Awake in the Night Land (43 page)

I put my hands on her slim shoulders and pulled her upright. “Anything you say, Mrs. Powell.”

Her helmet was in her hand (she had doffed it during the kiss) and now she raised it as if to don it again, but then stepped into the tent, mopped her brow with the scarf, and dropped the helmet on the cot. “Is too hot in here, Mr. Powell, nie? If you are better feeling, put on the trousers, and let us find a cool spot. You can teach me how to wrestle, like you promise back in Marrakesh.” She favored me with her little impish twinkle, and took the pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging from a tent peg. Casually she tossed the pack to me, and sat herself on the edge of the cot, her small hands gripping the wooden slat to either side, her booted legs crossed, her shoulders slightly shrugged, her head held in a relaxed poise. Her eyes were half lidded as she watched me, and a little sensuous smile crept into her lips.

I drew out two cigarettes, put them both in my mouth, lit them with a safety match, then plucked one from my lips and offered it to her.

She rose languidly, swayed over to me, paused to examine me a moment, and, with the slightest curtsey (for Lisa is a tall woman) she bowed her head a bit, taking the cigarette from between my fingers with her lips without touching it with her hands.

Now she leaned back, drawing thoughtfully, and she blew smoke toward the tent roof. She stood with one hip cocked, her arm half-folded, cigarette dangling from slim fingers, her head tilted to one side. “I think, to be married to you, Meister Powell, I am going to be liking this verr-rr-ry much, yes? Oh, yes.” And she could not hide her smile.

I said, “This is a dream.”

Her smile widened. “Oh, a dream it is, my love, yes.” She tossed back her head and shrugged. “Every bride, is she as happy as I am? I do not believe it. The world could not stay together, if there was so much happiness, so much, in the world. It would burst into pieces!”

“No, I mean this is really a dream. It is not happening. It is taken from life, but it is not life. I was in this tent before, but it was when we first met….I fell ill after drinking bad water. Your father was the nearest white man, and my guides brought me to him. Everyone had heard about the beautiful blonde valkyrie, his daughter, he had brought back with him from Pottsdam, but I had yet to set eyes on you.

“While I was ill, I had strange dreams then, that I was trapped on a ship circling the last of all suns, while brooding faces with staring eyes, or faceless things in hoods, all waited for me to let them and their hellish crew back into the universe again.

“I was delirious for a long, long time.

“You were my nurse. You brought me back from the brink of death. And so I met you.

“You did not walk in on me naked when we first met: and that did happen during our honeymoon. I did not even know I was in love, at first. You were just my friend’s daughter, a woman who liked the wild, a woman who knew how to ride and hunt and shoot and drink whisky and smoke tobacco.

“For so many weeks, we were just friends, you and I, friends like man-friends, if you know what I mean, like you were just one of the boys. We told each other everything, including the kind of things a man doesn’t normally tell a woman.

“Mother was wife-hunting for me, when I was back in the states. I asked you to pretend to be my fiancée when I went to visit home, to get Mom off my back. The joke turned real before I knew it. It took me quite a while to smarten up, get on my knee, and give you a ring.”

She smiled at that.

She said “A long time, yes, too long. But I knew I had you snared when you agreed to take me to see your mama.”

I said with surprise. “I never knew that! You did that on purpose?”

She chuckled warmly. “Do not underestimate the superior mind.”

“But it was just a joke I was playing on my Mother.”

“To you. Women do not joke about such things,” she said primly.

“Oh, come now. It was my idea to…”

“Ta-ra-ra.” She snapped her fingers. “I pick to marry you, so it is done, but I am patient, as the huntress is patient, for you to come to your senses, and ask.”

I said slowly: “I never knew that when I was alive. That means this scene, this dream, cannot be just from my memory.”

I gestured to the right and left. “This is from when we first met. But your little speech about seeing me naked, my hairy legs, that was when you surprised me in the binnacle. We were aboard my cousin’s schooner for our honeymoon, touring the Aegean, seeing the Greek Islands. Strange. The monsters, well, they somehow must have confused or combined elements from the two happiest periods in my life. But it never happened this way, not while I was alive.”

