Burning Down George Orwell's House (27 page)

“Pack your raincoat and a blanket so we can sit without being eaten alive.”

Another unidentifiable dead animal lay prostrate on the steps. It was enormous—the size of a deer. They stepped over it. The sky was bright and the air sharp in his lungs. A bank of clouds in the distance promised a shower. The two of them walked westward or maybe northwestward at half their usual pace in deference to his wound. It felt more like a leisurely stroll than their typical forced march. The clouds moved in and an advance party of raindrops persuaded them to put their coats on and quicken the pace. It fell in sheets by the time they got to the cliff that overlooked the water and the island of Colonsay. “We never get to see the sunset from here,” Molly said with some disappointment. The storm sat swollen in the sky between them and the sun. “Mind you, I have another idea. Follow me,” she yelled over the sound of the rain and the surf.

Molly found a switchbacking path that led down the cliff and to the beach below. The descent was treacherous with mud and slick rocks. She moved as gracefully as a mountain
lion and waited for him at the bottom, then took his hand and led him on farther. A lamb had spilled from the cliff and lay mangled on the ground, where it fed a murder undaunted by their presence. A crow popped out one of the animal's white eyes and flew off pursued by his friends.

“Here we are,” Molly said. She pointed to the opening of a cave and ran inside. He shuffled after her. The cave smelled of rain and freshly mown hay. Spray-painted graffiti covered the walls and the small fire pit contained some charred beer cans. Molly pulled the blanket from his pack and spread it on the ground at the opening, just beyond the range of the dripping water. He sat with some difficulty. Molly curled up next to him for warmth and pulled one end of the blanket over the two of them.

Even with the ache in his side, Ray felt satisfied now: neither sad to leave Jura nor eager to return to Illinois. He enjoyed the quiet moment in Molly's company and looked forward with equal parts anticipation and dread to whatever his life would present him with next. “It has occurred to me,” he said, “that I no longer have an email address or even a phone number, but once I get settled I'll send you my contact info. I can look around for apartments, unless you want to live in the campus housing, which I don't recommend. You're going to love Chicago. I mean, it'll be a little overwhelming at first, but you'll—”

“I'm not going.”

“—find that. What?”

“Don't be mad.”

“What do you mean you're not going?”

“I've decided to stay on Jura.”

“Because of your father? You can't listen to him! You need to decide for yourself.”

“Aye, he was against it, but this is my decision and mine only.”

“What are you going to do? Spend the rest of your life here?” He didn't like the tone of his voice but didn't know how to modulate it without sounding like even more of an asshole.

“Maybe I will, mind you. This is my home after all. I want to be a painter … no, I'm already a painter. No fancy university can make me get better at my art the way the sunlight and the sounds and the Paps will. I appreciate everything, Ray, I really do! But I belong here, at least for now.”

Ray felt like he had been shot all over again. Pitcairn had brainwashed this poor girl. There was no other explanation. The scholarship had cost him a fortune in the divorce settlement. Didn't she understand the opportunity she was throwing away? “Don't you understand the opportunity you're throwing away?”

“I think I do. I'll always be grateful to you, but there's an opportunity here too.” The rain formed a wall in the mouth of the cave, but it appeared to be letting up. “To be honest, I'm a bit tired of every man I know telling me what I should be doing with my life.”

He closed his eyes and inhaled the musk of the cave and the sweat of Molly's hair. Here he was, even further off the grid than ever before and outside of time, returned for a moment to a state of bucolic perfection. The rain slowed to a steady drip. Molly exhaled a wheezy snore. He slid her hair off her face and tucked the blanket under her chin. “I'm sorry,” he said. “You're absolutely right.”

It was dark when they awoke. Neither of them had moved. “Oh hell,” she said. “I need to get home. My dad's going to kill me.”

“You and me both.”

Ray stood and the soreness in his back and neck obscured the pain in his side. He helped Molly up. She kept the blanket wrapped around herself.

