Lightfall (9 page)

Iris scarcely raised an eyebrow. “
He
looks harmless enough,” she said dryly, doing all she could to show she had no fear. It had become a kind of contest. There was something else as well, of course: she saw how Polly shrank from her. It almost would have been hate, except it was so small. As if there was something Iris had that she felt belonged to her.

“Women like you,” said Polly, grim and caustic. “You're his type.”

But Iris had lost all notion of the men she'd had, or what they ever saw in her. Even Tim had vanished by the time she reached the Coast. She could have been celibate, frankly, for all the past she could still own up to. More to the point—stare though she did at Michael's ancient face—she didn't feel the slightest edge of chemistry. Clearly, he was not
her
type.

Yet she saw what a mortal blow she'd struck, however inadvertently. The pain that riddled Polly's voice was palpable. The road had forked irrevocably, for the two of them at least. They were doomed to be bitter strangers now, because Iris wanted a man.

Except it was more than that. Iris tried to focus on the page, piecing out a hastily written passage where Pitt's men skinned a hundred seals in a morning. A sudden flood of agonized desire swept her up. It was the
sex
she wanted, more than a man. The way she would have wanted air if she'd woken up trapped in a coffin. The whole project of Polly's room, the lonely urge to order, set her teeth on edge. Pitt's Landing had no carnal life. It was as if they'd found a way to be bodiless, barren as the rocks below. Their nerves were all short-circuited.

Here, thought Iris, the ghosts were physical. Reality itself was haunted ground. It touched her with a sudden pang of hope, that maybe she could equalize the horror after all. She was earthbound. She'd retreated to her body as the only thing they'd left her with. Perhaps there was a darkness even they could not endure.

“Who do
you
do it with?” she asked, so cool she could have threaded a needle. “Just yourself? Or have you got somebody regular?” She didn't mind a bit that she came off smug as an adolescent. Right now she was spoiling for a fight. They all knew more than she did. Manners were getting her nowhere.

“I think you better get out of here,” said Polly, stiff and glacial.

“Fuck you,” Iris threw back, hunching closer over the old ship's log. “You're in my light,” she said, placing her hand on the other's hip and heaving her out of the way.

Now, she thought as she groped to pick up the thread of Pitt's story, let them come and get me.

All morning he wanted to scream. Wherever he went, they grinned and said hello. They spoke their names and pointed out their houses. Tried to explain exactly where they fit. Their jobs. Their views on public issues. All of this to trick him into telling who he was. In the end he stumbled down the stony path to the harbor, just to escape their weird, relentless cheer. The glassy inlet, blue as a jewel, seemed to calm him. He didn't dare admit how terrified he was. He blamed it all on the village—Maybeth Blue especially, who backed him into a corner with her hungering solicitude. He lurched along, puffing and sweating. Methodically he ranked them, according to how he would make them suffer.

He went down into the boatyard, in the shadow of the boulder. The dock was empty. He slowed to a shuffle and walked out fifty feet along the weathered planking. Out in the water were several rocks, strewn here and there like splinters off a glacier. None so grand as an island, though one or two sported a lonely patch of grass. The tidal surge had slowly worn them down. They used to be bigger, thought Michael.

The problem was his hand. Ever since he woke, it twitched. Just a tic at first, and nothing he couldn't hide by keeping it in motion. All through breakfast he held it under his napkin on his lap, where it fidgeted like a puppy. Then, as he walked through town, he tucked it in his jacket pocket. He looked like he was fiddling with loose change, only there wasn't any noise. The more the villagers stopped to greet him, the more erratic did it become. By the time he reached the harbor it dangled at the end of his arm, seeming to work at some phantom task, as if to play a tune on a long-lost instrument.

The problem was, it was someone else's hand.

The sun fell all up and down the cliffs. It was more bright than warm along the water, but the winter laid no claim on the midday air. Though he could see the peaks of a few houses, the Methodist steeple and the red brick tower that held the light, the rim of the cliff was still as a million years could make it. He began to understand that his mission was entwined in the distant past. He did not require to know the reason or the meaning. He simply wished to do what he had to. The act was honor enough. He hoped his head would stay this empty always.

