Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  He wasn’t there in the room when they arrived. Like the day before, the two of them sat together on the bed, and he held her hand on his lap as she closed her eyes. He caressed her face; like the day before, Jason finally arrived and stood over them looking at her.

  “Is she all right?” he said to Michel, and then Lauren sat up. Like the day before, Jason went about his business, while Michel and Lauren sat waiting. Finally Lauren said, “I want to talk to you.”

  Jason sat in the chair, sullenly.

  “I have to make a decision, for all of us.”

  He said nothing.

  “I want to know if you still meant what you said this morning.”

  “What was that?” said Jason.

  “About us, if I stay with you.”

  He just stared at her; not a single expression flickered across his face. She waited, and after a moment of saying nothing, he just stood up from the chair and sauntered out of the room.

  That’s it, thought Michel, he’s lost her.

  Lauren turned to Michel and said, “I have to give him another chance.”

  He said nothing, but she could see the incredulity in his eyes. She wasn’t sure she believed it either. When he couldn’t find a response she tried to explain. “Don’t you see, Michel? I don’t know whether it’s that he deserves another chance, or I deserve another chance, or that I simply don’t deserve a chance with you. I don’t know which of those it is, but I have to do this.” Her eyes pleaded for him to understand, but he just sat there looking at her in an almost willful shock. “It was different when I thought I had found Jules again,” she went on. “It was different because somehow I’ve always known that abandoning Jules led to you—I don’t know how or why, but I’ve always known that. When I thought I’d found Jules again, it made it somehow all right to choose you; I think in a lot of ways he was more yours than Jason’s, though you never laid eyes on him. But then I lost him again, and my bond with Jason is fast for that reason, and I can’t break it for that reason—it’s something Jason and I share together, because Jason abandoned him too, from the beginning. So I have to give him another chance because of what we hold in common, as crazy and unreal as that may seem: the loss of Jules makes Jason and me inseparable.”

  She wanted him to say something. She wanted him to say it was all right, but more than that she wanted some ridiculous sort of reassurance that somehow it all didn’t matter. The enormity of what she’d done hadn’t sunk in. She hoped he wouldn’t hate her, and she could take some relief in that, because he didn’t hate her, there was nothing in his face like hatred, only disbelief; he stood up from the bed not looking at her at all; and she suddenly realized he was leaving, and she was simply astounded by it. It simply didn’t occur to her that whatever had been done or said could mean he was going to walk away now and be gone from her. It never crossed her mind for a moment that these were the last moments she’d ever lay eyes on him. She reached for him as he turned to go, and he bent down and kissed her gently and quickly.

  Michel, she said. She kept looking around as though he would surely appear again. In the hall he walked staring straight ahead, the willful acceptance transforming once more; he was intent only on getting past the washroom where Jason was waiting for him to leave, down the stairs past the lobby and its eventful telephone, out into the lagoon where the fog was no longer enough to hide him.

  From the moment he left her, he struggled to maintain his hold. It was strange for him to find himself so near a precipice, and yet to realize so dispassionately what was happening to him: he didn’t think it was possible for one to be witness to his own collapse. He found himself driven in such opposite directions with such identical force that he thought he would shatter at the middle if he didn’t stop and stand still long enough; yet he couldn’t stop. He found himself circling her hotel and then the train station for one more glimpse of her; he found himself waiting around the locanda for a phone call from her, or a visit; he found himself walking as far away as the city would allow him to go, placing as many of Venice’s twisting passages and corridors between the two of them as he could. He didn’t see her; he didn’t get a phone call from her; there weren’t enough passages or corridors. Whatever impulse seized him at a given moment, it was defeated as quickly; and when all impulses attempted to pull him one way or the other, then the defeat was just that much more unbearable.

  It was clear to him after five or six days that she wasn’t going to come; it was clear to him she might not be in the city at all. He couldn’t bring himself to call at the hotel to find out; she might suddenly appear with Jason and realize Michel was still waiting and dying for her, and consequently she might dread him or hold him in contempt. Still, he waited: she might just call from Paris or London, to tell him she’d changed her mind and was returning to him. After a while, he didn’t think this was going to happen either.

  He had no resources now. The money he’d saved those two years he ran the Blue Isosceles in Los Angeles was virtually gone. He had exactly eight dollars, plus the cost of one second-class train ticket back: back the way he had come. So still trying to maintain his hold, he stopped at American Express one more time, watched the window of her hotel one more time from a distance; and then got on the same train that had brought him here. He gripped the armrests of his seat, set his head back and stared straight before him; and with the lurch of the train he found himself hurtling again into darkness. He knew, of course, exactly what his stop would be.

