By Blood We Live (38 page)

I actually shook myself. To wake myself up. I was stupidly determined to finish the poem. (Though the memory of Devaz curled up on his bunk came back, suddenly. Bloomed in my head like a big cold flower. Tomorrow I would have to try to speak to him. How was I only just thinking this? My own dumb belatedness appalled me, though the soothing bedroom said Don’t be so hard on yourself.
Had
I been drugged? Everything here seemed out of sync with itself. For a moment I found myself wondering if even Konstantinov and Natasha … No. They were all right. The pounding love and pounding vigilance testified. Christ, what was wrong with me? I thought of the way I’d just sat down alone in the library when I arrived, just sat down like a moron and asked for scotch and picked up the goddamned book. As if I was waiting to meet a minor dignitary.)

Roland, utterly hopeless now, crosses the stream to find himself confronted by an impassable mountain range.

But I knew. The thing is you know. All readers of this poem know, by the time they get to the mountain range.

My head felt swollen and hot.
Wulf,
sick of all this reading, had started up again, torn through the scotch-and-codeine gauze and was raking me with foul-tempered kicks and swipes. The nearness of my own dream, my only dream, the dream to which I’d been reduced, was like a deep space very near me—like a vortex opening in the bed: fall through, let myself drop softly through and there would be the vampire, the sex—paradoxically dense and transcendent—the dusk beach and the black water and the handful of stars.

The words wandered, sprouted insect wings, buzzed and whirred away. All the day’s separate madnesses I’d absorbed without protest grew back in me to their proper unassimilable size. It was as if I’d let the hours and days put one by one more and more soft heavy things on me, and now was realising too late that I couldn’t breathe, that I was suffocating.

You’re just exhausted. This is just
tiredness
, Lulu. I imagined my father telling me this. I imagined I was a little girl. I felt small, at that moment, in the big bed. The dream pulling me like a black hole. I was going to go into it. There was no not going into it.

Of course you know. The whole poem’s a piece of escalating déjà vu. Like falling in love. Like
falling
in love.

Roland stands looking up at the Dark Tower—and you realise that until this moment in the poem you’ve never wondered what the point of
finding it is. It’s a quest—yes—but what will be gained by its fulfilment? The poem doesn’t tell you and you don’t ask. When you start reading you sign the contract. Like the contract you sign with life.

And when he does find it? This thing that’s all but killed him and sent every one of his companions to their bloody and debased ends?

T
HE WHOLE THING
so far had been me catching up to my own stupidity. In the cab from the hotel I realised I didn’t even know if he was here. If he was home. I had the landline number. Why hadn’t I just called? Because I was scared of hearing his voice? Because hearing his voice would remind me—just like Leath’s had—that I was nothing?

But I had his voice in my head anyway. Had had it ever since. His voice in my head and the bump of his heart beating against me. The heart that felt as big as a bull’s head.

He lived in a house on a hill fifteen miles southeast of Bangkok. Google Maps got me as far as an aerial shot. I couldn’t drag the human figure in for a street view. Satellite showed a red roof and a paved yard—salmon pink—with colourful plants in big tubs. A small pale blue swimming pool. I thought of how every time a TV ad wanted to show you success they showed you someone in a lounger by a pool drinking a cocktail. All the pools in satellite aerial looked like blue mosaic tiles. I thought how I wouldn’t ever see a pool in sunlight again. Not in real life. I imagined how weird it must have been for Fluff to have lost daylight thousands of years before there was TV and photography and the Internet. Before proper paintings, even. I’d asked him what it felt like seeing daylight on film. He said at first it was a miracle. He said he cried when he saw his first movie in colour, just sat there with tears streaming down his face. Then after a while it was like breathing recycled air.

The cab dropped me half a mile away, on a road that wound up the hill. It was after two a.m. Sunrise in three hours and fifty-six minutes. I didn’t want time. I wanted to have to get in and out, fast. Time was like someone alongside me who could be unpredictable, could nudge me into something stupid. The Thai air was the way I remembered it—soft and crammed and warm—but ramped-up by my new nostrils. Sweating asphalt and the land full of the sweet dense greenhouse stink and somehow no matter
where you were the smell of frying ginger and coconut and rice starch and drains. The hill had palm trees growing three or four deep on either side of the road. White gravel tracks led off to each of the couple dozen houses. Halfway up I looked back. There was a floodlit driving range down below I hadn’t noticed on the way here. A few guys smoking and laughing and whacking golf balls. They looked a little drunk. I wondered for a moment if he was down there, if he was one of the guys. But when I focused I saw they were young and dressed in the gear, those dumb check pants and v-necks, even the prissy shoes. I couldn’t see him in anything except the dark blue overalls that stank of engine oil and cigarette smoke and sweat.

At the wall running around the pool patio I stopped. My hands were shaking. There were two lights on in the house (a bungalow, though it couldn’t have been more different to Leath’s shithole), one behind the frosted glass window of what I guessed was a bathroom, the other in a bigger room at the other end of the house. I’d kept asking myself what I’d do if there was someone with him. I’d kept telling myself I’d know how to handle it if it happened. Except I hadn’t, really. It had just kept going round in my head like clothes in a dryer. I’d just let it keep going without knowing what I’d do. Without really even believing it was possible.

