The City of Mirrors (84 page)

—Here I am, Mama!

—Where?

Alicia caught a flicker of movement, ahead and to the right. A flash of red hair.

—Over here! the girl teased. She was laughing, playing a game. Can’t you see me? I’m right here!

Alicia plunged toward her. But like the animals in the forest, her daughter seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, her calls coming from all directions.

—Here I am! Rose sang. Try to find me!

—Wait for me!

—Come find me, Mama!

Suddenly the grass was gone. She found herself standing on a dusty road sloping upward toward the crest of a small hill.

—Rose!

No answer.

—Rose!

The road beckoned her forward. As she walked, she began to have a sense of her environment, or at least the kind of place it was. It was beyond the world she knew while also a part of it, a hidden reality that could be glimpsed as if from the corner of the eye but never wholly entered into in this life. With each step, her anxiety softened. It was as if an invisible power, purely benevolent, was guiding her. As she mounted the hill, she heard, once again, the bright, distant music of her daughter’s laughter.

—Come to me, Mama, she sang. Come to me.

She reached the top of the rise.

And there Alicia awakened. What waited in the valley beyond the hilltop was not yet hers to see, though she believed she knew what it was, as she also knew the meaning of the other dreams, of Peter and Amy and Michael and all those whom she had loved and been loved by in return.

She was saying goodbye.

A night came when Alicia dreamed no more. She awoke with a feeling of fullness. All she had meant to do had been accomplished; the work of her life was complete.

On the crutch she had fashioned from scrap wood she made her way through the debris, three blocks north and one block west. Even this short distance left her gasping with pain. It was midmorning when she began her ascent; by nightfall she had reached the fifty-seventh floor. Her water was nearly gone. She slept on the floor of a windowed office, so that the sun would wake her, and at dawn she resumed her climb.

Was it coincidence that this was the very same morning that Michael set sail? Alicia preferred to think it wasn’t. That the sight of the
Nautilus,
pulling away on the wind, was a sign, and meant for her. Could Michael feel her? Did he, in some manner, sense that she was observing him from above? Impossible, and yet it pleased Alicia to think so—that he might suddenly look up, startled, as if touched by a sudden breeze. The
Nautilus
was departing the inner harbor, headed for open sea. Sunlight glimmered dazzlingly upon the water. Clutching the balustrade, Alicia watched as the tiny shape became smaller and smaller, fading into nonexistence.
Of all people, Michael,
she thought. And yet he had been the one. He had been the one to save her.

A tall fence, curved inward at the top, fixed into the top of the balustrade, had once formed a barricade around the perimeter of the platform; many sections remained, but not all. Alicia had saved a little water. She drank it now. How sweet it was, the scavenged rain. She experienced a profound sense of the interconnectedness of all things, the eternal rising and falling of life—how the water, which had begun as the sea, had ascended, gathered into clouds, and descended from the sky as rain, to be gathered in the pots she’d laid. Now it had become a part of her.

Alicia sat on the balustrade. Below, on the outer side, was a small ledge. She rotated her body, using her hands to assist her disobedient legs over the rail. Faced away from the building, she scooted a few inches forward on the concrete until her feet touched the ledge. How did one do it? How did one say farewell to the world? She took a long breath and let the air out slowly. She realized she was crying. Not with sadness—no, not that—although her tears did not seem unrelated to sadness. They were tears of sadness and happiness conjoined, everything over and done.

My darling, my Rose.

Pushing with her palms, she drew herself erect. Space jumped away beneath her; she pointed her eyes to the sky.

Rose, I am coming. I will be with you soon.

Some might have said she fell. Others, that she flew. Both were true. Alicia Donadio—Alicia of Blades, the New Thing, Captain of the Watch and Soldier of the Expeditionary—would die as she had lived.

Always soaring.

Night came on.

Amy was somewhere in New Jersey. She had left the main thoroughfares behind, moving into the wild backcountry. Her arms and legs were heavy, full of a deep, almost pleasurable exhaustion. As darkness fell, she made her camp in a field of winking fireflies, ate her simple supper, and lay down beneath the stars.

