Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (30 page)

My mother sent lawyers and a piano, but she has never come to visit. The reporters came to try to make a story and went away defeated.
You can’t use the same straw twice,
I wanted to tell them, but they would not have understood what I meant.

There’s not supposed to be anything left after the end of the world, even if the end of the world doesn’t quite happen.

But I am beginning to think maybe it wasn’t a mistake, or a joke. In my coma I had Harry’s voice, and did not die. Last night, I had a dream.

In my dreams, I can still see, and in this dream I am walking among the ruins of a house, skirting crumbled piles of mellow red-pink bricks. It’s very peaceful, and the sky is the same blue I remember from the last day of my old life. I hear someone singing, a wordless crooning little tune, and I follow the sound until I come to a man sitting beside one of the piles of bricks.

Every brick he touches turns into straw, and as I watch, he takes the straw and twists and plaits it into marvelous multi-pointed stars. He’s utterly unhurried, utterly content; as he finishes each star, he balances it on his palm and gives it a little flip up, and when I look at the sky, I see his stars shining.

What are you doing?
I ask.

He looks up at me. It’s Harry, unscarred and unhurt, his eyes shining as brightly as the stars he has made. And he says,
You can use the same straw, kid. You just can’t expect it to come out as bricks.

Today I said, “Harry, take me to the piano.”

Fortinbras is not Hamlet.

I wish with all my heart that he were, wish even that I could close my eyes and pretend. But he is a swarthy, swaggering Pole, broad-shouldered, with a warrior’s heavy muscle. His hands are hard with calluses; Hamlet’s were soft, narrow, the hands of a scholar. Hamlet liked to discuss philosophy in bed, the light rambling voice like a counterpoint to the explorations of those soft, clever hands. Fortinbras does not waste his breath.

Fortinbras comes to me after the funeral, where I stand beside Hamlet’s grave. My throat is raw from tears, from words, from the cold, bitter wind of Elsinore.

He says, “You were more than friends.”

It is not a question; I do not answer it.

His hands are on my shoulders; his breath tickles my ear. He is standing too close, too close, but I cannot move. I have followed Hamlet for so long, so blindly. Now that he is gone, I do not remember how to walk on my own.

Fortinbras says, “You must be very lonely.”

A trite, obvious line, suitable for chambermaids and serving girls. I bow my head, choking back bitter laughter. We are alone in the graveyard, alone with the dead, and I know Fortinbras does not fear the dead. Unlike Hamlet, he is not an imaginative man.

The hands settle into a hard grip. He says, “I am lonely, too. It is difficult to find someone to trust, here in Denmark.” I shiver at the disjunct between the voice, with its gentle platitudes, and the hands, the punishing weight, the blunt fingers digging for nerve and bone. I do not know which to believe.

“We do not have to be lonely,” Fortinbras says, and under the pressure of his hands I sink to my knees. “I am told that Prince Hamlet was a lonely man. You must have helped with that, Horatio.” A shove, quick, brutal, and I only save myself from sprawling across Hamlet’s grave by catching at the headstone, a graceless block of granite he would have hated.

Fortinbras says, “Show me.”

The Danes do not quite know what to make of Fortinbras: the child of their old king’s enemy, but a strong man, a man for whom decisions are easy, policy is clear. After the short and serpentine rule of Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, Fortinbras comes as a relief to the court of Denmark. The soldiers and common people are only grateful that perhaps this winter they will not have to die.

I wear black now, as Hamlet did. The court ignores me, as they ignored Hamlet. In Elsinore, if you do not want to see something, then you do not see it. It explained so much about Hamlet to me, when I came to Elsinore: the frenetic brilliance of his wit, his hunger for attention, the way he would touch me, a light pat on shoulder or cheek, just to get me to turn and look at him. He was not the child his father had wanted, and I could imagine him becoming steadily more outrageous as he grew up, constantly devising new schemes to get his father and his father’s court to acknowledge his existence.

I am not Hamlet. I do not care if the court notices me or not. I wear black for grief; I wear black for him.

I bring flowers to Ophelia’s grave.

I hated her.

