By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  Overhead, the fjordy coastline of the cloud shifted its aerial tectonics, and swallowed the sun. For a moment its high-above beaches glowed lit gold, and even its inland mountain-ranges, granite-purple and black, lightened and gleamed. And the cloud moved westward and the last gleam of the sun was smothered. It was much cooler now, dark as dusk at noon.

  ‘So thrilling!’ Marie called to Arto over the wind.

  Look!

  A fishbone of lightning, discarded by the cloud. It made Marie’s breath stick in her throat. Scaldingly white, coldly white, and then vanished. It was a bone picked clean, bleached clean, washed clean by the oceanic sky, glimpsed clean, and gone.

  One, two, three seconds later: the cosmic empty-belly rumble.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ suggested Arto.

  A dozen or so longhair workers were inside the project shed, gathered over by the window and playing cards. The light was on, but the intermittent flickers of lightning lit the window more brightly than did the glowball inside. Arto marched over: ‘Clear off.’

  All twelve stood up. Though none of them came up higher than Arto’s chest, they had the advantage of numbers, and for a moment Marie felt a fleeting fear. What if they all ganged up? But they didn’t. Of course they didn’t: they looked at Arto’s muscular, plump torso; his long legs; his cropped hair, and they filed out into the trembling chill of the newly falling rain.

  In thirty seconds they had the whole place to themselves. The storm threw a million glass beads at the window. When Marie and Arto embraced, the rain on the roof sounded like applause – like thunderous applause – like raptures of applause. Marie kissed him; pressed her mouth against his. He responded to her passion. There was ozone in the air. He pulled her trousers off; and then dropped his own pants and stepped his left foot out and kicked them away with his right, like a sportsman. They fucked, naked only from the waist down, a partial nudity that made Marie feel, oddly yet excitingly, like a child again. She braced herself against a wall of packing boxes and he took her from behind. Then he sat on one of the chairs and she spread herself upon his lap. At one point he took hold of her ankles and lifted her feet up, so that she tipped backwards and her head touched the carpet. His long, fat arms opened wide, and Marie was conscious of her shocking, delicious openness – her delicious, shocking helplessness, upside down at forty-five degrees, dependent upon this large man to prevent herself collapsing. It wasn’t a very comfortable position, of course; which meant that she couldn’t come. But after a while they shifted again, and she laid her spine on the carpet and he got on top of her and she brought the palms of her feet together, yogalike, above the small of his back. And finally she felt everything shift and slide away into that place where nothing mattered any more and everything was blessed with heavenly pleasure. And – she was there, she was there, she was there.

  Afterwards, she clutched him, both of them lying on the carpet and sharing their warmth. She dozed a postcoital doze – minutes, no more, but long enough to dream. It was a strange dream. She was watching the moon coming down to earth, but the closer it came the smaller it seemed, until it approached her face as a white bubble of light, small enough to tuck itself into the bed of her fingernail.

  Her finger gleamed.

  She woke up with a little hiccoughing twitch of her whole body. Arto was fully dressed again, and standing at the window looking out. ‘I fell asleep!’ she said, sitting up and looking for her trousers. ‘How long was I asleep?’

  ‘Not five minutes,’ he replied, not turning around.

  And here were her trousers. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I had a weird little dream.’

  He grunted.

  ‘The moon!’ she said. But she didn’t elaborate.

  The rain was still coming down as white noise on the roof and sides of the little storehouse. Marie pulled her trousers on, dialled the colours up and changed the design of show. ‘What are you looking at?’ But, joining him at the window she could see what he was looking at. The dozen longhairs they had shooed out of the building had taken shelter – or approximate shelter – under a twenty-metre planar tree a little distance from the hut. They were bunched together, some of them hugging one another, others standing awkwardly with their arms pressed at their sides. All twelve were looking in the direction of the storehouse. Staring, really.

  ‘They’re looking at us,’ Marie noted, redundantly.

  ‘You know what they’re thinking?’ said Arto, in a strange voice.

  ‘What’re they thinking?’

  ‘They’re thinking how much they’d like to eat us.’

  She snickered at this, as at a joke, and draped her arm round the back of his neck and over his plump shoulder. But he wasn’t joking, and the more Marie looked at the twelve women, all of them looking back at her, the more sinister they appeared. ‘Not literally eat, though,’ she tried.