“What—what do you mean?”

“I am dead, my dear. I thought you were pregnant when I marched off to war, because you were so moody. I actually had your letter in my hand, and had lit a match to read it, when a sniper saw my light and shot me. Took me about an hour to bleed to death. Stupid of me. I won’t do that again. Never did find out what was in that letter. I hope it was good news.”

She raised an eyebrow at that, and puffed a nervous little puff. “Ah! What is this you say? Never mind it! Listen: Little ones; how many children do you think we will haff? I am strong; you have good bones. How many?”

I said, “Seven. Four sons, three girls.”

She smiled at that, and her eyes danced. “Seven? This is not bad. No so many as Mama, but—“ she shrugged. “I am the modern woman now, yes? American.”

“Two of the boys will grow up strong and tall; one of them dies in the crib. The girls will be as beautiful as their mother. We will lose our sons in the war.” I heaved a sigh. “That is not all you will lose to war. Our eldest boy will be called Frederick, after your grandfather. When he is fourteen, he will be the man of the house, and your sons will comfort you, once I am… gone… you will still be young, with children between six and sixteen, and your folks will urge you to remarry. Long you will live, my love, long enough to see a man step onto the Moon.”

Her eyes narrowed, and the gleaming love-joy in her eyes was muted. Another puff of the cigarette: this one rapid, nervous. “This joke you are making, I do not like it. Die in crib? Gott! That you should say such a thing! War? What war?”

“Two wars. Germany will rearm. Pacifists will weaken the will of the West to resist, and England will be slow to cry foul. A terrible war. A war fought with scientific weapons. Flying machines. Poison gas. Rapid-firing guns; cannon with rifled barrels. There will be an armistice for twenty-one years, and then the Germans will attack again, and the Japanese will help them. There will be Ironclads and land ironclads. Rockets. Planes made of steel. A wireless method for detecting ships at sea. Bombs that turn whole cities into ash.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Lay down. You have been sick. You must wake up from this.” I sat on the bed and she passed me the hip flask. “Drink! You will feel better.”

It burned my throat, but turned into a pleasant warmth in my chest and belly. I said, “I have stepped outside of time, and the devils want to use me to recreate all the misery in the universe. If I let them. I am the last life-line, the last thread, stretching between—I don’t know what to call it—heaven and hell, I guess. The devils want to use me to call back the things I love. You. Your family through you, and mine through me, I suppose. You could get all the generations of man back to the beginning, that way, I suppose, because no one was never loved by no one: every baby had a mother some time. And–”

She said sharply, “Let us hear no more of this talk! You, you make yourself sick again, you are, yes?” Angrily she threw down the cigarette butt and stamped it under her toe.

So many things about her are so perfect. The line of her thigh when she lifted her leg to step, the black and shining gleam on the toe of her boot. Such a little foot, so pretty. The flash in her eye, blue as summer skies, when she tossed back her head and blew from her red lips upwards, to dislodge some fine strand that had escaped her tight coif to tickle her nose. Everything she did was comical, and sweet, and solemn, and dainty, and fierce, and, oh, so very feminine.

I said, “This is a dream. All the details are wrong. Look.” I plucked the dog hair off my shirt. “I did not get Pepper until four years after we were married. How can his hair be on my shirt? This is the camp where I first met you, but you are talking and acting as you did on our wedding night, which we spent, if you recall, on my cousin's schooner, sailing the Aegean.”

I looked back and forth. “All the details are right. Little things. My tiger rug. But I never would have used it for a ground cloth. And the amber beads my taxidermist used for the eyes: I bought them in the queer little market in Cairo. I have not been to Cairo yet. But I loved that rug, and it did feature prominently on my honeymoon.”

She looked at the dog hair, and at the rug, a vertical crease of annoyance between her pale eyebrows. Then she giggled at the rug, and smiled her wicked little smile, hiding it unsuccessfully behind her fingers.

I said sadly, “Naughty girl, thinking about the honeymoon uses of a tiger-skin rug at a time like this. And, yes, that is why it becomes one of my favorite rugs.”

