“If you remain inside his tiny sphere, then maybe it does.”
She told him how they’d stopped to watch a hawk, twice — once on the way to the petroglyphs, again on the way back. Maybe it wasn’t the same hawk but that was hardly what mattered. Memuneh’s fascination with its gliding upon the air currents was at least as compelling as the bird itself, she said, and finally she’d watched him instead. His absorption whenever it flapped its wings.
“Even a cat eyeing something it’s about to pounce on doesn’t bring the same degree of focus as he brought to that hawk. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be that enthralled by watching something just go about its business,” she said. “Why did he share these things with me, Austin? I’m not anybody.”
“To me you are. And he draws a distinction between me and the rest of the town. He knew I wanted you to see him. Agreed to it.”
“And now we leave him behind,” she said. “I wish we could do something for him.”
You let him hold you the other night, Austin thought. I imagine he considers that payment enough.
But later, after they’d opened a jar of tamales and were heating them with rice over the fire, Austin began to wonder if the two of them hadn’t, in some benign but significant way, been used. Not to exaggerate his own importance, but Memuneh had nevertheless come to rely on him for companionship, and surely understood that this squalid shack wouldn’t be home forever.
Along comes Gabrielle, then, catalyst of that deliverance. As she was always meant to be. Memuneh might’ve even known it first … and so used her as a test before revealing himself to Miracle all over again. Letting her prove to him that not everyone here was the worst example of the human species.
A day alone with Gabrielle could do that to anyone.
Would Memuneh try again? Even now, somewhere in that glowing red horizon, was he hoping, planning, dreaming?
Austin thought it was one of the worst ideas he’d ever heard. Like Saint Francis when no one would listen, Memuneh belonged with the animals. They were so much less likely to disappoint him.
In the distance they could hear the coming of another train, and smiled at each other for everything the sound brought with it.
“Stars’ll be out soon,” he said.
“Maybe you should watch them by yourself tonight. I think,” she said, “I need to stay at the B-and-B. I have things in my head I need to get sorted out. I need to call Philippe. And if you have any … entanglements … you need to wrap up, maybe you should.”
Scarlett, she’d be thinking of. Wondering what the woman looked like. He didn’t tell her that this severance had already been taken care of, just told her she was right.
“Then tomorrow? We start fresh.” She reached out to touch his braid, the silver streak in his hair, the marks that his life had cut into his face. “I love you, Austin. I always have. But I never knew if that was enough. And I still don’t.”
He understood. So as the sun began to set on his last day in the desert he tried to soak in every diminishing ray. Let him hold them inside and let their fire burn there tonight so that tomorrow he could leave some ashen bit of himself smoldering on the ground, satisfied at last that it had the answers that mattered most.
*
“One of your philosophers — French, like the man you took for your husband — wrote ‘Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into each person’s heart.’
“If even the simplest man or woman is such a mass of contradictions, how much more so, then, is what you named God, simultaneously everything and its own opposite. God is life, God is death. God is growth, God is destruction. God is here, God is nowhere, always … and never.
“Deus Absconditus … the loving God Who Went Away.
“And so the Kyyth filled the void between, each of those contradictory thoughts, splintered off from the rest and contained within itself, with a mind of its own. So that we might come to you.
“It’s what our name means in the language of the first people we showed ourselves to, people the world no longer knows of. In their tongue ‘kyyth’ meant ‘bridge.’
“I would never tell this to Austin because there was so much he instinctively understood already, I felt it would benefit him to keep wondering about something.
“But I tell it to you, because I know he’ll be leaving soon and now I want him to know…”
*
The window of Gabrielle’s room faced east, and even through the blinds the light was bright enough to wake her. Sun and clock alike mocked her and the night she’d wasted.
She hated waking up fully clothed atop a made bed — the sleep never really seemed to count then. She hadn’t meant to drop off this way because she hadn’t meant to go to bed before calling Philippe. Which she hadn’t done because it was so much easier to worry about what she could take back to the magazine to possibly justify the trip here. “Interview With the Angel,” first in a three-part series? Have half the readership howling in protest — how gullible does she think we are? — and the other half applauding for all the wrong reasons: looove the irony.
One crisis at a time, please.
She looked at the clock again — 6:26.
Gabrielle heard from the bathroom the heavy plop of water as it dripped from the faucet into the tub. Odd — it sounded as though the tub were full. Which couldn’t be. She’d always used the shower. Never even stoppered the drain in the first place.
Austin would be here at 10:00. Give or take. He’d follow her to Salt Lake City, where she’d turn in the rental and hope his car was sound enough to endure to the east coast.
That dripping — a full tub, definitely. She listened to it for a few moments, perplexed; but a pleasant sound if you were in the mood. Promise of warmth and steam on a winter day, or a cool soak on one like today. But as her head cleared of the morning groggies the more she realized it shouldn’t have been promising anything right now.
When she got up to check, Gabrielle halted in the bathroom doorway. The tub could wait.
She knew without the slightest prompt that this was Austin’s woman. Scarlett, sitting on the toilet lid. It couldn’t be anyone else. In a town this size, she and Austin would find each other because there was something barbaric about the both of them, although Austin seemed to have bested it. And what had he implied — the relationship was only physical? In that case, she didn’t need to see Scarlett at all. This was a woman whose bodily tenure you really didn’t want to follow.
“How did you get in here?”
The faucet, dripping. The ripples, gentle across the water.
When Scarlett stood up, Gabrielle saw her arm, Hadn’t noticed it until now, the way Scarlett had been holding it down and out of view. Saw the smear of blood along the inside of her forearm. Saw something jutting from — oh god.
“You’re hurt,” Gabrielle said. The woman had come here to commit suicide, was that it? For the statement it made?
But no. It wasn’t Scarlett’s wrist that was the problem. Whatever was stuck into her was emerging from a split across the palm, just above the heel of her hand. Wide and flat and dense, almost blade-like, a cleaver or short machete. But not the color of metal. No, this was pale, almost a bone-white, and—
It was bone. And it was extruding by itself, as though a deformed extension of the bones of her lower arm had grown out through her hand.
Gabrielle understood then. If not everything, enough.
“But your eyes,” she said. “They’re both…”
“You don’t think we have control over them too? When we really don’t want someone to know?”
“Can’t you just leave us alone?” It was the closest thing to a prayer she would offer this creature. Austin’s demon lover. “God damn you, just leave us alone and let us have our lives.”