The Narrator (51 page)

“Will he be all right?” Saskia asks.

“No.”

I am redressing his wound as fast as I can.

“We can’t move him any more.”

“If they come for us, we’ll have to leave him.”

“You’ll have to leave him,” I say without a thought in my head.

I can tell he’s conscious, but he doesn’t speak. His face goes whiter and whiter, rigid with fear. The light in his eyes turns fixed, glassy. He’s watching something coming for him that he knows won’t stop. I call his name. His hand is clutching my arm, squeezing it with all his strength. His hand rests on my arm. His white face is turned up, in terror forever.

“He’s gone,” I explain.

*

She wanted to return through the city and start the machine I’d seen from the window.

“The machine is set off by light tripwires that are too close to it for you to be able to get away before being affected, or even killed,” someone is saying. “They might already be in the city themselves anyway, waiting for you.”

*

Trees, walk, dark, sleep, wake, walk, trees. Come out into colorless clay heath covered with puddles, some mountains bathed in fog in the distance. Muffled, close, hot my face against the cold air. We are heading toward the mountains.

“We can get out through the mountains,” she says, more to herself. “The reinforcements should be there by now. And we’ll come back. And this time we’ll win.”

“We should never have come,” I say.

“It was supposed to be.”

Suddenly I want to argue—it’s the first feeling I’ve had for so long—I almost feel nostalgic as the words burst from my mouth—

“What kind of nonsense is that?!”

“The spirits or gods whatever they are—”

“Gods?”

“... I don’t know anything about religion, but they must have brought us here to test us.”

“They
must
have?”

“Don’t parrot me!” she snaps, her chinstrap banging against her neck as she turns to me.

“Tested us why?”

“We have to prove our worth to them before they will help us.”

“What worth?”

“The worth of our side, you idiot! Our worth!”

“Worthy to do what? Make the whole world like this?!” I stop, wave my arm around, at the land, and the ruins in the distance.

She stops too. “Worthy because we are willing to die for what’s right, that’s what nobility is! When they see we are noble, I’m telling you, they will send us the victory we’ve earned.”

“What victory?”

“What victory?! Are you out of your mind? Who are
you
to say ‘what victory’—you want them to win?” She jabs the air with her finger in the direction of the cemetery.

“What you’re calling victory is just
death
—can’t you get that through your thick head? It’s all just death—that’s the only enemy I know or care about and who wins against death? What kind of victory is that? Who ever won a fight against death?”

“—And so Makemin and the rest, your friends, they all die for nothing?”

“Makemin was a murderer! He deserved to die! He deserved to die a thousand times! And just what price are
you
going to get us for their deaths? You think the enemy won’t try to make us pay for all the ones of theirs we’ve killed? Show me where you
go
to make these final payments you’re always talking about!”

“It’s not something you see happen—history in the future will show we were right, and say everything I’ve been saying to you. Now will you belt up and move?”

“Right about what? If you’re right you’re right whether you win or not!”

“Who’s going to tell the truth if we lose? If we lose, there won’t be any one to tell our story at all!”

“To hell with the story! It’s a stupid story! It’s a worthless story! It’s a shameful story! What do I care about stories when I’m dead!? Which of these dead people is going to tell the story?”

“
You.
”

“I won’t tell! I won’t tell a word of it!”

“You will,” she says. Panting and hot eyed she grabs me by the front of my uniform and shakes me. “You
will
do it. You are the narrator.”

“I’ll say they were all insane, I’ll call them murderers, and you too!” I shout it into her face, waving my head back and forth.

“You! You’re nothing!” Shaking me, “You tell lies and nothing is all you are—even a traitor tells lies for a reason! You’ll tell the truth!”

“I won’t do it! I won’t say anything! If I get back, I’ll say I never went anywhere! I was never
in
the army!”

I tear open my tunic, the buttons fly in all directions.

“I won’t say a word about this obscenity! I’ll say it never happened!”

She pushes me away from her.

“You think history can’t do without
you?
I can talk too you know—I can tell the truth better than you ever could! I’ll see to it every name is memorialized in a list of heroes, except yours! I’ll leave you out altogether, like you never lived at all! Or no, that’s not what I’ll do, I’ll tell everyone you were a hero just like the rest of them, then no one will believe your lies anyway. You’ll do your part whether you like it or not!”

I fly at her, she throws me to the ground so hard my breath is knocked out.

“If I didn’t need you—! ” she snarls.

“You don’t need me!” I shout back from the ground when I can. My voice is squashed flat.

“I could have been in those mountains by now, if I hadn’t held back to keep up with you! I’ll never understand why the spirits talk to you—that’s one thing I can’t understand.”

I get my breath back.

“The spirits never said anything to me you cretin! Pepedora gave both sides special compasses that showed the way in. I was following it until your boy broke it for me in service to your great cause, so don’t stick to me on your own account! I never knew any more about this place than you or the rest of them did—I knew less!” I’m getting onto my hands and knees, trying to rise.

“You’re not a traitor,” I hear her say, livid in her voice.

“You’re the one who’s thinking like war, not me,” I say gingerly, pausing until a twinge of pain in my gut fades.

“You’re not a soldier—you aren’t anything at all!”

I look up as she turns and begins to leap, each step growing longer and longer—now she is bounding away from me, toward the mountains, streaking just above the ground like an ice skater. She disappears into the trees.

