles and followed him back.

  She was asleep when she heard the door open; she didn’t know, that first moment, if it was Michel or Jason. He dropped his bicycle against the wall. He was bare to the waist, carrying a loaf of bread and a bottle of whisky. He didn’t look at her, even as she sat up in bed, nor did he say anything; he only pulled the chair over by the window and intended to eat, and particularly to drink. It was very early in the morning, the light only beginning to seep through the fog outside. Finally she said, “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t answer. He was exhausted and dirty.

  “Where were you?”

  He picked up the bread, he took a drink. He stared between his knees, hunched over in the chair, his blond hair falling around his face. Finally he said, “Are you in love with him?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. He continued to pick at the bread, as though he was going to eat it. “He won’t be any different, you know.”

  She said nothing.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I think we should separate for a while.”

  “We’ve been separated for a while. Ten months, a year—”

  “Longer than that,” she said. “We’ve been separated longer than that.”

  He slammed the bottle down on the table; he was in a deep and still rage. He stood up and now looked at her directly, for the first time. “Well,” he said, “I can see I’m not number one anymore.” He was radiating fury, and she couldn’t stand to look at him. He started to leave and she said, “Where are you going?”

  “What do you care?”

  “But what will you do?”

  He slammed the door on his way out.

  From his room in the locanda, Michel could see the window of a glass shop across the way. It was before dawn; he had returned to bathe and rest and wait until it was time to call Lauren. He had told Lauren he would call at her hotel, and he intended to, Jason’s return notwithstanding. Watching from his room, he could see a vandal at work in the glass shop at this moment; the fog parted just enough that a face and arm were visible, and the breaking glass. Everything was showered in blue; the sound of the glass was inaudible, so each methodic explosion burst like a silent bubble. On one top shelf was a string of glass heads, angelic and seductive; he could see them clearly even from this distance. He became attached to the glass heads and wondered if the vandal might overlook them. The boy was about sixteen; there was no sign of any pleasure in what he was doing. Michel deliberated, trying to decide if it was a political act, like blowing up a train station.

  He went down to the lobby of the locanda before noon. When Lauren came to the phone, she was crying. Michel could hear confusion over the line, in the lobby of Lauren’s hotel; she couldn’t talk. She kept breaking down. “I told him I want a separation.” She could hardly say it.

  “Is he there?” He was disturbed by how distraught she sounded.

  “He left and then came back, and now he’s gone again. Michel, where will he go? He has nowhere to go.”

  “I’m coming over,” he said. When he got to the hotel he looked for Jason; he went to her room and knocked on the door with apprehension, wondering if Jason had returned. Lauren answered, alone. She didn’t look at him when she held open the door, and he didn’t kiss her. She cried for a while, then he held her there on the bed, and kept thinking about what would happen if Jason came back. He won’t come back, she said. She was depleted; Michel wanted to take her to his locanda. She muttered, as she drifted, I know he won’t come back, if I know him at all. She finally fell asleep, and Michel sat holding her.

  When Jason came back he found Michel and Lauren on the bed; the two men just looked at each other. Lauren woke and sat up in confusion. Jason walked to the window, as though going about his business, and Lauren looked at Michel. Jason sat down in the chair at the end of the bed, never quite facing them. None of them said anything to each other, all sitting and waiting, the two men waiting for each other to leave, the woman confronted with her choice.

  Finally, in the midst of the silence, Jason shifted in the chair and cleared his throat. With difficulty, he found the words. “Uh, Michel,” he said. “This must be particularly difficult for you. I’m sorry.” Michel could think of nothing to say in return. Several more minutes passed and after a while Jason finally said to Lauren, “Can we talk?”

  She looked at Michel, and he looked at her. Everything inside him was turning. He was terrified that if he left her now, he would lose her; he was terrified of the hold Jason had on her. “I’ll call you,” she said.

  “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  He left, walking through the lobby of the hotel and back to his locanda, where he waited in his room for someone to knock on the door and tell him he had a call.

