A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  And awoke alone on the train as it pulled to a halt at its final stop. The loudspeaker blared the name of some town, which Susan couldn’t make out. She got off the train, walked down one flight of stone steps, turned left on a dirt path, then left again at a fork in the road and walked straight ahead; in front of her, a jagged mountain peak sliced a gash into the center of the moon, the largest and brightest full moon she had ever seen. She could find no street lamp, and could not see city lights burning on the horizon. She kept walking, pulling her coat around her. She passed a lake; a family of swans drifted peacefully through the reflection of the stars.

  A bit of fog cleared and Susan spotted a large house about a quarter of a mile away, supported by columns; several extensions stretched off into the blackness, and lamps burned by the front door.

  Joren seemed at home here; he seemed to melt into the atmosphere like wisps of fog.

  He took her hand and led her inside, into the front hallway. In the distance, a window filled one full wall, which looked out over the placid lake. Joren held a candle. No power, he explained. Blackout? she asked, and he didn’t reply. Susan walked to the window, sat beside him, staring out at the lake. He poured her a glass of wine from a decanter on a side table, which she accepted.

  “Do you ride at night often?” she asked, outside again in the chilly air. He said it was the best time, that it was dangerous, solitary, empty. Like being inside someone’s mind. Susan and Joren were in his stable, just east of the lake. Two muscular white horses stood side-by-side in his stable, keeping each other company. He helped her mount the smaller horse, then he mounted the larger one; they know their way around, he said, and they galloped out into the chilly night, through the field, under a full winter moon which burned a bluish haze into the speckled-black sky, finally diving together into the woods. The horses followed a narrow dirt path, and Susan held tightly onto the reins, feeling foolish, frightened, all the emotions she always tried to block. Through a clearing in the woods she thought she spotted a unicorn drinking from a mountain stream in the blue moonlight, a unicorn drinking, for just a moment, from a mountain stream as though it were the most common thing, but then the clearing disappeared, the darkness resumed, and Susan lost all her suspicions that she was not just in an unusually remote part of Connecticut.

  She said that he was lucky to live here, and he said that he was lucky to live anywhere, as he stared out at the lake. They were sitting on the shore, resting their feet in the warm, clear water. The night had grown balmy and friendly, and she was leaning her head on his shoulder, bobbing up and down with each breath. Where are we? she asked, and he wondered if it mattered. May I visit you again? Susan asked, and he said, Anytime. Her wine glowed like an emerald in the moonlight, and somewhere in the distance, a waterfall thundered.

  Susan asked: What about you? What’s your story? tragedy? triumph? Who do you live with? she asked, still resting her head on his shoulder. Did anyone know that he was spiriting young women from their beds in Manhattan? Did someone suspect, did that someone hate him for it? Where was she now, that someone whom Susan could only imagine? Was she watching from that window on the fifth floor, the window that glowed with candlelight?

  Joren took a sip of wine. “She is a part of me,” he said. “She knows everything I do.”

  “And she doesn’t care?”

  “She cares,” he replied. “Every moment, she cares.”

  “And where are you from?” Susan asked, touching his lips with one finger. “I just can’t place it.”

  “My accent,” Joren mused. “A dead accent, a dead people.” Suddenly he seemed empty, and centuries older.

  Joren was born in a palace far from here, a golden palace in the hills. A multitude of servants cared for his family – at least, Joren remembered a multitude of servants. All docile, all born to be servants. They would smile at Joren and his parents and they would bow. Joren remembered his father’s benevolence, his generosity. He remembered his mother’s warmth. He and his parents, and later his wife, were often entertained by the ruler of this clean, happy young nation, an old man dressed in robes, and when he spoke, wisdom poured from his lips. When he traveled through the streets of the capital city, the people would run from the stores, from their homes, from the cafés, waving their caps in the air, praising their beloved leader. He would wave back sternly, with one hand.

