anyway, the first part of the story remains available for all who wish to catch up from there. for now, we'll start anew.
and yes, it does occur to me that i'm going to feel pretty stupid reading that first line come january, but i really don't want to think about that.
-104-
Julian gives her a long
look and rocks her head back and forth in his hand. She can’t decide if he’s
studying her reactions or trying to figure out the fastest way to snap her
neck. Maybe both.
“Tell me something,” she
snaps, grabbing his hand at the wrist. She feels his fingers tighten in her
hair.
“Do you think he knew what
he was opening up?”
“I think he thought he was
writing a history text. I don’t
know what he’s opened up but I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Do you think it was a
mistake, letting him in?”
Adela shakes her head,
trying to loose his grip to no avail.
“How can it have been a
mistake when they got away with something? They didn’t suffer any repercussions
from any of this.” Every time she tries to twist or jerk away from him, it
seems he’s able to get a tighter grip. She can’t imagine that they’re unseen
and unheard. Perhaps this is normal behaviour for the Schooner Bar.
She throws her upper body
weight against his arm, thrusting them both back against the back of the
semicircular both. She can smell the mold trapped inside, tries to hold her
breath to keep it at bay.
“You were the one who
wanted to meet tonight,” she hisses. “You were the one who brought the damn
book up to begin with. And now you’re treating me like I’m doing something
wrong by follow the bread crumbs you keep laying out. I don’t care if I’m not
able to turn up anything, but I’m getting fed up with you taunting me along and
then pretending like this is all something that’s happening in my imagination.”
Julian slumps beside her,
his silvery eyes dead in the bar’s dim light, as if he’s vacated the premises.
He stares at her, or rather through her, for what seems like an interminable
amount of time. When he finally moves, it’s with an unexpected gentleness that
he pulls her close to him and holds her like she imagines one might hold a
child, or a precious relic, something fragile and treasured.
“If you were to grant that
all of it was a diabolical plan, you’d have to say that Meyrinck is an
interesting anomaly. All the others dead and accounted for. How difficult would
it have been for a group powerful enough to engineer all those seemingly
explicable deaths to track down and kill one man, a man whose roots and history
were well known to them. Once you’ve started down the ladder of conspiracy you
have to follow its rungs logically. And it makes no sense that all the others
could be so quickly and easily accounted for and the last simply allowed to
fade into the ether of time. If I were Cronos, I wouldn’t be able to rest until
I satisfied myself that he was dead or alive. And if I were investigating
Cronos, I wouldn’t consider my research complete until I satisfied myself on
the same point.”
With that, he finally
relaxes his grip and slumps back against the grubby upholstery. She can see
that he’s lost weight since she first saw him, but her mind, in its perverse
way, insists on taunting her with the idea that he has lost weight since
earlier that day, that he is growing thinner, drawn during the time that they
have been sitting together in the booth.
Wearily, he stands up and
stares at her, without ever looking in her eyes. “I can’t say I wasn’t warned,”
he says wanly.
“What?”
He shakes his head. “I hope
you find what you need, Adela.”
-105-
He coughs, a huge, barking
chest-heaving cough and wanders out of the bar. The elderly patrons turn their
watery eyes towards him as they sense movement, but are quickly drawn back to
contemplating the flat, tasteless beer dished out here.
For her part, Adela sits in
the booth, trying to decide what to do. She feels cut off here, abandoned,
intimidated by the lack of familiarity. Black and white photos, some turned a
sickly yellow with age, adorn the walls. Smiling faces of strangers, others
here in happier times, when there might have been more to get excited about
here. She hates the thought of stepping back outside, into the seedy
surroundings and the unfamiliar. She hates being in this place, with its air of
imminent collapse. Most of all, she hates the idea of moving, of bringing
herself closer to any of the ugliness she sees around her and so she sits,
shriveling ever smaller into the patchy velveteen with the funky aroma. It’s
the kind of smell she reacts to now, the kind of smell that makes her gag just
a little. The scent of bad scenes from which Adam and her uncle have pulled
her. This is the kind of place she knows they would not want her to be and the
kind of place she doesn’t like to be either. But she’s ended up in them before,
always of her own choosing, waiting for that moment when the knights in shining
armour arrive.
Slowly, Adela gathers up
her oversized purse and shuffles towards the door. She is almost certain that
the bartender watches her with an inappropriate intensity, as if he expects her
to pull out a gun and rob the place of its few shekels, or as if to catch a
glimpse of where she’s going.
The sun has settled far
enough down that only its echoes are visible, rose and tangerine light still
rippling across the evening cloud cover, arching about the sighing, weary
houses nearby. The fading light has changed the neighbourhood, or at least
changed the way it feels to Adela, hesitating a block away from the Schooner
bar. What looked shabby and dilapidated earlier is now murky black, unified,
menacing. With all the cars speeding through, she can’t see a single cab, nor
does she have the faintest idea how to get herself out of this area. Few human
forms move around her, although she knows they must be there. The radium glow
of television sets flickers from a few windows, but it seems abandoned, traffic
simply barreling through on its way to more hospitable areas. She’s very
conscious of her own raspy breathing, quickening little by little, aware of the
pressure of her fingers on the edges of her notebook.
Trying to calm herself, she
grabs her phone in the hopes of finding some electronic directions, at least
the first steps she should take to find her way home. As she attempts to enter
the street name single-handed, still clutching her book, a shadow sweeps up
around her, shaking her away from the street and the waning sun and throwing
her into a strange, dark chamber with a sharp white light blasting from the
side. Her instinct is to try to block the light, which keeps her from seeing
anything else and at the same time, she does not want to reveal that she is holding
a notebook in her hand.
