Still naked, she wandered back into the bedroom. As she’d hoped the celebrants next door had quietened down. The music was no longer rock’n’roll, but something smoochy. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran her palms back and forth over her breasts, enjoying their smoothness. Her breath had taken on the slow rhythm of the music through the wall; music for dancing groin to groin, mouth to mouth. She lay back on the bed, her right hand sliding down her body. She could smell several months’ accrual of cigarette smoke in the coverlet she lay on. It made the room seem almost a public place, with its nightly comings and goings. The thought of her nakedness in such a room, and the smell of her skin’s cleanliness on this stale bed, was acutely arousing.
She eased her first and middle fingers into her cunt, raising her hips a little to meet the exploration. This was a joy she offered herself all too seldom, her Catholic upbringing had put guilt between her instinct and her fingertips. But tonight she was a different woman. She found the gasping places quickly, putting her feet on the edge of the bed and spreading her legs wide to give both hands a chance to play.
It wasn’t Boone she pictured as the first waves of gooseflesh came. Dead men were bad lovers. Better she forgot him. His face had been pretty, but she’d never kiss it again. His cock had been pretty too, but she’d never stroke it, or have it in her again. All she had was herself, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. That was what she pictured now: the very act she was performing. A clean body naked on a stale bed. A woman in a strange room enjoying her own strange self.
The rhythm of the music no longer moved her. She had her own rhythm, rising and falling, rising and falling, each time climbing higher. There was no peak. Just height after height, till she was running with sweat and gorged on sensation. She lay still for several minutes. Then, knowing sleep was quickly overtaking her and that she could scarcely pass the night in her present position, she threw off all the covers but a single sheet, put her head on the pillow, and fell into the space behind her closed eyes.
The sweat on her body cooled beneath the thin sheet. In sleep, she was at Midian’s necropolis, the wind coming to meet her down its avenues from all directions at once north, south, east and west chilling her as it whipped her hair above her head, and ran up inside her blouse. The wind was not invisible. It had a texture, as though it carried a weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those routes too.
It was only as the dust blinded her completely that she realized what it was—the remains of the dead, the ancient dead, blown on contrary winds from pyramids and mausoleums, from vaults and dolmen, charnel houses and crematoria coffin-dust, and human ash, and bone pounded to bits, all blown to Midian, and catching her at the crossroads.
She felt the dead inside her. Behind her lids; in her throat; carried up towards her womb. And despite the chill, and the fury of the four storms, she had no fear of them, nor desire to expel them. They sought her warmth and her womanliness. She would not reject them.
“Where’s Boone?” she asked in her dream, assuming the dead would know. He was one of their number after all.
She knew he was not far from her, but the wind was getting stronger, buffeting her from all directions, howling around her head.
“Boone?” she said again. “I want Boone. Bring him to me.”
The wind heard her. Its howling grew louder.
But somebody else was nearby, distracting her from hearing its reply.
“He’s dead, Lori,” the voice said.
She tried to ignore the idiot voice, and concentrate on interpreting the wind. But she’d lost her place in the conversation, and had to begin again.
“It’s Boone I want,” she said. “Bring me Boone.”
“No!”
Again, that damn voice.
She tried a third time, but the violence of the wind had become another violence; she was being shaken.
“Lori! Wake up!”
She clung to sleep, to the dream of wind. It might yet tell her what she needed to know if she could resist the assault of consciousness a moment longer.
“Boone!” she called again, but the winds were receding from her, and taking the dead with them. She felt the itch of their exit from her veins and senses. What knowledge they had to impart was going with them. She was powerless to hold them.
“Lori.”
Gone now; all of them gone. Carried away on the storm.
She had no choice but to open her eyes knowing they would find Sheryl, mere flesh and blood, sitting at the end of the bed and smiling at her.
“Nightmare?” she said.
“No. Not really.”
“You were calling his name.”
“I know.”
“You should have come out with me,” Sheryl said. “Get him out of your system.”
“Maybe.”
Sheryl was beaming; she clearly had news to tell.
“You met somebody?” Lori guessed.
Sheryl’s smile became a grin.
“Who’d have thought it?” she said. “Mother may have been right after all.”
“That good?”
“That good.”
“Tell all.”
“There’s not much to tell. I just went out to find a bar, and I met this great guy. Who’d have thought it?” she said again. “In the middle of the damn prairies? Love comes looking for me.”
Her excitement was a joy to behold; she could barely contain her enthusiasm, as she gave Lori a complete account of the night’s romance. The man’s name was Curtis; a banker, born in Vancouver, divorced and recently moved to Edmonton. They were perfect complimentaries she said; star signs, tastes in food and drink, family background. And better still, though they’d talked for hours he’d not once tried to persuade her out of her underwear. He was a gentleman: articulate, intelligent and yearning for the sophisticated life of the West Coast, to which he’d intimated he’d return if he could find the right companion. Maybe she was it.
“I’m going to see him again tomorrow night,” Sheryl said. “Maybe even stay over a few weeks if things go well.”
“They will,” Lori replied. “You deserve some good times.”
“Are you going back to Calgary tomorrow?” Sheryl asked.
“Yes,” was the reply her mind was readying. But the dream was there before her, answering quite differently.
“I think I’ll go back to Midian first,” it said. “I want to see the place one more time.”
Sheryl pulled a face.
“Please don’t ask me to go.” she said. “I’m not up for another visit.”
“No problem,” Lori replied. “I’m happy to go alone.”
SUN AND SHADE
The sky was cloudless over Midian, the air effervescent. All the fretfulness she’d felt during her first visit here had disappeared. Though this was still the town where Boone had died, she could not hate it for that. Rather the reverse: she and it were allies, both marked by the man’s passing.
It was not the town itself she’d come to visit however, it was the graveyard, and it did not disappoint her. The sun gleamed on the mausoleums, the sharp shadows flattering their elaboration. Even the grass that sprouted between the tombs was a more brilliant green today. There was no wind, from any quarter; no breath of the dream-storms, bringing the dead. Within the high walls there was an extraordinary stillness, as if the outside world no longer existed. Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them. She was surrounded on every side by such signs: epitaphs in English, French, Polish and Russian; images of veiled women and shattered urns, saints whose martyrdom she could only guess at, stone dogs sleeping upon their masters’ tombs all the symbolism that accompanied this other people. And the more she explored, the more she found herself asking the question she’d posed the day before: why was the cemetery so big? And why, as became apparent the more tombs she studied, were there so many nationalities laid here? She thought of her dream; of the wind that had come from all quarters of the earth. It was as if there’d been something prophetic in it. The thought didn’t worry her. If that was the way the world worked by omens and prophecies then it was at least a system, and she had lived too long without one. Love had failed her, perhaps this would not.