Sunny says softly, “You know, I often think it was a girl. Sometimes I miss her. I didn’t know her at all of course but I miss her. But you always knew I felt this way, didn’t you?”
I nod, even though I’m unsure whether I did or not, whether I ever understood at all how deeply that time might have affected her. I was so thoroughly organized in my convincing her (though none of it would have worked had she not been plain scared inside, a frightened girl of seventeen, no matter how sure of herself she was, or believed she was), that I couldn’t stop until it was complete. I forced her to do it. Had she decided not to, I don’t know what I would have done. In a way, it was a kind of ignoring that I did, an avoidance of her as Sunny — difficult, rash, angry Sunny — which I masked with a typical performance of consensus building and subtle pressure, which always is the difficult work of attempting to harmonize one’s life and the lives of those whom one cherishes. It is the systematic operation, which always and obtusely succeeds, the well-planned response to life’s uncertainties and complications. And then, too, it is a profoundly arresting thing to realize the exact mode and matter of one’s own life at the very moment it is becoming incarnate and true, namely, how after you have pushed aside and pushed aside and pushed aside again, the old beacons will bob up once more, dotting the waters before you like a glowing ring of fire.
14
NOW AND THEN, I sometimes forget who I really am. I will be sitting downstairs in the kitchen, or on the edge of the lounger by the pool, or here under the covers in my bed, and I lose all sense of myself. I forget what it is I do, the regular activity of my walk and my swim and my taking of tea, the minor trappings and doings of my days, what I’ve made up to be the token flags of my life. I forget why it is I do such things, why they give me interest or solace or pleasure. Then I might get up in the middle of the night and dress and walk all the way to town, to try to figure once again the notices, the character, the sorts of actions of a man like me, what things or set of things define him in the most simple and ordinary way. But I forget the usuals, who his friends might be, his associates; I forget even that he has a tenuous and fragile hold of family, this the only idea that dully rings of remembrance in his heart. He walks at night in the center of town and it is too dark to see even a reflection in the glass of his old store. He’s stopped by a patrol car and asked what he’s doing and he says nothing, I’m not really walking, I’m not really here, and he turns for home with the cruiser slowly trailing him, unintentionally lighting his way.
When I reach the house and close the front door it’s then I think K has finally come back for me. It is the moment I think I feel at home. I am sure I was regarding her last night, her figure naked and pale, loosely enrobed in a black silken flag. The sight of her shook me. I saw her more clearly than I ever had before, as I was not dreaming or conjuring but simply reacquainting myself with her, as I might any friend of my youth. And so she visited me. Last night she lightly pattered up and down the hallway in her bare feet, pausing outside my bedroom door. I knew it was she. I sat up and told her to come in and she stepped to the foot of my lone twin bed. Though she sat down I couldn’t feel any press of her weight, and once again, for a moment, I was almost sure she was a spectral body or ghost. But I am not a magical man, and never have been. I am unversed in the metaphysical, have long become estranged from it, and if this can be so, I believe the metaphysical is as much unversed in me. We have a historical pact. And as deeply as I wished she were some wondrous, ethereal presence, that I was being duly haunted, I knew that she was absolute, unquestionably real, a once-personhood come wholly into being.
“Lieutenant,” she asked demurely, her voice full of penitence. “Did you sleep peacefully last night? I hope you’ll forgive me if I say you look somewhat weary this morning.”
“I do feel weary,” I answered. “Thank you for your concern. But what is it, K? It seems something is on your mind.”
“I’m sorry to ask this once again.”
“Please, K. You may ask me anything.”
“I like to think so, Lieutenant.”
“Well, then?”
“Will we be going away soon, Lieutenant?”
Her question was brand-new to me, but somehow I felt vaguely annoyed by it anyway. Even angry. I said to her, the hairs tingling on the back of my neck, “Where would we be going to, K?”
“I had hoped we would finally travel to all the places we have spoken of. To Shanghai, and Kyoto, and perhaps even Seoul. Or some other place.”
I didn’t answer, and she noticed this and asked if I was upset.
“I’m not upset,” I said, quite tersely, causing her to inch back on the bed. “But I have to wonder, why being here is so abhorrent to everyone but me? We have everything that we require. And much more. We have an impressive house and property in the best town in the area, where we are happily known and respected. We have ample time and quiet and means. I have tried as hard as I can to provide these things, and we have been welcomed as warmly as anyone can expect. Everything is in delicate harmony. And yet still you seem dissatisfied.”
“I am not dissatisfied,” she said, her eyes glassy and full-looking. “But I am anxious, Lieutenant. I do hope we might move on from this place. Nothing is wrong with it, nothing at all. But I know I will not die here. I cannot die here. And sometimes, sir, I so wish to.”
Her words at first confused me, as I thought she was saying this wouldn’t be a suitable place for her to pass over to the next life. But then I realized she meant that it wouldn’t be possible, as if this house were some penultimate trap of living, sustaining her beyond the pale.
“I don’t want you to die,” I said to her, feeling just as suddenly that this is a daily conversation we have, that we have gone over this ground before, and before. So I told her, as I always do, “I want you to live with me forever.”
A faint, sad smile softened her face, and she let slip the black cloth from her shoulders and lay down with me beneath the covers. Her skin was cool and chaste to me, almost sisterly, alabastrine, and I thought I had convinced her to remain yet again, remembering now how many times I had done so, today and yesterday and all the days before that, in a strange and backward perpetuity. I keep winning her over with hardly an argument, though each time an ill feeling comes over me, the soiling, resident sickness you develop when you have never in your life been caught at something wrong, when you have never once been discovered.
I lay back down and closed my eyes to sleep, sure that K would stay with me through the night. But when I woke up in the dim of predawn she was gone, and I put on my slippers and robe and went about the house, upstairs and down and even in the basement, in steady search of her. There were the remnants of a fire in the family room hearth, and I could not remember if I had lit one the evening before (I had been doing so periodically, if carefully, since that sudden conflagration). The scent of moist ash lingered in the air. For a moment I thought it smelled naturally of freshly tilled ground, of just-disturbed earth, but then I realized it was in fact not earth at all I was sensing but water. The scent was of the sea, a warm and gentle southern sea. Then I thought I saw a shadow pass outside the French doors of the kitchen, and being certain it was K, I quickly stepped outside. I called out and waited but there was no answer, no sound at all, not even the movement of wind through the tree branches. From the far end of the property the light of a reflection caught my eye, and with sharp anticipation I went to it, going around the pool and past the small cabana to the part of my property where the lawn ends and the wooded area between my land and the neighbor’s begins. I was quite sure I would find her, or come across the black silken cloth, left in a hurry by her on the ground. But there was nothing but brush and fallen leaves and the silent trunks of the trees. When I looked back across the precious, stately landscape of my property, it seemed I had traveled far miles to the place I was standing, as if I had gone round and round the earth in an endless junket, the broad lawn a continent, the pool a whole ocean, the house the darkened museum of a one-man civilization, whose latent history, if I could so will it, would be left always unspoken, unsung.