By Blood We Live (45 page)

“What?”

He sat, smiling, both hands on the wheel, staring out of the windscreen. He looked bright with tiredness.

“What did you say?”

The headlights of another car came bumping towards us. The road was wide enough—just—for it to pass. A Land Rover with mirrored windows.

He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t looked at the Land Rover. I knew if I asked him he might not even have registered it, though it had gone by with only inches to spare. He was still busy with what looked like a kind of empty delight.

“Hey,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”

But he just put the car in gear and eased it forward until we were more or less level with where the old man had been standing. There was a narrow road off to the left. The old man had been pointing it out.

“Is this the way?” I said. The fracture in my chest swelled again. I felt
afraid, though I didn’t know of what. “Is this the way back?” The sky definitely wasn’t wholly dark anymore.

“I think it might be,” he said. “Yes.”

The road wound between shaggy, unidentifiable trees for a couple hundred metres, then narrowed into a sandy track not wide enough for the vehicle.

“This isn’t the way back,” I said. There was a searing distance and closeness between us.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

The smell of the ocean hit me as soon as he opened the door. Not just the smell. I had a sickening sense of its size and depth and darkness. Its weight. I thought of a black, rusty container big enough to hold all of it, how big that would be, how awful it would be to climb up and look over the edge into it. All the billions of fish in there, sharks, wrecks. The tiny fleck of Cloquet’s rotting body.

“This isn’t right,” I said. “This is crazy. Look at the sky.” I was full of frantic weakness, legs, wrists, hands. I’d thought the invisible coercive choreographer had drawn off. But it hadn’t.

“We need to turn around,” I said. “Right now.”

But he was already moving.

“Wait. Wait! Fuck.”

I went after him. He was following the track, which broke first into bits of knolly, long-grassed turf, then soft sand dunes that eventually flattened into the beach. It was like entering a vast empty amphitheatre. The water was dark in the twilight, though every time a wave broke on the shore its pale foam ruff morphed out of the gloom.

He took his shoes off. Smiled when his toes gripped the sand. “That’s good,” he said. “One forgets the goodness of these things.”

I looked out over the black water. It was lighter on the horizon.

“Let’s walk a little,” he said. His voice sounded small in the big space of the beach.

“Why are you doing this?” I said, though I thought I knew. Soft invisible weights slipped from me with every step. The lightness when they’d gone would be unbearable.
Unbearable.
There was a line in one of Jake’s journals:
The word “unbearable” makes a liar of you—unless it’s followed by suicide.

“I’ve been dreaming of this place,” he said, after we’d walked a little way. The sound of the waves was a steady, benevolent depletion. Every one subtracted something. Repeated, painful acts of mercy. “Being in this place with someone.”

The breeze blew his hair back a little. His dark eyes were big and bright.

“So have I,” I said, though saying it made my mouth feel defeated.

“I read somewhere that only the dead understand their dreams,” he said.

“Why did you say that about the old man? Why did you call him that?”

He shook his head, smiling again. Happy incredulity. At himself. At how he’d missed something so obvious. “ ‘My first thought was, he lied in every word,’ ” he recited:

“I know that,” I said. Another soft weight dropped from me. Another mouth-defeat. “It’s from ‘Childe Roland.’ I just read it, here at Olek’s.”

He nodded. Smiled again. Unsurprised. I looked east. The twilight was paling.

“ ‘Yet acquiescingly,’ ” he continued,

“But of course—”

His legs gave way again. I helped him up. I could feel the warmth of what had gone into me from him in my loins. I wondered if I was pregnant again. The thought hurt me with a stab of premature loss.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Please let’s go back.
Please.
”

“What I was going to say was: But of course it’s
not
a lie, is it? ‘The
workings of his lie’? Because the old man really does point the way. The road he shows really does lead to the Dark Tower.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“In the dream,” he said, “I always saw this twilight as just after sunset. Didn’t you?”

I didn’t want to answer. Every answer, everything I said or did would shed another of the soft weights. Out of disgust, I forced myself. “Yes,” I said.

