12
VERTIGO
Dominic threw the thin hospital blankets from his restless body in disgust, and jumped out of bed. He shook himself, touched a sore place on his forehead, and bounced on the balls of his feet. If his memory didn’t start coming back today, it was likely to stay gone.
He was sick of pajamas. He was tired of sleep, of doctors, of the machinery of medicine. He plucked the irritating pulse oximeter from his hand and unpeeled the sticky electrode tabs from his chest with fingers that seemed to retain more memory than his mind. He spread his hands and looked at them. They were strong, but not callused, skilled. He had been a doctor. Dysart had told him so. And an athlete. He didn’t need any confirmation of that beyond his body’s indignation at his current lack of activity. He wanted to run.
“Dr. O’Shaughnessy?” His pretty, black-haired nurse poked her sharp face into the room.
“Good morning, Clare. How does a man get a pair of running shoes in this place?”
“Did you disable your pulse ox, Dr. O’Shaughnessy?” It was remarkable to Dominic how stern the Irish young could be. He grinned at the beaky girl and sat down on the edge of his knotted bed.
“Yes. Sorry, Clare.”
“Were you having the bad dreams again?” Her brow constricted in concern.
Dominic nodded. The past two days had been a restless parade of visits and visitors. Specialists, nurses, scans, tests, and their incomprehensible results were interrupted only by the necessity of rehashing it all with Dysart during visiting hours. When he slept, his mind tangled without context to make sense of it all.
“Your mum phoned from the airport. She’s on the ground in Dublin and should be here in another hour.”
“Could I please get some clothes before then?”
“She’s your mother.”
“Please?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
Clare’s slender, tapered fingers re-clipped the monitor and pushed Dominic back toward the stack of pillows on his bed.
“Maybe your landlord can help. He’s so lovely. Came by t’other day. Maybe he could bring you some of your things.” She regarded the discarded EEG pads and shrugged.
“I’d like to see him today,” Dominic said.
“That should be easy enough.” Clare untangled the blankets from their frustrated ball on the floor. “I’ll ring him for you, it’s a local number.”
“Thank you.”
Clare positioned pillows behind Dominic’s back and the blankets across his knees with the obscure precision of a mother bird. “You should try and get yourself a wee bit more sleep. It’s not quite morning.”
Dominic gazed out the window at the raw, late April sky. “You’ll call him right away?” he asked.
“If you want me to. I’ll ask him about your clothes.”
“No, that doesn’t matter, just tell him to come as soon as he can.”
In the reflective pane of his gray window, Dominic watched Clare tuck the blankets at his feet between the plastic-cased mattress and the metal bedrail. She turned at the door and smiled at him. Her gentleness and warmth seemed fragile in the window’s cold glass. Dominic shut his eyes against the sky, which lightened into the faded night that passed for a Dublin spring morning.
I am sitting before I wake up, dizzy on the floor beside my bed.
“Are you all right?” an old voice calls from another room.
My throat is too dry to answer. I stagger to my feet and grope for the edge of the bed. Then I fall back to the floor again. I reach up to find the tiny stem of a bedside table lamp, and twist it. Electric yellow light opens the old darkness, illuminating my broad, tumbled, black-covered bed. Shiny rock band posters on thin paper adorn the fresh plaster wall. I squint at a singer in bruise-colored dreads—but I can’t place the man.
“Hello?” An old man is knocking at my closed door.
“I’m okay,” I say, but I don’t sound it. My voice is raw, and the insides of my mouth taste like blood.
“May I come in?”
“Sure.”
He kneels beside the bed. I’m wearing sweatpants that are too ugly to be mine.
“Can you walk? It’s important to get on your feet as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” I say. He wraps a deceptively slender arm around my waist, below the blood-sticky, damaged places on my back, and pulls me to standing. My thighs run water. My feet are heavy red stone. I push them across the carpet with my will.
“Vanity,” I say, pointing.
He helps me reach the bench and I collapse on the little stool. I draw a slow breath to steady myself and look up. The large, round mirror balances on a low table with two drawers on either side. It’s a modern piece of furniture, maybe seventy years old and painted a high-gloss black. I look into the silvered glass. Ringed with old makeup and fresh bruises, my eyes are the gray of the cold, early morning sky behind me.
In the other room, a cell phone rings, and the old man leaves me between the window and the mirror, watching myself.
