Sudden Traveler

by Sarah Hall

  The first time she finds the man involved is not pure calculation, though why not remove one to prevent ten. It is progression, the honing of skill. She is on a nearby roof, next to a stretch of unlit scrubland, a cropped silhouette, neither mammal nor avian. She watches until he is done. The woman limps home, borrowing the shadows of the gaslit past, mute until she has shut her front door, then she screams, but not so loud the flatmate will hear. He goes back to the bar. How much better the beer tastes. Like it did when he was eighteen. Golden, fletched with barley, like drinking summer. He tells a few jokes to the barman, puts songs on the jukebox, leaves a message on his sister’s phone. Happy birthday, you old cow. Bet you thought I’d forgotten.

  Outside, he puts on his jacket, which smells a bit of perfume, and starts to walk home. She takes him by the shoulders, swings him up. A fast few miles—while he kicks, while his mind explodes and he messes himself—to a neighboring district of industrial warehouses and storage containers. She tries to be slow, inflict, she would like to examine inside and know why. But it is too exciting, or instinctive. Hot spray on her wing. She leaves the pile, like something spilled from a bin. The bloodweight affects her flight slightly, she is less balanced. She turns along the river, skims the surface, cleans. It makes the news. The weapon used is unknown. Nothing has escaped the zoo. The next, just before he veers the woman into an alley, she hoists on to a fire escape, drops. Accident. A broken neck. And no post-mortem to reveal the delicately evacuated heart.

  She has no dreams. No conscience. But in the mornings her body begins to seem less true. She is not unwell, but her legs tremor and feel cold, their vascular system compromised. She’s thinner, has bad breath, the tooth enamel is eroding, beginning to reveal a softer substance underneath. Her phone rings. Clients, old and new, who are transferred to colleagues, while she works solely for the Haven. The girl with the pale-green eyes watches her when she comes. She’s thirteen, give or take, has a mother sleeping upstairs somewhere. She holds the ragged dog to her breastless ribs, like a threadbare familiar. She watches, and doesn’t speak. Reminds her. The money, the land registry, though opaquely concealed, is traceable. She finds the name, and of course it is him, Olayan; he owns half the city, his wealth is a black river running through the world. He is beyond any legal reach.

  Fewer friends call wanting lunch. They suspect she is involved with someone inappropriate, or having health problems. She seems withdrawn, never goes out after work. Even Ilias, who has left several hopeful messages, stops calling.

  Within weeks the shelter is closed, its door chained until the demolition crane arrives. The women disperse; some are moved a hundred miles to other safe houses, overcrowded centers. Two are swept back into old worlds, one overdoses below a bypass, one is tattooed on the notch above her anus—Пожалуйста—and put back on the circuit. Cantrell goes with the mother of the baby to Scotland, the western islands, a stolen act of love. It is over.

  One night, instead of circling the city, she finds herself passing over the Channel. The sea is black, bladed, strung with small lights—boats like relics, stacked transport ships. High above the sea both landsides can be felt. The velocity is tremendous; distance another surprise. Lowlands. Fields of produce. Agricultural order. Towns of great, distinctive architecture. Forest, and white serrated mountains, where her blood translates, becomes a different temperature. Sea, and sea, separated by land like lovers walled apart. There are so many stars, multitudes, smoky galaxies, black, undiscovered planets. Finally, desert. She follows the new road between the dunes, its straight, immaculate tarmac.

  Armored vehicles surround the complex, groves of solar panels, and on the perimeter, a tall, inwardly sloping fence, as if he knows what enemy the sky might convey. A mile inside, modular white constructions begin. Tiled pools, the impossible prized lagoon. Fragrances rise from the gardens: black tulip, anise. It is a palace and a fortress. Arid vectors circle to the ground. The guards don’t look up. From military service to this easy duty, guns like armrests, TV shows playing on their phones. He is untouchable by name alone, spider in the globe’s rich web.

