The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories (10 page)

D’Souza does not open his eyes. His body is still scarred and pitted with the excesses of his torturers, but the wounds are clean and unmarked by red or black. D’Souza floats toward the window until his head is pressed up against it.

D’Souza
melts
or wriggles through the window. It happens so slowly that Gabriel should be able to tell what has occurred, but he can’t; it is as if he blinked and missed it. Gabriel runs to the window.

In the light of the moon, he sees D’Souza and dozens of other prisoners, washed clean by the bracing wind, the stinging rain. As they dip, gyrate, and glide through the sky, Gabriel can hear distant laughter, faint and fading. As they fly farther away, they appear as swathes and strips and rags of darkness swimming against the silvery white of the moon. He stares until he cannot see D’Souza, just the shapes of bodies moving like dolphins through water.

Watching their flight, Gabriel feels a weight in his heart, an emptiness, a loss, and a yearning. He shuts his eyes so tightly they hurt and wills that his spirit too should fly up into the moonlight, into the clouds, the torrential rain, and the wind. But as he wills this, as his body starts to become lighter than air, than life, he sees the images he has sought to block out: the scalpels edged with blood, the secret police gathered around their victims, the rubber gloves and the wires.

When Gabriel opens his eyes, he is still on the ground, in the empty cell, with the door open.

Gabriel stands there for a long time before he takes off his guard’s cap and lets it fall from his hands to the floor. He walks downstairs to the first floor, where the secret police no longer lounge, but instead run back and forth, scream, shout, and gesticulate wildly. This secret is too big for their minds to hold. Boots clatter against cement runways. Automatic rifles are loaded with a desperate
chut-chut.

Gabriel walks past them and out into the rain. The rain feels good against his face. It dribbles into the corners of his mouth and he tastes its sweetness. Above, the prisoners, and ahead, from the parking lot, guards and secret police, soaking wet and strangely silent, shoot at the prisoners as if their sanity depends on it.

Ignoring them, Gabriel gets into his car and drives off, past the empty observation posts, past the twenty-four-hour light, past the useless barbed wire, past the ludicrous outer fences, and onto the twenty-mile stretch of road that leads home. He shivers as his shirt sticks to his skin, but he feels the cold only as a numbness that has no temperature. The night along the roadside no longer feels like an infinite bubble; it is static, dead.

Finally, he drives past his neighbors’ ugly concrete houses and into the driveway of his own home. He gets out of the car and stands in the rain, but it no longer invigorates him. It makes him tired and old. He walks to the door, opens it, and shuts it behind him almost as an afterthought.

“Sessina?” he says, expecting no reply and hearing none.

He walks into the kitchen. Beside the stove he finds a message: “Dinner is in the refrigerator.” He does not look in the refrigerator.

Instead, he unbuttons his shirt and takes it off, letting it fall to the floor and, as he makes his way into the bedroom, he frees himself from shoes, socks, pants, underwear, so that when he enters he is naked. He does not bother to towel himself dry before he gets under the covers with Sessina. Ignoring the photograph of his grandfather that stares accusingly in his direction, he snuggles up next to her and finds that he trembles against her skin, his heartbeat as rapid as if he had just run three miles. Clutching her to him, he is relieved to hear her pulse slow and even beneath the pressure of his hands, having feared in some irrational way that she might prove to be a phantom. But she is here, and she is real.

Sessina stirs in her sleep and murmurs, “Gabriel.”

“Yes.”

“How was the prison?”

Gabriel’s mouth curls into a smile and a frown at the same time.

“I . . . I saw a miracle. A miracle,” he whispers, and now the tears come softly as he holds her. “He flew. He flew . . .
and I could not follow him.”

But she is asleep again, lost in her own dreams, and does not seem to hear him. No matter. Soon he too is drifting off to sleep, so tired and confused that he cannot think of anything and yet is thinking of everything, all at once, for the first time.

ABOUT THE BOOK AND THE AUTHOR

World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer has had books published in over twenty languages and his short fiction has appeared in many year’s best anthologies. Novels include
Finch, Shriek
, and
City of Saints & Madmen
. Nonfiction includes
Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer, Monstrous Creatures: Essays, Articles, and Reviews
, and
The Steampunk Bible
. Solo and with his wife Ann VanderMeer, editor of Weird Tales, VanderMeer has edited several influential anthologies, including
Leviathan vols. 1-3, The New Weird, Steampunk, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
, and the forthcoming
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
. He reviews books for the
New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post
, and others. A frequent guest at conferences and conventions, VanderMeer has lectured at MIT and the Library of Congress while also running writing workshops all over the world. He also serves as the assistant director to the Shared Worlds SF/Fantasy teen writing camp. Visit www.jeffvandermeer.com for more information.