Before (28 page)

Jiri's hand grips Anna's tightly, and she says, “Jiri?”

He shakes his head. “No, later.”

In the old black-and-white photographs, when he'd returned to them from the window that evening in Nuremberg, the female bodies, the curves of torn, human flesh, were doused with fuel, some of the women still alive, and set afire. The fire trembled against the horizon.

Jiri watches the police car, the van, another police car leave. Anna is urging him forward, for the crowd is dispersing. Jiri will not tell her right away. She sees that he is subdued but chalks it up, he believes, to what has just happened here, in the neighborhood. She is saying something, that this is all very dangerous. He wants the certainty of morning before he speaks of his mother and sister: the wall of daylight holding off darkness, night, before he makes it all completely real by telling his wife.

They go back to bed and after forty minutes his wife sleeps, and Jiri, his heart filled with grief, rises and puts on pants and a flannel shirt and the jacket and his shoes. He takes his cane and keys and locks the door and goes down the elevator to the back exit, to the garage, turns on lights, these bulbs shining above him; he stands in the dew-wet, cement-smelling space, his Buick clean there, a heavy red metal shadow. The bulbs throw black shapes all around him. He imagines daybreak, Anna listening to his memory of the SS images with her steady, believing eyes; she will go into the living room to call Shelley and tell her the situation, that she will not be in to work. Perhaps she will call Marjorie Legnini. Maybe Tika will come by during the day, too. That would be good, to see Tika. He opens the hood and checks the oil and the windshield fluid, then shuts the hood as quietly as possible and opens the driver's-side door and gets in, his hands tight on the steering wheel.

Wasn't Tika here earlier this evening? He
thinks
so. She had dinner with them. And why the devil were they just standing at Alison's doorway? God
damn
it, he cannot remember. He remembers the photographs, though, all those years ago on that winter night. Nuremberg. His mother and Helena against the sky. Burning.

The car feels musty—air closed here for too long—and he is crying like a goddamn baby.
Son of a bitch
. He could kill those Nazi bastards now as freshly as he did in the months, the three years, after Lidice. He puts his forehead on the steering wheel. His chest shakes with the ragged emotion, and he tries for a deep breath, but he cannot stop the shaking.

The garage looks like a kaleidoscope of light and dark: a shape of hedge clippers on the wall, a shovel, a rake. He leans back against the headrest, trying to gain some control of himself. He closes his eyes and sees Lidice: the village below him just before he entered the forest that last night.

He gets out of the Buick and walks out onto the driveway, back and forth, sometimes holding his head, the light of the garage casting his shadow in an arc against the chain-link fence at the end of the property. He can hear his mother's voice quite clearly, talking with his father in the garden:
Co se mu stalo? What has happened with Jiri?
He can see his mother's face, her eyes turning to him. He hears his sister mixing dumplings in the kitchen, the sounds of cicadas on the hill that goes down to the Horák farm. He goes around to the front of the apartment building and walks the sidewalk, speaking in Czech to himself, talking to his mother and father and sister. It is only after a long while that he is able to breathe a little more steadily.

EIGHTEEN

On the Coast of Maine: September 1996

Simon Jacob Acre turns on the lights of his house, kneels to the gasoline can, removes the cap. He gets up and pours a line on the blue-and-beige-patterned rug, over the armchairs facing each other, the duvet between them. There is a repeating call from a bird outside, the sound of the ocean below on the rocks, restless in early twilight. He pours past the cane dining table and onto a wall by the French doors. He opens the French doors to the sun porch, sweeps a bit of gas there. Up the stairs then, pouring as he goes, into the master bedroom, standing on the old bench at the foot of the bed, splashing the gasoline heavily onto the mattress, onto the walls, the floral-patterned draperies. He imagines the firemen saying to an open-eyed Jenna,
It started in the bedroom
. Oh, please God they tell her this. The gallon is empty; he throws it onto the bed. He steps through the sliding door onto the wide, screened-in sitting porch. The ocean is there, darkening, a crest of light at the horizon. He feels, suddenly, expansive; he has been living within the horror of Jenna's infidelity for five weeks now, and it can be over with this, with pulling the cloth from his pocket that he has weighted with a heavy, small piece of wood. He sets it aflame and imagines Jenna's eyes in disbelief—it cannot be that the man who always tried so hard to please her has this kind of fury in him. The news people will come interview the neighbors; Mrs. LaRoe, next door, will say,
He was such a quiet, hardworking man, I can't believe it.