  His residence is in the inner courtyard, deeply placed. Its rose-glass roof cannot be scaled. She clings vertically to the wall, unpicks the vacuum sealant, slides the pane. Space enough inside to stay airborne, even encumbered by her span. She sweeps the chamber, soundlessly. No guards, just one servant, an illegitimate, trusted, or bought, who turns and sees her coming. He presses back against the wall, and vomits, faints. She drills a tidy puncture through his neck, lifts his legs against the wall to speed the let.

  Inside are sensors on the ceiling and the floor. The scent of an unknown blossom, white and perfect. Breath. His bed is vast, and he is sleeping at its edge, as if unconfirmed. Dark hair on the pillow. He is beautiful, this prince, robeless, touchable on the altar. Whichever wife, or boy, or gelding, is finished with and gone. He is washed and oiled. The most powerful man in existence, except one. She retracts, and sits beside him for a moment. She could be a guardian, benign grotesque, a saint. If she had been made differently, or if a treaty had been signed somewhere in history, she might never have come. If what happened had not happened. It is so far away, deep in the vein, behind the lens, an animal’s memory. She is alone in the village. She has passed through the door of her neighbor’s house, and the high bolt has been slid across. She has pulled down her soiled dress and he has gone upstairs to bed. We’ll do that again tomorrow, shall we, before Mammy gets back home? She has crawled to the dog’s bed, where the dog is sleeping, and has climbed in next to it, and put her face on its damp and dirty fur. She’s fallen asleep, and has entered her own imagination, a cystic universe, grown by adolescent rage and disgrace; she is waiting for someone to come and help, waiting for herself.

  Enough. The alarms are flashing in another room. He is not the reckoned god she wants. She has come half a world away to know what she can do, who is within her grasp. Going west, she surfs the bore of coming daylight. She sleeps on the wing, dropping altitude, waking, and climbing back up, almost to heaven.

  Winter. It is colder than it’s been for years. Inside the walls of buildings water swells, turns rigid, splitting pipes, displacing bricks. Ceilings collapse with the weight of ice. The trees are black and stiff as railings. Long, productive darkness, but at dawn, and in twilight hours, there are great studios of teal above the city. She continues to administer, to those she didn’t reach, couldn’t reach, before. In a clinic in the south, a woman waits for the nurse to leave, then turns the baby over on its front, pushes its head down into the mattress of the crib. Warm, and soft as vegetable. It moves, surprises her with its strength. Strong enough to inch up a body to the breast, if the birth had killed her, if they lay inside a cave, still roped. The woman stops. She rolls the baby over and its mouth sucks air. Hasn’t got it in her. She sits down in the chair next to the cot, plastic tube between her legs, and reasons. It should be both of them. Tomorrow she will take it to the river. She cries with relief. The baby cries for milk. The woman dozes. She feels a breeze and when she looks the little boy is gone, adopted by the wind.

  The city freezes, encased as if in glass. Points on the train tracks fail. All flights are grounded and planes sit in silver ranks along the runway. The refineries fail to transport. No oil. No grit. Blackouts. There is an overgrowth of white along the roads. Jackknifed buses, cars pitched into drifts. People must walk or wait it out inside, rubbing up against each other, knowing there is no escape. Those in charge deny and then declare a state of emergency. Regardless, human core, dependent, unadapted, is exposed. She has it all, the greater part of time, the oceanic dark above the world, superiority. She hears, feels; she preens the masses of their disease. A star could be named for her. A blinding, new immaculate. Epiphany. But no one sees or guesses.

  Fission’s nocturne: it is painless now, a habit. Scars develop on her back, faint cords of white and grey. Near her shoulder is a small dry hole, incomplete closure, insignificant, but
these are the scales. For advance, for primacy: a leveling. Mutability. Glory. Brevity. She eyes the future with no more fear than a hawk its reflection in a pool.

  Now.