  Joren remembered his servants and the songs they sang him when he was little more than an infant. When he married, at the age of sixteen, they cheered for him and his smiling young bride. Following their ceremony, he and his wife traveled abroad for several years. They swam in the oceans of foreign lands, walked on foreign shores and spoke of infinite love and their eternal devotion. They would become so intoxicated by love that they would often gaze at each other with cloudy eyes and sometimes just hold each other and weep.

  After returning to their home country, they acquired a residence on the outskirts of the capital, and in the evenings they would ride into town and drink wine in the cafés with the intellectuals of the ruling class, where Joren would debate the latest war, the likelihood of gods, the possibility of alchemy. His wife would sit to one side, listening and occasionally nodding in agreement. In the summer they would retreat to their home in the country, several miles from his parents’ estate. Once a week the peasantry would dance for Joren and other members of his class. Joren and his wife would applaud, smiling at one another from time-to-time.

  Then one terrible night their world fell apart, the peasantry went mad. Joren and his wife were pulled from their bed, threatened with knife and sword. Their wise leader was paraded in the streets of the capital city, his clothes were ripped from him and the mob trampled him. When the dust cleared, a young girl, barely more than five years old, spat on his dead, naked body.

  He was old and wrinkled and alone, there would be no parades of mourning. The little girl spat, again and again, with the sort of hatred Joren had never seen in a young child, or in virtually anyone in their great country. From where could such hatred have sprung?

  From his cell, Joren screamed that he had known nothing of their hopes and dreams and fears. How could I have known! he screamed, as hungry, angry men pulled his wife from her cell, shouting insults and obscenities. She grabbed the bars and called out to him, tears streaming down her cheeks, pledged undying love, prayed for their souls, that they would live together again in heaven.

  Joren had studied philosophy, poetry, science and music, he had studied theories of the ideal form of existence, of the Nature of Man and the Nature of Love. Never the nature of hatred, or the terrible results of hatred in a country that had never been allowed to hate. From a torturer’s rack in the center of a plaza in the capital city, he watched his country descend into darkness, or perhaps merely acknowledge its true darkness at last. He saw his nation dissolve in anarchy and factionalism. The people fought themselves, killing each other’s wives and children and parents, stealing their neighbors’ food. Finally a young woman in a gray robe appeared from out of the darkness, unlocked the door to his cell and set him free. He managed to escape across the border and was taken in by other dazed refugees from the former ruling class. Occasionally he heard reports from the land of his birth: government followed government, sometimes two at once, all built on hatred and fear. Never again would a government create such a veneer of brightness, never again would the people march through the polished streets with smiles on their polished faces. Hadn’t they really been happier then?

  He would also hear news of his wife, but it was always different: she was still in prison; she had been set free and, thinking Joren dead, had married a high official in one of the new governments; she was as beautiful as always; she had lost the luster of life; she had died bravely; she had died with the cowardice that had suddenly afflicted all the ruling class; she had taken her own life, vowing to punish them all, her entire country, from beyond the grave.

  His fellow expatriates would dream of vengeance, of retak
ing the country. One woman told him: I have so many scores to settle. When we return there will be blood from the capital city to the border.

  How could we have known? Joren would always ask when the subject of his country arose. How could we ever have known?

  Susan asked why he had told her, and he said that she had asked.

  “How did you get here?” she asked. “How did you escape?” She lay back on the grass and stared up at the trees, crooked and towering and silhouetted against the orange haze of the sunrise. Her eyes began to close. Here, the world’s problems seemed to be a story that someone had made up. “You are not a man running from tragedy,” she whispered. “There is something romantic and hidden about the rest of your life. What is it? What is your last name? How old are you?” Then, more quietly: “And will you ever desert me?”

  Footsteps down a long hallway. Susan felt keys in her hand. Torches flickered on the wall. I will never desert you, came Joren’s voice, in her head. I can never desert you, ever. I will always be watching.

