It was very quiet, the sort of blanketing stillness that pours in between the final echo of an explosion and the first cries of its victims. The quietness confused him, lending an air of normalcy to the room, and he was puzzled by his sudden lack of emotion, as if now that he had completed his task, he had been reduced to fundamentals. He stood and almost fell, overwhelmed by the bad news his senses were giving him about death: dizziness, white rips across his vision, his chest thudding with erratic heartbeat.
Done.
Stamp the seal of fate, tie a black cord round the coffin and make a knot only angels can undo.
Both life and duty, done.
Filled with bitterness, he smashed his heel into the control panel, crumpling the metal facing. Smoke fumed from the speaker grille. Then he spun around, sensing Jocundra behind him. No. She was elsewhere, coming toward the house, and she seemed to surround him, every sector of the air holding some intimation. He could taste her, feel her on his skin. He started to the door, thinking there might be time to go back downstairs.
No, not really.
Not according to the twinges at the base of his skull or the dissolute feeling in his chest.
The leaves on the ebony bushes seemed to be stirring, and the dark loom of the forested walls held lifelike gleams of color, a depth of light and foliage showing between the trunks. To the south a road of pale sand plunged off through the trees, and at the bend of the road was a tiny orange glow. He laughed, recalling the light he had seen earlier in the gap made by the toppled oak; but he walked toward it anyway. The place where the road left the clearing was choked with branches, and they scratched him when he crouched to gain an unimpeded view. He must be very near the edge, three floors up, yet all he saw beneath was the starlit dust of the road. He shifted his field of focus toward the glow. The orange light rose from a metal ring, and beside it, sitting with his back against a stump, was a lean, wolfish man. Heavy eyebrows, dark hair flowing over his shoulders. He appeared to be gazing intently at Donnell, and he waved; his mouth opened and closed as if he were calling out.
Someone did call to him, but it was Jocundra, her voice faint and issuing from a different quarter. He forced all thought of her aside. Without access to his ourdha, it would be essential to concentrate, to synchronize thought with vision, or else the winds would take him and there would be no hope of return. He pressed forward into the gap, ducking under the branches. Right on the edge, he figured. He shifted his field of focus beyond the wolfish man, who was now waving excitedly, and out to the bend in the road. The forest plummeted into a valley, and below, nestled in a crook of the river, were the scattered orange lights of Badagris. Above the town and forest, the aurora billowed, and higher yet were icy stars thick as gems on a jewel merchant’s cloth.
Pain lanced through his chest, an iron spike of it drove up the column of his neck. His vision blurred, and to clear his head he fixed his eyes on the hard glitter of the stars. Something about their pattern was familiar. What was it? Then he remembered. The Short War against Akadja, the Plain of Kadja Bossu. There had been a night skirmish with a company of dyobolos, a difficult victory, and afterward he had stood watch on a hummock, the only high ground for miles. The myriad fires of the cadre burning about him, the sable grass hissing with a continental pour of wind. It had seemed to him he was suspended in the night overlooking a plain of stars, its guardian, its ruler, and he had thought of it as a vision of his destiny. Solitary, rigorous, lordly. Yet he had been much younger, barely past induction, and despite the elegance of the vision, the clarity, it had been a comfort to know the war was over for a little while, that the shadows in the grass were friends, and the hours until dawn could be a time of peaceful meditation. The memory was so poignant, so vivid in its emotional detail, that when a branch scraped at the corner of his eye, aggravated by the distraction, he knocked it away with his hand - a black, featureless hand - and thinking to avoid further aggravation, he took another step and shifted forward along the road.
Epilogue
July 15, 1988
The outcry surrounding the public disclosure of the project had taken only three months to die, this - thought Jocundra - a telling commentary upon the spongelike capacity of the American consciousness to absorb miracles, digest them along with the ordinary whey provided by the media, and reduce them to half-remembered trivia. Coil by coil, the various security agencies encircled the remnants of Ezawa’s project and drew them down into some mysterious sub-basement of the bureaucracy. Several people disappeared, evidence was mislaid, an investigative committee foundered in the dull summer heat of the Congress. Ezawa’s suicide caused a brief reawakening of interest, but by then the topic had lost vitality for even the off-color jokes of talk show comedians. After her interrogation and release by the CIA, Jocundra submitted a copy of one of the videotapes to a network newswoman and suffered debunking by a professional debunker, a pompous tub of a man, a beard and a belly and a five hundred dollar suit, who claimed any of Donnell’s feats could be duplicated by a competent magician. Throughout the winter she was besieged by obscene phone calls and letters, offers from publishers, badgered by the illegitimate press, and when someone painted a pair of devilish green eyes on her apartment door, she packed and moved back to a rented cottage on Bayou Teche.
She used the cottage as a base from which to send out her applications to graduate schools, the idea being - as her psychiatrist had put it - to ‘get on with life, find a new direction.’ She had agreed to try, though she did not think there was any direction leading away from all that had happened. Not being able to feel the things she had felt with Donnell was intolerable; it was as if she had been given a strength she never knew existed, and once it had been taken from her, her original strength seemed inadequate. And whenever she sought comfort in memory, she was brought up against Otille’s conjuration of her fantasy, of Valcours, and the sickly light this shed on her own relationship with Donnell.
‘You’re underestimating yourself,’ the psychiatrist had said. ‘You’ve handled this surprisingly well. Look at some of the others. Petit, for instance. Her incidence of trauma was much less than yours, and I doubt they’ll ever put her together. You’ll be just fine in a while.’
His pious smile, and everything he said, had come across as an indictment, an unspoken comment that she was an unfeeling bitch and should quit wasting his time. She had flared up, offering an angry apology for not having crumbled into schizophrenia, and walked out. But she had followed his advice. She had been accepted at Berkeley, and if everything went as planned, within a year she would be doing fieldwork in Africa. She had goals, much work to do, yet nothing had changed.
It was all empty without him.
The people of Bayou Teche, those Donnell had cured and others, had raised a stone to him at Mr Brisbeau’s. For a month she had avoided visiting it, but then, thinking this avoidance itself might be unhealthy, she drove to the cabin early one morning and - hoping not to rouse Mr Brisbeau - sneaked through the palmettos to the boathouse. It was there the stone had been erected facing the bayou. Her first sight of it appalled her. The stone was ordinary, gray-white marble shot with black veins, to the memory of donnell Harrison incised in neat capitals. But fronting it was a litter of candle stubs, gilt paper angels, satin ribbons, mirrors, rosary beads, and plate after plate of rotting food. Ants and flies crawled everywhere; mites and gnats swarmed the air. Greenish mounds of potato salad, iridescent hunks of meat. The stench made her gag. Dizzy, she sat down on a rickety chair, one of several crowding the boathouse. After a moment she regained her composure. She should have expected it considering how his legend had grown over the year, considering also the cultish nature of religion on the bayous. The chairs, no doubt, had been used in some rite or vigil.