  He had come to despise the things that tormented him, and to tire of sidestepping the shadows.

  Now he was afraid that some perverse twist of fortune would bypass his destination, having given him so many chances before. The train crawled through the night to Milan, and took the following day to weave slowly along the Côte d’Azur: Monaco, Nice, Cannes, St. Tropez, Marseille, Montpellier; and then that second night along the Pyrenees to Toulouse. He didn’t sleep much; the time he did fall asleep he would suddenly shake himself awake after an hour or two, alarmed that he might have missed it. But he didn’t miss it: by the second dawn of his trip he was within sight of the coast, though the sea itself was now far away. Biarritz, Bordeaux. The last hour before his stop Michel stood in the aisle watching out the window, eyes narrowed and scanning the horizon, unwilling to allow for the chance that it might slip by him. Finally the train slowed, the station came into view, and he saw the peeling green letters on the station sign.

  Walking through the city, nothing came back to him, nothing jarred a memory. The high walls and the garrets, the spires and the belfries—none of this looked familiar; the streets seemed foreign. He wasn’t sure whether this disappointed or relieved him. But at the city gates he did recognize, past the dry and empty docks and the hushed cafés, the house in the distance, overlooking as it did what was once the sea. This was not a memory related to his past, but rather to his visions from the train to Venice—only now the house looked like a black flame flickering at the sun, nearly as black as the large, almost perfectly round rock at the base of the house’s path.

  When Michel got to the house, nothing stirred. Walking slowly up to its front door, none of the manifest ghosts seemed to belong to him. He stood at the door several minutes before reaching over and opening it; then he stepped in and the house seemed to exhale back. He turned, looking at everything, then he stepped slowly through, the walls rising vertiginously as he circled through the house and then up the stairs. On the second level he walked from room to room: his mother’s room, with the one bed; the next room, with two small beds side by side; and the third room, off in a corner, very tiny, with one tiny bed that was his. This room he remembered from the movie. He gazed over the room and was about to exit when he lowered himself onto the bed, on his knees, and ran his hand over the wall to find the carving.

  There it was. He tried to read it. In the film it looked like A.D. 1957. The A and the D and the 1 and the upper part of the 9 were apparent; but now it definitely did not look like 57. It
looked more like roman numerals than any digits he could imagine. He sat there pondering this awhile, afraid the date was significant and that he was missing something. Then he bent down and looked much closer; and feeling foolish and disgusted with himself, he suddenly realized it was not a date at all.

  ADRIEN.

  For the first time, since that morning in Paris that seemed like forever ago, he knew the name Adrien was no figment of psychic calculus that had just wandered across his mind; and he knew he had been here before, right before that morning. Not here in this room, or this house, but here at the edge of this particular discovery, which now peered at him from around some cold stark corner from which he wanted to turn away. He realized that this discovery would ask more questions than it answered; and that these new questions would cut him to the core: they already once had. So as he always had, he now threw himself into the pursuit of his terror.

  He went back to the docks. The bars were empty; there weren’t a lot of sailors in Wyndeaux anymore. He came to one café in particular that gave off in the afternoon a faint glow, something incandescent and blue from within the walls. He went inside. At his entrance, a half-dozen older men turned to look at him. He could not have imagined what he looked like to them. His hair was white and his eyes throbbed blankly like small peepholes through which someone could look and see another place. His long blue coat was in shreds. In French, Michel found the words. “I need some men to do some work for me.” He stepped to the closest table and put his money in full view. “Eight American dollars. About forty-five francs.” He shook his head, trying to find the words. “It’s all I have.” He shrugged. “It’s not much work. An hour. It will buy six or seven bottles of wine; it—” He stopped; he could think of nothing else to say that would persuade them. None of the men moved at first. Then one came up to him, a smaller man with a cap. “What do you want?” he said.

  Michel drew him to the window. He pointed out, far on the beach, the rock. The small man couldn’t remember how long it had been there, but another recalled when it wasn’t there at all, many years before; and another told of the woman who lived in the house on top once, and how one stormy day she came into the village and hired a number of men to do some digging for her.

  When their own bottles went dry, the men in the café got their shovels.