The shadow is a living
thing, it’s body forming the chamber, huge leathery wings closing around her in
a way that seems familiar, being folded back into a pre-eternity, swallowed
back into a black womb. She can feel it shudder and breathe but cannot see its
face, only the passing sparkle of its demonic black eyes as it leans in towards
her, exhaling its hot, fermented scent against her face. She can see just
enough of its chalky face to be frightened by its tortured, damned expression
and she cries out weakly.
“You need to understand,”
the Demon whispers, beginning to dissolve around her, “you’re in terrible
danger.”
And as he speaks, the force
goes out of him, his wings become shadow and his body recedes into human shape,
Julian Baker, anguished eyes pulling at her.
Adela wants to ask him what
he means. She wants to ask him why he chose to frighten her with this strange
shape-shifting trick, why he didn’t simply tell her when he had the chance, but
she can feel how little it matters. He is right. She has brought danger on
herself and others, without meaning to or knowing how.
“Come with me,” he pants,
“we need to get out.”
-106-
He’s pushing her towards
the light, towards his car, stopped crazily half up on the curb, lights still
on, engine still running, guiding her like a wayward child.
“Hey, you OK?” grunts a
male voice from a short distance off.
Adela’s aware of new forms,
shadowy figure lurking in the gloom, bodies moving as if bracing for a fight.
Julian emits a low, gravelly sound from his chest.
“I said, you OK?” the voice
booms.
Julian’s arm slides around
her, wraps over her arm so that his hand presses down on the hand with her
notebook in it.
“I’m being robbed!” Adela
shrieks, twisting violently.
“It’s OK,” Julian
interjects, sounding more desperate than she does.
“Man, you better just back
off,” another man’s voice growls threateningly. “Take your hand off the lady
and back the fuck off.”
“I said it’s nothing,”
Julian insists, but complies nonetheless.
“And I said back up,
asshole.”
Adela doesn’t wait, simply
bolts down the street, moves at top speed for as long as she can, twisting her
path at random, men’s voice and traffic sounds chasing after her until she
feels herself come crashing through a clear wall, feels herself come out of the
space where she has been trapped, a new world opening around her. She wanders
deliriously into it, aware of the change but unsure what to think until she’s
frozen by a blaring noise out of nowhere.
The car swerves by her,
horn still sounding, more voices pouring out at her, angry voices. She’s
standing in the street, traffic is flying in many directions and she’s wandered
out into it. It would be safer to move backward, she’s less than halfway
across, but instead, she pushes ahead- more noise, more voices, more squealing
tires, until there it is, where the land drops away below her feet. The ocean.
She’s reached the edge of the earth and slides down the rough embankment
towards it to rest on the sand.
The traffic still grinds
angrily overhead, but it is away from her now. Momentarily safe, her first
instinct is to scratch at the sand, to dig a hole and bury the notebook inside,
cover it up and waiting for the tide to take it, to destroy it, to erase what
has been said and thought and done and to make everyone safe again. She sits
next to the rough grave to await the tide, unwilling to risk leaving it to any
passing scavengers or agents who might have followed her this far. Wings flap
overhead, prepared to descend on her at any moment, circling and waiting for
their opportunity. She needs to wait them out.
There is sand everywhere in
her, in her skin, her eyes, her hair, not the fine white sand that she
remembers from the tropics years ago, but dirty, salty grit, the sand of the
city, of this city where she’s found herself, this city that wants to harm her
with its secrets.
Did I ask to know?
She can’t remember. Can’t
remember how all this came to pass, how her life has suddenly started to slide
apart when it seemed so solid. It was Adam. Adam some how brought this on with
his travels and his absence and, at the same time, by his monotone presence.
But why? How does Adam, who isn’t even here, bring her to an abandoned corner
of beach, waiting for the tide?
She knows where the answers
are. The answers, those that she has, are beside her, buried alive. She can
hear them still moaning, still calling out, still wanting to be complete and
she sympathises with the desire.
This is stupid, she
reassures herself. I need them.
“Even if you forget,” a
doctor has told her sometime ago, “you can’t un-know. It’s all in there
somewhere.”
-107-
-107-
Lazily, Adela paws at her
makeshift grave until she finds her book, sullied but still in tact, still
bearing the knowledge she has inside her but cannot access. She would like to
sit here with her book, waiting for the tide and the sun to show her what to
do, but no longer be frightened, she’s aware that this simply isn’t safe. The
embankment, so easy to descend in a few seconds, has no path up and so, at
length, she stands and starts to make her way long the side of the shore. And
the sand becomes rocks, wet rocks that slow her pace to nothing and the rocks
sometimes give way so that she has to jump to avoid the water, tugging at her
and daring her.
This is it. She’s crossed
over and she knows it. The water teases death but she could wander into it and
she would float back to land. The cold and rawness in her hands, the spray
wearing away the skin on her face, she’s felt those before, wandering at night,
wandering in the places that only she can go, before others come to corral her
and bring her back to the familiar. She could lay back on the water, holding
the book of her mind on her chest and she would be borne to safety and
isolation, far away under a sky of indigo and ice green, a perpetual aurora
borealis, where everything happens in the distance. And as the stones recede to pebbles recede to sand again,
she wonders.
“Lady? Lady are you all
right?” It’s a young man, a curious, elfin-looking girl alongside and holding
his hand, trying to keep pace with her as she makes her way, bedraggled and
dripping, along the shore. “Do you need help, miss?”
