CAMBRIDGE NEVER REALLY gets that cold, it just becomes more and more damp. The water comes from the sky, and it seeps from the walls, and it kind of gasses from the ground in the rare moment of sun. Mostly the sky and the buildings and the people are gray. We loiter around our ancient space heaters, coiled springs that glow orange when electricity is run through them; we cup our hands prayerfully around mugs of hot tea; our eyes linger about the trees and lawns and their green promises.
The drinking goes on, the drinking goes up. We tell ourselves it is fun, but really it is because we are bored and cold, and it helps us stay interested in the tight circle of people and the formulaic days of lectures and tutorials and essays and classes.
Then one night, deep into a session, I break the rules. I start telling Rab the truth. In vino veritas, they say, which means “in wine, truth.” But the truth isn’t in the wine, it’s in me; the wine only makes the more fearful me go away for a bit. We stay up through the night, me talking and Rab listening.
As I let him in on my secret, I feel almost as if I am a different person. Telling Rab should make me feel more like myself, but it doesn’t work that way; I feel less and less like the person whose story I’m unraveling to him. Maybe because it’s only Rab I’m telling, and he is the perfect listener. He doesn’t interrupt, and he doesn’t judge, and he doesn’t tire. I should be paying him by the hour.
He’s a fire on which I’m burning my memories like unneeded possessions.
And then, one night, he kisses me. And I kiss him back.
I know that it’s not supposed to be this way. Like, I’m supposed to mourn forever, I’m supposed to die of sorrow, or become a nun at least. That’s what a heroine in a book would do. Maybe she’d go around in black and adopt fetching mournful poses. She’d resist to the end of the movie. She’d resist past the end of the movie and into the flashbacks of somebody else’s movie, and she’d be the old lady who ain’t nobody thought had an interesting life but who actually has a tale of tragic love to tell.
Maybe I should tell you that this is the way Jefferson would have wanted it. Like, he wouldn’t want me to grieve too long; he wouldn’t want me to stop living. Honestly? I think he’d be really jealous. But he can’t be jealous, because he’s dead.
He’s gone, and with it first love is gone, and everything that attached to it, my soul, whatever. I’m stuck here with what’s left.
This is what I would want for me if I weren’t me, and I was telling me what I wanted for me if I were me. That I not be alone in this world. That I fight my way clear to a life.
And maybe this would seem better if I had a really romantic scene to report, like it would be more forgivable if it were more dramatic, with clenched jaws and running after trains and tears and feverish embraces.
Instead: It’s late at Rab’s place. Michael and Soph have headed home. A pot of spag bol sits on the carpet, plates piled on the tea table. Two empty bottles of plonk, one with the cork stuck inside. A saucer with Soph’s spent rollies. Old music coming from the speakers.
I curl up with my head on Rab’s lap. It’s been that way awhile—the slippery slope of touch—at first it was like putting your head in the lion’s mouth—ta-da! We did it without any sexual tension!—and it became the new standard—maybe it’s possible for boys and girls just to be friends and to touch and be close and there’s no harm done.
And then Rab strokes my cheek, and it feels good. But I put my hand on his to stop the feeling good but then it becomes us holding hands. And he leans down and kisses me. And it feels good, better than anything has felt in a long time, and everything after feels good and keeps on feeling good.
This is life.
And it feels healthy, if my saying everything that’s on my mind and finally being able to speak the truth to someone is healthy, which it’s supposed to be, right? He doesn’t have that thing where he’s jealous of somebody who came before him. Which makes sense, of course, only not making sense has never stopped anybody. Rab says everything I’ve seen and everyone I’ve known and loved is part of me, and it’s me, all of me, that he wants to know.
Rab asks me about Welsh and the whole soft-sell, free-pastry interrogation thing we’ve got going on.
Rab: “What do you think they want to know?”
Me: “Everything. But Welsh seems to get especially interested when we talk about current events, or then-current events, like what happened right around when What Happened was happening. Like not just what was on the news but what I saw happening.”
Rab: “Why you? I mean, no offense, but you weren’t exactly at the center of things. Why are you the one they set up at Cambridge? Why not that kid Captain? Or one of the others?”
Me: “The others escaped before…”
Rab: “Donna—these people don’t do things by accident. If the Reconstruction and the government thought the others were of use, they would be here.”
Me: “Because I’m the only one left. Well, me and Captain. They liquidated everybody in quarantine a couple of years ago, right?”
He looks ashamed and angry. Nobody wants to talk about that.
Rab: “Yes. They had to. Well. They said they had to. It was agreed on in Brussels.”
He means the European Union. They had a protocol for everything, including, it turns out, what to do with a global pandemic.
Me: “Well, there you go. I’m special.”
I smile.
Rab: “Yes, you are special, you are a special, special, most wonderful creature. But in addition to that… there must be something. Tell me what you were up to that they might be interested in.”
So I tell Rab what I haven’t told Welsh.
Me: “Well… there’s this thing I haven’t said. Right? You may not know this, but I was South Korea.”
Rab: “Excuse me?”
Me: “Yeah, South Korea, Model UN. Do you guys have that here?”
Rab: “No.”
So I tell him what it is.
Rab: “I’m imagining you in one of those dresses that looks like a tulip.”
Me: “It’s not like that. You don’t wear national dress. You study up the issues, like the US military presence and the standoff with North Korea and whatnot. You make speeches. So, anyway, our teacher was very rah-rah and used to take us to visit the actual UN. She had connections there, some functionary or other. So we got to see the General Assembly and hear them talk and stuff.”
