43

What Will They Care

I DON’T CARE THAT YOU’VE DONE THIS BEFORE, AND IT DIDN’T work.

That’s Agnes.

Don’t tell me your stories, she says. I don’t care. This time will be different. Have you ever been to Invercargill before? Has she ever been named Shae before? I changed her name. Doesn’t that mean anything? Have you married her before?

He wasn’t marrying her now.

Marriage! Even simple human interaction is an ordeal. She has never been this hard. No one has been like her. Something has gotten corrupted in his doomed angel Mirabelle, and Julian doesn’t know why. For whatever reason, Shae is a block of ice through and through, her yearning Masha in Three Sisters notwithstanding. Her yearning is an act, and in any case, she is not yearning for Julian.

Why can’t he accept the possibility, Agnes keeps asking, that this time will not be like the others, because so much has changed—geographically, emotionally, physically—and because this time the mother and Julian are working together to protect Shae—and most important because this time Shae herself knows what’s at stake.

“Has she ever known before how numbered her days are?” Agnes asks.

“No.”

“There you go.” To bolster her argument, Agnes drags Kiritopa forward.

Kiritopa tells Julian about an old Polynesian legend. In the Tasman Sea, there is a fathomless trench that opens up during a storm when all the Southern Cross stars are lined up in the sky, when Jupiter is either visible or under an occultation, like when Venus passed in front of it a hundred years ago, and generations of Maoris still tell the story of Jupiter and Venus to their children. Venus was seen with a naked eye, gliding and occluding the giant Jupiter. The southern sky lit up with an eerie fire glow that was as rare as it was sinister. The seas broke apart. “The bottomless place in the sea will swallow you, the legend goes,” Kiritopa says, “but you don’t vanish. You fly through a screaming warp like a newborn, and on the other side you live again.”

“Yes,” Julian says. “Cleon said this, too. Also the ancient Africans. Groaning you fly over the emptiness into the abyss of your death.”

Agnes throws up her hands. “How is she going to fall in love with you when you’re like this?”

“You’re right,” Julian says. “I can’t make anyone fall in love with me. She has to come to me freely. Love compelled is not love. It’s slavery.”

“How can she come to you at all when you’re like this?”

How can Julian come to her when she is like she is.

“Listen, Julian,” Agnes says, “I don’t know what part of the world you come from and I don’t care to know. Maybe where you live, mothers don’t care about their young. But we share this small corner of the world with the emperor penguin. The emperor can’t fly and never sets one foot on land even to breed. The mother lays her eggs right on the sea ice. She lays them on the ice in the dead of the Antarctic winter, in sightless darkness, amid the most pitiless wind, during the harshest weather. She risks the blight of winter to save her chicks from leopard seals. Barely a quarter of her eggs survive. The mother penguin is willing to take that chance. Well, I don’t have four children. I have just the one. And I have kept her hidden in the frightful dark for you. So don’t tell me you’re not going to step up. That you refuse to struggle against her odds. Four hundred adult birds in the penguin rookery sometimes produce as few as thirty chicks. Invercargill is my rookery, Julian Cruz. And your one willful but worthy chick awaits.”

Julian and Shae are not the only ones ambivalent about marriage and a sea voyage. Kiritopa says no one is safe with Julian, especially Shae. “Mother, can’t you see? His insides have been taken out.”

“Hogwash.”

“Look at him, Mother,” Kiritopa says. “He can’t go out into the ocean. He can barely stand outside in the wind without keeling over. He needs more time in the hot spring. Only when he heals himself might he be able to help your daughter.”

“I see nothing wrong with him,” Agnes says. “And Godward has the safest ship. If she’s going to be all right on any ship, it’s his.”

“I’m not going on Godward’s ship, Mother,” Shae says.

“Be quiet, Shayma. I’m talking to Kiritopa now.” Agnes turns to her partner. “Julian’s all I got,” she says. “He’s the only one who can protect her.”

“He can’t stand aright,” Kiritopa says. “The sea will kill him.”

“No, it won’t, old man. What are you talking about?” Agnes is strident.

Kiritopa points to Julian, who tries to stand aright to prove Kiritopa wrong. “You don’t have to be a gypsy to see his body is bent in half, overcome by the affliction inside him. He is sick.”

“If he needs to act, he will act. I’m certain of it.”

“Act? He can’t even stand! He is crippled. He’s been sliced through the core. A man like that can’t go out into the open sea. Keep him here. When he’s better, six months, a year, maybe then they can go.”

“No, Kiritopa,” Agnes says.