Being unsure of them, Adela
keeps moving, keeps staring ahead, knowing that the shoreline must eventually
take her close to something she knows. It’s night now and the wind off the
ocean has picked up. Chilled to the bone, she simply keeps walking until the
young couple gives up the chase. Perhaps she does need help, but it’s too late
now.
The sand widens, allowing
her finally to walk in something dry, but she sinks and slips and it slows her
terribly, lets more of the cold get at her, into her, until her legs are so
heavy, she has to sit. And sitting is no better, with her legs still wet and
her hands and face still exposed. And there is nothing to do but sit and wait
for strength to return to her. She’s aware of whispers, whispers and eyes at
her back, but she needs to conserve herself, so that she can begin to walk
again. Even her own shivering is sucking energy out of her, energy she needs to
make it home. Perhaps she does need help.
“Help me,” she pleads in a
ruptured voice, “help me.” To no one in particular. “I think I need help.”
The white moon is there,
high in the sky now, pulling the waters below, in which direction she cannot
tell. Out, perhaps? Although it seemed like it was coming in just a few minutes
earlier? Or an hour? How long has she been here, sitting just in this place,
hearing the languid waves slap on the shore. Isn’t the water further than it
was? But wasn’t she walking in it a moment ago? The moon is high, it’s late,
much later than when she started. But how much later?
Well if you need help, she
thinks to herself, call someone. Get someone to come and find you. This is her
sharp, practical voice, the voice her mind uses to tell her how to get out of
trouble, the voice that comes out when she’s been very, very bad or very, very
stupid.
Fine, practical Adela.
Where exactly do I tell them to come? And the voice is silenced, as it always
is when it has run out of answers.
How the hell did I even get
here?
“Is that her again?” comes
a very sweet voice on the wind.
Two people, a young couple,
both blond and attractively windblown approach from the edge of the water. They
look down at Adela, the man bending over to look into her frozen eyes.
-108-
-108-
“Yeah, it is.” He waves a
hand in front of her face. Adela doesn’t want to waste the energy it would take
to raise her head, but she dully flicks her eyelids up at him. “What should we
do?” He turns his head to the girl as he says this. “I don’t think she wants us
here.”
“Ryan, she’s hurt,” the
girl answers insistently, motioning towards Adela.
Adela is not hurt. She
doesn’t remember getting hurt. Rather, she hurts everywhere, but in no way that
other people should be able to notice. What can this girl see?
Ryan, the boy, squints in
that way people do when they try to come up with a solution. “Well we can call
911 or we can try to take her somewhere ourselves.”
“You mean like a shelter?”
Ryan shakes his head. “No,
I don’t think she’s homeless, Jen. Look at what she’s wearing. And that bag- my
dad got one like that for my stepmother for her birthday. Cost a fortune.” He
crouches in front of Adela and reaches as if to touch her, but she pulls back.
“We don’t want to hurt you or anything, but is there some place we can take
you?”
Adela shakes her head,
although she might need help. If she can just rest and stay completely still,
she’ll be strong enough to walk.
“That thing on her head
looks pretty bad,” he says to Jen.
Jen leans in towards Adela,
studying her. “Wow, yeah.”
“OK, miss, it looks like
you got hit on the head with something. Do you remember that?”
Hit on the head? Thing on
my head? Adela stares back, wanting more information. Of course she doesn’t
remember, but how would he know that?
“Call 911,” Ryan says
quietly. “Miss, we’re gonna call emergency so they can take you to the
hospital, OK? I think you might have a concussion.”
Adela nods slowly, not that
it matters, because Jen is already on her phone. How did this happen again?
Ryan looks sympathetically back at her, but backs off slightly, giving her a
little more space. Adela would like to stand and run away, but she knows her
body couldn’t do it. Besides, she’d like someone to take her home. She’d like
to be in her bed again, her overstuffed bed, looking at the moonlight shivering
on the glass in the overhead light fixture in the same way that it reflects off
this boy’s eyes.
-109-
-109-
“Adela, what the hell
happened?” Lloyd’s mouth hangs open a little as he finishes the question.
“I haven’t looked in a
mirror yet, is it that bad?”
“Well it’s not good.”
Adela’s lids are heavy, so
heavy she can barely see Lloyd standing a few feet away. He looks like a
cutout, a paper doll like she remembers playing with- when exactly? She drops
her feet to the floor and slowly starts to push herself away from the hospital
gurney.
“Hang on, hang on,” Lloyd
mutters, swooping in to steady her. “You’ve had quite a night.”
“They drugged me,” she says
bitterly.
“They gave you something to
calm you down a little and so that you won’t feel the pain.”
“I can feel pain.”
“Yeah, so imagine how you’d
feel without the drugs.”
“Did they tell you what
happened?”
“As much of it as they
know. Some young couple was hanging out on the beach and they saw you come
walking out of the water near the cliffs. An hour or so later, they’d decided
to take a walk and while they were walking, they found you again, sitting on
the beach.”
“I remember being on the
beach.”
“They said they couldn’t
get you to talk and you looked pretty out of it, so they called an ambulance.”
“Is there something on my
head?”
“A bandage. Right now I’m
wondering if there’s anything in your head. People die on those cliffs every
year. You have any idea how dangerous it is?”
“No I don’t, because it
would never have occurred to me to go running around any ocean-side cliffs at
any point in my life.”
“So…”
“My book, my book, I had it
with me.”