  The village is the same, hemmed in by mountains weeping shale, wet, and ferned. Ditches of brown water score the moorland, wells of snowmelt, bracken on the slopes like burning ember. She passes over, twice, leaves no mark on any door. She sails the narrow length of the valley, along its glacial, feudal gash, arcs back again. Below, the church is empty, roof wrapped in plastic to protect it from decay. The barns are empty too, livestock gone to slaughter, farms sold off. The cemetery gates are closed. The river has redirected only inches. The steep field where her life almost ended, where her father lay beneath the wheel, blood forced into half his body’s compartments, eyes hemorrhaging, is fallow. The cottage where her mother passed away, and the cottage of the neighbor, are undistinguished, stacked in thick vernacular gray stone. It is here, one valley, in the thousands of the world, that she comes back to. Pulled by cells, eel-blind, brain a small magnetic pit. She can feel each cloud, the breath of the Atlantic, humid in her lungs. And the natal smell lifting, unforgotten—earth and mineral and rain.

  Even she cannot approach easily, is tested by the currents. The mountains flow with cold; wind rotors between the summits. When she lands she comes down hard on her hands and the loose skin behind her luffs. Dawn is approaching; green, underwater light struggling in the morning’s storm. The trees are unlocked and rock loosely in the ground. Stones and mud. Water’s surfaces mirror only cloud. She walks as she can, on her palms, supplicant, survivor, half-sized like a child, up the path to the house, where he is still living, barely, his chest rotting, his hounds dead, just a man who cannot stand from a chair without great effort, whose eyes are stiff with cataracts, and whose memories have not been saved. He will be waking into humanity, into his last day, and the unheated range, the smell of the empty dog bed, and the cold flagstones on the floor. Perhaps to thoughts of her, whichever stir.

  So the first dream ends or never started. She stands waiting at his door again, a creature unwhole, a creature so evolved and lethal it might free the earth’s hold on the moon. Everything is near and hers. The old man coughing through the wall as the bolt slides open. On the pillow, Ilias’s dark hair grows and curls, and she could go back, could wake him up and say, I am not this; she could tell him everything, or nothing, because the present is in each millionth moment remade and unstoppable, forgiveness, war, cause, cure, all moments, all selves, possible. But she is here. This time, she does not put herself away, but lays the wings behind her, as far as they will reach, across the garden, and the fields, almost to the fells, and they are open to the sky, already hardening in the light.

  The Woman the Book Read

  Ara. The name was unusual; he wouldn’t have recognized her otherwise. If she’d walked past him in the street, even if she’d been sitting opposite him in the cafe and he’d had time to study her, he probably wouldn’t have guessed. He was at his usual table, taking coffee, reading, watching the gulets dock in the harbor and unload passengers. It was still hot, his sleeves were rolled, but the town dogs were no longer collapsed in the shade—they were up and wandering. End of season, everything had slowed, and there was a sense of recovery, exhalation almost. He didn’t care for summers now; each year the town’s capacity felt breached. Loud music on the beach platforms, expensive drinks. The proposed airport had been halted, but more people kept arriving regardless.

  He was waiting for Eymen, as usual. They were supposed to discuss profits, tax, new ideas for the company, cider import, stonecrop export. Every Wednesday, the same. Eymen would arrive late, sweating, breathless, and would tease him for drinking espresso. You’re the late one, old wolf. When are you going to arrive home? If he’d been fiddling with his notebook and pencil he would put them away before they were seen and commented on.

  Someone close to the Great Han shouted her name across the square, and his head snapped up instinctively. It took a moment to register. He hadn’t heard it spoken in—how long? The name was called again. The accent was unmistakably English. Twenty meters away was a woman in a fedora and a lime-colored dress—the caller.

  The square was less crowded than the previous week. Small groups were congregated by the ice cream stall. The almond seller was talking to an elderly couple in matching linens. The rich young things from the city had gone. The sun was low; the woman in the green dress had her hand cocked, shielding her eyes. She was facing west, toward the lion’s tomb. There were two women in her line of sight—one small in stature with bleached hair, another Chinese. By the water’s edge Cemile teyze was bent over the dock, mooring The Domina after the day’s last tour.

