Wolf Point Page 19

  The woman and the girl were stretched out on the sofa, and the woman stroked the girl’s hair and cooed sweet sounds into her ear. T in the darkness was amazed that he could hear those sounds, and he realized that being able to hear was the striking difference between being there and just seeing the picture. There, in the shadows, in the surrounding dark, he heard the woman whispering promises into the child’s ear, and there, so close, he saw clearly that the girl in her arms was a beautiful child, and he knew somehow that she was more beautiful in that moment than she would be ever again. It was as if it were the child’s last moment and he knew it, and then a man who had been standing beside him in the darkness stepped into the light and T knew immediately at the sight of that bulky, hirsute body what was about to happen. He watched with his heart racing as the man approached the child and the child turned her cheek into the woman’s breast and opened her mouth. He could see that the child was full of the woman’s words and she wanted what was about to happen, and then he was there, at the exact erotic moment arrested in the photographic image, only now, when the man entered her and T heard the sound that issued from the girl’s lips, instead of the sensual moan he had imagined, a groan of pain rose up out of the belly of the child, a sound agonized and terrible. T saw her locked in the woman’s arms, and then he was in the next moment, the moment after the moment in the image, and he saw the child crying for all that was lost and all that would follow, and, in the next moment, she looked at him. She found T in the shadows, her eyes met his eyes, and T was ashamed. He closed his eyes to hide from her gaze. When he opened them again, he was back on the Saint Lawrence and the river around him for as far as he could see was littered with the bodies of young women, multitudes of bodies floating under the eye of the moon. For several long moments he could not shake it off, that vision of countless young women, raped, beaten, murdered, bruised, in shackles, in chains, all of them floating out to sea, all of them beautiful.

  In time the river returned to black waves and white froth, and it held him for hours more as his thoughts settled and calmed, though they also grew fuzzier, less distinct, the clarity of that terrible image lost as he recalled a long sequence of memories involving his own children, the most vivid a memory of the red maple in their front yard shedding leaves in an autumn wind, in a leaf storm, the red and yellow leaves falling thick as snowflakes, and the kids, Evan and Maura, running wildly through the falling leaves with their arms outstretched, yelling in the big wind, their open mouths full of joyful shouts. After a time, even those memories disappeared and he was left with a growing pain in his chest and arm, a pain that threatened to overwhelm him, and he slid his head along the slick black plastic to look at the hole in his chest. The sky over-head was beginning to lighten, the stars and moon beginning to fade, and out of somewhere something howled, a piercing growl, and he looked down into the bright yellow ball of the sun high on the horizon. Below him, he could feel Lester and Jenny swimming in the depths, as if trailing beneath him, and he tried to tell Lester, no, no, it’s not, the world is not what he, what Lester, said, but then T let that go, that desire to tell, and he held Maura’s hand and Evan’s hand and he focused entirely on the wavering yellow ball of the sun flickering over the green surface of the water, and then there were men in bright orange jackets trying to speak to him, only they spoke in tongues, they babbled, and then they were behind and alongside him as the guitar was pulled away and his body floated, held in Carolyn’s loving arms, and various memories fluttered through his mind like Carolyn’s snowflakes rocking lazily down as he was lifted into the hum and vibration of movement, into the skimming over water, the jostle and lurch, until a black wall of steel bore down on him and he struggled to find Carolyn in the stern at the engine and saw instead a bright orange jacket wrapped around a bearded man. T said, “Carolyn’s dead,” and the orange jacket beside him said okay, okay and nodded as he wrapped a blanket around him and then there was a great whirring sound as they rose out of the water, pulled up along a black wall into the heavens.

  Epilogue

  Kolympari, Crete, April 2003

  During the invasion of Iraq, T fell in with a group of fellow Americans in Crete. Nights they huddled together to watch the massive bombing of Baghdad and days they looked over their shoulders, concerned for their own safety. It was a time of quick friendships and T found himself in the regular company of an American writer and his physician wife, a pair of decent, generous people around whom a kind of old-fashioned salon revolved. They opened their home to artist friends from all over the world, most of whom only visited for a week or two, though one woman, an artist in her late forties, had been staying with them when T arrived in January and had no immediate plans to leave. Between the writer and his wife and their friends, there were always a half-dozen or so people with whom he might enjoy a social evening, or a late dinner at the Argentina, or a day of hiking and swimming.

  Typically, though, he spent his days exploring the beaches on the coast or the mountains of the interior. It was his habit to get up before dawn and sit out on his deck with a cup of Turkish coffee, where he watched the sun come up over the Aegean, the bright circle of light arising as if out of the sea itself. After breakfast he’d gather up his maps and guidebooks, pick an interesting spot somewhere on the island, drive to it, and spend the day exploring and taking pictures. He shot a roll or two most days, then on Saturdays went into Hania, where he had contact sheets made. In the four months he’d been taking pictures, he’d managed a dozen shots he liked enough to have enlarged and framed. Several of them he’d already given away, to the writer and the doctor and their friends; the others were in his study; one, his favorite, a shot of the late-afternoon sun exploding into an offshore cave, he had hung in his living room. He intended, sooner rather than later, to build a darkroom behind the kitchen.

