‘I love you!’ She found his rhythm, adapted to it, trying to take him all inside her. She wanted to see where they joined, and she imagined there was no longer any distinction between them, that their bodies had merged and were sealed together.
‘I cheated in mathematics class, I could never do trigonometry. God . . . Catherine.’
His voice receded, stopped, and the air seemed to grow solid around her, holding her in a rosy suspension. Light was gathering about them, frictive light from a strange heatless burning, and she heard herself crying out, calling his name, saying sweet things, childish things, telling him how wonderful he was, words like the words in a dream, important for their music, their sonority, rather than for any sense they made. She felt again the building of a dark wave in her belly. This time she flowed with it and let it carry her far.
Six
‘Love’s stupid,’ John said to her one day months later as they were sitting in the chamber of the heart, watching the complex eddying of golden light and whorls of shadow on the surface of the organ. ‘I feel like a damn sophomore. I keep finding myself thinking that I should do something noble. Feed the hungry, cure a disease.’ He made a noise of disgust. ‘It’s as if I just woke up to the fact that the world has problems, and because I’m so happily in love, I want everyone else to be happy. But stuck . . .’
‘Sometimes I feel like that myself,’ she said, startled by this outburst. ‘Maybe it’s stupid, but it’s not wrong. And neither is being happy.’
‘Stuck in here,’ he went on, ‘there’s no chance of doing anything for ourselves, let alone saving the world. As for being happy, that’s not going to last . . . not in here, anyway.’
‘It’s lasted six months,’ she said. ‘And if it won’t last here, why should it last anywhere?’
He drew up his knees, rubbed the spot on his ankle where it had been fractured. ‘What’s the matter with you? When I got here, all you could talk about was how much you wanted to escape. You said you’d do anything to get out. It sounds now that you don’t care one way or the other.’
She watched him rubbing the ankle, knowing what was coming. ‘I’d like very much to escape. Now that you’re here, it’s more acceptable to me. I can’t deny that. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t leave if I had the chance. But at least I can think about staying here without despairing.’
‘Well, I can’t! I . . .’ He lowered his head, suddenly drained of animation, still rubbing his ankle. ‘I’m sorry, Catherine. My leg’s hurting again, and I’m in a foul mood.’ He cut his eyes toward her. ‘Have you got that stuff with you?’
‘Yes.’
She made no move to get it for him.
‘I realize I’m taking too much,’ he said. ‘It helps pass the time.’
She bristled at that and wanted to ask if she was the reason for his boredom; but she repressed her anger, knowing that she was partly to blame for his dependency on the brianine, that during his convalescence she had responded to his demands for the drug as a lover and not as a nurse.
An impatient look crossed his face. ‘Can I have it?’
Reluctantly she opened her pack, removed a flask of water and some pellets of brianine wrapped in cloth, and handed them over. He fumbled at the cloth, hurrying to unscrew the cap of the flask, and then – as he was about to swallow two of the pellets – he noticed her watching him. His face tightened with anger, and he appeared ready to snap at her. But his expression softened, and he downed the pellets, held out two more. ‘Take some with me,’ he said. ‘I know I have to stop. And I will. But let’s just relax today, let’s pretend we don’t have any troubles . . . all right?’
That was a ploy he had adopted recently, making her his accomplice in addiction and thus avoiding guilt; she knew she should refuse to join him, but at the moment she didn’t have the strength for an argument. She took the pellets, washed them down with a swallow of water and lay back against the chamber wall. He settled beside her, leaning on one elbow, smiling, his eyes muddled-looking from the drug.
‘You do have to stop, you know,’ she said.
His smile flickered, then steadied, as if his batteries were running low. ‘I suppose.’
‘If we’re going to escape,’ she said, ‘you’ll need a clear head.’
He perked up at this. ‘That’s a change.’
‘I haven’t been thinking about escape for a long time. It didn’t seem possible . . . it didn’t even seem very important, anymore. I guess I’d given up on the idea. I mean just before you arrived, I’d been thinking about it again, but it wasn’t serious . . . only frustration.’
‘And now?’
‘It’s become important again.’
‘Because of me, because I keep nagging about it?’
‘Because of both of us. I’m not sure escape’s possible, but I was wrong to stop trying.’
He rolled onto his back, shielding his eyes with his forearm as if the heart’s glow were too bright.
‘John?’ The name sounded thick and sluggish, and she could feel the drug taking her, making her drifty and slow.
‘This place,’ he said. ‘This goddamn place.’
‘I thought,’ – she was beginning to have difficulty in ordering her words – ‘I thought you were excited by it. You used to talk . . .’
‘Oh, I am excited!’ He laughed dully. ‘It’s a storehouse of marvels. Fantastic! Overwhelming! It’s too overwhelming. The feeling here . . .’ He turned to her. ‘Don’t you feel it?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘How could you stand living here for all these years? Are you that much stronger than me, or are you just insensitive?’
‘I’m . . .’
‘God!’
He turned away, stared at the heart wall, his face tattooed with a convoluted flow of light and shadow, then flaring gold.
‘You’re so at ease here. Look at that.’ He pointed to the heart. ‘It’s not a heart, it’s a bloody act of magic. Every time I come here I get the feeling it’s going to display a pattern that’ll make me disappear. Or crush me. Or something. And you just sit there looking at it with a thoughtful expression as if you’re planning to put in curtains or repaint the damned thing.’
‘We don’t have to come here anymore.’
‘I can’t stay away,’ he said, and held up a pellet of brianine. ‘It’s like this stuff.’
They didn’t speak for several minutes . . . perhaps a bit less, perhaps a little more. Time had become meaningless, and Catherine felt that she was floating away, her flesh suffused with a rosy warmth like the warmth of lovemaking. Flashes of dream imagery passed through her mind: a clown’s monstrous face; an unfamiliar room with tilted walls and three-legged blue chairs; a painting whose paint was melting, dripping. The flashes lapsed into thoughts of John. He was becoming weaker every day, she realized. Losing his resilience, growing nervous and moody. She had tried to convince herself that sooner or later he would become adjusted to life inside Griaule, but she was beginning to accept the fact that he was not going to be able to survive here. She didn’t understand why, whether it was due – as he had said – to the dragon’s oppressiveness or to some inherent weakness. Or a combination of both. But she could no longer deny it, and the only option left was for them to effect an escape. It was easy to consider escape with the drug in her veins, feeling aloof and calm, possessed of a dreamlike overview; but she knew that once it wore off she would be at a loss as to how to proceed.
To avoid thinking, she let the heart’s patterns dominate her attention. They seemed abnormally complex, and as she watched she began to have the impression of something new at work, some interior mechanism that she had never noticed before, and to become aware that the sense of imminence that pervaded the chamber was stronger than ever before; but she was so muzzy-headed that she could not concentrate upon these things. Her eyelids drooped, and she fell into her recurring dream of the sleeping dragon, focusing on the smooth scaleless skin of its chest, a patch of whiteness that came to surround her, to draw her into a world of whiteness with the serene constancy of its rhythmic rise and fall, as unvarying and predictable as the ticking of a perfect clock.