He throws the flame and there is a last near moment of silence, the unassuming sound of birds and cicadas, the flame on the bedspread.
Foom.
The bed explodes and Simon ducks out onto the balcony; the drapes are afire, licking quickly onto the ceiling, and just before he turns to go down the outdoor stairs, Simon sees the fire blackening the mattress.

He walks down the spiral staircase and does not look back until he has nearly crossed the lawn. The birds now seem to be calling out an emergency to one another, and the sun porch is completely engulfed and a dark cloud is rising from the roof, rolling against the sky. His green Mercedes is up here, through this small grove of woods, on the abandoned dirt road.

He drives in a calculated fury down the darkening coast. He has a suitcase in the backseat with clothes and cash; in another car that waits for him in a drugstore parking lot there are more clothes and cash and a number of new identities. After half an hour of driving he gets onto Route 9, controlling his speed a little more carefully; the road winds above cliffs, by cold, majestic homes that are lit against the sky. His headlights sweep over oak, ragged pine trees. Here the road rises; the sea stretches before him, a dark eternity. Here is the dirt pull-off. He slows, and then, where the dirt begins to pitch downward again, he opens the door and
now
goes out shoulder first, rolling, a crack to his head and elbow, scuttling under the scrub brush. Stunned, he watches the Mercedes drift down, picking up speed, toward the guardrail; just yesterday, at eleven at night, he checked that the rail was loose enough not to hold the weight of the car, and the car snaps through easily now. The drivers'-side door swings open as the car bumps over the cliff, taillights blazing, and the vehicle is gone with a heavy, brief explosion of sound. Ghost-Man ducks, for a car whooshes by, lights washing over the trees above where the Mercedes has gone. There are lights on in a mansion high above him, but he doubts he was seen if someone was on the lawn; all they would have noticed, quite distantly, would have been the hesitation of the car and the lights continuing into the trees, then going out. Still, he must quickly get moving.

He raises himself painfully—tests his joints. His arm seems all right. By the time he makes his way to see the car it is almost fully submerged, taillights and green disappearing sluggishly into the waves. He goes back behind cottonwood trees and thickets of sumac and witch hazel, picking his way along the rocky coast—something he practiced yesterday as well—until he is out of eyesight of the mansion. Then he is on the dark highway. Everything seems large and solid, too still, suddenly, after his frenzied evening. A ten-minute walk and he is at an intersection that leads to a small village; the pharmacy is only two miles away. A dog is barking, and the sound and smell of the sea become more distant. There are insects sounding here in the weeds. Ghost-Man walks, watches pale summer homes in the darkness.

*   *   *

Many hours later, at a hotel in Pennsylvania, Ghost-Man gets up and throws sheets aside and does not turn on lights. His arm at the elbow and shoulder is bruised, throbbing. There are rivulets of water light dancing on his shade and ceiling, and he raises the shade and sees what woke him: Someone has turned on the lights of the pool.

He is on the second floor and as he looks down a group of drunks are coming out, laughing, some jumping into the water, and someone—the manager—is admonishing them and the pool light goes out again and what is left is the roof of the hotel, a flag flying, an astonished moon. And the drunks go off to bed and very soon a square light of window just below, across the courtyard, comes on, and the occupants have drawn only lace curtains and Ghost-Man can see a man and a woman, just arrived from the night of revelry, kissing. The woman reaches both arms across, swiftly takes off her dress, then falls on the bed, pulling the man atop her, her legs enveloping him. There is laughter. Ghost-Man watches. His hands grip the windowsill; his eyes remain fixed on the figures below.

NINETEEN

In the darkness behind her lace curtains Tika is being filled, and she lets herself go with Jesse's lovemaking, lets herself scream with it, for Susan is gone and her landlord's bedroom is in the back of the building and it seems as though the darkness is a conspirator, and she loves that she can tease Jesse and make him grow hard and then he can take her like this, and these moments of release. Whenever Susan is here their lovemaking is tense and exciting and quiet, but now she screams with Jesse's thrusting, and it feels that her mouth could not go wider, and when Jesse turns her over she pushes her face into the pillow and takes that cloth with her teeth and feels the rawness of her scream in her throat, her chest, vibrating in her collarbone.

