Via Dolorosa (25 page)

Over on the other side of the pools, something caught Nick’s eye. He looked and saw a young female child in a blue-and-white checkered sundress giggling with her hands up to her face. She appeared to be looking at someone hidden behind the corner of the hotel and out of Nick’s line of sight. The girl dropped her hands and began speaking with whoever stood just beyond. She was too far away for Nick to hear any of her words such as he had heard just the vague titter of her giggling only moments before.

“Are you all right?” Emma said.

Looking at her, he said, “Sure. Why?”

“You seem distracted.” She turned briefly in the direction of the little girl but found no interest there.

“I’m fine,” he said, picking up his coffee mug and staring at the empty bottom for lack of any other gesture.

“You want more?” she asked him, hefting the carafe. “Well,” she said, “it’s empty. Where is that little waiter, anyway? Did he vanish into smoke?”

“It’s not a big deal,” he told her. “The mimosa is fine.”

“No,” she said. “Every time we eat out here they forget to refill the coffee.”

“They’re busy inside.”

“I’ll get some more coffee.”

“It isn’t necessary.”

“It is,” she said, rising with the carafe and walking back into the hotel.

He watched her walk. When she had gone, he turned his gaze back on the little girl in the blue-and-white checkered sundress. She was young—perhaps five or six—with cream-colored skin and dark, raven-colored hair long and straight down her back. A very pretty little girl, he thought.

Still giggling, she turned and looked at him from across the pools. Uncertain as to his response, he raised a hand and offered a clumsy wave. This made the girl giggle some more. She pointed at him, which caused him to wave further, feeling playful but a bit foolish, too…and then she turned and said something to whoever was hidden on the other side of the hotel. Looking at her invisible friend, the girl began pointing in Nick’s direction. Still talking to the hidden person behind the corner of the hotel, Nick could see she was doing so with some urgency now. As kids will, he supposed. But no—there seemed a bleak desperation in her eyes, and he was suddenly discomforted by her previously innocuous stare when she again turned to look at him. This time, there was a flicker of fear in her eyes, a presentiment of distrust and confusion.

He thought,
What the hell?

From behind the hotel ambled a stooped,
burka
-clad figure, undeniably female despite the amass of robes, with only a narrow panel of brown face and piercing black eyes staring directly at him from within her robes. Nick shuddered and knew immediately that he had seen this woman before—had seen her in the hellish ruins of the outskirts of Fallujah, where she had cried and pleaded and said something—something directly at Myles Granger—in a language Nick himself had not understood. That woman. That little American girl…

He was not in control of himself. That was so clear to him now. How long had he been functioning this way? How long had he been driven to the brink of the ruinous and the fantastic by some unseen and preternatural force? He was powerless to choose his actions, and powerless to choose his feelings, too; like in war, he could not choose his battlefield, could not choose his stance. And now the goddamn war was in his head. He was merely led and thusly functioned, broken, automatic, at a whim, aimless and pitiable. Aimless? Perhaps his aim was predestined after all. Perhaps (it occurred to him) his path had been chosen long before he’d ever appeared as a reddened, blind, squealing infant, wet and sticky from the womb. There was no aimlessness here; no whimsy. Here, in this island purgatory, he was simply going through the motions, and his actions were not his own. He felt dazed, lost, suspended in a colorful animation of wakeful dreamlessness, executing the precarious act of balancing—vertiginously—on the cusp of some undefined void, his entire body frozen at the zenith of his most important hour, hesitant, the physical and mental caesura before the final physical and mental exhalation. It was watching speed freeze.
Speed,
he thought,
as a noun, as time, moving
time.
Like the biblical wandering through the desert, he could no longer find himself, walking lost and destitute in a Heliopolis mind, scorched by sun and ruined and parched by the unforgiving dry heat.

Looking out across the pools, he saw that both the Islamic woman and the little American girl were gone. And for a split second, he was confused as to what brought him to this point.
Where am I? Who am I? What
the hell happened to me?
But then he remembered it all over again,
all of it,
and it was abruptly, fiercely too much. All of it was too much…

Women with their memories of their first lovemaking experience, and how many things in their lives inevitably and uncontrollably spiraled further and further away from where they’d always truly wanted to be, with only a few times finding their way back; and men, stupid men, consumed by war, both inward and out, and how there was an underlying sense of hopelessness in the doing and undoing of those very women whom they would both come to love and hate simultaneously. Everyone had their cross to bear. On Christ-less shoulders, Nick had borne his through tumultuous desert landscapes while riding on a confession of faith, and now, here and now, with the undoing of his and Emma’s marital compromise—that traitorous misalliance—he continued to carry that horrid thing through this island paradise façade.

