Janus (31 page)

Slowly he turned to look at her. His eyes were steady, watching for her reaction. His lips thinned in what might have been meant for a smile. “I was a doctor.”

She was compelled to listen.

He talked for a long time, in a quiet, controlled voice, describing what he had been and what he had done, giving details, all the time with his gaze fixed on her, hardly blinking. He was tense and still, making no gestures, hardly ever turning his head or looking away while he found the right words. The speech came out of him as if he were reading it from the air between them.

“So now you know,” he said finally, and waited, still watching her.

The cold had sunk into her bones. She could feel nothing but the tension that petrified her, that would shatter her if she tried to move. Then she saw how the same rigidity held him; she saw his eyes looking out from it. “You’ll never be happy now,” she whispered. “Never again.”

He flinched, as though a cold gust had struck his face. His gaze lost focus, then returned to her with full intensity. “That’s all you have to say to the monster? You’re not appalled.”

“It’s in the past, what you did,” she said, clinging to the last illusion. “It’s over.”

“Is it?”

Of course it wasn’t over: he was making plans. She said nothing.

“If you’re not appalled,” he whispered, “you should be terrified.” There was intense concentration in his face now. She could almost see the opposing tensions threatening to pull him apart. “You should get out of here and run for your life.”

If she moved, he might spring at her. If she got up, if she left, she would tear herself open. “Is that what you want?” she asked. “Do you want me to run away from you?”

He shoved the chair back and stood up. For a moment he loomed towards her. Then he had turned and was pressing his forehead against the window. “I enjoyed it, what I did—I still enjoy it. You realise that? And to women. You don’t know what you’re risking. You haven’t seen—you can’t know . . .” He swung round to face her with his fists held shaking in front of him. His face was white. It contorted, and was immediately expressionless again. Through bloodless lips he whispered, “Why are you doing this to me? Why did you come?”

“What am I doing to you? Say it. Say it, say it—because otherwise I’ve gone mad and tied myself to a monster that doesn’t care for me or anything human.”

“Care for? Is that what you want me to say?” For the first time, he was shouting. “Care? Like a six-year-old with a best friend—with a kitten? Did the arena bull
care
for the dart in its flesh? Does the whale
care
for the harpoon? If I could rip you out of me, I’d do it, and be myself again.”

“But you can’t,” she said, and was briefly, shockingly comforted. “We can’t.”

“No,” he said flatly, “I can’t . . . So we’re tied to each other. Is that what it’s come to? Conjoined twins? If one is destroyed, the other goes too.”

“And if we try to cut the bond, we bleed,” she acknowledged. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can help each other. We can be stronger than we were separately. Oh god—don’t look like that. It must work. It has to. We’ve got to make it work.”

“That—that leaflet was right. We’re insane, both of us. Or if we’re not, this will drive us mad.”

“Jesus Christ. . . . Yes I know.”

He had been gripping the back of the chair with both hands. Now he scraped the chair across the floor and moved towards her. “Why did you have to come here today? I was . . . I had it all coming into place. Everything was clear. It fitted: who I was, what I was going to do—and I’m still going to do it! I am! They’ll see what I am, all of them. They’ll hate me, they’ll scare their children with my name, but they’ll remember. . . . And you’ll hate me. You hate me now, part of you does, and you hate yourself for being here. Hate and pain and fear—they’re what make people act, they make us what we are, because you can drive out anything else with them. Anything at all. And they last. Have you seen a man who’s been broken by pain, or who’s just discovered the strengths of his own terrors? He’s marked for life—deeper than if he’d lost an arm. And love—have you seen what happens between a man and a wife when pain is used to divide them? Or between a mother and child?”

“Stop it! You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to be this way. Give it up—”

“Don’t I? Don’t I really?” He fumbled with the fastening of his sleeve, then tore the button off and ripped the cloth back from his arm. He brandished his scars at her. “How do you think I got these?” Before she could speak, he snatched up a glass and swung it against the edge of the table. Shards flew and the remains glittered in his fist.

“Glass,” he said, and thrust it towards her. “It’s sharp, it cuts. It hurts.” Then he brought the splinters to his arm and began to rake them along his scars. She saw his wrists quiver with strain, his free hand spasm and clench.

“There was a window,” he said, between ragged breaths, “in the passageway from the garage, when they took me to the treatment centre back there. It looked into a storage area. An old window in a grey wooden frame. I disabled one of the guards and put my fist through it. Then I raked my arm. They had a tight schedule; I knew they wouldn’t have time to get rid of the scars. I wanted something to remind me, when I got to this side. If necessary, if I’d had time, I’d have gouged an eye out. I’d do it now.”

On his forearm the glass left ragged white furrows that turned red and dripped. He faced her until her gaze was wrenched back to his eyes. “Tell me now it’s not necessary,” he whispered. “Tell me I can give up anytime. Tell me I can stop being what I am.”

