As always, he knew death, and together he and Scarlett found their release, then he slumped across the moist sheen of her back and felt the reaffirming thud of his heart. She shrugged him off her and they rolled over on sweaty sheets. She drew her legs up, crossed them at the knee and dangled five toes over his belly.
“This was it, wasn’t it, Austin?” she said. “I can feel it. This had ‘finale’ written all over it.”
“I suppose it does.”
“Were you planning on telling me? Or just assuming I’d figure it out on my own?”
He had to chuckle. “I didn’t know you ever waited to be told
“Well now you have a point.” The toes came down, lightly squashing his wet genitals. “You’re going away with
“It’s why she’s here. Neither of us knew it at first, but it’s why she came.”
“Sure about that, are you? What’s so special about her? A nomad like you, you must’ve had lots of basis for comparison.”
“Gabrielle … believed in me. At a time when no one else did. She believed.”
“I guess that’d explain why she left you all those years ago. Yeah. Anyway. What’s it matter who believed you and who didn’t, as long as
“Sometimes,” he said, “you just need that mirror for your own sanity. You know — like the man who went to the asylum?”
Scarlett looked out the window. “I hate it when they use my own damn words on me.”
“There aren’t going to be any grudges here, are there?”
She turned onto her side and her elbow. “I’m not possessive, Austin. I’m very disappointed in you. In what you’re settling for now. But I’m not possessive.”
“And fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow’s another day, right?”
“Wait and see,” she said. “It might even be more than that.”
III. Terra Infernal
Their hike had started not long after sunrise, leisurely and even meandering at times, but always guided by a sense of destination. Memuneh would stop and show her a particular bush or rock formation as if it had some special significance to him, but wouldn’t always explain why, and when he did, the explanations as often as not left her baffled.
“Don’t move any closer to that rock. A nest of diamondback rattlesnakes lives beneath it,” he told her. “I spent a day here once letting them bite me.”
She’d come to Utah with proper clothes for this — loose shorts and a white cotton blouse and a hat wide enough to shade her face — but had had to use her MasterCard to buy hiking shoes. A worthy investment. With them on her feet and Austin’s canteens slung on her hip, she’d lost her terror of the desert now that it would have to work so much harder to kill her. Drink her water, watch her step, and all was well. As for the heat, summers in New York could be as bad, with humidity, concrete, and kamikaze taxis to tip the balance. She could even claim witness to the imperious beauty that Austin found here.
A friend she’d lost track of had once spent a year in Africa and come back singing the praises of ripping herself loose of all that was familiar. New languages, new cultures, new faces — almost everything she knew had been invalidated. It had been, her friend said, the most terrifying and exhilarating time of her life.
Gabrielle now thought she could understand what this must’ve been like, the past few days taking her to a place that a shift in geography alone could never have accomplished. It had been the rediscovery of a world she’d seen long ago but rejected, in her youth too intimidated by its strangeness to acknowledge it, too threatened by its darker corners to let them touch her.
It was no place to live every day — even Austin seemed to know that now — but it could shape the ways those days were spent.
And now, as she moved in the shadows of vast rocks, she felt a manic joy, no longer afraid to walk away from the life she thought she’d wanted.
Memuneh pointed to a hummock of red stone curving out of the earth. “Here. Look. Here. This is where I encountered Austin. I was sitting, he was walking.”
“He told me you were crying.”
Memuneh didn’t affirm it, but neither did he deny.
“Why?”
“Because I was able,” he said, and seemed to edge away from the matter. She decided not to press it. Had done so once already and the resulting seizure was nothing she wanted to repeat.
“Why’d you talk to Austin at all?” she asked instead. “If what he says is true, you hadn’t shown yourself in Miracle for a couple of months or more. To anyone. Why him, then?”
“I had watched him already, from a distance. I knew who and what he was. I watched him play with the whirlwinds. When he saw me that day he looked at me with such recognition that I saw from his eyes that he already knew the Kyyth, even if our name was unknown to him. He saw me, and knew, and his knees didn’t bend. I had no reason to hide, because there was nothing in him like the others.”
“You were hiding from the whole town?”
“They were not what I thought they were,” he said, “and when the new ones came they were not what I hoped they would be.”
He seemed bewildered by this, like a child in a new school struggling to make sense of why he wasn’t accepted for himself. And Memuneh
At first this was hardly reassuring, that even the agents of whatever lay beyond the narrow spectrum of everyday didn’t have all the answers. But now she was reconsidering. In a peculiar way, Memuneh offered hope, if