Then I heard something that was definitely a shout, and stopped dead. The noise came from the far corner of the village, and any words contained in it were indistinguishable.
It was very bad timing for me to have to make a decision. My fingers were beginning to feel very long, my mind extremely vague. At any moment I could be Gone Away and suddenly I had to think.
There were two options. The first, go forward, threading my way through the huts until I saw what was going on. Downside: if Vinaldi wasn’t calling for me because he’d found something, I’d walk straight into the trap which Yhandim had undoubtedly set. With sudden clarity, the idea of going into a village struck me as irredeemably stupid. Why else would we be here unless we’d followed the clothes? Yes, we had to find out where Yhandim’s camp was—but not at the expense of walking straight into it.
So I took a second option, and quickly retreated out of the village. When I was at the perimeter I turned right, keeping my back to the forest, and ran round the edge of the houses, checking the spaces between buildings and trees. It was colder outside the village, much colder. Another night was coming. Night isn’t really night in The Gap. It is simply a period of indeterminate length when it will be darker and even less fun to be there.
Then I saw a figure, on the other side of the village—standing before one of the huts. It looked like Vinaldi, but he wasn’t moving. I was relieved, but only momentarily. There was something strange about his posture, as if he was holding his hands up in the air. As I tried to work out what he was doing, and wondered whether to shout, the second Rapt rush really hit home and suddenly things became difficult and strange. I teetered on the edge of being Gone Away for a moment but managed to hold it off.
I moved very close to the wall of the nearest hut and slid around it, blinking in the way which sometimes helps. Something was very wrong. Vinaldi’s hands were in the air because they had been tied to the hut, and though I couldn’t see any blood, his head was drooping.
Run, my mind said. Just turn around and run.
I crept forward another couple of yards, blinking my eyes rapidly against the coming darkness. Vinaldi was still alive; his head was jerking slightly. Either he was trying to clear it, or he was reeling from Rapt rush. Almost certainly both—my mind was already about as clear as sewage and getting more tangled all the time. I couldn’t see anyone nearby, and I briefly considered simply running toward him and trying to get him free. Then something made me turn my head and look down the path toward the center of the village.
There was nothing there. But the clearing looked ruffled as though seen through a heat haze. Whichever way I turned my head, the haze stayed in the same place. It was flickering very slightly too, like a bad quality film print, but the flecks weren’t white, they were dark. I rubbed my eyes hard and blinked, but after I stopped seeing stars the effect was still there. The flecks seemed to organize into broken and shifting vertical lines as I watched, as if something was hidden behind a curtain of rain, rain so colored as to make up an image of that patch of the path.
I realized what I was seeing just an instant before the image settled enough for my eyes to tell me. It was Yhandim and Ghuaji, and they were running along the path straight at me. They’d been taken up by The Gap enough to slip into it almost like natives. Ghuaji’s injuries weren’t holding him up any, and Yhandim looked like he’d never been injured in his life. He probably hadn’t. People like Yhandim didn’t get injured: The traffic’s all the other way.
Both looked like a condensed pack of wild animals, bludgeoned into a human state and howling with happy lust.
I did what I’d been trained to do. I ran like hell.
I ran, and eventually I was Gone Away. I cannot tell you where I went. I can only say this:
Henna used to tell me the names of flowers; their names, what they liked in terms of water and sunlight, and where they were originally from. Whether we walked the corridors of 72, or made an excursion out into Virginia, there would be a constant background hum of information, a datastream from Henna’s internal world. At first I feigned interest, and then I ignored her, and now I’ll never know. She would also tell me things which had happened in her day, because she loved me. But because I couldn’t fit them into my life I let these too slide past me and fade away.
All those parts which I could have saved have slipped between my fingers and disappeared.
I don’t know how many people I slept with while I was married to Henna. I don’t mean there were that many, simply that I didn’t keep track, which in some ways seems worse. I didn’t start for three years, but once I began I just couldn’t seem to stop. Sometimes I was drunk, sometimes I was Rapt, sometimes I was stone-cold sober. I can’t really blame any mitigating substance, unless it’s one I produce in my own mind. Unfaithfulness was coded in.
I’m not trying to excuse it. It’s inexcusable. That’s the whole point of vices, of alcoholism, addictions, and eating disorders. They have to be inexcusable. The soul wages war on the self, making it do things it can’t respect—as a punishment for crimes it doesn’t even remember. What’s the point, unless it’s something bad? And what do you do about yourself when you know you can’t stop doing something you despise? You carry on doing it, that’s what. The merry-go-round never stops. The worst of it is that people will respect those addictions, legitimating your own private civil war. They’ll think you can’t help it, that your childhood’s to blame, or some cultural malaise. Anything but you. Sometimes that’s true, but often it just comes down to being an asshole.
It’s an easy thing to do, for a cop, finding someone new to fuck. There’d always be some lonely woman who needed comforting after finding her apartment trashed, or a girl in a bar who thought it was a turn-on to sleep with someone who should have been out catching criminals—or better still, at home with his wife and daughter. Each would last a few weeks, or months, and then I’d purge myself and leave it be. For a little while I’d be good, and pretend to be happy, and then it would simply happen again.
