I would admit the lesser of two evils with most of my mind, and say I may have been wrong for a moment.
An intense tiredness begins to drown me. The strain to resist it becomes more and more difficult. My effort trembles the faces and the shape of the room. The danger shakes me. When I hit back against the people staring down, the dream splits open. I wake to find the Maori clutching my left wrist, looming over me, indistinct in the half-light of a torch which is propped on a chair by the bed. He’s got a gun in his other hand. We stare at each other for a moment until I can divide the dream images from the reality of the dimness here.
‘You were shouting,’ he says, letting my wrist go. ‘You okay?’
My mouth is dry; I have trouble speaking.
‘Yes. It’s alright.’
He sees me looking at the gun.
‘I didn’t know what was happening.’ He exhales and walks slowly to a chair and sits. I can see enough of his expression to detect an unusual nervousness.
‘Nightmare,’ I say. He nods.
‘You remember it?’
‘No.’
It is true; no deception. The events of the dreams slide past me as if I have tunnel vision and can’t turn to look back. They seem to gather at the back of my head at an unseeable point.
‘I remember mine,’ he says. He becomes pensive.
‘What did I shout?’
‘Eh? Oh, don’t know. Couldn’t tell.’ His face composes itself into a carving of frowns. ‘I think I always remember mine,’ he repeats.
‘What are they about?’ I ask, as tonelessly as possible. His features don’t move.
‘Things that have happened to me.’ He sighs, then nods towards the window. ‘It’s raining. Getting colder now. End of summer.’
I listen and there is the faint sound of rain rustling on the window.
‘I reckon we ought to get out of Wellington,’ he says suddenly, as though he’s been giving it some thought. ‘I don’t like it here. I think it’s…’
‘It’s what?’
‘Aw… kind of… I think it’s getting at us. Don’t you?’
‘Where will we go?’
‘I can work an outboard motor. We could get one of those small boats and cross Cook Strait. There might be someone in the South Island.’
‘You said you didn’t know anything about boats.’
‘I can work an outboard.’
‘I’m useless with boats.’
‘We could make it. Wait for a calm day.’ He rubs his face wearily. ‘It’ll be okay. But you get better first, eh?’
‘Alright, then.’
There is a pause. I can see that his concern for me is a dry piece of calculation. How much should I trust him? He’s had chances to kill me. But he needs me alive.
I don’t think he knows how closely I observe him, or what deductions I can make. In the movement of expressions across his face an almost childlike openness is always being betrayed or replaced by something hard and at the same time subtle, exactly like a mask carved in great secrecy a long way from the light, covered in intricate, devious designs all with concealed meanings; the result came from the gradual working away in half-light of opposing forces, one trying to wear down the other and being blindly resisted.
‘I once heard this story,’ he says, ‘ages ago, can’t remember where I got it from. It was about these people who are trapped some place. There’s this door or gate, I think. It’s fastened up. The point is, when they work out the right words to say, the door will open, or they’ll be able to get out some way. Each one, separate. Different words for each one. Or for some of them, they have to do something, and that will open the way out. They don’t all see what it is.’ He glances at me. ‘Because it’s whether they understand what went wrong, how they got trapped there. They’ve got to understand, and then and then—’
He stops. The same impulse to confess; I see the reason more clearly now. It forms itself into a religious image filtered through second-hand legends from Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante or Grimms’ Fairy Tales, stories I can remember too, vaguely.
‘Abracadabra,’ I say.
‘What?’ He turns and looks.
‘The magic formula. When you say the right words the door opens on the cave full of treasure. It’s from the Arabian Nights.’
‘Is it?’ He frowns and shakes his head. ‘No, don’t think that was it.’
‘You still think we missed something good because we survived,’ I say, wearily.
‘Well. Is this good?’ he asks, waving his hand at the dark. ‘You do all those tests, with machines and bits of paper. How would they tell you? They know down from up, and north from south, but they don’t know good from bad. You said, the world’s the same as far as they can tell. I mean, we know that’s not bloody true.’ He stands and looks down at me. ‘I still reckon there’s a reason why we’re here.’
‘There doesn’t have to be.’
‘There’s got to be. And we could be the last people to ever know what the hell it is, because if we knew we wouldn’t be here.’ He picks up the torch and holds it down so that both our faces are obscured. ‘Try and remember, when you wake up.’ His voice shades between a plea and a threat; without seeing his features it’s hard to tell.
‘Remember what?’
‘What makes your dreams so bad.’
He walks back into his room, the pool of light held down, vast shadows hunching and slanting over the walls and flat ceiling. The door closes and the lock clicks this time with no furtive secrecy. The sound is meant to snap against my mind.
Everything has changed. I know he is a murderer. How have I let him get so much power? What does he think I forget?
The rain increases. It rattles against the window like tapping fingernails.
The day breaks from a pack of heavy clouds. Rainwater glistens everywhere like impacted glass. He wants to drive down to the harbour near the swimming pool to select a boat. He persuades me to go with him in the Lotus Elite. I eat breakfast and am apparently recovered so there is no excuse to stay behind. I have to admit the car is rather good. It smells very new inside and everything squeaks slightly.
‘I wanted one in lemon yellow with tan upholstery,’ he says, as we drive down the Terrace, ‘but this was all they had. Red and black. Bit crude really.’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘I’ve got good taste, you know. Where are the rich suburbs round here? That’s where they’ll have the best cars, eh? I wouldn’t mind having a go in a Jensen. Or a Rolls.’
The banter seems to go on regardless of me or the weak attempts to respond. The displaced word ‘they’ has sealed itself in a special vacuum. His joking breaks this open with a subversive mockery directed outwards at the negative force, taunting it.
The car hisses over wet roads. The rain has stopped but loaded clouds are coming in to land too low, colliding with the tops of hills and being torn to mist in a slow film. The single windscreen wiper flicks away remaining bits of rain with a few arrogant movements, then squeals to be stopped.
I walk around the wharf whilst he explores the boats and breaks into several sheds looking for equipment. There is a long building on one of the jetties with sliding doors set back about three metres from the edge of the jetty. As I stroll along by this building I feel strangely reluctant to walk directly round the far corner; as if I might bump into something. So I stop, about five metres away, and then walk out diagonally to the edge of the jetty and continue to stroll along, so that I can see round the corner from a distance before I reach the end of the building. There is nothing there. When I get to the end of the jetty I turn and look back. Apirana is standing by a boat on the slipway staring at me, unmoving. I turn and walk to the other side of the end of the jetty and look down the back of the long building. There are only a few rusting cans and a couple of lifebelts there. When I walk back into Apirana’s line of sight around the corner again he is still standing in the same attitude, gazing with catlike intensity at the corner of the building where I reappear. I stroll along back to the slipway, and look down at him. He has a spanner and an oil-stained rag in his hands.