Come to me,
she thought.

All around her, and all above, the small lights of heaven danced. A stout full moon rose from the trees, sharpening the shadows.

I’m waiting for you. I’ll always wait. Come to me.

A pure silence; not even the air was moving. Time passed in its languid course. Then, like the brush of a feather inside her:

Amy.

At the far edge of the field, in the boughs of the trees, she saw and heard a rustling; Peter dropped down. He had just eaten, a squirrel or mouse perhaps, or some small bird; she could feel his contentment, the rich satisfaction he had taken in the act, like waves of warmth washing through her blood. Amy rose as he moved toward her, passing among the fireflies. There were so many, it was as if he—as if the two of them—were swimming together in a sea of stars.
Amy.
His voice like a soft wind of longing, breathing her name.
Amy, Amy, Amy.

She raised her hand; Peter did the same. The gap between them closed. Their fingers meshed and fell together, the soft pressure of Peter’s palm against her own.

Am I … ?

She nodded. —Yes.

And … I’m yours? I belong to you?

She sensed his confusion. The trauma was still fresh, the disorientation. She tightened her fingers, pressing their palms together, and held his eyes with hers.

—You are mine, and I am yours. We belong to each other, you and I.

A pause, then:
We are each other’s. You are mine and I am yours.

—Yes, Peter.

Peter.
He held the thought for a moment.
I am Peter.

She cupped his cheek.

—Yes.

I am Peter Jaxon.

Her vision swam with tears. The moonlit night was fantastically still, everything held in abeyance, the two of them like actors on a stage of dark wings with a single spotlight falling upon them.

—Yes, that is who you are. You are my Peter.

And you are my Amy.

As she made her way west—and then for many years after—he was to come to her each night in this manner. The conversation would be repeated countless times, like a chant or prayer. Each visit was as if it were the first; at the start he retained no memory, either of the previous nights or of the events that had preceded them, as if he were a wholly novel creature in the world, born anew each night. But slowly, as the years became decades, the man inside the body—the essential spirit—reasserted itself. Never would he speak again, though they would talk of many things, words flowing through the touch of their hands, the two of them alone among the stars.

But that came later. Now, standing in the field of fireflies, beneath the summer moon, he asked her:

Where are we going?

She smiled through her tears.

—Home, said Amy. My Peter, my love. We are going home.

Michael had cleared the harbor. Over the transom, the image of the city grew faint. The moment of decision was upon him. South, as he’d told Amy, or a new direction entirely?

It wasn’t even a question.

He tacked the
Nautilus,
turning in a northeasterly direction. The wind was fair, the seas light, with a gentle green color. The following afternoon he rounded the tip of Long Island and leapt into open sea. Three days after leaving New York, he made landfall at Nantucket. The island was arrestingly beautiful, with long beaches of pure white sand and crashing surf. There appeared to be no buildings at all, or none he could see; all traces of civilization had been swept away by the ocean’s hand. Anchored in a sheltered cove, he made his final calculations, and at dawn, he set sail again.

Soon the ocean changed. It grew darker, with a solemn look. He had passed into a wild zone, far from any land. He felt not fear but excitement and, beneath this, a thrilling rightness. His boat, his
Nautilus,
was sound; he had the wind and sea and stars to guide him. He hoped to reach the English coast in twenty-three days, though perhaps that wouldn’t happen. There were many variables. Maybe it would take a month, or longer; maybe he’d end up in France, or even Spain. It didn’t matter.

Michael Fisher was going to find what was out there.

84

Fanning came to awareness of his surroundings slowly, and in parts. First there was a sensation of cold sand on his feet; this was followed by the sound of waves, gently pushing upon a tranquil shore. After an unknown interval of time had passed, other facts emerged. It was night. Stars thick as powder lay across a sky of velvety blackness, immeasurably deep. The air was cool and still, as after a daylong rain. Above and behind him, atop a steep bluff of eelgrass and beach plum, were houses; their white faces shone faintly with the reflected light of the moon, which was ascending from the sea.

