by Alon Preiss
She stood naked in Joe’s bedroom, her robe on the wooden floor. He loosened his tie a bit more. Extending his right arm, he brushed a finger between her breasts. “I’m getting cold,” she said, suddenly embarrassed again.
While she sat on his bed, his head between her thighs, she yanked on his brown-blond hair. For a moment, or more than a moment, she could not remember whose hair this was – whose bed was she sitting on, whose unseen face was between her thighs, whose tongue was inside her? She lay back and wrapped her legs behind his neck; it didn’t really matter whose head this was, did it? Then she remembered: It’s Joe, average Joe, bad pun loud laugh twice in a week then goodbye forever Joe. Now she laughed loudly, and his face emerged, lips wet.
“What’s funny?”
She smiled.
“I was just thinking of something,” she replied. “Something that made me laugh.”
“Oh,” he said.
Later, when he was on top of her, light filtering through the translucent curtains, he looked like a wolf, his body lean and blue in the moonlight, and his eyes glowing, burning into her like fire.
Lying in his big bed, under his broad, king-size comforter, Joe felt suddenly very happy. Susan was nestled in his arms; he lay on his back, staring at the fluorescent stars he had glued to his ceiling a few months earlier. Susan, his old girlfriend, had just ended his year of involuntary celibacy, and now Joe felt very happy, and very warm. Outside, the wind whistled through the trees, them skimmed along the surface of the lake. Somewhere a wolf howled. Memories of Susan flooded back to him now, nice little happy things he had long since blocked, the sound of her laugh hitting its high note, her eyes scanning a restaurant menu. So it was perhaps understandable if unexpected that Joe would flip over on his side to whisper, “Stay as long as you want, Susan. You are loved here.” Not I love you, but “You are loved,” as though the wallpaper loved her, or the double bed, which felt perhaps unfulfilled without her, or the wolves howling in the darkness.
Susan had seemed half asleep, and now opened her eyes, horrified. She sat bolt upright. “No!” she exclaimed. “I’m just passing through, I’m just staying here a night or two, not for any longer. This is a vacation, not a –”
“I just meant – ”
“How could you even say that?” She stared at him as though he were completely insane. “I’m not even divorced. We haven’t even filed the papers. I’m not even legally separated. I’m just a very unhappy married woman.” She bounced over to the edge of the bed. “Just swoop in, OK? Don’t even worry about how I feel, all right?”
As Susan walked from Joe’s bedroom, shaking with anger, she could feel the heat of his gaze on her bare back.
Joe lay in bed, stupid and silent. He felt as though ambulance sirens had just woken him from a beautiful dream.
He found her pacing in the front hallway, all packed.
“You don’t have to go, you know,” he said. “It’s three in the morning. You’re too sleepy, you shouldn’t drive.”
“I have to get out of here.” She looked over at him. “I owe you an apology, Joe.”
“No,” he said, “it was nice while it lasted.” That sounded more vulnerable than he felt, and he reddened. “Anyway,” he added, “I didn’t mean anything much. You know, just that you’re loved, that you don’t need to feel all alone.”
She laughed, just a little. “Saying it when we were naked in bed together gave it an un-platonic ring, somehow.”
“Susan, I – ”
“It’s OK, Joe. I just have to be alone in my car.”
Behind the wheel, she rehearsed what she could have said to him. Joe, suppose you were a little boy, and you’d stared into the face of absolute evil, just a swirling mass of –
She hadn’t exactly worked out the image yet.
– well, just a swirling black mass of evil. But after that, the rest of your life would be pretty nice in comparison, except that you would know that evil existed, and you would be afraid of it. So the moments of your life would be more beautiful, but your heart would be always fearful. So think about me – suppose at the age of eight I face absolute goodness. Just the face of – I don’t even know what I’m talking about – goodness, just completely heavenly goodness. Then everyone and everything else would fall short, and I would always hunt for that beauty. So believing in absolutes ruins us, and knowing the Truth screws us up even more.
