Lucia's Masks (26 page)

When at last they exit the cave, Chandelier’s eyes begin to smart. He might as well cry, he thinks, and so blur to some degree the appalling ruin all around them. There is nothing left; not the least skeleton of a leaf. The air has a nasty orange tinge. They tread carefully, trying to avoid spots where the ash is still dangerously hot. Chandelier is especially cautious, not wanting to burn his woven silk boots.

It is a good thing that the masks make it so difficult for them to speak and hear each other clearly. For what could they say about this infinitely sad, immolated ground? To look at it, to think about it for any length of time, makes a hole in his brain into which twisted fiends rush, with faces he does not want to look upon.

“Be resolute and of good cheer.” Whose voice does he hear? Harry’s? The Outpacer’s? Or is it Snake?

Who would say — “Be of good cheer”?

The boy begins to sing to himself under his mask as he walks, his hand beneath Harry’s elbow. He makes up his song in which the words “
speranza
” and “good cheer” intertwine. It seems to him sometimes, on their long trudge northward, that Snake sings along with him.

Towards dusk, he hears the Outpacer cry out. “Just below us, in the valley — there, look. It is safe now. You can take off the masks.”

Looking down where the Outpacer points, the boy sees his first fir trees. Their compelling shapes, like slope-shouldered beings with full bell-like skirts, make him want to laugh. This is the beginning of the north, he tells himself. He takes off his mask, wanting to speak this idea out loud and find out if he is right. But his lips are still numb, and he cannot make his mouth move properly. A wonderful scent fills his nostrils, which somehow makes the air brighter and wider. It is like an emerald song, he thinks. Essence of green. Snake will like this.

“Only a little further,” the Outpacer encourages them. They move on, hungry and foot-sore, yet heartened by the sight of many more coniferous trees ahead. At last they reach a spot that the Outpacer judges to be safe and sheltered enough. Together they scoop up cedar boughs on which to lay Bird Girl. She is so unlike herself the boy does not like to look at her for long. An unmoving and silent Bird Girl is like Nature undone. He thinks again of Snake, who had been present at the birth of time, and yearns for his guidance. But Snake does not come.

Nor does Snake return when Chandelier assumes his turn at the night watch, sitting cross-legged at the girl’s side. Every few moments, he puts his ear near her mouth to assure himself she is still breathing. Whenever he hears a sound, he looks up, his muscles tensing, his hand ready to take up the thick cudgel that lies by him. He hears the Outpacer’s soft whistle which reassures him it is only their protector making his circuit.

Chandelier feels the girl stir. She sits upright and looks about her wildly.

“Lola!” How sore her throat sounds, he thinks. He offers her water, but she pushes his hand away. “Where?” she demands.

He gets to his feet, intending to waken Lucia whom instinct tells him will be the better comforter. But Bird Girl grabs his wrist with a grip as forceful as it is unexpected. Her eyes lock on his and will not yield.

“Where is Lola?” He hears the animal urgency in the question, and is frightened by the invisible claw marks her other hand tears in the air. How can he refuse her an answer when she so burns to know? Then he thinks: what if the answer kills her? But such a truth did not kill me that fiendish morning, he reasons. And Bird Girl is stronger than I.

He kneels beside her and put his lips to her ear. He believes it will be less cruel to whisper Lola’s fate. As he breathes the words through the tendrils of Bird Girl’s hair, he feels her body stiffen. He is not ready for the inarticulate sounds that issue from some deep cavity inside the girl’s body. “Oh. Oh.” He recognizes his own voice weaving with hers in a plaintive song.

Her head strikes him repeatedly in the chest. She pummels his back with her fists. He puts his arm round her, and she writhes against this offer of comfort, writhes against him as he too grimaces, his jaw clenched and his eyes screwed shut. She writhes and coils and strikes inside his grip as Snake might writhe if he were caught.

And then he is there. “Kiss her,” Snake hisses. “Kiss her full on the mouth as you would kiss me if I were in agony.”

The boy grasps the girl hard in his arms and does as he is told. Her lips are so dry, they rasp against his. He manages to moisten her mouth with his tongue. His tongue touches hers, and there is Snake. Chandelier recognizes his mesmerizing electric charge.

