Throne
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- The Grind Show Preview Chapters
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
http://www.transientme.com
Acknowledgments
And many thanks to Jay Russell of www.photofiend.com fame for allowing me to use his brilliant shot of Irene Rudnyk on the cover!
Afterwards, whenever she thought back to that night, she remembered first and foremost the screams. There was no rise or fall to them, no character or shape; rather, they had been bursts of sound, visceral and blank in their terror and denial. Even as the nurses had clamored around her, trying to restrain her, pull her down to the ground, the screams had continued. They had lit the hall with their stark ferocity, each one a camera flash that caused the nurses’ faces to stiffen with fear and dismay.
Sanity, it felt, had never really returned after that night. Lucidity, yes; the ability to think, to analyze, to comprehend the passage of time and the general linkage between cause and effect. But not sanity. Awakening the next morning, the pale, diffuse New York dawn drifting into the hospital room, she had lain still and felt a terrible new presence in her chest come to replace the life she had carried in her stomach these past seven months.
A dark presence. Turning onto her side, crossing her arms over her chest and tucking her fists under her chin, Maribel had been able to picture the new presence perfectly. It was like a black conch shell, vibrating within her, threatening to crack if she shifted it too violently, to spill its contents into her body, pollute her irrevocably with madness.
Instead, she stayed still, eyes wide and glassy, staring out the window at New York, at the skyscrapers that melted into the thick winter fog that hung like a funeral pall over the city. Everything looked anesthetized, still, silent. Breathing slower, she willed her mind to blankness.
Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think
. The black shell vibrated within her, vivid in her mind’s eye.
Don’t think
, she whispered to herself, but greater than the ebon shell, greater than herself, even the city outside, was the emptiness in her body, the hollow center around which all her pain was arranged.
June 21st, 2010
Rain, rain falling in long, hissing needles over Barcelona. Vicious rain, the kind that hurts. But that doesn’t matter, it’s irrelevant, the world could be coming down outside, the buildings collapsing, flames roaring into the sky because here, inside the empty gallery, Maribel feels a sense of potential and joy that she’s never experienced. Not even when she first stepped before the cameras for her first photo shoot, all those years ago. Never have blank walls seemed so luminous, never has a large, empty room seemed so fraught with promise. Her agent Juan is speaking, walking ahead of her, his footsteps echoing back down from the tall ceiling that is all industrial pipes and ventilator openings, but she’s not listening to him.
Reaching out, she brushes the tips of her fingers against the smooth wall, the gray paint, and walks, running her palm across the cement. It’s rough, but that’s what she wanted, crudeness, a defiance to her art. Blank wall, but she can see her prints, see the large posters hanging here, one by one, can imagine the gallery filled with them, suffused with what she has seen with her eyes.
Juan turns, arms outstretched, a grin on his face. “So. Barring all that, we should be ready to begin in a couple of weeks. What do you think, Maribel? Did I keep my word?”
She turns to him, a smile flashing across her face. Outside, Barcelona breathes and twists and turns, is slashed by rain, but in here, in here—something promises to be born. Unable to resist, she places her hand on her flat stomach, where her secret, her true creation is growing.
“Yes, Juan,” she says, nodding her head once, suddenly shy before his confidence. “This is perfect. But.”
“Ah ah ah!” he says, striding forwards, wagging his finger at her. “No buts. None. You are barred, prohibited, absolutely denied the right to use that word.” He reached her side, and placed his hands lightly on her shoulders. She raised her chin defiantly, and he smiled at the look in her eyes.
“You have the most stunning ability to take any admonition as a critique, my dear.” He turned to stand next to her, and look out at the empty room. “Soon. You’ll see. When your photographs are on these walls, and the room is thronged with people and the media, then you will see. How right I was, how I am always right.”
“If you say so,” she said, uncertain before the promise of lights and attention, the furor that might accompany success, that might accompany failure. “But already I am hearing—“
“Ignore them, my dear,” says Juan kindly. “Ignore those little voices. I would have thought you practiced in that fine art by now.”
“Perhaps. But this is different. Before they just criticized my body. Whether I was beautiful, ugly, whatever. Now they mean to criticize my… ‘art’.” The word still came awkwardly.
“And soon they will see that both are alike, one just as beautiful and entrancing as the other. I was thinking. Now stop, listen. Just listen. I was thinking, you should call the exhibit, ‘
Visions of War
”, That or ‘
Shitty Dates My Husband Has Taken Me On
.’ I think Antonio would like that, no? What do you think?”
Maribel smiled, and then shook her head. “No… actually, I already have a name. Or think I do.” Juan turned to look at her, lowering his arms from where he had been framing the title before them. “
Katabasis
,” she said, stepping away to look at him, to judge his reaction.