That’s what she would have said, had Joe been in the passenger seat at that very moment. But it would have only made things worse, she knew.
A while later, she crossed the border into Canada, and a rainstorm began to brew.
Floating invisible through the clouds and the wind, made up of electromagnetic radio waves and photons, the ghostly image of Senator Stephen Solomon tried to smile, occasionally pounded the table forcefully. It was two in the morning and the interview was a few months old – some of the enemies Solomon condemned so vehemently had faded into history so quickly it was hard even to remember them. His invisible image floated eerily through the clouds, swooping to earth, passing through a young couple asleep in their beds – creating a nightmare or two? – his face swirling about in the darkness, forming and reforming, until he landed in the television set of an old man who couldn’t sleep in his comfortable little house in the mountains, an old man who had fled his home country and a once-sacred ideology back in 1953, when the tables had turned on him, and had settled in the United States, opened a store, raised a family, watched them die ....
“Why do you think the traditional politicians fear you?” An interviewer sat, pencil poised on the very edge of his lip.
“Not all politicians,” Solomon said. “Some I have worked with very well on some of our anti-Communist packages. The others, well, you’ll have to ask them. I suppose they fear me because they know I speak my mind, that I won’t be won over by a quid pro quo in some pork barrel spending bill. You know, honestly, if a guy comes into the Senate and refuses to play the game … Well, they ask themselves, what drives that man? They can’t understand real conviction.”
“How about this Communist thing?” the interviewer said now. “Communism is gone. Are you obsolete?”
“To begin with, it’s still a very dangerous world. And as for your premise, ‘this Communist thing’ as you so lightly put it, I disagree. Communism is not gone. We still have work to do, overthrowing the regimes in Cuba, Angola, Cambodia and Vietnam –”
“Vietnam? Are you advocating another Vietnam war?”
“We could do worse you know, Bill,” the Senator said cheerfully, excited by his own audacity. “We never should have left the regime standing. I think history has shown that we were right. Of course, this time around it would be preferable to arm an opposition force, to see how – ”
“But another Vietnam war – ?”
“Would you dispute that we were right? That the war was right? That the Communists – ”
“There are those who say, Senator, that you care more about your own personal glory than – ”
“My own personal glory? I hardly think that – ”
“That you care more – excuse me, Senator, let me just say – that you care more about your own ambition and career and so on than about actual democracy in – ”
“Democracy? I’m the only one standing up for – ”
“That, for instance, you support a regime that you perceive in friendly terms whether or not it were elected democratically, and if you’re hostile to a regime, you will support legislation to overthrow it, even if it came to power in free and fair elections, for example the Sandinistas in Nicaragua – ”
“In Nicaragua – and thank you Bill for letting me address this – in Nicaragua, I was very clear in my warnings in 1984, that if the Nicaraguans elected Daniel Ortega that would not be democracy because he does not stand for the democratic values that America stands for. I was very clear that they would have to elect the opposition if they wanted the war to end. And thank God they got the mes
sage in 1990, and now the war is over.”
“Or in Angola. For many years you supported the rebels, insisting that the government hold free elections, they won the free elections, the rebels attacked again, killed 50,000 people, and now you’re calling for more aid to the rebels.”
“Again,” Solomon said, “is a Communist tyranny ‘democratic’ just because they contend that they won an election? What about the brave soldiers who counted us for so many years?”
The interviewer put a picture in front of the camera. It showed two tiny black children, huddled together and crying, one looking up at the sky.
“From the New York Times,” the interviewer said. “I hope everyone can see this. Two little children in Angola in a refugee camp under attack from Jonas Savimbi’s Unita rebels. Their parents dead from weapons bought with money Senator Solomon pushed through Congress, and now they –”
“Look, I’m not some kind of warmonger,” Solomon said. He shook his head in exasperation. “I want peace as much as anyone. I hate to see death – I hate it, I pray for the killing to end. But the killing will not end if we just fold our hand and go home. That’s a recipe for genocide.”