“You apparently got very
frantic when they tried to take it off you. That’s part of the reason they
decided to sedate you. Normally they don’t like to do that with head injuries,
but they couldn’t get you to calm down any other way.” Lloyd gives her a
questioning look. “Your notebook is in your purse.”
Think. She wants to
remember. The drugs make her brain sluggish, more sluggish and unwilling than
ever. She was on the beach with her notebook and then what? Or what before? “I
was scared by something. I was getting chased by something.” Lights shooting at
her from the dark, blaring lights. “I really don’t know.”
“You went to meet Julian
Baker. Do you remember that?”
Adela smiles and starts to
nod, but then fades. She doesn’t remember it. She so desperately wanted to that
just for a minute, it all seemed perfect. “Who’s Julian Baker?”
Lloyd starts. “Man, they
really did give you a load of those things.”
“I forget things.”
“You’ve been better
lately.”
“Have we known each other
so long?”
“Adela, do you know who I
am?”
At last she can smile. “You’re
Lloyd from the record store.”
“Well… small victories.”
-110-
-110-
“Did I call you?”
“Yes. You wouldn’t let them
call for you, either. You were apparently quite adamant that if anyone was
going to wake me up at four in the morning, it was going to be you.”
“Four in the morning?
Jesus, is it that late?”
“No. It’s after five now.”
“Oh, Lloyd, I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK. I’m glad you
called.” He hooks an arm around her waist and the two of them move slowly to
the door. “Too bad.”
“That I got hurt?”
“That you probably weren’t
in any shape to write things down. I’d love to know what actually happened.”
“Mmm… Me too.”
She has to check her
address twice in the cab on the way home. The third time she reaches for her
book, Lloyd politely asks if he can hold it and, with surprising unease, she
surrenders it. For the moment, she doesn’t want to be burdened with it. Let him
carry it for a while, until he can get her home, until he can get them to a
place where they are both safe.
Lloyd insists on paying for
the taxi when they arrive, but makes no move to get out.
“Would you like to come in?
I can make some coffee.”
His lips mouth
imperceptible words, but at length, he just says, “Thanks, but I have to go
home and shower before I open the store. Don’t want to be frightening people
off with my masculine pheromones.”
Adela laughs as best she
can. Even her face muscles seem stiff and reticent. Inside, she’s relieved,
which she hopes does not show on her face. People have been around her for
hours, prodding at her, talking at her, talking about her. Alone seems just
fine now. Perhaps Lloyd can tell.
“Wait,” he says as she goes
to close the door and thrusts her notebook at her. “You’ll want this.”
As he presses the book into
her hand, she feels two of his fingers press quickly, tightly against hers.
“Get some rest and call me
when you feel a bit better.”
And with that, he slides
away into the misty morning light and Adela is at home again. It takes her
minutes of fumbling through her purse to get her keys, not only because her
fingers feel the effects of the drugs, but because they seem to be swollen
quite stiff, covered in scrapes and cuts. Despite the painkillers, she knows
that this hurts.
As she clumsily gets the
key in the lock, the door on the other side of the vestibule opens creakily and
she is suddenly face to face with a bright-eyed old woman, hunchbacked with age
but still strangely vibrant.
“Oh good morning,” she says
pleasantly. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”
Adela shakes her head,
unable to remember ever seeing this woman before.
“Did you have an accident?”
Reflexively, Adela touches
the bandage on her head. “Yes,” she answers quietly. “I was at the beach and I
slipped on some rocks.”
“Oh dear,” her neighbour
answers emphatically. “Are you OK now?”
Adela nods. “Just a few
bumps and bruises. Nothing serious.”
“Your friend was here
yesterday, but you were out.”
Adela freezes for what
seems like a very long time, trying to figure out who the old lady means. When
had they met? Was Adam there? Nothing is cutting through the fog. Wherever they
connected, it is completely lost to Adela now.
-111-
-111-
“My friend?”
“Lovely man, really, so
smart. He came in for tea.” The woman’s grey eyes sparkle with an almost
coquettish expression. “Handsome, too.”
Adela tries to return the
woman’s keen smile, but finds herself too tired to pretend she gets the joke.
Nonetheless, the woman gives her a wink and very slowly starts to bend forward.
It takes Adela a minute to realize that she’s trying to pick up the newspaper
in front of her door. Hastily, Adela crouches to get it for her.
From inside the woman’s
apartment, she can hear the swell of a tinny brass orchestra, something that
sounds like it’s coming from a canister, something familiar, music she’s heard
before. Even at the door, the volume is higher than Adela would keep it on her
own.
“Thank you so much, dear,”
the woman says touching her shoulder, “I’ve asked them to leave it on the bench
so that I can reach it, but they almost never do.”
As Adela rises, the woman
gives her another almost sly look. “I didn’t know when to tell him you’d be
back, but he said that he’d drop by again soon.”
Adela nods and vigourously
jostles her keys to get in her own apartment.
“Nice seeing you, dear,”
the faded voice calls.
“Nice to see you too,”
Adela answers, as politely as she can.
She retreats upstairs with
purposefully heavy footfalls, wanting the woman to be aware of what she is
doing, lest her behaviour, or this mysterious visitor, have cast some kind of
suspicion on her. Her apartment seems unmolested, everything more or less as
she expects it to be and yet she finds herself almost immediately ill at ease.
Something, someone, has been in here in her absence, some strange person’s musk
hangs over the place like a mist, she can sense it without even meaning to. It
lingers despite the fact that, she quickly discovers, she’s left the bedroom
window open, allowing a good breeze to cool the place down to a damp chill. She
needs to leave a note for herself to close the window. Is that how a stranger
got in? Or did her elderly neighbour let this supposed friend in to snoop
around?