But why did he have to lose control? He felt as if his hand were draining all his energy and trying to shake him loose so it could struggle back to another life. He felt like a sloughed-off skin. He could not bear to weaken, even for a moment. No one had ever touched him. No matter how hard he got, he left himself alone. If he sometimes came in his nightmares, it was only to prove how near to death all passion seemed to lead. He hated sleep itself because it cast him far away.

Now was all he had ever had time for. Now was the single freedom he could trust. He had lived his life like a deer at the crest of a hill, head cocked to the wind and what it carried. He loved nothing better than running away. But now the hunter was inside him. There wasn't any fleeing this. He'd have cut off his hand in a minute, except he knew the root went deeper.

So he let it be. And it flexed and gripped and fingered the air as if he were starting to talk in signs. It felt like he was trying to hold on to a bird.

“Hey,” called a voice close by, “can you help me?”

It sounded as if it came from the water. He turned with a curious thrill of detachment. It would have been lovely to watch someone drown. But no—it was only a skinny boy, clambering up a ladder off his boat. He held aloft a net of silver fish, which he wanted Michael to haul up onto the dock. Michael stood impassive, as much ashamed of his useless hand as wishing to stay aloof. The boy groped up another step and heaved his catch so it landed safely. He seemed accustomed to being ignored.

Michael would have gladly walked away—he was that sick of village types. But he noticed now with a shock that the boy had stone-gray hair, cropped close to his head like a convict. Lines on his face, and a stoop when he came to his feet. Not a boy at all, as it turned out, but a middle-aged man who'd wintered out endless years of rain.

Didn't he used to be a boy?

“Who are you?” asked Joey Barnacle. The question no one dared put into words. On the cliffs above, it was themselves they filled the silence with, in a torrent of nervous chatter. Who Michael was was no-man's-land. For
him
to say, not them.

“A man of God, I hope,” said Michael crisply.

“Well, there's no God here. You better go now, while you still got time.”

“Got all the time in the world.”

But Joey was staring down at Michael's hand, which did not cease its changing. It twisted and cupped its palm and shook like a leaf, as if he were just about to beg for alms or roll a pair of dice. Joey was so mesmerized that Michael grew ashamed. No one ever saw him naked either. This was as crucial as not being touched. Imperceptibly, by slow degrees, he turned so his left side faced away. He stood like a narrow target, wishing he'd gone ahead and knocked the ancient boy into the water. Right at the start he should have killed him. Beat his brains out with an oar.

“I can help,” said Joey, his voice shrunken to a whisper. Michael drew back, and his features glazed. He was offended by this stinking fisherman's presumption. Still he could not help himself; he groped to recall what it was between them. Once, it seemed, they had slept with their arms about each other's neck. He could hardly bear these partial findings. Why didn't someone lead him back? Were they so afraid to let him see it whole?

“I can get you the key to the church,” said Joey. “I live with the minister. He's real sick.”

“But why?” asked Michael shortly, trying to make a mockery of everything he'd heard.

“It's the strongest place,” the other replied without a pause. It seemed he'd been expecting just this question. “Like a fort. It's the only building for miles that's got stone walls.”

Except the lighthouse, Michael thought. The kid was bright, but he couldn't think. Michael had already placed him. He knew how to use this eagerness.

“Who are
you?
”

“I'm Joey,” he said with obvious disappointment. For a moment he seemed to grow very shy. “You probably don't remember. I was just the cabin boy.”

A ship? Was it on a ship? He seemed to remember a cabin, fitted with brass and papered with charts. Of course: the trunk stowed under the bed was filled with gold. Unconsciously, he turned and looked out on the harbor. He knew it so well, it seemed he'd just come up from a boat himself. He did not even notice that his mad hand was groping toward the boy. He was too caught up in peering out at a certain rock that broke the water about a hundred yards to port.

It was shaped like half a dome and rose up twenty feet at its highest point. It sported a flock of water birds, fighting for space along the crown. They jabbered and skittered about, feeding on mussels they dropped and broke on the stone. They had done it just this way for a hundred generations.