“
Katabasis
,” he said, musing. He was intelligent, cultured, educated, but the word meant nothing to him.
“It means a descent and return from the underworld,” she said, turning to look at the blank walls once more. Envisioning the photographs. The faces, the bombed out buildings. “Katabasis.”
“Mrs. Martel?” asked a voice, and she realized it was the second or third time she had been addressed. She blinked, and then slowly turned over to face the door and the speaker. It felt so strange to roll over without the baby inside her.
She didn’t recognize the man. She had seen a score of strangers since being admitted to the hospital yesterday, had come to know the pediatrician, the anesthesiologist, her nurse. But not this man.
“Mrs. Martel,” he said, voice quiet like leaves sinking into the clear depths of a pond, “my name is Pedro Gusman, a grief counselor attached to the hospital. Do you mind if I speak to you?” He was balding, this Pedro Gusman, older than her but younger than Antonio. Late forties, perhaps, dressed in a shapeless gray suit, and he spoke with an American accent despite his name. A kind face, and so she nodded.
Pedro pulled out a chair and lowered himself into it, and then looked at her, lips pursed, pale blue eyes soft and cautious. “I’m very sorry about your loss, Mrs. Martel. I know that there’s nothing I can say to ease your pain, but I can advise you as to what to do next, whom to speak to, what steps to take in order to lay you baby to rest.”
“That’s not my baby,” she said, and something about her voice made him flinch. Pedro blinked rapidly several times, and she could see him quickly shifting her from one box in his mind into another.
“I—ah. I’m sorry, Mrs. Martel, what do you mean?”
She wrapped one hand inside the other, and placed them both beneath her chin. Taking her gaze from his face, she directed it at the wall beyond him. “That’s not my baby,” she said again. “That’s not my little girl out there.”
“Mrs. Martel – “ began Pedro, and then stopped. He leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, hands between his knees, “I can’t imagine the pain you are going through, the loss. But that is your baby. And she is your responsibility. Grief is a powerful thing, and the mind—“
“Didn’t you hear me?” she said, turning to stare at him. He stopped, cold, as if slapped. “That thing in the ICU is not my child, it is not my baby, it did not come from my body. My baby has been stolen. That thing—that thing—“
Pedro Gusman opened his mouth, closed it, and stood. “Excuse me, Mrs. Martel,” he said, and stepped round so that the chair was between them. “I’m sorry, I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Maribel took her eyes from him once more, and lowered her head slowly to the pillow. The dark shape in her chest was tremulous, swelling. She closed her eyes, forced her mind to blank, to stop, to cease. Gradually it slowed.
July 28th, 2010
“But
conho
, Antonio, what is the meaning of celebrating if you are not able to stay for the celebration?” Her anger, as always, was sudden, furious, spiraling out of control as he looked at her, chin lowered, face grave. The sound of people, music, just through the wall.
“Maribel. This is beyond my control.”
They were in a side room, just off the gallery itself. She was drunk, she felt perilous, beautiful, her dress wrapped around her long legs, her swollen stomach and chest like swathes of iridescent black silk, spun directly onto her body by some vast spider. The gallery had been a success, a success such as she had not hoped for, had not allowed herself to dream might happen. Positive reviews, Juan pushing champagne into everybody’s hand every five seconds, art critics, people there to see the photographs and not just her, or her famous husband. And now, before the event was even over, at the apogee of her victory, Antonio, Antonio.
“My love,” he said, and stepped forward, towards her, his eyes wise, deep, older than her, always older, wiser. He took her two hands within his large ones, stilled the anger that made them tremble, cupped them to his chest. Looked down into her face. Not for the first time she wished they were of equal height. “You have no idea how proud I am. But I have to go. They would not have called me for anything less than an emergency.”
She wanted to tear her hands from his. Wanted to hold onto her fury, the river of molten metal that electrified her, gave her strength. But instead, old melancholy, her gentle and constant friend, came stealing in. Fatigue, such that her head felt too heavy to hold up. She closed her eyes. “Antonio,” she said, “It is always an emergency. Your life, our life, is always being broken by emergencies.”
Sensitive to her moods, knowing when to move forward, he released her hands and wrapped his arms around her bare shoulders, gathering her to him. She rested her cheek against his chest, felt the soft burr of his suit lapel, the glossy touch of his tie. Listened to his heartbeat, so slow and sure.
“Maribel,” he breathed, and she felt ashamed at the pain she heard in his voice. “This is the life I chose a long time ago. You know this. You knew this when I married you. These people, if I can help them, if I can make a difference, like I did in Bangladesh, if I can prevent what happened in Sarajevo,”
