60

I wanted my brother at home, in the house that belonged to my family. I wanted to be in the rooms that had heard my father’s voice, felt the whisper of my mother’s step.

There were questions I needed to ask him, and there was something I needed to destroy.

I had lost track of time. It was night, and I was surprised at the darkness. We left the hospital, and I felt like someone recovering a land he had lost, a survivor of a one-man voyage. The parking lot was not especially remarkable, but it looked, with its red lights and carefully delineated parking spaces, like a fragment of a beautiful world.

Ask him, I told myself. Ask him why Nona is afraid.

Something about Rick. Something about Rick isn’t right. Something about Rick has never been right. Has it?

“Hurry up,” said Rick, but I was amazed at the sounds of the darkness. I gazed around at the buildings, the sky. A car started. Someone laughed. People were talking, their voices far away.

I reminded myself that I couldn’t leave Nona here. Something bad would happen to her.

Underfoot was the solid, gritty asphalt. I would have to call Renman. I would have to tell him that his experiment had worked. No doubt he had known that I would eventually end up with the same constellation of symptoms as my mother. Renman must have figured that I would do no harm, given a chance to spin out some of my own plans. The wise, careful man had won. I could bear him no malice. I had enjoyed my hours in the light.

“We’re not driving straight there,” I said. “There’s something I have to do.” It had nothing to do with Renman, or with packing one of my bags for a long stay away from home.

“Dr. Ahn’s meeting with Dr. Skeat. They’ll be waiting.”

“I insist.”

“Absolutely not,” he said, but his determination was flickering.

“It will take just a few minutes.”

No response.

“A few minutes. That’s all.”

Rick examined the keys in his hands. He looked around at the cars, the obscure figures of passing people on the sidewalk.

“I don’t like it,” he said after a long moment. The stiff, distorted conical shapes of the junipers, the winking red brake lights of passing cars, all seemed to trouble him.

An older brother has a lingering, minor sort of authority. “What harm can I do?”

We both seemed to find that amusing, in a grim way. Rick gave a toss of his shoulders, as though to say: murder, suicide. Nothing much.

He started the car. “I can have clothes shipped up to you. Books, tapes. You name it.”

“Home first. Please.”

“It’s a bad idea.” There was, however, no force in his words.

I thanked him, but the way he drove troubled me, wrenching the Alfa from one lane to another, glancing into his rearview mirror. At one point I asked him to slow down, and he did not seem to hear me.

It is an ancient irony, which Milton illuminated perhaps without fully understanding it himself: in the old story Adam fell because he loved Eve, because he was enough like God to be unable to forget his heart’s companion.

I found the feather in the calfskin Milton. It left an imprint on the page, and the blood left a trace of black dirt.

It was a dim object, the blood filling its shaft. I found some matches in a drawer. A feather burns quickly, with the same frizzled swiftness with which hair will be consumed. I needed a second match to reignite it, but soon even the blood, which smoldered and gave off smoke, was gone, leaving a waxy residue of ash in the ashtray, and a sultry, clinging smell.

I put the volume carefully back into its place on the shelf.

Stratton.

I am still here.

I buried my face in my hands for a moment.

I didn’t want her. I knew she did not exist. She had nothing to do with reality, with the land of day and night. The flickering image was there, to one side, that figure I had begun to realize was a symptom, a lapse of consciousness rather than a presence.

She had nothing to do with me. I averted my eyes, feeling the beginning of pain in my skull. Don’t talk to her. Whatever you do—don’t say a word.

She spoke my name again, a sound like a page turning.

She had never existed. Grab a few shirts, I ordered myself, and get out of here. I was a man sitting in the presence of a drug that had mastered him, poised, waiting for the toxin to take its grip.

She ascended into half-focus. And stood, milk-gowned, watching me, flickering, spinning. When I looked at her directly she dimmed, and when I looked away she grew sharp and bright.

“I’m finished,” I said. I had meant to say: I am finished with you.

Her voice was like wind in sails, rippling. “You have not lost us, Stratton.”

It was a struggle to remain upright. I did not answer her.

“What did you want? Your name. You wanted fame. And beyond that—nothing.”

I hurried through drawers. I packed this shirt, that notebook, feeling futile, my acts senseless, my shadow falling and flowing over the room. “I am a creature of my time,” I said.

I bit my lip. Don’t. Don’t talk.

“Ask, Stratton. Ask for something great.”

“Great?” I echoed the word mockingly.

Tell her to leave. Silence her. But I couldn’t—that was the problem. She was proof of how sick I was.

But her words caught me. Great.

No, don’t think, I told myself. Hurry. Leave now. My lip was raw. I whispered, “You’re challenging me.”

Ask, I thought.

Why not ask?

I was excited for a moment. “I would like you to do something wonderful.”

“What is it you want?”

My emotion faded. “You won’t be able to do it.”

We are real.

I was disgusted with myself. “What are you?”

“Something beyond your grasp.”

“An angel?”

The silence pulsed around me. “You’ll never understand.”

“The ghost of my sister—who died before she was born. Is that what you are?”

There was a laugh, like the rush of wind in a tree.

“All of the unborn, all the people who never had a chance to live, the shadow people who want a part to play in life.” I stopped myself. “Am I right?”

She did not answer.

“Nothing. An absence.” I took a deep breath. “You did harm.”

I was answered by the sort of silence a monument casts, a promontory, immense and dumb.

“I’m beginning to see that you can do nothing for me. The death of my adversaries, the conversation with my father, were all empty theater. It was all an effect of my imagination. And perhaps I actually killed Blake. And DeVere. With these hands.”

These hands. I knew it was the truth.

A whisper, from all around me. “Nona’s return to life?”

I did not want to talk about Nona. “Valfort is a great physician. Besides, maybe you had her nearly killed, and kept her, until I almost took my life. As a game.”

The thought-voice was beautiful. “Have you lost faith in us?”

I wanted to laugh, but I felt sick. “You don’t exist.”

She spoke as with the voice of a stadium, packed with voices: You’ll never understand.

Don’t listen. “I have no interest in you. It’s all in my mind.” I was panting. “You’ve been proving that to me, little by little, and now I’m convinced.”

“We are what you believe us to be.”

I shook with quiet laughter, but it was a furious laughter, and I ached to seize this smudge of light in my hands.

I closed my eyes. Even so I could see her radiance through my eyelids, suffused with the color of my own flesh. Was she toying with me? Or did she, in truth, have power?

Bring Stuart back, I thought. Bring him back to life and health.

But I turned away. When we mature we climb to higher ground, leaving the quicker, lower years behind. The view is greater. The tower of our own making enters the sky. We see more of the landscape around us. We press brick upon brick and stand ever taller in the countryside of our lives. And if all that happens is our flowering ignorance, what have we accomplished?

Perhaps something. Something small. Perhaps we have exchanged one sort of ignorance for another, finer kind, a fabric old and human.

“Bring Stuart back,” I said.

There was no response.

The light had vanished.