We got what we hoped. The book won a slice of attention. Those who still read read with a promiscuous hunger that would try anything once. Readers persisted in searching for a desperate, eleventh-hour fix. It might take any form at all, even this long, molecular strangeness.
C. and I flinched for weeks, coiled, waiting to be hit. The blow, when it fell, was a clap on the back. We sat dazed at the breakfast table, passing back and forth the glossy weekly with a readership even here, in our little ex-coal-mining town, where English was exotic novelty.
"That's not you, is it?" My first public photo made C. laugh bitterly. "I wouldn't recognize you without the caption."
"It's a haircut double," I tried, too hard. "Another reclusive writer with the same name, trying to pass himself off as Dutch. But note the palm trees in the background."
"You've made it, Beau. You've arrived."
I heard it in C.'s voice. My success killed her last chance. Somehow we'd lost our story.
"Nothing's changed, C. It's still the same book. I'll write the next one the same way. For the same reasons." To extend the parallax you give me and help refract sense from everything we come across.
She looked away, no longer believing or satisfied by belief.
I grew gentle. C. never could endure gentleness. She might have survived yelling. She might have been able to live with me, had I fought fair and shown anger.
"Buddy. Sweetheart. What do you want? Just tell me what you want."
But the only thing she'd ever wanted was the thing I took away by doing for her.
We fell. C. became skittish. She buried herself in schoolwork, her final translation project. She'd sit for meals, but do no more than nibble, chafe, and make polite conversation. Sometimes she grew giddy, hilarious. Her generosity screamed for help. She showered me in attentions and gifts — dried banana mixes, a pair of field glasses to spy on frescoed church vaults, books she knew I coveted but would never buy for myself.
Her hours became erratic; I never knew when I would see her or who she would be when I did. One night, she failed to come home at all. From the balcony where I always watched her get off the bus, I clocked the empty coaches each half hour until they stopped running. After midnight, as I prepared to phone the police, she called. She was all right; she'd explain when she got in.
That night was a night such as everyone spends at least once in life. C. walked in around midmorning. We couldn't look at each other.
"I'd better pop you some corn," I told her. Always one of her favorites.
"Ricky. Don't. Don't be nice to me. I can't bear it."
I popped her some corn. Not to outhurt her. To have something to do with my hands. I brought the bowl to where she sat. She would not look up, say a word, or eat.
"C. Beau. Say something. What's happening?"
C. froze, the classic small mammal in the headlights. Only: I was the headlights. It took me ten years, but at last I learned it. That comfort she showed me on the Quad — the internal calm I loved and built my own on — was dread. Paralysis. Her crumpled, engaging smile had never been more than sheer terror.
She said nothing. The more I needed to hear, the harder she bolted. My need gagged her, and her silence made me desperate.
"It's somebody else," she sneered. "That's what I'm supposed to say, right?"
"Is it somebody else?"
"I don't know."
"Suppose it were somebody else."
"P. At the Institute."
"Your teacher? The one that makes the Dutch girls cry?"
But that sadistic skill was mine alone. And C., in tears, chose her nationality.
Love became fierce after that. Sex, stripped of all ends, went ballistic. Our shy, awkward, ten-year delectation turned to sick and lovely heroin, worth any degradation to suck up. Doomed pleasure injected us with rushes neither of us knew we could feel. Caresses, each the last, burned in their care, and bites that began as tender mnemonics left bruises lasting weeks.
Our last abandoned love act delivered the violence we were after. That night, in the dark, in our blushing bed, we sexed each other like alley strays, grilling each other's skins with nails, teeth, anything that would hook. We choked on those forbidden little cries that stoke lust by flattering it. We told desire that everything else was a lie. That we were not us until mindless in itch, incapable of any more than the odd feral syllable.
Spent, dripping, we held each other. This grace, at least, we shared, even if only humiliation. Sense slunk back. When it did, it struck me with fascinated horror that the condom we'd been using had vanished. Our barrier against birth lay nestled somewhere up inside her. We stared in incomprehension. In that awful second, we each accused the other of subconscious engineering.
We did what we could to counter. Then the long, stunned aftermath of accident.
"What if it's happened?" C. asked me, afraid. "What if I've conceived?"
"I don't know. What would you want to do?"
She seemed lifetimes away. She wasn't talking to me. She listened to some invisible messenger. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what to hope for. Part of me wants it all to be taken out of our hands. Maybe we think too much, Beau. Maybe we've always thought too much."
I thought a baby now, with things so volatile, would be disaster. She felt my failure of will, and to her, it was already a murder.
"What do you want?" she dared me. "What do you think?"
To be born is as painful as to die. "I think we need to wait and see what we are talking about."
We waited. We waited seven weeks. In hope or fear, C. missed a period. She threw up continually. She wasted and turned the color of a sunken copper statue. Then one morning, we got an All Clear that left her suicidal with relief.
Not long after, she announced at dinner the end of the narrative.
My life with C. was a long training. I learned most of my adult truths with her. I learned how to travel light, how to read aloud. I learned to pay attention to the incomprehensible. I learned that no one ever knows another.
I learned her condition of statelessness, steeped in survivor's guilt. I learned how to make a virtue of necessity. How to assume a courage when I had it not. I mimicked that skill she exercised without thinking, for which I loved her most of all. I learned from her how to keep fitting myself against those things that left me for dead.
I learned that only care has a prayer of redressing the unlivable terms of politics. Yet I learned that a love fostered on caretaking crippled the loved one, or, one day — worse — it did what it promised and worked its worldly cure.
"How would you like," I asked A., "to participate in a noble experiment?"
I winced to hear myself talk to the woman. I still took a 50 percent hit in intelligence each time I saw her. Actual attempts at conversation halved that half. Sentences of more than five words I had to rehearse well in advance. I hoped A. might have a fondness for the pathetic. That idiocy lent me comic appeal.
I had lived by the word; now I was dying by the phoneme. The few good cadences I managed to complete competed with countless other claims on A.'s attention. We could not speak anywhere for more than three minutes without someone greeting her effusively. This self-possessed child, who I'd imagined spent solitary nights reading Auden and listening to Palestrina, was in fact a sociopath of affability.
The bar where we sat overflowed with her lost intimates. "Experiment? Just a sec. I'm getting another beer. You want something else?"
She curved her fingers back and touched them to my shoulders. I was finished, done for, and had no objections.