“Yes,” he says into the phone. “I’ll be right there.”
I close my eyes and start to fall.
“Dominic, let me beg you, one last time, to reconsider.”
Dominic stood with his hands jammed into the pockets of the jeans Gaehod had brought for him. In them, and his own sweatshirt and running shoes, he was even more certain of his decision. He wanted his memories back, and he trusted the stranger seated across from him to do what his doctors were afraid to tell him had already slipped from probability.
But the old man looked tragic. “The restoration will be complete you understand,” he said. “I cannot pick and choose what to leave lost and what to retrieve. It will all come back to you. All of it.”
Dominic shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to be content with not knowing.”
“Yes, I was afraid of that.”
“How will it work?”
“You must make certain that we are not interrupted.”
Dominic felt a thrill of dread, but set his jaw. “All right,” he said. He had learned enough about himself in the last three days to be intensely uncomfortable taking the recommendations of a non-scientist over those of doctors and professors, but he had seen enough of memory, living without it, to know it dwelt in a landscape between science and something else. His doctors had done everything they could within their kingdom. He must venture into the other now.
“I must go and retrieve a few things,” Gaehod said sadly.
“All right.”
The old man wrapped a heavy cloak around his graceful shoulders, glancing distractedly around the sterile hospital room. “Objects and artifacts to ground. Signs and symbols are uplifting,” he sighed.
“What?” Dominic was seized with a momentary apprehension. What sort of bizarre procedure was this man planning? Signs and symbols? “What did you say?” he asked again.
“Nothing. You need such different things, arcane and mundane . . .”
“I do?”
“Not ‘I,’ ‘we.’ ”
“You and I?”
The old man stopped his preparations. He stood motionless a long time. Then he reached up and placed both his slender hands on Dominic’s broad shoulders and looked directly into the younger man’s eyes. “Once upon a time . . . No, never mind. There’s a vast difference, my friend, between restraint and sacrifice.”
Every time I close my eyes, I am falling again, so I get back out of bed.
My room is a TV set. Everything in it is new. I find a pair of jeans and a NYU sweatshirt in a wad behind the door. The soft, fleecy interior of the sweatshirt sits familiarly against my warm skin. I put on the only pair of shoes in the closet without a price sticker on the sole and twist open the plastic blinds. The window lets in anemic light and offers a view of the quaint, crumbling brick wall across a narrow alley from me.
The wall paint of the kitchenette and small sitting room is fresh as a murder site, sins covered, but not cleansed. Beside the sink, a stack of freshly scrubbed pots, terrines, gelatin molds, and a glistening steel mandoline drip dry on a kitchen towel. A small white and red teapot sits as centerpiece on the pretty kitchen table, which also holds a large glass mixing bowl in which dismembered roses float. A gleaming automatic coffeemaker, with a sleek pneumatic hum, discharges the last of a steaming stream of fresh coffee into a pressure-locked aluminum canister. I pour myself a cup.
Slender bottles of champagne, vacuum-sealed tins of caviar, and cheeses of every imaginable shape stand in neat rows in the stainless steel fridge along with several foil-wrapped packets I don’t open. The dishwasher is empty. The pantry is stocked with gold seal balsamic vinegar, black truffle oil, and dried morel mushrooms. I tear the top off a paper bag of unrefined cane sugar and spoon some into my mug.
I deduce from the neatly folded blanket on the sofa that the old man had been sleeping out here when my fall from bed woke him. I sit on the springy new cushions and leaf through a magazine, but I’m hungry. Beside the door, a frameless mirror is mounted above an antique table of flowing wooden vines. It holds a single brass key on a slender chain and a U.S. passport. I put the photo up beside my face in the mirror. When I’m finally able to look away from my reflection, I take the handbag from the doorknob. It holds a camera, a thick wallet, a hand-drawn map and a blood-red lipstick. I paint my mouth in the mirror and smile at Olivia Wright. The brass key locks the door behind me.
The hard muscles along Dominic’s spine were gripped so fiercely that when Madalene Wright burst into his hospital room, her interruption was almost a release. A child knows his mother before light or air, and every understanding of the wider world is anchored in that primary connection. An hour ago, Dominic had greeted his mother without context or history. Difficult though he knew mother-child negotiations could be, he had found being a stranger’s son almost unbearably painful.