He thought perhaps he had put something there. He couldn't imagine what.

In any case, there was so much else gone wrong with his hand that he noticed nothing new. So when he turned, the sudden shock of this life made him gasp. Joey was down on one knee, his head bowed forward. He held Michael's hand in both of his, pressing the palm against his forehead, as if to cool a fever. And the strange thing was, the hand was still. It had ceased to pantomime the motions of a frantic stranger. For this one moment, it was home.

Michael watched with a kind of ritual fascination. Since he couldn't really feel below the elbow, he made no immediate move to snatch his hand away. The intimacy was horrible to him, but he was only a looker-on. At least it was a break from fits and nervous spasms.

“You're right, Joey. I don't remember any of it.”

Perhaps he spoke so gently here because the boy was crying. Perhaps he was simply grateful to have summoned one small feeling from the darkness. For the boy's sake he tugged his hand loose. It fell back limply against his side—still not his own, but quiet now. Meanwhile, Joey rose to his feet and struggled to stay calm.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's just … I've waited all this time. I know what you need. Come on.”

He turned and loped away, abandoning his morning's work. As Michael hurried after him, he glanced at the shivering net where the fish still fought the air with water moves. It made him happy—like a sack of money—to see the brink of death caught up like this in a single song. The beat of his running feet along the dock rang out as rhythmic as a drum. The boy up ahead, now darting through the boatyard, looked to be the shadow of the past come alive. It was himself he seemed to be gaining on. The gray rotting hulk of a trawler, broken at the spine, appeared to his glittering eyes like a great beached schooner. He could hear a gang of sailors hammering and fitting.

Up the steep harbor path the two of them raced till they had to stop for being winded. The boy turned laughing, holding his sides to pant for breath while Michael staggered up to join him. A bank of yellow flowers, drunk from last night's rain, sent out a honeyed ripeness as he passed. The landscape seemed to cling to him. He gave the boy a playful punch, and they fell into step. Michael was so happy he could hardly speak.

“We landed the first of May,” said Joey as they reached the top of the rise. “We set up camp right over here.” He gestured toward a ring of stones set neatly in the park, maybe fifty paces downwind from the light. “This was a grove of trees,” said Joey, clasping Michael by the hand.

They drifted forward until they stood exactly in the center. Children played on the lawn and left them alone. A man came out the lighthouse door to knock the ashes from his pipe. He coughed and hawked a lunger in the gravel. He didn't so much as look in their direction.

“Now do you remember?” Joey asked expectantly.

“No,” he said without a trace of rancor. How to explain it didn't matter. All they had to do was stay right here, just the two of them together.

“Never mind. It's just as well,” the boy retorted.

He released the ghostly hand and walked away toward the town. Michael followed in a daze of need. His hand now prickled with life again, but it ached as if its bones were knitting. He cradled it against his chest as he trotted to keep up. Joey had grown preoccupied, as if he had private matters to work out. He checked his watch. He checked the cut of the wind by the flag above the Grange.

Michael kept out of his way. He felt the burden of decisions lift. Things would be taken care of. Four doors down the street they came to a yard with a picket fence around and a flagstone walk to a shabby cottage. A trellis of leafless vines staggered along the porch. The wicker chairs were beaten to the dowels.

“Wait here,” said Joey firmly.

He bounded up the steps, crossed to the front door, and let himself in. Michael stood inside the picket fence, smiling emptily into the sun. He had a lazy picture in his head: him and the boy, setting up camp and building a fire. They would make their way inland, deeper and deeper into the woods. They would find a lonely valley all their own.

Becalmed as if on a silver sheet of sea, Michael moved across the lawn to the border of winter flowers huddled among the vines. He crouched and picked a bunch of nameless blossoms, pink and violet, none any bigger than the joint of his little finger. He used only the hand he had lost and found, laying each flower on a tuft of grass till he had a dozen. A tear of spittle gathered at his lips, then drooled down the front of his shirt. He closed his hand around the miniature bouquet. He rose to his feet, as vague and private as a child.