Lenzen watches me, waiting until the fits of laughter subside. Only the pain remains. I suppress a whimper.
“Why don’t you hate me?” I ask when I can talk again.
Lenzen sighs. “I’ve seen wars, Linda. Fighting, the aftermath of fighting. I’ve seen what it looks like when nothing will ever be right again, prisoners of war, children with their limbs blown off. I know what it looks like when someone is deeply traumatized. Something in you has broken, Linda; I can see it in your eyes. We’re not so different, you and me.”
He is silent for a moment, appearing to deliberate.
“Linda, do you promise me you’ll leave me in peace?”
I can hardly speak for shame. “Of course,” I say. “Of course.”
“If you promise me that you’ll leave me and my family in peace, and if you’ll promise me to seek psychiatric treatment”—he seems to hesitate before making up his mind—“if you can promise me those two things, then no one need know about what’s happened today.”
I look at him in disbelief.
“But…what will you tell your editor?” I ask stupidly.
“That you didn’t feel well. That we had to break off the interview. And that there won’t be a repeat.”
My brain can no longer keep pace.
“Why?” I say. “Why are you doing this? I deserve to be punished.”
“I think you’ve been punished enough.” I look at him. He looks at me.
“Can you promise me those two things?” Lenzen asks. I nod.
“I hope you can make peace with yourself,” he says.
Then he turns and leaves. I hear him take his coat from the hook in the hall and go into the dining room to fetch his jacket and his bag.
I know he’ll be out of my reach as soon as he crosses the threshold. I know I’ll never see him again and that there will be nothing more I can do.
And what were you thinking of doing?
I hear Victor Lenzen’s footsteps in the hall, hear him open the front door. I stand in the kitchen and know I’m not going to stop him. The door falls shut behind him. Silence spreads through the house like floodwater. It is over.
22
The rain has come after all. Again and again, the wind flings it at the kitchen window as though it were trying to break the glass. But it tires, and eventually ceases altogether, and soon the storm is no more than a memory, a mute flash of summer lightning in the distance.
I stand there, propped up at the kitchen table, trying to remember how to breathe. My body has stopped doing it for me automatically, so I have to focus all my attention on it. I don’t have the strength for anything else; I think of nothing. I stand like that for a long time.
But then a thought does reach me, and it gets me moving, and while I’m wondering at the fact that my arms and legs and everything else function the same as ever, I’m walking through rooms and climbing stairs and pushing open doors. Then I find him. He’s asleep, but wakes up when I sit down beside him. First his nose, then his tail, then the rest of his body. Bukowski’s tired, but he’s pleased to see me.
Sorry to wake you, mate. I don’t want to be on my own tonight.
I curl up in a ball beside him on the floor, half on his blanket. I snuggle up to him, trying to get some of his warmth, but he wriggles free; he doesn’t like it, needs his space. He isn’t a pussycat after all; he wants freedom, room to move. Soon he is asleep again, dreaming his doggy dreams.
I lie there alone for a moment longer, trying to keep thinking of nothing, but an animal impulse stirs in my chest and I remember Lenzen’s embrace — the firmness, the warmth — and I have a feeling in my stomach as if I were in free fall, and again I try to think of nothing, but still I think of Lenzen’s embrace and the beast in my chest and its terrible name: desire. I know how pathetic I am, but I don’t care.
I know too that this isn’t about Lenzen; that it isn’t his embrace I desire, that my desire isn’t for him. I know who it’s for, but I mustn’t think about that.
Lenzen was merely the trigger, but now it hurts to remember what it could be like to live among people — the looks, the physical contact, the warmth. I don’t want to think about it, but I’m drawn into my memories, and then the rational part of my brain starts up again. The grace period is over, and I think: any minute now the police will arrive.
I know that I have committed a crime, documenting it myself fastidiously — all those microphones and cameras here in the house. I have done terrible things and the police will come and arrest me, no matter what Lenzen said. As soon as he can think straight again, he’ll call them. But it won’t make much difference whether it’s here or in some prison, that I sit on my own and vegetate with a knot of desire in my chest.
So I do nothing. I don’t go around the house destroying all the tapes and cameras that have so mercilessly documented my madness. I lie down on my bed and wait, glad that nothing of the past hours surfaces in my consciousness, because I know that there is such a lot there that could distress me. As I’m thinking this, it happens, and a thought pops up, clothed in Lenzen’s voice, although it’s my thought too: “The worst is the doubt. Doubt is like a thorn you can’t get ahold on. It’s terrible when a thing like that destroys families.”
I think of my parents, of what they were like in the aftermath of that terrible night — and, indeed, have been ever since. Subdued, as if someone had turned the volume down. They treated me gingerly, as though I had been made of glass. Gingerly and guardedly. Courteously, too, as if I were a stranger. I have always tried to interpret it as consideration, but deep down I’ve known that it is something else. It has taken Victor Lenzen for me to work out what that something is: it is doubt.
Linda loved Anna. No, Linda doesn’t have any motive at all. No, Linda wouldn’t be capable of a thing like that, and in any case, why would she? Impossible. No, never, definitely not, not a chance. But what if she had?
After all, we live in a world in which anything is possible: in which babies come into being in test tubes, and robots explore Mars, and tiny particles are beamed from A to B. So why not that? A vestige of doubt always remains.
I can’t bear it. I sit up in bed, reach for the telephone, dial my parents’ landline number that’s been the same for about thirty years, and wait. When did we last speak? How many years has it been? Five? Eight? I think of the drawer in the kitchen that is full of Christmas cards from my parents, because that’s the way we celebrate Christmas — we send each other cards. We haven’t spoken properly since Anna’s death. We ran out of words. Conversations became sentences, sentences became single words, words became syllables, and then we stopped talking altogether. How could it come to this? And can we ever get back from postcards — the only thing keeping us from total communication breakdown — to conversations? What if my parents seriously think I’m a murderer?
Do you really want to know, Linda?
Yes, I do.
It’s not until the ringing tone sounds that I remember that in the other world, where my parents live, time matters so much more than in mine. On the second ring I cast a hasty glance at the clock: it’s three in the morning — that late, damn it. How long did I stand in the kitchen, staring into space? How long did I spend watching my sleeping dog? How long did I lie there with the cold eyes of my surveillance cameras looking down on me like indifferent gods?
I’m about to hang up, having decided it’s too late for this, when I hear the alarmed voice of my mother.
“Hello?”
“Hello, it’s Linda.”
My mother lets out a noise that I can’t place — a deep, distressing groan. I don’t know what it means, and I’m searching for the right words, words to explain why I’ve got her out of bed in the middle of the night and to tell her that there’s something I must ask her that’s terribly difficult for me to ask, when there’s a crackle on the line followed by a drawn-out bleep. It’s some time before I realize that my mother has simply hung up.