“It got out of hand,” Vince answers for her. “There was nothing in our lives but sex. It was an addiction.”
Their distance makes it feel more like there’s a continent between them and him rather than a few feet. The distance was there when he arrived, but now it is tangible. And it is growing, solidifying.
“We didn’t understand that, not really. Nobody does, anymore. We thought the pleasure we wanted, or whatever it is life is about, was somewhere else, something else, someone else. That’s what you were all about, what that whole thing was about. It felt like a big mountain we were climbing, but we were only climbing out of ourselves. We discovered that what matters is the village at the base of the mountain. Now we get up in the morning and work on things. One day at a time.”
Ferris can feel disappointment straining against his discretion. Vince has just given him a cliche-ridden Alcoholics Anonymous speech. It’s evidently a sincere one, and the small smile on Ava’s face as he speaks confirms her agreement.
“But you know, Ferris,” Vince says after an awkward silence Ferris doesn’t break, “we’re okay, now. It started to come around when we realized that life isn’t supposed to be easy. None of what we did was a total waste of time. We had to go through it and come out on the other side. I think that’s what you’re doing, too, in your own way. It’s too bad you have to do it alone.”
Ferris shrugs. Maybe, just maybe, it is that simple. The way they lived, the dangers must have kept growing, while the payoffs got smaller, or at least harder to find. Eventually, the accumulated discretions and indiscretions must have toppled over on them in some terrible way. Maybe in the real world, maybe just in their minds. But maybe they just got tired of the complications, and stopped. So maybe the unfinished business he came here to settle isn’t unfinished, and there are no revelations forthcoming.
Well, not quite. Ever since he got on the ferry this morning, he’s been wrestling, somewhere in his subconscious, with the puzzle of how Vince and he performed simultaneous anal and vaginal intercourse with Ava. He’s certain it took place, because he can distinctly remember the sensation of his and Vince’s penises touching through the thin membrane between them. What’s bothering him – what’s been bothering him for a long time – is the configuration.
It was part of an obscure fidelity Ferris kept, and he’d been subtle enough with it that he was certain that neither Vince nor Ava were aware of it. But throughout everything they did, Ferris had not once entered Ava unless they were face to face. Now, suddenly, he realizes the configuration he wants isn’t physically possible. He’s been deluding himself. Vince had been on his back, she kneeling forward on his chest, and Ferris was squatting behind her. In the crudest possible sense, Ferris had fucked her up the ass, impersonally, like a dog would. And for ten years, he’d been blocking the memory of it.
“What’s wrong, Ferris?” he hears Ava asking. His consternation must have shown in his face. “Were you expecting more?”
Ferris looks at the ceiling. “No,” he says. “I just thought of something. It’s obscure stuff. Nothing to do with you.”
He wants to tell Ava he’s sorry, but what he’s sorry about is so oblique there’s no way he can make her understand – even if she wanted to. It’s the truth, but sex delivers an almost infinite number of truths, all equal. It’s also true that he didn’t return after that because he was frightened to. Beyond unrestricted pleasure he’d glimpsed its opposites: violence and pain. And in Ferris’s mind, they had crossed the boundary.
Or maybe that’s what
But there’s nothing discreet for him to say, nothing he needs to know or say about this. By a different route, he’s come to the same conclusions they have. It’s time to go.
“I should catch the next ferry back,” Ferris says. “But you’re right. Life isn’t supposed to be easy: I just wish I’d known that twenty years ago.”
Ava smiles. It’s a real one this time, and as Ferris gets up to leave, she reaches over and grasps his hand. “So do we,” she says. “But we didn’t.”
It’s too early to leave for the ferry, so Ferris and Vince wander out to the workshop, where Vince shows him an array of power tools and a birdhouse he’s planning to elevate next to the livingroom window. It’s a mess, big enough to house a raven, but Ferris doesn’t say so.
On the ferry back from the island, Ferris writes this in his notebook:
“Well then,” he says aloud. “I will generate no more darkness.”
The man sitting next to him looks up from the book he’s been dozing over. “What did you say? Were you talking to me?”
Ferris laughs. “No,” he says. “Not directly. Thinking out loud, I guess.”
He pulls his bag onto his shoulder. The ferry is nearing the mainland terminal, but he’s got time for a pee before it docks. After that, he has distant places to go, faraway people to meet and write lies about.
Over the urinal is scribbled the following barely literate message:
I guess the confusion is universal, Ferris thinks to himself as he tries to come up with an answer to the graffito. Trouble is, it exists in specific conditions. Some of them lead easily to violence, others get resolved by small bursts of insight, and some simply remain unanswered and unrelieved.
He feels the gentle bump of the ferry meeting the slip, hears the rumble of the motors as they reverse. He leaves the graffito unanswered, and seconds later he’s back in the crowd of travellers hurrying to the next destination.
LIES by Geraldine Zwang
translated by Maxim Jakubowski
It was past four in the morning when I opened the door to my flat, hesitant like a thief. I felt dirty, exhausted by what I had just come through. In the hallway’s mirror I quickly noticed the darkness surrounding my eyes, as well as a look of exaltation I had never glimpsed before. In the penumbra of the hallway, the mirror was showing me the very image of a loose woman, so far from the conservative and restrained bourgeois fifty year old image I tried to adhere to.
I silently made my way to the bathroom when I heard my husband’s voice from the corridor.
“Do you know what time it is?”
Unknowingly, he was saying the exact same words my father would throw at me whenever as a teenager I returned from parties at my friends. A wave of fear coursed through me, a fear which quickly changed into anger. Anger towards the proprietary male, the accountant in our couple. I’m anything but a submissive woman, far from it, but there has always been a kernel in me that makes any woman of my age her husband’s woman.
As a soothing April dawn neared, I knew I no longer wanted this relationship and that from now onwards I would lead a new life according to my own will.
“I’ve just been fucked,” I said, enunciating the words carefully, with an assurance that surprised me.
Sometimes silences can feel endless, but this one lasted an eternity.
“Is that your idea of a joke?” my husband asked disbelievingly.
I knew for a fact that his voice was not that of someone who had just woken up. He had been waiting for me. I wasn’t surprised when he appeared at the door fully dressed. His eyes moved between wrath, incredulity and
