Fugue
edMalignant Self Love Narcissism
Revisit
After the Rain How the West Lost the East
A World in Conflict and Transition
"It is June", she says. The anxiety wells in the contours
of her contorted face as she leans closer to me and scrutinizes my evasive
gaze. I am in January and she is in my future, in the June of my life. Her eyes
suspicious slits, wrinkled in the twilight zone between disbelief and fear and
self-delusion. These months, a temporal abyss. She
passes a hesitant hand through my hair and eyes her fingertips wistfully. She
asks where I have been. "Here", I retort, "where else?" Where else, indeed. I am here in the month of January and it
is searing hot and flowers and bees aflutter and the sun, an incongruous disc
high in the sky. "It is June", she repeats, "and you have been
gone for months." She elevates her lithe frame and sighs as she glides
towards a half-opened door. Then she pauses, her hand on an immaculately
polished metal handle. "The Police say they found you in the city,
wandering, aimless, disoriented, half-naked." She
studies me, hunting for a flicker of recognition, an
amber of admission. In vain. The voices of
exuberant children drift through the window and hang like pulsating smoke
in mid air. She shrugs resignedly and shuts the door behind her. Minutes later
she returns with a sweaty jug of sparkling water. "It's hot," she
says, "it's summer, you know." I don't know,
but I gulp down the libation. She reclines on the worn armrest of the couch and
supports her oval face on a cupped and sensuous palm. "What have you been
doing all this time? Don't you have the slightest recollection? Can't you try
harder?" It's getting boring. I can't try harder. I can't try at all. I
don't know what she's talking about, except that she has a point about June.
Unless this is the hottest January on record, which deep inside I know it is
not. I study the floor tiles intently: aquamarine borders besieging a milky center. I count them. It gives me respite, it calms me
down. "What have you been doing so far away from home?" She utters
the convoluted, hyphenated name of a town I do not recognize. I shrug, it's
becoming a reflex. A snippet: a man walking; the sounds of a raging sea as
it confronts a barrier; the haunting lament of a solitary seagull. I shrug
once more. She sighs and retreats, a whoosh of warm, perfumed air, a presence
withdrawn in feigned resignation. But I know better than that: she never
relents, that's the way she is. How can I be so certain? How could I have
become acquainted with such an intimate detail if we have never met before as I
so tenaciously maintain? It may well be June, she may well be right. There is a
tiny fairy-tale house directly on the beach, its foundations bone-bare, gaping
in limestone and steel-pierced concrete. The man is inspecting these exposed
ribs of a beached abode, kneeling and fingering the walls in a curious cross
between sacro-cranial massage and a caress. I cannot
see his face, just the crew-cut of his hair and the outline of his sagging jaw.
Then it's gone and she busies herself with a cigarette, the lighter clinks as
it hits the reflective surface of a rotund glass stand. I watch her silhouette
in the hallway mirror. She is a zaftig woman, her hair long and unbraided, eyebrows unplucked,
two simmering coal lumps for eyes and a pale rendition of a mouth. She may well
be a vampire. But sunlight is streaming through every crack and opening, a
yellow, ethereal emanation, distinctly unsuited to zombies and other creatures
of the night. Eerie apparitions jostle on the television screen, cut in half
by potent words scrawled atop captions and banners: something about a
family found murdered, stakes driven through their hearts while asleep. She
says from the doorframe: "This happened a few days ago in (again the
unutterable name of that town)." And then: "They are still looking
for the killer." I nod. The man is raising a glove-clad hand
and peruses it in fascinated horror: the garment is
bloodied and torn. He peels it off and tucks it into the crevice that
underlies the house. The wind is howling. He scoops up sand and lets it drip
through a funneled palm. Upstairs a
woman and her children. He shudders at the thought. There's something familiar
in the man, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I wish him to
turn around so that I could see his face, but the man just keeps facing
the wall, his back to the foaming sea, on his haunches, ramrod straight,
frozen in time, in a grey January morning. January.
