Falling Idols

On foot yet four miles in as many minutes? It was profoundly disorienting at first. But now he just accepted, and laughed. And today headed for the hotel.

With a hesitancy to discuss her past even greater than his own, Scarlett had come to Miracle last year within a week after he had. She’d given different last names on different occasions, and there was no reason to believe any were valid, just as there was no reason to believe that Scarlett was her given Christian name. He’d made these near-anonymous acquaintances before, men and women brushed into peculiar corners by circumstances of lives that had slipped their control, or those who’d remade themselves from scratch and hid from whatever they wanted to leave behind.

It was morning, with Memuneh and Gabrielle off on their own, as he’d promised her. Austin supposed he was taking advantage of it to come say goodbye. Neither he nor Scarlett had ever said how long they planned on staying, but it went unspoken that Miracle was no permanent destination.

“Well look at you, all red-faced and serious-looking,” she said when she opened the door to her room. “You run all this way just to see me, or are you meeting your friend for cornflakes and thought you’d drop by for a quick bounce?”

“You know about Gabrielle already?”

“This town doesn’t bustle so much these days that a new face doesn’t stand out when it stays more than one afternoon. People talk. She’s at the bed-and-breakfast, right? They know where she’s from, Austin, and I’ve got me a good memory. Oh, and come to think of it? I might’ve heard she wasn’t there for breakfast this morning, imagine that. Now where ever can she be, I wonder?”

“Well,” he said, “that’s what I get for trying to keep a secret in a townful of born-again telepaths.”

She reached out and drew him in by the buttons of his sun-faded denim shirt and began to undo them. “I’ve always found that to be one of your more endearing qualities, that you’ll laugh at your own kind.”

But they weren’t his kind any more than they were hers, and everyone around knew it. He and Scarlett may have come to Miracle in last year’s flood of seekers, but there the similarities ended. They were both outcasts in that sense, suspect and heretical.

As a mecca, Miracle was just as crippled now as it had been as a played-out mining town, and this had nothing to do with Memuneh’s abrupt vanishing from public view. The town drew children in adult bodies, and while he didn’t fault them for the sillier beliefs and practices they clung to — children were like that — they showed up wanting to bathe in the glow of angels without ever having shaken hands with devils. Desperate for lives that meant something more than sweat and a grave, they craved the light without wanting to know about the darkness. The wiser among them would eventually learn that the two were indivisible. One couldn’t be had without the other. The rest would always live in fear.

Scarlett seemed the only other one who knew this. She shunned the tarot readers, the crystal merchants, the aroma therapists. She laughed at the wishful thinkers who looked to the desert and swore the buttes were shaped like pyramids. She mocked the fools who waited for a spacecraft to land and pick them up.

Then why was she here?

“You ever hear about the man, thought he was losing his mind, so he checked into the asylum to compare?” she’d told him, her only nod toward an explanation.

“I thought he never left,” Austin had said.

“That was only because he didn’t have anyone else to talk to on his own level.”

And yet. He’d had more serious discussions with the cook at the diner than with Scarlett. It was as if she’d gravitated toward him precisely because she sensed that he wouldn’t go prattling on about auras.

As she pulled him toward the bed he thought of Gabrielle on her hike this morning with Memuneh, and it felt like a betrayal. Not just of Gabrielle and the resurrection of old feelings, but of Scarlett too. He’d never even told her about finding the Kyyth, much less introduced them. She’d seemed so complete without it, the time to do so never right.

She was one of those rare women who became less vulnerable the less she wore, as comfortable in her skin as a panther. There was something about her that he found, not godless, but resolutely pagan. In her physicality she was unapologetic and unshameable. In their coupling Austin felt he came closer to death than he ever had with trains or accidental overdoses.

While she liked to be mounted from behind, bracing herself on hands and knees, there was nothing submissive about it, as she rammed fiercely back with haunches strong as a mare’s. The rising and falling arch of her spine was muscled and, like the rest of her, brown as a pecan. If she scissored him between her thighs he was as good as clenched by a python. Scarlett would toss her head, that shimmering fall of straight hair, crow-black with a reddish sheen, and look back at him over her shoulder as he held on, and her grin was the most lascivious thing he’d ever seen, as if she knew exactly the effect she was having on him.

But that was hardly likely.

This one stubborn concession to an animal urge became the gateway to the most universal trait shared by everything alive: It was like dying. They made savage love and he died, over and over and over and over.

His loins took care of themselves, lunging after rapture, but synapses fired in his head without regard for logic. Like frames from movies seen only while passing through a room, or the frustrating sips of otherwise forgotten dreams.

They took him over again, as soon as he’d gotten to the state where he couldn’t have dwelled upon Gabrielle and Memuneh if he’d tried. Eros and thanatos saturated every breath. He floundered in a chilly bog while a bronze blade slashed his throat. A steel axe caught the sun before splitting his helmet on a battlefield of baked clay. He was shot in an alley, he sighed final breaths upon soft beds and wheezed in agony with fluid-choked lungs and felt the spark leave him as he stared at cow dung inches from his eyes. He felt the claws of a leopard crack open the bony little cage of his chest.

There was no end of ways to die, and when he meshed with Scarlett he was privy to them all.

Had they been his own demises? Other lives, other times? He didn’t know. The forty years of this one seemed enough, that he’d lived different lifetimes in just a few years, through cycles of madness and despair and hope and hatred and love and joy, each one consuming him yet always leaving a capacious hunger for more.