The Man In The Wind (13 page)

       There was only one time he ever felt in danger of being found out. A young man he’d met at the fountain had launched into one of these hand-me-down legends, but unlike everyone else, he qualified his story with the declaration that his grandfather actually owned one of the posters upon which the necromancer had been identified. The boy was about the correct age to be a grandson to someone of Iris’ generation, and Rai fought with himself for the whole afternoon about whether or not to ask about it. If it were true and he was exposed, there might be some trouble, or there might be none at all. Most likely, it’d be noted that he bore a striking resemblance to the man in the photograph, followed by the usual tame jokes about holiday costume potential. As it turned out, however, he didn’t need to ask, because the young man left and came back at the beginning of the evening with the fabled poster in his hand. Rai saw immediately that it wasn’t authentic, and he relaxed enough to have a good laugh about it with the others. Somehow, that revisiting of the past actually made him feel better about it, as if it really was all water under the bridge and he wasn’t just pretending.

       But the mention of the poster stirred up the aching loneliness he felt after Iris died. The thoughts of her were little, jagged reminders of how much he had loved her, how much he still loved her, and how much he had yet to love anyone else. There had been girls, sure, but they were nothing more than passing interests, little flirtations with only shallow potential. He did not feel he had it in him to pursue something greater. He was perfectly aware that he had fallen into the fallacy of comparing future relationships with a past unattainable standard, but he was okay with that. Being alone was what he needed at the time.

       It was not what he needed when he thought about Iris while playing chess in the park. Stored away in his brain was a recollection of a conversation they’d had one night on the porch. He couldn’t remember the sound of the cicadas, or the temperature of the air, but he felt the warmth of her body against his as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, nestled in the crook of his arm. As was his habit, he’d kissed the part of her hair.

       “Do you believe in an afterlife?” was what she had asked him.

       He shrugged. “The concept of an afterlife is a romanticism of death. I have trouble getting around that.”

       She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed the side of his face. “That’s understandable. But I like to think we get to go somewhere new after we die, because if this is it, that’s so….awfully small.”

       “Yes, your family’s massive wealth is awfully small.”

       Iris frowned. “You know what I mean.” He did. He supposed that if death were an issue for him, he might want to believe that he’d get to continue on after leaving this life. The thought of ceasing entirely was sobering.

       “So, what?” he said teasingly. “Do you think you’re going to come back as a housecat and get spoiled all day again?”

       She smirked. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ll be a lion.” Resting her head on his chest, she lapsed into silence for a while. Then her eyes brightened. “We should do an experiment.”

       “How do you mean?” he asked warily. At this point, he had known her long enough to understand that sometimes her ideas were dangerous. If she was calling it an experiment, all bets were off.

       “Well…you’re going to outlive me, right?” It was the first time she brought it up so directly, and it kind of made him wince.

       “Yes,” he had said, as shortly as possible.

       “So why don’t we test the theory of reincarnation? After I die, you start looking for me and see if you find me again.”

       “What? That sounds crazy.”

       “You know what else sounds crazy?” She turned his face so that he was looking right at her. “Jumping off a fifty foot tower ledge. But you did that anyway, didn’t you?”

       The point was well made and well taken. He’d agreed to test her theory, just for the sake of her happiness. And fittingly, that’s what he was thinking about the very first time he saw the girl.

       The first thing he noticed about her was that he had never seen her before, and for someone who spent the majority of his time in the same collection of places, her newness stood out. She started appearing in the summer, when she’d come and sit on the lip of the fountain with a big pad of paper spread across her knees, and she’d paint until it got too dark to see what she was doing. Then she packed up her things and went away, heading east down the park boulevard. Even though he found her supremely interesting, Rai took care not to pay too much attention, lest he scare her away or attract the suspicions of others. But she always sat on the side of the fountain nearest the winged horse, and so he always saw her.

       During the winter, she wouldn’t be outside, because the temperatures would freeze her paints; he often spotted her ensconced in a booth at the restaurant across the road, another slightly smaller pad before her on the table. In the restaurant, she drew with pencils or pen and ink. He became as familiar with her habits as he was with his own, but not because he made a point to. They were just two people coexisting in the same vicinity. They grew accustomed to one another’s presence. One day, he decided to stay in, and the next morning she was waiting for him at the fountain, watching for his approach. Eye contact was made. He waved. She waved back. As he got close enough, she greeted him, the first words they had ever exchanged. Her smile was sunny and infectious. He liked her immediately.

       “It’s weird,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve ever spoken, but I definitely noticed you weren’t here yesterday.”

       He nodded, somewhat apologetically. “I had something else to do.”

       “No, yeah,” she said quickly. “I mean, it’s not like it’s fair of me to expect you to show up all the time. But you’re here so often, it’s like you live here.”

       He gestured to the chess table. “I have been told that no one sits here, even when it’s empty.”

       She laughed. “No one was there yesterday. You could probably take it home with you and nobody would say anything.”

      He agreed, and then he examined her closely for a moment. “Excuse me for asking,” he said, “but who are you?” A sweet, slightly coy smile graced her pretty face, softened her sea-blue eyes.