  After Michel had gone, Jason got up from the chair and walked to the window and from there awaited the passing of the afternoon. He seemed to stand there for hours, as Lauren sat on the bed waiting for him to turn and face her. Outside, the shutters of the village windows were pulled closed as the day grew later, and Lauren thought she could almost hear the sound of the fog in the canals like the flow of the water that wasn’t there. The room darkened, its light narrowing to the scope of the burning lamp on the table; and several times she could see his body visibly shudder. His head would shift so that she could see the side of his face, and then he’d gaze back out the window, not yet prepared for what he had to say to her. Several times she thought to ask, What is it? but she did not, leaving it to him to find his own impulse: it wouldn’t be the same if she had to provoke him. When the silence was such as to swallow them up, he pivoted finally, almost angrily; and then the anger washed away and what she saw in his eyes appalled her. She could see that in his mind he knew he had lost her, and all that was left was something so desperate he had let his own self go in order to say it. She didn’t want to hear it. She was about to shake her head no; and he saw that too, when he blurted, before it was too late, I’ll do anything you want. Then he faced the dark again, leaving her with a Jason she’d never known.

  Michel did not leave his room. Each time the telephone rang he listened for the sound of the landlady’s steps on the stairs; each time he heard the sound of the steps on the stairs, he listened for the knock on the door that would tell him he had a call. Several times the telephone rang, several times he heard the steps on the stairs: the knock on the door never came. He began saying aloud to the ceiling, Please call me. He wanted to walk to her hotel to see if the light was on in their room, but he was afraid he’d miss a phone call, he was afraid she might see him and think he was spying, he was afraid the room would be dark and that s
he’d be making love to him. He didn’t sleep at all. Instead he lay awake and saw to his astonishment the vandal still in the glass shop across the way. One small candle was burning in the window, and all the shelves were sprayed with bits of glass by now; and the boy sat there looking as though he had nowhere to go. Behind him, on the one shelf, was still the string of sculpted heads that Michel had noticed before; they were intact, overlooked in the carnage. It was at this moment that the boy glanced up before him blankly and saw he was being watched; Michel could not help but eye the glass heads, and from across the way the boy could not help but catch the expression of alarm and turn to find its source. He saw the heads. He looked back at Michel and then mercilessly started for them, as though performing an inescapable duty: and as the final bit of destruction was completed, something swept before Michel’s eyes. It was an image of a woman’s face so powerful that it exploded before him and was lost again: it was like the other memories and dreams he had of his past, except nothing before had been this powerful, nothing had touched him quite like this—not the twins or anything else. But now he’d lost that image: he couldn’t place it, he knew it was a woman; but it wasn’t Lauren and it wasn’t his mother, it wasn’t his aunt, it wasn’t the girl on the train in the pink dress and bow, and it wasn’t any face on the street he could remember. He looked back at the glass shop for whatever it was that had triggered this recollection; the vandal, hopelessly trapped only moments before, had disappeared. The heads had disappeared. Michel worried that it might have been the glass heads that brought this memory back to him and now that they were gone he would never recapture that memory. But then he realized that in fact it was the smashing of the glass that did it: and its light. The strange, refracted sort of light caught in the glass itself, from no other source, from no sun or moon or celestial origin—a light that seemed born of itself, inimicable, contained in itself; and then it came back to him again. The light: and he was in a strange room, with no windows and no door to be seen and there on the wall before him, framed and overwhelming, was the picture of a very young woman. His recollection of this was now as vivid as any memory he’d ever known. Every detail of that picture was clear to him: her sad desolate eyes and full child’s mouth, and he realized it was the woman in the film that he had given up for his own film of his mother. Standing there in his own mind, in this unknown room, he stared at the picture a long time and then saw, over in the farthest dark corner, a small old figure with white hair. The man looked familiar. Michel retreated, from the old man, from his own mind, from the memory which ticked in his ear like a bomb. This was one fear he would not actively pursue. But backing away from it as he did, everything in him sank, and left him facing nothing but his own savagery. He now thought of Lauren and of his own emotional violence, and his dark appetites. He wondered if he was no different from Jason.

