Paris Twilight (26 page)

Good, then, I've amused you. But I want you to tell me, in the meantime, what all that we've been through means. What did it mean that Maria Xavier came to her murder not by accident but with a purpose, and was murdered for the purpose of her coming, what will you tell me of that? That it was all in the service of mankind and progress & fulfilling our moral responsibility & making this a better world? Then I will truly hate you & you do not have my blessing. For that is the coward's way out, & damn the coward who thinks this is about usefulness, for each time as she spun around Maria's eyes met mine. Or about the greater good and our duty to each other. It cannot be just that. I have an answer for this too (I have been using my time here well), though you will not like my conclusion, for it entails a conversion of sorts. And you see that I have run through my paper, & so you get a stay, but I will continue in the next, poor you, you cannot escape, I love you that much. Forgive my ranting, and Alena begs me to convey her incoherencies. (Like mother . . . )

—A.

 

And so that was her letter, and I confess by the time I finished it I'd developed a brand-new theory about the root cause of Carlos's suicide, for had I been as desperate for news from a loved one as he must surely have been, and had I received, instead, this—Boo! My love, a lecture!—I too might have felt inclined to stick my tongue in a light socket (were that a method sufficiently violent to confirm my aristocracy).

But as I ate a so-called dinner (a crust and cheese) and then drank by lamplight a second glass of white Bordeaux, my dismissive reaction curdled into serious claustrophobia. Not because of my own narrow confines—the snug room was actually a comfort—but because of the threat closing in on the woman in the letters, a juggernaut of harm. She seemed so adroit, this Alba, so full of light and air. Even her densest ruminations were agile, and her darkest ones irrepressible, and that made her situation the more unbearable to me. Her child made a hostage . . . Alba's dawning comprehension that the monster she faced was implacable, that it would consume her no matter which course she took . . . then eat up her girl, for good measure. Once again, how glad I was for my blessed childlessness! Alba's vulnerability was compounded exponentially by her daughter's, and her peril made doubly perilous.

Triply! For I already knew what Alba could not about her future, that beyond her current trials, something more horrible yet awaited her. The morning's news crashed in on me, belatedly. Oh, Daniel, what a disastrous kinship we shared, me and this woman! Not a year hence, she would know what I do, what it means to be bereft in war, to lose your lover to violence. Of course, what happened to you and what Carlos did were different things, Daniel. Still, I felt smothered, as though Alba's fate had reached through the decades to wrap me in a headlock.

Finally, wanting to escape and animated by a persistent anxiety, and deciding of a sudden that my dinner was disappointing and that one cannot live by day-old bread alone, I hopped up and shod myself and headed out to the ToujoursBonne!, the corner market on the boulevard that would still be open on a snowy Sunday night. I took the long way around and walked one more time down rue Nin. No sign of Corie. On the way home, I veered up Nin again, a dread still roiling in my mind.

 

“
Haraam
also indicates blood,” Emil had said that morning as we sat by his fire discussing the catastrophe that had destroyed the life of Carlos Landers, and he'd gone on a bit about suicide being a cardinal Catholic sin but Islam being the world religion that most explicitly forbids such action. “Suicide is prohibited blood. Maybe we should convert your comrades.”

“My . . .”

“Anesthesiologists,” he said. “Morrison, Massenet . . . Didn't you say your mentor—”

“Maasterlich,” I said. There were times when Emil knew too much for my own good, and here was an instance, though what he knew I'd told him—that Maasterlich had killed himself.

“Well, then, so it's true. Your specialty has the highest rate of suicide? You're like the Sweden of occupations,” Sahran said. I allowed that some people made that claim, but it wasn't a subject I wished to pursue and I wasn't sure it was very fair to Sweden.

“What could explain this?” he said.

“Don't know,” I said. “We also like to fly airplanes.”

“Pilot them?”

“Yeah. Own them, fly them. Don't ask me why.”

“That's interesting,” he said. I wasn't sure it was. He said, “Maybe it's just availability.”

