He chased the different faces with his mouth, stopping no one. Wanda mistook his exercise for passion.
They walked back up the path. The sky was mauve. A moon emerged from a gentle accumulation of clouds. The path was softened by millions of pine needles. Martin would find out how many, perhaps.
Wanda sneezed. The damp wood planks.
“It was so peaceful down there, so peaceful.”
Breavman was tempted to punish her for the trite rhythm of her sentence by telling her about the pool for her body.
“Do you know what the ambition of our generation is, Wanda? We all want to be Chinese mystics living in thatched huts, but getting laid frequently.”
“Can’t you say anything that isn’t cruel?” she squeaked as she ran from him.
He sat up all night to punish himself for hurting her. The morning birds began. In the window grew a cool grey light, the trees beyond still black. There was a light mist on the mountain but he didn’t feel like following it.
A few days later he discovered that he had caught Wanda’s cold. And he couldn’t understand the way his campers were shoving food down their faces. They bubbled in the milk, diluting it with spit, fought over extras, sculptured out of squeezed bread.
Breavman glanced at Martin. The boy hadn’t eaten anything. Krantz had warned him that he must supervise the boy’s diet closely. Sometimes he went on mysterious hunger strikes, the reasons for which could never be discovered. On this occasion Breavman could have hugged him.
His head was completely stuffed. The flies were vicious. He went to bed with the campers but couldn’t sleep.
He lay there thinking stupidly of Krantz and Anne, lovingly of Shell.
The horizontal position was a trap. He would learn to sleep standing up, like horses.
Poor Krantz and Anne off in the woods. How long can they lie naked before the black flies get them? His hands will have to leave her flesh and hair to scratch his own.
“Can I come in?”
It was Wanda. Of course she could come in. He was fettered on the bed, wasn’t he?
“I just want to tell you why I haven’t let you see me.”
She turned off the lights to give them an even chance against the flies. They mingled fingers as she talked. Just before he drew to himself and kissed her lightly, he noticed a firefly in the corner. It was flashing infrequently. Breavman was sure it was almost dead.
“Why are you kissing me?”
“I don’t know. It’s not what I came here for. Just the opposite.”
He was taking a great interest in the firefly. It wasn’t dead yet.
“Why the hell don’t you know?”
She was fumbling with something under her blouse. “You’ve broken my bra strap.”
“This is a great conversation.”
“I’d better go.”
“You’d better go. He’d better go. We’d better go. They’d better go.”
“You can’t seem to talk to anyone.”
Was that supposed to make him miserable? It didn’t. He had given himself to the firefly’s crisis. The intervals became longer and longer between the small cold flashes. It was Tinker Bell. Everybody had to believe in magic. Nobody believed in magic. He didn’t believe in magic. Magic didn’t believe in magic. Please don’t die.
It didn’t. It flashed long after Wanda left. It flashed when Krantz came to borrow Ed’s Time magazine. It flashed as he tried to sleep. It flashed as he scribbled his journal in the dark.
Boohoohoohoohoohoo say all the little children.
12
It was three in the morning and Breavman was glad they were all sleeping. It was tidier that way, the campers and counsellors arranged on their cots, row after row. When they were awake there were too many possibilities, egos to encounter, faces to interpret, worlds to enter. The variety was confusing. It was hard enough to meet one other person. A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.
A clear night, cold enough to turn the breath to steam. The landscape seemed intimately connected to the sky, as if it were held in the grip of the high, icy stars. Trees, hills, wood buildings, even a low streak of mist, were riveted to the rock of the planet. It seemed that nothing would ever move, nothing could break the general sleep.
Breavman walked, almost marched, between the black-filled cabins. He was exhilarated to be the only free agent in this frozen world. Wanda was asleep, her hair colourless. Martin was asleep, his jaws relaxed, at home in his terror. Anne was asleep, a dancer out of training. Krantz was asleep. Certainly he knew how Krantz slept, how his lips budged forward each time he exhaled his jagged snore.
He dissolved the walls in his mind as he walked between them, and he took an inventory of each form’s isolation. This night’s sleep was strangely graceless. He noted the greedy expression a sleeper wears, that of a solitary eater at a banquet. In sleep every man is an only child. They turned, they shifted, drew up a limb, uncocked an elbow, turned again, shifted again, a series of prize crabs, each on his private white beach.
All their ambition, energy, speed, individuality was swaddled in excelsior, like rows of Christmas ornaments out of season. Each form, so intent on power, was locked in a nursery struggle far away. And it seemed that the night, so sharp and still, the physical world, would wait motionless until they all came back.
You’ve lost, Breavman addressed them out loud. It’s a hypnotists’ tournament, this little life of ours, and I’m the winner.
He decided to share the prize with Krantz.
The screen in the window above Krantz’s bed had a bulge in it. When Breavman tapped it from the outside it created a miniature thunder.
His face did not appear. Breavman tapped again. Krantz’s disembodied voice began in a monotone.
“You are stepping on the flowers, Breavman. If you look down, you will discover that you are in a flower-bed. Why are you standing on the flowers, Breavman?”
“Krantz, listen to this: The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to