“Madalene, I’d like you to meet my mother.” The tall, expensive woman at the door extended a hand to the short, practical woman by the window. She rose to take Madalene’s gloved fingers in a small shake. Dominic recalled the gesture’s origin as an above-elbow clasp between warriors evaluating for bicep strength and concealed knives.
“Maeve O’Shaughnessy,” his mother said, easily stepping into the gaping chasm Dominic’s absent memory had opened.
“That’s a lovely name, Maeve, are you Irish?”
“My people come from here, but a long way back. It was my great-grandmother’s name. Won’t you sit down, Madalene?”
“No, thank you. I can’t stay. In fact, I was only stopping in to say good-bye.” Madalene turned a radiant face to Dominic. “My goddaughter is checking into a treatment program—we’re all thrilled! But the program director has taken her passport, so I’m off now to see her get settled in. Then I’m flying back to New York on Monday to pack up her things and get her out of her sublet.”
“An inpatient program?”
“Yes.”
“Medicinally or behaviorally based?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, my dear. I really must be going. It’s quite a drive.” Madalene smiled benignly and swiveled to face Dominic’s mother. “So very nice to have met you, Maeve.”
“I want to thank you for all you’ve done for my Dominic.” Maeve smiled as smoothly back. “You’ve been so kind, the private room, the clothes . . .”
“Not at all. I am still indebted to your son. I’ll be back in a month to check on both our children.”
“Lovely. I’ll see you then.”
As Madalene left, Dominic’s mother turned back to him. “You know this program her daughter enrolled in, don’t you?”
“It’s experimental,” Dominic answered.
“You’ve always been drawn to the radical thinkers,” his mother smiled. “I remember the Times article about your Dr. Dysart. What was it they called him?”
“I don’t remember.”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry, darling. It was ‘enigmatic, brilliant, controversial and vilified,’ I believe. The same article referred to you as ‘Dysart’s charismatic and rambunctious assistant, who may just be the brains behind this genius operation.’ ”
“Why don’t you show me the next album, Mom?”
From an oversized suitcase sprawled across his hospital bed, Dominic’s mother extracted another leather-clad binder.
“I’m so glad Dysart suggested I bring these,” she said. In profile, she looked younger, her wild white hair could be stylish rather than harried. But Dominic didn’t know. He re-seated himself at his mother’s side, re-cramping his neck to read the Roman numeral on the book’s stout spine. “I’m sure he didn’t mean for you to bring them all.” He smiled. “It must have been quite a chore wrangling that many scrapbooks onto an airplane. Did you even pack clothes?”
“In my carry-on.”
His mother opened the third album to the first page, reading the dates inscribed, but ignoring the Latin notation in Dominic’s stilted, adolescent handwriting. “You would have been fourteen.”
“The year you gave me that Nikon for my birthday.”
“Well, you developed such an interest in photography the year before.” She leafed past the front page inscription, Noli esse incredulus sed fidelis, to the first archival-quality sheet of simple, English declaratives under photos. “My house: front door.” “My dog: Twin.”
“I never understood why you named him that,” Maeve mused. “Plenty of dogs have only two-puppy litters.”
“I know,” said Dominic, “but Thomas was different.”
“That was what your sister named him! Are you beginning to remember?” The unfamiliar lines of his mother’s hopeful smile told Dominic, in a language more ancient than his adolescent secret code, of the aging woman’s private struggle. Be no longer unbelieving, but believe.
“I think, maybe, I am.”
The famous teahouse makes liberal use of the peculiar Dublin physics that allow an almost infinite catacomb of vertical space within very concrete horizontal parameters. It irritates me.
Stairs wind up and down, and an arcane calculus based on whether you want tea or supper determines whether you sit above or below street level. Since each word has a different meaning in Ireland than it does in the states, I just tell the skinny hostess I’m hungry and go where she takes me.
My plump waitress addresses the gentleman seated across from me by name, calls me “luv,” and says she’s Kate. She drops off my neighbor’s ticket—handwritten on an unlined slip of notepaper—and deposits a plastic basket of Irish brown bread before me. She pats the back of my pale hand and says she’ll be back directly for my order.
I sink my teeth into the dense, moist Irish texture which eclipses flavor, and close my eyes. An open void swallows me, hurtling up through story after story of historic wood-floored teahouse. I tear my wheeling eyes open to meet my waitress’s concerned gaze. Her soft hand touches my sore shoulder.
