He immediately knew the third vision was real. Three men stood before him; one had half a face. Where the other half had been, his mouth curled in a massive scar upward, the face having revolted against its own nature that it might grow back together. Through the hole in the middle of the face came a smudge of words. “Well well well,” he said.
It had taken so much effort before that Wade wasn’t sure he had it in him to laugh anymore. But he couldn’t help it. Stupefied, besotted and trapped like a rat, looking up at the man with the hole in his face, he figured he might as well let it rip from down deep. “You don’t look so good, Mallory,” he guffawed from the floor where there was no floor.
Mallory kicked him savagely in the head.
Wade came to in time to see the sky above him, bearing down on him like the wave of the world as the three cops dragged him to the car. “Only the night,” he cried, “damn the light!”
24
WHEN LAUREN WAS AN old woman, she would stand on the Kansan desert and watch the leaves. They would dance in dark patterns across her feet, and disappear over the small white hills that filled the dead fields. It was several autumns before she actually walked from her porch to one of the small hills and, turning over a few handfuls of dirt, discovered the rail of a small bridge; she recognized it as a moonbridge, like the ones she’d seen in California years before, from which people had watched the trajectory of the moon across the night sky. The nights that the young girl Kara came to visit Lauren for supper, it was Kara’s gaze that found those skies, a mass of starry light for which the adolescent had a thousand names. Lauren fixed a simple meal and they ate on a plain tablecloth in the main room of Lauren’s house. They talked of Kara’s parents, who lived in Chicago and had sent their daughter to the ranch for children possessed by deep disturbances, odd visions, strange talents. Kara’s talent was renaming every star in the sky and following them as they shifted from one quadrant of the night to another; but as she grew older Kara progressed beyond the ravages of her deep disturbances, beyond the grip of her odd visions, beyond the enthrallment of her strange talents, all of which manifested themselves one last time on the night she found the bottle.
She’d been waiting for the headlights of the brown bus that would take her back to the ranch, and had come across a star she couldn’t account for. When she ran from the porch it was not to the bus but the unaccountable light, which she soon realized wasn’t a star after all but the glint of something lodged in the white earth. Kara brushed away the sand and dug the object from the small hill; the bottle had been caught, it turned out, in the railing of one of the old buried bridges. She held up the bottle and, in the light of every star in the skies above, saw two blue eyes blinking at her.
The eyes in the bottle were old and sad and nearly blind. At first Kara thought she could speak to them and that somehow they understood her; in the same way that she could compute the language of stars, she might compute the language of eyes as they communicated in return. But she concluded they were useless, like blue fish in water, and she was only to be their keeper, and so over the years she kept the bottle wrapped in cloth that the blind eyes might be protected from the light. The bottle became a secret that Kara and Lauren withheld from each other, a pact of mutual betrayal maintained not by choice but because the secret was somehow too laden with meaning for either woman to divulge to the other. The only person Kara ever told about the bottle was the stranger who came down the road one afternoon as she was nearing her fifteenth birthday; Lauren invited him to share a meal and spend the night in the back room. Georgie was around twenty years old, good-looking, even pretty, it seemed to Kara. His head was completely shaved and there crept up around his neck, above the collar of his shirt, a dark growth. At first Kara thought he was horribly scarred, until later that night in his room when she saw the tattoo.
In the light of the small gas lamp by his bed Kara made her bargain, that if she could examine the nude woman with the bird’s head standing in a sea of fire on Georgie’s chest, if she could run her hands along the brilliant wings he wore on his shoulders, she would reveal something in return. In the light of the small gas lamp, she unwrapped from the cloth the bottle with the eyes, and the man and girl sat looking at them together. Georgie understood this secret was very important to Kara, and in the bottom of his backpack he searched for another forbidden thing of his own to show her: it was a stone, flat on one side and rough on the other, a little larger than Georgie’s hand. “But look,” Georgie said, when he could see the girl was disappointed, and turned the stone over; on the rough side was written pursuit of happiness. Kara nodded, trying to appear impressed. “It’s a nice rock,” she offered, without conviction, “but you have to admit it’s not as good as a bottle with eyes, or even wings on your back.”
When the young girl saw the old woman standing in the doorway of her house gazing out at the sand and muttering a strange man’s name, Kara knew this was the moment Lauren began to die. A week of uncollected mail sitting in the box by the road greeted Kara’s next visit; inside the house she found Lauren slumped in her rocking chair. After Lauren had been buried among the white hills of the plains where she lived, Kara examined the mail and discovered a letter sent to the old woman many years before when she lived in California. How the letter finally found its way to Kansas, how it had taken so many years to get there, was nearly as mystifying as the contents of the envelope itself, one letter enclosed inside another which in turn enclosed another, until the answer at the core simply said I’m waiting. But whoever was out there waiting for Lauren would now wait forever, and for Kara it was something like a child’s first understanding that everyone dies, this lesson of how love can wait in the heart unanswered.
Kara left Kansas and traveled west. Because her gaze had been fixed so long on the stars, she barely noticed the strange shimmer of everything that passed her, how as she headed west everything was blurred around the edges in its rush to an abysmal moment. She continued traveling until she came to a river, where she took a boat navigated by a young man with white hair growing on his arms like fur. The man had been sailing the boat for fifteen years, the length of her own life, back and forth between the shore and an island less than a mile away; from the deck of the boat she looked for the stars in the sky. They were gone. For a moment, between the island and the shore, there was nothing except the boat in the fog on the water. “But why have you come?” the boatman asked when they reached the island and she was about to step ashore; unseen in her coat, she cradled the bottle with the eyes. “To bury something,” she murmured.
The answer was still on her lips when she woke. It was still in her ears when she sat up in bed in the dark of the strange motel. She stared in alarm at the strange man sleeping next to her with the white hair on his body that grew like fur; she had no idea who he was or what she was doing in this motel room. She only knew that whatever her life had been before now was consumed by this night’s dream, and that the only remaining trace of that dream was some forgotten thing peering out at her from behind glass, twin blue ghosts joined at the soul by the last thread of memory. Immediately she rose from the bed to check her coat, which lay on a chair, as though it protected something. But nothing was there. Before dawn she slipped from the room and caught a bus at the side of the road.
The bus drove through an endless forest. Watching from the window she couldn’t remember having ever seen, on the ground and in the trees and hovering in the sky, so much ice. On a far hillside four days west, Kara lived in an observatory as caretaker and chief stargazer. If it was now beyond her waking consciousness to name any stars, she accepted that beneath that consciousness lurked the names that didn’t need to be remembered in order to be known. In the isolation of the observatory she felt safe enough in her exposure to the heavens to walk the dark nightlit cavern of the concrete bubble naked, the bright pink of her bare body the only violation of the black-blue sky and its gray outpost. In this way she felt the freedom of loving something that couldn’t be expected to love her back, until — after nearly ten years had passed — she met a man who insisted on loving her more than she could stand.