Not Dark Yet (8 page)

“I haven’t,” Narayan said. “I assume he’s at home taking care of himself. At least he should be.”

“How did the owl room look?”

“Awful. I called the university’s cleaning service, but all that blood seemed dangerous so I wiped up a little first, and threw it in the biohazard bin before they arrived. But everything is clean now.”

“What about the owl?”

“I put it in the freezer for dissection later on. Who knows, the bird might have been sick, injured, or had some kind of parasite, which caused the sudden change in behavior.”

He nodded. “Let me know if there is anything I can help with.”

“Not much we can do about the owl now,” Narayan said. “But better it than professor Kaye. How badly was he hurt?”

“I didn’t see the wounds clearly, they had to be cleaned first,” he said. “But I’m certain the owl missed Kaye’s eyes. He wouldn’t have been sent home so quickly if not.”

“Good point. It can’t have been that serious then.”

“I left the camera bag in the owl room, but will pick it up as soon as I can. If Kaye calls tonight, will you let him know I said hello?”

“Of course.”

He downloaded, prepared, and sent the last batch of photos to Kaye’s email account. Then he sent the professor a text message wishing him a good and speedy recovery. He didn’t stop by Kaye’s house, thinking that the professor needed sleep to heal. Instead he went home to the honeycomb towers.

He texted Michael, but there was no reply. Maybe Michael was still at work, preparing mathematical simulations of financial risk that were going to run the whole night. He showered
and pulled on the terrycloth bathrobe and slippers he had pilfered from some hotel abroad, padded out to the elevator, and upstairs to the swimming pool. At the time of planning, a pool on the top floor probably seemed like a good idea to draw more buyers to the overpriced apartments instead of a few large and even more difficult to sell penthouses, but now, with the towers built and populated, not many inhabitants seemed to have the time or the inclination to use the large space and water.

As usual at night, the cold unlit room beneath the vaulted glass ceiling was empty, and the water’s surface still. He stepped out of his slippers and left the bathrobe on one of the white plastic chairs furthest away from the pool so it wouldn’t get wet. Then he dove in and swam two laps, fifty meters, under water, with slow, deliberate motions, finishing each arm stroke before starting on the leg stroke. When that was done he crawled fifty laps on the surface, quietly, in the darkness. Afterward, he floated in the water for a long time while he watched the cloud of stars at the center of the galaxy rise above the silhouette of the marsh and the city center in the distance, feeling like every shining point of light moved and lived inside him.

“Sometimes when I think about you, it’s like there’s nobody there,” Kaye once told him. They were lying in the broad bed on the second floor of Kaye’s house. As the dining room downstairs, the bedroom was filled with antique furniture in a ruddy wood with carved legs and miniature pilasters: the stout double bed, a two-door closet with matte elliptical mirrors, and two bedside tables. Paperbacks, hardbound, and jacketed books, mixed with academic journals and photo prints were stacked in a blast radius around the bed.

“I’m here,” he said. “I always am.”

10

HE DIDN’T RECEIVE ANY MORE REQUESTS FOR photographic assignments from the faculty, but nevertheless sent them his resignation letter, preferring to believe that he had preemptively quit, rather than been fired.

Beanie, Michael’s sister, came over. At first she was yelling a stream of unflattering descriptions because she had recently thrown her boyfriend out, despite not being able to pay the rent on the apartment they shared on her own. But as her anger cooled it turned to tears.

“It’s so unfair!” Beanie said, crumpling the tissue paper he had offered her against the crying, and which she had wept and blown her nose into several times, and threw it against the living room wall. “Just because he’s a cheating bastard, I have to move out! I love that apartment! I found it!”

He wanted to go and pick up the moist wad and place it in the bin in the bathroom, but instead he said, “Why don’t you come and stay here?”

“And live with you?” Beanie said, but then lowered her head and voice. “This apartment is too small for two people.”

That was the argument Michael had used when he’d suggested
they move in together, more than a year ago. “No, I just need a house sitter,” he said.

Beanie pulled another tissue from the plastic pack in her lap and wiped her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said, “but I can’t afford it. Freelance music producers don’t earn that much.”

“I’d rather have someone I know stay here instead of renting it to strangers,” he said. “I could pay part of the cost if you wanted to stay and look after the cats.”

Beanie lit up so much he regretted not having mentioned it sooner. “Would you really do that?”

He nodded.

“For how long?”

“A few months,” he said. “Maybe half a year.”

She frowned. “Where are you going?”

“Work.”

“Did you sign up again?” Beanie looked as if she had been waiting for it, that she thought he was stupid enough to do that.

“No,” he huffed. “It’s not like that.”

“Thank goodness,” Beanie said, her relief as touching as it was annoying. She looked at him. “Does Michael know?”

“I’ll tell him soon,” he said.

“You must.”

“I will. I promise.”

Beanie stood. “All right,” she said. “I’ll start packing right away.”

“But no smoking,” he said. She wasn’t allowed to when she was visiting.

Beanie sighed, then bulged her upper lip with her tongue at him to emulate the small packets of ground and moistened tobacco that had become increasingly popular, even among women, as smoking became less and less accepted. “I’ll have to start snuffing then,” she said.

He made steak and a green leaf salad for dinner, no rice nor pasta, and a shake of blueberries, lemongrass, and spirulina for dessert for Michael and himself. After the meal they watched the news together: floods to the north, crop failures on the eastern continent, hurricanes on the western continent, drought on the entire southern continent, food prices going up all over the world, demonstrations, riots, wars.