Hated her doe eyes and her little soft grasping hands. Hated her for being able to flirt, demurely, with Hamlet when I could do nothing but stand to one side and watch. The loyal friend.

And I hated her because she loved him. I hated her for her pain, her grief. I hated her for going mad. And I hated her most of all for dying. I stood, the loyal friend, and watched Hamlet leap into her grave. Later, I held him while he cried, neither of us knowing that he had less than a day to live. I kissed his tear-damp cheeks and told him I loved him and knew he did not hear me.

If she had risen from her grave in front of us, I would have killed her myself.

I bring her flowers because she loved him, because she died for him. Because he would not let me do the same.

I should leave. I know I should leave. Fortinbras has a country to rule, an uncle to placate. He would not stop me, though he would not help me, either. But if I leave Elsinore . . . I cannot go back to Wittenberg, where every hallway, every street corner, will have some memory of Hamlet as he was. I could not protect that bright Hamlet from his father’s dark hand. I cannot face Wittenberg without him. And I have no family, no kin, no place where I can truthfully say I belong. I hoped when I came to Elsinore that it might prove to be such a place, that because it was Hamlet’s home, it might become my home as well. But Hamlet died in Elsinore, died
of
Elsinore. It will never be my home.

But I cannot leave. I cannot leave the pain, the cold, the darkness and the damp and the constant stench of death. I cannot leave Fortinbras, for at least he notices that I am alive.

I want to be haunted. I go up to the battlements at midnight, slipping out of the new king’s bed. The sentries eye me warily and skirt wide. The wind scours the tears from my face, but I taste them at back of my throat, bitter as graveyard dirt.

I stand there until dawn, waiting, but he does not come.

I. In the Night City

In the January that I turned thirty-five, sleep became a foreign and hostile country. I had never been more than what one might call a refugee in the country of sleep; one of my earliest memories is of my nurse telling me that if I did not go to sleep, the goblins would get me, and of waiting all that night for the goblins to appear. They did not, of course, but even so I am not sure that she was wrong.

I have always been an insomniac, but in that January ‘insomniac’ itself began to feel like the wrong word. When I slept at all, in sporadic cat naps lasting between fifteen minutes and an hour, my dreams would be vividly senseless, and I would be plagued with images from them for hours afterwards. The other archivists and curators remarked uneasily on my bloodshot eyes and bruise-dark eye sockets; I said truthfully that I often had trouble sleeping, and they left me alone.

I could not sleep between midnight and dawn. It was not even worth the effort, and I grew to loathe my bedroom, then to loathe the study, the living room . . . Finally, desperate for peace of mind even if I could not rest, on the last Friday in January, I put on my coat and went walking. If I was robbed or assaulted or murdered, I felt vaguely that it would be no more than I deserved.

But this quarter of the city was antique and genteel; not only were there no miscreants abroad, there was no one at all, no one but me. The only sound was the echoing of my footsteps; the only lights were the street lamps. No one else was awake; they slept the sleep of the just and innocent. Like Satan in the Garden of Eden, I looked at their darkened windows and was consumed with envy.

I paid no attention to the routes I took, nor to how far I went. Some part of my mind, better regulated than the rest, seemed always to contrive that I should return to my own front door around dawn, so that I could shower, shave, sleep soddenly for three quarters of an hour, and eat breakfast before going to work. One afternoon in early February, I found myself doodling the hubristic Gothic outline of the Nicodemus Kent Building on my desk blotter and realized hollowly that I must have walked halfway across the city the night before. And yet I had no memories of leaving my own neighborhood, no recollections of the poorer neighborhoods, the financial district, the massive Mycenaean bulk of the Public Water Utility, which I must have passed to reach the Kent Building. Could I in fact be sleeping even as I walked?

The idea was so unsettling that I very nearly locked myself into my apartment that night. But I could not stand the oppressive familiarity of the patterns made by the shadows on the floors, the relentless ability of my ears to catalogue every strange sound the building made in the deep watches of the night. I decided instead to choose a goal and to pay attention as I walked, to prove to myself that I was not slipping into some unnatural fugue state in my perambulations. I further decided that I would walk to the Public Water Utility; it was an achievable goal, and even in the darkness, it was readily recognizable as itself.