  ‘That depends what you mean by literally,’ said Arto. ‘Food is a pastime for us. But it’s an obsession for them. They want what we have got, which is to say they want to be us, which is to say, they want to internalize us. They’re so numerous, the poor, you know? They are so many and we so few. Soon enough that fact is going to embolden them. And then what? There isn’t enough food in the world for everybody to eat. There hasn’t been for a hundred years. So let’s say they’re successful, and sweep us away; they eat our supplies of food and it lasts them a day. Then what? Us.’

  She didn’t know what to say to this. ‘What a horrid notion,’ she said, quietly.

  And he turned to her, and embraced her properly, and spoke in a warmer tone: ‘I don’t mean to be gloomy!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. That was such a lovely thing we just did. Being put in touch with such joy prompts a kind of equal-and-opposite reaction in my head, perhaps. But the world is still a lovely place.’

  She looked through the window, deliberately ignoring the knot of surly longhair women under the tree, and instead looking across the spacious prospect; broken old buildings yielding to the green of nature. It was beautiful. Spawning strands of water eeled through the beautifully inconstant skies.

  ‘Lovely!’ she agreed.

  There was no point in trying to avoid it. She was in love. She wrote him upon sheets of paper, like a character from Shakespeare. Love letters. My heart is with the butterflies, she wrote, for they can only be and move in the world by folding themselves in half, over and over, like a letter that is finished to be tucked into its envelope. Butterflies live in the crease; they are the living crease; and so am I.

  He didn’t write back. But he did send a Helios message, and they arranged to meet again. It made Marie thirteen years of age all over again.

  He came to stay over at her place, and they made love in the bed and in the shower and back in the bed. Afterwards she watched him sleep. He was a restless, fidgety sleeper. How could anyone, she wondered, regard sleep as repose? Watching him reminded her of the urgency of sleep; of how effortful and strenuous it can be. It’s a puzzle how anybody could confuse, even for mere poetic effect, sleep and death. Not siblings, those. Not related at all.

  Later they talked about her previous life, and she felt a cartilaginous protrusion, somehow, on the inside of her throat. It was hard to talk about it, and she didn’t want to talk about it. But he asked, with his big ingenuous face. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she did. ‘Your husband,’ said Arto. ‘He was hardly faithful, though. The rumours – you know.’

  ‘I know. And I knew.’

  ‘And didn’t it bother you?’

  She thought about it. ‘It might have bothered me,’ she said, in a queer voice, ‘if I had desired him more.’

  Arto’s eyebrow came up like a sideways question-mark. ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘At first I did: when we were young. He’s quite handsome. And he used to be more handsome, when he had the sheen of youth on him. But he’s – a kid, really. And I fell into habits of – mothering him. I suppose I did. And that kills desire, you see. It ended up with him having these fli
ngs, and me indulgently, I don’t know, noting them, giving him permission.’ She didn’t add, because she didn’t think she needed to, or perhaps rather that she hoped she didn’t: that’s not how our relationship will work. Arto was man, not boy. Apart from his silly spy play-acting. But that, Marie told herself, that would go away.

  5

  The spy stuff didn’t go away. One day Arto was at her apartment, and Marie took a Helio message from Rodion, the old man who’d owned the other half of their previous mansion-block. She still met up with him, from time to time, in the park.

  ‘Who was that?’

  Arto’s tone was sharper than usual. She might easily have rebuked him for the rudeness of this; but instead she only said, ‘An old friend, just arranging a time to hook up.’ Old friend was to distinguish him from the newer friends she had made since her divorce. Although of course, it was a stretch describing Rodion as a friend.

  ‘Friend?’ said Arto, suspiciously. Was that jealousy? Dimples appeared in Marie’s cheeks.

  ‘It’s not like that!’ she said, cajolingly. ‘He’s more a friend of Ez and, and – Leah. He meets them in the Park, buys them ice creams.’

  ‘Rodion?’

  The dimples dissolved back into the flesh. ‘That’s right.’

  A peculiar expression took control of his eyes. ‘Can I come?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to meet him.’

  She wasn’t sure why she felt uneasy at this. And of course there was no reason to deny him. She said: ‘Sure.’