The damp air is chilling me. I regret tearing open my tunic. I start rooting the buttons out of the mud, and sewing them back on as best I can. I work for a long time, and the air grows darker between my eyes and the buttons.

Dusk comes down.

I look to see just what a bad job I’m doing, thread jabbed in and out of the cloth everywhere. Buttons and tunic slip from my nerveless fingers and my hands fly up to my face.

“Saskia!” I scream through my hands.

Weak I droop over onto my side—I imagine the victorious stories rolling out like crawling smoke from the cemetery, the city, the capitals of both sides, and rolling us, the ones who lived and died the story right off the page like we never existed for ourselves, we were just characters. I look up and see nothing around me, no people anywhere—not even me.

“Saskia!”

Does my voice even make a sound?

I’m calling her name to the distant woods, the gathering dark, the empty fog—

“Come back! You were right!”

*

The cemetery is nearby, but the landscape is monotonous trees and clay land, trees again and clay land again. I never see my footprints ahead of me so I can’t be going in circles. Even in the open spaces I can’t see above the trees, or through the mist. I can sense the mountains without seeing them, and I keep them in to my left.

I’m not alone—the woods and open places are filled with people, going up and down on all sides. Nardac is here, the Captain, Silichieh, Jil Punkinflake, Thrushchurl, the Lieutenant, Makemin. They’re all too preoccupied with what they’re doing, with their own thoughts, to talk to me, but they look happy and well, only very busy. I can’t get close to them—whenever I draw near, they have somewhere else to go, and withdraw faster than I can follow, always with the air of people who have some private matter to attend to; but they always show me, never with words, but by means of very slight gestures that a less astute observer might not notice, that they are aware of me and entreat my indulgence a little while longer.

Soon they will have time for me, I’m sure.

*

“Cemetery can’t be far a happy thought.”

Happy thought. Happy thought.

No thinking, no thought at all.

“I will go on long enough find my way there.”

The cemetery? Or the coast, what name is used to mean what isn’t the interior? Another clearing.

“I’ll get
out
.”

—“Then?

“Happy then?

“Then what?

“Happy?

“How?”

—“Then I’ll be out of this.”

—“War is everywhere.

“Out there too.”

—“I’ll be out of
this
.”

—“This won’t get out of you.

“Happy?”

—“Better.”

—“Happy? Or just not afraid, not tired?”

—“That’s a cynical definition of happiness.”

—“Who are you calling cynic?”

—“You talk like one.”

Who am I talking to?

The air is settling like a pond after someone threw in a rock. Who was talking?

It might be the cemetery up there. Now I’m alone I can feel it pull me in. The others were the only ones keeping me from being pulled in. I don’t want to go. Where’s out?

I’m struggling, moving this way and that like a dog straining on his leash. I know where the mountains are—thinking all mountains are the same chains you enter here you can come out anywhere in the world there are mountains ... mountains are mountains. All I need is snow to feel at home, but here there’s only this white ashy ground that’s a pretty poor counterfeit.

I’m alone, but someone in an identical clearing only a few yards from mine is imitating my movements as precisely as a mirror would, although his jaw whips and snaps in the air with his more abrupt movements in a way mine never could.

*

A place like the cemetery—the light here seems to ebb and flow with the air, and my breath, which at times is so thin I feel my lungs grow heavy through their emptiness and drag me toward the ground and at other times is so full I feel buoyed up with its glassiness and freshness. I came in, in a dream of mine, shared at the same time with some others, but now the dream has sprung free from all of us. It’s rioting now all on its own. It has turned into a disembodied insanity, that can touch down in souls like lightning. The flash already passed off, stand and look at the devastation on all sides, and then a deafening crash breaks on the air, spreads unhurriedly in all directions, resounds with morbid deliberation back from the landscape.

I’m not nothing. Approaching the white being, I hear Thrushchurl’s song, maybe I sing it, although there are many voices I hear. As long as I can go on speaking like that, I’m not nothing. I’m sure this is some other part of the vast cemetery but there is a persistent feeling that this is some other cemetery in the vicinity but separate. It’s too dark to see the monuments around me clearly enough, and the light there is so intense—I turn my head to see what it illuminates but the brilliant streaks it sheds around me block my view, and I can’t stop or turn all the way around it I am certain will get darker everywhere else if I do, and that thought is like death, dying to be alone here when everything goes completely dark. A bowl of light in the earth, a shallow bowl, with a white figure or some figure in there, lying there in such brightness that I can only see some of its outlines, a pink glow through the fingers ears and toes, the thin tissues, and the shadows where its legs are pressed together. It looks naked and is lying down. It lives because I see some regular palpitation and it rolls, now on its back, onto its side, back onto its back. It’s having a nightmare. Out of the egg of its sway I see the paper thing shake its body of wind on the far side of the bowl, a dream I can see but only from the vantage point of another dream that I’m in at the moment. I’m still alone. The dream is real in the world—I see the person having the nightmare is the paper thing at the same time—he lies like a corpse there in the light, then shakes roll onto its side, then onto its back again the head turning back and forth, dimly dark opening of the mouth, like its decomposed belly is swollen with the gases of its decay and now it belches them in a long harsh voluminous emission that seems it should splinter the throat, as full of pain as a scream, and the dream-rotten thing is still twisting at my feet, now so small I could squash it with the toe of my boot. The serial nightmares all together say I am the war: and now the war is over.