“I'll come visit you in Chicago,” she said.

“I'd like that. I'll need to find a place to live first, though. Speaking of which, my lease of Barnhill isn't up for a few more months. If you have any more trouble at home you're welcome to stay there.”

“What about the people from London?”

“If they offer you enough money for the place, take it.”

“I may just do that, thank you. It looks like I need some new art supplies.”

“Yeah, about that.”

Back at Barnhill, he had removed her self-portrait from the bedroom wall and, without asking, rolled it up and packed it with his things to bring to Chicago. It remained
unfinished—she never got around to painting her hands or feet.

“I would've given it to you if you'd asked, you know. I do want you to have it.”

“Thank you—that means a lot to me. You can finish painting it when you come visit.”

“It is finished, Ray, or at least as finished as I want it to be. Portraits are unlucky here. They say that the woman who gets her portrait painted will never enjoy a day of health ever again.”

“Do you believe that?”

“It doesn't matter what I believe. I'm glad that at least my image, if nothing else, will get off of Jura. Now I really have to get home. You can find your own way back. Leave my bike in the garage. I'll get it another time. Look!”

A falling star dripped into view, a hunk of rock that had come too close and got sucked into the earth's atmosphere to die a fiery death. They watched it burn with its own innate sense of purpose, but it didn't flicker out. It kept moving, steadily, perhaps in too straight of a line.

“They're watching us,” Molly said.

“Who?”

“That's a satellite.”

She was right—the flight path was too perfect to be natural. Only the manmade achieved such pristine linearity. Ray's precise location at that moment, and at every other moment of his gleefully inconsequential life, could be found and plotted
on some celestial map of the cosmos. That had always been true. There had only been the grid the entire time.

“I need to go,” he told her. “Goodbye, Molly.”

She hugged him and headed in the opposite direction, back to her father.

The next day, he awoke with the dawn and set out for a final errand. All of his affairs were in order except for one thing. Wind stirred in the trees. The sheep
bah bah
-ed at him with contentment, their bells tickling his ears. He smiled into the morning sunlight, and it smiled back at him. His new boots made all the difference in the world, and he regretted not buying them sooner. They were sure to keep his feet dry during even Chicago's slushiest winter days. He didn't look forward to those, but he also did. Some wool socks would be essential. Maybe he could score some from a local spinster before he left.

Smoke rose from Miriam's chimney, so he knocked. “Miriam?” he called. No answer. He knocked again. “Miriam, it's Ray.” Her dog growled at him from her new prison of barbed wire. It looked like she had grown even fatter. A curtain fluttered open at the next house over, where Mr. Harris's truck was parked. Ray understood his desire to be left alone and had once shared it, but he gave Mr. Harris a regal wave all the same and the curtains shot closed with grumpy finality. Some people really did want to be by themselves.

Miriam opened the door a crack and blocked Ray's view of
the interior. Her face was covered in sweat, her hair matted to her forehead. “Hello, Ray, this is quite a surprise.”

“Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“No, I'm just dismembering some children so they'll fit into my cauldron.”

“I'd be glad to help.”

“With all this proper nourishment these days, these vitamins and whatnot, their little bones aren't as quite brittle as they used to be.” She smiled and wiped at her forehead with a paper napkin. A loud scraping noise came from the direction of the kitchen. “If I might have a moment to straighten up I would be glad to offer you a scone.”

“No, no, that's not necessary—thank you. I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Aye, I understand you're taking your leave, and I hope you didn't find we Diurachs too unaccommodating.”

“Well I did get shot and thrown into a whirlpool.”

“Aye, I can see how that might be frustrating. Speaking of which, before you go, do stop at the strand facing the Corryvreckan.”

“I know it all too well. In fact, I'm on my way there now.”

“Good, good. Some people will tell you that if you take a stone from that particular strand and bring it home with you, it means that you will come back to Jura one day.”