  They all went to the park. There was Rodion, with his old-fashioned tunic, and his big bald head, at once fragile-looking and brutal, and his absurd black eyebrows like two simcards stuck over his eyes. ‘Rodion,’ Marie said, ‘may I introduce my friend, Arto?’

  ‘Let’s not be bourgeois,’ said Arto, bouncily, shaking Rodion’s hand with vigour. ‘Marie and I are lovers.’

  Rodion’s eyebrows slid a long way up his big wrinkly forehead at this forwardness, but he mumbled ‘Good to meet you.’ Although he didn’t meet Arto’s eye. Then he bowed down to bring his face closer to the level of Leah and Ezra: ‘Would you like ice cream?’

  Ezra gave voice to his opinion: ‘Ice-cream is yucky.’

  ‘Oho! So you don’t want any?’

  ‘Strawberry,’ Ezra said, looking pointedly past Rodion at the sky.

  Rodion went to the booth and returned with two globes of coral-pink iced goo. Leah, at least, thanked him. The three adults sat on a bench and watched as the children, self-consciously, ate their treat.

  ‘Has Marie mentioned me, to you, I wonder?’ asked Arto, beamingly.

  ‘I can’t say she has,’ Rodion replied in an embarrassed voice.

  ‘No matter. She’s a special human being, Marie.’ He patted her knee. It was all very embarrassing. Indeed, it was so embarrassing that Marie almost literally couldn’t believe it. It had that weirdly jointed clumsiness of dreaming. Perhaps Arto was playing some peculiar game.

  ‘So, Rodion,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind if I call you Rodion?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Rodion said.

  ‘How old are you? More than a hundred, I’d wager. You have the look of a three-figure fellow.’

  ‘Arto!’ Marie cried.

  He turned an ingenuously wide-eyed expression on her. ‘What! It’s an achievement! It’s an index of vigour. Now I’ve always said,’ he added, expatiating for the general benefit, ‘that one thing we can bring to the cosmos is the vigour to live long and well.’

  ‘ “We”?’ queried Rodion, mildly.

  ‘The wealthy. Oh, the longhairs sometimes hang on, I know, for ages and ages, like – moss or something. But I don’t call that really living. And in my experience jobsuckers wear themselves out, like components in a machine, with their ceaseless activity. They don’t usually live long. We are the pinnacle of existence, though, aren’t we? We’re what existence is for. We’re the overmen and the overwomen.’

  ‘I was a jobsucker myself,’ said Rodion, unassertively, ‘for many decades.’

  But Arto bounced straight off this implied rebuke. He was beyond shame. ‘Our eminence carries with it certain responsibilities, you know! Certain duties and responsibilities. Do you travel much, Rodion?’

  ‘Are you drunk?’ Marie asked.

  Arto laughed at this. ‘It’s an innocent question, my love. There’s a lot of world to see! I bet, Rodion, that you’ve seen a good deal of it in your time?’

  ‘I did travel, a long time ago,’ said Rodion stiffly.

  ‘But you don’t travel nowadays? Wise of you, Rodion. Manhattan, Manhattan! Wouldn’t you agree, Rodion, that Manhattan has all that a person needs right here?’

  Rodion sat straight up on the bench at this, and looked more closely at Arto. Then he said a strange thing: ‘You’re one of those, are you?’

  Arto didn’t stop grinning, but he did stop talking. In that moment Marie was simply grateful that her lover (shudder!) had ceased embarrassing her. Only afterwards did it strike her as strange that Rodion’s mildly spoken words would have such an effect on Arto’s impregnable ego. But the weather was nice, and the sound of the ocean rubbing itself, catlike, upon the Hough Wall was a pleasant distant susurration, and the air tasted clean, and for a while Marie just sat and permitted herself to enjoy the moment. She let her eye drift over the great bank of blooms opposite. Properly beautiful flowers, a well tended horticultural display. All the reds and purples and pinks. The great variety of greens. The empty skullcaps of the hyacinths. The cabbage in-folded pinks of roses. The purity of lilies. The long grass-coloured tubing through which the bindweed blew its effortless white trumpet.

  ‘We’ve finished our ice creams,’ said Leah. ‘Can we go?’

  Later, back at the apartment, after a strenuous but oddly unsatisfying session of lovemaking, Marie asked him: ‘What did Rodion mean when he called you one of those?’ Arto was face down on the bed, and his reply sank inaudibly into the mattress. But Marie wasn’t in a mood to let it go. ‘What did he mean? One of what?’

