Runaway (42 page)

Them
means the people at the theater, or the organizers of the entertainment, whoever they are.

She says nothing. She stands in front of the mirror looking at herself, and then still bearing the weight of her heavy costume and hair—it is a wig—and of her spirit, she walks around the
room as if there are things to be done, but she cannot settle herself to do anything.

Even when she bent to take off Ollie’s shoes she has not looked into his face. And if he shut his eyes the moment he landed on the bed—she thinks this—it might have been to avoid looking into her face. They have become a professional couple, they sleep and eat and travel together, close to the rhythms of each other’s breathing. Yet never, never—except during the time when they are bound together by their shared responsibility to the audience—can they look into each other’s faces, for fear that they will catch sight of something that is too frightful.

There is no proper space against a wall for the dresser with the tarnished mirror—part of it juts across the window, cutting off what light can get in. She looks at it dubiously for a moment, then concentrates her strength to move one corner of it a few inches out into the room. She catches her breath and pulls aside the dirty net curtain. There on the farthest corner of the windowsill, in a spot usually hidden by the curtain and the dresser, is a little pile of dead flies.

Somebody who was in this room recently has passed the time killing these flies, and has then collected all the little bodies and found this place to hide them in. They are neatly piled up into a pyramid that does not quite hold together.

She cries out at the sight. Not with disgust or alarm but with surprise, and you might say with pleasure.
Oh, oh, oh
. Those flies delight her, as if they were the jewels they turn into when you put them under a microscope, all blue and gold and emerald flashes, wings of sparkling gauze.
Oh
, she cries but it cannot be because she sees insect radiance on the windowsill. She has no microscope and they have lost all their luster in death.

It is because she saw them here, she saw the pile of tiny
bodies, all jumbled and falling to dust together, hidden in this corner. She saw them in their place before she put a hand on the dresser or shifted the curtain. She knew they were there, in the way that she knows things.

But for a long time, she hasn’t. She hasn’t known anything and has been relying on rehearsed tricks and schemes. She has almost forgotten, she has doubted, that there ever was any other way.

She has roused Ollie now, broken into his uneasy snatch of rest. What is it, he says, did something sting you? He groans as he stands up.

No, she says. She points at the flies.

I knew they were there
.

Ollie understands at once what this means to her, what a relief it must be, though he cannot quite enter into her joy. This is because he too has nearly forgotten some things—he has nearly forgotten that he ever believed in her powers, he is now only anxious for her and for himself, that their counterfeit should work well.

When did you know?

When I looked in the mirror. When I looked at the window. I don’t know when.

She is so happy. She never used to be happy or unhappy about what she could do—she took it for granted. Now her eyes are shining as if she has had the dirt rinsed out of them, and her voice sounds as if her throat has been freshened with sweet water.

Yes, yes, he says. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck and presses her head against his chest so tightly that she makes the papers rustle in his inside pocket.

These are secret papers that he has got from a man he met in one of these towns—a doctor who is known to look after touring people and to oblige them sometimes by performing services
that are beyond the usual. He has told the doctor that he is concerned about his wife, who lies on her bed and stares at the ceiling for hours at a time with a look of hungry concentration on her face, and goes for days without saying a word, except what is necessary in front of an audience (this is all true). He has asked himself, then the doctor, if her extraordinary powers may not after all be related to a threatening imbalance in her mind and nature. Seizures have occurred in her past, and he wonders if something like that could be on the way again. She is not an ill-natured person or a person with any bad habits, but she is not a normal person, she is a unique person, and living with a unique person can be a strain, in fact perhaps more of a strain than a normal man can stand. The doctor understands this and has told him of a place that she might be taken to, for a rest.

He is afraid she will ask what the noise is that she can surely hear as she presses against him. He does not want to say
papers
and have her ask, what papers?

But if her powers have really come back to her—this is what he thinks, with a return of his nearly forgotten, fascinated regard for her—if she is as she used to be, isn’t it possible that she could know what was in such papers without ever laying her eyes on them?

She does know something, but she is trying not to know.

For if this is what it means to get back what she once had, the deep-seeing use of her eyes and the instant revelations of her tongue, might she not be better off without? And if it’s a matter of her deserting those things, and not of them deserting her, couldn’t she welcome the change?

They could do something else, she believes, they could have another life.

He says to himself that he will get rid of the papers as soon as he can, he will forget the whole idea, he too is capable of hope and honor.

Yes. Yes. Tessa feels all menace go out of the faint crackle under her cheek.

The sense of being reprieved lights all the air. So clear, so powerful, that Nancy feels the known future wither under its attack, skitter away like dirty old leaves.

But deep in that moment some instability is waiting, that Nancy is determined to ignore. No use. She is aware already of being removed, drawn out of those two people and back into herself. It seems as if some calm and decisive person—could it be Wilf?—has taken on the task of leading her out of that room with its wire hangers and its flowered curtain. Gently, inexorably leading her away from what begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash.