At some time a rainstorm rattled across the space outside, running against the glass of the high windows. It went on quick to the west. I closed the curtains.
The beam of light from the torch revealed the things in the room one by one: chair, bed, gun, lamp, mirror, picture, chair. I moved to look at my image in the mirror and there was a pale skull there, shadowed black, the bone only millimetres beneath the stretch of skin. I propped the torch on a chair. My fingers went towards the glass and touched the tips of the fingers of the image. I put my hands up to my face. The reflection obeyed. It looked sad. And frightened. The eyes were hard to see, the shadows deep over lids and sockets. There was a frown.
I remembered being here with Joanne years ago. She would now be dead. Like everyone else. That was what the remnants of the crashed plane had meant. The passengers and crew could never return. Where would they return to? The plane had crashed because everyone had vanished. The crash had not killed them. They could not reappear dead in the wreckage; they had never been part of that event. It had been caused only by their absence. They could not reappear alive unless time ran backwards and the plane somehow reassembled itself and flew back together again as it had been at 6.11 am five miles high. Both options were equally impossible. Time has no way to run back. Events are sealed.
Everyone has gone forever. Face it.
The image in the mirror moved its mouth. It was forming the beginning of syllables, fractions of words. The words had never made their way so far before; even now they carried scarcely any weight of meaning. They were worn down. The restraint normally held by the brain over the larynx and tongue and lips loosened now that acknowledgement had been made that there was absolutely no one to hear. The words were about love; a declaration, an admission, that once there had been somebody who had been loved. It was not extraordinary. For most, a fact as conventional as the word. But to the reflected figure now mouthing syllables of affection to shadows in a concrete cell on an empty planet to someone seeming dead so many times over, it had all been unbelievably strange and unexpected. How could expressions of love have been used? What emotions did they refer to? There had been no standard of comparison for those feelings. A life had functioned without them. How could they be known?
As a child I had waited in the dream room, deaf to sentences of consolation or attempts to distract me from the realisation that my parents had left me alone. I deflected it all, I let it pass by. I knew the truth. Once was enough. I wouldn’t risk so much again to the chance of betrayal.
Then Joanne, smiling across the isolation, weakening me, vulnerable herself, had unfolded with hardly a move of my hand. She stayed with me. At first nothing involved us with each other beyond the skin-deep, the pleasure of sensations. Or that was what I wanted to believe, then; because I was still unsure about the distance between independence and loneliness. One sounded so brave and decisive, the other so pathetic and helpless, that I’d always imagined they must be separated by an immense space and time. When we started to depend on each other in small ways, hardly noticing it, I began to realise the closeness of the two. They could be only minutes or inches apart. One morning as we were lying in bed in the Parnell flat, I had woken early and stretched out my hand to draw aside a strand of hair which had fallen across her face in sleep. An expression like a smile had formed on her features for a moment, half-conscious. And I had moved the tips of my fingers down her face very gently and traced them down her throat and over her shoulder, and at that moment, with the waves of early light breaking through the curtains onto the walls of the room, I realised with a distinct and separate surprise that there were reserves of emotions somewhere inside me which I hadn’t suspected. There was no reason for their existence. If evolution and adaptation counted for anything in individuals, then expressions of tenderness, if that was what this gesture involved, should have been extinct.
If she’d gone away, after those first few weeks, I could still have coped with that and made my own sense of it and not been changed. Of course I would not have found it easy; but it would have fitted into the view of the world, the ideas about people, which I already held.
But she stayed. In secret I was amazed. Even more, when we invaded each other deeper, discovering more needs than a few millimetres of skin; that marked the start of waking to a new set of chances for my life. If I concealed from her how much I needed that chance, it was only because I was afraid of trusting so much to someone whose judgement I suspected, someone I didn’t fully understand. Our dependence on each other even made me think, suddenly, that perhaps she might be very like me. I pushed the idea aside. It was absurd; frightening. Anyhow, it could not survive in a time when I was happy. I held very close to that happiness and gave most of myself to what was not understandable.
So without my conscious awareness of how it was happening, the bitterness in me had retreated and faded. Yet my mind would run ahead at times in half-panic like a recluse in a remote home might rush to empty rooms, make them look used, open the blinds, check on what the light might show, then turn a casual face to the unexpected. The danger was alive.
Finally in spite of myself, I did trust too much, I ran risks, I got kicked for it. Self-pity? Why not? Who the hell else is there?
The image in the mirror dissolved to a blur as the eyes blinked liquid. Useless; a spill of saltwater down a face. But not selfish. The point of deception was gone now.
Steel oil from the gun barrel soured the inside of my mouth. Lifting the torch I walked slowly to the bathroom. The light picked out the dull cool of chrome and porcelain. Another mirror gave back the face with the silver trails on its paleness. I turned a tap and ran some water into a glass. The pressure was weak. The taste, in a quick rinse and spit, was musty. I threw water on my face and pushed a towel across it. Behind me in the mirror I could see the outline of the white bath.
In the nightmares I see it like that. There is the wet hand of a child holding the edge of the bath, tightly, then weakening. The hand lets go and the arm and hand slip back into the water and sink beneath the reflections of the fluorescent light. Beneath the clear water the eyes are still open. They collect images the brain never receives.
I shoved the towel over my face and pressed it against me, groped for the torch and stumbled out of the bathroom, closing the door securely.
‘He wanted to drown,’ Joanne had said; ‘I know he did.’ And she had looked straight at me. ‘It frightened me.’ When I shrugged as if I didn’t really believe her, she flared up; ‘Yes, I know what you think.’
‘Go on. What?’
‘I’m inventing it.’
She was right. I thought she was finding reasons for having Peter committed to an institution. She couldn’t cope. Of course she presented it as a humane answer. They would look after him properly there. He would be in the care of specialists.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.
‘Tomorrow night, you give him his bath.’
Peter was eight. A special nurse came several times a week to supervise him. This was to take some of the burden from Joanne. There had been no suggestion that Peter might be a danger to himself or to anyone else. I had noticed, though, a slight change. His invisible world seemed to be failing him in some way. He had begun to push it away, turning from whatever images were there for him in the empty parts of rooms, literally pushing back the air with an odd tightness set on his face, frowning and thin-lipped. I had only seen this once or twice. And once or twice, also, I’d seen him shake his head at nothing as if making a decisive denial, an absolute no to some unimaginable problem or object.