Adie stared at the ribboning road. Finally, in a voice the color of that hypnotic pavement, she said, Denise Girandel.
Denise Girandel? Nothing. Then: Denise Girandell How in the name of hell did you dig up that one?
She shrugged. How many cat women are there in one persons life?
Why didn't you tell him?
I wasn't about to give the bastard the satisfaction. A mile went by. Besides. Trying to remember gives him something to do all day.
They pulled up at the motel. Spiegel sat still in the passenger seat, the motor dead. You two should never have gotten divorced. You know that, don't you?
Whatever you say, Stevie. Then, softer. It's not that people shouldn't get divorced. It's that they can't.
Hours into the night, she came into his bed. Looking for something— an explanation, a barricade, another mammal's pelt.
I'm not going to hurt you, she said. I just need to lie here. I just need to hold someone.
Holding lasted no longer than holding ever does. But when it came to the things she needed, hurt and hurting were not least among them. She kneaded into him, as if the thing she had to release lay on the far side of a wall, just out of her reach. She ground against him, less in pleasure than in desperation, in search of some permanence she meant to work on his body. She forced into him, desperate to press all shale to slate. He tried to say her name, but she put her fingers into his mouth, gagging him with desire.
Whatever release she wheedled out of the contact had nothing to do with him. He was just the nearest body, the closest living thing that Would hold still. She fell off him finally, spent, holding him so that he could not turn to embrace her.
For the longest time she did nothing except to lie beside him on this single motel bed, returning to the unbearable baseline of sixty beats a minute. Then she reached over, her hand cupping around his face, a child playing guess who.
By the tips of her fingers, Stevie felt that his temples were wet. Remind me, he said.
She rustled up close to his ear. Remind you what?
Once out of nature. To look for something better than this body.
She stroked his temples, counterclockwise. Each trace around the circle undid one spent year. Then she placed his words — the past, the poem that he was quoting. Her fingers clenched. Go on, she commanded. Desperate. Say it. Say the rest.
He could not refuse her anything. He'd given her worse, more irreversible, already this night. His own voice rang strange to him, speaking into the black:
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling…
Her hand closed on the skin around his eyes. Her nails clenched, as she pressed back into him. He held still in pain, ready to be blinded.
That's it, she whispered into the gaping motel room. That's the room we're supposed to build. And set upon a golden bough to sing. The place we're after. Byzantium.
35
In time, whole days start to vanish. For a long while the orderly egg carton of the calendar has regulated your mind, kept it, if not productive, at least aligned. But now the carton starts to crumple, the eggs to break against one another in an angry omelet.
You carry on numbering the days, desperate for form, although the tally no longer correlates with anything. The week arrives when you can't make it from one Friday call to prayer to the next without disorientation. It pulls you up out of a night's sleep and runs you under the freezing fire hose — this drift into terror, into utter timelessness.
This room's day permits only the crudest clock. Sometimes it is dark; sometimes a little darker. The only reliable instrument here is your English Qur'an, that earthbound perjury of heaven's uncreated original. Its pages solidify into a discipline, the rigorous training for a track meet you must get ready for. Reading is your daily regimen, each session coming to a forced stop after ten verses, wherever that leaves you. Whole surahs dangle right before the end, or break off bluntly after just starting. Only the count counts.
You may reread the day's passage as often as you like, but not a word more. When the hours expand beyond their usual cruelty, you pore over the opening fatihah until it induces oblivion. But you keep to the day's installment. For tomorrow, after the forced march through the latrine and the return to the chain, this system will return you to the previous outing's exact stopping place, to start you up again in the slot where today has dropped you.
This ritual hammers out a few still moments to stand in. It steadies the swirl of eternity, for as long as the verses last. This time you ration yourself, sustain the escape. The Cow, the Bee, the Table: just the mystery woven into these chapter names diverts you from hovering madness. However reconfigured this Jonah, this Joseph, this Abraham, they make their way against the backdrop, under the Thunder, out from the Cave, along the Night Journey. Say, the words of the Prophet always start. Say: were the sea ink for the words of God, the sea would fail before the words did.
The verses themselves evade you. Their linked riddles will not crack. But the torrent of words, their sense-free cadences suffice to hold you, even in the absence of story. Their pageant of sounds drowns out your own incessant dunning. The throwaway phrase "and the water-bearer let down his bucket" expands in your eyes for hours, sounding in your ear for all the world like a soul-saving miracle, the most magnificent idea, the roundest image you have ever stumbled on.
But the secret side effect, the contraband payoff must never have occurred to your captors. They've already broken one divine prohibition in giving you this forbidden foreign translation in the first place. Surely they would confiscate the Scripture if they suspected the scope of its revelation. These measured-out passages keep you tethered in the flux of time. If you start at the fatihah and sum the verses you have read, then divide the total by ten, the quotient yields, by the miraculous dictate of numbers, the total number of days that have passed since you received the word. This is your new perfected calendar, dating not to any fixed year but resetting all dates to your own private hegira.
Most days, the balm of this word hoard outpaces the torment of its rationing. But sometimes balm and torment settle into a dead heat-starting and stopping, sentences and silence torturing one another to death. How have you been brought to this, staking yourself to the same book your mother once committed to memory without her understanding more than one in a dozen words? You reopen the wounds that that victim once inflicted on herself. Did you think to enter paradise without suffering the violence of those who have come before you?
They tame the abyss, these verses, better than any parade of orderly notches in the wall plaster could. But they cannot repair your own damaged mainspring, or synchronize it. When you return to the well of text, passages that you recall from adjacent days now stand split by several pages, while those separated by weeks in your memory run flush against each other. This evidence hits you, like a freshly discovered lump in your abdomen. You and lucidity have been parting company without your knowing. Mind has been resorting to the quietest drift, a protective hallucination finally gentler than the alternative.