Into That Darkness (22 page)

He thought the woman was staring at her bandaged arm but then he saw her eyes were closed.

You won't make sense of it, he went on. There isn't sense in it.

She waved a tired hand at him. You said there were three endings, she said.

Yes.

What was the third?

He shifted his hips on the bench, his bones creaking. It doesn't matter, he said. You should get to sleep.

Tell me.

He looked along the hill into the blackness. The third ending is no different from the first two, he said, but it elects cessation over conclusion. All things end. Nothing is ever finished.

I'm sure you're forgiven
, the geologist told his friend, begging him to let him know where to mail the letter.
Not just yet
, the creationist replied. And he took his friend's arm and told his friend to wait just one more day. There was one more thing he needed to add. They would finish it in the morning, he promised, and then they would send it. Of course, as is the way of things, the letter was already finished. For the creationist died that very night.

No, said the woman.

Yes. Is there some meaning in all of this? Some common thread to bind these three? The old man blew out his cheeks, growing tired. I think not. There's one irrefutable truth in our lives and everything else is doubtful. Everything. He removed the lid from his coffee and hurled the dregs into the grass with a kind of disgust. You just get old, he said. You don't think you are and then you are.

She said nothing and they were silent a long while.

At last she stirred. I'm sorry about your friend, she said softly.

Well.

If there's anything I can do.

There isn't anything.

I know it.

I keep looking for some good in it but there isn't any.

No.

He ran a begrimed thumb along the skin under his eyes.

Where will you sleep, Arthur? Out here?

I don't know that I will.

You should try.

I know.

Try to sleep.

Okay. I will.

The woman slid down to the grass and crunched around the truck and the old man heard the door open and close with a soft click. Then he leaned back. The blue stars in their great wheeling tracks brutal and perfect as clockwork. Glinting in their gauzy webs of light. Closing his own eyes to imagine some fixed eye on some icy otherworld. He stretched out, his hands interlocked at his stomach like an indigent and he felt the cold metal through his jacket and after a time he slept.

When he awoke the moon had risen and the world lay waxen and strange in its stark light. He could smell the wild grass among the trees and also the dust in the air and there was a darker smell also like pitch or tar rising from the pits below. He lay very still with an arm across his eyes. Finally he sat up and rubbed his unshaven face with his hands.

The wind had died. Out in the pit the low-slung tarps shivered in the light like the rippled surface of a sea and the weird crumpled heaps of the buildings loomed up behind. All of it below in a kind of crater as if the earth itself had opened. He thought of the woman's shattered arm. Along the far slope in the hooded moonlight passed what seemed a long line of refugees ascending out of that place and they shuffled with their heads low and shoulders dipping and though they trudged without break their numbers did not diminish. In the broken dark they seemed penitent and scourged and in the pooled light their strange figures twisted trembling and sad. He watched for a time but could make no sense of this vision and he sat with his big hands deep in his pockets and stamped his feet for the cold.

In the morning the low sky was dark with cloud blown in during the night. The old man ran his hands through his hair, grimacing. His cold jeans slucked to his legs heavy with dew. Above the trees a rent in the clouds pulsed smouldering and red as if some more fiery world lay just beyond this one and he sat looking at it and then he looked away.

I suppose it was already over before we left for Greece. It must have
been.

I guess she would have gone regardless. I guess so. It was the only
overseas journey we ever took. The sunlight in the Mediterranean was
what struck me first. It was a different kind of seeing, it was beaten flat
and very white and it seemed to seek out the edges in things. It was a distinguishing
kind of light. I expected Callie to be drawn to the statues.
The ancient frieze in its eaten relief around the Parthenon, the votives
with their flat lifeless eyes. But it was the general decay that seemed to
hold her. I wonder now what she was seeing. The famous pieces she completed
after we returned, in that year before her death, were filled
with a kind of ruin. A decay. I heard a feminist critic wrote once that
this reflected her despair at our marriage. Maybe that was a part of it.
But her name was Callie Andersson before we married and I always
thought of her like that. Never as a Mrs Lear. I don't know. I still do
things I don't understand the reasons for. Art is truthful when it does
that to you. I don't know if I thought some of this would have settled
down by now. That I'd have known myself a little better. I can say that
after sixty-eight years the heart is still a mystery and when I say that I
don't just mean my own.

I remember wandering through the overturned stones, the rubble,
on the island of Delos. The pale light felt so clear it blinded us. The heat
was terrible, there wasn't any shade. I wondered at the time at the silences.
There was nobody around. This was before the days of the big tourist
buses, the big ferries. I think now of the ruined houses and their atriums
opening up onto the blue sky, the terrible pink and white dust in our
clothes, the hopeless silence, and wonder if the Greek idea of the afterlife
was anything like that. Sun-drenched and quiet and empty. There were
dozens of cats like living shadows weaving in and around the stones. All
of that turned something in her, I think. Callie used to say about her
work that there was always a point where the gesture exhausted itself.
But that you couldn't see it until you were on the other side of it.

The other side of it. I can't say that now without feeling an obscure
anger. Our last morning in Greece we spent walking through the narrow
quarters under the Acropolis. The light was dazzling. The air was
muggy and warm and old and I remember it felt strange breathing air
that had been breathed for three thousand years. There was an age to
everything man had made there. So old it might have been inhuman. I
guess that's truer than I mean it. You live long enough, you stop resembling
the living.

In the shuttered doorway of a small café Callie put a hand to the
lines at my eyes and told me I was getting old. I was just thirty. It's a
kind of sadness, remembering. Some things you want to forget. The sun
was blurred and painful in the sky behind her. When I closed my eyes I
could see the perfect negative of her form burned into my eyelids. I can
still see it.

