A Cruel Season for Dying (45 page)

Like this, they had not come together for too many nights. Together in their marriage bed, so completely as one, the great
wedding quilt, a curling wave of silk and fine thread, rolled at their feet. The past weeks, too, rolled away, deep inside
of her, out of memory’s reach, where they could do no harm.

Her husband rested now in her arms, listening to the thrumming of her heart, counting beats, measuring rhythms. Hanae breathed
his moist smell. The feel of his hair, cool and dense against her fingers. He sighed, a happy noise, like a small boy’s. A
sound too long absent from her ears. He moved his mouth to her breast, suckling lightly. She slipped a finger between his
lips to feel the warm rough of his tongue. Only moments before he had poured himself full inside of her.

He rubbed his hand now over her abdomen. A small tremor shot through her, and she wondered if at last he would take notice
that his wife had grown fleshy. He did not.

He lifted his head. “You are cold, my wife?” he asked quietly, and moved to unfurl their wedding quilt, gathering it snugly
around them. “Better?”

“You spoil me.” She whispered against the side of his throat.

“No, Hanae, I do not spoil you. I have not been such a good husband.”

She wanted to speak, but let the silence stand.

“This case has taken me away from you and that is not good.” He turned her under him. She could feel his warm breath, his
dark eyes on her. “I love you, Hanae.” He kissed her softly.

“Watashi mo,”
she answered.

He rolled onto his back, pulling her close, surprising her with his words. “I know you want a child. And it would be good
for you.”

She wanted to ask would it not also be good for him.

“I am afraid … ,” he whispered into her hair.

“Afraid, my husband?” She rose up on her side.

“Of the evil in the world.”

“Good cannot exist without evil,” she said.

“But this job lets me see too much.” His voice was almost angry. “I don’t know if I want our child to come into such a world.”

“This little girl’s death stays with you.”

“Yes.” This time there was only sadness in his voice.

She lay back next to him, wishing for a better world. For her husband not to be afraid. That he would want this new life she
carried. Her heart had already made a place for their child. Now she must pray that in her husband’s heart there would also
be a place.

“Jimmy …”

The ringing caused him to jump. He rolled over to pick up his cell phone from the bedside table. She heard him flip up the
receiver. “Lieutenant Sakura.”

She placed her hand against his back.

“When?” he asked.

She could feel the muscles tensing along his spine.

“I’ll meet you there.” He was already moving, his legs swinging off the bed. “I have to go, Hanae,” he said. “The priest we
were going to arrest is dead. Apparently a suicide.”

She brought her lips to the soft curve of his back. “I am sorry, Husband.”

She could hear him move into the bath, the shower running, then the water in the sink, the brush against his teeth.

“Go to sleep,” he said softly, coming back into the room, his soap-sweet smell reaching her.

She heard the hangers click against the metal rod in the closet, the crisp sound of his shirt, the swoosh of his trousers,
the slap of his belt. Then the jingling sounds as he filled his pockets.

He bent and kissed her.
“Aishiteru yo.”

He padded almost soundlessly across the
tatami
in his stocking feet. His shoes waiting in the
genkan.

The outside door opened and closed. The sounds of his key in the lock.

Gently she exhaled, listening to the absolute stillness of the room. Then slowly, very slowly, she allowed herself to cry.

Asleep in the bed, Darius breathed in real time, but his consciousness was in dream time. He moved disembodied through lives
half remembered, a ghost-snake slipping its skin. Whispers followed like footsteps. Words of the medicine man tickled his
ear. An echo that thrummed with the blood in his veins. A truth that prickled his skin like the old fears, to halt the clicking
sideshow.

In dream time he saw himself with fresh eyes, a boy upon a mountain, stripped down to breechcloth and moccasins, a small knife
tucked against his hard young belly. He sniffed the air. Inside the heat he could smell the coming of autumn. Yet he did not
trust his senses, hungry as they were for an end to summer and
o-kee-pa.

Unlike the others, he would not give over his body to
o-kee-pa.
He would not hang in the lodge, suspended from rawhide ropes, hooks driven into his flesh with buffalo skulls tied to his
feet, dangling until the spirits came. He would find his own way, he told himself, while cursing his weakness.

Listening with the boy’s ears, Darius heard the chirr of an insect, saw it skitter beneath the rock, a black smudge against
red. His brown fingers slid into the fissure, pinching the hard armor, plucking out the small, struggling thing. Twice the
hot sun had risen and set, and no food had passed his lips. Yet even as he opened his mouth, his white teeth cracking the
tough shell, his ears feeding on the sound, he cursed his weakness.

He understood that he was without whole mind, for he had not slept these two days, the sharp rocks between his toes and pebbles
under his back had kept him awake. Sometime during the night, the skin between the first and second toe of his left foot had
broken. Using clay and some of his own saliva, he’d fashioned a putty to staunch the bleeding, cursing his weakness.