He began to walk. The hems of his trousers were damp; he seemed to have mislaid his shoes, or else he had arrived in this place without them. He had no destination in mind, merely a sense that walking was something the situation called for. The unanticipated nature of his circumstances, its feeling of elastic reality, aroused in him no anxiety. Quite the contrary: everything felt inevitable, reassuringly so. When he tried to recall anything that might have happened prior to his being in this place, he could think of nothing. He knew who he was, yet his personal history seemed devoid of narrative coherence. There was a time, he knew, when he had been a child. And yet that period of his life, like all others, registered only as a collection of emotional and sensory impressions with a metaphoric aspect. His mother and his father, for example, resided in his memory not as individuated beings but as a feeling of warmth and safety, like being cradled in a bath. The town where he’d grown up, whose name he did not recall, was not a discrete civic unit of buildings and streets but a view through a window screen of rain pattering upon summer leaves. It was all very peculiar, not unsettling but simply unexpected, especially the fact that his adult life seemed almost completely unknown to him. He knew that in his life he had been happy, also sad; for a long time he had been very, very lonely. Yet when he tried to reconstruct the circumstances, all he remembered was a clock.

For a great while, in this unforeseen and generally pleasant state of un-remembering, he made his way down the broad boulevard of sand at the water’s edge. The moon, having cleared the horizon, had ceased its upward arc. The tide was high, boastfully so, the sky immense. At length he became aware of a figure in the distance. For a time the figure grew no closer; then, with a telescoping quality, the gap began to narrow.

Liz was sitting on the sand with her arms wrapped around her shins, gazing over the water. She was wearing a white dress of some diaphanous material, light as a nightgown; her feet, like his, were bare. He vaguely recalled that something had happened to her, very unfortunate, though he couldn’t say what that thing might have been; she had gone away, that was all, and now she had returned. He was happy, very happy to see her, and although she indicated no awareness of his presence, he felt very much as if she were expecting him.

“Liz, hello.”

She looked up at him; her eyes twinkled with starlight. “Well, there you are,” she said, smiling. “I was wondering when you’d get here. Do you have something for me?”

In fact, he did. He was holding her glasses. How curious this fact was.

“May I have them, please?”

She accepted the glasses, turned her face once again toward the water, and put them on. “There,” she remarked, with a nod of satisfaction, “that’s much better. I can’t see a damn thing without them. All of this beauty was practically wasted on me, if you want to know the truth. But now I can see everything just fine.”

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Why don’t you sit?”

He lowered himself onto the sand beside her.

“That is an excellent question,” Liz said. “The beach, would be the answer. This is the beach.”

“How long have you been here?”

She touched a finger to her lips. “Now, isn’t that funny. Even just a few minutes ago, I think I would have said for quite some time. But now that you’re here, it doesn’t seem like very much at all.”

“Are we alone?”

“Alone? Yes, I should think so.” She paused; a look of mischief came into her face. “You don’t recognize any of this, do you? That’s all right; it takes a little while to adjust. Believe me, when I first got here, I didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

He looked around. It was true; he had been in this place.

“I always wondered,” Liz continued. “What would have happened if you had kissed me that night? How would our lives have been different? Of course, you might well have, if I hadn’t gotten so drunk. What a self-pitying fool I made of myself. The whole thing was totally my fault from the get-go.”

At once he remembered. The beach below her parents’ house on Cape Cod: that’s where they were. The place where, long ago, he had let life pass by, failing to say what his heart knew.

“How are we … here?”

“Oh, I think ‘how’ is not the question.”

“What’s the question, then?”

“The question, Tim, is ‘why.’ ”

She was looking at him absorbedly. It was a gaze meant to comfort, as if he were ill. She had taken his hand in hers without his quite being aware it. It felt warm as a cup of tea.