“Their parents are dead for absolutely no reason, and you killed them, Senator Solomon, you murdered them. And if Unita kills the boys – and perhaps they’re already dead, you know, this picture was taken yesterday – if Unita kills the children, it will be as though you killed them, because you paid them to kill children, your hands are covered with blood, Senator. When rebels torched an orphanage – a home for children whose parents were killed with your dollars, Senator Solomon –when they burned little children to death as they – ”
“We must achieve peace from a position of strength,” Solomon said. He had come prepared to discuss military policy in measured tones, and seemed unable to cope with this fairly rabid onslaught. “You know, General Eisenhower once said that power comes from the barrel of a gun – ”
“When you look in the mirror, Senator Solomon, what do you see?”
Solomon blinked. “I see nothing,” he replied. He didn’t seem to understand the question. “I see nothing at all.”
Susan drove for hundreds of miles, until she could see distant, snowcapped mountains, dark against the reddish-orange of the sunrise. She would learn later that the mountains were not capped with snow, but with ancient glaciers, but she would never be sure what that meant. Then she drove some more. There were no radio stations in these valleys, so she hummed to herself. Occasionally she would pass a small mountain village. General stores abutted the highway, selling little knick-knacks. From time to time, Susan fell into such deep thought that she was nearly unconscious – she would awaken, unsure of what she had been thinking. Finally, she turned off the road at Revelstoke, registered to stay at a cabin for the night, fell asleep as the day broke and slept until late afternoon.
Moments before her father’s operation, she sat with him in his hospital room, trying to be encouraging. You’re very young, she said a number of times, as though that were a very good thing. He would always be young to her, she realized. She didn’t say: You’re still very young, which is something you say to old people. As they wheeled her young father into surgery, she wondered whether everyone in the last few years or decades of his life feels that everything has crumbled underneath his feet. Is that the way she would feel? But what a beautiful thing, she thought again, if I could just love someone so deeply that I would eagerly go mad for him, as mad as my father has gone for my mother. To be sucked into a real Zelda and Scott love affair, to overpower a man and to be overpowered by him, to float lightly about him like a swan, to stay like a sort of atmosphere around every house that he inhabits – well, she thought, as her father vanished around the corner of the hospital in his wheelchair, perhaps Love is the most unhappy thing that there ever was, but at least it’s beautiful, and the most beautiful sight she had ever seen, she thought, was her father now, his life slowly ebbing away, and all for a woman.
In late afternoon she vanished into the woods that led up to the peak of Mount Revelstoke. She trudged along the trail for miles and miles, or kilometers and kilometers, to be more accurate. The trail weaved past wide open meadows filled with red and blue flowers, with those glacial peaks on the horizon. Finally, when the air had become cool and crisp, the path opened up on a mountain lake, vast and clear, surrounded by thousands of pines. She put on her sweatshirt, sat down on a rock by the water, took a bag of carrot sticks out of her backpack.
On a hill overlooking the lake, Susan came upon a small cabin. A guest-book inside, and a trail map that had fallen to the floor and was now covered with dirt. The windows were dusty and opaque; one was broken. This had perhaps been a visitor’s center, long-since abandoned. She looked in the guest book. The last page was ripped in half, and the page before it recorded happy raves from French visitors who had visited in 1974. The pages were brittle and dry. She sat down on the floor and flipped through the book. “A wonderful mountain!” wrote Rose Rigler in 1971. In 1973, Alma Riddle exclaimed, “I have never seen such a mountain!” And on and on and on. She felt very tired, and so she lay down on the hard wooden floor, and allowed herself to rest her eyes for just a moment or two.
To her dismay, she awoke some time later. She bounded out of the cabin, and shivered. She had slept too long, and turned back, worried, into the darkening dusk.