“I thank the gods every day that we live in a place that is peaceful and has few natural disasters,” Michael said.

When the news was finished, he brought the laptop over to the sofa and showed the image on the screen to Michael.

“I’ve found a cabin,” he said.

Michael leaned past him for a closer look. The red one-story structure had been photographed from the air. The nearby hillock wasn’t tall enough to put the cabin in shade and in the far distance a lake glittered under the blue sky, making the area look generous and sunny. The cabin’s sharply gabled roof was dark with solar cell panels and the deck in the front was unpainted, but tidy.

“There’ll be lots of mosquitoes with all those trees nearby,” Michael said and started scrolling down the website to the realtor’s information about the property. “How old is this thing anyway?”

“Just a decade,” he replied. “But it’s built from re-used wood. It was the previous owner’s pet project.”

“‘Has its own well and solar cell panels, no municipal water supply or electricity,’” Michael read. “That’s certainly basic. Are you sure the previous owner didn’t die from a heart attack while cutting firewood or pumping water from the well?”

“No,” he said, “she died at home from old age.”

“So the previous owner is dead,” Michael said. “And how on Earth do you know that?”

“I phoned the realtor,” he said.

“You’re serious about this?”

He nodded.

“Are you leaving?” Michael said. “Without me?”

“That’s why I’m showing you the cabin,” he said. “Come with me.”

“For how long?” Michael said, frowning.

“I don’t know,” he said. “For as long as necessary.”

Michael sighed and looked at him as if he were a beloved, but naughty puppy who had just peed in his favorite shoes.

“I can’t,” Michael finally said. “I have my family, my friends, my job here. And what are you going to do up there anyway?”

“Renovate the cabin?” he said, but it came out much less certain than he had intended.

Michael gave him the look again. “You’ve already bought the place, haven’t you?”

He nodded.

When he was a toddler his mother took him to a nearby park that had a large circular fountain on its thin lawn. The fountain’s shallow but wide basin was bounded by a simple concrete ring. The fountainhead in the middle was dry and had rusted shut a long time ago, leaving the water smooth and dark. He enjoyed sitting on the circumference while stirring the lukewarm, algae-green water and watching the reflections caught in its surface. As the mirror images of the knobby trunks and leafless branches of the brutally sheared oaks behind the pool trembled and merged into one other, the sound of the surrounding children and their guardians muted to nothing. Even from far away the fountain blinked like an eye between the streets and houses.

When his parents found a new home in another neighborhood they stopped going to the park and he forgot about the fountain, until his teens, when he started seeing a round body of water the color of the sky in his dreams. As an adult he once
passed through the park by coincidence. Recognizing the footpath that led up to the fountain, he began to hurry, eager to see if the eye of water was really there at the top of the hill, as it always was in his dreams, or whether it was just something he had made up. He ran the last stretch, expecting to see only brown grass and bushes shivering in the cold spring gale, but when he reached the top of the slope, the fountain was there, its encompassing basin shallower and more algae-filled than before, the flagstones littered with gravel from the winter’s ice and snow, and the oaks grown taller and thicker than he remembered them. He marveled at having found the place from his childhood that he still visited in his dreams, and sat by the pool for a long time, watching the reflections of the bleak clouds rush across the sky in the water. Having revisited the site in his waking life, he never saw the fountain again in his dreams.

The train line from the honeycomb towers was closed due to a power failure in the grid, so he had to take a bus to the central station for the journey to the mountains and the cabin. On the way there the street filled with people: women, men, young, middle-aged, elderly, who carried posters and banners, shouted slogans and sang, and banged on the windows of the bus and the other vehicles that came to a halt. The crowd was protesting against the city council’s increased taxes and the cost of utilities such as water, power, and renovation. The bus driver pulled into a side street to get away from the demonstration, but even there the traffic was choked by people.

After half an hour with barely any movement, the passengers became restless. First, a man in a suit and tie rose from his seat and told the bus driver to open the door to let him out on the narrow pavement. The man exited and was swallowed by the crowd. Fifteen minutes later a young couple in fleece jackets and large backpacks exited the bus too. The traffic remained still for a while longer, then started and stopped a few times,
like a vehicle with ignition trouble, before it flowed again. But because of the detour and the unfamiliar streets he couldn’t tell if they were getting nearer or further away from the station. The small TV screens above the seats were filled with news images of buildings on fire, vessels spilling refugees in a stormy sea, livestock carcasses drying in parched fields, canoes navigating flooded suburban gardens. Then they showed another demonstration, in another city, on another continent, it wasn’t clear which, maybe from several different places, not just one. He took in the images of the political manifestations on TV, and marveled at how it was mirrored by the shouting crowd that surrounded the bus, before he turned his gaze back to the throng on the screens.

11

THE WATER IN THE OLD POT HAD BEGUN TO BOIL, convection bubbles bursting on the surface of the liquid. He reached for the handle to move the pot off the flame, but a brightness flared inside him and flooded his mind. He was familiar with the brightness; it was nothing new. He had first seen it in his sleep when he was little. At that time it caused nothing more than slightly painful contractions along his spine. During the previous spring the brightness became impossible to ignore, but he had gradually grown used to it. After the initial blast it usually faded to a glow behind his thoughts, but now, in the solitude of the cabin with nothing to distract him, the brightness overtook him. He was distantly aware that his legs buckled beneath him and that he banged against the stove, faintly hoping that he wouldn’t knock the boiling water over and glad he had placed it on a ring in the back. Then the light outshone everything else. Inside it, he was what he had been before he was born and what he would become when his body was forgotten.