“Of planes?” I said.

“Of drugs. You work every day with curares and belladonnas and barbitals, whatever, these exquisite poisons. It makes it too convenient, when things are looking grim, don't you think? An easy solution.”

I conceded that that might constitute a factor, though more people attributed the danger to the “availability” of a rollicking good time, for anesthesiologists know what a blissful state our poisons can induce. “‘The most delightful physical sensation I ever enjoyed.'” I lowered my chin to my chest to achieve a masculine register.

“Who said that?” Emil asked.

“Old Stonewall,” I replied. “Jackson. The general. Before he died. Obviously.”

“Ah, back on the battlefield,” Emil said. “But he didn't die by his own hand, did he?”

“Shot by his own men,” I said. “So I heard. Does that count?” I'd learned a good deal about old Stonewall over the years, and not just at your graveside. In any anesthesiology program, he's a darling of the curriculum, having been a prominent early adopter. I told Emil how the surgeon had administered chloroform and the Confederate general had reported back, “Blessing, blessing, blessing.” “Maybe we just want to find out what the big deal is,” I said.

Though I didn't really believe that then, and I especially don't now, after all that's happened.

“But that's not what you really believe,” Sahran said. Knowing too much.

“Well,” I said, “no, since you ask. I think actually the connection with the flying is more to the point, if you want to get right down to it. We're like air traffic controllers; we like running the show, but we miss the travel. We spend our lives sending people off on journeys, and they never tell us where they've been, and it's tempting to want to go and find out for ourselves.” I asked him if I'd already told him a story.

I said, “Stop me if I have.”

He said, “French Broad? I don't think so.”

So I gave it to him as the old man had related it to me as I stood beside his supine form and started the IV in his arm, the old man's story of his trip on the river with his son.

The boy was a teenager, the man had told me, and he'd tried to give him some basic knowledge, before they set out in their canoes, how there were two things to watch out for that could kill you on a river: hydraulics and whirlpools. Both were currents that plunged straight down, and both would suck you under. But to survive, you had to know which was which—that was the trick. If it was a hydraulic, you had to fight like hell, because everything it took in, it smashed against the bottom and held there, and sometimes a body wouldn't be released until it was dynamited loose, and occasionally not even then and you had to wait for the season to change and hope for the current to slack. A whirlpool was the opposite. It would release you after it had sucked you to the bottom, but only then. You couldn't possibly fight it, and if you tried to resist, you could drown yourself with exhaustion. The way to survive a whirlpool was to let it take you and hope you came out the other side.

“Are you with me?” I asked Emil. “So this man, he's on the river, it's a mile-wide stretch of river, apparently, and he comes upon a whirlpool, and he skirts away and avoids it, but then he sees his son's canoe has been caught. It's roaring, it's impossible to yell and be heard. He can see his son fighting, and see him losing the battle and getting pulled to the center, and he sees the boy remember his advice and stop paddling. He lets himself go.” The boy reaches the eye of the current and the boat flips upright and everything springs out of it, the boy and his gear, and then they're all swallowed down and they disappear.

And the old man starts his vigil.

Had he told his son right? He'd never actually been through a whirlpool himself. A minute passed. A second minute passed. The old man floats on the surface of the water and counts the seconds and waits. Whirlpools are most often in the middle of the river, like here, and hydraulics are behind an obstacle, a dam or a rock shelf, but not always and you can't always tell from the surface which is which. It's beautiful out, a beautiful day. The kingfishers are skimming the calmer currents for minnows. A damselfly, petroleum iridescent, adopts the old man's canoe prow as its private lily pad; it alights, drifts away, alights again to dry its wings. And then, some time before the third minute ends, a paddle shoots out of the current, high into the air, and soon after it comes the boat, breaching up vertical and collapsing on its side with a splash.

And then, at last, the boy. He's nearly sodden dead. But he'd grabbed enough breath and had managed to hold it, and he clutches the side of the waterlogged canoe and gasps and pukes while the old man paddles down to him. “When the man—he was an old river guide and a hard father—reached his son's side, he said to his son, ‘You all right, boy?'

