River of Gods (14 page)

Dr. Ghotse slips the file player into his jacket pocket. No ITMA
today. Or any other day, it seems. Thomas Lull picks up the hardback
copy of Blake that has sat beside every bed he has ever made home. He
weighs it in his hands, then puts it into the case.

"Come on, I've coffee on the go."

The rear of the boat opens in an impromptu veranda, sheltered by the
ubiquitous coir matting. Dr. Ghotse lets Thomas Lull pour two
coffees, which he does not much like, and follows him out to the two
accustomed seats. Swimming kids splash in water two degrees lighter
and cooler than the coffee.

"So," Dr. Ghotse says. "Where you will go?"

"South," Thomas Lull says. Until he said it he hadn't an
idea of a destination. From the day he had moored the old
rice-kettuvallam to the backwater shore, Thomas Lull has made it
clear he was only here until the wind blew him on. The wind blew, the
palms beat, the clouds passed and dropped no rain, and Thomas Lull
remained. He had come to love the boat, the sense of beachcombing
rootlessness that would never have to prove itself. But she knew his
name. "Lanka, maybe."

"Island of demons," Dr. Ghotse says.

"Island of beach bars," Thomas Lull says. Schubert reaches
his allotted end. The waterkids dive and splash, drops clinging to
their dark grinning faces. But the idea is in his head now and will
not leave. "Maybe even get a boat over to Malaysia or Indonesia.
There're islands there where no one will ever know your face. I could
open a nice little dive school. Yeah. I could do that. Hell, I don't
know."

He turns. Dr. Ghotse feels it too. Living on water makes you as
sensitive to vibrations as a shark.
Salve Vagina
rocks subtly
to a tread on the gangplank. Someone has come aboard. The kettuvallam
shifts as a body moves through it.

"Hello? It is very dark in here." Aj ducks our from under
the coir awning on to the rear deck. She is dressed in the same
loose, flowing grey of the night before. Her tilak is even more
prominent in the daylight. "I'm sorry, Dr. Ghotse is with you, I
can come back later."

Say it,
Thomas Lull thinks. Her gods have given you this one
chance, send her away and disappear and never look back. But she knew
his name without meeting him, and she knows Dr. Ghotse's name and
Thomas Lull has never been able to walk away from a mystery.

"No no, you stay, there's coffee."

She is one of those people whose smile transforms their entire face.
She claps her hands in small delight.

"I'd love to, thank you."

He's lost now.

The hour clicks over to thirty and Lisa Durnau bubbles up from deep
memory. Space, she decides, is the dimension of the stoned.

"Hey," she croaks. "Any chance of some water?"
Her muscles are beginning to twist and wither.

"Tube to your right," Pilot Captain Beth says without
looking up from her board. Lisa cranes round to suck warm, stale
distilled water. The woman pilot's men friends back on the station
are chattering and flirting. They're never done talking and flirting.
Lisa wonders if they ever get round to anything, or are they so frail
and attenuated that anything approaching a fuck would snap them in
two? New memory steals up on Lisa.

She was back in Oxford again, running. It was a city she loved to run
in. Oxford was generous with paths and green spaces and the students
had a culture of physical activity. It was an old route from her
Keble time, along the canal path, through the meadows of Christ
Church, up Bear Lane on to the High and then dodge pedestrians to the
gate of All Souls and through on to Parks Road. It was good,
physically secure, familiar to the foot. Today she turned right past
the back of Merton through the Botanic gardens to Magdalen where the
conference was being held. Oxford wore summer well. Groups of
students were encamped on the grass. The flat thump and yell of
soccer carried over the field, a sound she missed at KU. She missed
the light also, that peculiar English gold of early evening with its
promise of seductive night. Set in her evening were a shower, a quick
squint at the completely unsuspected mass extinction in Alterre's
marine biosphere, and dinner at High Table, a formal thing of frocks
and jackets to conclude the conference. Much better to be out in the
streets and people places with the gold light moth-soft against bare
skin.

Lull was waiting in her room.

