“It seems apt,” says Pfenninger, “since we’re in Switzerland, anyway. But first line your stomach: You’ve eaten nothing since Tuesday.” D’Arnoq’s next to me with a steaming cup. I smell chicken and sage and my stomach groans. “Don’t burn your tongue.”
I blow on it and sip it cautiously. It’s good. “Thanks.”
“I’ll let you have the recipe.”
“Being moved under hiatus is a double hand grenade in the brain, but”—Pfenninger clears the snow off the low wall and motions for me to sit down next to him—“a quarantine period was necessary before we let you into our realm. You’ve been in a chalet near Oberwald since noon of the second, not far from here, and we brought you here this morning. This peak is Galmihorn; that one is Leckihorn; over there, we have Sidelhorn.”
I ask him, “Are you from here, Mr. Pfenninger?”
Pfenninger watches me. “The same canton. I was born in Martigny, in 1758. Yes, 1758. I trained as an engineer, and in spring 1799, in the employ of the Helvetica Republic, I came here to oversee repairs to an ancestor of that bridge, spanning the chasm below.”
Now, if Pfenninger believes that, he’s insane. I turn to D’Arnoq, hoping for supportive sanity.
“Born in 1897, me,” says D’Arnoq, drolly, “as a veryfar-flung subject of Queen Victoria, in a stone-and-turf house out on Pitt Island—three hundred klicks east of New Zealand. Aged eighteen, I went on the sheep boat to Christchurch with my cousin. First time on the mainland, first time in a brothel, and first time in a recruiting office. Signed up for the Anzacs—it was either foreign adventures for king and empire or sixty years of sheep, rain, and incest on Pitt Island. I arrived in Gallipoli, and you know your history, so you’ll know what was waiting for me there. Mr. Pfenninger found me in a hospital outside Lyme Regis, after the war. I became an Anchorite at twenty-eight, hence my eternal boyish good looks. But I’m ninety-four years old next week. So, hey. The lunatics have you surrounded, Lamb.”
I look at Pfenninger. At D’Arnoq. At Pfenninger. The telepathy, the hiatuses, and the Yeti merely ask me to redefine what the mind can do, but this claim violates a more fundamental law. “Are you saying—”
“Yes,” says Pfenninger.
“That Anchorites—”
“Yes,” says D’Arnoq.
“Don’t die?”
“No,”frowns Pfenninger. “Of course we die—if we’re attacked, or in accidents. But what we don’t do is age. Anatomically, anyway.”
I look away at the waterfall. They’re mad, or liars, or—most disturbing of all—neither. My head’s too hot so I remove my hat. Something’s cutting into my wrist—Holly’s thin black hair-band. I take it off. “Gentlemen,” I address the view, “I have no idea what to think or say.”
“Far wiser,” says Pfenninger, “to defer judgement than rush to the wrong one. “Let us show you the Dusk Chapel.”
I look around for another building. “Where is it?”
“Not far,” says Pfenninger. “See that broken archway? Watch.”
Elijah D’Arnoq notices my anxiety. “We won’t put you to sleep again. Scout’s honor.”
The broken archway frames a view of a pine tree, virgin snowy ground, and a steep rock face. Moments hop by, birdlike. The sky’s blue as a high note and the mountains nearly transparent. Hear the waterfall’s skiff, spatter, and rumble. I glance at D’Arnoq, whose eyes are fixed where mine should be. “Watch.” So I obey, and notice an optical illusion. The view through the archway begins to sway, as if it were only printed on a drape, caught by a breeze, and now pulled aside by an elegant white hand in a trim Prussian-blue sleeve. Miss Constantin, bone-white and golden, looks out, flinching at the sudden bright cold. “The Aperture,” murmurs Elijah D’Arnoq. “Ours.”
I surrender. Portals appear in thin air. People have pause buttons. Telepathy is as real as telephones.
The impossible is negotiable.
What is possible ismalleable.
Miss Constantin asks me, “Are you joining us, Mr. Anyder?”
April 16
“IF YOU’RE ASKING whether I’m a war junkie,” I tell Brendan, “then the answer’s no, I am not.” I sound pissed off. I am, I suppose.
“Not you, Ed!” My virtual brother-in-law disguises his backped-aling behind a Tony Blairish suavity. Brendan looks like, and is, a workaholic property developer in his midforties having a rare weekend off. “We know youaren’t a war junkie. Obviously. I mean, you flew all the way back to England for Sharon’s wedding. No, I was only asking if it ever happens that a war reporter gets sort of hooked on the adrenaline of life in war zones. That’s all.”
“Some do, yes,” I concede, rubbing my eye and thinking of Big Mac. “But I’m not in any danger of that. The symptoms are pretty obvious.” I ask a passing teenage waitress for one more Glenfiddich. She says she’ll bring it right over.
“What are the symptoms?” Sharon’s four years younger than Holly and rounder in the face. “Just out of curiosity.”
I’m feeling cornered, but Holly’s hand finds mine on the bench and squeezes it. “The symptoms of war-zone addiction. Well. The same as the clichйs of the foreign correspondent, I guess. Rocky marriages; estrangement from family life; a dissatisfaction with civilian life. Alcohol abuse.”
“Not Glenfiddich, I trust?” Dave Sykes, Holly’s mild-mannered dad, lightens the mood a little.
“Let’s hope not, Dave.” Let’s hope the subject goes away.
“You must see some pretty hard-core, full-on stuff, Ed,” says Pete Webber, accountant, keen cyclist, and tomorrow’s groom. Pete’s bat-eared and his hairline’s beating a hasty retreat, but Sharon’s marrying him for love, not hair follicles. “Sharon was saying you’ve covered Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Baghdad. Places most people try to get away from.”
“Some journos carve a career in the business pages, others out of the plastic surgery of the stars. I’ve made mine out of war.”
Pete hesitates. “And you’ve never wondered, ‘Why war?’ ”
“Guess I’m immune to the charms of silicone.”
The waitress brings me my Glenfiddich. I look at Pete, Sharon, Brendan and his wife Ruth, Dave, and Kath, Holly’s ever-vigorous Irish mum. They’re still waiting for me to say something profound about my journalistic motives. The Sykeses aren’t without their scars—Holly’s youngest brother, Jacko, went missing in 1984 and his body was never found—but the loss I see, work with, has been on an industrial scale. This makes me different. I doubt this difference is explicable. I doubt even I understand it.
“Do you write to bring the world’s attention to the vulnerable?” asks Pete.
“God no.” I think of Paul White, on my first assignment in Sarajevo, lying dead in a puddle because he wanted to Make a Difference. “The world’s default mode is basic indifference. It’d like to care, but it’s just got too much on at the moment.”
“Then to play the devil’s avocado,” says Brendan, “why risk your neck to write articles that won’t change anything?”
I fabricate a smile for Brendan. “First, I don’t really risk my neck; I’m rigorous about taking precautions. Second, I—”
“What precautions can you take,” Brendan interrupts, “to stop a massive car bomb going off outside your hotel?”
I look at Brendan and blink three times to make him vanish. Damn. Maybe next time. “I’ll be moving into the Green Zone when I go back to Baghdad. Second, if an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That’s what I can’t stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, iswritten about, then at least it’s made a tiny dent in the world’s memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it’s there.”
“So you’re a sort of archivist for the future,” says Ruth.