39

At first she looked like part of a tree, a forked, treelike growth, an oak turning into a human being. It was easy, for an instant, to believe exactly that: a tree was turning into a woman, blossoming into a human form. This transformation was curious, and even amazing, and it was an illusion he struggled to maintain even when he began to realize what he was actually seeing.

He reached up to take her into his arms, but she was too high, and her face, a twisted, blackened gargoyle, looked down into his. Speechless, he stretched his arms upward. A cord cut into her blue neck, and attached her to the great, smooth-barked branch of an oak.

Even when he called to her, she did not respond. This isn’t what it seems; it’s another trick, he tried to tell himself. It’s only another joke.

But the cold stone weight in his blood told him the truth. She was nothing like herself at all. She was transformed. She was no longer human, this woman he had never really known at all.

Her name was his heartbeat, his breath: Maria.

Blood and other fluid had streamed from her body, and spattered the ground beneath the tree. Already there were flies. It was the sight of the flies that snapped him, that and the sound they made, the relentless, pointless hum, that endless nearly soundless syllable they made, that tiny, mindless keen.

The idiot chaff of the world had her. Flies, the little, mindless flecks, tasted her eyes, and Speke did not know where he was. He did not know his own name, and whether or not he had a past. He was not a man anymore.

There was only the strangest sound, a shriek, as of a voice torn. That, and the strangest lucidity. He observed himself with a sickening detachment. There had been blackouts before, during his drinking days, nights that were holes in his life, holes so complete they seemed never to have happened. Waking after such a night, it seemed that time had, somehow, healed itself, sunset welding with dawn.

But this was something entirely different. He forgot everything, and everyone. And yet, he knew. He lived the present like something years gone, or like something far in the future, something that had been foretold and inevitable.

Speke threw himself through the half-opened French windows. The window frame clung to him. Glass shattered, shards of it skittering underfoot. He stumbled, and recovered his footing.

The knife was in his hand, the light off the steel nearly making a sound, a crystalline peal. Asquith cut at him with the poker, but it was not, both of them seemed to understand, a serious attempt to defend himself. Asquith thrust again, and it was a fencing pose, the tragedian’s flair for the rapier, that allowed the poker to ring against the knife, withdraw, and strike it again, virgin fire tool against kitchen implement making a crisp, metallic music.

“The final scene, dear Hamilton, strewn with noble corpses.” Asquith stabbed with the poker, and Speke reflexively fended the heavy weapon to one side with a stroke of the knife.

“So you see at last,” said Asquith, smiling, or was it a grimace? It was the expression of a man looking into the blast of a sudden fire. “Endgame. I win. You mastered life, dear Hamilton, but I mastered everything else.”

The poker whipped the knife from Speke’s hand, and sent it spinning far across the floor. The heavy iron lashed again, humming through the air, an arc descending toward his skull.

He caught it, seizing it with both hands, wrenching the poker from Asquith’s grip, and hurled the tool to one side. It spun, describing a gray circle through the air, and punched the wall just beside Athena.

It was an embrace. He grappled with Asquith, finding a grip on Asquith’s crusted neck. His thumbs found the life in Asquith’s throat, a leaping thing like a trout, and he caught the living creature under his thumbs, and pressed, pressed hard, seeking, and finding, the little jerking thread.

He held the quivering fiber of Asquith’s life.

This wasn’t happening, and yet it was. It was the only event in his life that mattered, the only thing that had ever actually taken place. This embrace, this grip. There was, in this vivid dream, a struggle. Asquith fought back, his fist striking Speke’s forehead, knuckle crunching against his ear, his jaw, bringing the barest of taste of blood to his tongue.

Asquith flailed. He wrestled free. He slipped as he picked up the desk chair. He hurled it, but Speke caught it easily. Another pane of glass crashed, and the chair flew, as though by its own will, dancing on one leg, out the open window.

Speke caught him again, by the arm, and wrenched that limb so hard the joints popped. He felt now that he would never release Asquith again. They would be locked like this forever. Even Asquith seemed to understand, and to surrender, Speke’s hands at his throat. His hands clawed and grappled at Speke’s face briefly, but they weakened and began pattering about Speke’s eyes like large, warm butterflies.

Asquith’s expression was blissful. His lips twisted, as though with speech. Yes, his eyes seemed to say, I have put up a fight, but it was all to establish myself before this audience as a man who was a hero—flawed, betrayed by even his soul, but in the end a human being of noble nature.

Speke did not release his grip on Asquith’s throat. Asquith made a sound, a rasping, airy utterance, and one of his arms waved up and down, a referee signaling an obscure but outrageous penalty.

This was further magic, the adept at his most skillful, both hero and clown. This was yet another role, the escape artist in agony. Speke thought only of Maria, and Clara, even as he was aware of Asquith’s contortions. He watched himself, aware as he might have been aware of a television in a hotel room next to his own, hearing without listening to the tattoo of Asquith’s feet on the floor.

There was a bright sun inside him. It rose. They say suns never rise, that the earth falls, continually, toward the star, and away from itself. But this sun rose, white and blinding. Speke had the impression of squeezing so hard that Asquith’s spine was a knobbed cable in his fists. He saw only a distant face, blurred and unreal, a charred and twisted cartoon that became with every hammer of his pulse less and less human.

Speke took a breath.

He stepped back, and a heavy burden collapsed awkwardly away from him, and sprawled. Speke’s own throat hurt, and he coughed. There was a silence in the room, a flat, total quiet, worse than a blast. There had been a roar, but now there was nothing. The sun in his head faded, dissolved in the sky.

There was a smell, like the soil of a hospital room. Speke put his hands to his lips, to his eyes. He groped his own head with his hands.

He took another breath. The roaring noise, he realized, slowly, had been his own voice. He tried to take a step, but could only shift one foot forward, like dragging a large, heavy stone.

A room. Of course—he knew exactly where he was. He had always known. The gray and white veins of the green serpentine shivered in his vision. Athena was eyeless, staring with those two planets where there should be irises and pupils.

He wanted to talk to Asquith. He wanted to ask him a few questions. Where was his old friend? He would call and his friend would answer. They would understand each other. They would help each other again. He would never forsake his old companion.

Sarah’s hand was cool, and it was strong.

He worked his lips, and yet no words would come.

“Maria,” Sarah said, not a question, a password.

Outside, Speke said, forming the word soundlessly. She is outside. Go look. Go look, and tell me none of this has happened.

She left, briefly, and then she returned. She knelt and examined the sprawling, gaping creature at Speke’s feet.

She put her hands to her face, and her silence was like a word—like a prayer.

Speke felt a tiny, dry laugh twisting deep within himself. I can bury Asquith yet again, he thought. This entire play can be leafed back, page by page, to its beginning. It will all take place, over and over, scene one and the final, silent scene both encased in the same cover, held by the same spine, enclosed within the same darkness into one single point in timelessness.

She took his hand. “Come on out,” she whispered. “Come on out, away from this place.”