By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  bye-bye

  bye-bye

  bye-bye

  Afterwards, since it wasn’t comfortable lying on the floor, they got onto the bed and lay, side by side, staring at the ceiling. For a long time neither said anything. Then Arto said: ‘I haven’t come twice in half an hour, like that, for years!’ And he laughed. Marie reached over and patted his stomach. ‘It’s been a while for me too,’ she said.

  ‘You’re a very special person,’ he said.

  She felt that some significant change had occurred, that afternoon, in that room. That there was now no going back. She wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not. She thought of his face, uglified with anger. She remembered the profound satisfaction she had experienced as, unrestrained, she had punched at him. Leah’s face, blankly observing, flashed into her mind, but she put it aside. ‘Arto—’ she began to say.

  He was chuckling, still. ‘You’re special to me, Marie,’ he said. And when he said that, she understood that he wasn’t chuckling at all. He was sobbing.

  ‘Arto, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh Marie!’ he said. ‘Oh! Oh Marie!’

  This was unexpected, and it wasn’t very pleasant. Really it was very far from being pleasant. ‘My dear man,’ she said, awkwardly, unsure what to do. Then, dutifully, she slid one arm (with some difficulty) underneath him, and laid the other over his broad chest. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I’ve done such things,’ he gasped. ‘I’ve done such things!’

  ‘What things?’ she asked him, not because she wanted to know, but because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, and felt she had to say something.

  ‘I was in Florida, on a Standship,’ he said. ‘The sea was so thick with bodies you could have walked to the beach. You could have literally walked to the beach!’

  ‘There there,’ she said. ‘Shush, shush.’ This wasn’t right. She didn’t want to be the mamma. She didn’t want a full-grown man in her arms who was nothing but a supersize baby. But what could she do? He was hysterical. She wanted him to stop.

  ‘We killed so many of them. I did, I killed so many.’ His sobs had settled, and now he spoke in a sort of breathy monotone. ‘I expected to be shocked at killing them, and at first I was shocked, but after a while it stopped being shocking and became just boring. Became a chore, you know?’

  ‘I know,’ she said, although of course she knew nothing at all about it. But what else could she say. ‘Shush, shush.’ Why wouldn’t he shush?

  ‘But that’s a different sort of shock, though?’ He seemed to be getting his sobs under control. That was a relief. ‘A what do you call, a meta-shock? It doesn’t dawn on you at first, but then when you look back, you know? I got tired of the killing, but it had to go on.’

  ‘Shush all this talk of killing,’ she said, in as kindly a tone as she could. She could hear her own voice. She could hear that it wasn’t a very kindly tone at all. ‘Don’t upset yourself. It’s all nonsense, this talk. You didn’t kill anybody.’

  ‘Only longhairs,’ he said.

  ‘Shush,’ she said, stroking his chest.

  He coughed, and ran a fat hand over his face. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy. But honestly, Marie—’ His voice sounded more normal now. ‘Honestly, it was like a slick.’

  This made no sense. ‘Slick?’

  ‘You know. Like an oil slick. Just a mess of arms and legs flopping over one another, hair swaying in the water like seaweed. Paved with faces. The ones that live at sea wear floats, you know. In case they fall in, I suppose. So they don’t go under.’ He shifted his position. The crying had stopped now, and the tone of voice was more controlled. He was explaining, not confessing. ‘Some of them have proper buoyancy waistcoats, or whatever; some just have plastic or sealed bags tied around them. They’re in the water a lot, you see. But it means, the bodies don’t sink.’ Sink was uttered with a worrying catch to his voice, so Marie spoke up briskly, to stop him dissolving again.

  ‘Let’s have a drink, yes?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He stretched out his arms and legs, like a cat, stretching. ‘I’m sorry, sweet-bread, I’m sorry for losing it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, firmly. She meant it.

  So they had cocktails on the balcony, and watched the waterracers coming darting round the shoulder of Roosevelt and making the surface of the lagoon shiver. Arto talked a little more about his work with the government. Marie didn’t especially want to hear all this, but at least he wasn’t actually sobbing any more. So she listened, as politely as she could, and sipped her drink, and let herself unclench inside. She couldn’t evade the knowledge that this new intimacy made a difference to their relationship.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to anybody else about it,’ he said. ‘Only you. I haven’t spoken to another solitary human soul. Not since the army psychiatric debrief, I mean.’

  With a little tingle of insight, she understood the ground of their new connection. It was trauma, and it was the way life’s flow gets twisted into tourbillons and eddies by the interruptions of trauma. She and he had it in common. Tentative, she explored the ground.

  ‘What anti-melancholics did the army give you? Not GēnUp, I hope. There are much better treatments on the market than GēnUp, believe me.’

  ‘There’s a government-only branding, Forward.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You ever heard of that?’

  ‘I never have,’ she said.

  ‘It works pretty well.’

  ‘Forward,’ said Marie.