“Very well!” she said, growing sober, and she put on her face what I like to call ‘her Prussian face’, which she would use in years to come when she was trying to explain to our children, why it was illogical to cry, or why it was important to stand up to schoolyard bullies, even when very afraid.

“Let us be scientific about this, yes? You say this is a dream. What dream?”

“It is the moment of time between the destruction of the old universe, and the beginning of the new one. It may be too late already, but something must be happening now, right now, to set things so that the new universe is created as one They also own.”

“So, then,” she shrugged, “You wake up, new universe starts, all is happy, yes? We go back to the honeymoon. I want to start on the seven little ones. Will be a lot of work.”

How could I help but smile? It brought tears to my eyes, to see her again. But it was strange to see her so young! So thin! I had to hide my eyes in my hand, so that she would not see my tears.

“You are in pain? I will get mine father.”

“Wait,” I said. “Let us be scientific about this. The devils—I don’t know what to call them. They are not from inside the universe—want to use me, want to use my love for you, to do what? Kitimil would know. Something bad. Mr. Bliss spoke of orchestrating the moment of creation, running it like it was an adding machine to sum up to what he wanted. Mr. Threshold said we could use his art, the dimensional rotation, to move ideas from the realm of memory into the material realm, folding something along the time-axis back into three dimensional space, fleshed from dreams. But he said we needed to use the ship’s engines to do it. And he said. What is the word? The enemy was ‘entangled’ with them. As if it were tainted or poisoned.”

She started to move away. “Father will help you…”

I held up the hair from my coat again. “Whose dog is this?”

She said. “Pepper. He leaves the hair over everything. You know that.”

“Where is Pepper now?”

“With your mother, at her house, back in Nantucket.”

“Across the Ocean. Then how can his hair be here? How can I do—this?”

Since imagination, like everything else, was part of the indistinct totality, I needed do no more than imagine the thousand-sided nine-dimensional hypersolid, anchored it in the points that Abraxander’s people had prepared to receive it, and the imaginary object would move the ideal object, which affected the time-versions of the object. And time, after all, was merely one aspect of space. A slight pressure was all that was needed to move from the fourth to the third dimension. A link led from the hair, along the time-axis, to the source of the hair. And of course I love my dog. So, I squinted, and–

There came a bark echoing in the distance, faint as a dream, like the wind. Then paws were rustling through the grass of the plains. Then, loud, sloppy, solid, and needing a flea bath, Pepper bounded into the tent.

I petted him and made much ado over him while Lisa, showing great aplomb, helped herself to a slug from the hip flask. She coughed and sneezed only a little.

She said, “Enough. Proof is proof. I believe.”

“Then help me?”

“How? This means I am not real, either, you know.”

I blinked at that. “I – I suppose. Are you an image in my mind, or—a ghost? A hope?”

She shook her head brusquely, her Prussian look back on her finely sculpted features. “An image of something to come. A temptation. No matter. I will help. What am I to do, eh?”

“You must help me to commit suicide.” I passed my left hand over my right forearm. Again, I saw the multi-dimensional geometric shape in my minds eye. Again, I turned it. Ydmos was myself, reincarnated into the future. Surely no man has ever lived, who does not love himself, with some part of his heart, in some way.

When I drew my hand back, I saw the raised red spot on my forearm where the capsule was embedded. The capsule is made so that the venom is released both into the mouth, and into the big veins near the elbow, when the traveler despairs of ever returning to the Last Redoubt as a human, and bites it.

She put her little hand over the reddish mark on my arm. “No,” she said. “That is madness, cowardice.”

I said, “Not cowardice. Not when done for reasons such as these. The Romans often slew themselves when…”

She just gave a snort of contempt. “Romans, eh? Italians, but old, that is all.”

“They were brave and great men: Trajan; Cato; Aeneas; Seneca…”

“The pagan, he martyrs himself to serve his own glory, no? And on the inside, he worships himself. Just himself, nothing else. Very small thing, a man; not a good thing to worship, I think.”

“Japanese Samurai, when his honor has been…”

She just rolled her eyes at that. “Honor! Another word for man who talks big, too scared to back down when people are watching. Universe is dead, you say. No one watching now.”