I felt better for having formulated a plan, even a plan as ultimately meaningless as that one. I set out into the nighttime streets, feeling a certain cautious optimism that I could at least contend with this piece of the wider and apparently insoluble problem that beset me.

I became lost.

In itself, I do not suppose this is either alarming or surprising. My sense of direction is not particularly acute, and in their dark desolation, the streets of the city all looked remarkably similar. Against this stood the fact that I had known where I was going and that it was a walk I had taken before in daylight. I confess to a certain morbid affection for the Public Water Utility, surely the most graceless piece of civic architecture in America. And, paying attention or otherwise, I had become accustomed to the city’s nocturnal streets; they no longer seemed unfathomable to me.

And yet I was lost. The buildings did not look familiar; the street signs, when I found them, were for streets named
Boulevard de la Lune, Nyx Place, Umbra Road
—streets which I had never seen before in my life, and I was born in this city.

“I must be asleep,” I said to myself, muttering under my breath simply for the comfort of hearing my own voice. I did not believe it, but there seemed no other explanation, no other method by which I could have walked out my apartment door into a city of such absolute unfamiliarity. If I was dreaming, I reasoned—tenuously and uncomfortably—then I must have been dreaming all those previous nights, and the best strategy for finding my way out of the dream was to do what I had done before. I had an uneasy sense that there was a fallacy somewhere in that piece of logic, but I turned down Umbra Road because standing by myself under the street sign was becoming increasingly nerve-wracking, and I knew I was in danger of beginning to imagine that things were watching me from the shadows.

I decided to keep walking as if I could come to the Public Water Utility, hoping that I might wake up when I arrived there, or that my failure to do so would somehow shake me out of this frightening maze. I knew I would not find it, and so I do not know the right words to express my complete bewilderment when I did.

There it was, looming out of the darkness like a prehistoric temple idol, its entryway looking as always like the lowered head of a bull before the monstrous bulk of the main building. It was incontrovertibly the Public Water Utility.

And yet I was standing on the sidewalk of—I walked to the corner to check the street sign—Artemis Street, and I knew as well as I knew my own name that the Public Works Utility brooded over the south side of Fairlie Road between Jackson and Godolphin. Artemis Street at this point claimed that it crossed Nocturne Street.

I sat down, quite without meaning to, at the base of the signpost. It is one thing to suspect yourself of going mad; it is another thing entirely to discover that your suspicions are correct.

I wondered drearily what would happen if I sat here until dawn. Would I wake up in my own bed? Would I wake up at the corner of Fairlie and Jackson? Would I not wake up at all, but find myself admiring the sunrise from Artemis and Nocturne? Each option seemed more repellant than the last.

It was at that nadir in my thoughts that I noticed the light. In all the vast darkness of this city, there was one light burning. I surged to my feet and started toward the light.

I walked a block and a half down Nocturne Street and found myself opposite a church. The light came from a lamp hung over its doorway. The church was brick and homely, and as I climbed the steps, I saw it was dedicated to St. Christopher, patron saint of ferrymen, protector against floods, fires, earthquakes . . . and bad dreams. When I tried the door, it was unlocked. I pulled it open and went in.

The interior of the church was a great, gloomy vault. I realized after a moment’s bewilderment that it was not fitted for electricity; the only light came from candles, in sconces on the walls, crowning great candelabra on the altar, offered as votives in the two chapels that flanked the nave. I could see stalagmites of wax beginning on the floor beneath the sconces that flanked the front door.

I was still standing, unable either to sum up the courage to penetrate farther into the tremendous darkness of the church or to maintain the resolve to turn and walk out again, when a voice called, “Is someone there?”

It came from near the altar; seeing movement, I realized that what I had taken for a deeper patch of shadow was a man, now in the act of getting to his feet from the first row of backless pews. At first I could not make sense of his shape, but then he moved into the light and I saw that he was winged, marble-white feathers rustling softly from his shoulders to his heels.