  ‘Sure. Forward. The trick it has: it makes it so that you don’t mind, any more; but – and this is the clever wrinkle – you do mind that you don’t mind. If you see what I mean. It doesn’t produce that zombie thing. That, uh, affectless blankness some of the other treatments give you.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Marie suggested, ‘it doesn’t hold up so well in the case of sudden, strong emotion?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Arto, looking across the water at a dinodozer churning up some old building on the far shore. ‘I suppose none of them are too good at that.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother you?’

  ‘What?’

  He swirled the last of his cocktail in the glass. ‘I’m not used to talking like this, you know.’

  ‘Does it bother me. You’re asking if it bothers me. Do you mean,’ Marie asked, ‘does it bother me that you’ve killed people in your time?’

  ‘Not that,’ said Arto.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well, no! I know you well enough Marie. I know you. You have the soul of a warrior. You have the soul of a warrior. It was war, after all. It is war. You know that much, though. I’m not asking: does it bother you I killed people.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’m asking: does it bother you I had a breakdown?’ Ugh, what a word!

  ‘Breakdown?’ she snapped.

  He nodded, mournfully. ‘Nervous breakdown, after Florida.’

  That was a cold-water shock to the soul, to Marie, and no mistake! So, so. She lost a portion of his next sentence, and when she tuned in again Arto was saying: ‘They posted me to the Queens garden project to help me recover, true, true. There are levels of stress that – well, anti-melancholics only go so far, don’t they? Sometimes the spirit is simply drowned by the weight of . . .’

  ‘Now, don’t be silly,’ she told him, fiercely.

  Below them, the water was changing colour as the sun descended though the sky. There was a jellyfish tremor in the bulk of it, and the light slickly blushing. She sat next to him, conscious of the fact of this intimacy between them, a new importance. Falling in love, she thought, was a magnifying of importance. People in love were more important than people who were not in love. And the trauma they shared, she told herself, was more complex and ensnaring than she had at first thought. Because her trauma was not that she had lost her daughter but that she had got her back. Hers was not the misery of loss but precisely the happine
ss of reunion. And his trauma was not the violence. And she wasn’t a monster, she wasn’t interested in knowing all the horrible details, like some sort of voyeur, like a peeping-Tom, like a news-junkie. His violence was something else: not that the violence had shocked him, but precisely that the violence had not shocked him. Their affinity was more than elective.

  He was what she deserved.

  ‘I love the way dusk comes out of the east,’ Arto said. ‘I love the way dusk comes out of the same place dawn comes. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  6

  She knew exactly what he meant. This, rather than being with somebody when everything had to be spelled out, this was the genuine currency of love. Wasn’t it? Arto’s home was somewhere else in the Five States, Connecticut or somewhere, but he had a base in the city, in the Lower East Side, so as to be at hand for the rewilding project. A bare boxy space, uncluttered with the usual appurtenances of day-to-day. On occasion Marie would stay the night, and some sort of instinct would wake her before dawn. She might lie there, in his bed, listening to her lover breathing scrappily through his nose, as the white room filled up with light. She contemplated the way love comes into a soul, as light comes into a room. She felt a motionless horror, a sense of great misery pressing down upon her. The prospect of this new emotional greatness inside her was alarming rather than liberating. Shouldn’t it have been freeing? It wasn’t. Not that there was any mystery about what was going on. She went back to her therapist, Wiczek, who had done such a good job before, tweaking her prescription. ‘You said how great and sudden happiness is as disorienting to the psyche as great sorrow.’

  Wiczek nodded, smiling a knowing smile.

  ‘I think it has happened again. The first happiness was getting my daughter back, of course, and, yes, the drugs I was on did stabilize my happiness. But now I’m experiencing a new happiness.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I have fallen in love. I’m in love. I think it has destabilized my medication, because I feel full of a kind of . . . dread.’

  Wiczek nodded again, more slowly. ‘Is that not part of being in love?’

  But Marie wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense. ‘I’m not talking about butterflies-in-stomach. I’m talking about a kind of misery – depression, I mean. I want you to rewrite my prescription to take account of this new thing in my life.’

  Wiczek wouldn’t meet her eye. This really was the last thing she had expected. ‘I am really not sure, Ms Lewinski, that it is best to smother your feelings with medication.’

  Marie felt like she had been slapped. The words came to her almost exactly as if she had been struck in the face! ‘Smother my feelings!’ she gasped.

  ‘You are in a new relationship,’ the woman said. ‘You need to attend to what your feelings are telling you. How can you judge whether this is indeed love, if you squeeze out your natural reactions?’

  Marie got to her feet. She stood a little unsteadily, wobbly-wibbly, wibbly-wobbly. It was like a blow to the solar plexus. ‘I trusted you,’ she said. And then: ‘If I understand you correctly, you are saying that I do not love this man. Without knowing anything about him, without even knowing his name, you have the nerve to tell me that this is not the man for me!’

  Wiczek was also on her feet, with a gratifyingly horrified expression on her thin little face.

  ‘How dare you! You don’t know anything about it!’

  ‘Not at all, Ms Lewinski, I assure you, I was not . . .’