“But that was the wrong twilight, wasn’t it? One forgets there are two. One forgets so many obvious things.”

Twenty paces on, the dunes and broken turf on our right gave way to dark rock. Cold came from it. Touched all the exposed parts of me from which the soft weights had gone. And there, of course, adding its own innocent portion to the dreary, deadening déjà vu, was the little rowboat.

He went to it and began pulling away the seaweed.

“You don’t have to do this,” I repeated. Saying it was perverse proof of its own falsehood.

He carried on methodically freeing the boat. “You’re not her,” he said. “Not literally. But you’re the call back to her. That was the part of her message I misunderstood. She said:
And you will come back to me.
That was the important part. The dead can’t come to us. We can only go to them.”

His calmness made me angry, suddenly. “This is fucking stupid,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. This is just … So you had a dream. So what? Dreams are … Fuck.”

“Dreams are prick-teasers
non pareil
,” he said. “They promise and promise but never put out. A friend told me that, once. He was right.”

“So don’t do this.”

“Listen,” he said. “Tell Justine …” But his voice faltered a little on her name. “Tell Justine she’ll find a copy of Browning’s
Collected Works
open face-down on the floor of the library at Las Rosas. Ask her to tell you what poem it’s open at.” He shook his head. Laughed again. Another belated realisation. “Ask Caleb what poem he was reading in the volume of Browning’s
Men and Women
on the plane.”

“That’s nothing,” I said. “That’s just what we put on random shit. That’s just
us.
”

“Tell her the house in Big Sur is for Mia and Caleb. With her. They’ll be good for each other. She needs a family. So do they.”

“Why are you
doing
this?”

He pushed the rowboat over onto its keel. The oars were strapped to the little seat. There was a fat, slimy rope tied to the bow. He looked at the eastern skyline. I couldn’t tell how long till the sun came up. But it couldn’t be much longer. Twenty minutes? Half an hour? We could get back to Olek’s in that time. I knew we could.

“Justine tried to keep me away from you,” he said, “because she thought getting close to you made me ill. Even when she left it was because deep down she knew I’d come after her.” He took a moment to absorb the comfort of this fact. It warmed him. A smile without tiredness. “Because she knows I love her. Thank God she knows that.” He looked at his hands, which were shaking. “But it wasn’t you. I was ill anyway.”

“Olek can fix you,” I said. “Yesterday you were fucking unconscious.”

He began unwinding the rope. “Vali made me promise her something, once,” he said. “She made me promise to live as long as I could. How strange that I’ve kept my promise! I never imagined I would. And now here you are, her message, to let me know she holds my oath fulfilled.”

It wasn’t easy for him to dislodge the boat. It took three attempts, and each visibly depleted him. I just stood there, watching, helpless.

“You know what my maker said to me before he died? He said: ‘I’ve seen this place in my dreams. It’s a relief to come to it.’ In my dream of this place I had the profound feeling of knowing that I knew something without knowing what it was. Now I know.”

“Please don’t go.”

He dropped the rope, came to me, took my hands in his. They were full of fluttering blood. “Talulla,” he said. “Such a pretty name. I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“You’re going because you think she’s waiting for you on the other side,” I said. “What if she isn’t? What if there’s nothing on the other side for you or anyone else? There
is
no other side.” But I thought of the way I’d known what Olek was going to say before he’d said it, the picture I’d had in my head, clear as an enamelled Station of the Cross, of the baby, the stone tablet, the mixed blood running through the hole. Down
through darkness that wasn’t earth or space, that had no relation to time at all. Remembering it infuriated me. Because it didn’t prove anything. Of course it didn’t prove anything. Except that our imagination had habits. Except that we were inclined towards things. Get a Jungian on the subject. Get a fucking
Structuralist.
God—
gods
—and fairy stories were nothing but disposition plus desire. The desire for the whole bloody mess to be more than a pointless accident, the desire for it to be
for
something.

