She seemed so singularly calm he hardly knew what he ought to think.
When he called for her, at the house on Bagatelle Road, she came out calmly, spoke to him in measured, quiet tones, turned carefully to lock the door behind her, keeping her ring of keys in her hand.
"It's all right, I'll drive," she said, and he quickly agreed. He had a license, it was a requirement for graduating from Ionia County High School, but had hardly driven at all in his life, so that he would not have known the gas pedal from the brake, and she was exceedingly calm, he knew her moods so well and she was calm.
They were going to see Dietrich Spencer at his home. He had told them to come to his home. He lived a few miles outside of town, and Dana knew the way, she said. She said she knew exactly how to go.
"It was you who destroyed him," she said, though she said it calmly, never taking her eyes from the road.
But the nature of her calmness, he saw it now, was new and full of hidden dangers. Justin saw that her sorrow had turned to madness, as it had been with her father, and he felt the nausea of dread, for he had learned that there is no reasoning with the sorrowing mad.
There was only one way that he knew to cure the madness of the Mallachs. Her own eyes had gone in search of his, imploring him to stop up the embittered contents of her father's soul, the recriminations that could pour from him and coat him and everything near him with the color of black bile and the stench of old despair. And so he had spoken that night of the formidable problem suspended before them like the fire-spilling mountain of ancient Etna: a leap into the lava that would return them as pure and bright as gods, to live on and on forever.
They would live forever.
He remembered how when Samuel Mallach had spoken like this, of his hatred and world failure, then the bliss had fled from her face, all the warm colors had bled from her face, and her eyes had gone pleadingly in search of his in wordless language, it was as if he'd heard her speaking directly into his mind, and he had answered her and watched the full range of her rapture all at once restored to her, it came back to him precisely, how it was that he had once been able to stave off the madness of the Mallachs, the world-darkening beating of their awful wings, the world as it really is after all, the world as it really is, he had known it with sure instinct, so that when she had turned her imploring eyes on him, he had spoken of possibilities for immensity: the unveiling of the implicate order that would accommodate the universe's irreconcilable truths, with all things suspended in the vast and still geometry of light.
So he understood and so he gathered up all the faculties of his mind so that he might know how to say what he must say to her, as she sat beside him in the late afternoon, steering the car easily around the curves of the tree-shrouded road and calmly cataloguing the reasons for her everlasting hate.
"It was you who destroyed him in the end. Not my mother, not Dietrich Spencer. You were the one who made life finally impossible for him. Only you, Justin Childs."
"Dana, listen to me. Listen to me carefully. We're very close. Don't you see how close we are?"
"What?" She turned herself to face him on the right. "What are we close to, Justin?"
"We've almost solved it, we're essentially there. The math is still messy, but it's going to all come together now for us very, very soon. We're so near I can feel the fire of it hanging. Tomorrow, darling, or the day after. Some tomorrow soon. It was always you and I, Dana. Your father wasn't really up to it anymore. His day as a great scientist was over. He knew it and so did we. It was you and I, Dana, drawing it out from each other, drawing the physics out from each other as he'd always hoped."
"How dare you, Justin Childs." She said it calmly, though the hiss of it was deadly, filling my name with some noxious ether of sound. "First you kill him and now you tell me that he was expendable. How dare you. You're more hideous than I ever dreamed. Hideous."
"Think, Dana. Try to think logically."
"How dare you."
"Be reasonable, Dana!"
"You're a murderer, cold and simple."
"You call me his murderer?"
"His murderer, yes. His false friend, that's what he called you himself. It was your falseness that drove him to it."
"How dare you, Dana? How dare you? I loved him! Dana, I loved him!"
The dreadful ascent, the rising up of love for him, for Samuel Mallach, for if there were fathers in science then there were also sons, and I was his.
"Whether you loved him or not, you managed to kill him. You heard him yourself. 'My entire life I've been betrayed, and you, false friend, are the last and you are the worst, but at least you are the last.'"
"I was the one who brought him back to life. You couldn't do it all those years, even though you tried. I was the one who reminded him of everything that he'd lost, of everything he could still regain. It was me, Dana!"
"Yes, it was you, Justin. It was you. He was alive, he was alive, even if he wasn't all that he'd once been, he was alive, and now he's dead, and you're the one who killed him."
"No, it wasn't me, Dana. Someone killed your father, but it wasn't me."
"What are you talking about? Who is it that you're going to blame now? Hideous." The hiss of it so deadly.
"You're pathetic! You're like some little child. You don't really know the first thing about it. You have no idea what really went on. The night your mother died, she and her lover, your uncle Dietrich, had told your father that she was leaving him. They were coming back to collect you in the morning. That's what made your father the lunatic he was. Everybody knew he was insane. It was the department's kindness not to fire him."
She turned around to face him, and for the briefest moment there was a shudder rising up through her, pulling all her features along with it, so that she was for one single instant a ghastly ugly woman. Not a frenzy-painted stranger, like he had seen tugging at her father. This one was recognizably the same Dana Mallach, but she was ugly.
It passed, and she was restored, though she still stared at him, her hands not on the steering wheel of her car but on her lap, placed very deliberately and calmly and perfectly still, the long tapering fingers of her hands arranged serenely on her lap.
He saw her hands resting there, and knew that there was something fundamentally amiss, for a few long moments, it seemed, until the world ripped itself open into waves of noise and sickening motion, the car rolling over and over, and screams ascending from every direction of the world.
And then it all stopped, the vast waves of it collapsing, with the car rocking slowly back and forth, a gentle cradling motion and the singsong of a gentle noise. The car was upside down, all things going again to calm, though Dana was strangely gone from his side, and he smelled the fumes of battery acid, so great a silence after so great a sound and motion.
And then suddenly a vast explosion of unleashed voices, voices human and inhuman, each flame distinctly shrieking, with paradox abounding even in death, for though he burned and burned he felt that he froze, that though he was blackening he was turning into ice, she had been hurled out from the wreckage and he was caught, his leg crushed somewhere in the mangle of metal, and she didn't move, he saw the fact of her perfect stillness with his dying eyes, her own eyes mercilessly unveiled, inhabiting no warmth of love at all, immobile in her cold, hard gaze.
— For pity's sake for pity's sake why can't you pity me as I'd pity you?
— But I did, Justin Childs. I did pity you. How much I pitied you!
— You didn't move. You looked at me unmoving.
— I thought that I was dead. I thought that I had died.
— Because you had meant to die.
— I had meant to die and thought I had.
— And meant to kill me, too.
— No. My intentions were all for me. I only wanted to follow after him.
— To follow after the beloved dead: I know the desire.
— I'd wanted to go to him even before that moment. But then hearing you—
— The terrible things that I was saying—
— It was all that I could think: to get away from you and go to him. I wasn't thinking of your death but only of mine.
— You plunged yourself into the fire. You crawled back and plunged your arms deep in to get me.
— Too late.
Few words can accommodate the full dimensions of our mortal sadness, but these two can, and spoken as she speaks them now, they do. — I remember the sound of your teeth chattering as you squatted in the grass beside me.
— I remember your eyes filling up with emptiness. A mirror of the world no more.
— I saw your face the first time in a mirror.
— And I saw you in that same mirror.
— I thought you weren't real.
— You thought I was a painting. I thought you were a ghost.
— You believe in ghosts, Dana Mallach.
— I believe in you, Justin Childs.