“I'll do that. Thank you, Miriam.”

“God bless you, Ray,” she said and shut the door. She appeared to be in some hurry.

“Bye,” he said and there was so much more he wanted to say. He continued on to the island's northern tip, where he had a date with a whirlpool.

On days like this one, even with the lingering discomfort, out in the sun on the planet's last unspoiled corner, the amount left to learn felt more like a privilege than a chore. Jura still contained so many things beyond his experience or understanding—but so did Chicago.

The boat Pitcairn had commandeered still bobbed next to the creaking dock. Ray went down to the shore and chose a flat, grey stone to bring home then sat at the end of the pier with his feet dangling over the water. The Corryvreckan gurgled her farewells in the distance.

He pulled the first edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
from his pocket and tore out the first page, crumpled it up, and tossed it like a basketball free throw into the water. He had done the same thing in Chicago with his cell phone. It felt even better this time. Perhaps there was a trend in his behavior. The paper sat for a moment on the surface as if surprised to find itself getting wet, then caught a prosperous current and moved slowly away from the shore. With calm and joyous deliberation, Ray ripped all the other pages out, one after the other, for what had to be an hour or maybe two or three. He watched each page of the appendix float on the surface and drift, ever so slowly, in single file, toward the whirlpool: a fleet of rudderless paper boats carrying the sum of everything he had learned and wished to forget.

T
HE BELLS TIED TO
the doorknob jingled, and Bud walked in. It had only been a matter of time. Ray muted the TV on the wall behind the counter. The White Sox were playing the Tigers. The game had gone on for hours. The Sox had been his father's favorite team and Ray was praying for them to win. “Hello, Bud,” he said.

“The fuck are you doing, Ray?”

“What does it look like? I'm the proud owner of a drycleaning business. How did you find me?”

“I knew you were back in town when that check cleared. Then I saw your ads on TV Fifty thousand dollars, Ray.”

“Yeah, thanks for that. It was the only way I could get the mortgage on this place. Do you like what I've done with it?”

He hadn't changed all that much other than upgrading the television and having new signs and plastic sacks made. A photo of a young Mrs. Kletzski hung next to the board listing all the prices. The bells tied to the door were new—they had been liberated from the necks of Barnhill's ovine population.

“That check was an advance against your salary at Ethos. It wasn't your money yet.”

“That's strange. It had my name on it. I assumed it was a bonus for the millions of dollars Logos made from my Oil Hogg campaign.”

“You knew perfectly well what that money was for.”

“I wasn't trying to steal your money. You're now a twenty-five percent owner of Welter's Warsh House. I have the
paperwork around here somewhere. Our accountant says we may not see a profit for five or ten years. Dry cleaning just isn't as popular as it once was. People are apparently content these days to throw away their clothes when they get dirty. I'm bringing in just enough business to pay the bills and get those TV spots made. Catchy, aren't they? The apartment upstairs is mine, though. I'll show you around sometime.”

“I don't care about the money, Ray. My problem is with friends quitting on me. You left me hanging.”

“I left you hanging? Tell me this—did you fuck Flora?”

“Is that what this is about? It wasn't for a lack of trying. She just wasn't interested.”

“Hard to believe.”

“She said to tell you that she plans to stay in South America more or less forever, but if something changes she'll look you up. You're right, though, that I would not have thought twice about selling you down the river just for the chance to sniff her panties.”

“There are plenty here in the back if that's what you're into.”

“Dry cleaning? You can't even keep your own clothes clean.”

“It's tough to explain, but this is exactly what I want. Real, honest work. These clothes are either clean or they're dirty. There's no middle ground, no ambiguity.”

“The fuck happened to you over there?”

“Among other things, I got shot.”

“Did you deserve it?”

“No! I don't know. Maybe.”

“What the fuck, Ray?”

“I need to finish up here. Come back at seven when I close, and we'll talk then. I have a bottle of scotch I'd like you to try.”