"See you, L. Durnau," he said. "See you in those
ridiculous, clingy little lycra shorts and that tiny tiny top and
your bottle of water in your hand." He stepped towards her. She
was glossy and stinking with woman sweat. "I am going to take
those ridiculous little shorts right off of you."

He seized two fistfuls of elastic waistband and jerked down shorts
and panties. Lisa Durnau gave a small cry. In one motion she peeled
off her running top, kicked off her shoes, and jumped him, legs
around waist. Locked together, they reeled back into the shower.
While he struggled with his clothing and cursed his clinging socks,
she showered down. He barged in, pinned her against the tiled wall.
Lisa swivelled her hips, wrapped her legs around him again, trying to
find his cock with her vulva. Lull took a step back, pushed her
gently away. Lisa Durnau flipped back into a handstand, locked her
legs around his torso. Thomas Lull bent down, went in with the
tongue. Half drowned, half ecstatic, Lisa wanted to scream but fought
it. More enjoyable to fight it, half asphyxiated, inverted, drowning.
Then she pinned Lull again with her thighs and he took her dripping
and wrapped round him, threw her on to her bed, and fucked her with
the quad bells ringing curfew.

At High Table she sat next to a Danish postgrad, starry eyed at
actually talking to an originator of the Alterre project. At the
centre of the table Thomas Lull debated the social Darwinism of
geneline therapy with the Master. Other than glancing up at his
words, "kill the Brahmins now, while there aren't that many of
them," Lisa did not acknowledge him.

Those were the rules. It was a thing of conferences. It had begun at
one, it found its fullest expression at them. When it came to its
allotted end, the rules and terms of disengagement would be drawn up
between conference items. Until then, the sex was glorious.

Lisa Durnau had always thought of sex as something that was all right
for other people but was never part of her lifescript. It wasn't that
fantastic. She could live pretty happily without it. Then, with the
most unexpected of people, in the most inconvenient relationship, she
discovered a sexuality where she could bring her own natural
athleticism. Here was a partner who liked her sweaty and
salt-flavoured in her beloved running gear, who liked it
al fresco
and
al dente
and seasoned with the things she had locked
up in her libido for almost twenty years. Pastor Durnau's sporty
daughter didn't do things like play-rape and Tantra. At the time her
confidante was her sister Claire in Santa Barbara. They spent
evenings on the phone going into all the dirty details, whooping with
laughter. A married man. And her boss. Claire's theory was because
the relationship was so illicit, so secret, Lisa could unfold her own
fantasy.

It had begun in Paris in the departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle
Terminal 4. The flight to O'Hare was delayed. A fault in Brussels air
traffic control had backed up planes as far out as the East Coast.
BAA142 was on the board with a four-hour delay. Lisa and Lull had
come off an intellectually gruelling week defending the Lullite
argument that real and virtual were meaningless chauvinisms against
heavy attack from a cadre of French neorealists. By now Lisa Durnau
just wanted to climb her porch steps and check if Mr. Cheknavorian
next door had watered the herbs. The board clicked over to six hours
delay. Lisa groaned. She had done the e-mail. She had updated her
finances. She had looked in on Alterre, going through a quiescent
phase between bursts of punctuated evolution. It was three o'clock in
the morning and in the boredom and the tiredness and the dislocation
of the limbo of the brightly lit lounge between nations, Lisa Durnau
leaned her head against Thomas Lull's shoulder. She felt his body
move against hers and she was kissing him. Next thing they were
sneaking into the airport showers, with the attendant handing them
two towels and whispering
vive le sport.

She liked to be round Thomas Lull. He was fun, he could talk, he had
a sense of humour. They had things in common; values, beliefs.
Movies, books. Food; the legendary Mexican Friday lunches. All that
was a long way from fucking doggie style on the wet tiles of a
Terminal 4 shower cubicle, but in a sense not so far. Where else does
love start but next door? You fancy what you see every day. The boy
across the fence. The water-cooler colleague. The opposite-sex friend
you've always been especially close to. She knew she had always felt
something for Thomas Lull; she had just never been able to give it a
name or an action until exhaustion and frustration and dislocation
took her out of her Lisa Durnau-ness.

