NOT LONG AGO I SAID to a friend, “But of course, nothing’s irrevocable.” And she was surprised. “Then you’ve changed your mind,” she said, “because up until now everything you’ve written has been that some things are irrevocable.” For a moment I felt dishonest or exposed. I was certainly confused, because I hadn’t been aware that my view of things had changed so profoundly. I had to give some thought to the possibility that, if I had in fact made this profound change, it was to survive, a necessity I nonetheless couldn’t respect because I don’t believe the truth of the world changes in order to accommodate anyone’s survival. If it’s the nature of some things to be irrevocable they remain so however urgently I may need to feel differently. At any rate, I knew it was a process of age. I knew I was now nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and the facts and incidents of that life take on more significance simply because there will be fewer of them, and so I had to believe that they were in fact less fraught with consequence so that I could go on. So that, in the darkness left by passion’s supernova, I wouldn’t hurtle back into the dead calm that had preceded it. I would defy my own passivity by making the world around me a more passive place, where everything’s ultimately inconsequential and nothing’s irrevocable, where everything can be returned to the way it was before and every choice includes the option of reversing it when it turns out to be a mistake. Where risk isn’t always a matter of life and death. Where at the end of the two years during which you turned your life upside down, rearranging it from top to bottom, you can wind up back where you started, only a bit older and a bit more broken, closer to the end of everything than to the beginning.
And the truth is that I was right all along. Even as the fact of it becomes more overwhelming, more unbearable, some things are irrevocable, if not circumstantially then in the heart and memory, the heart and memory being the only two things that can puncture the flow of time through which hisses the history of the future. Two years ago when I stood with her on the cliffs overlooking the sea beyond that point where the fence ended, we said nothing, we touched nothing, we saw nothing, we were nothing but the two of us together; and afterward nothing, including all the things that had not been said and not been touched and not been seen, would ever be the same for either of us even now when I’m alone once more, as before, and she’s gone. In the bid and hunger for freedom in which she’d lived her whole life, she couldn’t help but be cavalier about love; love would not undo that bid or satisfy that hunger. Everything that’s truly irrevocable finally has to do with love or freedom, but whether you act in the name of the first or the second, one of them ultimately bows to the other and that’s the most irrevocable thing of all.
Standing with her two years ago on those cliffs overlooking the sea, even I knew that.
Etcher’s treacherous boat found its forsaken shore thirty miles up the coast, on the second day after he’d left the city; and though he’d had his hours in the sun, nothing could warm him. The cold of the sea had sunk so deep into his bones that by the time he made his way to the first little village inland, taking a job stocking the meat locker for a local storekeeper, he was like an animal hurrying to the chill of its natural habitat. In the locker his heavy glasses fogged over and froze to his face. Sometimes he thought about Mona and sometimes he thought about Sally; sometimes in his thoughts the two of them blurred together into a flaxen black succubus so sexually lush it repelled him to think of her. So he didn’t think. He worked in the meat locker for four days, drawing wages and hitching a ride out of town up the main highway, bypassing the first station and the second until he reached the third, where he gambled that it would be safe to take a train.
He was always on the lookout for cops. From station to station over the next six days he would constantly change trains, change cars, change seats to the dismay of the conductors. He reached his home village and stayed with his mother one night and then moved on the next day; but he wasn’t racing against time. He was traveling on time’s train and time’s car in time’s seat, shifting from one to the other when seat after seat and car after car and train after train eventually fell behind. He had finally given his compulsions over to his fatalism in the same way the sea left him no choice about Mona. On the trains he huddled in the cold that hadn’t left him since the grotto.
He finally came to the last little town. He paid a guy in a truck the last of his meat-locker wages to give him a lift the twenty miles to Sally’s house. They got there after sundown. The house was dark on the fjord in the distance. The driver said, “You sure someone lives there, pal?” and Etcher lied. He barely heard the truck driving off as he walked up the path, and by the time he got to the house there wasn’t any sound at all.
Until, somewhere, he heard Polly crying.
The ice had frozen the front door around the edges and he had to force it open. The house was dark inside except for the faint glimmer of coals in the cast-iron stove, where a feeble fire had been built hours or perhaps even days before. Its warmth had long since fled the house. The frigid blast in Etcher’s face was the first cold to impress him since his thirty-six hours in the boat; he shuddered not at the cold itself but at recognition that he hadn’t yet met the limits of cold, that something in the world was colder than he was, and that it was this house where he’d once dreamed of living with the woman whom he would have once died loving. Stumbling over a squat wooden stool and kicking a toy duck at his feet, Etcher stood in the dark and listened. For several moments it was quiet and then once more he heard the crying.
He made his way through the front room. He stopped at the foot of the stairs before crossing the kitchen toward the back hallway and listened, peering up the stairs into the blackness to see if anyone was there. He passed one room after another. All of them were so dark that Etcher couldn’t see the small white clouds of his breath he knew were right in front of his eyes. In the back hallway he saw a faint glow shining from Sally’s bedroom. Then he could clearly hear Polly, and a woman’s whispers.
A small lamp burned on a table. Next to the table the mother and her child were in bed. Clothes long since worn and toys long since forsaken were strewn throughout the room, where the walls and ceiling were bare of pictures and a curtain was pulled across the window in a last-ditch effort to keep out the cold. Draped over Sally’s bedroom was a massive silver web. From one corner to the other a swarm of iceflies had spun a cocoon that glittered like a giant jewel. The lamp inside gave the jewel its light, fire flashing off the dense crisscross of ice; and behind the gauzy paleblue membrane of the cell the ephemeral forms of Sally and Polly, moving with a languid vagueness, resembled the metamorphosis of a black larva. For a moment Etcher couldn’t say or do anything. With the sweep of one arm and what he thought was a cry, he tore the web away; but afterward he wasn’t sure he’d cried at all. He heard no echo, and at first neither Sally nor Polly even looked up at him, barely aware in the stupor of their cold and hunger that anyone was there.
He called her name. She barely turned her head. She looked so ravaged and wasted, her face and hair so white like the sheets of her bed and the crystalline bedlam of ice surrounding her, it was as if most of her had vanished altogether, nothing but a pair of deathly distant eyes lying on the pillow and the broken black slash of her mouth. Huddled against her was the small helpless body of her daughter, desperately trying to warm herself against her mother’s fever. Speechless and petrified, Etcher stirred himself from the grip of his shock to rush to them and throw his arms around them; but he’d forgotten how cold he was, and Polly screamed at the touch of him, and her scream in turn jolted Sally to a grunt so meaningless and unearthly that Polly cried more. Sally instinctively clutched at Etcher not because she was aware he’d come back to her but for his coldness, since she was on fire, and the same cold that the daughter recoiled from the mother pulled closer to her so that she might press her whole raging body against his. Thus Etcher was as consumed by Sally as he was rejected by Polly, who tried to beat him away from her even as Sally wouldn’t let him go, the three of them locked in an absurd embrace of ice and fire.