Alexa asked what.
“The bombing.”
“Bombing?”
“Oh, you haven’t heard. They’re bombing New York. They showed it on teevee, where it landed. These steps!” She collapsed beside Alexa with a great huff. The smell that had seemed so appetizing outside Big San Juan’s had lost its savor. “But they couldn’t show”—she waved her hand and it was still, Alexa had to admit, a lovely and a graceful hand—“the actual airplane itself. Because of the fog, you know.”
“Who’s bombing New York?”
“The radicals, I suppose. It’s some kind of protest. Against something.” Lottie Hanson watched her breasts lift and fall. The importance of the news she bore made her feel pleased with herself. She waited for the next question all aglow.
But Alexa had begun calculating with no more input than she had already. The notion had seemed, from Lottie’s first words, inevitable. The city cried out to be bombed. The amazing thing was that no one had ever thought to do it before.
When she did at last ask Lottie a question, it came from an unexpected direction. “Are you afraid?”
“No, not a bit. It’s funny, because usually, you know, I’m just a bundle of nerves. Are you afraid?”
“No. Just the opposite. I feel…” She had to stop and think what it was that she did feel.
Children came storming down the stairs. With a gentle “God-damn,” Lottie squeezed up against the crusty wall. Alexa pressed up to the railing. the children ran down through the canyon they’d formed.
Lottie screamed at the last of them, “Amparo!”
The girl turned round at the landing and smiled. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Miller.”
“Goddamn it, Amparo, don’t you know they’re bombing the city?”
“We’re all going down to the street to watch.”
Dazzling, Alexa thought. She’d always had a thing for pierced ears on children, had even been tempted to do Tank’s for him when he was four, but G. had interposed.
“You get your ass back upstairs and stay there till they shoot that flicking airplane down!”
“The teevee said it doesn’t make any difference where you are.”
Lottie had gone all red. “I don’t care about that. I say—”
But Amparo had already run off.
“One of these days I’m going to kill her.”
Alexa laughed indulgently.
“I am, just wait and see.”
“Not on stage, I hope.”
“What?”
“Ne pueros coram,” she explained, “populo Medea trucidet. Don’t let Medea kill her boys before the audience. It’s Horace.” She got up and bent round to see if she’d soiled her dress.
Lottie remained on the step, inert. An everyday depression began to blunt the exhilaration of the catastrophe, like fog spoiling an April day, today’s fog, today’s April day.
Smells filmed every surface like cheap skin cream. Alexa had to get out of the stairwell, but Lottie had somehow caught hold of her and she wriggled in the meshes of an indefinite guilt.
“I think I’ll go up to the battlement now,” she said, “to watch the siege.”
“Well, don’t wait for me.”
“But later there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Right. Later.”
When she was one landing up Lottie called after her—“Mrs. Miller?”
“Yes?”
“The first bomb got the museum.”
“Oh. Which museum?”
“The Met.”
“Really.”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
Like a theater just before the movie starts, reduced by the darkness to a bare geometry, the fog had erased all details and distances. Uncertain sounds sifted through the grayness—engines, music, women’s voices. She felt through her whole body the imminence of the collapse, and because now she could feel it, it was no longer debilitating. She ran along the gravel. The roof stretched on and on in front of her without perspective. At the ledge she swerved to the right. She ran on.
She heard, far off, the stolen plane. It neither approached her nor receded, as though it were executing an immense circle, searching for her.
She stood still and lifted her arms, inviting it to her, offering herself to these barbarians, fingers splayed, eyes pressed tightly closed. Commanding. She saw, beneath her but unforeshortened, the bound ox. She saw its heaving belly and desperate eyes. She felt, in her hand, the sharp obsidian.
She told herself that this was what she had to do. Not for her own sake, of course. Never for her own sake—for theirs.
Its blood drenched the gravel. It gushed and splattered. The hem of the palla was stained. She knelt in the blood and dipped her hands into the opened belly to raise the dripping entrails high above her head, tubes and wires in a slime of thick black oil. She wound herself in the soft coils and danced like some god-drenched girl at the festivals, laughing and pulling the torches from their sockets, smashing sacred articles, jeering at the generals.
No one approached her. No one asked what she had read in the haruspices. She climbed up into the jungle gym and stood peering into the featureless air, her legs braced against the thin pipes, raptured and strong with a dawning faith.
The airplane approached, audibly.
She wanted it to see her. She wanted the boys inside to know that she knew, that she agreed.
It appeared quite suddenly, and near, like Minerva sprung full-grown from the brow of Jupiter. It was shaped like a cross.
“Come then,” she said with conscious dignity. “Lay waste.”
But the plane—a Rolls Rapide—passed overhead and returned to the haze from which it had materialized.
She climbed down from the gym with a sense of loss: she had offered herself to History and History had refused. With a sense, equally, of what a fool she’d been.
She felt in her pockets for a pack of hankies but she’d run out at the office. She had her cry anyhow.
Since the Army had begun celebrating its victory the city no longer seemed a sanctuary. Therefore early the next morning Merriam and Arcadius started back home on foot. During the darkest moments of the siege, with the generosity of despair, Arcadius had given the cook and the Theban girl their freedom, so that they were returning to the villa completely unattended.
Merriam was dreadfully hungover. The road was a slough, and when they came to the cut-off, Arcadius insisted on taking the even muddier path that went through Alexa’s fields. But for all that, she felt happy as an apricot. the sun was shining and the fields steamed like some great kitchen full of soup kettles and sauceboats, as though the very earth was sending up its prayer of thanksgiving.
“Lord,” she would murmur, “Lord.” She felt like a new woman.
“Have you noticed,” Arcadius pointed out, after they’d gone some distance, “that there is nowhere any sign of them?”
“Of the barbarians? Yes, I’ve been crossing my fingers.”
“It’s a miracle.”
“Oh yes, it’s God’s work, beyond a doubt.”
“Do you think she knew?”
“Who?” she asked, in not an encouraging tone. Talk always dissipated her good feelings.
“Alexa. Perhaps she’s been sent a sign. Perhaps, after all, she danced in thanksgiving and not… the opposite.”
Merriam pressed her lips together and made no reply. It was a blasphemous proposition. God did not give signs to the servants of the abominations he loathed and comminated! And yet…
“In retrospect,” Arcadius insisted, “there’s really no other explanation.” (And yet, she had seemed altogether jubilant. Perhaps—she had heard this suggested by a priest in Alexandria—there are evil spirits whom God permits, to a limited degree and imperfectly, to see the shape of future things.)