Czerny, along with LeGary, Ashford, and Holmes, was positioned to the left of the entrance. As I waited for whatever ritual was to occur, still uncertain why I had been invited, he came a tottering step toward me, eyes down, hands fingering his belt, and addressed me in his usual muttering cadence. I did not understand a single word, but the towheaded man, who was sticking to my elbow, said in a snide tone, “You been a bad boy, Penhaligon. That’s what the man’s telling you. You seen things few men have seen. Maybe you needed to see them, but you weren’t prepared.”
The towheaded man paused and Czerny spoke again. I could find nothing in his face to support the sternness of his previous words—he seemed to be babbling brokenly, as if speaking to a memory, giving voice to an imaginary dialogue, and thinking this, I wondered if that was what we were to him, memories and creatures of the imagination; if he had gone so far along the path to freedom that even those who lived in Diamond Bar had come to be no more than shadows in his mind.
“This is the edge of the pit,” the towheaded man said when Czerny had finished. “The one you saw below is only its metaphor. Here you were closest to peril. That’s why we have summoned you, so you can watch and understand.”
Another spate of muttering and then the towheaded man said, “This is your final instruction, Penhaligon. There are no further lessons to be learned. From now on we will not protect you.”
Czerny turned away, the audience ended, but angered by his claim that the board had protected me—I had no memory of being protected when I fought with Colangelo—and emboldened by the certainty that I was not to be transferred, I said to him, “If the pit I saw below was a metaphor, tell me where Causey is.”
The old man did not turn back, but muttered something the towheaded man did not have to translate, for I heard the words clearly.
“If you are fortunate,” Czerny said, “you will meet him again in the new wing.”
The towheaded man nudged me forward to stand by Czerny and the rest of the board, inches away from the line demarcating the limits of the prison and the beginning of the world, a dirt path leading downward among boulders to the river flashing along its course. I have said the river was moonstruck, yet that scarcely describes the brightness of the landscape. The light was so strong even the smallest objects cast a shadow, and though the shadows beneath the boughs quivered in a fitful wind, they looked solid and deep. The dense firs and the overhang of the entrance prevented me from seeing the moon, but it must have been enormous—I pictured a blazing silvery face peering down from directly above the river, pocked by craters that sketched the liver spots and crumpled features of a demented old man. Sprays of water flying from the rocks in midstream glittered like icy sparks; the shingle on the far shore glittered as though salted with silver. Beyond it, the terrain of the opposite bank lay hidden beneath a dark green canopy, but patches of needles carpeting the margins of the forest glowed a reddish-bronze.
Who it was that shoved Colangelo out onto the path, I cannot say—I was not watching. It must have been a hard shove, for he went staggering down the slope and fell to all fours. He collected himself and glanced back toward us, not singling anyone out, it seemed, but taking us all in, as if claiming the sight for memory. He wiped dirt from his hands, and judging by his defiant posture I expected him to shout, to curse, but he turned and made for the river, going carefully over the uneven ground. When he reached the river’s edge, he stopped and glanced back a second time. I could not make out his face, though he stood in the light, but judging by the sudden furtiveness of his body language, I doubted he had believed that he would get this far, and now that he had, the idea that he actually might be able to escape sprang up hot inside him, and he was prey to the anxieties of a man afflicted by hope.
Oddly enough, I hoped for him. I felt a sympathetic response to his desire for freedom. My heart raced and my brow broke a sweat, as if it were I and not that ungainly pinkish figure who was stepping from rock to rock, arms outspread for balance, groping for purchase on the slick surfaces, wobbling a bit, straining against gravity and fear. I had no apprehension of an inimical presence such as I had detected that morning, and this made me think that it had been nerves alone that had stopped me from escaping, and increased my enthusiasm for Colangelo’s escape. I wanted to cheer, to urge him on, and might have done so if I had not been surrounded by the silent members of the board and their faithful intimates. That Colangelo was doing what I had not dared caused me envy and bitterness but also infected me with hope for myself. The next time I was alone at the gate, perhaps I would be equal to the moment.
The wind kicked up, outvoicing the chuckling rush of the river, sending sprays higher over the rocks, and along with the wind, the brightness of the river intensified. Every eddy, every momentary splotch of foam, every sinewy swell of water glinted and dazzled, as if it were coming to a boil beneath Colangelo. He kept going past the midpoint, steadier, more confident with each step, unhampered by the buffets of the wind. Close by the gate the boughs bent and swayed, stirring the shadows, sending them sliding forward and back over the dirt like a black film. The whole world seemed in motion, the atoms of the earth and air in a state of perturbation, and as Colangelo skipped over the last few rocks, I realized there was something unnatural about all this brilliant movement. The shapes of things were breaking down… briefly, for the merest fractions of seconds, their edges splintering, decaying into jittering bits of bright and dark, a pointillist dispersion of the real. I assumed I was imagining this, that I was emotionally overwrought, but the effect grew more pronounced. I looked to Czerny and the board. They were as always—distracted, apparently unalarmed—but what their lack of reaction meant, whether they saw what I did and were unsurprised, whether they saw something entirely different, I could not determine.
Colangelo let out a shout—of triumph, I believed. He had reached the shore and was standing with a fist upraised. The sand beneath his feet was a shoal of agitated glitter, and at his back the bank was a dark particulate dance, the forms of the trees disintegrating into a rhythm of green and black dots, the river into a stream of fiery unreality. How could he not notice? He shouted again and flipped us off. I realized that his outlines were shimmering, his prison garb blurring. Everything around him was yielding up its individuality, blending with the surround, flattening into an undifferentiated backdrop. It was nearly impossible to tell the sprays of water from sparkling currents in the air. The wind came harder, less like a wind in its roaring passage than the flux of some fundamental cosmic force, the sound of time itself withdrawing from the frame of human event, of entropy and electron death, and as Colangelo sprinted up the bank into cover of the forest, he literally merged with the setting, dissipated, the stuff of his body flowing out to be absorbed into a vibratory field in which not one distinguishable form still flourished. I thought I heard him scream. In all that roaring confusion I could not be certain, but he was gone. That much I knew. The world beyond the annex gate was gone as well, its separate forms dissolved into an electric absence of tremulous black, green, and silver motes, depthless and afire with white noise, like a television set tuned to a channel whose signal had been lost.
The board and their retainers moved away, talking softly among themselves, leaving me on the edge of the prison, of the pit, watching as—piece by piece—the forest and river and rocks reassembled, their inconstant shapes melting up from chaos, stabilizing, generating the imitation of a perfect moonlit night, the air cool and bracing, the freshness of the river sweetly palpable, all things alive with vital movement—boughs shifting, fallen needles drifting, light jumping along the surface of the water with the celerity of a charge along a translucent nerve. Even after what I had seen, I stood there a long while, tempted to run into the night, disbelieving the evidence of my senses, mistrusting the alternatives to belief, and so oppressed in spirit that I might have welcomed dissolution. A step forward, and I would be free one way or another. I stretched out a hand, testing its resistance to the dissolute power of the world beyond, and saw no hint of blurring or distortion. Yet still I stood there.