“No, Kiritopa. She doesn’t have six months, a year,” Julian says, inaudibly, as he walks away. But he walks away bent through the middle.

A day later while cleaning the tavern tables and watching two young men talking over a cider, Julian breaks down. It’s inexplicable and mortifying. Sinking into a chair, he sobs as if he will never stop. He doubles over his knees. He can’t bear to see their casual laughing faces.

Neither Agnes nor Kiritopa know what to do. Grimly they stand nearby.

“What did I tell you?” Kiritopa says.

“I didn’t want to hear it then, old man,” Agnes exclaims, “and I don’t want to hear it now.” She thrusts a handkerchief at Julian. “What’s the matter with you?”

Julian grows even more mute. He will never explain himself. And what is there to say. These people are not his confessors.

They are not his friends.

What will they care, Julian thinks as he lowers himself into the ground filled with steaming water and lies motionless, his head thrown back, a hot rag over his face, over his eyes so he doesn’t see his life.

Everything that could be lost was lost.

What will they care.

Julian saw a star fall from heaven to earth into a bottomless pit. The pit was burned out wormwood, bitter with the bitterest smoke. The star fell like a lamp and was snuffed out, dying in the blackest black, in the coldest grass. Some men sought death and did not find it. And some men sought life and did not find it either.

What will they care.

Nothing remained in the whiteout desert that was Julian’s life, across every icy plane, across every dimension. Everything was leveled.

Four men went out on a stag night in York the day before a wedding, pub crawling through every historic watering hole in the ancient town. Nigel, his brother Simon, a guy named Byron.

And Ashton.

What will they care.

Their guesthouse was twenty miles north of the city, near the Yorkshire dales. Late Friday night coming back, they decided to pop into one more pub, two miles from their inn. The pub was called the Three Horseshoes and it summoned their lives for last call.

They took a wrong turn and wound up in the hills above the dales, on a country road called Crag Lane. The road was blind and lined with trees. It was almost too narrow for one Mini-Cooper, much less for a Mini and a Fiesta to pass side by side. Drunk Nigel was speeding, and the raucous drunks in the car were singing. Nigel said later they’d been singing “The Wild Rover.”

An impaired Nigel couldn’t gauge the width of the road and no one else in the car was sober enough to see or care. Nigel thought he had plenty of room. When he saw that he didn’t, he panicked and stepped on the gas. Oaks fenced the narrow way, oaks and gulleys. There was nowhere to turn, though the Fiesta driver desperately tried, a sixty-year-old man returning home with his wife after an anniversary dinner. Nigel’s Mini crashed into the Fiesta, flipped on impact, and smashed into a tree.

The Mini wasn’t a Volvo, it wasn’t the safest car on the road. But even the vertical steel pillars of a Volvo would have had a hard time withstanding a high-speed collision with another car and a 400-year-old oak. Ashton managed to crawl away from the devastation into a ditch, which is where they found him at dawn the next morning.

Except for Nigel, everyone in both cars was dead, five people, including Nigel’s brother, the groom-to-be, on the day of his wedding.

Including Ashton.

What will they care.

Julian, Devi, and Ava drove to Yorkshire to bring Ashton’s body back to London.

But first, Julian had to identify him.

The priest at St. Monica’s made a special dispensation for Devi, who’d been a parishioner for many years, and commenced a man Devi called his friend, a man who had not shown his face inside a church except on the day he was baptized and the day he was buried.

Julian never heard a man cry as Ashton’s father had cried the day they buried his son. An old man overnight, Michael Bennett had to be held up to stand, supported by two of his five wives, four of them in attendance, Ashton’s mother long gone.

Julian stood flanked by Ava and Devi. After the service, still in his funeral suit, he took a train to Greenwich, foregoing the interment, barely making it to the Observatory in time for noon. Julian and Ashton went into the ground together. Julian threw himself into the blue hole at the Transit Circle, resolved never to come back.

He had begged Ashton, implored him not to trust Nigel with anything important, like his life. Yet Ashton had begged Julian for many things, like to come with him to York. Julian could’ve. But he did not. The equinox was coming. He had a lot to do to get ready. Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve. Run along, my friend.

The unendurable sound of the head-on collision is what Julian heard through his silent hours. Ashton crawling away into the icy trenches is what he saw when he closed his eyes. His forehead pressed into the cold metal is where Julian was every minute of every day, sunk to his knees in the morgue, in front of the slab where Ashton lay.

I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer, and now I’m returning with gold in great store, and I never will play the wild rover no more. And it’s no, nay, never, no nay never no more, and I’ll play the wild rover no never no more.

What will they care.