After a long time, and from a long distance, Farrell heard himself say, “Get down, Briseis. They don’t let dogs on the zoo train.” The rear door’s open, she must have gotten on that way. I just didn’t see her. He started toward her, but Briseis growled once, so quietly that Farrell froze between steps, suddenly very uncertain of his ability to identify dogs. She stared boldly into his eyes, as he had never known her to do, then leaped to the floor and out of the train in two elegant bounds that were nothing like the movements of Sia’s clumping, apologetic old companion. Turning to look back at Farrell, she growled again, and this time it was unquestionably a command. Farrell was never mistaken about commands.
“Wal, Ah swan, Ah reckon the critter wants me to follow her,” he said aloud, just to keep the whole affair on the level of a Lassie movie as long as possible. Briseis was loping away, back past the elephants, then slanting off in the direction of the employees’ rest-room. She neither slowed for Farrell, nor looked around to be sure of him. He trailed after her, trying to keep her in sight without really running, feeling like the White Rabbit as he checked his watch to see that he had almost an hour of liberty before the alligator train’s next appointed round. His supervisor, who mistrusted him, called questioningly as he hurried by. Farrell waved, earnestly yelled back, “Till they touch in flood,” and kept moving. I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date, and I am not dressed for it, whatever it is.
Briseis surprised him greatly by leading him on his favorite path, down behind the bear cages. Unpaved, too narrow for trucks or the alligator train, it was used more as a shortcut by the zoo staff than by visitors. Farrell liked it for its rough coolness and silence, and for the smell of the bears in the shadows. Briseis was waiting for him at a bend where the path broadened briefly to make room for a low stone fountain, which had become a birdbath by default long ago. The tiny silver hiccup of the water was the only sound Farrell could hear, except for Briseis’ deep panting.
Ben’s own breath was so shallow as to be inaudible in the clearing. He was hunched over the fountain, propping himself with his hands in the concrete bowl, his head sunken and turned away, like an animal too sick to drink. Farrell recognized his suit first—the shabby gray corduroy that Ben treasured obstinately for the elbow-patched stereotype it was and wore to work whenever Sia got up too late to protest. Except for the water-soaked cuffs, the coat was unstained, and the rucked-up shirt, missing three buttons, still showed the dry-cleaner’s creases. But what was inside the familiar clothes was not Farrell’s friend. He knew that before he saw the face, even before the alien flesh, rigid beyond bearing, howled under his hand. He said, “Ben,” to it anyway, because he could not make himself call it by the other name.
The stranger replied in a voice that was higher and sharper than Ben’s voice, speaking words like the rattling of oarlocks and anchor chains. It was the voice Farrell had heard outside Sia’s door on the night when Ben came home, the same voice that had chanted Norse battle songs or nursery rhymes while she and Nicholas confronted each other across their ravaged battlefield, Aiffe. But then Ben—Egil, Egil Eyvindsson, say it in your head at least—had been hurt, helpless, unable to stand, or to do much else but glare through Ben’s eyes like a madman through steel mesh, monstrously afraid. Now he was facing Farrell with two feet of bird-limed concrete and rusty water between them, testing his strength against the boundaries of this body, making it move. The little, dim scar was stretched dark, and a grin had begun to dance on the clenched mouth, fire along a knife blade. Farrell was afraid for his life then, but he kept his hand on the stranger’s arm, for no reason he could ever name, and felt the creature trembling in slow, aching, hideous waves. He held on tight, letting the terrible shivering pass into him.
There is not a chance in that world that you would have known what to do, Sia said. Farrell glanced quickly around for Briseis, but the dog was gone. The stranger was speaking to him directly now; it sounded savagely questioning, probably something about my executor, or which afterlife program I’m signed up for. He fell back on his oldest schoolyard gambit, a shrugging, smiling face meant to indicate simultaneous incomprehension and absolute agreement, combined with utter nonaggressiveness. He had never known it to fail, except with Lidia Mirabal’s boyfriend Paco, and with Julie.
The next thing he was sure about was being on the ground, unable to breathe. A raging, hammering weight was aboard him, a crowbar forearm crushed his throat, and a sound like trees splitting in a great storm was going on somewhere quite near. Dazed, frantic, he got a knee up into the center of the sound, and the strangling pressure eased slightly. As loudly as he could under the circumstances, he yelled, “Ben!”
A hand scrabbled over his face, feeling for his eyes. Farrell knocked it away, grabbing out wildly himself. His mouth and nostrils were full of musty corduroy, and he felt as though Mr. Ngugi were using him for a fly-switch, but he dug and twisted and worried, still coughing Ben’s name, until the stranger grunted and reared up astride him. The wide, rather flashy green tie, the one I gave him for his birthday, dangled askew, yanked loose from the torn collar into a knot the size and shape of a Brazil nut, surely never to be undone again. Absurdly, the tie terrified Farrell completely, in a place where the insane assault itself could not go, but it also wrenched him at last to understanding. Poor sonofabitch couldn’t get it off, just panicked. Must have thought it was witchcraft, a curse, poor sonofabitch.
“Egil, goddamn it!” he cried, but the berserker only mumbled to himself, turning his head to left and right. Farrell saw where he was looking, heaved wildly with the free upper half of his body, and lunged for the stone lying between two redwood roots. His hand closed on it, but the other took it away from him, almost gently, poising it over him, cocking it so far back that it disappeared behind the corduroy shoulder. Raising his own arms to ward it off, he shouted his old high-school nickname for Ben straight into this empty and blazing hero’s face. “Rubberlips! Hey, Rubberlips!”
The stone faltered, started down again, then hung in the air, quaking daintily, like a wind chime. Farrell said, “Rubberlips?” and saw the face begin to buckle and slip, melting into the face of their childhood, soft and wise and secret, the scar dissolving like a star at sunrise. Farrell closed his eyes, out of pity and a kind of numbing propriety—I shouldn’t see this, it’s not right—but even then, he felt Ben’s return to the body that still pinioned him, in the same way that he could always feel morning moving up across his blankets, warming his dreams.
“Joe.” The voice was small and parched.
A root was grinding into Farrell’s back, and he became aware of sweat sliding out of his hair, delicately maddening as fly feet. He sat up as Ben got clumsily off him, swiped at his forehead, and said mildly, “Seizures, my ass.”
In the same unfamiliar voice, Ben said, “I’m sorry.” Farrell had begun to brush off his uniform, but found himself tidying Ben’s torn, dusty clothes, even trying to do something about the hopelessly jammed tie. “Could have goddamn killed me,” he said, muttering like an irritated nanny as he worked. “Seizures. He could have goddamn killed me.”
“He didn’t know you,” Ben said. “Egil doesn’t know anybody in this world. Except Sia.” Now, suddenly, he was insubstantial, a figure of slowly pulsing ash; the wild power out of time that had answered Farrell’s touch a few minutes before seemed to have abandoned Ben completely, taking the marrow of his bones away with it.