The Reckoning

nothing more than an instrument for monsoon songs, why couldn’t she be that little girl carved among all the other stories? What else was humankind—all life—but a figment of a stone spinning through time?

Her eyes opened. The wall was whole again. The war was gone. It had never been. How righteous, she thought. How stoned-out cosmic cool.

She rolled onto her back, a change of view. Parrots flickered overhead like bits of flame. A gecko eased in along the skylight. A few monkeys perched along the rim. Like this, in unconditional surrender, her mother must have watched the snow descend.

44.

The afternoon thunder arrived. It came up from the earth, not down from the sky. It was still too far away to hear. The vibrations buzzed against her skull. She remembered sitting in a restaurant along a river long ago and how the sunset had trembled. Let it rain, she thought. Come what may. She was finding her happy zone.

But then she saw the soldier. He was sitting at the far end of the wall where the rubble had cleared itself away. Thirty years ago someone had buried him violently, with plastic explosives. Now he was bared to the world.

His legs and boots were crushed flat. The rest of his skeleton rested precariously upright. It must have been hot the day he died. He had no shirt. But like Kleat, expecting trouble, he wore a flak jacket.

She knew him, or at least of him, not his name or his face, but his legend. The fragments of the journal had spoken of him. He was their commander. Here was the man who had gotten them lost and found them sanctuary, and doomed them by preserving them among the ruins. This was the tower of his tomb.

She dragged herself closer, a creature of her curiosity.

Their discoverers would link them, a man and a woman, a soldier and a civilian, two Americans caught in a faraway land. Never mind that she was as old as he was dead. Details. The story was too good. They were as good as married, a Romeo and Juliet for the ages.

The rubble had flattened his left hand in his lap. It looked like some complicated fossil. He wore a wedding band.

His skull leaned on his chest as if he were in mid-siesta. His sole wound, it seemed, was a crease along the temporal bone. The bullet had not pierced his skull. It might only have stunned him, in which case he’d been buried alive.

Molly touched nothing. The skeleton looked like a house of cards ready to fall. She lay beside him, resting her head, hunting for clues.

This was not another of their suicides. For one thing, there were more certain ways to put a bullet into yourself, and the bone was not scorched or powder burned. Also there was no weapon lying close at hand. And again, the bullet did not seem to have been a killing shot. Someone had shot him, and then buried him. Her eyes wandered higher. All in front of the Buddhas.

How had it gone?

He had caught them in the act of savaging the statues and gotten between their weapons and the wall. The journal fragments whispered to her. It’s not true he loved the city more than us. He was only trying to preserve us all. They had looted the city, or part of it, planting that terra-cotta head on their exhaust pipe. Had he tried to protect the Buddhas? Had someone kept on firing?

There was just one wound that she could see. She couldn’t find any bullet holes or bloodstains on the flattened fatigues or the flak jacket. Just the single shot along his head. Just one shooter.

Had it been an accident or an execution? Had they tried to revive him, or panicked and given him up for dead? No matter. They had blasted this section of the wall and hidden their deed under a ton of debris. That much was no accident. Someone had deliberately tried to conceal the evidence. The body, living or dead, damned them. And so they had shut it from sight.

The journal spoke of one man whipping up the mutiny. But once the commander was killed, the rebels had realized their fall from grace. At least the journal writer had expressed repentance.

The story took shape, a murder. The soldiers had driven the shooter from their midst…like Cain, the killer of his brother. He was the same man who had led them in mutiny. Molly knew it. The murder had shocked the rebels from their rebellion. They had scattered after the killing. The mutiny had dispersed.

The shooter had set off on foot, west of Eden. Did that mean he’d fled toward Phnom Penh or gone out the western entry, or was it simply the writer carrying through his biblical strand? No matter. Somewhere out there the killer had met his end. The rest of the Blackhorse men had stayed in the city, languishing, divided, hungry and diseased, drifting into madness, and, like her, too weak to leave, dying in animal niches among the ruins.

End of story. Everyone, it seemed, had paid for the sin. In a way, the commander was lucky. Of all the bones she’d seen in the city, his had come the closest to a permanent burial.

But the knife still bothered her. It could have been their way of marking the grave, but why mark a grave you wanted no one to find? No, she thought. Someone had added it to the wall as a finishing touch, after the shooting, after the killing, probably after the blast, a final piece of rage.

It was the shooter’s knife. Molly knew it instinctively. He had stabbed the wall.

Thunder rippled far away. A breeze stirred the canopy.

She clutched her cold, fiery self.

“Now what?” she whispered to the bones.

It didn’t seem right. They’d brought her here. Her. Luke had said so. But all this way for what? This was just another dead soldier from a dead war. Vietnam had nothing to do with her. She had a life. For a little while longer.

The trees moved. The floor shivered, or she did. It was like a dock that seems to move because the water is moving. The big river was waiting.

“Not yet,” she said. Where’s my circle? She deserved that much. A bit more beta. Some raw connect. Her missing link.

The tremors upset the careful construct of his bones. With the clatter of sticks and empty spools, the soldier spilled to pieces. The skull landed facing her, mouth parted, his jaw still wired in place with tendons. Weighted with vertebrae and ribs, the flak jacket tumbled into her hands. It was a simple matter to pluck the dog tag from inside.

The name was perfectly legible.

She should have known.

“ ‘O’Brian,’ ” she read aloud to him, “ ‘Duncan A.’ ”

The jaw stayed frozen, half open, caught in the act.

There was his date of birth. She made the calculation. He’d been shot on his birthday, or shortly after, twenty-one years old. She’d fallen for a younger man.

Molly cocked her head to see the skull.

His features emerged clearly now. It was almost like lying with him in her tent, watching his young face while he slept. There was his thick brow and his thin cheekbones, and the white teeth he’d brushed so religiously. She purged from her mind the poor creature dwindling in the rain last night, losing his long hair in her fingers, that phantom crumbling beneath her doubts. She closed her eyes and saw Duncan at dawn in the blue-green light.

Had he suspected his flesh encased a ghost? She recalled his briefcase full of tidbits and his confusion when she’d confronted him. And his odd reluctance to follow Luke to these ruins.

It wasn’t that he’d tried to fool anyone. Duncan had been as truthful as he could remember, in fragments, with an Ace comb in his pocket, just a spirit borrowing himself together, the same as Luke and all the rest.

When had he escaped from the ruins? Obviously, Luke had been sent to fetch his restless brother back to the source, back to the underworld. But why bring her?

She had daydreamed about taking Duncan home with her. Over these last few days, that seemed to be what she was meant to do, to usher him back into America. But he’d turned the tables on her, not knowing himself. He’d