The Color of Night (18 page)

The car crept along the waterline, beside the great oily river of Babylon. In the bay, the goddess standing on her rock thrust her blunt metal torch into the sky.

Beyond, the glittering lights of the city. Packed close together, like jewels in a coffin. I saw two pillars of darkness where the towers had stood, fracturing slowly into the first light of the dawn.

Raze it. Raze it.
Bring it all down.

As the sky paled and daylight grew, the black oiled surface of the river turned silver. There were waves from the wind, and a slow barge pushing through them. Wheel and scatter of gulls above the water.

The electric gleam died in the windows, and the thousands of buildings that remained turned their blind steely faces to the water and the wind. Along the opposite riverside I saw the tiny dark figures of mortals, scurrying on their errands, intent and insignificant as ants.

I reached toward the triumph of my own intention.
Daughter of Babylon, who shall be destroyed, happy is she who dashes your little ones against the stones.

Silence.

The ragged hum of my own engine. Within the city opposite, there was a whistle, a squeal and a clatter as a thirty-story crane swung into action.

I steered the car into the sounding hollow of the tunnel, thinking bitterly, whatever is razed down is bound again to be raised up.

In the outer room of Laurel’s office a secretary intercepted me. Did I have an appointment? No. My name? I invented something. Will she know what this is in reference to? No comment.

I composed myself to wait. Not long. The classroom clock over the inner door lintel advanced in little jits. A bell rang somewhere. There was the sound of young voices and hurrying feet. Then the inner door opened and Laurel leaned out, both her hands grasping the sides of the frame. Her green eyes were unfocused at first, then came clear.

“Come in,” she said, with a half smile. It pleased me that she wasn’t afraid. She had seemed surprised for only an instant.

Inside was an ornate desk, a grandfather clock, and, grouped around a small Persian rug, a coffee table and three upholstered chairs. Laurel pointed me to one of these and sat down in another.

“My predecessor,” she said with a shrug, when she saw me looking at the furnishings. The little school was rich and Laurel worked in development, raising more money. It seemed an odd vocation for her, but probably she’d have felt the same about mine.

It seemed to me a wave went through her now and then, and that she weakened and bowed beneath it. Nothing so obvious, just a faint slackening of her body, the eyes going drifty. Anyone looking in on us might think, two well-preserved women, meeting after … perhaps we’d have a cup of tea.

“Coffee,” Laurel called to the anteroom. The secretary brought it in with a stiff smile. We sipped. I went on looking at Laurel. She did seem softer, blurrier than before, in her body. Her face had not changed so much as that. Her chin had lost some definition and there were lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, from her laughter and her smiles. Her cinnamon hair was lush and shining.

“It’s the radiation,” Laurel said.

“What?”

“The hair.” Laurel picked up a lock to show me. “It comes back better after the radiation. For what it’s worth.”

I remembered how, back in the day, she used to follow my eyes to a target and see whatever I looked at with me. That wave came over her. Where was she?

“Sorry,” Laurel said. “It’s the drugs.”

“You narced on me,” I said. That antique term. Probably the one word had suggested the other.

“Did I,” Laurel said. With an absent smile she set her cup down in its saucer. A frail white cup of Scandinavian china. I had a flicker of wonder that it wouldn’t be better to look poor when you asked for money.

“Oh, Mae,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m taking a lot of dope for the pain. They’re nice, they cover for me here, but half the time I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing.” The slackness in her throat came taut when she raised her chin to me. “Or what I did.”

“They cover for you?”

Laurel laughed. “I’m well liked. I’ve done them quite a bit of good, over the years. And it won’t be long. The doctors all said I’d be dead by last month. I’ve got ovarian cancer, Mae. Not much anyone can do.”

“You told me,” I said. “On the phone.”

Laurel bit her lip and released it. She’d ratted me out on the phone as well. She might or might not have been thinking about that just now. The drifting look in her eyes as she lowered them might have been some kind of resignation.