       “I guess I should be asking you the same.”

       Rai observed the girl, turning something over in his mind. For some reason, the interaction was jogging his memory, taking him way back to a time he hadn’t thought about in years. He could see himself standing in the dingy shadows of the castle cell, face to face with a girl who’d just broken in.

       Shouldn’t I be asking you the same?

       On a whim, he followed the script in his memory. “Technically, I was here first.”

       She sighed. “Okay, fine.” Then she stuck out her hand, which was long and slender. “My name is Lily.”

       He offered his. They shook. “I’m Rai.” He was struck by the fact that she, too, had a floral name, and by the way in which she ran her fingers through long, dark hair.

       “I come here to paint stuff for the castle,” she said. “They hang it up in there for a while, and then they sell it and I give them a new one.” Serberos’ castle was home to the Museum of Mythology, the same institution that had donated the fountain. He had seen her paintings there before: rich, vibrant depictions of dragons and great whales and serpents with five heads.

       “Those are yours?” he said. “They’re good.”

       “Thanks!” She dropped her voice conspiratorially. “I heard the castle used to be a dungeon or something. Do you know anything about that?”

       “A little. There’s a whole legend around it.”

       Lily’s eyes sharpened, and he knew her interest was piqued. “Would you tell it to me sometime?” she asked. “Do you think it would make for some good paintings?”

       “Yeah,” Rai said. “It might.”

       That was how he ended up telling her the whole story of him and Iris. He told it truthfully, something he had never done, but he passed it off as hearsay. She devoured it. While he talked, she sketched absently on her pad of paper, drawing out the scenes as he described them. She drew the desolate tower chamber, the Queen’s abandoned bedroom, the inside of Iris’ tent. Rai noticed that when she drew him, it did look an awful lot like him. When he pointed it out, she smiled a little and said, “He reminds me of you, that’s why. It seems like you could have been brothers.”

       When he wasn’t telling her rebranded tales about his secret past life as a necromancer, he was teaching her how to play chess. He found very quickly that her artistic temperament didn’t often have the patience for strategy and preferred to analyze the way the shadows moved across the squares, or something equally abstract. Rai was too fond of her to be a firm teacher, and they rarely ever finished a game before veering off into debate or other conversation. Occasionally, if he was playing on his own, he would catch her watching him. Upon meeting his eyes, she’d blush and turn back to her painting. Finally, one day, she asked if she could paint him.

       “Not for the museum,” she said quickly. “You just…make a nice figure, sitting there. It would be a good study for me.”

       “Do I have to stay still?”

       She shook her head. “Do whatever you want. I’ll be fine.” That struck a chord with him too, and he must have been looking at her strangely, because she tilted her head and asked if he was okay. He said yes, and the moment was gone.     

       True to her word, the painting of him never appeared in the museum. In fact, he didn’t see it until much later, after he and Lily had started dating. She brought him back to her cozy little loft one night, and before they made love, he saw it hanging on the wall above her desk. “Do you like it?” she asked, nuzzling his neck tenderly.

       He said yes, and kissed the part in her hair.

       It was interesting when he realized that Iris and Lily had become interchangeable in his mind. He could see one as well as he saw the other, and he often thought of them together, as if they were one entity. It made him wonder if Iris had been right after all, if there was such a thing as reincarnation. Lying in bed with Lily at night, her body curled up against his, he’d run his finger along the smooth curve of her hip and think, Have I found you? He was hesitant to say he knew for sure. There were so many things about her that were the same, and yet, there were so many people in the universe that he was all but certain he could find someone similar to Iris and still not identical.       

      But maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe it was about growing and moving on, allowing old wounds to scar over. No, he couldn’t keep Iris forever, and he wouldn’t be able to keep Lily, but wasn’t that part of their beauty? They were so temporary, so fragile asleep beside him. And he was their constant. He would keep each one as long as he could, and when it was time for her to go, he’d let her. And it wouldn’t hurt. And he’d be happy, because he’d know that in a little while, she would return to him.

       It was a nice thought. He noticed that he’d been having more and more nice thoughts where he was awake at night. His mind no longer felt the need to dwell on things that happened in the past. There weren’t issues he couldn’t get over. He was awake because he wanted to be, not because he had no choice.

       He felt okay again. He told Lily that she was pretty and he was very fond of her. She smiled and said, “I’m glad I found you.” That was almost all he needed.

       Then came the one warm afternoon when they were sitting together on the fountain and she was drawing a study of one of his hands. She turned it over, traced the contours of the palm, and said, “Do you ever like, meet someone and even though you haven’t met before or you don’t know them very well yet, you feel like you’ve known them for a really long time?” He watched her draw his index finger.

       “I don’t know,” he said. “But I haven’t met a lot of people, so maybe it just hasn’t happened yet.”

      She picked up the pencil and ran the soft, blunt tip gently down his neck, where she knew the skin was sensitive. “I feel that way about you,” she said. “It’s like I knew you somewhere else and I just forgot about it. And I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet you again.”