  She took a right turn, felt her bare feet on the stone floor, gasped when passing a few cloaked figures in the hallway, but they didn’t even glance in her direction. She was just one more jail keeper, one more torturer in a gray robe. Now she heard screaming, desperate and inconsolable. She walked past two empty cells, and unfamiliar memories filled her head: one young girl had been executed many years earlier, a young girl with flowing blond hair, dressed in silk, who had played and laughed with her parents in the central plaza. Perhaps this was where she had lived her final moments.

  Joren stared from the last cell on this primitive death row. He looked ten years younger, or a hundred. His hair was almost entirely black, and he had an uncontrolled growth of beard. His fine purple clothes were torn and dirty. His chest and back shone with cuts and burns, but they weren’t fresh. His eyes were wild. He opened his mouth to speak, tried to utter a few words, swallowed, tried again to speak with his dry mouth. Blood oozed from his lips.

  “Forgive us all,” he said. “We didn’t know– ”

  The image vanished, and Susan felt herself falling, deeper and deeper into sleep, until she landed with a thud in the waking world. She was in her own bed, the sheets and blankets were pulled up to her neck. She opened her eyes warily. Joren stood beside the bed, the shadows of morning dancing on his face. She turned on the bedside light, and he disappeared into her memory.

  What was Susan to make of Joren’s pain? As the months became years, as his absence became an ache in her heart, she often awoke in the night calling out to him, or to him and Daniel simultaneously. How could she love and yearn for them both? Joren was somehow her fantasy of Daniel’s inner strength; and they both, she realized, had been consigned long ago to the dustbin of history. Why did she yearn to join them? And would she ever see either of them again? The probability that she would not seemed almost too painful to face.

  As predicted, one year passed, then two, then a good portion of a decade passed by, just like that. The nineties dawned. Katherine found a job in California, and Emmett sat at home, reading books, studying French (because why not? and shouldn’t a fella know French?), calling friends long distance and assuring them that he was fine, just fine. He retained his lifelong certainty that somewhere outside his front door evil waited – evil that could swallow a man like a snake eating a rat, or fill up a man the way coffee fills up a mug (the way cappuccino fills up one of those tall thin cappuccino mugs, all the way to the top, with the puffy steamed milk almost overflowing so that one can’t even add a teaspoon of sugar – that full) – and his certainty of this wet, swirling evil kept him in the shadows, yearning for quiet mediocrity. He probably would have spent his life almost contentedly cowering indoors, cooking dinner for his wife, and doing a little light dusting; that is, if not for his wife’s fortuitous meeting with a renowned Chinese acrobat, whose friendship landed Emmett an unlikely freelance assignment at an international entertainment magazine. Susan’s faith in absolute goodness provided no more stability than Emmett’s belief in evil. Where Emmett sought shelter, Susan ventured into the storm, searching for the beauty of life, which had become so elusive.

  For Daniel, the luckiest of the three, believing as he did in nothing at all, life remained the same.

  On the other side of the world, Irina starred in a film filled with romance, war, politics and magic. Even one big lavish musical number for which she had to learn to sing and dance. It was generally considered an artistic disappointment, and it didn’t earn very much money.

  On Tuesday, in early Summer, the air-conditioning clicked off around two in the morning, and the atmosphere in the bedroom became heavy and wet. Daniel began to sweat, woke up, flipped over on his side, pulled the sheet away. Natalie pulled it back, muttered something unintelligible. Daniel fell back into sleep, little voices flitted through his mind. He woke up, and it was three in the morning. He was still a little drunk from the night before, and veins in his head throbbed with every breath. Did Daniel still often wake up in the middle of the night, screaming, death fresh in the room? Yes, of course, from time-to-time, and Natalie would always nibble his ear a bit and coax him back to sleep. Did Daniel still stop in the middle of the morning, coffee mug clutched in one sweaty hand, to reflect that he was breathing the air of an ancient past that no one now remembered, to feel the heat of a universe that would soon enough crush him? He did, but he no longer even noticed. He shivered a bit. “I miss Henry, still,” Daniel whispered to Natalie. “I miss him, and I have no idea where he’s gone.”

  Natalie patted him on the side of the face. “There, there,” she said.