And that is enough — Chandelier knows it was enough — to spell her into quietness for a time.

She gestures for water and he raises the bottle to her mouth. She asks him to hold her.

“Talk to me,” she pleads, as he hugs her tightly. “Tell me a story to stop me thinking for a while.”Chandelier tells her the story that is always foremost in his mind. He describes the Egg and why his father built it and what happened on that fateful morning.

Bird Girl listens and asks only: “Why did your father call it the Egg?”

And so Chandelier recounts the myth of origins that had captivated his father when he was himself a boy: “Night and the Wind made a cosmic egg, and out of that Egg came Eros, the god of Love, who carries the seeds of all things in his body.”

Bird Girl does not laugh mockingly as the sewer people had when Chandelier told them this tale. They had held a knife to his ear lobe and throat. “Tell us a story, pale fright,” they said. “Amuse us, or we’ll cut you now.”

He had told them and immediately felt unclean. Now the story seems to have found its right shape again. There is a gleaming place in his mind where it lives.

“And the god’s wings?” Bird Girl prompts. “What were his wings like?”

“They were as glorious as the tail feathers of the male peacock and as wide as world,” he tells her.

She nods, as if this response makes perfect sense and is exactly what she expected. And she sleeps, her hand still clutching his.

Chapter Thirteen
Harry Finds a Theatre Box

H
ARRY SLEPT BADLY, A WEIGHT OF
doom upon his chest that was at times the Ancient Mariner’s slain albatross out of Coleridge’s poem, and at others the inert form of young Bird Girl. He woke often, a startled cry stopped in his throat, the smothering weight of the slaughtered bird of his nightmare hampering his breathing, its blood soaking through his shirt, making a gruesome band round his rib cage. This wetness was, he recognized on shaking himself properly awake, the sweat of fear. And because the night sky was coal-black without the least glint of starlight, and his every joint pained him, that pressure of doom upon his chest seemed to him the inescapable fate of all the world’s innocent creatures. The blood-stained, snowy white breast. Harpoon-struck. Arrow-struck.

Although he is overjoyed to learn the girl spoke during the night to Chandelier, he still worries about the lingering effects of the poison. She is such a delicate-looking child. He yearns to pray. But because he has never been a conventionally religious man, he lacks the strict forms. He has done true obeisance only to the spirit of that place he cherishes most on earth: his beloved Antarctica of the Emerald Heart. So each time he wakes, it is her spirit he invokes: his Great Queen of the Southern Pole. He peers through the dark, to the spot near the fire where Chandelier sits, his thin frame taut as a bow, watching over the wounded girl. Harry whispers: “Is all well, boy?” And through the dark, catches the murmured “yes” he yearns to hear.

Now, as the light of a new day breaks, and the pressure on his bladder grows intolerable, Harry realizes anew just how much he has come to rely upon the boy. Most particularly in the mornings, when the pain in his limbs rankles and his vision fogs, Harry finds Chandelier’s aid indispensable: the strong, young, supple body that bends so fluidly to help an old man to his feet; the willing hand cupped at his elbow as a gentle guide and reassurance; the sharp eyes that help him steer through underbrush and tangled branches to some place private enough where he can empty his bladder without indignity.

Harry loathes the ignoble disguise of old age, and daily enumerates its most humiliating aspects to himself as a mantra that keeps his anger fierce, and his will primed.

I hobble (on the best of days).

I limp (on the worst).

I stink.

I dribble.

I drool.

My eyes exude gum like the amber sap of a fir tree.

I am sometimes beset by tremors.

I do not recognize my own flesh, which has grown thin and spotted.

It hurts to piss.

My spirit is not at home in this fumbling carapace.

I did not think it would be like this.

It hurts to piss.

I am not this.

I am not this.

Once, he had a young body, lean and hard. On land, he was a runner. He had been a fighter too. He had to be. He abhorred sensualism. He did not eat the flesh of animals. His stomach turned at the sight of charred steaks, and plates piled high with pink-tipped ribs. Throughout his life, Harry had remained true to his own moral imperatives. He thought it wrong to slaughter beasts in order that he could eat. His vegetarianism is likely one of the chief reasons he is still alive. His years make him an oddity these days. He is eighty-eight. There are few in this apocalyptic time who make it to fifty.