Her flashlight beam cut through the blackness of night, kept her feet on the trail. She was in a little hollow tunnel in which nothing existed but her flashlight and a narrow dim cylinder of light. She stumbled, rocks slid out from beneath her feet, and she heard them cluttering into a canyon, echoing into the distance far below. Had she almost fallen? and would park rangers have found her lying peacefully in a sunny meadow of beautiful Canadian wild-flowers? And would Joren have been there to meet her when she hit the ground? She stopped walking and sat down on the trail, stared up at the night, the glittering stars overhead. The radio had said that there would be meteor showers tonight – so she watched the sky for fifteen minutes, perhaps, or for half an hour; she didn’t know, she had left her watch in her room. The stars were motionless, frozen pinpricks in the night, a snapshot from millions – billions? – of years ago. A light drizzle began, and Susan moved on.
What seemed like twenty minutes passed, and the stars vanished. Susan imagined that they had fallen from the sky when he hadn’t been looking. But she knew that invisible clouds now covered the sky, blocking out the stars, and that a thunderstorm might begin at any moment.
Thunder crashed in the distance, she saw lightning flash, illuminating the peaks of the distant mountains. Soon rain was dropping heavily down on her, the wind swirled angrily through the canyon, buffeting her from side to side. Her clothes were soaked, her hair matted against her face. Like a pack-mule, she trudged on. But moments later, her left foot skidded over a rock, and she stumbled to the right; immediately she put her hand out to steady herself against the cliff, but the cliff was gone, and she fell, tumbling through the air – she believed she turned completely head over heels (she saw her flashlight hurtling above her, the beam cutting through the night sky), then for just a moment, or for a split second, she hung in the air, the way one does when one is about to die, forever – then her heel hit the ground – she heard a CRACK! and she tumbled headfirst into cold, wet mud. Her flashlight landed politely beside her, still glowing. She got up, wiped the mud away from her eyes with her sleeve and shined the flashlight about. The mountain from which she had fallen so far was nothing more than a little hill. She climbed back up, put her recent setback behind her, and trudged to her cabin.
When she reached her cabin, the clock inside said that it was one o’clock in the morning. She turned the heater up full-blast – it was probably forty degrees outside, and the cabin had chilled considerably – cleaned herself with a washcloth. She stood by the heater, drying off. The cabin radio received one station, and some late night radio host was asking caller after caller:
“Is Kim Campbell really a different kind of politician?” Each caller said no. Ms. Campbell was the prime minister at the time, and had raised eyebrows by allowing herself to be photographed with bare shoulders, and no one in Canada could talk about anything else. Meanwhile, the war in Yugoslavia went on and on, and the government of John Major had scored a popularity-enhancing coup by air-lifting one little girl to a British hospital. And still the callers voiced outrage at their prime minister and her new GST tax, whatever that was. At least it sounded as though they were saying GST tax. Maybe they were saying GSP tax. Or something else. Susan could stand it no longer; she threw a hiking boot at the radio, and it smashed into pieces against the wall.
“I don’t care,” she said out-loud. “I'll buy them a new one – my father is dead, and I’m rich.” I’ll trash the whole place if I want, she thought. My father is dead, and I have all the money in the world now.
She changed into a night-shirt, flipped the blanket to one side and slid under the covers. She was about to turn out the light when she heard a faint rustle outside, then footsteps on her front porch, and a gentle tapping at the door. She padded warily across the cabin and opened the window curtain with a jerk. A man was silhouetted against the night sky, now bright and shimmering with a billion stars. Over his left shoulder, a meteor shot to earth, burning a silver trail in the dark blue ocean of night. Susan turned on the porch light, and her heart melted. She twisted the lock and swung the door open; freezing wind hit her in the face. Joren smiled.
“I’ve missed your house out in the forest with those horses, and the lanterns burning at the front door,” she said softly, sitting on her bed. He sat beside her. Then, peevishly: “How could you go away for years and years, how could you leave me alone like this?” She wanted to cry but she didn’t.