“Are you ill, luv?” she asks.
“No,” I croak and clear my throat. “A little giddy.”
“You’re American,” she notes and I nod. “Jetlagged?”
I nod again.
“Flying sure can take it out of you.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Have something to eat. You’ll feel better.”
I give her fleshy hand a little squeeze. “Thank you,” I say.
She returns the squeeze and bustles away. I smile reassuringly at the business suit my waitress called James. His elaborately bow-tied silk cravat protrudes beyond the horizontal plane of his tuberous nose.
The soup, when it comes, is simple and rich. It smells of field and barn, carrot, barley, meat and—of course—potato. It is as Irish as Kate. She takes my empty bowl away.
“Do you feel better?”
“I feel wonderful,” I tell her and point questioningly at the bright blue bandage across her chubby thumb.
“So we don’t lose them in the food,” she chuckles and pockets the extravagant tip I’ve left.
I walk out into the late afternoon chaos and theater of Grafton Street, feeling fully nourished and grounded. I have one more thing to do in Dublin, and then only one place left on this earth I must go.
Dominic had stopped listening to Dr. Dysart, acutely aware of how little he knew about himself. He was nervous, and didn’t know what indications were typical of him, what he needed to conceal. Only two hours remained of visiting hours, and Gaehod had said he would need at least ninety uninterrupted minutes alone with him. Dysart’s blue eyes glinted with mischief through his spiny brows and Dominic returned the man’s discolored grin, although he had missed the joke.
“I need to ask you a favor,” Dominic said, and was surprised by how quickly his mentor’s expression changed. Whatever humor the doctor had been sharing was as forced at Dominic’s had been.
“Anything you need, my dear boy, anything at all.”
“Thank you. It’s a bit awkward, really.” Dominic reminded himself what Gaehod had told him—a fiction as close as possible to fact was best.
Dysart’s intelligent eyes betrayed no anticipation of what Dominic was about to say, and for a moment Dominic hesitated. He steeled himself. He knew very little about the man he had been before his still unexplained injuries landed him in the neuro ward of St. James’ Hospital, but he was absolutely certain he was about to betray that prior self.
“Our lab hadn’t been working on any medicinal formulae, had we?”
“Oh, some theoretical ones. You know how it is, speculation really. What compounds might be efficacious, what current drugs we might use off-label, or in combination, but we were several years away. Why?”
Dominic took a deep breath. There was only one thing he could trade for Dysart’s guaranteed absence through the end of visiting hours. He lowered his voice. “I found some pills.”
“What sort of pills?”
“Homemade capsules.”
The old man’s marbled jaw fell.
“I think I was taking them. Experimenting on myself.”
“Jesus, Dominic!” Dysart sat as if electrocuted. “Could that be what happened to you? A chemically induced amnesia?”
“I don’t know.”
“Obviously, you’d suffered some external injury . . . the blood loss, fractures . . . but the brain scans have all been negative . . .” The old man chuckled. “Our own Albert Hofman! Who would have thought it of you, Dominic? You were always so obedient.”
“Apparently not.”
“No. How gratifying.”
“I thought you’d be angry.”
“Oh, I’m sure I should be. And I certainly would not have condoned it, had I known. I would have insisted you stop. It’s professionally useless and personally dangerous, as I obviously don’t need to tell you. But I must say, my dear boy, I’m pleased by your daring. And your dedication.”
“There’s one capsule left,” Dominic said.
Dysart leaned in eagerly. “And you would like me to have it analyzed?”
“Do you know any place local that—”
Dysart sprang to his flat feet. It startled Dominic to see such mass move with such speed. He suppressed a grin. That had been easier than he had expected.
“Of course, son! I have a few folks over at Trinity who would love a chance to do me a favor. A phone call or two, and I’m certain we could find a lab willing to let me borrow a bit of space tonight. And if not, we’ll see what doors Madalene’s last name unlocks!”
“You know Madalene?”
“I’d be glad for an excuse to know her better.” Dysart winked and scurried away. Dominic pushed his feet into the new running shoes Gaehod had brought him that morning and went looking for Clare in the little gray and aqua nurse’s lounge. The time pressure squeezed his throat, and the minutes beat against his rib cage like an impatient pulse. Gaehod had been very clear. They must not be interrupted. Whatever weird ritual the mysterious old man was planning, he was very keen that they be left alone for the full ninety minutes he said it would take, and time is the last possession a hospital returns to its patients.