In the City, the most pitiless of the young had found his seamed face an affront. (Was there ever a time when to be old warranted respect? Was even to imagine such a time an old man’s folly?) In the urban streets, he had crossed paths with the Vigilantes for Beauty. They were succinct, these glossy, perfect children. He would grant them that. “Your ugliness offends me old man,” their leader said. He had prodded Harry’s chest with an iron bar.

“It would please me to snuff you out,” the vigilante captain said. “You’re grotesque. Useless as a two-legged dog.”

“Snuff away,” replied Old Harry. And there was the worst of it, his recognition that he would welcome immolation at the hands of this cruel and beauteous youth. Indeed, that he would welcome death at anyone’s hand.

Even the young man’s gasoline can was an objet d’art. Against a background of black lacquer, dogs with sinuous bodies and long narrow heads sank their teeth into each other’s flanks. These dogs, Harry noted as the young man waved the can in front of his face, had all their legs.

Harry closed his eyes and gritted those teeth he had left, readying himself for the pain. The first touch of flame, he speculated, might well stop his heart. He waited for the stench of the flung gas; the sound of the struck match. Which did not come. When he opened his eyes, the young vigilantes had gone.

At that instant, Harry realized just how pathological was the City’s influence, and how his own will had sickened, exposed to this heartlessness. He had come to the City to seek a pension. He knew he was deserving. He had done long and faithful service, even if his employers had constantly ignored his findings. But by the time his savings ran out and he arrived in the City, he could not locate his former employers at all. Did such a department in such a ministry still exist? Was there indeed a government of any kind? And if there was not, then what agency was it that erected the sky-screens? Who was it that operated the omnipresent mechanical eyes that scrutinized every public toilet and alleyway, and the underground parking lots where hundreds slept nightly? Harry had taken shelter in one of these concrete bunkers where the concept of privacy was as archaic as the virtue of kindness. The stench of these places was unspeakable, but what could one expect with no running water and no means to dispose of human waste but purloined buckets?

The irony was that he had come to the City in an effort to preserve his dignity. With a pension, he could purchase false teeth to replace those he had lost. He would be able to bite again into the tart-sweet flesh of apples, and chew properly the coarse-grained bread he loved. He wanted to purchase a cane, a sturdy companion with a hook carved to fit his hand and a stout rubber tip. He had reached that time in his life when he would soon require three legs in order to make his way through the world. The devastating confrontation with the Vigilantes for Beauty decided him. He would use what strength and mental acuity he had left to walk and keep on walking. He wanted to perambulate, to perform a plain and decent human act. This would help him exorcise the worst of the City’s malign influence, which had so undermined his spirit he had welcomed the chance to die. He could still walk, albeit slowly, and with pain as his constant taskmaster. He would make a decent progress toward the bracing north, and perhaps see again a silvery stand of birch.

Harry had no illusions about his failing body. He knew he would never dance again. Dancing had once been his delight. He had whirled and waltzed alone on the ice floor of the continent that had drawn him like the most magnetic of lovers. He had danced beneath the miraculous hoops of the ice bows, balanced on one leg, his arms stretched above his head, palms touching, fingers pointed, as he swayed in worshipful silence, before the sun pillars. He had leapt upon the ice in a frenzied primordial joy under a sunset that resembled molten metal and churning fire. He was extinguished. He was purified. He was born again and again in that crucible of sheerest, virgin cold.

He had tried sex and found it vastly wanting. He had “swung both ways” as they used to say (Was there anyone else left alive, he wondered, who remembered that foolish phrase?). But with neither man nor woman had he felt anything approaching the ecstasy that bound him to the Earth’s southern pole. There are times when Harry is parachuted back into sacred memories so vivid, and with such astonishing rapidity, that he seems to inhabit again his own youthful body. Just as now, he stands amazed, and almost dizzy, feeling again his young body’s roaring hot blood, every muscle primed for purpose. He recognizes the situation immediately.