  Her grovelling came too late, obviously; but it at least gave a kind of strength to Marie’s own anger. ‘Be quiet! Shut up! I trusted you, I came to you for help! If a person came to you with a broken leg, begging you for a painkiller, would you smugly instruct them to pay attention to the message of their nerves?’

  There were tears in the stupid woman’s eyes now. ‘Please! Please!’

  ‘We’re through,’ said Marie. ‘I am happier than I have ever been, do you hear me? How dare you tell me I am not! You don’t know anything about me, you skinny little jobsucker. What can you possibly understand about a person like me?’ Her anger elevated her. ‘I’m only surprised I ever thought you had any expertise,’ she said.

  The woman just stood there looking poor and drawn, her face ruddy, wet with tears. Marie left her like that, and went home. There was so much resentment in the world. There were so many people who could not bear the happiness of others. Pettiness and hate.

  At home, Ezra and Leah were watching a book. Marie kissed them both on the tops of their heads, feeling the ferocity of pure love thrumming inside her. Her kids! Out on the balcony she drank a beaker of grass wine down in one great gulp, and poured herself another. A sunkite was sliding overhead like a huge autumnal leaf. Its shadow seemed wholly disconnected from it; a double diamond of grey sliding over Roosevelt and over the lagoon. The edge of its shade was doing that disconcerting quantum-leap thing: now adhering closely to the street, now jumping suddenly on the roof of the adjacent building.

  Leah came out. ‘Ma,’ she said. ‘Carol wants to know if she should cook now?’

  It took a moment to remember who Carol was. ‘And she can’t ask me herself?’

  Leah shrugged, slouching half in at the door and half on the balcony. There was something particularly provoking about her posture. Ill-disciplined, loose-limbed. As if she weren’t taking things seriously enough. ‘Ma,’ she said again. ‘The charity you work for?’

  ‘What, Leah?’ she said, tipping the beaker to get the last drops of drink into her mouth. She sounded a little more peevish and annoyed than she intended. ‘What is it you want?’

  But her tone had cowed the girl. Look at the restlessness of her long limbs! She slouched most of the way back into the apartment so that only her left leg remained on the balcony. The fact that Leah could so easily be browbeaten by her mother’s anger, paradoxically, only made Marie angrier. She made an effort to control herself.

  ‘You mean the Queens garden? You mean the rewilding project?’

  Leah’s expression was incomprehensible to Marie.

  ‘That’s not a charity, my love,’ Marie said. ‘Come here.’

  Leah obeyed, in her slackly fidgety way. She sat herself down next to her mother, and permitted herself to be embraced. ‘What do you want to know about it?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Not the garden,’ said Leah, in a low voice.

  ‘Not the garden?’

  ‘The Gunes-what-you-say.’

  ‘Oh!’ Marie said. ‘You mean the Gunesekera Organization?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about it?’

  It took a moment for Leah to come out with it. ‘Could I do something for it?’

  This was a very strange development. ‘Do something for it? What do you mean, do something? What do you think you could do for it?’

  Leah shrugged again.

  ‘You do understand what it is, don’t you? It provides educational opportunities for the children of the very poor,’ Marie explained. ‘The absolutely poor, you know.’

  ‘You’re still involved in it, right?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Marie. ‘Although most of my time is taken up with the garden, now, to be honest. But I’m still on the committee. Oh, my love, do you really think there’s much a twelve-year old could do for the Gunesekera people?’

  ‘Thirteen,’ said Leah, staring at her own feet. ‘Ma – are you going to marry Mr Arto?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marie, surprising herself with how easily the word came out. ‘You see, he and I have fallen in love. We are going to get married, my dear. That’s what people do when they’re in love.’ Trying without complete success to put a wry and funny inflection on her words. She waited for Leah to follow up with a question about her father, but instead she said: ‘I’ll go tell Carol to cook, then,’ and wriggled free. Away she sloped, drawing her long limbs fluidly after her.

  Marie watched the lagoon, and the sky, and the buildings. If she were any happi
er, she’d die. If she were any happier she’d expire. If she were any happier, if it were even possible to be happier, then she would break down in a blizzard of cold tears. Stand in the place where you live, is good advice.

  7

  Arto asked: ‘Are you planning on seeing your friend Rodion any time soon?’

  ‘What is it with you and Rodion?’

  ‘Oh you know,’ he said, smiling. ‘Spy stuff.’

  ‘That attempt to put a twinkle into your speech,’ she said, coldly, ‘is, I have to say, a complete misfire.’ She took hold of his hand. ‘You know, a more suspicious woman might get the impression that the only reason you spend time with me is to get close to that old man.’

  ‘Sweetheart!’ he laughed. ‘How could you think it? The spy in me is interested in Rodion, but the man in me is interested in you.’

  ‘And why,’ she said, only partially placated, ‘would a spy be interested in that dried-up old man? He must be a hundred and fifty.’

  ‘He has historical importance.’

  ‘History!’ sniffed Marie. ‘No such thing. An abstraction – by very definition it is past and over and dead and inexistent.’ Was that even a word?