I went over the wall.

That helped. The ease of it. The strength and silence I was still getting used to. That was like a friend that would be with me now, always.

The front door was unlocked.

It led into a small, white-tiled hallway with nothing in it except a wet pair of bathing shorts on the floor. There was a smell of bleach and burnt onions. The room with the sound of the TV was two doors up, on the right.

H
E WASN
’
T ASLEEP
. He was sitting in a rattan chair next to the bed in his underwear, with his feet up on the bed and a laptop on his lap. Details come at you. The first thing I noticed was that the big toenail on his right foot was black. His feet were big and fat.
He
was big and fat. His chest was full of cobwebby dirty grey hair. The room smelled of whiskey and cigarettes. His face had a bulldog underbite (badly fitting dentures) and jowls like pears. His thin hair was grey, swept back, but his sideburns and eyebrows still had black in them. His head seemed huge. There was a drink and what looked like some sort of croissant on a small white plastic table next to him.

I felt the floor pitch under me. Had to grab the door handle to stop myself falling. The noise startled him, violently.

The laptop fell. I didn’t look at what was on the screen. I knew what was on the screen. The screen was something I’d fall into.

It would have been comical, the way he tried to pick up the computer and cover the front of his underpants. In the panic he accidentally kicked the laptop further away from himself. It hit the base of the bed and half-shut. He fell on his knees trying to grab it. It was like a fist in my gut, the way a separate part of me could see it would look comical on a YouTube video. There was a book at home in LA.
Ways of Seeing.
There was a sort of exhaustion, if you saw things enough ways.

“What the fuck—What the
fuck
? Who are you? Get the fuck … What the fuck do you think you’re doing in here?”

“Nothing,” I said. It seemed to take a long time to say that one word.

“Who are you? This is a fucking … This is a private …”

Something about the way I was looking at him. I could feel how still I’d gone. I could feel him suddenly thinking I had a gun. Because there was no fear coming off me.

I wasn’t afraid. Only pressed down on again by the temptation like a
heavy drug to just lie on the floor and let whatever was going to happen happen. Let it all happen again. The thought of his life, all these years—images came: him pushing a shopping cart around a supermarket, bored; him emptying an ashtray; him lying on a sun lounger squinting at a beer in the sun—and nothing had happened to him for what he’d done. He’d won the lottery. He’d won a fortune. I’d heard a Catholic nun on TV once saying that bearing suffering was the route to grace. Forgiving those who inflicted suffering on you was the route to grace. I remembered Fluff saying: If there’s a God he’s addicted to faith. Because without evil there’s no need for faith. I can’t get excited about a God whose divinity depends on a drug habit.

“What are you on, fucking
crack
?” he said. His erection had gone. Now that he stood upright I could see the little pouches of soft fat above his knees. His gut was big and shiny. I could feel the panic in him subsiding. Now he didn’t think I had a gun. He just thought I was on something. Yet at the same time, because of what he’d done, because of what he was, because of all the seconds and hours and days and years of hiding it, his mind was still racing over all the possible ways this might be connected to it, might be because of what he was.

The disgust came up again. The disgust which, if I didn’t act—

If he hadn’t moved, if he hadn’t taken a step closer, I might have stayed paralysed.

He went over when I hit him. I don’t remember. My feet were off the ground. I felt the air moving under me. A cheap white-framed oil painting of a matador sticking a bull (heart as big as a bull’s head flashed, the beguilement) in reds and golds went by. A digital clock with a flickering number nine that reminded me of when you’re short of sleep and your eyelid twitches.

Don’t drink.

Because I didn’t want to know.

My fingernails went so easily through the soft flesh of his throat. I was on top of him. His body was like a tough waterbed. His face came close. I could see the capillaries in his eyeballs. Smell the whiskey dehydration on his breath. I could feel the bull’s head heart. The familiarity of it butting me.

Honey, I’m gonna make you so dirty you ain’t
never
gonna scrub clean.

Don’t drink.

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t. I
didn’t.

I got a grip on the wet tubing of his throat and pulled. A lot of it came out. His eyes couldn’t open wide enough to fit this surprise in. Miles away, his legs were kicking, trying something, some shift of weight. It wouldn’t help him. His feebleness brought the tiredness and disgust up in me again. The power I had over him made me furious and empty. I felt my thumbnail go through a big slippery vein. An artery, I guess. Blood went through the air like a Spanish fan. I wanted something, I didn’t know what—for it to be more, for it to be enough, for it not to be ordinary. The ordinariness of the facts—the veins, the blood like a weakening water fountain, his fat heels thudding, his face going through all its pointless expressions—just made the fury and emptiness worse. I knew, suddenly, that I wouldn’t go see my mother. She’d be just another collection of facts. A small collection. This was what happened, I realised: the ordinariness of the facts shrank a person—or rather, made you bigger, once you could see them, made you bigger than them, made them something you could contain, whether you liked it or not.

Don’t drink.

But in the end I had to. You have to. You have to know.

I
T RAINED
. H
ARD
. One of those absurd South Asian downpours that come like a sudden burst of religious conviction. Caleb had insisted on accompanying us, much against his mother’s wishes. Partly out of fascination with my condition.