Don’t be silly, she chides
herself, how would she have let someone in? She doesn’t have keys.
Other than their landlord,
Adam and Adela have always had the same arrangement with their spare keys:
Cronos offers a service so that their employees can deposit keys and, should
they ever be locked out, someone is available twenty-four hours a day, every
day, to come to their rescue. The service also finds reliable help- cleaning
ladies, nannies, pet-sitters, people to do every sort of work one could want
around the house- acting as the guardian for any participating employees’
homes. Adela has used this service since she first moved out, called them in
the middle of the night in desperation, depended on them for every person who’s
been contracted to come into her home. Never once has she felt nervous about
the fact that Cronos has a copy of her house keys. Until now.
Instinctively, she checks
to see where her copy of the mysteriously powerful book should be and finds it
untouched. The pages remain crisp and there is no evidence of tampering.
“So if this book is so
dangerous to them,” she asks herself, “why just let me have it, let me keep it
so I can show it to everyone?” Assuming it was even Cronos who were in here.
Assuming it was anyone.
“I need to rest,” she
growls to no one in particular. She knows that what she really needs is to
sleep, because these fears, these persistent fears of being invaded, of being
violated without her knowledge, are the sorts of things her doctors have long
told her are the result of not sleeping. They’re partly right, of course. She
doesn’t think these things so much during those infrequent periods where she’s
able to sleep. Then she dreams them.
She can hear the tinny
music from downstairs give way to the morning news. Storms are the lead story
today. Strange weather we’re having, over much of the country, warnings to
people on how to secure their homes, warnings to others to abandon them. This
seems strangely far away. These storms always affect other people’s houses.
-112-
-112-
She should call her uncle.
It always seems like he has one house in the path of something. Perhaps it
would help to show him that she remembers this. And what else would she tell
him? That she’d been reading a secret exposé on Cronos? That Adam had abandoned
her, possibly for another woman? That she had spent the night wandering around
and been taken to an emergency ward by strangers? That last one, at least, would
come as no real surprise.
Adela rummages through her
drawers until she finds it among her stash of previous notebooks- the one he
brought her in the hospital to get her started again, the one that he handed to
her with that shamed, pitiful look that seemed so unlike him, that look that
stays with her more than anything else in the months before or after.
“Here,” he’d said, suddenly
shy of making eye contact, “they said you hadn’t been writing anything.”
Adam had been there,
somewhere, perhaps even in the room with them, although she doubted it. She
couldn’t imagine that he would have let Adam see him so cowed, let alone by
Adela, who normally couldn’t have intimidated a fly. And even if he had,
somehow, been comfortable showing this side of himself, he wasn’t pleased to
have Adam around at all. Never had Adam seemed more like the unreliable hired
help and Adela wonders if her time in hospital wasn’t extended in the hopes
that Adam would simply go away.
“Get writing again,” he’d
told her. “Don’t let them tell you what you’re thinking.”
Adela’s notes from this
period are often so rushed and crammed in- a reflection of how little time she
was given to herself and of her attempts to capture what parts she remembered
from having ended up there, a dark space ending in what seemed like a sudden
descent of raptors, wings flapping around her ears, claws pulling her away from
the hole in which she’d run to ground.
During her time in
recovery, she’d hidden her notebook at first, until finally, recorded in emphatic,
darker print, her uncle had simply instructed the staff to cease bothering her
about it. All her notes about new medicines they were trying and long
conversations with doctors and therapists trying either to figure out what was
wrong with her or make her believe that there was nothing particularly wrong
with her. Frequent visits with her uncle. Less frequent, at least at first,
visits with Adam.
-113-
A shrill alarm blasts through the voices and for a
moment, Adela thinks her heart has stopped. It sounds again.
Another canine growl follows followed by the
hissing sound of air and spittle sucked back through clenched teeth. The
breaths are tense, heavy but too fast, a guard dog who spies an intruder.
-113-
Her accounts of these
visits are brief, without detail, perfunctory at first. Later on, after she’d had
her surgery, his visits and her notes on them grew longer. They talked about
what they might do once she was released. Once again, there was a “we”, a
vision of a shared future. When he’d first come to see her, there had been only
a present and the idea of a past. After her operations, Adam came more often,
until he eventually gathered her up and took her home, even as her uncle’s grey
eyes whispered misgivings and safe haven in the background.
And this she somehow
remembers as if it were real: a sense of floating home, carried on a cloud of
opalescent wings, reflecting Spring colours like the sheen of a soap bubble.
She moves with a lightness, a delicacy that is not hers, that takes all weight
from her and bears her up, up so that she can barely keep her arm on Adam’s as
he guides her home. The sky and the light and the scent of the world wrap in
ribbons around her and carry her out of her stygian cloister on to a future
free of…
Even now, knees bunched up
and hands clasping an old journal as she sits in the geographical centre of her
enormous bed, her mind does not want to remember. These unnerving places, like
caves in her memory haunted by the rough crews drowned there, are things she
can never figure out how to approach. Her memories, such as they are, sit in a
rough pile, jagged edges cutting at one another and rubbing against her
present.
They would have a fresh
start, Adam reassured her in the hospital, her notes recording the pervasive
sense of discomfort he showed. Yes, they had been fighting- he never tells her
about what- and yes, she had run away, but they’d found her- he and her uncle-
and now their proverbial slate could be wiped clean and they would start fresh.