She lies in his arms after, backed up to him, shielded by his lovely nakedness. The faint light from the street comes through the curtains and in a swath across the bed, across the door of the bedroom. The clock beneath her bedside lamp reads 4:05, burning numbers that make her bracelet there, her watch, red as well. The streetlight dims and is blocked for a moment and Tika turns and looks to the window but nothing is there.

She nestles back to Jesse, his thick arm in sleep thrown haphazardly across her breasts. She strokes his forearm, massaging with her fingers the muscles surrounding thumb, strong wrist. In his sleep, he groans. She thinks about the moment she can bring Jesse to, as he makes love; he works for so long that he is exhausted, and then she can say something into his ear, or touch his scrotum, or arc her body toward him and spread her legs a little wider and it is suddenly as if another being in him takes over—this is how it is for her, too—and in that place beyond exhaustion Jesse pushes beyond his pounding heart; he tells her that in orgasm he sees, momentarily, light. Tonight before her own orgasm she saw the circle of Arabian dancers, the spinning veils and gowns and hands; she made a circle of her legs, wrapped them around Jesse, holding him, bringing him into his light.

In a dream later Tika hears the sound of a woman crying with grief. Someone has lost a dog. Who is saying those things? Not Kascha, for Kascha has told Tika many times that she would like a dog, but that with her travel schedule it wouldn't be fair. Such sad, hysterical grief. Tika feels the mattress shifting, Jesse sitting up—that cannot be a dream—but her arms are so heavy and independent that she has not a chance of rising. She senses Jesse's lips on her cheek, hears his voice saying, “I'll check it out, honey.” His weight lifts and she thinks she says,
Thank you, sweetie, thanks for taking care of it. Someone is very unhappy.
But she is not sure she's said the words, is almost positive she did not, and Jesse's footsteps creak across the floor and soon she hears him go out the back.

She and Jesse have pulled into a gas station and the landscape around them is barren and as they get out of the car there are a lot of people there looking for a dog. Someone walks on the roof of the station. How the hell would the dog get up there? She wakes to footsteps on the floorboards coming from the back door. She stretches for a moment, anticipating Jesse, and she will ask him about the dog. The dog? Not a dream then, but a woman crying with grief, saying,
“Someone killed my dog,”
and this wakes Tika and there is a man who is not Jesse standing there, looking at her fiercely in this darkness and she screams and his hand is on her mouth and she is struggling, turning, pulling away and the hand is roughly replaced by cloth that smells of gasoline, she is choking on it and her hands are slapping back in terror but the cloth is jerked tighter and she screams in her throat and smells flesh of fist and the man pulls her upright, to get her on her knees, her neck cracking with this force and the voice is saying, “Sshhh, Christ, just listen. Just
listen
to me. I just will tell you, and then you'll know, and I'll be gone, just for once stay still and fucking
listen
 —”

Tika reaches and grasps the lamp and swings her arm with it hard, the cord snapping from the wall. She has aimed for the window, but the lamp falls short, ceramic and lightbulb shattering, and the gag tightens fiercely as Tika scrambles, trying to reach the clock, anything that she can throw. “
Goddamnit, fuck,”
the voice is saying, tight and controlled, close to her ear,
“just won't fucking listen.”

Snapping her head back, the man begins to drag Tika off the bed. Still she kicks, tries to get her hands back at him, her fingers into his eyes, listening to the man breathe, horse breaths, and he says, “Oh God, oh my
fuck
ing God”—is he crying?—“now you fucked up everything. I could have just fucking
talked
to you. That's
all,
to make you
see
.”

There is rapping, pounding at the front door; Jiri's cane, Jiri is here. Oh, sweet Jiri. “Tika.
Tika
. What is going on?
Open this
.” And there is a hesitation and then Jiri is smashing the glass and the man holding Tika is saying,
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,”
and Tika hears Jesse's voice at the back of the house, pounding on the door there, and the man and the cloth suddenly are gone, a knife, a package of papers sprawling on the floor, and when Tika looks up she sees the figure of the man in her bedroom doorway, his head turned toward the back, for now Jesse is breaking the door open and yelling her name in the hallway, and the man, in that dim light, that heavy smell of fuel everywhere, swivels his head and disappears and bangs through the front door, and Tika looks through the window, and then Jesse is beside her, holding her, and on the porch the man from the darkness and Jiri are grappling, Jiri's white fingers holding the man's waist; in their struggle Tika sees a moment, a glance of Jiri's teeth in the dark.