One of their lunches a few months ago was all about genocide, and Roz wanted to talk about the Holocaust, and Tony launched into a detailed thing about genocides through the ages, Genghis Khan and then the Cathars in France, and then the Armenians being butchered by the Turks, and then the Irish and the Scots and what the English did to them, death after horrible death, until Charis thought she was going to throw up.
Tony can deal with all of that, she can handle it, maybe to her it’s just words, but for Charis the words are pictures and then screams and moans, and then the smell of rotting meat, and of burning, of burning flesh, and then physical pain, and if you dwell on it you make it happen, and she can never explain this to Tony in a way that Tony will understand, and also she’s afraid they’ll decide she’s being silly. Hysterical, a nitwit, a flake. She knows they both think that sometimes.
So she’d got up and gone down the dark splintery stairs to the washroom, where there was a Renoir poster on the wall, a rounded pink woman drying herself leisurely after the bath, with blue and mauve highlights on her body, and that was peaceful; but when she’d gone back upstairs Tony was still in Scotland, with the Highland women and children being hunted down in the hills and spitted like pigs and shot like deer.
“The Scots!” said Roz, who wanted to get back to the Holocaust. “They’ve done very well for themselves, look at all those bankers! Who cares about them?”
“I do,” said Charis, surprising herself as much as she did the two of them. “I care:” They looked at her in amazement, because they were used to her taking mental time off when they talked about war. They thought it didn’t interest her.
“You do?” said Roz. her eyebrows up. “Why, Charis?”
“You should care about everybody,” said Charis. “Or maybe it’s because I’m part Scottish. Part Scottish, part English. All those people who used to kill one another so much.” She leaves out the Mennonites because she doesn’t want to upset Roz, although the Mennonites don’t count as real Germans. Also they never kill people; they only get killed, instead.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” said Roz, contrite. “Of course! I keep forgetting. Stupid moi, thinking of you as pure creme de la wAsp.” She patted Charis’s hand.
“Nobody’s killed them recently, though,” said Charis. “Not all at once. But I guess that’s how we ended up here:”
“Ended up here?” said Tony, looking around. Did Charis mean the Toxique, or what?
“Because of wars,” said Charis, unhappily; it’s an insight she doesn’t like much, now that she’s had it. “In this country. Wars of one sort or another. But that was then. We should try to live in the now—don’t you think? Or at least, I try to:”
Tony smiled at Charis with affection, or the closest she usually got to it. “She’s absolutely right,” she said to Roz, as if this were a noteworthy event.
Right about what though, Charis wonders. The wars, or the now? Tony’s standard response to the now would be to tell Charis how many babies are being born per minute, in the now she’s so fond of, and how all that excess birth will inevitably lead to more wars. Then she would add a footnote about the crazed behaviour of overcrowded rats. Charis is grateful she isn’t doing that today.
But she has it at last, the thread: it’s Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Kuwait, and what will happen next. “It’s already been decided,” says Tony, “like the Rubicon,” and Charis says, “The what?”
“Never mind, sweetie. it’s just something historical,” says Roz, because she at least does understand that this is not Charis’s favourite topic of conversation, she’s giving her permission to drift off.
But then it comes to Charis what the Rubicon is. It’s something to do with Julius Caesar, they took it in high school. He crossed the Alps with elephants; another of those men who got famous for killing people. If they stopped giving medals to such men, thinks Charis, if they stopped giving them parades and making statues out of them, then those men would stop doing it. Stop all the killing. They do it to get attention.
Maybe that’s who Tony was, in a previous life: Julius Caesar. Maybe Julius Caesar has been sent back in the body of a woman, to punish him. A very short woman, so he can see what it’s like, to be powerless. Maybe that is the way things work.
The door opens, and Zenia is standing there. Charis goes cold all over, then takes a breath. She’s ready, she’s been readying herself, though lunch at the Toxique is the last place she would have expected this, this manifestation, this return. The Tower;thinks Charis. A sudden event. Something you weren’t looking for. No wonder the pendulum stopped dead, right over her head! But why did Zenia bother opening the door? She could have walked right through it.
Zenia is in black, which is no surprise, black was her colour. But the strange thing is that she’s fatter. Death has filled her out, which is not the usual way. Spirits are supposed to be thinner, hungry-looking, parched, and Zenia appears to be quite well. Especially, her breasts are larger. The last time Charis saw her in the flesh, she was skinny as a rake, a shadow practically, her breasts almost flat, like circles of thick cardboard stuck against her chest, the nipples buttoning them on. Now she’s what you would call voluptuous.
She’s angry, though. A dark aura swirls out from around her, like the corona of the sun in eclipse, only negative; a corona of darkness rather than of light. It’s a turbulent muddy green, shot through with lines of blood red and greyish black—the worst, the most destructive colours, a deadly aureole, a visible infection. Charis will have to call on all her own light, the white light she’s been working so hard at, storing up, for years and years. She will have to do an instant meditation, and what a place for it! Zenia has chosen the ground well for this encounter: the Toxique, the chattering voices, the cigarette smoke and wine fumes, the thick breath-filled air of the city, all are working for Zenia. She stands in the doorway, scanning the room with a scornful rancorous glance, pulling off a glove, and Charis closes her own eyes and repeats to herself. Think about the light.
“Tony, what’s wrong?” says Roz, and Charis opens her eyes again. The waitress is moving towards Zenia.
“Turn your head slowly,” says Tony. “Don’t scream:” Charis watches with interest, to see if the waitress will walk right through Zenia; but she doesn’t, she stops short. She must sense something. A coldness.
“Oh shit,” says Roz. “It’s her.” ,
“Who?” says Charis, doubt beginning to form. Roz hardly ever says “Oh shit:” It must be important.
“Zenia,” says Tony. So they can see her too! Well, why not? They have enough to say to her, each one of them. It isn’t only Charis.
“Zenia’s dead,” says Charis. I wonder what she’s come back for, is what she thinks. Who she’s come back for. Zenia’s aura has faded now, or else Charis can no longer see it: Zenia appears to be solid, substantial, material, disconcertingly alive.
“He looked like a lawyer,” says Charis. Zenia is coming towards her, and she concentrates all her forces for the moment of impact; but Zenia strides right past them in her richly textured dress, with her long legs, her startling new breasts, her glossy hair nebulous around her shoulders, her purple-red angry mouth, trailing musky perfume. She’s refusing to notice Charis, refusing deliberately; she’s passing a hand of darkness over her, usurping her, blotting her out.
Shaken and feeling sick, Charis closes her eyes, struggling to regain her body. My body, mine, she repeats. I am a good person. I exist. In the moonlit night of her head she can see an image: a tall structure, a building, something toppling from it, falling through the air, turning over and over. Coming apart.