Adela, whose slate is perpetually being wiped clean, still doesn’t feel fresh.
She can feel the accumulated damage of doctors and nurses prodding and poking
and jabbing and cutting so that her insides feel like they are just great knots
of scar tissue.
Things would be different,
she notes Adam saying repeatedly, which is useless to Adela, who wouldn’t know
better anyway. Things must have been bad to make her run, or she must have
thought they were. Is telling her that these things will change his way of
acknowledging that she might have had her reasons? She doesn’t know and no one
seems to want to tell her, even her uncle who seems to wait for the word that
he should pack her up and take her with him. Adela tries to record what she’s
thinking, but can’t quite come up with it.
“Asked Joe if the people
who I was with are OK,” she notes on one page. There is no indication that he
gave a response, just a question mark hovering below it, traced over and over,
in different pens, at different times. People she was with, who took her in and
tried to help her live independently, not realizing the impossibility of the
task. Unfocused memories of unlaquered faces gleaming in the summer light, but
nothing else- no distinct features, no names, no specific place in geography.
Everything imaginary and concrete is equally real to Adela, who writes that for
all she knows they might have found her by a highway overpass eating her own
hair for sustenance. But there is something of her honeyed memories, golden and
sweet, that seems as if they might have been there. She dreams of a place
hollowed out by fire, so hot the very air seems to combust. She dreams of her
honeyed land as scorched earth and the radiant faces melted into smudgy
charcoal. For weeks, this same dream gets recorded, alongside it regrets that
her screams bring the night staff running with potions to soothe her fractured
mind.
“Did you want to stay
there?” she recorded Joe asking her.
No, she supposes she
didn’t. She wasn’t one of the honey-people, no matter how hard they both tried
to make her feel like one. Even with them there to reflect on her, she was
brown and dirty and incapable of emulating their inner light. She wanted to
feel that luminosity, wanted to nurture it in her as they did, but she had no
spark. She stayed cold all the way through.
-114-
Or possibly not. She smiles and reclines into the
embrace of a hundred thousand pillows. She was remembering. When had this
become so easy?
-114-
Strange, though, that her
uncle had asked. After he’d arrived to scoop her up and after she’d been
confined to hospital, something in him had compelled him to being it up.
Something in him was curious to know what she’d wanted on her own, wanted the
reassurance that he hadn’t destroyed a real happiness. Whether she told him so
or not, her notes following his question make it clear he did not. As much as
she might have wanted to be in that place, as much as she admired its sweetness
and pure perfection, she could never have said it made her feel at ease, which
would have made her happy.
Below her lengthy
explanation of this is a single line, traced over several times and crossed out
almost as many.
“I couldn’t have kept it
anyway.”
“It doesn’t make you any
less of a woman,” Adam had reassured her. But Adela hadn’t ever felt like much
of a woman to begin with. These
new cat scratches of scars don’t change anything for her, although, she notes a
few times in the weeks following her release from the hospital that she uses
her surgery or her changes in medication in order to justify how irritated she
gets when Adam fusses over her every cramp and ache.
“Why am I suddenly an
invalid to everyone?” she
scribbles in large, heavy letters on one page near the end.
As difficult as she might have
been, Adam had stuck with her, had continued to take care of her and be her
companion. Alone afloat her giant, tufted bed, Adela lights herself a cigarette
and wonders about that and about the woman who’d answered the phone in his
hotel room. Had he been playing around the whole time? Had there always been
some unbearably sexy thing with a taunting, weary voice hovering on the side?
It would have been easy enough, she knows, to sneak one past her, she who was
oblivious to almost everything by nature. Even if she’d discovered a clue,
she’d have forgotten it quickly enough.
-115-
Downstairs, she can hear
the radio doling out the morning’s bad news. A great roar, a million voices
shouting a single, incomprehensible phrase, follows seamlessly from the end of
the hourly theme music. Adela closes her eyes and tries to focus on the
explanation. Students protesting across Europe.
“… when a university
investigation found that graduate students working as laboratory assistants had
been used to administer tests later deemed to be unsafe and that this
information was covered up by more than half a dozen universities for as long
as ten years.”
Lab techs used as lab rats.
“Furthermore,” the crisp
voice continues, “no one seems to be able to say for certain who authorized the
tests, how many institutions were involved, or even when these specific tests
may have been discontinued.”
Adela buries her face in
her pillows, trying to avoid the mixed scent of sand and hospital clinging to
her hair.
“Rescue workers have
finally been cleared to enter the Indian town near Bangalore where an explosion
at a chemical plant followed by a catastrophic failure of the facility’s
containment procedures has exposed hundreds and possibly thousands of people to
toxic gases.”
The world, Adela knows, is
a dangerous, damaged place. She doesn’t want to imagine the faces of the people
in that town. She doesn’t want to imagine the fates of the students, forced
into unsafe work. She’d like to
exist, just briefly, in a world limited to the confines of her apartment, where
the most vexing problems are easily solved, even by her. She’d like to be able
to ignore the fact that there is an outside world. The bed seems so comforting,
such a natural place to hover in blissful stasis.
But the voices hammer away
insistently through the floorboards. The bewildering search for a killer after
the body of a young American turns up brutally murdered in Prague. The voices
bray for her, not just for answers, but for her personally. Adela Landis needs
to respond, because somehow she is responsible for all of this misery. Why else
would they be so insistent she hear them?