“I’m in a lot of pain,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. Who isn’t. But the thought of her suffering commanded in me a degree of respect.

“Morphine.” Laurel’s head moved back and forth. “I hear things. See things that aren’t there. Sometimes I wonder if you ever really called.”

The voices of the gods, I thought, and wondered if she heard them still. Again.

“I’m here,” I told her.

Laurel didn’t answer that. I looked around and saw a picture on her desk. A young woman with long black hair in ringlets, deep dark eyes, ivory skin with a faint tinge of gold.

“My daughter,” Laurel said. “Ariadne.”

“Oh,” I said. “How old is she?”

“Thirty-something,” Laurel said, with a certain slyness to the joke.

My mind went spinning for a moment. I pulled myself together, studying Laurel, groping for the old hard edge under this strange softness that blanketed her now.

“So,” I said. “She’s beautiful. Takes my breath away.”

Then Laurel drew up, and I felt her old spirit strong in her, like a snake standing up in her spine.

“You can’t have her, Mae,” she said.

“She’s a mortal,” I said. “Anyone can have her.”

“Do you think I want to die this way?”
Laurel’s green eyes flashed, then faded. She shook her head slowly—disbelief or resignation. “If I had some other choice. Supposing that crazy thing you claim was true. If it ever had been.”

I’ll kill you if you tell,
I thought.

Laurel raised her tired eyes to me. “I’ve got to work,” she said. “Pretend to work. We can meet tonight.” She named a bar.

So the interview was over. According to her. Well, let it be.

“I never meant to harm you, Mae.” Laurel was shaking her head in that same sad rhythm, like the brass pendulum on her predecessor’s clock. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I never meant to harm anyone.”

Can you be serious,
I thought, though truly I did not know what to say.

“Mae.” Laurel turned her full attention on me as I stood. “I knew you’d come.”

That night the canyon filled with screaming, like floods of rain might fill a gorge—our own cries and the victims’ blended, fused, till there was nothing but this tapestry of sound. Now and again the flash of an image: Stitch running down a woman who’d broken out of the house somehow, closing on her across the yard, with the knife hammed in her fist like a long bloody tooth and the singleness of purpose of a hunting animal.

But all these things came to me in fragments. The shutter revolved over my vision, opening, closing it, opening again. Somewhere nearby in the room I could hear Creamy gasping in exhausted passion, frustrated that her victim wouldn’t die.

“Take me,” I heard the woman say, who faced me, hanging in the rope. She had fought hard, for a long time, but now she would surrender. Her head bowed. We had been in the house for a long time by then. It was surprising how much blood could spill out of a person, through how many wounds, and she still fight, cry out and live.

She had raised her head to speak, and for a moment I held her gaze, until her head flopped down again and I summoned frenzy to slam the knife into her a few more times, with my bruised hand and my sore arm.

It stays with me, her dying look—how finally, how absolutely she accepted Até, the suffering passed on to her through me.

Again the dark wing strokes across my sight and when it passes I see Laurel, crouched on her haunches, both hands streaming with blood, on her face a childishly rapt expression, with her fingertip writing higgledy-piggledy on the wall.

You can’t have her, Mae,
was what Laurel said, but I wanted—
eoui,
how I wanted this mortal child, though not as my lover, not as my meat.

To bring a new birth from gray feathered ash … from the shivering dust that the lightning blaze had made of a foolish mortal mother.

And it ought to be Laurel and I together, swinging the newborn in its basket wreathed in vines. The vine sprang up where blood fell on the sand, and the child was reborn from the vine.

I waited outside the school for most of the rest of the day. There was a pretty little park, with a brick terrace, green benches and rows of ginkgo trees with their frail silverish branches bare. Some of them had been decorated with tinsel and red balls.