QUESTIONING THE DEAD

Astonishment. That was what she felt. Seeing the old man tilt his face down towards her son, murmur some kindness, seeing her son grin back. Astonishment and a kind of gratitude drenched golden in that wash of golden light. She watched his yellow eyelids, his sunken cheeks, the play of early shadow in his stubble like steel wool as he tied off some bundle in the bed of the truck, banged the tailgate shut. He clapped his hands across his dusty trousers. Mason went around to the cab, swung himself up and in. The old man kneeled to inspect the rear tire.

Why are you doing this? she asked after a moment.

He peered up at her in surprise. Doing what?

Watching out for us.

He coughed a wet thorny smoker's cough into his fist.

Isn't there anyone looking for you? she said. Anyone you need to find?

I suppose there must be, he said. There's always someone.

When she climbed up into the truck she could see leaves still on the chestnut trees along the street and leaves scurling in the ditches also. The old man got in after her. The windshield was rimed with dust and he flicked on the wipers over the dry glass but they dragged raggedly to no effect. Then the motor wheezed, cuttered in, roared to life.

At the hospital overpass he let the engine idle and leaned low over the wheel and told her he thought her daughter had probably gone home. If you want to know what I think, he said. His eyes scanned the bad road ahead.

Kat won't be there, she said firmly.

But we should check there first.

No.

The old man peered across at her.

We'll start at her school, she said. If she's not there, then we'll see.

Your house is closer.

Arthur.

It just makes sense.

Arthur.

What.

Take us to her school.

His elbow bumped the keys where they swung from the ignition and the sharp metallic crunch was startling. You're as stubborn as Mason, he muttered.

I'm not stubborn.

The old man frowned. Not compared to your mother you aren't.

He punched the truck into gear.

They turned south, then south again, over asphalt burning off white in the rising sun. Past storefronts shuttered dark. The old man gripped the steering wheel in two hands sitting very erect in his seat. Despite the hour there were many on that road and the driving was slow in the cleared lanes. Over a traffic divider she saw the roadbed crested in a frozen comber of pitch and tar. She lifted her eyes to the side mirror. Crows were circling some kill on the highway behind them and she looked to see if her son had seen them but he had not.

She thought Kat might be anywhere. She did not believe she would find her at her school but did not know where else to begin. She stared at her son's sticky unwashed hair and wondered where her daughter must have slept last night. If she was cold. If she had gone back to the house. Mason was slouched in the seat between her and the old man with his safety belt loose around his waist and his eyes fixed on the lanes ahead.

Within the hour they had left the highway. A few survivors swaggered weirdly off before them into the ruins. After a time they reached a shopping mall and then turning west they saw the mall storefronts on that side shattered and a slab of the roof fallen in. Its parking lot filled with chunks of concrete, shards of glass long as a man's legs. Some cars were crushed. Fire crews stood in the rubble smeared black with ash. The old man drove on. Down roads labyrinthine and thin and some of them impassable with bricks, fallen telephone poles, abandoned cars. The dormer windows of many old houses had crumpled or sheared off and swaths of cloudy plastic sheeting had been nailed across the holes and as they passed Anna Mercia thought she could see figures moving greyly within like blurred phantoms.

On the radio a seismologist and a professor from the university were being interviewed.

Our instruments indicate a series of shallow crustal quakes, the seismologist was saying.

Crustal quakes?

Yes. Ruptures in the earth's crust that occur very near the surface. Usually on minor fault lines. Because of their epicentres— Epicentres?

The seismologist cleared his throat. The precise places in the earth's crust at which earthquakes occur.

Sort of the cradle of the quake, the professor interjected. Where it's born.

I see, said the interviewer.

Our instruments have indicated a kind of zipper effect, in which a small crustal quake originating outside Nanaimo appears to have triggered a secondary quake, and this a third, and so on, rippling the earth throughout the region. So what should have been damaging over a small area was actually devastating over a much broader region.

And where were these epicentres located?

Well, yes, that's the question. Many struck directly underneath the major metropolitan areas. Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle—

And that accounts for the destruction?

Excuse me—

Yes, we think so. We've never seen anything like it. Our instruments are very precise.

Professor Michaels, you were going to say something?

Thank you, yes. Our instruments are also very clear but they suggest nothing of the sort.

What do you mean?

What we've experienced is what we call a megathrust subduction quake—

The Big One—

Mm. And all of our data is in perfect agreement on this point.

The seismologist again cleared his throat. We think otherwise.

Gentlemen—

This is absurd, the professor said angrily. Nobody has ever heard of such a thing as a zipper effect.

You just mean
you
haven't heard of it. Despite all of Professor Michaels's confidence, the truth is we don't really understand how the earth's crust works. I mean in any detail. Or even how earthquakes happen. Let alone why.

Are you suggesting there might be even more explanations? the interviewer asked.

Yes.

No. We know what we know.

Which doesn't sound like much at all, the old man muttered. He leaned forward and switched the station. Is there nothing else, for god's sake?

There, she said. Wait. Go back.

A recording of emergency shelters and routes of travel was being repeated and then the announcer came on the air. He said many roads were open and that although rescue operations continued the destruction was now well under control. He said the earthquake was estimated to have registered at 8.1 but the damage was far less than previously feared. Nor would the death toll be so high as dreaded. He urged citizens not to panic and he explained that the army had been called in to keep the peace and that public safety would be ensured.