Liberty closed her eyes. She had disappeared long ago, she knew, and so had Willie. But it was time to come back. It was time to come back or vanish. And yet what this was about was that it was too late to come back. The noontide demons were all illusion and error playing a game of outlaws and hermits, hiding behind the apparently real, the stubbornly real. The other couple appeared to her. There had been another couple, a horrible couple, tricked out to deceive, a man and a woman, then just a woman, through some accident.… Liberty opened her eyes and fixed her gaze outside, at the clear, vacant light there. The beach was still. Poe was saying,
“… and those who are left are usually so puzzled by it, the children, the lovers, the parents, the friends. They can’t believe it. I’ve never understood their confusion myself …” She looked at Liberty. “You’re admiring the light, dear? There is an extraordinary light here, isn’t there? It only reveals, never explains.”
“It’s just daylight,” Liberty said. “It falls on us all.” She hated the talk. Talking never explained anything, it was like the light, like one’s life.
“You can tell me anything,” Poe said. “Whatever you tell me will be the truth.”
“It’s not possible,” Liberty said slowly. “You are not a possibility.”
She saw the other couple again. She was aware of the mirrors, the loud music at the critical moment, the sweetness of the food.
“You don’t know what you want, do you dear?” Poe said. “Willie knows what he wants.”
“I don’t want anything,” Liberty said. She was close to tears.
Poe drew back. “And this animal,” she said, smiling at Clem, “who is always with you. Has he ever indicated what it is he wants? Would he care for my jacket, do you think?” She rose and took it off. The scales of the jacket caught the light and shook like oil. She lay it before them on the table. “I knew this snake. He was a companion of mine for many years. You mustn’t be alarmed. He died a natural death. He was enormous. An entire room here was devoted to his habitat and glassed off. He made such a lovely sound — the sound of a hundred castanets. When the little girl I was telling you about first saw him, she pressed her little hands against the glass and said, ‘Goodness.’ ”
“She spoke?” Willie wondered.
“That was the only time. ‘Goodness,’ she said.” Poe’s smile widened and she turned toward Liberty. “Why so glum, my dear! We should all be enjoying this rather sinister moment.”
“Liberty believes that freedom consists in being inaccessible,” Willie said.
“I’m not sure that’s true at all,” Poe said. “Perhaps your Liberty is trying to make an object of her life. It’s very difficult, you know, far more difficult than merely longing for what comes after — to try to make one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge.”
Poe was pumped up, sharp, with not a single, blurred line. Her face was spectacularly, peacefully ugly.
“You’re a boy who likes to tell lies, aren’t you?” she went on. “Why is that? The truth is so much more frightening. I watched you here for a long time in this house. Oh, I didn’t watch you every moment, but I was here. You’re a boy who makes promises. You promise to make up everything. You’re the one who has dreams of serving the inconceivable.”
The day had a terrible sweet heat to it. Small black butterflies wobbled through the air.
“For a moment just then,” Poe exclaimed, “I was seeing us all from a great distance. The first time it happened to me I was with my husband, but it’s occurred dozens of time since then. My husband and I had just gotten into bed when I suddenly found myself suspended just beneath the ceiling, looking down on him in his pajamas, sipping his nightcap. My husband said afterward that he himself had seen nothing unusual. This from a man who had danced with Jesus! Well, perhaps he had seen nothing unusual. But I enjoy seeing my own body, as well as others, from a distance. I don’t dwell upon my head, but my body is good looking and I know it. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that autoscopy was a rather vulgar practice.” She stretched her hand toward Clem, but he stepped backward, out of reach.
“He displaces space so effortlessly,” Poe said. “He’s so sure-footed. Has he ever broken anything?”
“He has never broken anything,” Liberty said softly. The feeling persisted that there was something in her throat, that there were stitches of coarse brown thread holding the flesh together there, keeping something in, not letting it spill out.
“And you are never lonely with him, are you dear. And yet it is our duty to be lonely, don’t you know? One must strive to be more and more perfectly lonely. The heart grows indifferent, but one must push upward continually, more and more alone, toward the surface, like a blind, wild seed.”
She took the rose from Willie and brushed it against the razored darkness of her breastbone.
“Tell me about your lovers, dear,” she said to Liberty.
“There’s only been Willie.”
“Only is such a step into darkness, dear. The house of darkness throws wide its doors to ‘only.’ Do you know what I would like very much? If you would give me a day of your past, some summer day when you were just beginning, somewhere in that time when there were moments for you.”
Liberty was silent.
“You don’t want anything, dear, but you go on. That’s because your life wants, it wants you to discover it.”
“It was in July,” Willie said, “in the year when we were fifteen.”
“This is wonderful,” Poe said. “It was July. Really, I couldn’t ask for more.”
“Liberty and Willie,” Willie said.
“Lovely,” Poe said.
“They vowed to be different.”
“Of course,” Poe said.
“And never to be at the mercy of events.”
“Give me the twisted shape of the day,” Poe said. “The form that dissembler love took that day. That green and sour, fabulous, tedious day. Slim twins, golden children, your lips blistered, sweat running from your hair …”
“They were capable of any crime,” Willie said.
“The young, bless them, they want so to be damned.”
“They loved dangerous games.”
“There was something final in that day that doomed you,” Poe said. “I can see you then. You had the full lips of anarchists. Ringless, reckless hands. Your love was romantic, in defiance of life.”
Outside, the sun was descendant and pressed fiercely against the window glass. Clem lay on the cool rim of its sprawl. On the water, light lasted the longest. It was a day that was never going to end was the way it had once seemed to Liberty. But now it was beginning to end. She saw an image before her of her father, the blank canvas before him, beyond the canvas, the brilliantly flowering tree. He raised the brush … There was a moment, and beyond that moment was where the dead began.
“Perhaps we should pray, dear, before you begin,” Poe said.
“What would we pray for?” Willie asked.
“The usual,” Poe said. “Understanding.”
5
The summer that Willie and Liberty were fifteen was the summer that someone was mutilating the pelicans. Someone was capturing the birds, slicing off half their bills with a saw, and releasing them
Liberty saw such pelicans once; flying heavily through the bright air, flying with their dreadful injuries home. Once, she saw one closer. This was years ago.
Under everything that summer — the summer that they were fifteen — under the heat and the fitful breezes, the slide of leaves against one another and the soft, whipping sound the water made as it was flung in an arc from the sprinkler, under everything was the voice that says, Are you ready?