“God damn you, you can try! Is hurting the only thing that matters to you, is that all you understand? You think because you do that to yourself, because you’re in pain, it justifies anything? It doesn’t. It’s a show, it’s to convince you more than me.”

She had risen and moved close to him; but when she reached for the glass in his hand, his wounded arm jerked up and he seized her wrist. The shards with their red smears and globules threatened her face. “
I
am,” he muttered. “Not some puppet they think they’ve made.”

She forced her gaze back to his eyes. “I won’t beg.” Her tongue was shrivelled, her lips numb. “Either use that thing or give it to me.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what happens. So many of them start out like that, saying they won’t talk, they won’t confess, they won’t beg.”

“Add me to your list then, or let me go. Your arm needs bandaging.”

She moved her free hand, found his shirt sleeve, felt towards the wrist. She would not look away from his eyes. His skin was hot and damp. His hand quivered, but was immovable as the handle of a locked door. She dared not look down to see if her fingers were smeared with blood. She found the glass, sticky when her thumb brushed a sharp edge, then smooth and cold. She tugged, and it came into her hand. His fingers slipped from her other wrist.

She did look down. The glass was clutched in her fingers, a cruel, leaking gem. On her other arm were yellowish marks, as though she had been manacled, darkening as she watched. Carefully, she reached out and put the glass on the table. It rattled as it left her fingers. She pulled her arm back and turned to him. Her mouth spoke. “Let me see your wrist.”

Her body made its way to the bathroom, found bandages, returned. It wrapped his arm like a parcel, with fingers as brittle as glass tongs. When it was finished, her hands tied the bandage, and, marionette-like, she walked back to the bathroom with the remainder.

When she returned, he had picked up the broken glass from the table and was testing its edges with his thumb.

She screamed and ran at him.

“
Throw it away!
”

Glass shattered on the floor. She struck out, shouting, trying to hurt, then to seize him, shake him—

And then they were clinging together, their shared solidity the only refuge in a world gone to chaos. There was no room in them for gentleness. Instead of warmth there was desperation, and passion in place of hope. Her body felt weak as if it had been beaten, so that she looked for bruises when she bared it. But there was only the pale vulnerability of a drowned swimmer in the light of the morgue.

He was faceless with the light behind him, tearing his shirt off—his head drawn out into a horned grotesque—and black as his shadow. Then he came to her, cold waves of light sliding across his skin, his face that of a man awaiting execution.

He went to her, and his shadow slid from her face to enshroud her body. His skin trembled, as though he had been charged with lightning, and to discharge that tension would flash him out of existence. And yet the tension would not be borne. He was compelled towards her; and though she was the one who gasped and arched when they touched, he felt the shock throughout his body.

Before, she had been motionless; now she seized him and writhed and choked against his cheek. He could no longer help her, only let her hold him, and hold to her himself, while something in his spine, in the back of his head, and finally close behind his eyes, tightened and pulled and stretched, and would not, would not break. His mouth strained wide. He had lost sight of her, and darkness covered his eyes. The only sounds were the sounds of suffering. And the tension bent him backward without promise of release.

She spasmed and moaned aloud, then fell silent, then moaned again. His eyes flickered open. Her face was crimson, crumpled like a newborn child’s.

He bent towards her—and the tension broke. The shock of discharge surged through his limbs and erupted into his brain—a white incandescence of sensation beyond pain or joy, that obliterated all he had ever been.

Slowly he came back into himself, into suspension between the poles of his existence. His cruel hand smoothed and caressed. His clinical eyes watched, and were clouded. His awareness, his vision of future possibility was shrinking to encompass only this other human, this other sack of vulnerable struts and pulp. His practised fingers touched flesh, and they trembled.

She stirred, slowly and heavily rising from her private depths. Her eyes were closed, turned away from his face, their lashes wet. Helpless, he held her against the hollowness in his chest.

Her jaw moved against his sternum several times before the words came. “I can’t stay here. That’s what it comes down to. We’ll just keep torturing ourselves if we go on this way.”

She slipped away from him and began to dress.

When she left, he watched her through the window until she was out of sight. The sun was sinking towards the mountain tops, and the inland passes were spilling cloud into the valley. Catching the sun as it came in along the river, a dirigible descended towards the landing field. He turned away and went to clean the blood and glass from the floor.

The next weekend, Elinda let Carlo take her to a dance. In her closet she rediscovered a cream silk blouse and a maroon calf-length flared skirt. She tried to lose herself in the primitive energy of the music and her sheer physical exertion on the dance floor. Then she had one or two drinks too many. The bass was booming in her head.
Obstinate
, she thought,
obstinate bass, it never changes.