Wildalone (51 page)

It turned out to be a monument.
This is hallowed ground
, a plaque read.
Across these fields in the early light of the third of January 1777, Washington's Continentals defeated British Regulars for the first time in the long struggle for American independence.
And then, farther down:
In the memorial grove beyond you, those who fell in the battle of Princeton, both American and British, lie buried. The historic portico in which you stand was re-erected here to mark the entrance to the tomb of these unknown soldiers of the Revolution
.

Hallowed ground.
I liked the sound of it. I also liked the idea of a tomb where enemies were buried together, having finally won peace. In death, all were equal. Feuds no longer mattered. Nor did time. Under that colonnade, antiquity seemed just around the corner. The War of Independence—a blink away. And, somehow, it became plausible that a daemon from the ancient Greek legends could love a girl who was (or, more likely, wasn't) a witch from the Bulgarian ones.

Except Bulgarian legends didn't have happy endings. Certainly not ours, the one about the
samodivi
, in which Vylla marries her shepherd, then falls
deadly ill. Homesick for her forest. For her freedom. For moonsoaked nights on the meadow, away from human eyes. Only one thing can save her: to be released as a wild creature back into the night. But it means that the shepherd would never see her again. That he must shut his heart to the world for good.

One quiet evening, when the stars spilled across the blinded sky, he took her hand as if to tell her: “It is time, my love.” And back he led her—across ravines and deaf hills and secret mountain paths—up to the lake whose waters had first revealed her to him. There, safely folded, hidden beneath the oak tree's roots, lay a dress of woven moonlight . . .

I ran the entire way back—frantic, out of breath, thinking perhaps that I could outrun fate. Jake was in the living room, sunk in one of the armchairs, staring at the floor.

I stopped a few feet from him. “Any news?”

Instead of a response, I heard the front door open and close. Not a slam. A normal click, of someone coming home on a night like any other.

I rushed into the hallway—telling Rhys that I loved him, that we could fix things, mistakes and siblings notwithstanding—but he wouldn't look at me. Passed at a safe distance and walked into the living room, heading straight over to his brother.

“The two of you are going to Bulgaria. I changed my name on the ticket to yours.” A heavy envelope landed on the table. “The flight leaves in the morning.”

“Rhys, she loves
you
, not me.”

“I'll see if a transfer to Harvard is possible, for both of you. The winter classes start in four weeks. By then, Ferry will take care of the move. All of her things. And yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Princeton can take papers instead of final exams. So just e-mail them in, no need to come back.”

“You know I'd do anything for you, but not this way—” Jake's voice fractured.

“You aren't doing it for me. You're doing it for Thea. And if you break her heart, you will no longer be a brother to me. I'll kill you with my own hands.”

He went to one of the pianos, sat down, and smiled at Jake.

“Last playoff?” A brief variation on a Liszt theme, then he tapped on the wood. “Your turn.”

No response.

“Jake, come on, don't get all soft on me. It's just a few notes.”

Jake slid on the other bench, forcing his fingers to repeat the same tune—mechanically, as if playing in his sleep.

“That's shameful. Try again.” Another Liszt, slightly faster.

Jake followed, and the first signs of energy trickled out as he played.

“Much better! How about this—”

The two of them kept playing, racing each other over the keys as they had to have done countless times before I came into their life. With each turn, the strength was slowly returning to Jake. It was probably what Rhys intended, the music being just a pretext, a way of forcing his brother to own up, to shake off the guilt and start a future with me—the same future that Rhys had wanted for himself.

Then he looked at his watch. His hands clutched his knees so hard the skin around the knuckles turned white, and his eyes lifted into mine, letting me know that he wasn't done playing. That the last sounds from his fingers that night would be for me.

A chord slipped out. Cautious, followed by two more, closer together and lower on the keys. Then two more, even lower. And then one final chord—quicker than the others, a hurried question mark. My heart sank as I recognized the piece: the fiercely private Nocturne in C-sharp Minor that Chopin refused to publish during his life. The six chords again, this time charged with force, insistent—not a question but a threat.

Followed by silence. The same silence that the written score had intended to last a mere second had now become merciless in his hands—agonizing, unending, silence in whose grip it was impossible to breathe, in which time itself had vanished until the only thing left was the terrified anticipation of
the music that was about to follow. And it did; it finally came. Music as unforgiving as I never knew music could be. Music of absolute, desperate aching.

It began with a single note: high, disarmingly fragile. The right hand took it and curled it into a phrase of crystal beauty, lifting it, letting it drop deep, then repeating the entire move only to reach impossibly high, even higher than before, and roll down a cascade of keys as if a quick venom had drained it of its strength.

Only his hands and arms moved while he played. Yet I could sense the tension in him, in the rest of his body, its hundreds of muscles willing his fingers to deliver this incredible music with a precision I had never thought possible. I wished he would stop halfway through, before the softer middle part—softness I knew he couldn't stand—but he played on, and the harmonies he would have called “saccharine” once were now unfolding into one another with stunning simplicity, until the rhythm broke into syncopated strokes and shattered over the keys, hushing up the higher octaves to a delicate final note—warm and brief, like the touch of a blessing.

Then his silence again. The impossibility of breathing. I imagined him turning around and smiling, letting me go to him. But he sat there without a trace of movement, eyes closed, the eyelids bulging almost imperceptibly until the first tears I had ever seen on him came quietly down his cheeks. Jake sat across from him, bent over in a collapsed heap.

The music resumed—lavishly simple, complete as no music is ever complete. And inconsolable. Hopeless.

I had wondered many times whether Rhys would leave me one day. Now I knew:
this
was his good-bye. This music, which left no doubt of his intent yet made the thought of living without him feel like death. Music with which he was breaking his own heart, giving his brother a chance to mend mine.

