38

There was a sound I barely recognized as my own voice, calling her name. I swept her into my arms. One arm dangled. The metal pole that suspended the plastic bag of saline solution swayed and nearly fell.

She was slack in a way that disturbed me. She was thin, her bones apparent in the feel of her body in my arms. But she had no spark of even twilight awareness, no roll to settle inward against me, no sigh to show her relief to be in my arms.

Careful, I cautioned myself. Don’t hurt her.

She was beyond feeling. Her gauze-wrapped head lolled. One arm was bandaged, and her legs were swathed. She did not breathe so much as tug in air just a few slack inches and then, almost soundlessly, work it out again, like a person breathing the same exhausted breath over and over again.

I ceased abruptly. Someone was coming. I did not move, listening hard to footsteps in a far-off corridor. The steps pattered, receded, and at last left us alone together.

Lowering her to the floor, I slipped the IV from her arm, withdrew the catheter, carefully as the most skilled nurse, working to detach her from the courses and alternates of her bodily fluids. I cradled her recumbent weight, and I made hushing sounds, as though to encourage her to sleep. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “Don’t worry, Nona.”

I would not surrender her. I would take her away. I would flee with her—I stopped myself, holding her there in my arms. Where would I take her?

Nowhere. I was outside the room, but I did not carry her any farther. Where would we hide?

I did not move again for a long time. Then I hurried toward a green EXIT sign.

I was determined: No one would take her from my arms. My feet echoed in the stairwell. There was a scent of old concrete dust. Light reflected dimly off the handrails. I was climbing upward, carrying Nona.

I leaned into the pushbar of a door. The door did not budge. I leaned into it again, hard, and the heavy barrier made a scraping rumble, and slowly gave way.

The smell of night surrounded me, the sea air, the tannic flavor of trees, the purr and mutter of faraway traffic I had never been alive to before this night.

I stretched her on the gravel of the roof, massaging her hands.

She did not stir.

She was waking up, I told myself. Keep talking to her. Keep massaging her arms. She’s coming back. Look.

Her lips were parted, unmoving. Her eyes were closed, her breath so slow I could barely hear it, even when I held my own breath.

I swung a fist into the dark around me. “You lied!”

There was no response, but the silence was like that of a retreating wave, a falling back full of capability—and promise—to return.

A step pressed the surface beside me, a sound that was inaudible but which I felt in the lacquer of my own thoughts, like a sensation within my own flesh, a brain surgeon’s probe calling forth this memory and that desire.

At first I felt joy. So, I thought, I was not alone. This was not insanity.

My joy did not last. “Lies,” I whispered.

This presence was a source of light. I could not look at her. Her gown made a sigh as it brushed the skin of air, the last remaining heat of sunlight radiating from the roof.

“That’s all you offer, isn’t it?” I heard myself say.

The light did not answer.

“Perhaps I lied to myself,” I said.

There was a long silence. Then a voice, like a whisper at the very edge of hearing. “There is a way for you to stir her,” the voice said. “But in your selfishness you will not discover how.”

Gravel scattered. “Tell me!”

There were no further words.

“Tell me how to wake her!”

The thought came: Soon you will forget all about her.

I said, carefully, deliberately, “We have no contract.”

A force wrenched me to my feet, and slammed me against an air-conditioning duct. A weight pressed my ribs. The breath was crushed from my lungs. All the air was flattened out of me, and I went numb. I struggled, my arms twitching. I could not make a sound, or think any thought except: air.

I was suffocating.

The invisible grip let me drop, sprawling to the sharp stones. I tasted my own blood, and wiped the water that flowed from my nose on my sleeve.

The whisper again, a sound I could barely make out. “You think of us as evil,” she said. “So that is how we appear to you.”

“How can I win her back?” I asked.

There was no response. Her presence was like the flickering fragment that precedes a migraine, like the shard of light associated with a blow to the face.

They won’t give you Nona, I said to myself.

What can they give you?

Sometimes the cheers of a crowd are so complete that they deafen, a solid wall of noise. Sometimes a leader steps before his adoring subjects and, when he speaks, is silenced by the love his supporters feel for him.

I was this prize, this man who stood before the senate of the dark and found myself buffeted by their acclaim. I was no longer a man who had lost his humanity. I was one of their creatures, and while I had no hope, what hope did any man possess?

For a moment I thought I could escape, forgetting that what I breathed was the same air that sustained Nona, except that she was still alive, however vanquished, while I already felt the socket in me, the stump that had been my soul.

I gathered Nona into my arms. The gravel was unclean. So was I.

Perhaps I had struck a bargain with nothing more than my own insanity. I lectured myself in a wry, peevish inner voice: Your own mental illness, your own circus of hallucinations, would make nothing happen in the world of plasma and blood gases.

Whatever I had bargained with, I could not turn back.

“Let them attack me again,” I said. “The people who did this.”

Again—silence.

“That’s what I want. Let them try again.”

There was a silence, and the light around me was dimming.

“I can have that, can’t I? If I can’t have Nona, then I can have revenge.”

There was no answer.