Not June. A tsunami of relief: it couldn't have been me. I was here in
January, almost throughout the entire month. With her?
She stubs out the cigarette and re-enters the room. She catches glimpse of the gory news. Her voice is firm, determined:
we have to talk. Talk, I say. "You vanished one January day ..." What
day? On January 23. Go on. "You did not make
contact since. A week ago, six months after you have gone missing, the Police
found you ..." Yes, yes, I know, dishabille, rambling, incoherent.
"When was this family killed?" I catch her off-guard. She veers
towards the blaring set and then: "Their bodies were discovered a few days
ago, skeletons really. They seemed to have been butchered months before, no one
knows exactly when." An oppressive interlude. Why
did it take so long to find them? "They have just relocated. No one
knew them, the kids didn't even register at
school yet." Kids? As in how
many? Three, the youngest one four years of age.
The man ... was he the father, her husband? Her breath is bated: "What
man?" The murderer. "No one said anything
about a man. They don't know who did it, could have been a woman." And
then: "Why do you think it was a man?" It takes a lot of strength to
drive a stake through someone's chest, even a child's. "How would you
know?" - she whispers. Was she married? I insist,
an urgency in my voice that compels her to respond:
"She was a widow. Cancer. He died four years ago
to the day." What day? The day they were slaughtered.
There's such finality in her voice, it's chilling. A tidal
wave of apprehension. "You think I did it?" Her
turn to shrug. We contemplate each other in the waning light. Her hair
is glowing as she avoids my stare. Finally: "I know you did it."
Know? How? "You told me." I am overtaken by panicked indignation:
"I never did." She smiles wanly: "You were worn-out and
fatigued. You remembered nothing except that you have finished off a family of
vampires. You said you have made the world a better place." Vampires? "Vampires, like in the movies and the
books." She crouches besides me and takes my hand tenderly. Then she pulls
me off the couch and drags me through the penumbral corridors of her home.
"Where are we going?" She doesn't bother to respond. We climb some
stairs and walk the length of a carpeted landing. She turns a key and unlocks a
massive oak door. She stands aside and lets me enter first. "This is your
study." - she says. I want to deny it except the
words stick in my throat as I survey the cavernous space: photos of me everywhere,
and of us and professional certifications and award plaques and framed letters
to and from. Too many to forge, they resonate and reawaken, they overpower me.
I wander in, dazed and perplexed. A massive mahogany desk,
littered with papers and opened books whose spines are shattered by frequent
use. "Have a closer look", she suggests, quietly. I sink into an
overstuffed imitation leather chair and ponder the stacks. "Vampire
lore, vampire science, vampire films, vampire
literature," - she exclaims as she ruffles through the papers and the
dusty tomes, enunciating the titles. "The family ..." -
I mumble feebly. "A stake through the heart,"
she concurs, "the surest way to kill a vampire." "It's
still doesn't prove it's been me ..." "Oh, give me a break!" she
erupts and then clams shut and settles onto the window
seal, pondering the overgrown garden. "What will you do now?" I
ask and she quivers. There is a long silence, punctuated by our belabored breath and the rustling of dying leaves against
the window. Her skin is abnormally pale in the dusky orange-flaming sun. I
study her profile: the pronounced, hollow cheekbones, the deep-set sockets, the
venous neck, down to her arthritic, gnarled hands that keep clutching and unclutching an imaginary purse. I can't remember the shape
of her feet, or breasts, or womanhood. She is so alien, so out of my world.
"You really don't remember a single thing?" I don't, except the
maddening racket of the sea. The man springs to his feet. I feel he is about to
turn. My knuckles white against the armrests, I shut my eyes and look inward at
the unfolding scene. He swerves and, for a dizzying moment there I am afraid
that he will lunge at me, just cross the distance in a leap and drive a
sharpened stake down my spurting, protesting, convulsing heart. But, instead,
he merely smiles, awfully familiar and friendly-like, and hands me the dripping
implement. Then he waves his head in her general direction, something between
farewell and an admonition. He is full of empathy and compassion as he fades
and exits the darkened chamber.