I wanted the nocturne to end, so I could tell him that life didn't have to imitate the legends this time. That, for once, we needed to decide our future instead of leaving it up to others or to chance or, worst of all, to fate. But he stopped playing way before the final notes. His shaking hands lingered on the wood for one last second, then he jumped from the piano like a chased animal and ran out of the room—

As if running away could solve anything. I loved him. More than life. More than I feared dying. Which meant that nothing was irreversible, and one day I would get him back—I just had to figure out how.

YOU SHOULD NEVER OPEN A
door through which you might not wish to enter.

Yet Silen hadn't predicted that soon, when all other doors of the world would slam shut, this same warning would bring me back to the Graduate College, looking for him.

Or had he?

The vine-leaf door was locked, and I waited—for the familiar voice, for its oddly wise words whose advice I needed now more than ever. But the corridor remained quiet, as I headed back past restroom signs and rows of light switches.

Darkness doesn't find us on its own, Theia. It wants to be invited.

I pushed the switches down, every last one of them. And, finally invited, the darkness became complete.

A STEP DOWN THE PITCH-BLACK
corridor.

Then another.

I had walked into the abyss of night so many times, but never like this. Groping for walls. In a basement. Alone. Terrified.

Suddenly a light began to take shape. A faint silver glow, intensifying as I walked, until I recognized what my fingers had felt only moments earlier: the door's handle, shaped like a crescent moon.

This time it opened, and I found myself in a tunnel dug straight into the earth, lit up by dozens of candles hidden inside the wall's crevices. At the other end was a cave unlike any I had ever seen. Whimsical carvings spiraled up in erratic reds and browns, carrying their luminance through the air, all the way to a ceiling whose shoulders bent from the weight of world above. Far ahead, caught in a surreal play of symmetry, a lake doubled everything up. And in the middle, indulged in its own frightening beauty, the strangest
of trees cast its reflection—green foliage on the right; bare branches on the left—over a satyr who sat in his usual solitude, waiting.

I followed a stone path across the water, over to him. “What is all this, Silen?”

“The beginning of the Underworld.”

“But the Underworld doesn't exist. It's just legend.”

“Humans call ‘legend' whatever frightens them most. Still, it doesn't cease to exist.”

“So you're telling me that this is where the dead . . . that the entrance to the Underworld lies in a Princeton basement?”

“For every world, there is an underworld.” His hand swept the air, up toward what lay above us. “These buildings, they all have basements extending far, far deeper than you think. Even your mind”—his index finger touched my temple—“has its catacombs, secret passageways that you can only glimpse, in a single lifetime. And your heart, too; it has the most beautiful of underworlds. Have you noticed that for everything you want or love, something in you always begins to want or love the exact opposite?”

“Yes. That's how I lost them both.”

“Lost?” He gave me one of his esoteric winks. “Tonight the fates have cast a choice for you.”

“Between a man and a phantom?”

“No, between memory and oblivion. A sip is all it takes.”

“Sip from what?”

“These—” He pointed at the water. The stone path divided it in two, with the tree exactly in the middle. “The Lake of Memory or the Lake of Forgetting. A choice given to each soul as it enters Hades.”

“The land of the dead? But I'm not dead yet.”

“You don't need to be. The tunnel that led you here happens to be the
Necromanteion
, the death oracle of ancient Greece. It allows a communion with the deceased, a brief meeting with your loved ones. For that, many have braved the Underworld. Dionysus himself descended into its labyrinths, to bring back his mother, Semele.”

“Dionysus is a god, though.”

“Nongods have managed it too. Heracles, Odysseus . . . and, of course, Orpheus.” He took a golden sheath out of his pocket. About a square inch, perforated into lace by words that appeared to be in Greek. “This is the first of the Orphic tablets, the one that started them all. Dionysian mystics were buried with them, for the journey to the Underworld, and this one belonged to Orpheus himself. I gave it to him when he decided to venture into Hades.”

The thin foil looked so delicate I was afraid to touch it. “What does the writing say?”

“It comes from one of his songs. Instructions for the afterlife.”

He recited the contents from memory, in English:

       
You shall find on the left of the House of Hades a wellspring
,

       
And by its side standing a white cypress.

       
To this wellspring approach not near.

       
You shall find next to it the Lake of Memory
,

       
Cold water flowing forth, and a guardian before it.

       
Say: “I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven
,

       
I come parched with thirst. I perish.”

       
And you shall be given a drink from the sacred water.

“This means you are the guardian?”

“Me?” He laughed, dropping the tablet back into his pocket. “No, the Lake of Memory is guarded by the fig tree. The sacred tree of Dionysus.”

The fig again. Always the fig. No other tree could survive on the barren hills above the Black Sea. But figs did. And it was under a fig tree that my sister had danced, alone with the moon.

“Why are there no leaves on the rest of it?”

“Because the rest is the white cypress.”

“Two trees grown into one?”

“We have only one heart. Memory and oblivion both stem from it.” He pointed to the left, where bare branches, white like bones, reached down toward the water. “The cypress means letting go. Only a sip from its lake, and you can forget everything that has troubled you until now. Even love. Your
mind will be wiped of dark memories just as the bark of this cypress grows immaculately clean.”

I imagined forgetting. Quiet. Safe. Earth without a pulse, under the protective snow of winter. I would go back to my life unscathed. Graduate with honors. Conquer the music world. Even date—someone sweet and uncomplicated, like Ben.

“And the other lake?”

“The Lake of Memory will cause everything in your mind and heart to be imprinted there for good. So consider your choice carefully. Once made, it cannot be reversed.”