Cyrena Lohr was sitting in her parlour when she heard that Eugène Marais had died, and that it was believed he had committed suicide. The news attacked a cherished, unlived part of Cyrena’s life, the place where she had fantasised about a close relationship existing between them, where they would mutually guide and support each other in all the years that they had been separated. In the place where their meaning and ages were alike. Beneath that dream were the very real memories of her father and her childhood. That superstructure that formed the foundation of all her most reliable and enjoyable recollections. A suicide always hacks away at such supports. The rareness of Marais just made the cruel axe even blunter, more pointless. There was nobody to share her pain with. The grief and disbelief locked claws in her lonely heart in her empty house two thousand miles from where she last saw him. She climbed the staircase, stopping on each stair for a minute or two, her heels kicking the back of the step for reality. Her hand stroked the polished banister, feeling its firmness and the space between her grip and its surface. The view from each step she noticed for the first time. The difference, the uniqueness. How could he do it? How could he leave everything so unfinished? She moved through her favourite room touching things. Their temperature and texture imprinted them beyond sight in her innermost recess as if they were exotic, fabulous troves. She opened the glass-panelled door and smelt the city and the wilderness combine. A homeland that was suddenly more precious than any single person. For isn’t it so for all that touches our animal brain? The old lizard mind notched just above the spine, surviving on a starvation diet forever. Then the meaning of the things in her room and the view from her stairs only found words to explain them. Their real sensations had crossed the chattering library of the frontal lobes without friction or a whisper. Their essence now uncapped as sign, direction, and pulse. She sat on her balcony and faced the Vorrh, closing her eyes and breathing it in. Seeking comfort without implication from its sultry, passionate indifference.
The next morning she decided to go to where he died. To see the place in which he faded.
Again she contacted Talbot. She hated playing the hurt and needy female, but she knew it was what he wanted. She explained her grief, isolation, and urgent need. She promised to explain it all to him on her return. Hinted at long evenings of intimate confession. The plane was waiting on the runway the next morning. It was the same as before but with a different interior, its skeletal furnishings extracted and replaced by plush, regular seating. Two other passengers were already seated. A wizened white woman and a tall black man dressed in a blue robe. He stood when she entered and the old woman winced, tutted, and looked away, staring out of the oval window. Cyrena smiled and took her assigned seat. Ten minutes later they were heading south, after circling over the Vorrh.
This time the journey was vague and numbed, the colours from above and below holding her and the plane in a blur of swaying, meaningless hugging. Before they landed for refuelling, the old woman moved into the seat next to Cyrena, peering back at the other passenger sitting at the rear.
“Disgusting,” she said in a snarling hiss. “Disgusting that we have to share a compartment with that.” She stabbed her thumb towards the back of the seat. “And how can ‘they’ get the money to buy a ticket? It cost me a fortune.”
Cyrena took off her green Italian sunglasses, stared at the bitter harridan, and said, “He is my personal Obeah-man and his prayers will keep the wings attached to this plane. Please do not speak again or he will lose his concentration.”
The old woman’s mouth dropped open and she shrivelled back along the row of seats. Cyrena replaced her glasses over her magnificent eyes. On the next part of the flight there were only two passengers. It was somewhere over the sea of white sands that she first spoke to him. She had walked to the little bar counter at the back of the plane to stretch her legs and spine, balancing on the undulating thin carpet over the two inches of metal, over the vastness of blue vacant air. On her return she caught his modest eye. He said, “Thank you,” without looking up.
“For what?”
“I heard what the other lady said.”
Cyrena was surprised and mortified. How could anyone hear such a whispered conversation in the loud compartment of the juddering plane?
“Oh!” she said.
“The lady disliked me travelling with you.”
“I think that lady would dislike travelling with anybody, including herself,” said Cyrena.
The man grinned broadly through his troubled face. “Then, madam, you don’t object?”
“Not at all.”
The plane lurched in a pocket of swollen air. Cyrena stumbled backwards and then stopped, held in grip of crystal breeze, as if the interior oxygen of the plane had caught her and kept her from falling and guided her gracefully to the nearest seat. She was breathless and looked at three of her fingers held gently in the young man’s sensitive hand.
“Are you all right, madam?”
“Yes, yes, thank you.”
He let go and normality shuddered with the noise of the engines back into the cabin. He quietly sat next to her, offering a glass of water. She had no words to say, so she just sipped and slid into a remarkable and unexpected sleep. The stranger covered her with a blanket and adjusted her elegant spectacles that were pushed askew on her beautiful face.
When she awoke he seemed to be asleep in the next seat. She blinked and tried to remember the sequence of events that she knew was strange, but could not find them on the other side of her glowing sense of well-being. She had dreamt of the tree. The tree that Marais had guided her to, all those years ago. The tree where she had seen something wonderful that he seemed anxious or even scared about. She had been there again, bathed in a warm, overpowering light that was beyond vision and the irritations of sight. It had followed her into waking in the same way that it had waited for her in dream, and she knew that her fellow passenger had assisted in some way in the dissolving of the boundaries. She watched him carefully, looking for signs of recognition. There was a sense of ease about him that had nothing to do with contentment. Nor was it casual apathy. It was a positive known direction rather than a lack of feeling or interest. She had become an expert at recognising that, even if it had been a late and spiteful lesson in her essential optimism. Then, without knowing why, she stretched out her hand and moved it above the sleeping man. Moved it in a slow flat rotation as if caressing an invisible halo that floated around and over his gentle head. The steward came into the cabin and broke the intimate moment without dispersing the atmosphere of blessing. He announced that it was thirty minutes before landing and that it might be “bumpy” again as they crossed the last jagged ranges and flattened plains. The other passenger was concerned again about her well-being. She told him that she was more than fine and had enjoyed the flight in his company. He beamed openly.
“May I introduce myself?” he said cautiously.
Cyrena quickly nodded assent.
“I am called Seil Kor.” And the name settled in a part of her mind that she did not know.
“I am Cyrena Lohr,” she said, the name sounding rather detached in the space between them.
“I know,” he said, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.