  He led them down the docks to the beach. The sand, after several weeks in the sun, was dry and hard. After Michel and the six men had pushed the rock several feet away, they began digging. The work went on three-quarters of an hour when they came to something. The discovery of the small casket disturbed the men, but Michel exhorted them to begin another hole next to the first. Another three-quarters of an hour revealed the second casket; Michel had the men pull them up and set them on the beach. Then the men stood away, staring at Michel. The two holes were side by side, one thread of earth separating them.

  They were my twin brothers, said Michel. He leaned over the first casket and with the blue sleeve of his coat wiped away the layer of hard sand at the wide end of the box. Then he wiped away the sand on the other. The letters were carved on each. The first casket read: ADRIEN. The second: MICHEL.

  Open the caskets, said Michel; but at this the old Frenchmen balked.

  Michel reached into his pocket and pulled out the eight dollars; he handed the money to the small man. Still, the men didn’t move, waiting to watch Michel take the shovel from one of them and pry open the lids of the plain, simple wood caskets. As the first lid came off, the men turned their heads away, and then glanced back slowly, and stared first at the boxes and then at each other. The second lid came off; both caskets were quite empty.

  No bones, no skulls, no remains at all. Some sand in the corner of one, the slight corrosion of salt to each.

  They watched him standing above the two caskets, not looking at them but facing the empty sea, his eyes ablaze in the falling sun and the shovel dangling at his side.

  The flame that was the house seemed to rise like smoke. He turned and looked toward the hill, not expecting to see Lauren, not even expecting to see his mother standing there in front. Instead, for some reason, he thought he might see the face of a woman in a picture in a room in a light he remembered; he thought he would glance up at that house and see her face framed in the window. But the window was empty, all apparitions vanished with the revelation of the empty caskets, and the sun at the edge of the endless beach was the only thing that vaguely resembled a ghost.

  No twin brothers, monsieur, said the small man, finally.

  Michel shook his head. N-N-N-No, he said, no t-t-twin brothers.

  They left, filing back up the beach. M-M-Merci, Michel said to each one; and then was there alone.

  He sat down, straddling the earth between the two graves and watching the sun disappear. He took off his coat and threw it up by the empty boxes. He held the sand in his fingers, his hold maintained.

  Lauren, name me now. He knew if he called her she would hear him. He knew if he called her she would answer. Since she had known him from the beginning, she would know who he was at this moment; it was one final thing on which he could count. He began: LLLLLLLLLLLLLLL—and he lost his breath, forced to inhale again. Swallowing, he tried once more—LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL—until his entire body was racked with the effort, as though his tongue was coiled around his throat, strangling him.

  He would wait until it came to him. He would say it sometime tonight, or sometime tomorrow, or sometime the following day; he would remain here until he did. Then he would wait for her answer. That night, the sea returned. He could hear it rumbling in the distance, he could see the blue line shaking itself loose. Should the seas ultimately dry up completely, they would nonetheless come back one more time tonight; he would be there when they did. Should she stop at this moment, wherever she was, and hear him calling her, and whisper back a response, the resonance of that very murmur would nonetheless return across the miles no matter how many there were; he would be there when it arrived. He had not come this far to desert all these things simply because of the treachery of his voice; though broken into a thousand shards of sound, each shard was still his. After all of this he would not allow his own lips to betray his talent to speak her name: this vigil was set. He watched the horizon widen before him in a growing gash of blue, as time and time again he wrestled with the name his throat would not give up. Straddling the graves, the Atlantic plains before him bleached in a tawny red light, he felt as though in a womb of haze, anticipating the inevitable cradle.

  My dear grandson, the letter began. I have not heard of or from you in some years now and, unsure precisely where you may be at this moment, I can only hope this note finds you. I also hope you can make out the French; I fear an attempt at your language on my part would serve neither of us well. Recent events in my very old life have made it somehow appropriate I try and reach you once more before I die. None of these events directly affects you, but they have unlocked particular memories that do affect you, and they seem to me things it might be well for you to know of, and things only I may have the opportunity to clarify. A young man, about your own age, appeared some time ago with the idea that he would finish my picture, which you yourself took some interest in the last time we were together in Paris, and on which you squandered too much of your own youth, if I may say so. I have attempted to dissuade this young man from the enterprise, as I know, for reasons of my own, that the effort is futile. I say this because I have always felt a measure of remorse over your own sacrifices for me, sacrifices principally of the spirit. I suppose I never told you your contributions were doomed because, as I am with this other young man, I was moved by the generosity of heart and mind which I surely did not deserve. I could not bear to tell you how completely, how totally this failure was my own, and I sensed you left the effort a bit broken, and now it haunts me—one more element of guilt in a generally haunted state such as mine.