  He lay back on the bed waiting. The longer he waited the more hopeless he felt. He wanted to pick up the telephone and call her, but he wasn’t sure what he would tell her. He’d resolved he was going to wait, anyhow—that she was going to call him as she had said. But the phone downstairs did not ring, not until once at three-thirty in the morning; he heard it and believed it had to be her, but the footsteps never came up the stairs and the knock never came at the door. So he waited. By dawn he understood the train from Paris was but a prelude to this; but he was held back from that last complete collapse by his hope and sureness, both of which Lauren embodied to him. It was unfathomable to him that he would lose her. It had all gone much too far for Jason to reverse the course. They were all at a point they would never get back from, and the bond between Lauren and Jason was fatally shattered. Lauren had to see that. Jason had to see that. They would have to see that they could never survive a reconciliation now, because they could never know but that Michel might be around any corner waiting. Jason would have to realize that his list of second chances had expired, he would have to live with the fact that she gave him a chance because he begged for it, and Jason wasn’t the sort who could stand something like that. She could never again, whatever happened, be quite Jason’s; she could never again give herself to him quite completely; everything would be a little less for him, and Jason wasn’t the sort who could stand for less. There would always be that part of her heart where Michel had traveled, there would always be the territory Michel inhabited. Jason could live on it like a squatter, steal his time rent-free; but Michel would have been there once, and she would never forget it, and Jason would never forget it. Nothing would ever be quite the same for Jason again. And that was the only conclusion one could come to about all this, and it had been determined during a moment neither Michel nor Lauren could remember.

  But by dawn Michel’s will had collapsed. The fatalistic ramblings of the night fell in tatters around him. Now he was bitterly sorry he’d left Lauren there with Jason. Yet he understood she had to make this choice not for him or for Jason but for herself; he also understood that her wisest and best choice truly was neither man. Michel understood too many gold rings had adorned and bound her body too long, and he asked himself if he was offering only another gold ring. He examined his own wrists, his own ankles; he felt for a leather collar around his neck; he felt for a lock on his chest, or a zipper across his heart.

  Nine o’clock he walked from his room and stood over the lobby of the locanda. It faced him like an abyss. He sat with an Italian magazine in his lap and gazed at the telephone; the landlady watched from behind the front desk. Occasionally she would nod and smile. Half an hour passed and the telephone still didn’t ring. An hour passed.

  Why are you doing this to me? he whispered. Then he called her.

  When she came to the phone he said, I have to see you.

  Yes, she replied, I have to talk to you too.

  They spent the day walking around the city. Portentously the fog began to disperse, but the scathing heat was still there, and the canals were still empty. Her face was red and her eyes were swollen. She showed him a note Jason had written her. In it Jason talked about how everything had turned against him, how everything had fallen through and nothing had worked out; the note seethed with a sense of betrayal. The last line was: I had the best woman in the world and I fucked up. Now Lauren told Michel that Jason was willing to do anything. He was willing to be married on her terms; there would be no more women. It wasn’t worth it, he told her, if it really meant losing her. He would do anything she wanted. He had never said these things before, and he wouldn’t have said them now if he didn’t mean them; whatever else was true, Jason wasn’t a liar. For Jason to beg her for anything was almost more than she could comprehend. Now she didn’t know what to do; Jason himself assumed it was over, that his pleas were useless. Jason could see, she told Michel, that she was in love; but she felt she needed time. In San Marco Square she cried as Michel held her; by the Rialto Bridge where they had made love she cried. Michel couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand to watch her like this. You can’t afford, he said, to take more time: look at you. Look what this is doing to you. I want you but I would rather you chose to stay with him than go on doing this to yourself. Why am I the villain in this? she asked, at the Accademia Bridge.