  “I think Henry’s laughing at me, somewhere.”

  “Henry wouldn’t do that,” Natalie whispered.

  Daniel awoke in his apartment at 4:30 in the morning, struggled out of bed, took a shower cold enough to jolt him into full consciousness, then went to work. He arrived at six in the morning, signed in at the front desk, then wandered through the deserted hallways, past ghostly secretarial stations, to his office. Though still groggy, he was eager to put the finishing touches on a particularly difficult brief in the case of Fornsby v. Lattimore Paint Co., a legal action that he had recently inherited and that had had a long and tortuous court history. His firm represented the Lattimore Paint Company, accused of contributing to the mental retardation of scores of poor children. Lawyers for Fornsby, a severely disabled child, had made the following argument: although the family was not sure which paint had been used on the walls of their ghetto apartment, and the records had long since been destroyed, the Lattimore Paint Company had captured 15% of the market in lead-based paint, and it therefore should be required to pay for 15% of the damage to little Fornsby’s development. Daniel and the Lattimore Paint Company were appalled at an argument – an argument that (as they insisted) completely ignored the central tort concept of “causation” – and they were willing to fight this one all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. (A dramatic-sounding boast, but what lawyer would not want to fight all the way to the Supreme Court, with glory and fame at the end of the rainbow, a wave of billables along the way?)

  Then he was asleep again, and dreaming again. In this dream, Henry’s office was unlocked and ajar. He could see through the crack that the light inside was on. Bracing himself, he swung the door open, taking a deep breath. There, in his sad crowded office, he found Henry, dressed in a natty little suit, just like the old days, looking tanned and fit, sitting at Daniel’s desk, staring absently at the wall. Henry, Daniel said. I’m ever so very happy to see you. We all thought you were dead. I’ve missed you so terribly. That’s the way Daniel spoke in his dreams: emotionally, like the heroine in an old Hollywood tear-jerker.

  Daniel would sometimes awaken from a particularly sentimental moment, thick with bathos, and wonder aloud: “How could I have said such a thing?” He did believe in maintaining a bit of decorum, after all. Also, in Daniel’s dreams, melodramatic music would swell up at the most moving mome
nts, sometimes even drowning out the dialogue.

  I am ever so delirious with joy, Daniel said now, to Henry.

  I want my old job back, Henry said.

  I thought you were dead.

  I died, Henry said, but I can’t get through the pearly gates. I can’t pass the entrance exam. So I thought I’d try law again.

  In Daniel’s dreams, canned laughter would occasionally stop all action. Daniel stood for a moment, waiting for the hysteria to die down.

  We’re always being tested, Henry added. It never stops.

  I love you, Henry, Daniel said, surprising himself. You’re my best friend.

  I’m startled to hear you say that, Henry replied. We were pretty much just friendly co­workers. You’re just remembering things wrong. Because I’m dead.

  Please, don’t, Daniel pleaded. I need something sad to obsess about.

  I’m sorry, Henry said. I didn’t really like you that much. I cannot be that tragedy in your life. Mourn your parents. Or something.

  Daniel fell to the floor. My poor tragic parents, he cried, but it didn’t feel right anymore.

  Back when Daniel considered himself an artist, he’d lived on 8th street on the other side of the park, in a cheap little apartment where he painted and thought a lot about Life. When he got a job teaching, his situation improved, so he moved to the western side of the park. He married a beautiful girl, a student in his class. He felt better about his long-term financial and psychological survival, but he also felt as though he’d lost something. He stopped painting; ideas abandoned him. He was no longer afraid. He no longer wandered through the dark streets near the looming projects, drunk with fear and brilliance, and alcohol, of course, and even sometimes-or-often the surging madness of a drug or two, back then. All of that was gone. So he quit entirely, his brain atrophied, and for lack of any other apparent options, and after what seemed a brief moment of confusion, he suddenly found that he had become a lawyer, moved uptown, wore nice suits that felt rough on his body, subjected his beautiful wife to the admiring gaze of ageing partners at official firm functions.