“Dr. O’Shaughnessy! Whatever are you doing?” Clare’s keen black eyes darted up to meet his.
“Going running.”
“Absolutely not.” She plunked her knitting down on the table and turned her chair to face her patient.
“I can’t sleep.”
“I can ask the doctor to write you something for that.”
“I don’t want pills Clare, I want exercise.”
“So you propose to just trot about my corridors?”
“Until I’m tired enough to drop.”
“I cannot allow that.”
Dominic leaned wearily against the cold, tile wall, closed his eyes, and listened to the little lounge refrigerator’s dull, mechanical keening. He waited. Frail and nervous though she was, Clare had clearly chosen nursing out of a genuine care for others. Dominic felt her eyes touch his face and he sagged deliberately, making his best play for her compassion.
“Clare,” he said, meeting her eyes at last, “I’m exhausted. There has been a constant parade of visitors and doctors through my room since I regained consciousness. And I’m certain that I loved my friends and family, but they all feel like strangers to me now.”
“I never thought of that. It must be like entertaining guests for you, rather than visiting with family.”
Dominic nodded. “And the doctors . . .”
“I understand.” Clare stood up. “You go back to your room now and relax. No running, but take a shower. Go to bed. I won’t let anyone disturb you. Not even the doctors. Not for a couple of hours, anyway.”
“Can you really do that?”
Clare’s dark eyes glinted with determination. “Aye, I can do that,” she said. “You get some rest, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”
Dominic smiled wearily and walked to the door. “Why won’t you use my first name, Clare?”
“I remember who you were, Doctor.”
“And you use my title to remind me, is that it?”
Clare regarded him unblinking. “Go to bed, Doctor.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You have my personal guarantee of at least an hour to yourself. But I can only keep the doctors away for so long. They begin last rounds at nine. I can stall them, but I can’t stop them.”
“Thanks for taking me under your wing this way, Clare.”
“Never you mind. I hope it helps.”
Dominic glanced back at the nurse, but she had resumed her knitting and did not meet his eyes. He retreated to his room, to find Gaehod there, dressed for safari in white linen, already engrossed in his mysterious work. Dominic closed the door.
The old innkeeper had laid out an array of strange supplies on the striped plane of Dominic’s hospital bed. A slender Chinese calligraphy brush and an ancient carved bone flask waited beside seven neat piles of vellum, hide, clay, and paper. Gaehod was crouched over the red leather-clad diary when Dominic came in. He looked up, but seeing Dominic, gestured for him to sit, and began leafing through a clearly decades-older, yellowing, blue-lined notepad spidered in rough semi-literate scrawl. Gaehod made a final notation and looked up.
“Very well. I think we’re ready.”
“Okay.” Dominic squared his shoulders. “What do you need me to do?”
“Nothing, right now. I need to prepare the window.”
“Can I help?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Gaehod opened the hinged brass lid of the squat, bone pot and dipped the brush’s unevenly colored hairs into it. With careful strokes, he began painting the hospital window in minute, swooping red symbols.
“What does that mean?” Dominic asked.
“It’s a name,” Gaehod answered, preoccupied. Beneath it, he drew another symbol. Then, taking a step to his left, he made another sign a little lower on the glass. “Another name,” he explained without turning around. He drew four figures directly beneath the name, and moved left again and farther down again. Dominic was surprised by how beautiful each symbol was, and the way the deep red ink stayed completely opaque and glistening, but did not run or harden.
Gaehod worked counterclockwise, creating a circle of stacked symbols on the window. Each stack was crowned with a unique name, but in the columns below, Dominic began to notice a few repeated motifs, a pattern in the incomprehensible signs.
“What does that symbol mean?” he asked, as Gaehod finished drawing one of the more frequent symbols on the glass.
“It’s the sigil ‘heartbreak.’ ”
Dominic snorted. “I seem to have had more than my share.”
Gaehod consulted the next stack of papers on the bed and shook his roan head. “No. Below each name is a list of pivots, the points where a life turns.” He dipped the brush into the bone pot again and returned to the window. Dominic watched the stabbing liquid lines.
“They all look painful,” he said.