  Again, the call came, floating across space, like the invitation of a ghost. Ara! Something released in his chest. A sense of her. That familiar feeling: uncomplicated, tender. He’d loved her name; it sounded stateless, when such ideas had seemed possible. The bringer of rain: her mother’s idea. He knew Catherine had been bullied by the father’s family, pressured to change it, even after the birth certificate; he’d admired her stubborn refusal. Whenever he’d thought of Ara, and he so often had—her hand in his, her skin immeasurably soft—he’d imagined she would be doing extraordinary things. She would have flown so far, her time with him forgotten. But if she were here, wouldn’t it be because of him? Or was it simply coincidence? The town was popular now, the country stable, and the British especially were building villas all over the peninsula and up into the hills.

  The caller was balanced on her toes, waving and gesturing. Come here. He put his hands on the table, next to his coffee cup, and strained upward to see who was being summoned. A woman was walking round the low wall of the fountain. She’d been drinking from the tap, perhaps, bent to the waterspout, hidden from view. Now she was walking across the square toward the han. Tall—and fair, yes—but the sun was obscuring her face. Her hair was bound back. How strange, his heart’s agitation, as if a piece of him already knew.

  She arrived out of the late-afternoon light, and he could see she was the right age and had a wide, clear face. She was wearing sunglasses, large and fashionably angled. He couldn’t see her eyes. She was scanning the vicinity. If she cast her gaze further left, she would see him. Or she would see a man sitting at a cafe table. He was not unchanged. Nor was he unlike his younger self. Stomach, OK, a little rounder. Hair still good, thick, and dark, attractive to women, he knew. The pallor from ten years in her country had disappeared. Bones, of course, were an indication. His were distinctive, slightly leonine, and would probably not begin to sink for another decade. She was beautiful, he could see that—more so, a woman now. The white dress sailed from her body as if she were a rigged ship. Rose-gold skin—so easily burned. When they’d been here before, she’d kept to the shade, struggled at midday. They had retreated back to the hotel often.

  Where have you been, he heard the friend ask. Laughter. An apology. Her voice was too low to make out the words. They conversed for a moment. Which one, the friend said. Hurry up, I really want to swim. They both turned and looked at the towels hung and stacked on tables outside the emporium. So many colors—not the best quality, but eye-catching. Her hand brushed over the sky, lavender, turquoise cottons. Should he go over and say hello? How would she feel about that? The last time he’d seen her, at the train station, the tears, the fight—he didn’t want to think of it.

  A shadow fell across the table, and someone loomed in front. Crumpled trousers, a dark patch along the shirt above the belt. Drinking coffee, I see, foreigner. Who is president of this country? Eymen was fishing in his pockets for some item, elbows flapping, thoroughly obscuring the view. Ah, still so hot, can you believe it. Must be eighty-five at least, old wolf! Where is the car key? I thought I put it. He leaned to the side to see round his partner, but Eymen was ample, planetary almost. Please get your ass out of the way, Arab. He put his hand on the solid hip, shoved Eymen to the side. Hey! What?r />
  She was gone, inside the han, or away into the square. He still hadn’t seen her properly. Eymen was sitting down now, scraping the feet of his chair noisily, complaining about the heat again, he couldn’t find parking, why was traffic so bad, there should be a congestion charge for people north of Izmir. Have you ordered my tea yet? He did not reply and Eymen held up his hand for the waiter. He looked toward the marina, the steep street that led to Derya beach. The fountain again. Nothing. She had vanished, like a figment. What’s the matter with you today, wolf? And what’s this? Eymen picked up the notebook from the table, flapped it. Don’t tell me, the master plan? Very carefully, very calmly, as if defusing a bomb or handling a snake, he reached over and removed the pad from his partner’s hand. It’s my letter of resignation, Arab. He slipped the notebook into his shirt pocket.

  The two women emerged from the arch of the han, carrying thin plastic bags along with their totes. It had been a quick transaction, no browsing, and probably carried out in English. He felt a little pinch of sadness. Had she forgotten? They began to walk in the direction of the beach platforms. She had her back to him and the sun flooded her hair, making it seem colorless, then copper, blonde, ash. Like tweed, he remembered Catherine once describing it. He heard the sound of a brush passing through the length of it, once, twice, an exquisite, gentle, tearing sound. How quickly the past could be restored.