  ‘Spy,’ said Arto, turning his head.

  ‘This nonsense again?’

  ‘A spy,’ said Arto.

  ‘You said Manhattan has all that a person needs, and he replied that you were a spy. That hardly makes sense, now, does it?’

  ‘Oh he recognized me well enough. Which is to say; he recognized my type. He’s had plenty of run-ins with people like me.’

  ‘Spies?’ Marie sneers.

  ‘People telling him not to leave the city, I mean.’ With a heave and a hup! Arto was off the bed and padding towards the shower, his bulgy buttocks wobbling. Listen! Those tender little smacking sounds, as his thighs chafed step by step: the somatic percussion of affluence.

  Marie lay on her back. ‘Why can’t he leave the city?’ she called; but the whoosh of the shower had started up and she couldn’t be heard. So she sat up and thought about the idiocy of Arto’s game-playing, and how infuriating it was, and how infuriating he was. When he came back, dribbling water from his naked body all over the floor, she was waspish: ‘It doesn’t impress me, you know.’

  His tone was mock-innocent. ‘What doesn’t?’

  And she saw that a fight was coming. More, she welcomed the possibility. ‘Your nonsense about being a spy,’ she said, belligerent. ‘You do it to impress me. Well, I’m not impressed. You can drop it.’

  He stood at the foot of the bed, dripping water. ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘You’re an innocent. You don’t have the faintest notion.’

  ‘You’re so condescending,’ she returned. ‘You know nothing about me! You don’t know what I’ve gone through.’

  ‘The world is one lit candle away from going up in flames!’ He was yelling, he was really shouting. ‘You have no idea now precariously we’re positioned! You don’t know what we do to keep you safe.’

  ‘To keep me safe!’ she cried.

  ‘You are like a child. All you people, you’re like children
. You’ve no idea what the grown-ups do so you can sleep safe and sound at night.’

  This was too much. She leapt straight up, standing on the bed. ‘Don’t talk to me about the dangers of the world! You’re not the one who spent a year of your life in misery, in purdah, because your child was stolen from you. You tell me that I don’t understand? Tell me what?’ She felt the fury pour through her, like a poet from the ancient world visited by the Muse. She was channelling it. It was too powerful a force for the filigree structure of words to carry. ‘The cruelty of the world – the cruelty – hammering right into the heart of my life—’ She wanted to convey to him how deadly, how harrowing it had been, the violation of the family. She wanted to say how, when she looked at her daughter now, she saw a stranger. As if she could see the Bug living inside her. As if she could only see George in her face, and not herself in it, at all, any more. But all of this was too fiddly to express, there, then. Instead she howled. Wolf.

  She jumped from the bed onto the floor. She was looking for something to throw at him, to batter him with. She wanted very acutely to hurt him, to mark him. But there was nothing to hand, and he was shouting something at her, his face weirdly, almost ecstatically, coiled and distorted. She could not even hear his words.

  Then she was at him, slapping and punching, and he went down under the abruptness of her attack. A face possessed by surprise looks very like a face possessed by anger. And then, belatedly, he was countering her blows, trying to grab her wrists. She got in two or three satisfying thwacks to his big face, and wrung a twist of delight from her sluggish soul to see his astonishment, to see the skin blush with the blows. But then he had her – he was bigger than her – and he rolled. He was gasping out a series of ‘ah! ah! ah!’ noises. He pinned her under his bulk; and when she darted her head forward to try and . . . whatever, bite him, headbutt him, she didn’t know. He lifted himself up on his hands, on her wrists, to get out of range. She was aware of his belly sagging upon her own, moving as he shifted position. With a shriek she struggled, and struggled, and they were kissing, aggressively kissing, and before she knew it his cock was inside her again. She twisted her legs out and round to grip him, and he was squirming heavily in her arms, pushing his splodgy manhood into her over and over. They rolled over onto their sides, and then she was on top, and the roll continued. Out of the corner of her eye Marie saw a figure in the doorway – Leah – and then another figure, swooping her up with an adult arm and pulling her away, her carer. Then Arto was on top again and gruntingly thrusting, and she lost track of her surroundings, and herself, and she was pushing her own pelvis up to grind against his, and