And it is not wholly mine this time.
It was not only about the war. It was about Emma, too.
She has forced me to carry hers, as well.

He could recall Emma’s small voice, wanting to weep but somehow unable to do so:
I can’t live with myself if you don’t know, Nicky. I can’t live
with myself if I keep this from you…

And young Myles Granger’s croak:
Lieuten
—

He felt himself jerk back from the table. His fork clattered to the pavement at his feet. Looking down, he saw his right hand begin to spasm in his lap. He tried to lift it but found that he couldn’t: it no longer belonged to him. Wincing, he forced himself to make a fist. It hurt like hell. Yet he made the fist, and it was with much difficulty, and held it. In his mind, he willed his muscles to relax, willed his arm to cease moving.
Stop it, you lousy goddamn bastard. Stop it, or so help me God I will cut you
off with a saw.
And he could see that as his surprise ending, as the grand finale to this romantic but terminally plagued getaway scenario: back in the room, hearing the slow creak of the bathroom door as Emma catches a glimpse of red splashed along the basin of the sink, reflected in the mirror just above it, while he stands huddled and now abbreviated but free of the torment, the metal glint of flesh-flecked saw teeth on the basin, the saturated cling of bloody hotel towels balled into wet afterbirth—

The arm continued to spasm. Yet he willed it and, after a moment, it was still. His fist remained. He did not even know if he could unclench his fingers. And when he finally did, he saw that his fingernails had cut crescents into the flesh of his hand. His goddamn ruined hand…

By the time Emma returned with a fresh carafe of demitasse, Nick was not feeling well. She set the carafe on the table and felt his brow.

“You’re burning up,” she told him.

“It’s just the heat.”

“It feels like fever.”

“The heat,” he repeated.

The afternoon was mild and cool; the remnants of the storm still hung wet and bleak over the island.

“Maybe you should go up to the room and lay down,” Emma said.

He pushed himself away from the table and balanced, standing, on legs that felt like wet cornstalks.

How did I get here? Who am I and how did I get here?

And another voice, this time not Myles Granger’s—this time completely unrecognizable to him:
How the hell should I know?

What should I do?

—Go shit in your hat.

What should I do?

—Go take a flying leap, you piss-scared coward.

What should I do?

—Play possum, why don’t you?

Back up in the room, Emma pulled his shoes off and unrolled his socks from his feet. He climbed into bed and tried not to move after falling back into the pillows. There was no moving now. Emma went directly to the double doors and pushed them wide open. A good, strong breeze filtered into the room. Nick felt his sweaty body break out in gooseflesh.

“How’s that?” Emma said, still standing by the double doors. “I don’t want it to be too much on you.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at him. He could not meet her gaze. Again, he could hear her voice echoing in his head:
I can’t live with myself if you don’t know,
Nicky. I can’t live with myself if I keep this from you.
Those goddamn words. Why had she felt the need to absolve herself? Why do that to him? Goddamn it, why?

“This is my fault,” she said. She was crying.

“Some of it,” he said.

“I hate this.”

“So do I.”

“Then what do we do?”

He could give her no answer. What answer was there?
Then what do
we do?
He thought,
We take it back, that’s what we do. We summon some
supernatural powers and go back in time and take it the hell back. Can you
do it? Can you do it?

He said, “Let me sleep for a bit.”

She did not say anything. She did not stop crying and did not remove herself from the bed, either.

“Emma,” he began.

She bent and kissed him hard on the mouth. But before he could react at all, she had finished, and was rising from the bed and moving across the room. She picked up one of her poetry books from the desk and pulled half the drapes closed over the patio doors so the cold would not be too unbearable. From seemingly out of nowhere, something about her presence reminded him of their early courtship, before both their relationship and his hand became tainted by the war. It was nothing specific this time, though. Perhaps he had just glimpsed the simplicity that was her, and that he had fell in love with (in a time that now seemed very far away), and it was a powerful and lingering sensation. He tried to recapture it fully then, right then, as he remained unmoving on the bed with his head pressed into the pillows, sweating on himself, his mouth tasting old and bad and sour. He tried to recapture whatever it was that made him recall their uncorrupted time together, but he could not do it quick enough.

She left the room, leaving him alone.

Limbo,
he thought, and it was as loud as a gunshot in all that silence.
How low can you go?

—Chapter XIII—