The polished accent of a
professional reporter articulates the latest facts: a young man’s body turned
up in a street in Prague in the early hours of the morning days before. Even
now that they know he was an American vacationing there, there is precious little
information and the tension between boy’s family and the authorities is
palpable. The shrill voice of the mama bird cuts to the forefront.
“Our son was not involved
in any sort of criminal activity,” cries the bereft mother. “He was a good boy.
He cared about the world, about all the people in it and he wanted to discover
it first hand.”
“A collection of trinkets
has been laid near the entrance of the café where Albert Salmon worked and
today, a group of his friends gathered there to commemorate the short life of a
young man filled with a passion to make the world a better place,” interjects
the cold voice of a professional journalist aping sympathy. “One young woman, a
friend since childhood, remembers that sense of justice.”
“Albert was never about
what was going on in his life,” comes the tear-choked voice of a young woman,
“he was all about how to make things better for other people. He just wanted to
get to see everything and understand everything. He was starting an
international relations program in the Fall and all he’d done since high school
was work and travel to other places to get to know them. There is nothing he
could have done to deserve this.”
-116-
“Jesus,” she mutters,
reminded, as she always is, of one of her few childhood memories: an elderly
woman assuring her adoptive mother that she was damned to Hell because of her
strange mental defect. It’s a shard, out of context, because what kind of
horrible person would even say that to a woman with a young child?
The phone shrieks again.
“Hello?” Her own voice is
surprisingly raspy, as if she hasn’t used it in days. Is that possible? Has she
been up here by herself for days? There is a long, noisy pause on the line
before the person on the other end seems to snarl a little.
“Hello?” Adela repeats, a
little alarmed. “Who is this?”
A distinct throaty growl,
like a hideously distorted recording of a laugh, rises from the receiver. It’s
a sound from a nightmare, something that’s crossed through the fog of the
unconscious and into her previous safe bedroom.
“Who is this? What do you
want?”
If Adela were someone else,
she would assume it was some kid playing a prank and hang up. But there is
nothing in the call that sounds like a prank, nothing that makes her think for
a moment that this person isn’t calling to snarl at her.
And for a moment, they both
stop, both hover in breathless silence, broken by a brisk rattle of a fist on
the front door. Cautiously, Adela advances to the edge of the staircase and
peers around the corner, barely cognizant of the raspy breathing that’s resumed
in her ear, but all too aware of the rabbit-beat of her heart as she tries to
deal with a two-pronged assault on her privacy.
Through the pebbled glass
of the door, a shadowy figure raises his arm and raps again, firmly but not
violently.
“I have to go,” Adela
mutters distractedly into the receiver, realizing as she says it how bizarre
what she is saying would seem to anyone watching.
She presses the release,
but keeps the phone cradled in her hand as she crouches down, trying to make
out the figure at her door. She’s certain it’s a man, which rules out Louise,
whose wild wreath of hair would likely be recognizable even though distorted.
It seems to tall and too squared in the shoulders to be Lloyd, who always seems
to be a little slouched when she thinks of him. But how reliable is that?
Faces, bodies, the forms of other human beings have a strangely malleable
character in her mind, like warmed wax, shaped by the simple touch of trying to
recall them.
-117-
-117-
There’s another muffled
sound from downstairs, like voices shouting, but from a great distance and the
stranger turns his head and responds. He’s having a conversation with the
voices from the other side.
The neighbour. It hits her
that he’s speaking to the neighbour, the old lady next door with the constantly
blaring radio which accounts for the cacophony of voices. She’s spoken to the
lady, recently. Before she went out? When she came back? Adela touches her head,
which is aching and is surprised by the rough edges of the bandages that she’d
forgotten.
The doorbell, more
obnoxiously loud than the phone or the knocking, sounds.
It was this morning she
talked to the old lady. It was when she got home and dragged herself upstairs.
Her neighbour knows she’s here, which means that this stranger now knows that
she’s up here, cowering in the shadows from his intrusions. Adela winces at the
thought of how often she’s been like this, shrinking away from others, from the
world as a whole, petrified and sniveling like a runt child, how it must
irritate all those who have been forced to face the world for her. There’s no
one else here now. And so she descends the stairs and opens the door slightly.
“You see,” comes the light,
weakened voice of her elderly neighbour, “I knew she was at home.”
With the sunlight cracking
through the fog behind the windows of the foyer, it takes a minute for Adela’s
visitor to come into focus. At first, what she sees is a slender form, dark
like ebony wood with bristly light hair. But it’s not what she sees that first
strikes her as the immediate sense of familiarity and unease she feels. Some
almost imperceptible scent curls off him like smoke and dusty leather and dead
leaves, dry and acrid.
“This was your friend who
was here yesterday,” the old lady explains sweetly.
Adela steps back a little
from her door, but pulls it a little further open so that her eyes can draw a
bead on the figure before her. And as she does, she feels herself grow even
more puzzled at the angular, lantern-jawed smile of a longtime friend beams
back at her. It is a face she knows, but not one that makes her feel like
smiling. Rather she tilts her head in curiosity.
“Oh dear,” he says
politely. “How on earth did that happen?”
“Poor thing hurt herself,”
volunteers the neighbour. “down at the beach.”
Her guest smiles
solicitously and nods to the door adjacent. “I’m glad I’m here to take care of
things, then. Thank you again for the tea yesterday.”
Adela begins to back up the
stairs as her apparent friend invites himself inside.
“Please,” he begins,
holding his hand up as if to motion her to stop, “I’m sorry if you don’t
remember meeting me.”
“I do know you,” Adlea
responds dully, tightening her grip on the railing.