I met Henna through Mal, when I was twenty-two and had just joined the cops. Mal had been in the Life for a year, and seemed to be liking it. We’d been Bright Eyes together—the only two survivors from our unit. We came to New Richmond after being sideslipped out, full of secrets and in search of some kind of life. Mal was originally from Roanoke but didn’t want to go back. I didn’t have anywhere to go back to anymore. My mother was dead of cancer by then, my father soon afterward in a petty suicide. None of the towns we’d lived in meant any more than the others, and I went to New Richmond to look for a place to call home.
Neither of us had much of an education, or a family to help us up the ladder and over the TOO line, but we didn’t care. For a few years we tried different things, hoping that something would reach out and grab us. We were entranced with the city, with its possibilities, even when it didn’t seem to harbor much more than apathy toward us. New Richmond was a house with many rooms, and I wanted to visit every one of them, make them open to me. When I should have been looking for work I walked its streets, delving through its hidden passages until I knew I could live there-forever.
In the end Mal decided that there was nothing much he could do so he might as well join the police. I watched him for the first year, saw him get wrapped into his work, and concluded that the kind of things he was doing would probably suit me, too. Suit me better than they did him, in some ways; the trawling through debris and junk, the psychos and streetwalkers, the blood and violence seemed to speak directly to some part of my mind. It looked like fun. The Gap had affected Bright Eyes in different ways, and in my case it was as if I’d blossomed there. Leaving it was like having some essential nutrient removed—not one whose absence kills you, but one that simply changes the color of your leaves. I’d learned to live inside fear. The idea of being a cop appealed to that side of me, as did the notion of remaining outside society. I wanted to stand looking in. So I went to the office, proved I could spell at least one of my
names, and they gave me a badge and a gun.
I met Henna a few months later, in the depths of a riotous party on 110. Mal had wangled us invites, having met a group of above-the-liners somewhere along the line of duty, and we spruced ourselves up, hopped on an xPress and went in search of fun. I didn’t have much in the early parts of the evening, as I remember, and felt conscious of the fact that I was currently bunked down in a nasty apartment on one of 38’s more alarming streets. It’s possibly my imagination, but I rather got the impression that Mal and I had been invited as performing bears. I responded in the most constructive way I could: by getting profoundly drunk.
By ten I was so wasted I had been officially downgraded to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. Some guy in a suit came up, listened to my attempts to string words together, revoked my rights as Homo sapiens on the spot, and reclassified me as some kind of plant life. I had to fill in all kinds of forms and shit. It was very embarrassing.
But then I saw Henna, and got talking to her, and the evening turned out to be fun after all. She was tall and slim, with cool green eyes and an agreeably rangy figure, and even in my state I saw immediately that she was both intelligent and beautiful. She in turn seemed prepared to ignore the chip on my shoulder and the whiskey on my tie, and to find at least some of what I said interesting rather than merely aggressive, and at the end of the evening I staggered away with her phone number.
A month later she moved down from 102 to anew apartment we took together on 61—at first largely financed by her salary. We outlasted the schtupfest, found we liked each other, and two years later were married. Mal was the best man. Henna’s parents came down, and were polite—icily so, in retrospect—and it was only many years later that I discovered how much they’d hated the idea of her marrying me. I was poor, I was a rookie cop, and I was resolutely not from above the line. All this was their problem, not mine, but they were Henna’s mom and dad. One night, not long before she died, Henna accidentally revealed just how much they hated their son-in-law, and I understood for an instant just how much she’d given up to be with me, and how little I’d given her in return. For a moment, just a moment, I had a glimpse of the kind of man I’d become; but then I stormed out of the apartment and spent the next few hours with the woman I was having an affair with.
The first three years of our marriage were a contented blur. Henna professed herself happy, told me how she loved me, and so the days went by. I discovered that I could do policework, and that it mattered to me. I was busy trying to get into Homicide. Henna put up with the late nights, the no-shows, the worry that one night I simply might not come back. We talked, we smiled, we went out and did things together. Occasionally we would flare up over something, and argue briefly and bitterly, but, in general, the times were good.
But the truth is this: I never really loved Henna enough, not until it was far too late. I cared very deeply, and I felt affection, but even on the day I proposed to her I believed it was not love I held in my heart.
I thought I had known absolute love before, when I was eighteen. Her name was Fhee, and we spent two years together before the relationship blew apart. Fhee had a smile like a cat in front of a fire, and I was so terrified of losing her. She was an uncontainable force of nature, a shout of existence with thick auburn hair and big brown eyes; a lithe, running woman who always seemed to be turning and urging me to catch up with her. Her skin was sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, and her hair hung in rats’ tails to the middle of her back. Making love to her was like a delicious road accident which left you breathless and shocked. Instead of a gentle celebration of considered love it was a function of her whole being, a physical reaction as unstoppable as a sneeze, as elemental as fear.
