and wade in the water and splash each other and do everything they desire until the sun comes up. They don’t care that they’re wet and sticky with salt and each other. Where did the magic go, Benton? Getting old is when nothing’s enough and you know you’ll never feel magic again. I know what death is, and so do you. Sit next to me, Benton. I’m glad you want to chat before I go.”
“I talked to your mother,” Benton says. “Again.”
“You must like her.”
“She told me something very interesting that’s caused me to retract something I said to you, Dr. Self.”
“Apologies are always welcome. From you, they’re quite an unexpected treat.”
“You were right about Dr. Maroni,” Benton says. “About your having sex with him.”
“I never said I had sex with him.” Dr. Self goes cold inside. “When would that have happened? In my goddamn room with a goddamn view? I was drugged. I couldn’t have had sex with anyone unless it was against my will. He drugged me.”
“I’m not talking about now.”
“While I was unconscious, he opened my gown and fondled me. He said he loved my body.”
“Because he remembered it.”
“Who said I had sex with him? Did that goddamn bitch say that? What would she know about what happened when I checked in? You must have told her I’m a patient. I’ll sue you. I said he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t resist, and then he fled. I said he knew what he’d done was wrong and so he fled to Italy. I never said I had sex with him. I never told you that. He drugged me and took advantage of me, and I should have known he would. Why wouldn’t he?”
It excites her. It did then and it still does, and she had no idea it would. At the time she chided him but didn’t tell him to stop. She said, “Why is it necessary to examine me so enthusiastically?” And he said, “Because it’s important I know.” And she said, “Yes. You should know what isn’t yours.” And he said as he explored, “It’s like a special place you once visited and haven’t seen in many years. You want to find out what’s changed and what hasn’t and whether you could live it again.” And she said, “Could you?” And he said, “No.” Then he fled, and that was the worst thing he did, because he’d done it before.
“I’m talking about a very long time ago,” Benton says.
Water laps quietly.
Will Rambo is surrounded by water and the night as he rows away from Sullivan’s Island, where he left the Cadillac in a secluded spot an easy walk from where he borrowed the bass boat. He has borrowed it before. He uses the outboard engine when needed. When he wants quiet, he rows. Water laps. In the dark.
Into the Grotta Bianca, the place he took the first one. The feeling, the familiarity, as fragments come together in a deep cavern in his mind among dripstones of limestone, and moss where sunlight touched. He walked her beyond the Column of Hercules into an underworld of stone corridors with prisms of minerals and the constant sound of water dripping.
That dreamlike day they were all alone except once, when he let excited schoolchildren pass in their jackets and hats, and he said to her, “Noisy like a swarm of bats.” And she laughed and said she was having fun with him, and she grabbed his arm and pressed against him, and he felt the softness of her against him. Through silence, only the sound of water dripping. He took her through the Tunnel of Snakes beneath chandeliers of stone. Past translucent curtains of stone into the Corridor of the Desert.
“If you left me here, I would never find my way out,” she said.
“Why would I leave you? I’m your guide. In the desert, you can’t survive without a guide unless you know your way.”
And the sandstorm rose up in a mighty wall, and he rubbed his eyes, trying not to see it in his mind that day.
“How do you know the way? You must come here often,” she said, and then he left the sandstorm and was back in the cave, and she was so beautiful, pale and well defined, as if carved of quartz, but sad because her lover had left her for another woman.
“What makes you so special you can know a place like this?” she said to Will. “Three kilometers deep into the earth and an endless maze of wet stone. How horrible to be lost in here. I wonder if anyone’s ever gotten lost in here. After hours, when they turn out the lights, it must be pitch-black and cold as a cellar in here.”
He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. All he saw was bright red as they were sandblasted until he thought he would have no skin left.
“Will! Oh, God! Help me, Will!” Roger’s screams became the screams of the schoolchildren a corridor away, and the roar of the storm stopped.
Water dripped and their footsteps sounded wet. “Why do you keep rubbing your eyes?” she asked.
“I could find my way even in the dark. I can see very well in the dark and came here often when I was a child. I’m your guide.” He was very kind, very gentle with her because he understood her loss was more than she could bear. “See how the stone’s translucent with light? It’s flat and strong like tendons and sinews, and crystals are the waxy yellow of bone. And through this narrow corridor is the Dome of Milano, gray, damp, and cool like the tissue and vessels of a very old body.”
“My shoes and the cuffs of my pants are spattered with wet limestone, like whitewash. You’ve ruined my clothes.”
Her complaints irritated him. He showed her a natural pond scattered with green coins on the bottom, and wondered aloud if anyone’s wishes had come true, and she tossed a coin in and it plashed and sank to the bottom.
“Make all the wishes you want,” he says. “But they never come true, or if they do, too bad for you.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said. “How can you say that it would be bad if a wish came true? You don’t know what I wished. What if my wish was to make love to you? Are you a bad lover?”
He didn’t answer her as he got angrier, because if they made love, she would see his bare feet. The last time he made love was in Iraq, a twelve-year-old girl who screamed and cried and pounded him with small fists. Then she stopped and went to sleep, and he has never felt anything about it because she had no life, nothing to look forward to except the endless destruction of her country, and endless deaths. Her face fades from his mind as water drips. He holds the pistol in his hand as Roger screams because the pain is too much.
In the Cave of the Cupola, stones were round like skulls, and water dripped, dripped, dripped, as if it had rained, and then there were formations of stony frost and icicles and spurs that glowed like candlelight. He told her not to touch them.
“If you touch them, they turn black like soot,” he warned.
“The story of my life,” she said. “Whatever I touch turns to shit.”
“You will thank me,” he said.
“For what?” she said.
In the Corridor of the Return, it was warm and humid, and water ran down the walls like blood. He held the pistol and was one finger away from the end of all he knew about himself. If Roger could thank him, he would.
A simple thanks, and doing it again isn’t needed. People are ungrateful and take away whatever has meaning. Then one doesn’t care anymore. One can’t.
A red-and-white-striped lighthouse, built soon after the War, is isolated three hundred feet offshore and no longer has a beacon.
Will’s shoulders burn from rowing, and his buttocks ache on the fiberglass bench. It’s hard work because his payload weighs almost as much as the flat-bottom boat, and now that he’s close to his place, he won’t use the outboard motor. He never does. It makes noise, and he wants no noise, even if there is no one to hear it. No one lives here. No one comes here except during the day, and then only in nice weather. Even then, no one knows this place is his. The love of a lighthouse and a bucket of sand. How many little boys own an island? A glove and a ball, and a picnic and camping. All gone. Dead. The forlorn passage in a boat to the other side.