He'd had them before. She knew all the names and many of the faces.
He'd told her about them when the others went back to their partners
and families and it was just the two of them with the jug of
margarita and the oil lamps burning down. Never student flings, his
wife was too well known on campus. Usually one nighters on the
conference circuit, once an e-mail affair with a woman writer from
Sausalito. And now she was a notch on the bedpost. Where it would end
she could not say. But they still kept the thing about the showers.

After the dinner and the drinks reception they extricated themselves
from the knot of conversation and headed over the Cherwell bridges to
the cheaper end of town. Here were student bars that had not
succumbed to corporatisation. One pint turned into two, then three
because they had six guest real ales.

Halfway down the fourth he stopped and said, "L. Durnau."
She loved his name for her. "If anything should happen to me, I
don't know what, whatever happens when people say, 'should something
happen': would you look after Alterre?"

"Jesus, Lull." Her name for him. Lull and L. Durnau. Too
many Ls and Us. "Are you expecting something? You haven't got.
anything?"

"No no no. Just, looking ahead, you never know. I could trust
you to look after it right. Stop them sticking fucking Coke banners
on the clouds."

They never made it through the rest of the guest ales. As they walked
back to the halls through the warm, noisy night, Lisa Durnau said, "I
will, yes. If you can swing the faculty, I will look after Alterre."

Two days later they came in to Kansas City on the last flight of the
night and the staff closed up the airport behind them. It was only
jet lag that kept Lisa Durnau awake on the drive to the university.
She dropped Thomas Lull at his sprawling green place out in the
burbs.

"See ya," she whispered. She knew better than to expect a
kiss even at three in the morning. By the time she got up her steps
and through her screen door and dumped her bag in the hall the
accumulated bodyshock rolled over her like a semi. She aimed herself
for the big bed. Her palmer called. She thought about not answering
it. Lull.

"Could you come over? Something's happened."

She had never, ever heard his voice sound like that before.
Terrified, she drove through the greying predawn. At every
intersection her imagination cranked up a new level of dreads and
possibilities but back of them all was the master fear; they had been
found out. The lights were all on and the doors stood open.

"Hello the house?"

"In here."

He sat on the old rollback leather sofa she knew from faculty
barbecues and Sunday sports days. It and two tall bookcases were the
only pieces of furniture in the room. The rest had been stripped. The
floor was bare, the walls carried picture-hooks like hanging Spanish
question marks.

"Even the cats," Thomas Lull said. "Right down to the
toy mice. Can you believe it? Toy mice.

You should see the den. She took her time over that one. She went
through every single book and disk and file. I suppose it's not so
much losing a wife as getting rid of a collection of Italian opera
favourites."

"Had you?"

"Any idea? No. I walked in and all was as you see it. There was
this." He held up a piece of paper. "The usual stuff,
hadn't been working, sorry, but it was the only way. Don't try to get
in touch. You know, she has the gumption to get up and lift
everything without a word of warning, but when it comes to the fond
farewell, she comes out with every fucking cliche in the book. That
is so her. That is so her."

He was shaking now.

"Thomas. Come on, you can't stay here. Come on back to mine."
He looked puzzled then nodded. "Yes, thank you, yes."

Lisa picked up his bag as she steered him to her car. He suddenly
seemed very old and uncertain. At her house she made him hot tea
which he drank while she made up the spare bed, out of sensitivity.

"Would you mind?" Thomas Lull asked. "Could I come in
with you? I don't want to be on my own."

He lay with his back to Lisa Durnau, folded in on himself. Photosharp
images of the desecrated room and Lull tiny as a boy on his big man's
sofa startled Lisa awake each time she approached the drop into
sleep. In the end she did sleep, as the grey of predawn filled up her
big bedroom.

Five days later, after everyone telling him she was a cow and how
well he was doing and he would get over it and he would be happy
again and there's always your work/friends/self, Thomas Lull walked
out of the worlds real and virtual without a word, without a warning.
Lisa Durnau never saw him again.

"You'll forgive me, but this seems a somewhat unorthodox way of
curing asthma," says Dr. Ghotse. Aj's face is red, her eyes
bulge, her fingers twitch. Her tilak seems to throb.