After that the long distant part of who he had been drifted so far it was out of sight. He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can’t see it any more, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward. Then he stands watching a fragile white line winding across the country before him and wondering if the end lies in a pool or a bush. There seemed no way to draw back in the long distant part of who he was. He was terrified by the prospect that some current in the air would thwart him, he was terrified he would draw it in and nothing would be on the other end. Better to risk a sudden collapse of the line on its own. Of course something in the cordiality of Penzance changed when Anne Bradshaw left; though no one blamed him directly, the people of the town couldn’t help the sense of violation, the sense that this dark Yank had divided the town’s present life from its future life, England and events having already divided present life from earlier life. Mrs. Easton became flustered in his presence. Lake considered leaving the Blue Plate Inn and then wondered if this would compound the insult. If I had compromised her, he thought of Anne, I’d be wildly popular; he told himself this with sardonic indignation. But lie knew the sardonicism was false and uncalled for, let alone the indignation.
In the spring I began walking out onto the moors every week to see the old American. What with Anne gone, someone needed to take him his groceries, which the town contributed: some bread and a couple of meat pies, some potatoes. He did a little gardening out in front of the stone house. Feeble as he was he did all right for himself. He’d barely speak to me when I first arrived, but if I stayed long enough he’d finally talk. It became pleasant in the spring when we sat in front of the house until nine or ten in the evening without feeling the chill, in little chairs that seemed made for children, rocking back and forth. Across the moors could be seen the lights of church steeples, churches not even there in the silver sheen of the moor days, as though they were beneath the earth and their lights shone up through the ground after dark. He watched the lights very intently, counting them in his head. Twenty-eight, he reported, I got twenty-eight. What do you get? I counted. Twenty-eight, I told him. He nodded in disappointment.
I couldn’t vouch for it that he wasn’t a little out of his mind. He was certainly confused about things: time and dates and places. I told myself I should become more careful about time and dates or I would be confused too when I was older. One night he asked me the year and I actually had to think a moment. Nineteen fifty-two, I said; he shook his head peculiarly. It was as though he didn’t understand the very number itself: No, no, he said, that can’t be it. He understood the numbers of churches but not the numbers of years. I could never get a straight answer out of him; I asked if he’d been to Chicago. Again he looked peculiar and shook his head, as if Chicago were Asia or the Antarctic. I asked if he’d been in New York and that seemed to ring a faint bell. Once I think, he said, nodding. Very long ago, before I went to prison. Prison? I said, startled; and he answered, Out in the annexes. Montana. Saskatchewan. And then I went to a city, he said, where there were a hundred canals, and storefronts that wept in the distance, and whores that slept in the lagoons. His whole little white face struggled with the memory of it. He said, A terrible music came from the earth. He said, A boat circled day after day, and she was on it. He said, In this city I died, over and over.
Music came from the earth? I said.
It’s you, isn’t it, he said. He said it in my presence but he didn’t say it to me. It’s you I hear calling over the songs of a zombie city. I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guilt, to live where I once died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own grave. Those things that I once thought dead. By the plain form of my delirium I’ll blast the obstruction of every form around me—Mr. Cale, I said to him—into something barely called shadow. I sail. Mr. Cale? I swim to you. I reached over and shook him roughly by the shoulder. I know the water. Mr. Cale, I said again, shaking him.
He turned to look at me, and I pulled my hand away. I saw her there waiting for me as I came out of the water, he said. It was dark there on the peninsula, nothing else around; but I’d been wrong about one thing, and that was the light. The light that had called me across the bay. I thought it was the thing she hid beneath the folds of her skirt (as though at this point she could actually deceive me). But it wasn’t that at all, it was her eyes, they were the fire that had warned a hundred sailors.
Perhaps they were meant to warn me. I stumbled onto the beach, falling down on one knee but then getting up, and she walked up to me in the same dress, her feet bare as I’d always seen her, and her black hair and bloody mouth. She still held her hands behind her skirt. We stood inches from each other and she gasped slightly when I wouldn’t take my eyes from hers, when I held her stare with my own; I knew if I looked away, if I turned away, she would have done it to me, as she believed she had done it before, in other places, on other beaches.
Done it?
On other beaches, in other places. But I looked at her and she finally said in her bad funny English, “It is you, but it is not you.” I said, It’s me but it isn’t me.
We slept on the beach, not together, warmed by no fire because I knew the feds would come if I made a fire. Several times I woke in the night to see her leaning over me, right above me, her face in mine, and I could feel the thing she held against my neck. I’d look in her eyes a long time and soon she’d pull back. Several times I think she tried to work up the nerve for it. I didn’t care. I’d died many times in the city; there was nothing with which anyone could threaten me anymore. There was nothing that could be done to my life that had not been done already to my conscience or honor. Finally, after everything, the prison and self-torment and the larceny of my dreams, I was beyond the touch of every fear other than the fear I would lose her. I was in this place out beyond America One or America Two or as many Americas as they supposed they could invent. I knew she knew it. I knew she saw it in my eyes and understood I was not whoever she had believed me to be. I would not be surprised that men cowered before the things her face once dreamed, before the dream that destroys what is not fulfilled; but I wasn’t like them, and finally she left me undisturbed. When I woke she seemed to be watching me, sitting in the sand with her hands in her lap. But though her eyes were open, she was only sleeping.