I held her eyelids up with my thumbs. I shook her until she saw who it was. She didn’t care. I’m here. I love you, I said. She closed her eyes, it seemed to me in disgust. Then she was in pain again.
I can’t give you any more, I said, I’ll lose you completely. She put her hand up and made a gesture across her throat.
The train was sucked into the tunnel and they moved within it, shuddering in the darkness.
Who was she, Gamini? She could not see him. She touched his shoulder and could feel him turn towards her. He brought his face close to her. She could see nothing in spite of the muddy flicker of light now and then.
What would you do with a name? But it wasn’t a question. He spat it out.
The train came into daylight for a few seconds, then slid into the darkness of another tunnel.
All the wards were busy that night, he continued. Shootings, others to be operated on. There are always a lot of suicides during a war. At first that seems strange, but you learn to understand it. And she, I think, was overcome by it. The nurses left me with her and then I was called into the triage wards. She was full of morphine, asleep. I found a kid in the hall and I got him to watch her. If she woke he was to come and find me in D wing. This was three a.m. I didn’t want him falling asleep, so I broke a Benzedrine and gave him half. He found me later and told me she was awake. But I couldn’t save her.
There was a train window open and the sound of the clatter doubled. She could feel the gusts.
What would you do with her name? Would you tell my brother?
Someone kicked her ankle and she drew in her breath.
When Leaf left Arizona Anil didn’t hear from her for more than six months. Although during every moment of her farewell she had promised to write. Leaf, who was her closest friend. Once there was just a postcard of a stainless-steel pole. Quemado, New Mexico, the postmark seemed to read, but there was no contact address. Anil assumed she’d abandoned her, for a new life, for new friends. Watch out for the armadillos, señorita! Still, Anil left a snapshot on her fridge of the two of them dancing at some party, this woman who had been her echo, who watched movies with her in her backyard. They’d sway in the hammock, they’d consume rhubarb pie, they’d wake up at three in the morning entangled in each other’s arms, and then Anil would drive home through the empty streets.
The next postcard was of a parabolic dish antenna. Again no message or address. Anil was angry and threw it away. A few months later, when working in Europe, she got the phone call. She didn’t know how Leaf had found her.
‘This is an illegal call, so don’t say my name. I’m cutting into someone’s line.’
(As a teenager Leaf had made long-distance calls on Sammy Davis Jr.’s stolen phone number.)
‘Oh Angie, where are you! You were supposed to write.’
‘I’m sorry. When’s your next break.’
‘In January. A couple of months. I may go to Sri Lanka after that.’
‘If I send you a ticket, will you come and see me? I’m in New Mexico.’
‘Yes. Oh yes…’
So Anil returned to America. And she sat with Leaf in a doughnut shop in Socorro, New Mexico, a half-mile from the Very Large Array of Telescopes, which minute by minute drew information out of the skies. Information about the state of things ten billion years ago, and as many miles out. It was here, in this place, that they caught up with the truth in each other’s lives.
Originally Leaf had said she had bad asthma, that was why she had moved into the desert for a year, disappearing from Anil’s life. She had got involved with Earthworks and was living at The Lightning Field near Corrales. In 1977, artist Walter De Maria had planted four hundred stainless-steel poles high in the desert on a flat plain a mile long. Leaf’s first job was to be a caretaker of the lodge. Powerful winds swept in from the desert and she got to witness storms, because during the summer the poles drew lightning onto the plain. She stood among them, within the electricity, the thunder simultaneous around her. She had just wanted to be a cowboy. She loved the Southwest.
Now Leaf met Anil near the Very Large Array-the telescope assembly that picked up languages of data out of the universe above the desert. She was living alongside these receivers of the huge history of the sky. Who was out there? How far away was that signal? Who was dying unmoored?
Well, it turned out Leaf was.
They sat facing each other during the meals they had together every day at the Pequod. Anil felt the giant telescopes in the open desert belonged to the same genre as Leaf’s beloved drive-ins. They talked and listened to each other. She loved Anil. And she knew Anil loved her. Sister and sister. But Leaf was ill. It would get worse.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I just keep… forgetting things. I can diagnose myself, you see. I have Alzheimer’s. I know I’m too young for this, but I had encephalitis as a kid.’
No one had noticed her illness when they had worked in Arizona. Sister and sister. And she had left without telling Anil why she was really leaving. With all the solitary energy she could draw on, she had gone east to the New Mexico deserts. Asthma, she said. She was starting to lose her memory, fighting for her life.
They sat at the Pequod in Socorro, whispering into the afternoons.
‘Leaf, listen. Remember? Who killed Cherry Valance?’
‘What?’
Anil repeated the question slowly.
‘Cherry Valance,’ Leaf said, ‘I…’
‘John Wayne shot him. Remember.’
‘Did I know that?’
‘You know John Wayne?’
‘No, my darling.’
My darling!
‘Do you think they can hear us?’ Leaf asked. ‘That giant metal ear in the desert. Is it picking us up too? I’m just a detail from the subplot, right.’
Then a splinter of memory returned and she added, awfully, ‘Well, you always thought Cherry Valance would die.’
…
And did she? Sarath had asked, when Anil told him about her friend Leaf.
‘No. She called me that night when I had fever, when we were in the south. We always would phone each other and talk till we fell asleep, laughing or crying, trading our stories. No. Her sister watches over her, not far from those telescopes in New Mexico.’
Dear John Boorman,
I do not have your address but a Mr. Walter Donohue from Faber & Faber has offered to forward this to you. I write on behalf of myself and my colleague Leaf Niedecker about a scene in an early film of yours, Point Blank.
At the start of the film, the prologue as it were, Lee Marvin is shot from a distance of what looks like four or five feet. He falls back into a prison cell and we think he might be dead. Eventually he comes to, leaves Alcatraz and swims across the So-and-so Straits into San Francisco.
We are forensic scientists and have been arguing about where on his body Mr. Marvin was shot. My friend thinks it was a rib glance shooting and that apart from the rib break it was a minor flesh wound. I feel the wound to be more serious. I know many years have passed, but perhaps you could try to remember and advise us of the location of the entry wound and exit wound and recall your discussions with Mr. Marvin as to how he should react and move later on in the film when time had passed and his character had recovered.
Sincerely,
Anil Tissera
A rainy-night conversation at the walawwa.
‘You like to remain cloudy, don’t you, Sarath, even to yourself.’
‘I don’t think clarity is necessarily truth. It’s simplicity, isn’t it?’
‘I need to know what you think. I need to break things apart to know where someone came from. That’s also an acceptance of complexity. Secrets turn powerless in the open air.’