Читать книгу Promiscuous Unbound - Bex Brian - Страница 13

She is haunting me. Go away. You’re not even dead. I want to be haunted by dead people. She won’t move and I can’t. Gone mad. Bonkers, crazy, twisted. Tons of words for that slipped knot. Crossed over, from framed panic into boundless madness, no longer held together, mind or spirit. Shape-shifted. The blue-black air is dense with possibilities. She has brought her smell. Rank. Pissy. Four days walking through the summer heat. But there is no earth, no dust. Her smell is high, assaulted by soaps, powders, disinfectants. First she peed, then she shat. Familiar signposts on the untraveled road leading to madness. Now the other patients are weary of her. Sonia is disgusted. Perhaps then she hovers at my door because Sonia is asleep and the refugee knows I know that look in her eyes, the crazy look, the one so familiar in a familial sense, the look of sudden flight—no escaping that, was there, Dad?

My father. I was forgetting him. And now this ghostly woman, whose mind and motive I cannot read, brings him to me. Is there an honor code among the mad? My father. He’s here now. And I am to remember. Flight no different from that of a startled blue jay. Botswana. Lake Turkana. Ellesmere Island. Samos. Remember Greece? One end of the island to the next, just him and me again. (Funny, how he claimed all those trips were on a whim, and yet the feel of menace stalked us, as if in our solitude the world’s darker corners would be revealed.) We had abandoned on a whim the film crew, and the army of young personal assistants who screwed him even though they were paid to take care of me.

A hot bus, smelling of orange rind and diesel fuel, grinded its way up the mountainside. “In a billion years,” he shouted over the roar of the engine, “the sun is going to grow hotter as it burns its fast-depleting fuel. The oceans will start to evaporate, creating a greenhouse effect, so things will get very hot down here, then hotter still as the water disappears. The atmosphere will become just like Venus’s. Can’t live on Venus. We’ll have to move the earth.”

I didn’t understand.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a plan. We’ll rein in a gigantic asteroid with enough gravitational pull and have it pass by to yank us out a little farther from the sun. Do this every few years and save life on earth, if that’s important to you. Of course, if the asteroid hits us that would be that and the sun can go on its merry way to extinction.”

The bus started to careen down the other side of the mountain. He held on to the bar on the seat in front. I couldn’t reach and had to fight hard not to rock into him.

“Nobody goes to this part of the island,” he said. “It holds no interest. There aren’t any beaches, although there is a little-used port.”

He was right. We were the only ones to get off the bus. All I could see was a white, hot, empty town square and a lone boy sitting outside a cafe, his chair tilted far back against the wall, a gun across his lap. He was looking cross-eyed at something crawling in and out of his shirt collar. “Look,” I said, pointing, “there’s a giant beetle on that boy.” My father raised his hand to shield his eyes. I was expecting to be told the beetle’s scientic name. As I waited for him to speak I could see the vast, sun-blanched sea stretching far out behind him. And then he was gone. It took me a moment to realize it. The boy and I stared at the space he had just occupied. I don’t remember the sound of his receding footsteps. There was no sound at all. I didn’t dare move.

What happened next? There was no next. The memory stops. A blank hole carved by paralyzing fear. That’s why people are stupid. We expect answers. If I think, if I pray, if I stay still long enough . . . bull-fucking-shit. A blank hole is a blank hole.

I’ll turn and tell her that.