Brainfire (32 page)

Rayner looked suitably impressed. The girl gazed at him and he had the distinct feeling she was, in a fashion, deriding him for his own obvious lack of extrasensory perception. Fox got up from the table and brought a bottle of elderberry wine from a cabinet. It's the whole trip around here, Rayner thought. The weird music, the vegetarian bit, the homemade wines, the voices from the ether. He sipped some of the wine, but it was bitter and vinegary.

Fox said, “You don't believe, do you?”

“Believe in what?”

“In other modes of perception?”

“I try to keep an open mind,” Rayner said.

“Ah. The skeptic. I was like you once. But you can't fight it.” Fox smiled, an odd rubbery expression, as if he had no full control of his lips. “Take the narrow view of reality, and what have you got? Is that a glass of wine in your hands?”

Perplexed, more than a little irritated, Rayner wondered about perpetual trees falling in forests and whether anybody could hear them fall. Sally's unanswerable questions.

Fox said, “It isn't a glass of wine. If you had another view, if you weren't such a
limited
man, Mr. Rayner, you would understand that you hold only the illusion of wine there. From the viewpoint of eternity, you're holding something that is already decaying and disintegrating—only you don't see it. Fixed, you think. Substantial. But no.”

Isobel, dear Isobel, Rayner thought, how did these people grab you? How did they take hold of you? He watched her now as she nodded her head up and down seriously. The man's gobbledygook enthralled her, you could see.

“My daughter's gifts,” Fox said, staring at Rayner as if he meant to blind him with his large eyes, “my daughter's gifts have taught me to open up my head.”

Let it all hang out, Rayner thought.

The child groaned, as if this praise of her father's annoyed her. What is she but some typical teen-ager? he wondered. A child tired of whatever prodigal talents had been ascribed to her? She got up from the table, scraping her chair, and went to the kitchen window, where she pulled back the curtain and looked out. From somewhere, perhaps from a pocket of his vest, Fox had produced a pack of ESP cards and was shuffling them quickly. He slid them down the table to Rayner, who stared at them, wondering what was expected of him.

“Go ahead,” Fox said. “Cut them. Shuffle them. Then take one off the top without letting Fiona see.”

By the window, the child moaned. “I don't think I'm up to this,” she said.

“Do it,” Fox said. “Just do it.”

Rayner cut the deck. He raised the top card: a star.

“Star,” the child said.

He raised the second card and looked at it. A square.

The girl was quiet a moment. “Square. Square, I think. Yeah.”

Fox, as if something had been confirmed to his great satisfaction, watched Rayner with the expression of a true believer turning a new disciple. The next card was a plus sign, a cross.

The girl said nothing.

“Well, Fiona?” Fox asked. “Well?”

The girl, her back to the room, didn't move.

Something all at once was different here, something—at a level Rayner couldn't absolutely comprehend—had changed. A mood, a certain ambience; he wasn't sure. He could feel the change as surely as a draft coming through an open door. He felt a pulse of a strange alarm within himself: it was as if, having sat down jokingly to tinker with a ouija board, he had received a message of utter malice. The girl turned around and stared at him.

“What is it, child?” Fox asked.

The girl was still staring at Rayner. He couldn't keep her eyes in focus, couldn't look at her, didn't want to see her expression; his hands trembled slightly on the deck. Come on, he thought. Control yourself. She just can't get it, that's all. She just can't see this one, that's all it is. A flaw, a failure, a breakdown. The girl had moved toward the table. Her mouth opened, as if she was about to speak, but she said nothing. Fox was standing up now, touching his daughter on the shoulder.

A difference, a change: something unraveling, coming undone. Rayner didn't want to hold the deck any longer. It felt hot in his hands. He wanted to drop it. A game, he thought. A game of cards.

“Can't you see it?” Fox asked.

The child shook her head.

“The next card,” Fox said. “Pass to the next card.”

“No,” the girl said. “No. Don't pass. Don't.”

“Pass,” Fox said, glaring at Rayner.

“No!” The girl was panicked suddenly. She came closer to Rayner. “I know what it is. I know what it is. Don't pass to the next one. I know.”

“Tell us,” Fox said.

“It's a frame of wood,” the girl said. “It's a frame of broken wood.”

3.

Koprow, dozing in the armchair by the dying fire in his room, was awakened by the woman touching him lightly on the shoulder, shaking him. For a moment he was uncertain of his surroundings. Katya was looking urgently at him.

He stirred in the chair, half rising. “Is something wrong?” he asked, wondering if perhaps she had caught him talking in his sleep, an embarrassing prospect altogether. He stared up blearily into her thin face.

“It's the old woman,” Katya said. “I think you should change your mind about the medication.”

“Why? Whatever for?”

The woman hesitated a moment. “Come and see for yourself.”

Koprow, irritated, rose. He shuffled after the woman and out into the corridor. His limbs were numb from the position of his sleep; needles and pins, slight aches. He saw the woman hurry ahead of him to the stairs. Climbing, trying not to pant, he reached the upper landing, where Katya was already at the door of the old Jewess's room, opening it so that a rectangle of light fell through the dark. He went in after her.

“I think she needs medication now,” Katya said.

“Do you? Do you indeed?” Koprow went closer to the bed.

She might, save for the way her head rolled from side to side, her mouth opening and closing silently, she might have been dead: the skin was white, beneath the eyes there were fleshy circles of dark purple—and sweat, everywhere the glossy covering of perspiration. Momentarily Koprow felt an unusual sense of panic: if she were to die, if they were to lose her now … He leaned closer to the old woman, seeing how the eyelids flickered, sometimes barely opening to reveal expanses of white flecked with blood—and he realized that she was not silent at all, but that in a voice that was a whisper she was uttering some kind of gibberish.