It was Christmas, the Christmas season rather. On my approach I had managed not to notice it. As I withdrew, awareness forced itself upon me. The school hallways were full of cardboard elves and Santas. And flummery decorations filled the windows of most of the shops. Groups of gay men strolled by, chattering urgently, tricked out in scarlet and hunter’s green. Women passed, with clutches of bright shiny shopping bags, like inverted bouquets of balloons.

At three, the students came out boiling, gleeful. Their winter holiday must have begun.

I waited, motionless in the deep cold. Now and then I cheered myself with a quick shallow slash of the box-cutter blade across my palm or the inside of my forearm. It was twilight by the time Laurel emerged. She hesitated on the white steps of her building, turned back to the doorway above, where another woman leaned over her, murmuring some words of concern. Laurel tossed her head, flashed her old insouciant smile. She snuggled a bloodred scarf around her neck as she came toward the park where I was sitting, pinning it in place with a little enamel Christmas tree. Her smile had lost its brilliance by the time she was near, and as she passed, without seeing me, it looked rather a sad little smile.

Or if she saw me, she gave no sign. But it was very dark by that time. I drifted in her wake, like a bit of blown ash. She didn’t look back. The cinnamon hair flowed over the scarf as the heels of her soft brown ankle boots clopped along over brick and concrete.

Laurel lived one avenue over, on one of the charming little side streets of the Village. A four-story brick building, its windows warm with yellowish light. She already had her keys in her hand and went in quickly, with a hint of stumble and recovery on the sill, under a lintel featuring a stylized cement lion’s head, festooned with the ivy that climbed the brick wall.

I could have pictured her apartment, well-appointed, cozy, and snug.

Instead I began to walk downtown. I didn’t know the city so well but all roads led to the same place really, like water running toward a drain.

Below Canal Street there began to be obstructions. Some areas were barricaded, meant to be sealed off. But enforcement was thin, the barricades permeable.

Hey, lady,
some uniform called to me once.
Hey, lady, you can’t
—but I went on my way without turning once to look at him, and he was wise enough not to follow.

I knew I must be near from the smell. And in this region the buildings were deserted, temporarily sealed with plywood, draped with cautionary banners. The city’s dead core. Three months after the event it seemed impossible that smoke should still be rising from the center of the ruins, and still I seemed to see it, breathe it in.

Again, again, I felt my heart rising. Singing like a blade slashed through the wind.

What stopped me were the relics left by mortals. They began to appear everywhere, dropped on the sidewalk, wired into storm fences, taped crooked to the plywood sheets that sealed the shattered doorways of this zone. Mortals had arranged these things in tribute to their lost ones: photographs and talismans, flowers and strings of beads.

Beneath these wayside shrines, small scented candles burned. I saw a shrouded woman come and light one and remain there crouched on the sidewalk for a moment, lowering her head. I thought of Laurel but it wasn’t Laurel. Her head was completely wrapped in a fringed shawl.

When she departed, I approached—above the candle she had lit, a photo of a husky youth, strong jaw, white smiling teeth framed by a U-shaped mustache. Both his eyes and his nose were shining. He might have been a little drunk when the picture was taken. There was a note that said
I love you.
Many notes, strung along the fence wire with the photos.
I love you I will never forget you. You are forever alive in my heart.
Notes and medals and keepsakes and bunches of flowers withering in the winter wind.

I am your love,
we had been told. And then—

O——’s love for Eerie brought her out of death, the first time, as my love for Laurel drove her deeper in. The way that O—— loved Eerie made it rain down water, and I loved Laurel so the rain was blood.

It was not unknown for a goddess to surrender immortality, reduce herself to the world of mere living, to share with a mortal lover everything—down to death and dissolution. But I couldn’t recall, that night on the street, the name of a single one who had done so. And Laurel’s mortal lover was long dead.

To weaken. To weaken oneself so.

Now and then a child’s toy hung there among the other mementos. That put me in mind, somehow, of the plastic trike in what had been my brother’s yard in Chillicothe. I drew the box-cutter blade across my palm to scrape that thought away.