Now in the high heat of the third day, the torn flesh throbbed. The sore would keep him from making a perfect dance when the
moon rose again. He tried the song he would sing, but his throat was rust.

From the beginning he knew his body was his only possession. It was the only thing he could give. Yet his weaknesses defied
this understanding. He looked down at his dusty feet, slowly loosening the hard paste between his toes. His dark eyes sought
the ground. The sharp edge of a stone glinted. He reached, placing the rock between the first and second toe of his left foot.
He squeezed until he drew new blood. The spirits must see he offered his flesh freely.

Still, the spirits hid from him on the third day, and once more he cursed himself for his weakness. He lay rolling upon the
hard earth, his mind gone, wishing for the shade of a cottonwood tree. Then behind his eyes he saw the giant clouds split
open the sky and the great wheel of sun spin, spiraling in upon itself, fire falling in straight paths from its great heart.
He cried out only once, and when he came back to himself, the sun lay upon his chest, its fiery tongues branding him.

Darius jolted awake, his vision fading to ash. Beside him, curled like a child in her sleep, Willie dreamed on, untroubled.

He got up and moved naked and sweating from the bed to the uncurtained window. He’d been dreaming again, one of those nightmares
that clung to near-consciousness like a virus. He struck a match, lighting the last of his cigarettes.

The first exhalation diffused his reflection into a ghost in the glass so that only the hot orange globe of the cigarette
could clearly be discerned burning at his side. Slowly the image resolved, and he began to perceive the beveled outline of
his flesh, looming larger, denser. Brighter than in life, his emerging form made a blinding contrast against the black slab
of night.

I
n the red environment of the darkroom, the man worked efficiently, despite the strangeness in perception that was an effect
of the drug he had taken. He forced himself to concentrate, removing the nascent print from the enlarger, placing it in the
tray. The blank white rectangle, floating near the surface, appeared bloody in the light. He pushed it under with the tongs,
held it until the image took hold, blooming outward from its center like a flower. He did not fight his sorrow, which the
drug painted as a violet shift in the air. He let it fill him, let it flow like dark music, like the grief he had felt over
the loss of his wife.

He lifted the print from the fixative, rinsed it, and hung it with the others. The woman in his photos pulsed with life, the
corporeal life of blood and flesh. Despite the lies that stood like a wall between them, she had touched him on some level
that was yet human. Even with the LSD filling the receptors in his brain, he had to force himself to perceive in her Zavebe.
That essence he had always known from before there was
before
or
after.
Known in that eternal
now
from which they both stood banned.

That was the real sorrow. He. Zavebe. All of the Fallen trapped in an eternity of what the Buddhists called
maya.
The illusion of matter. The seductive lie of warmth and happiness … and love. Warmth that grew cold. Love that died. Happiness
fading to a sorrow that had no end. Over and over. Forever.

If not for the paramedics resuscitating his body after the accident, his own cycle of death and rebirth would yet remain unbroken,
the
memory of his true identity locked in the decomposing brain of what had been his human self. He could not waste this chance
he’d been given. He was the only hope for the Fallen to regain what they had lost.

Which was why Kellog couldn’t matter. Why the ghost of that girl in his bedroom couldn’t matter. Nor, he reminded himself,
should the other, the unfinished child.

He had always planned that Zavebe should be his last in New York. It was clearly time to move on. L.A. was the logical choice.
“Los Angeles,” he said the name aloud, letting the drug inflate and color the words.
Los Angeles… city of angels.

The influence of the drug persisted, intensifying into a sensation of split time. He finished in the darkroom and went to
fix himself a sandwich, sitting down in front of the television, which was blaring out commercials for insurance and soap.
But he was also in the tunnel, reliving the fact of his death. All of it, here, now, then, complete and coexistent. The woman
on the television chattering about whiter than white socks. Marian moving ahead of him, silhouetted in the light. And the
moment of awakening that he could never quite encompass or hold. Only its pale reflection. And only when the drug was at its
zenith.

He flipped to a local channel. As promotional spots since yesterday had promised, there was live coverage of today’s police
press conference. A bit of an anticlimax, since it was obvious from everything that had already appeared in the media that
the dead priest was to be the anointed scapegoat. He felt bad about Thomas Graff, the second of his unintended victims. Another
of God’s little jokes.

He looked at the clock. The event was late getting started. The TV screen showed a still-empty podium, the fringes of a waiting
crowd. He set down his unfinished sandwich. On the screen the shot had widened. He saw James Sakura emerge at the edge of
the frame, ready to ascend to the stage. A dark-haired woman had walked out behind him, and merging with the crowd, someone
else.

He was not prepared. A brilliance uncontained within the pixels of the screen poured like living phosphor from the set. He
was off the sofa, moving to the light, bathed in the force of its radiance. On his
knees, inches from the image, he tried to see, to penetrate to the human face that lay behind the aura. It was not possible.

No matter. It changed everything.

“Samyaza.” He whispered the holy name, placing his lips in reverence against the fiercely glowing figure that lingered for
a moment on the screen.