  His brief, violent weekend with Jenny and Lester had already settled into a dreamy memory. Sometimes it seemed impossible that he had picked up a pair of young hitchhikers and almost paid for that bit of recklessness with his life. After his hallucinatory night on the Saint Lawrence, he had spent close to a month in the hospital recovering from complications caused by the gunshot wound, which by itself had done limited serious damage, but the bullet had lodged close to his heart, and after much debate the doctors had gone in and removed it. During his hospital stay, Alicia had come to visit him, as had Maura and Evan. Alicia had entered the room guardedly, clearly not knowing what to expect, given he had pretty much thrown her out of his house the last time they’d met. When he apologized to her for all that had gone wrong between them, when he told her he wanted to let it go and move on, she only nodded at first, and then she touched his leg—she was sitting alongside his bed—and laid her head down on the mattress, her forehead against his thigh. She looked away from him as he stroked her hair.

  Soon after Alicia’s visit, Maura came; and then a week later Evan walked through the door. He sat in a chair near the foot of the bed. His first words were, “Mom said I should come to see you,” which he issued as if a challenge, as if to reassert his anger. T told him how glad he was to see him, how much it meant to him that he had made the trip. Evan nodded. When the silence thickened, T told him about his night on the water, as he had told Alicia and Maura before him. He told him about the hallucinations, the travels he had taken inside the body of the guitar—and he told him how, on the edge of losing consciousness, his mind had taken comfort in memories that were so intense they felt real, as if he were back again living through them—and he told him that one of the last things he remembered was Maura and Evan as children shouting and running wildly through a big wind in autumn, the air around them thick with a blaze of brightly colored leaves. Evan said yes, he remembered that too. Then he got up and touched T’s shoulder and said he was sorry but he had to leave.

  Within a month of being released from the hospital, T had sold his house in Salem, given away or sold most of his possessions, and moved to Crete, where already he felt mo
re at home than he ever had in Virginia. He found his villa comforting, with its view of the Aegean, its thick stone walls and oak bookcases, and its growing collection of art he was acquiring from visiting painters, as well as from a local gallery in Hania, where he had developed a friendly relationship with the owner, a thin Greek woman in her fifties with a caustic sense of humor and a genial smile. Time seemed to move more slowly in Crete, and in a good way, not the way it had slowed down in Salem, thickening in the air, suffocating him, but in a comfortable way, in a slower pace, in an atmosphere that allowed him to breathe easily as he moved among the island’s mythic places, looking, and taking pictures.

  He thought a lot about Carolyn. He was reading her books of poetry again, working his way deep into them. He was coming to see her as a kind of storm force of intellect and talent that had swept over him as a young man. It didn’t seem necessary anymore to keep his relationship to her a secret. He had even written about her to Maura and Evan, though he was writing to them about everything in his life. He had taken to writing them twice a week, long letters in which he talked about his past and tried hard to explain himself, and to convince them that they were both immensely important to him. Maura had begun writing back. Evan had called a few times. He planned to keep writing to both his children, the letters having become a twice-a-week ritual. He kept all of the letters in a computer file, and nights he’d sit in front of the glowing monitor and read through them.

  He didn’t think about Jenny and Lester much anymore. He remembered them as tragic figures whose lives had intersected with his for a fiery instant. When he thought back to that weekend, he wound up thinking about his time on the water. He had been out of his mind for most of that night, but not so out of his mind he hadn’t known to cling to the guitar. He had been picked up by an Argentinean freighter, though he remembered very little beyond the vivid images of rising up into the early morning sky as their dinghy was hauled by winch up the side of the ship. Now the restaurant where he had dinner so many nights, a Greek restaurant on a Greek island, was called the Argentina. Did that mean something? Was there a message there somewhere? If there was, he didn’t get it. He was a rube scratching his head before the work of a masterful magician. All he knew was that he didn’t know much of anything beyond that he wanted to live. You don’t cling all night to a guitar case while floating in the Saint Lawrence with a bullet lodged near your heart unless you want very much to live. He did. He would. Nights in his villa, when he was finished reading whatever book he was reading, or tinkering with the red guitar, or rereading his own letters, he’d turn off the lights and get into bed and stare out his open window at the sea. Sometimes in the moments right before sleep, those moments that are like floating on water, the shame he felt that night on the Saint Lawrence, when that child’s eyes searched out his eyes and found him watching in the dark, that shame returned so vividly that he had to get out of bed and turn on the lights, because he knew if he closed his eyes he’d see the nightmarish hallucination of an ocean littered with the bodies of murdered women. Those nights he’d get dressed and walk along a dirt-and-cobblestone road that wound its way along the Aegean and into the village, where he’d usually find someone still talking over wine or raki at the Argentina, and he’d join them, taking part in the conversation, which somehow, always, for reasons he didn’t understand, helped him reclaim a sense of his own decency, just sitting at a table over food and drink and talking about each other and the world. Sometimes he’d spend half the night there, among Greeks who it seemed could talk forever. Often he was the first to leave, to get up amid the chatter and laughter, to finish off his drink and start back for his cottage, looking forward to the quiet walk along a seaside road.