Farrell said, “Individuals have memories. Groups have forgetteries.”
Hamid laughed outright. “Tell me the difference. There’s no law against anything that child did, there’s no way to prove anything we saw, and there is damn sure no undoing any of it. Might just as well make up a poem about how old Crof Grant died in battle with ten million trolls, tell stories about Prester John getting taken up to heaven by St. Whale. Just as likely as what really happened, and it sings better.”
“But everybody knows the truth,” Farrell said. He felt mired in priggishness, and Lovita’s dimple did not help him.
Hamid said, “That’s why there’s the League, babe.”
Sia’s lawyer—a short, dashing woman with a few too many pointed white teeth—called Ben and Farrell to her office to read them Sia’s will. It had been drawn up several years before Ben ever met her, spoke nowhere of her death, but only of a possible disappearance, and left everything to him, with the exception of Briseis. Not only was the dog left specifically in Farrell’s care, but a remarkable number of clauses went into making it clear that, if Farrell refused to accept Briseis or attempted to get rid of her at any time, the entire bequest to Ben was to revert to a trust administered for the purpose of feeding the ducks in Barton Park. Farrell yielded without a struggle, but with curious misgivings. “She could see the future,” he said to Ben. “If you can see the future, you don’t just do things.”
“She saw part of the future part of the time,” Ben said. “I think she liked it that way.”
Farrell had spent the first days after Sia’s departure hovering around Ben like a Gray Lady, trying to help him deal with a loss that Farrell could neither share nor truly imagine. But in fact, as the fall passed, Ben went about his life with a quiet decisiveness, teaching his classes, keeping office hours, going dutifully to faculty meetings when no escape offered itself, working on his overdue skaldic poetry book on weekends, and even going swimming with Farrell once or twice a week. He spoke of Sia from time to time, gently and with affection, as if remembering an old lover now safely married to an eye doctor. Farrell knew just enough about grieving to be alarmed.
They walked all the way home from campus one evening, taking advantage of the last softness in the air, cheerfully debating aspects of the class struggle involved in the coming World Series between Seattle and Atlanta. Ben interrupted the argument to ask abruptly, “Why do you keep looking at me the way you do? Is something falling off?”
“Nothing,” Farrell said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was staring.”
“Every damn minute, weeks now. This isn’t the Island of Dr. Moreau. I’m not going to revert, start running on all fours.”
“I know that, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just waiting for you to start breaking furniture.” They walked on in silence for some time, meeting no one, listening to music from lighted windows, until Farrell said, “In the end, it’s none of my business—”
“Of course it’s your business; who else’s damn business is it? Don’t get all humilified on me.” He paused, and then said in a quieter tone, “Do you remember when she realized that she couldn’t save Nicholas Bonner? I mean that one exact moment?”
“When she opened her mouth and I thought she was going to cry everything to pieces, just shout all of it down. But she never made a sound.”
“No, not a sound. If she had, if she’d let even the least little bit of that sorrow out, we’d have been lucky to go mad. Most likely, we’d have turned into something that could endure to hear her—stones, air. She ate that pain to save us. That’s what destroyed her, you know.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about her, except that she’s a goddess and immortal, and you’re not. You’re supposed to scream.”
“Oh, I will. But not for a while yet.” He smiled at Farrell then and touched his shoulder. “You do know how it is with really little kids, when they get hurt or really upset? That long, awful moment before the howl?” Farrell nodded. “That’s where I am right now. I can’t even get my breath to cry, but I still have to live.”
Briseis met them halfway down the block, ignoring Ben entirely to dance and yap around Farrell as if she were a much smaller dog, running between his legs and all but snapping at his ankles. Ben said, “Well, somebody sure knows an authority figure when she sees one.”
“It’s not funny. Don’t encourage her. Ever since we told her about the will, she’s been getting nutsier by the minute. Knock it off, Briseis,” he ordered, as the dog leaped up to him. “See that? That’s not fawning, she never licks my face, she just looks at me as if I know where all her puppies are. Wake up in the night, and she’s standing right by the bed, waiting. I hate to tell you, but if she keeps this up, the ducks are going to get your house. Briseis, God damn it!”
They stood outside the house for a few minutes, watching timers turn lamps on and off. Ben said finally, “You still talk about Sia in the present tense. I always notice.”
“I think of her like that. Hell, I dream about her most nights. The strange thing about that is, we’re always out of the house, going shopping, working in the garden, just walking down Parnell. Don’t you have dreams about her?”
Ben shook his head. “I can’t afford to, Joe. Sometimes I think she’s really dead, sometimes she’s just gone somewhere I don’t know how to imagine. But it doesn’t make any difference, it can’t. Where she is, she’s done with me, the same way she’s done with Nicholas Bonner. He was the real reason she hung around the human shape, he was her responsibility, but he’s gone, and she’s done with all of us, she meant what she said. And I still have to live.”
Farrell’s unease deepened with the autumn, putting him at vague but constant odds with everything. His dreams of Sia persisted, companionable and undemanding in themselves, but more and more leaving him angrily bereft each time he woke to look up into Briseis’ foolish, urgent eyes. The dog took to following him to work, which was bad enough but manageable; the people at the auto restoration shop liked her and fed her bits of their lunches. But the second time she dragged the blankets off him in Julie’s house at three in the morning, he came up reaching for her throat, and it took all of Julie’s efforts to make him stop yelling and throttling Briseis. It took a good deal longer for him to stop trembling, even when Julie held him.
“I wouldn’t say this to everybody,” she said, “but I suspect you’re getting a message.” Farrell huddled in a chair, glowering across the bedroom at Briseis. Julie said, “I think our friend wants to talk to you.”
“Not me. Definitely not me. Ben’s her man, and you’re her friend, practically a second cousin. I’m the straight man, the dummy—I’m Briseis, when you get down to it. You don’t make long-distance calls to Briseis.”
“We’re all her Briseises. What else could we be to her? Tenth-rate material, cheap styrofoam, meant for packing cartons, not to be depended on by a goddess. But she didn’t have any choice, she was stuck with us and, damn it, she could have done a lot worse for familiars. Maybe we couldn’t be much help, but we must have been some, because she’s sending for you again. And if she wants you, you have to go.”
“Go? Go where?” Farrell sat up, and Briseis ran into the bathroom, rousing the white cat Mushy, who won the ensuing two-rounder by a TKO. Farrell said, “Jewel, I couldn’t even guess if she’s on the bloody planet anymore. And it’s not just where, it’s what. She could come back as the Pocatello National Bank or a manhole cover in Kuala Lumpur, I would not know.”
“Briseis would. She left her to you for a reason.” Farrell snarled. “So would your ring, probably. Look at the way it’s shining right now.”
“It just does that. It’s not any good for anything, it’s just supposed to remind me of her.” Julie smiled and spread her hands. Farrell said heavily. “Even if. Even if I quit the job and pile my stuff in the bus one more time, and sit Briseis on the dashboard so she can point where she wants me to go. Even if I’m that crazy. What happens to us?”