She opened her eyes again, just to be certain the world she'd left out there, beyond her lids, was still in existence. There was a nice, mellow sense of dislocation in all this: no paranoia, no fear; simply suspicion that things outside her head were not to be taken too seriously tonight.
The room was still there: the ring of lamplight on the ceiling, the open window, the drapes lifted and let go by the breeze; the carved bed in which she lay, with its lovers lying in their ripe bowers; the door at the end of the bed, leading out onto the hallway, down the stairs-
Her gaze seemed to go with her thoughts, out onto the darkened landing-floating up to the ceiling one moment, grazing the footworn weave of the rug the next.
By the time she got to the top of the stairs an unbidden thought had formed in her head: she wasn't alone in the house. Somebody had come in. As silent as smoke, and just as harmless-surely, on a night like this nobody meant harm-somebody had entered the house and was there at the bottom of the stairs.
The realization didn't trouble her in the slightest. She felt absurdly inviolate, as though she had not simply watched the fire on the beach but stood in its midst and walked through it unscorched.
She looked down the flight in the hope of seeing him, and thought she caught the vaguest impression of his form, there in the darkness: a big, broad man; a black man, she thought. He started to climb the stairs. She could feel the air at the top of the flight become agitated at his approach, excited at the prospect of being drawn into his lungs. Her gaze retreated along the landing, back toward the bedroom; back into her head. She would pretend she was asleep, perhaps. Let him come to her bedside and touch her awake. Put his hand to her lips, to her breast; or if he wanted to, press his fingers against her belly; then down, between her legs. She'd let him do that. None of this was quite real anyway, so why the hell not? He could do whatever he wanted, and no harm would come to her. Not here, in her carved bower-bed. Only joy here; only bliss.
For all these fearless thoughts there was still a corner of her intellect that was counseling caution.
"You're not being rational," this fretful self said to her. "The smoke's got into your head. The smoke and this island. They've got you all turned about."
Probably true, the dreamy wildling in her said. So what?
"Butyou don't know who he is," the cautious one pointed out. "And he's black. There aren't any blacks in Dansky, Ohio. Or if there are, you don't know any. They're different."
So am I, the wildling replied. I'm not who I was, and I'm all the better for it. So what if the island's working magic on me? I need a little magic. I'm ready. Oh Lord, I'm more than ready.
She'd closed her eyes, still thinking she would pretend to be sleeping when he came in. But as soon as she felt the stirring of the air against her face, announcing his presence at the threshold, she opened them again, and asked him, very quietly, who he was.
By way of reply, he spoke one word only.
"Galilee," he said.
A that moment, on the cloud-obscured summit of Mount Waialeale, the rain was falling at the rate of an inch and a half an hour. In gorges too inaccessible for exploration, plants that had never been named were drinking down the deluge; insects that would never venture where a human heel could crush them were sheltering their brittle heads. These were secret places, secret species; rare phenomena on a planet where little was deemed sacred enough, exquisite enough, tremulous enough, to be preserved from the prod, the scalpel, the exhibition.
Out in the benighted sea, whales were passing between the islands, mothers and their children flank to flank, playful adolescents breaching in the dark, rising up in frenzied coats of foam and twisting so as to spy the stars before they came crashing down again. In the coral reef below them, its caves and gullies as untainted as Waialeale's heights, other secret lives proceeded: the warm currents carrying myriad tiny forms, transparent flecks of purpose which for all their insignificant size nourished the great whales above.
And in between the summit and the reef? There was mystery there too. No less an order of life than the flower or the plankton, though it belonged to no class or hierarchy. It lived, this life, in the human head, the human heart. It moved only when touched, which was rarely, but when it did-when it shifted itself, showed itself to the creature in which it lived-there was revelation. The prospect of love could stir it, the prospect of death could stir it; even, on occasion a simpler thing: a song, a fine thought. Most of all it was moved by the prospect of its own apotheosis. If it felt its moment was near, then it would rise into the face of its host like a light, and blaze and blaze-
"Whoever you are…" Rachel said softly, "… come and show me your face."
The man stepped into the doorway. She couldn't see his face, as she'd requested, but she could see his form, and it was, as she'd guessed, a fine form: tall and broad.
"Who are you?" she said. Then, when he didn't reply: "Did you make the fire?"
"Yes." His voice was soft.
"The smoke…"
"… followed you."
"Yes."
"I asked it to."
"You asked the smoke," she said. It made an unlikely kind of sense to her.
"I wanted it to introduce you to me," he said. There was a hint of humor in his voice, as though he only half-expected her to believe this. But the half that did believe it believed it utterly.
"Why?" she said.
"Why did I want to meet you?"
"Yes…"
"I was curious," he said. "And so were you."
"I didn't even know you were here," she said. "How could I be curious?"
"You came out to see the fire," he reminded her.
"I was afraid…" she began; but the rest of the thought eluded her. What had she been afraid of?
"You were afraid the wind would blow the sparks…"
"Yes…" she murmured, vaguely remembering her anxiety.
"I wouldn't have let that happen," Galilee reassured her. "Didn't Niolopua tell you why?"
"No…"
"He will," Galilee replied. Then, more softly. "My poor Niolopua. Do you like him?"
She mused on this for a moment; it hadn't been something she'd given much thought to. "He seems very gentle," she said. "But I don't think he is. I think he's angry."
"He has reason," Galilee replied.
"Everybody hates the Gearys."
"We all do what we have to do," he replied.
"And what does Niolopua do? Besides cutting the grass?"
"He brings me here, when I'm needed."
"How does he do that?"
"We have ways of communicating that aren't easy to explain," Galilee said. "But here I am."
"Okay," she said. "So now you're here. Now what?"
There was more than enquiry in her voice. Though her tongue was lazy, the words slow, she knew what she was inviting; she knew what answer she wanted to hear. That he'd come to share her bed, whoever he was; come to exploit the dreamy ease she'd inhaled, and make love to her. Come to kiss her back to life, after an age of thorns and sorrow.