“You don’t remember my
name, though.”
“No.”
“My name is David. We met
at Moebius. And at the restaurant upstairs. We had dinner together with my
friends Chris and Daniel and your friend-“
“Louise.” Adela pictures
herself drinking beer, two young men playing chess. Louise. “One of your
friends- he and Louise…” Adela can’t think of a polite way to express it.
“Yes, although I promise
you, he’s harmless to her.”
“Is he harmful to other
people?”
“I suppose everyone is
under the right circumstances.”
-118-
-118-
“Is that supposed to make
me feel frightened?”
“No,” David answers
quietly. “It’s the last thing I want to do. Quite seriously, he’s been trying
to get a hold of Louise, but hasn’t been able to. He was worried he’d done
something to offend her.”
“And he sent you to talk to
me?”
David shakes his head
again. “I assure you, I’m only here to speak to you. No ulterior motive
whatsoever.”
Adela is still
apprehensive, but also curious. “Come upstairs then.”
She turns and walks up
herself, seating herself primly in one of the living room’s smooth velvet
chairs. David glances at the sofa, but remains standing in the doorframe.
“Is your head OK?”
“Yes, I spent the night at
the hospital, but they released me. I’m just a little banged up.”
“How did it happen?”
“I slipped on some rocks
along the waterfront.” Uncomfortable talking about her midnight excursion on
the beach, the mad, hallucinatory images flitting through her mind of what
happened there, she adopts as firm a tone as she can muster. “But you came here
to see me about something.”
“Yes, although I’m not
quite sure where to begin.” For the first time, he looks slightly flustered,
edgy. “I just… When I met you- when we first talked- I was quite impressed- you
seem to know a lot…”
“About what?”
“I’m getting this all
wrong.” He seems legitimately to be struggling to find words, like he’s
speaking a foreign language. Something of Lloyd’s disdain for him, distrust of
him, hovers in her memory.
“While you’re trying to get
that figured out, can I ask how you knew where I lived?”
David smiles and seems to
regain his footing. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t remember
that.”
A tight knot jerks into
place in her stomach. “Remember what?”
“You were at Moebius by
yourself one night. You’d had far too much to drink and possibly more than
that. The bartender couldn’t get you to leave even after they’d closed- so I
helped him get you home. I hope you’ll forgive me, but we had to check your
wallet to get your address. I hadn’t realized who you were until then.”
“Who I was?”
“Adela Landis. I knew your
first name, but I never connected it with your father. Or your uncle, I’m
sorry- he is your uncle, right? Joe Landis?”
“Yes.” Adela wishes he’d
sit down, if only so that she weren’t forced to look up at him like a student
towards her teacher.
“Did you know I used to
work for Cronos?”
“A lot of people have
worked for Cronos over the years.”
“You’re avoiding the
question, but fine, it was a bit pointless. Better for me to have said it
straight: I worked for Cronos when I first came out of university. I was
actually kind of a prize- top of my class as a metals engineer.”
“Cronos likes those sort of
prizes. They get a lot of them.” Adela purses her lips, the way she’s seen
other women do, expressing a sense of indulgent superiority. She’s already
becoming lost in the thicket of this man’s conversation and she’s fairly
certain he hasn’t come close to the difficult part yet. But perhaps pursed lips
and slightly arched brows will be enough to fool him.
“That’s right, I forgot.
You worked in the Human Resources department for a while.”
Adela feels her mask crack,
feels as if something is literally breaking over her face, exposing the inside
of her brain. Yes, it’s true, when she was very young, one of the jobs her
uncle had given her was in the human resources department. She knows this,
although she can’t remember what she was doing, for how long, or even exactly
when it was. But when he says it, something in her knows it to be true.
“How… how did you know
that?”
-119-
-119-
“I kept in touch with some
people after I left. I understand that there were quite a few of them who were
sort of fascinated by your charms… from a discreet distance.”
Adela shakes her head a
little.
“I doubt it would be anyone
you knew well. Just the sort of typical fascination with the boss’s daughter-
or niece in this case. Although I suppose you were more like a daughter. Your
story was kind of a company legend.”
“My story?”
“Well, there were people
who had been there a long time and stories get passed down. And it’s an
interesting story, after all.”
“I don’t mean to be rude,
but I’m not really comfortable talking about this with you. And it’s more than
a little unnerving to have a near-complete stranger show up at my house and
start reciting bits of my past like he’s been following me around for years.”
David made an awkward
little bow. “I’m very sorry to have offended. Please be assured that it was
unintentional. I’m a bit of a student of Cronos Corporation, that’s all. And as
such, the anecdotal history of the company is something I’ve paid more
attention to than most.”
“Is that what brought you
over here? You’re interest in Cronos?” Adela suddenly feels something
uncomfortably familiar: the sensation of being a science experiment, or a lab
animal. Something to be poked and observed. A physical pain, a burning as if
her blood is turned to lava, shoots up from her throat to the top of her head,
propelling her out of her seat with the force of a rocket. The pain is enough
that she wants to collapse, but she stays standing and conscious and panting,
audibly, for breath.
“What is it? Can I get you
something?” David asks with what sounds like real concern.
A few minutes, or seconds,
or perhaps longer, when Adela is able to breathe and think more clearly, she is
faintly surprised to find herself back in her living room, a little damp with
sweat, supported by David’s wiry arms, his round grey eyes fixed on hers.
“Are you back?” he
whispers.
Adela nods, too frightened
of the pain coming back to ask him for his perspective on what just happened.
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