  You’re not the villain, said Michel. What makes you think you’re the villain? We’re not victims. We’re all where we’ve chosen to be. Jason is where he’s chosen to be; he’s been making that choice for all the years you’ve known him, just as the choices I’ve made have brought me here, even the ones I don’t remember. Being a victim has nothing to do with it.

  They walked on. Having exhausted things to mourn, having nothing left to say, they were left to a kind of calm; and they accepted it. They took in the city as lovers, lamenting the lost water, seeing the palaces and drinking wine in the square. Sometimes they circled around the places they had been an hour before; sometimes they stood together in one place without moving at all. From the high windows of one gatehouse in particular, she could see the mist lifting from the basin of the lago
on; and the heat seemed to turn its floor to glass. This took Lauren back to one of the last things she remembered before burying Billy, which was looking up at Gibraltar and seeing how it shone like a mirror in the sea. Only now instead of watching the land from the sea, she was on land gazing out to where the sea had once been, and in the glass she saw herself living with Michel in a small house high on a fjord near the top of the world. The fjord was jagged and stark, and over its cliffs, which she could see encircling their house, clouds rolled past. Each cloud released another, which released another. At the edge of the fjord she could see many gorges cutting their way through the earth; the bottoms of the gorges were filled with water and in the distance she could see veins of light blue trickling across the dark fjords with their odd streaks of red cast from no sunlight. Living here with Michel it was never noon or night or dawn—only a vague gray solstice tumbling endlessly across the sky. At this moment Lauren was standing outside the house and could spot Michel far off at the foot of the cliffs, his white hair visible against the dark blue and black that was all around him. He kept walking and she couldn’t be sure if he was coming nearer or going away, or just treading the curve of the earth. Lauren was quite a bit older, and though he was too far away to tell, she was sure he was quite a bit older too. Through the open doors of the house Lauren could even see some of the things from her apartment on Pauline Boulevard. The room inside looked casually familiar; she was sure that behind the door, which she couldn’t see from this high gatehouse window, was an ivory trinket Jason had brought back from a race in New Orleans, and a brown milk pitcher she made in Kansas as a girl, with two sleeping children shown near the handle. It didn’t seem peculiar to her that there were also, behind the door, two pictures of Jason—one from their wedding day and one from the period of time they lived in San Francisco; she hadn’t even thought to take these down when she assumed a new life. Everything seemed in its place to her, there in the glass bottom of the lagoon, except one thing: and turning now from the gatehouse, descending the steps and walking back with him, she realized what was missing and that was their child. She realized that because of the surgery in Los Angeles she wouldn’t be able to have a child by Michel, and someday she was sure he would come to bitterly regret this. He would come to see that in choosing her he had foreclosed part of his future: for a man without a past this might be unbearable. Lauren was too keenly aware of all the ways there were to be hurt by someone. Along this walkway, she could still sometimes see through the buildings the glass bottom of the lagoon; and she remembered something that had taken place on her wedding night years before. It wasn’t her first night with Jason of course; she was already pregnant with Jules when they flew to San Francisco, where they arrived several hours before dawn and caught one lone taxi into the city. In their hotel room not far from where they would come to live, she turned from a long doorway mirror to see his reflection out of the corner of her eye, and then to see him before her, as his real and reflected images seemed to glide into one. She could see, in his eyes, not her reflection but his own. She raised one finger and he raised his correspondingly, and they drew a line together down an unseen untouched looking glass that divided them. Together they explored this looking glass, running their hands up and down between them. She was sure it was there. He knew it was there. It was always there with Jason. And, as he always did with her and the others, he stood and waited, tall and nude and blond, waiting for her to step over to his side of the glass and become part of him. At this Lauren stopped and looked around her, to see that they had circled back and now she and Michel were at the hotel; with nothing having been spoken for some time, she turned and looked him fully in the face. In the new light of the village, his hair was even whiter, his face more drawn, and his eyes seemed to swim and sink within themselves. I want to go back now, she said to him. I’m ready to make a decision.