“What about the kids? Can’t you think of them?”
“I do,” she says. “I have. I’ve thought of nothing else but them. And you. I put you first for twenty years, Ran. I was the colored girl who sang doo da-doo da-doo-doo-doo, and I don’t blame you. I made the choice myself, but now I won’t be her anymore.” She takes his hands.
“To me,” she says, “and I’m sorry if this hurts you, Ran, but it’s like God or some higher power has put this love in front of me, and I must turn to it, I must, like a green plant to the sun. I have no power to do otherwise. When I turn to Cell, my whole life brightens, the lights come on, I feel alive, I feel myself, and I realize how far from it I’ve drifted in these years with you. I feel seen by him and understood. And when I turn away, the lights go off, I feel tired and old. It’s a struggle just to keep up with the kids and make it through the day and find the simple energy to live. It’s like this marvelous drug, Ran, only I don’t think it’s a drug at all, I think this is just what it feels like to be human, fully human and alive and healthy and running on all eight cylinders, and even if it is a drug I don’t want to stop taking it. It’s how I once felt for you, Ran, but not in a long time. For years now, we’ve been sleepwalking through this marriage, marking time, and now that I’m awake again, how am I supposed to let it go? If you love me, really love me, you have to let me go. I would you. If you came to me and said this was happening to you, I would.”
“Would you?” His voice is soft now. His face is cold. His eyes are hard and bright. “Would you really, Claire? Are you that pure? Are you so sure?”
“Yes, Ran, I would,” she answers without hesitation. “I’m sure.”
“What if that’s what evil is?” he says. “Just a form of intoxicating selfishness that feels like goodness, feels like it’s from God, but really isn’t?”
“Then the world is too fucked up for me, Ran. I can’t be that complicated and believe that what makes me feel alive is evil and what makes me feel dead is good. That’s what I’ve been doing for too long, and I don’t feel any better or holier, I don’t feel improved by all my martyred suffering and self-denial, so why not try what actually feels good? Why not try happiness? That’s what I mean to do. I don’t have anything to lose.”
“You stand to lose a lot,” he says. “What you stand to lose is everything. Ask me. Ask me, Claire. I’ve felt what you feel. I lived that way for years. It’s why our marriage is in trouble. In the end, it’s not the answer either.”
“Then what is, Ran? What is?”
He doesn’t answer. Ran has none to give. He looks at her, then up into the branches of the tree. We are not the peak…not the peak…. Beyond, the sky, so blue. It is that day. That day.
“Our marriage is over, Ransom, not in trouble. Over. Don’t you see?”
“Can’t I change? Haven’t I? There must be something I can do, Claire. Something. Hold out some hope for me, some little thread, however thin, however frayed…Because if there’s nothing…if I’m so fucked up and irredeemable…”
“Then what, Ran? What?”
Never good enough…Never fucking good enough, right, lad?
Nemo, now, Ran’s last friend, is speaking in his accustomed voice again. Claire’s face is wavering like a candle flame in wind, and it is blowing Ransom, too, blowing him away. He’s having trouble focusing, trouble answering the question, remembering what the question is…. Then what? Then what? What then?
I will tell you a secret, Nemo says, not without compassion, a quick, violent death solves many things. It isn’t painful. Is that what you thought? No. Oh, no. Don’t you remember Livingston? The woman, mauled by lions, went into dreamtime, like the Aborigines. She saw higher realms of truth. So will she, Ran. So will he. So, at the end, will you. It will be merciful. And more. It will be mature. Death is simply the end of human striving, dying, no more than going from a hot, sweaty place into an air-conditioned room. And then you’re on a road with many others. It’s the journey you’re on now, in fact, the one you’ve been on all along. Very soon you’ll come to a door. Before it stands a man who holds a book. He’ll scan the columns till he finds your name, and you will be admitted. There will be no lapse in consciousness. You’ll still be yourself. What is lost—your body and the earth and sex and food and birth and death and change, and her, and Hope and Charlie, everything you’ve known and been till now, everything you took, mistakenly, to be yourself—all this is, finally, small. What you’ll gain is your True Self, the thing you’ve sought and cannot have on earth.
“Like this, though?” Ransom’s voice is pleading. “Not like this.”
Like this.
“Who are you talking to?” asks Claire.
He looks at her and blinks.
“Ransom, look at me. Who am I?”
He shakes his head and weeps. “I don’t know. I don’t know who you are.”
“I’m Claire, Ran, Claire. Look at me. LOOK AT ME.”
“I can’t,” he says. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
And Ransom, after all, can’t find the strength to take it on the chin, to bear the raw and undiluted thing, and so, once more, he does what he does best. He runs.
Here before him is the old slave cabin Claire converted to a gardening shed. And there, as if at Ransom’s thought-command—leaning in the corner where