Rab: “Interesting.”
Me: “Not really. You’re thinking it’s all Cuban Missile Crisis and that general dude holding up a fake vial of anthrax, but actually it’s more like one schmo after another making a speech about the same boring commemoration of this or that. But there was one time where it was really interesting, which is when Mrs. Geleitner got us in to see the opening remarks that the president was going to make at the big meeting on the Sickness.”
Rab: “Wow.”
Me: “Yeah, it was pretty intense. Everybody was up in arms about how the Russians and the Chinese were blowing it off, and security was nuts. The president had, like, a zillion Secret Service guys with him, and this was when they started open carrying—like, they obviously had guns and stuff besides their cool suits. And there was this whole entourage of, like, power-suit ladies and an army officer and stuff—and a general-type guy, and he had this kind of puffy briefcase. Very dowdy. Anyhow, the president was about to give a speech when we heard these big booms from outside. It was some kind of terrorist attack, only it was sort of half-assed, thank God. Everybody was freaking, and the Secret Service was all human-shielding the president, and UN security told us we had to leave in an orderly manner. So pretty much that was that.”
Rab: “Where did the president—”
Me: “Oh! Except I was within, like, twenty feet of the president, which is as close as I ever got to a president. His entourage was heading out, and I heard something about a secure room.”
Rab: “And then what?”
Me: “Then I headed back home and switched on the TV, except the TV was gone. Blank screen. That was how it was those days. No Internet, the TV gone, no news, only rumor.”
Rab: “What happened to the president?”
Me: “Look, I know this sounds nuts, but everybody and their uncle was getting sick. I really didn’t have time to think about it. It was the least of my worries. I had been thinking about quitting school anyhow, but my mom insisted I go, like it was going to make things normal or whatever. So I go on a field trip, and somebody tries to blow the building up. I know that sounds pretty extraordinary, but shit like that was going down all the time.”
For a moment, Rab’s eyes look glazed over, like he’s cogitating deeply, chewing over a bone. Then he comes back.
Rab: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
Me: “It’s okay. I feel okay telling you. Anyhow, I never told Welsh that.”
Rab: “Why?”
Me: “Because he wanted to know. Like, really wanted to know. And I don’t trust him.”
Rab: “But you trust me.”
Me: “Of course I do.”
Actually, I don’t.
Call it cynicism. Call it an inability to take life as it comes. I don’t know. But lately, I’ve been getting the feeling that this is all too good to be true.
That is to say, everything that happened from the moment I woke up in the bed in the Old Guest Room. The Shirley Temple moment. Seeing Rab staring at me in the noodle restaurant. His approaching me at the college bar. His patience. His goodness. His ability to listen.
What, I’ve begun to think, if he’s just another kind of listening device?
Maybe it is a sign of low self-esteem. Like, maybe I can’t believe that I rate this sort of attention from him. That would be damn embarrassing, if I turn out to be wrong. Still, I hope I am. Wrong.
I wake up alone, which is odd. Rab usually stays, or at least says good-bye.
He’s not in the sitting room, so that covers the entirety of my domain. Maybe he’s down in the bathroom. That’s one of the charming eccentricities—read: incredible pains in the ass—about the rooms at Trinity. Most of the bathrooms and showers are at the bottom of a stairwell if they are in your stairwell at all; in fact, I have to go all the way down and walk through the colonnade to the next staircase along to find a shower. It’s kind of a drag having to cruise through a fifteenth-century courtyard in a bathrobe with wet hair.
When I get to the bottom of the staircase, barefoot for better sneaking, Titch is not at his usual post on his tortured metal chair, nor is Taut Guy. That’s strange.
The air is chill and clear, Nevile’s Court is a flitting hologram caught in the silver-blue gaze of the moon. My feet catch the chill of the stones. I marvel for a moment at the beauty of it, the hushed secrecy. All the drunk students are in bed and the libraries are in hibernation and there is no one but me and the nightingales.
But then—I hear a serpentine whispering and a vague thrumming as the deep pocket of the arcade beneath the Wren catches the low notes.
Three figures are silhouetted against the green-gray of the Backs of the Cam at nighttime. One is gigantic, unmistakably Titch.
I slink along the wall, out of sight of the silhouettes, who haven’t noticed me and continue their hissing. I creep slowly past M staircase, closer and closer.
I take in another face—it’s Welsh.
He’s talking to Rab.
Rab: “There isn’t much time before she notices I’m gone.”
My legs give out, and I slide down the wall to sit on the pocked marble. I so wanted to be wrong about this. My heart makes one last stab at an explanation—maybe Welsh ambushed Rab at the bottom of the stairs and is giving him the third degree, or trying to talk him out of something, or trying to talk him into something.
But it doesn’t sound that way.
Welsh: “Get her to repeat the story. Verify the details.”
Rab: “It’s taken long enough to get to this. She’s very closed. If I push on this—”
Welsh: “There isn’t much time.”
Welsh: “Yes.”
Rab: “Fine. But I think you’ve got what you need. We should wrap it up or—”
Welsh: “Or what? Ah. You’ve gone native.”
Rab: “She’s not a native. Nor is she the enemy.”
Welsh: “That’s where you’re mistaken. She is a native. She’s a tribeswoman from a savage land. We are explorers in that strange country. And there’s a ways yet to go.”
Rab: “I should get back.”
I make my way quickly and quietly along the colonnade and then up the stairs and, my skin still prickling with the sense of betrayal and anger, I slip into bed and wait.