The telegram comes in a yellow envelope with a glassine window, and it says the same thing telegrams like that always say-the words distant, like the words of a stranger, an intruder, standing at the far end of a long empty room. There aren't many words, but every word is distinct: inform, loss, regret. Careful, neutral words, with a hidden question behind them: What did you expect?
What's this about? Who is this? she says. Oh. I remember. It's him. That man. But why did they send it to me? I'm scarcely the next of kin!
Kin? says one of them. Did he have any? It's meant to be a witticism.
She laughs. It's nothing to do with me. She crumples up the telegram, which she assumes they've read on the sly before passing it on to her. They read all of the mail; that goes without saying. She sits down, a little too abruptly. I'm sorry, she says. I feel quite strange all of a sudden.
Here you go. This'll buck you up. Drink it down, that's the ticket.
Thank you. It's nothing to do with me, but still it's a shock. It's like someone walking on your grave. She shivers.
Easy does it. You look a little green. Don't take it personally.
Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps they got the addresses mixed.
Could have done. Or perhaps it was his own doing. Perhaps it was his idea of a joke. He was an odd duck, as I recall.
Odder than we thought. What a filthy rotten thing to do! If he was alive you could sue him for mischief.
Perhaps he was trying to make you feel guilty. That's what they do, his kind. Envious, all of them. Dog in the manger. Don't let it worry you.
Well, it's not a very nice thing, no matter how you look at it.
Nice? Why would it be nice? He was never what you'd callnice.
I suppose I could write to the superior officer. Demand an explanation.
Why would he know anything about it? It wouldn't have been him, it was some functionary on this end of things. They just use what's written down in the records. He'd say it was a snafu, by no means the first, from what I hear.
Anyway, no sense in making a fuss. It would just draw attention, and no matter what you do you'll never find out why he did it.
Not unless the dead walk. Their eyes are bright, all watching her, alert. What are they afraid of? What are they afraid she'll do?
I wish you wouldn't use that word, she says fretfully.
What word? Oh. She meansdead. Might as well call a spade a spade. No sense not. Now, don't be…
I don't like spades. I don't like what they're used for-digging holes in the ground.
Don't be morbid.
Get her a handkerchief. It's no time to badger her. She should go upstairs, have a little rest. Then she'll be right as rain.
Don't let it upset you.
Don't take it to heart.
Forget it.
The destruction of Sakiel-Norn
In the night she wakes abruptly, her heart pounding. She slips out of bed and makes her way silently towards the window, and raises the sash higher and leans out. There's the moon, almost full, spider-veined with old scars, and below it the ambient sub-orange glow cast up into the sky by the street lights. Beneath is the sidewalk, patchy with shadow and partially hidden by the chestnut tree in the yard, its branches spread out like a hard thick net, its white-moth flowers glimmering faintly.
There's a man, looking up. She can see the dark eyebrows, the hollows of the eye sockets, the smile a white slash across the oval of his face. At the V below his throat there's pallor: a shirt. He lifts his hand, motions: he wants her to join him-slip out of the window, climb down through the tree. She's afraid though. She's afraid she'll fall.
Now he's on the windowsill outside, now he's in the room. The flowers of the chestnut tree flare up: by their white light she can see his face, the skin greyish, half-toned; two-dimensional, like a photograph, but smudged. There's a smell of burning bacon. He isn't looking at her, not at her exactly; it's as if she is her own shadow and he's looking at that. At where her eyes would be if her shadow could see.
She longs to touch him, but she hesitates: surely if she were to take him in her arms he would blur, then dissolve, into shreds of cloth, into smoke, into molecules, into atoms. Her hands would go right through him.
I said I would come back.
What's happened to you? What's wrong?
Don't you know?
Then they're outside, on the roof it seems, looking down on the city, but it isn't any city she's ever seen. It's as if one huge bomb has fallen on it, it's all in flames, everything burning at once-houses, streets, palaces, fountains and temples-exploding, bursting like fireworks. There's no sound. It burns silently, as if in a picture-white, yellow, red and orange. No screams. No people in it; the people must be dead already. Beside her he flickers in the flickering light.
Nothing will be left of it, he says. A heap of stones, a few old words. It's gone now, it's erased. Nobody will remember.
But it was so beautiful! she says. Now it seems to her like a place she's known; she's known it very well, she's known it like the back of her hand. In the sky three moons have risen. Zycron, she thinks. Beloved planet, land of my heart. Where once, long ago, I was happy. All gone now, all destroyed. She can't bear to look at the flames.
Beautiful for some, he says. That's always the problem.
What went wrong? Who did this?
The old woman.
What?
L'histoire, cette vieille dame exalt ©e et menteuse.
He shines like tin. His eyes are vertical slits. He isn't what she remembers. Everything that made him singular has been burned away. Never mind, he says. They'll build it up again. They always do.
Now she's afraid of him. You've changed so much, she says.
The situation was critical. We had to fight fire with fire.
You won, though. I know you won!
Nobody won.
Has she made a mistake? Surely there was news of victory. There was a parade, she says. I heard about it. There was a brass band.
Look at me, he says.
But she can't. She can't focus on him, he won't stay steady. He's indeterminate, he wavers, like a candle flame but devoid of light. She can't see his eyes.
He's dead, of course. Of course he's dead, because didn't she get the telegram? But it's only an invention, all of this. It's only another dimension of space. Why then is there such desolation?
He's moving away now, and she can't call after him, her throat won't make a sound. Now he's gone.
She feels a choking pressure around the heart. No, no, no, no, says a voice inside her head. Tears are running down her face.
This is when she wakes up really.
Thirteen
Today it's raining, the thin, abstemious rain of early April. Already the blue scilla are beginning to flower, the daffodils have their snouts above ground, the self-seeded forget-me-nots are creeping up, getting ready to hog the light. Here it comes-another year of vegetative hustling and jostling. They never seem to get tired of it: plants have no memories, that's why. They can't remember how many times they've done all this before.
I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.
The winter's ice in the Louveteau Gorge is almost gone, even in the shaded crevasses of the cliffs. The water, black and then white, hurtles down through the limestone chasms and over the boulders, effortlessly as ever. A violent sound, but soothing; alluring, almost. You can see how people are drawn to it. To waterfalls, to high places, to deserts and deep lakes-places of no return.
Only one corpse in the river so far this year, a drug-ridden young woman from Toronto. Another girl in a hurry. Another waste of time, her own. She had relatives here, an aunt, an uncle. Already they're the objects of narrow sideways looks, as if they had something to do with it; already they've assumed the cornered, angry air of the consciously innocent. I'm sure they're blameless, but they're alive, and whoever's left alive gets blamed. That's the rule in things like this. Unfair, but there it is.