“What's she saying? What's she talking about?”

Katya shrugged. “I don't know.”

“Is it some kind of Hebrew nonsense?” Koprow asked. “A prayer for the dead, or the dying?”

“I think she's in terrible pain,” Katya said. “And withdrawal—the shock.”

“Yes, yes,” Koprow said impatiently. He stood upright, feeling coming back to his legs. “Very well. Give her her damned dose. Do it now.”

The woman broke the plastic seal of a new syringe and filled it from a small bottle, then shoved the needle into the old woman's arm. Koprow winced at the sight of the puncture. Did it have to be done so roughly? with such a lack of care and concern? with such an obvious look of triumph? The old woman continued to turn her head this way then that on the pillow. Watching, Koprow caught the unmistakable scent of excrement. He stepped away from the bed.

“And for God's sake, change her sheets,” he said.

“I'm not a nurse—”

“Change the sheets,” he said again. He hated it—that trifling defiance, the hard little light in the eye.

The woman pulled the surface blanket away. Beneath, the white sheet was stained with blood and excrement. She stared at him as though to say,
You'd have me do this
? He turned—he could look no longer—then went toward the door. When he had reached the corridor he felt he was gasping for air, choking, as if he had stepped into a vacuum.

4.

A sense of touching, of feeling: reaching across darkness to the single point of light. Like being inside a camera. If you concentrated on the light the pain would go away and everything would be well but the light was so small, such a tiny hole in space, just an absence of all the dark. Then the pain came back, waves, hot waves, a tide of lava running in every vein, in every muscle, every fiber; then you tried for the small hole again. Dear God. It was only a whisper anyhow and you couldn't really catch it because it was so weak so thin so faraway, this touching, this reaching

How can I help

You don't know. You can't help whoever you are because you don't know and you don't have the reach

Reach help me reach

Impossible

Help me
what do you want

Pain all the fires all the hideous infusions of blind-hot wires running through me
no you couldn't help me because you don't have the reach

The reach
?

It goes on through the mind
a picture repeats and repeats
you are too young to know
if the sweetness of youth dies and it dies at the end of a rope in a barn stinking of old hay and rotted manure
only if the sweetness goes will you know and understand
but you must close your mind to me

No

You must

Where are you? Who are you
?

There are no measurements for these distances
inches and yards and meters they don't matter
you're too young and you must kill this thing you must kill it inside you the way you would kill any disease do you understand me do you understand me the way you would any disease

You asked for help

no
there's no help
trapped

Trapped where? Trapped how
?

no
questions
answers wouldn't help you

Danger
?

danger
death
please
leave
leave
now
you don't want to be in this room with this pain
and know who I am

Don't make me leave

the reach fades

You're old, I can feel it

you don't feel anything
you dream this
you dream the wrong dreams for yourself

Who are

none of this happens don't you see

A friend I could

you can't be anything
if you listen it's going already
I know
listen closely and I know you can hear the sea

Please don't make me leave you

we don't have those choices you and I
none of this is what we choose
before it's too late you must kill it in yourself

Kill what
?

No
more
she
comes
with
the
needle
with the needle
the dreams are better when the pain is gone
and when you tell them
what you can do
what you are capable of doing
they'll make you kill and kill and go on killing

Killing who
?

names
names are nothing

Please
?

no more
nothing more
nothing more now

5.

Fox carried his daughter, saying she needed air, through the kitchen door and out to the lawn, carried her—out of breath, straining—to the willows that hung above the inlet of water. He laid her on the grass, gently stroking her hair with one hand, massaging her fingers with the other. In the light that reached through the open kitchen doorway Rayner watched: cold, a chill rising from the slow water that pierced his clothing, but colder still in ways he couldn't quite describe, in places he couldn't exactly name. He heard Isobel beside him. She stood with her arms folded, staring down the slope of grass to where the girl lay.

Fiona. Fiona. Everything is fine. Fine
.

The father's voice, filled with an almost hopeless concern, carried up from the water's edge. Rayner could hear the motion of willow leaves. They were like soft hands dangling in the quiet stream. What happened? he wondered. How would you describe what had happened? In the space of minutes, moments—how could you say? Isobel, shivering, moved nearer to him; he put his arm loosely round her shoulder.

Fiona. Fiona
.

A trance, Rayner thought. But that didn't do it. You would have to make that one work harder to carry the load. No, not a trance. Then what? I saw a child, he thought. A teenage girl. I saw her suddenly pause in the middle of her guessing game—
no, goddam, it wasn't a game
—I watched her fall to the floor and lie there motionless. And then what? Then what did I see? What did I hear?

Upward, through the branches of the willows, the night was starry and somehow complete. He saw the moon, faceless, a flat anonymous disk, drift. What did I hear? He shut his eyes.
Fiona. It's all right. Everything is all right
. Isobel was shivering still, huddled against him. A trance, he thought again. She was talking to somebody who wasn't in the room, talking in words he couldn't understand, in meters he hadn't heard before—a language that wasn't a language at all, but something else, something more basic, more primitive: as if you were hearing, he thought—amazed by his own sense of the ridiculous—the first forms of communication that had ever been uttered anywhere. A thing comes out of a swamp, rises out of the vapors, and speaks. But it was a language nevertheless because the
form
was there, the intonations of questions uttered in faint, breathless whispers. Questions.
Where the hell were the answers coming from
?

And then. Then what?

Open your eyes, child. Come on
.

He had heard only the questions, watched the fluttering motion of the eyelids, the grotesque stiffening of the child's body as she had lain on the floor, the palsied twisting of her hands and fingers and her limbs. She had been in pain, he had no doubt of that. Real? Imagined? Some distinction there; did it matter anymore?

The real. The fanciful. What did I really see?