“Pain is a catalyst for change.” Gaehod bent to draw an abbreviated column at the lowest point on the window.
“Not all changes are good,” Dominic said, his lingering eyes on the brilliant red knife-lines of heartbreak.
“No,” Gaehod agreed, consulting the next stack of papers on the bed, “but even good change can be painful.”
Dominic watched the red ink clinging to the motley bristles of the brush. The cord binding them looked new, although the handle was ancient.
“Did you make that brush yourself, Gaehod?”
“Yes.”
“Especially for tonight?”
“Yes.”
Gaehod glanced at Dominic and turned to the hospital window again.
“Gaehod, is that my hair?” Dominic asked.
Gaehod dipped the brush in the ink and drew another name with another line of symbols. He worked swiftly, with complete concentration, and Dominic didn’t interrupt again, watching the red circle close, searching for patterns in the columns and letter shapes.
“There’s the symbol for heartbreak again,” Dominic noted.
“Heartbreak is necessary to a complete life. You can’t fall in love until your heart’s been broken. You must stand on the splintered pieces to reach the first rung. Come here, Dominic.”
Dominic walked to the glyph-crowded window, his heart thundering. Every animal part of him, brain-stem to fingertip, was alight with danger.
“It’s time.” Gaehod said. His face was deeply lined with fatigue or anguish, but he did not ask Dominic if he was certain he wanted to proceed, despite clearly wishing that he would not. “Look at your eyes in the glass,” he said.
Dominic looked at his reflection. He looked ragged, unshaven, and weary. Then he met his own eyes and gazed into their unfamiliarity.
“Now look out the window,” Gaehod said.
Dominic toggled his focus and saw the rain-polished roofs and streets of Dublin.
“Put your left hand on the top symbol.” Gaehod’s voice was soft, a subtle whisper, almost more in Dominic’s thoughts than hearing. He touched hesitant fingers to the cold glass.
“See your eyes.”
They were darker somehow, and his nose longer and strong. His face, lashes, and brows, where they bordered his vision, seemed younger, but unfamiliar still.
“Look through the window.”
The city’s spires and depressions, shades of darkness, profiles of commerce, swam into focus.
“Look in your eyes.”
Dominic’s focus switched, blurring for a moment, the red circle at the periphery of vision, but he did not blink, and black eyes met his gaze again.
“Look through the window.”
His raised hand on the glass kept him from falling into the night outside, where buildings, like trees, stretched endlessly up.
“Look through your eyes.”
The whirling red circle rimmed his vision and the glass, like water, rippling, showed him himself reflected, deep eyes, almost green, beneath long lashes, still unblinking.
“See through the window.”
Back again, the switching focus, dizzying, the lights shining, city smoking, shivering.
“See through your eyes.”
“The window.”
“Your eyes.”
“The window.”
Gaehod’s voice commanded. Dominic’s focus shifted. The red ring around him blurred. The night, his vision, his open eyes, the glass between them, everything began to dissolve and whisper, blur and seep. Dominic caught glimpses of different eyes, none of them—and all of them—his own, reflected back and across nights of cities and forests and towns.
“Sweep your hand in a circle across the glass.”
Dominic obeyed, his stiff arm twisting in the socket.
“Again.”
It was easier the second time, although he still did not blink his eyes. His palm slid frictionless across the cool glass. “Again.”
His arm flooded with the heat of movement returning, tingling up from his fingers, smearing the glass. He blinked. Staggered. Shambhu, Bel-nirari, Gnith Cas.
Brother! Priestess!
Gaehod’s arms came around his violently convulsing shoulders. Leaning against Gaehod’s maternal softness, Dominic backed numbly from the window. His arm fell heavily away from generation after generation. He stumbled against the edge of his metal hospital bed and let Gaehod ease his exhausted body down. Antonius Musa, Huáng Zōngxī, Venerio lo Grato.
Mother! Ghita!
The man’s tender hands pulled the blankets up, and Dominic closed his smoking eyes. The metal door whispered closed.
Dominic looked through the wiped-clean glass, ready to continue, learning nothing but the unique lines of cityscapes and faces. His searching eyes closed against the unending night, willing to keep solving nothing, fighting and building, with his stubborn strength against the vast and constant void of love and loss repeating. It had been so much, so distant and enduring. Heartbreaking. And yes, magnificent.