“You’ve got nothing,” I said. “Just dreams and coincidences. Just something that makes it look like there’s a … Like there’s some pattern, as if life’s like a stupid fucking movie or a stupid fucking
book.
”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said. Then smiled, sadly. “I’ve reached the end of my psychology.”

I wasn’t going to help him with the boat. But he fell, halfway to the water’s edge. I suppose I must have looked ridiculous, crying, dragging a boat. Still, I went with him, into the surf up to our knees. In spite of everything the ocean’s raw fresh smell excited a part of me. The big sky and the deserted beach. I wondered if I would ever have had enough. The world, the things that happened. The people you got close to. The honest warmth of flesh and blood. Both kinds. I thought of how much I’d hurt Walker. I thought of how disgusting it was that Jake was gone. Cloquet, Trish, Fergus. Never coming back. The dead can’t come to us. We can only go to them. That’s what life is, after a while, I thought. Choosing not to go to the dead.

“This is wrong,” I said. “This is just stupid and wrong.” It felt stupid and wrong, too, the two of us standing in the wobbling water, the optimistic little boat, the faint line of light on the horizon saying the sun would rise, another day would come, things would keep happening, the fucking world would go on.

But he laughed and took my hands again. “All these years,” he said, then seemed unable to find the words. “Life drops terrible hints. We call it the Beguilement. When we drink …” He looked up. Hardly any stars still visible. “When we drink, we see so many of them, coincidences you’ll say, the connectedness of things. Humans see them, too. It’s our shared curse, that these things won’t leave us alone. Dreams aren’t much. It’s not dreams. It’s beauty. Metaphor. Love. Mainly love. Love’s the big
hint life can’t stop dropping, the biggest beguilement of all.” He looked out towards the burgeoning light. “I was going to say I’m tired of not knowing,” he said. “But that’s not right. It’s better than that. I’m ready to find out. That’s not such a bad thing, is it? Being ready to find out? Come on now, don’t cry, please don’t cry.”

But I
was
crying. Not only for him, but for myself, for the mess I’d made of everything, for all that I’d wasted and all that I’d lost. And of course, of
course
, because I
wasn’t
ready to find out, couldn’t imagine ever being.

“They say your life flashes before you when you die,” he said. “That’s going to be some flash. It’ll probably kill me.” He looked at me, smiling, daring me to laugh, and because there’s no end to the opposites we can make meet, the grotesqueries and farces we can find room for, I did, with a sort of anguish, find myself laughing.

“Give me a kiss,” he said. “One last one. For luck.”

I kissed him. Tried to make it last. But you can’t. It ends, sooner or later. You love, you lose. That’s the trade.

He got into the boat and dipped the oars. Lost his balance for a moment. Righted himself, laughing again. “It must be a hundred years since I’ve done this,” he said.

We looked at each other. Whatever it was that had gone into me from him tingled, fanned out in my blood.

“You should go now,” he said. “Please don’t stay.”

I didn’t go. I watched him pulling away, finding the rhythm with the oars. Ten strokes. Twenty. Thirty. I turned, sloshed back to the shore, my jeans and boots soaked, my eyes burning, my chest emptying. The last of the soft weights dropped from me. For a few moments I stood with my back to the water, looking down at the glimmering sand.

Then I turned.

He was much further out than I’d imagined he’d be by now. It had only seemed a matter of seconds, but the little boat was barely bigger than a matchbox.

It was hard to tell at this distance, but it looked as if he was standing up, facing the horizon. I thought, I never said goodbye. Just thinking of
the word, “goodbye,” imagining how it would have felt saying it, brought tears again. I wrapped my arms around myself.

And watched.

He had a few moments. Perhaps even a minute. Deep red and orange light, low feathery clouds in bloody, membranous flakes, water the colour of mercury, flecked with blue, pink, peach. Not pretty, but spectacular, a terrible indifferent statement of the scale of things out there, the giant heat involved, the vast, soulless mathematics that gave incidental rise to everything we knew here, all our murders and poems, our dreams and epiphanies, our boredom, our love.