A few weeks after we parted I ended up in The Gap, because I was angry and unhappy and didn’t feel I had anyplace else to go. I was there for over two years, and that period changed my view of the world for good. By the time I came out, Fhee was gone. I only saw her once more and that was many years later.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that I let a marriage slide because of some idealized first love, something that had died long before; but ifs a sad fact about life that you can’t always learn from your mistakes, because by the time you’ve made them you’ve changed the playing field forever.
As I got older, I became increasingly haunted by a vision of some perfect woman I believed I was destined to find. In each person I would see only what was lacking, and in every place and activity know the lack. Sometimes I felt I could actually see this woman, feel her, smell her. I knew exactly what she would look like, how she would speak, how she would be.
I knew when I married Henna that she wasn’t that woman, though she should have been. I married her anyway. I married her because she wanted me to, and because I loved her too much to disappoint her. I don’t want you to get the idea I had an especially bad time. Henna played a mean game of pool, was very nice to me, and I missed her like hell when she wasn’t there. She laughed like a drain, didn’t take me too seriously, and had the cutest chin of all time. It wasn’t that Henna was bad, or deficient: It was just that she wasn’t her, and sometimes when I went to meet her I expected someone else. The other woman. The one who would have made me afraid.
The contradictory pulses of guilt and excitement, the feeling of a stranger’s lips on yours when you should be somewhere else: Somewhere in the gap between those two emotions, perhaps, was what I was looking for.
I never found it. Eventually Angela came along, and after that things were different. I slept around less, and when I did it was with a mean-spirited pragmatism. I loved Angela with all my heart, and part of the reason I was able to do that was that so much of Henna was in her. It was as if there was a version of my wife that I didn’t have to be married to, didn’t have to have a male-female relationship of any kind with, but could simply love. Angela wasn’t a flawed version of some imaginary woman; she was simply my perfect daughter. So much of the love we have for people depends on how they make us feel about ourselves, and Angela made me feel like I was worthy of loving. She would stand in front of me, looking up, and then suddenly just hurl herself upward as hard as she could, arms stretched out, trusting me to catch her. I’d fold her to my chest, and sometimes as I nuzzled her face I’d be aware of Henna in the background and be able to feel the tangible wave of her happiness and relief.
I would watch Henna and Angela together, and hear them talk, and during that period feel closer to happiness than any time before or since. I remember one afternoon when we all went walking, up on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Lexington, and Angela found a snail crawling over a rock. “Look,” she said, and Henna looked, and told her how snails carried their houses on their backs. Angela was entranced, and I knew for sure that was one story which she would never forget for the rest of her life, which she would tell her own daughter when the time came.
For a moment I was truly there with them in the sunshine, in the real world rather than my own mind. Maybe things should have changed for me then, and I could have found something approaching a life. All that really stood in the way was my unwillingness to commit myself. Perhaps I could have learned how.
Two things intervened to stop it from being so, and the first of these was Fhee.
I was sitting in a bar in the Portal one evening when Angela was four, trawling for information on a sex-related homicide involving someone on 138. The night was young, and I was only slightly drunk, when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned round to see someone who looked familiar.
The woman grinned, and I knew: It was an older version of Fhee. For a moment I was speechless, and then I forgot all about the questions I’d been asking the dopeheads at the bar.
I forgot about Henna, Angela, the present, everything. For three hours Fhee and I sat, knees and hands touching, competing with each other to remember times now ten years past; and while we spoke we knew they were gone, but it didn’t feel as if that made any difference. I felt as if years we
re being stripped away, as if acid was being poured down drains and pipes in my head which had been blocked for years.
At ten o’clock we bought a couple of bottles to go and took off in my car, driving randomly through the wilds until we came by chance upon Lake Ratcliffe. We parked the car by the shore and walked along the banks still talking nonstop, until we saw a small island and paddled to it through the freezing water. We explored the island, clambering clumsily over rocks in the dark, finding things to look at and enjoy and point out to each other as we had done many years ago.
When we’d worked all the way round we made our way up to the higher ground, and found a hollow, an enclave, a little way down from the top of the island shielded on two sides by the walls of rock. We sat and smoked and drank from our bottles of wine, talking of the people we’d known, the times we had seen, the way the moon glinted on the crests of the water.
And then we were lying, still talking, but with her head on my chest and my arm loosely around her. The inevitable came slowly and unexpectedly, and we watched it arrive, until our lips started to brush together and our hands moved less accidentally on each other’s arms, and faces, and bodies. Bewildered, as old friends, we made love then lay naked and warm, still friends. In a little while, with a calm and surprised enthusiasm, we made love again, still laughing and talking as we always did, and fell asleep wrapped together in the hollow.
We woke an hour later to find the first drops of rain falling on us out of a warm sky. The rain gathered and fell, and we lay in it, arms around each other, laughing and talking in low voices.
In the morning, we walked back across the water hand in hand, and we wrapped the night up in time and walked away from it. I saw Fhee in New Richmond a few more times after that, as a friend, but we never spoke of that night, except perhaps in silences sometimes, and in our loyalty to each other; and in the single rose I placed on her sealed coffin after her head was blown to mist by a mortar fired into a restaurant where she was eating lunch, in an attack on a local gang leader of whose existence she had been, and always would be, blissfully unaware.
Spares Page 25