“We had the Renaissance,” the man said to him, “and then we had the Enlightenment, and they’ve always hated us for that.”
Faulk did not want to talk about it. “Awful,” he said to the man, hoping to leave it there.
The man was traveling with two young girls, the taller of whom pushed past his heavy knees and out into the aisle. She stood before Faulk. “My name is Sheila.”
“Sheila,” the man said. “Come here.”
“That’s all right,” Faulk told him. “Hello, Sheila.”
“How old are you?” Sheila asked him. Her eyes were the color of clear water in sunlight.
“I’m very old. How about you?”
“I’m going to be seven. We saw a catastrophe. We were on vacation in Washington, D.C., and we saw a catastrophe. Have you ever seen one of those?”
“Sheila, don’t bother the gentleman.”
“No, it’s fine,” Faulk said. “Really.”
“Have you ever seen a catastrophe?” the girl persisted.
“Well, yes.”
“Did you see what we saw?”
“No, ma’am. I wasn’t there.”
“Don’t you think it’s elegant that I know the word catastrophe?”
“It certainly is.” Faulk smiled at her and then at her father. “I think it’s elegant that you know the word elegant.”
“I know a lot of words.”
“That’s wonderful. You can never know too many words.”
“I know the word fanatical, too. And theocracy. Do you know those words?”
“I do. But I’m so old. It’s excellent that you know them.”
“I just learned those two. My father said them and I learned them.”
“Sheila,” the girl’s father said.
“We were there at the catastrophe,” Sheila said. “We were going to the airport, and we saw a building on fire and smoke going way up in the sky. Way, way up. Way farther than anything we ever saw. So far. Smoke can be a catastrophe, can’t it.”
Faulk nodded at her and kept the smile.
“It scared me. Are you scared?” Sheila looked like she might begin to cry now.
“Sheila,” her father said. “Come here, honey.”
Faulk looked at him. “I was in New York.”
“Our flight home was canceled.”
“We live in Chicago,” Sheila said, sniffling. “We’re taking the train from Memphis.”
“Come up,” the man said, and pulled her onto his knee. The girl on the other side of him, probably four or five, said, “Daddy, I’m hungry.”
The girl named Sheila said, “You always whine when you have nothing to whine about.”
“Sheila.”
“She has nothing to whine about. We didn’t get a catastrophe.”
“Be still.” The man looked over at Faulk. “Tough to explain.”
“Yes.”
“You live in Memphis?”
“Yes.”
“New York on business?”
“A wedding that got canceled.”
“Yeah. Cancellations.”
The girls went on arguing, and the man murmured to them. Faulk got up from his seat and nodded at the man, then went to the entrance of the car and out, to the vestibule. Another man was standing there smoking a cigarette. The man wore a uniform — a dark blue coat and pants. Faulk pushed open the door into the next car and strode carefully in the rocking motion of the train to his compartment. Out the window there was a farmhouse and wide fields, rows of corn. He sat on the thin fold-up bed thinking about his country as he never had before. His own sighs came back to him from the walls, even with the rush and roar of the train, and he let the tears come.
4
Most of the day, Natasha kept to the room, and in the night she made herself walk out alone, along the shoreline. Just at the edge of the bath of light from the resort, she found a piece of driftwood a little smaller than a baseball bat lying in the sand and dry weeds. She carried it with her, tight in her fist. The night was peaceful and clear, and she watched the lights of a passing ship at the farthest line of the horizon. When she returned to the resort, she sat for a little while in one of the chairs on the veranda while the night breezes went over her. The susurration and clicking of the palms soothed her a little, though the whole scene also seemed to increase her sense of the uselessness of everything.
No one spoke to her.
Back in the room, she tried to sleep and couldn’t. She wrote a few lines to Iris, and more to Faulk, but then crumpled the pages and threw them away. The phrases were fraught with complaining, and the complaints were colored by what was really the matter. It looked absurd, was absurd and selfish to be lamenting about being stuck in paradise, and if she kept the real situation to herself while complaining about being here, that was how it would seem.
The night wore on. Toward dawn, she woke sitting in her chair, her neck sore and stiff, both her hands asleep. She paced and swung her arms and rubbed her own numb fingers along her thighs and finally got into the bed under the sheets and lay staring at the white ceiling or at the flicker of lights out in the dark reaches over the sea. At last, sleep came, a dream that she was home, and there was nothing slightly nightmarish about it, yet when she woke, fear roiled in her stomach. Turning over on her side in the softly rising light, she thought about how far she had come from where she had just dreamed she was. There would be no more sleep in this dawn.
She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the light. Amazingly, the sore places were not bruising. She saw herself, tanned, slim, no sign of violence showing. Her jaw was sore.
The hours of the morning were rainy with a slight chill in the air, though by early afternoon the temperature had risen. The waves thundered continually on the beach. She had gone back to bed, and she lay listening to the sounds. She did not even get up to eat.
She slept more, not aware of it as sleep until she opened her eyes and saw that the light was different. She turned and looked at the entrance of the balcony, the railing, and the ocean. She closed her eyes, dozed, and awoke to the rhythmic pounding of the surf and the fading light.
The day passed like this, and Constance stayed away. Constance was leaving her alone.
Natasha couldn’t think now what they might find to talk about. And then of course she knew. They would talk about the attacks, the planes, the killings, and the backdrop of it all would be what Constance had seen of her and Nicholas Duego on the beach. It would be there, unspoken, the mud on the floor, as Iris used to say. Constance would never be able to accept that nothing had happened; and what she did believe about it was too far from the actuality to contemplate without anger.
There were little bottles of liquor inside the minibar. Constance had opened the one in her room on the first night. Natasha opened hers now and drank four of the bottles, two whiskeys, a brandy, and a rum, sitting up in the bed with the blankets over her knees. When she was finished with the rum, she stood, a little shakily, moved to the window, and closed the curtain across the entrance to the balcony, and then got back in bed.