“And his son wheezes, ‘Yes.'

“And the old man said, ‘Well, then, gather up your gear and let's go.'”

That was the story, and I told it to Emil in such detail because I'd rehearsed it to my lonesome self so many, many times over the years, imagining into it damselflies and kingfishers. And especially, I'd rehearsed the way the old man ended it, with his stone-cold stoicism concealing the wreckage inside of him, and all that that stoicness implied—love withheld, restrained, but felt—that he'd then tried to ask me about. The only reaction I'd ever had on finishing telling the tale to myself was silence in my mute-stunned mind, and that's what Emil gave it now, a long, long silence, staring straight at me, and I wondered if he was thinking of young Odile and of standing by her bedside, waiting for her to surface. He said, “That's a mighty elaborate story for someone to tell as he's going under.”

“He was fighting it,” I said. “And then he quit fighting. Do you know what he said as he let go? He said, ‘Now I'll know where my boy went.'”

“Really!”

“Because his son could never tell him, you see. And I think maybe that's what Maasterlich was doing. I don't think he meant to die. I think he meant to come back. It's just that he'd sent all these people away—that's what we do. And he wanted to go where he'd sent them.”

Emil nodded and stared at the fire. “Couldn't he just get operated on for something or other? Then he'd know.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I have, and I know it only makes the mystery worse. You still don't know the answer when you wake up, and it makes you want to go again, and deeper.”

“What if,” Emil said, and he continued on with his speculations, but my mind had slipped the scene and fastened somewhere else, on another what-if he'd uttered the day before. “What if she thinks she's figured it out, that the only way to make love last a lifetime is to cut the lifetime short?” That's what he'd asked. “The problem's real,” he'd said as we sat in the Citroën headed to Reims and imagined Corie's heartbreak, “but the solution's a sin.” That's what my fallen Muslim said: suicide was a cardinal Muslim sin.

And maybe that was the thought—the conflation of Corie and suicide—that had me marching nervously past the Wisteria for the third time today, like a sentry on endless duty. Approaching the building on my way back from the market, I was elated at what I saw—a light was burning in the top-floor window. She'd returned! For the nth-plus-one time, I pressed the buzzer.

Exactly as on the nth, I got no answer. Not the one I was listening for, anyway, though I quickly received another kind, inaudible. Above me, the light went dark.

I turned in dismay. A slap! Surely Corie must know who it was calling at this late hour, she could easily see me from the window, did she look, and did she think I wouldn't notice the rebuff? Was she watching now, as I beat a stung retreat? My way back home was a long crooked grumble of chagrin—what had I been thinking, presuming such informality?—and I added to the mystery of the curtness of the darkened window the odd little detail I'd glimpsed through the fence as I slunk from the site. There, in the snow in the blue-white evening, was something so small in its consequence that I was a couple blocks away before I considered what it implied: two sets of boot prints traversing the Wisteria's yard, one set pushing off into its darkest corner, and the other coming back.

The other coming back. “I do wonder,” Emil had said as we'd come across town that morning—he'd been pensive and preoccupied since our talk by the fire—“who took the longer journey. That day, I mean. Really, who had more happen to him? The boy struggling all the way to the bottom of the river and back? Or the old man floating above him, the father with nothing to do but drift and wait and hope that his son survived? Did he say more? Afterward?”

“No,” I answered, and I would have preferred to let that be all I said. But Emil persisted.

“Didn't you talk to him after?” he asked.

I shook my head and gave him the truth of it. “It was unfortunate,” I said, stoic. “It was a risky procedure. He knew that going in.”

“T
HE USUAL?” PASSIM ASKED
when I took my seat the following morning, and he brought me my customary espresso and customary newspaper, along with something I hadn't expected and didn't want, marked with the customary
confidentiel
. To my anticipated question, he proffered his customary response to any catastrophe survivable or dire: he shrugged.