“Thanks again for the twenty million, by the way. Another sentence I never imagined I’d have use for.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And the fictional wife?”
Another kite dip. The fictional wife evoked the real one. The aphrodisiacal kick Arabella’s ghost being forced to watch had given us, the promise of dark enlightenment. All apparent evil promises the same. It’s a lie. There’s no dark enlightenment because there’s no evil. Whatever it is you’re doing—raping a child, gassing a million—it’s just another thing you can do. The universe doesn’t care. Certainly doesn’t give you divine knowledge in return. All the knowledge and all the divinity is already there in you doing whatever it is you’re doing. Who knows this better than monsters?
Nonetheless my cock thickened next to the moist heat of her hand, and she took it and held it, and that was all the acknowledgement the moment required.
“Enteric fever,” I said. “Poor Emily. She was only twenty-two. And Jacob Junior barely a year old.”
“Birth and death certificates forged.”
“Exactly. I followed them into the grave myself courtesy of heart failure in 1885. I grew an impressive moustache for my return as Jacob Junior, donned a pair of specs, got a new hairdo. My accent had changed, naturally. People see what they’re told to see, by and large.”
“And real kids? You must have them scattered all over the world by now.”
Oh.
As soon as the words were out she wanted them back. These were the last seconds before something was gone forever. Very briefly I considered lying.
“We can’t have children,” I said.
I felt it go into her, find the place already there for it. Of course she’d known, and denied, and still known.
“My periods stopped.”
“I’m sorry, Lu.”
“Richard and I were supposed to start trying. Then I found out about the affair.”
For a few moments we lay without speaking. Cradle comfort of the train’s rocking. It would be peaceful segueing into death like this, I thought, the deepening lull, a tunnel that gets darker and darker until eventually you’re gone out into darkness yourself. Gone out, quite gone out. I held her, but not as if my holding her could make any difference. (The fierce male embrace is invariably patronising to the female embracee.) She still had my cock in her hand. I felt grief and anger and futility going through her and her keeping very still. It was as if she were being burned and had to bear it without flinching or making a sound.
“I knew,” she said. “Carried on taking the Pill in denial. I suppose the thing to say would be ‘Well, it’s for the best.’ ”
There were bigger patches of open night sky now. Stars.
Then suddenly the moon.
“And just to rub it
I too had thoughts of burning, quietly and without pain as she rolled me over onto my back and climbed by degrees on top of me. Burning—or accelerated decay, like time-lapse film of decomposition, my headless trio of foxes going from plump corpses to dust via maggot orgy in grainy fast footage. It looped while we fucked (while
She fell asleep immediately afterwards, half draped over me. Her weight had in it the finality of the new fact, a brutal peace now the thing had been faced and taken in.
WE ONE-WAY HIRED a Toyota in Chicago. Stayed off the freeways. My thinking was the emptier the space the easier we’d spot a vamp or WOCOP tail. Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.
“But you’re saying there are WOCOP exorcists,” she said. “What are they exorcising?”
One returns to metaphysics, but with diminishing urgency. The assumption is that new phenomena must fill in the picture. But if the picture’s infinite, what difference can half a dozen new species make? She was seeing this already. She sat with a strange neatness in the passenger seat alongside me, knees together, hands in her jacket pockets. She’d pinned her hair up and her slender bare neck gave her a look of appalling vulnerability.
“Demons,” I said. “As far as I know, demons. That’s the idiom. That’s the terminology.”
“Which means heaven and hell, right? Demons and angels. God and the Devil.”
“You’d think I’d know one way or the other by now, wouldn’t you?” I was struck by how long it had been since I’d considered such things, how these questions had subsided. I had only a generic memory of small-hours conversations with Harley, though I knew his view well enough, that there was a transcendent realm but that it spoke in many languages. In one of its languages Isis was a word. In another Gabriel. In another Aphrodite. All we ever got was the language. We were a language ourselves. The thing
“But you’ve seen this stuff?” she said. “You’ve seen demons?”
“I’ve seen someone with something inside them that wasn’t them, that was definitely a separate entity. I’ve seen it—
“And it was evil?”
This, of course, is the crux. It doesn’t really matter what the language is, only whether there’s a transcendent moral grammar underpinning it. No one really cares what hell’s called or who runs it. They just don’t want to
“It felt like it intended harm to humans,” I said. “But not as if it had much choice about it. Evil has to be chosen.”
She kept her hands in her pockets. Stared at the road ahead. This was the problem with talking. Sooner or later it led here. Sooner or later everything led here.
Evening on our fifth day from New York we stopped in the middle of nowhere for me to pee. Sunset was a gap between land and cloud like a narrow eye or broken yolk of light, rose gold, mauve, dusk. On either side flat prairie to the horizon, an effect that remade the earth as a disk of pale grass. Ahead the road ran straight to vanishing point; turn 180 degrees and look back, same thing. Talulla got out, stretched, leaned against the Toyota’s bonnet, lit one of my cigarettes. (I’d told her smoking wouldn’t harm her and she’d said okay what the hell, it’s something to do.) We yet hadn’t said anything about where we were going or what we were going to do when we got there, and the not saying anything was for her like flies gathering on her skin, more every hour, every day. These last two nights the Hunger had kept us awake in shivering TV light, drinking bourbon, screwing till we were sore, unable to find comfort lying still. Full moon was eight days away.
“When I was driving in the desert,” she said, staring at the horizon, “I’d go a hundred miles and see nothing, just empty landscape.” She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, a cream rollneck sweater. I was thinking of lines from a Thom Gunn poem:
