By Light Alone (32 page)

‘To keep me safe!’ she cried.

‘You are like a
child
. All you people, you’re like
children
. You’ve no idea what the grown-ups do so you can sleep safe and sound at night.’

This was too much. She leapt straight up, standing on the bed. ‘Don’t talk to me about the dangers of the world! You’re not the one who spent a year of your life in misery, in purdah, because your child was stolen from you. You tell me that I don’t understand? Tell me
what
?’ She felt the fury pour through her, like a poet from the ancient world visited by the Muse. She was channelling it. It was too powerful a force for the filigree structure of words to carry. ‘The cruelty of the world – the cruelty – hammering right into the heart of my life—’ She wanted to convey to him how deadly, how harrowing it had been, the violation of the family. She wanted to say how, when she looked at her daughter now, she saw a stranger. As if she could see the Bug living inside her. As if she could only see George in her face, and not herself in it, at all, any more. But all of this was too fiddly to express, there, then. Instead she howled. Wolf.

She jumped from the bed onto the floor. She was looking for something to throw at him, to batter him with. She wanted very acutely to hurt him, to mark him. But there was nothing to hand, and he was shouting something at her, his face weirdly, almost ecstatically, coiled and distorted. She could not even hear his words.

Then she was at him, slapping and punching, and he went down under the abruptness of her attack. A face possessed by surprise looks very like a face possessed by anger. And then, belatedly, he was countering her blows, trying to grab her wrists. She got in two or three satisfying thwacks to his big face, and wrung a twist of delight from her sluggish soul to see his astonishment, to see the skin blush with the blows. But then he had her – he was bigger than her – and he rolled. He was gasping out a series of ‘ah! ah! ah!’ noises. He pinned her under his bulk; and when she darted her head forward to try and . . . whatever, bite him, headbutt him, she didn’t know. He lifted himself up on his hands, on her wrists, to get out of range. She was aware of his belly sagging upon her own, moving as he shifted position. With a shriek she struggled, and struggled, and they were kissing, aggressively kissing, and before she knew it his cock was inside her again. She twisted her legs out and round to grip him, and he was squirming heavily in her arms, pushing his splodgy manhood into her over and over. They rolled over onto their sides, and then she was on top, and the roll continued. Out of the corner of her eye Marie saw a figure in the doorway – Leah – and then another figure, swooping her up with an adult arm and pulling her away, her carer. Then Arto was on top again and gruntingly thrusting, and she lost track of her surroundings, and herself, and she was pushing her own pelvis up to grind against his, and

Afterwards, since it wasn’t comfortable lying on the floor, they got onto the bed and lay, side by side, staring at the ceiling. For a long time neither said anything. Then Arto said: ‘I haven’t come twice in half an hour, like that, for years!’ And he laughed. Marie reached over and patted his stomach. ‘It’s been a while for me too,’ she said.

‘You’re a very special person,’ he said.

She felt that some significant change had occurred, that afternoon, in that room. That there was now no going back. She wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not. She thought of his face, uglified with anger. She remembered the profound satisfaction she had experienced as, unrestrained, she had punched at him. Leah’s face, blankly observing, flashed into her mind, but she put it aside. ‘Arto—’ she began to say.

He was chuckling, still. ‘You’re special to me, Marie,’ he said. And when he said that, she understood that he wasn’t chuckling at all. He was sobbing.

‘Arto, what’s the matter?’

‘Oh Marie!’ he said. ‘Oh! Oh Marie!’

This was unexpected, and it wasn’t very pleasant. Really it was very far from being pleasant. ‘My dear man,’ she said, awkwardly, unsure what to do. Then, dutifully, she slid one arm (with some difficulty) underneath him, and laid the other over his broad chest. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I’ve done such things,’ he gasped. ‘I’ve done such things!’

‘What things?’ she asked him, not because she wanted to know, but because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, and felt she had to say something.

‘I was in Florida, on a Standship,’ he said. ‘The sea was so thick with bodies you could have walked to the beach. You could have literally walked to the beach!’

‘There there,’ she said. ‘Shush, shush.’ This wasn’t right. She didn’t want to be the mamma. She didn’t want a full-grown man in her arms who was nothing but a supersize baby. But what could she do? He was hysterical. She wanted him to stop.

‘We killed so many of them. I did, I killed so many.’ His sobs had settled, and now he spoke in a sort of breathy monotone. ‘I expected to be shocked at killing them, and at first I was shocked, but after a while it stopped being shocking and became just boring. Became a chore, you know?’

‘I know,’ she said, although of course she knew nothing at all about it. But what else could she say. ‘Shush, shush.’ Why wouldn’t he shush?

‘But that’s a different sort of shock, though?’ He seemed to be getting his sobs under control. That was a relief. ‘A what do you call, a meta-shock? It doesn’t dawn on you at first, but then when you look back, you know? I got tired of the killing, but it had to go on.’

‘Shush all this talk of killing,’ she said, in as kindly a tone as she could. She could hear her own voice. She could hear that it wasn’t a very kindly tone at all. ‘Don’t upset yourself. It’s all nonsense, this talk. You didn’t kill anybody.’

‘Only longhairs,’ he said.

‘Shush,’ she said, stroking his chest.

He coughed, and ran a fat hand over his face. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy. But honestly, Marie—’ His voice sounded more normal now. ‘Honestly, it was like a slick.’

This made no sense. ‘Slick?’

‘You know. Like an oil slick. Just a mess of arms and legs flopping over one another, hair swaying in the water like seaweed. Paved with faces. The ones that live at sea wear floats, you know. In case they fall in, I suppose. So they don’t go under.’ He shifted his position. The crying had stopped now, and the tone of voice was more controlled. He was explaining, not confessing. ‘Some of them have proper buoyancy waistcoats, or whatever; some just have plastic or sealed bags tied around them. They’re in the water a lot, you see. But it means, the bodies don’t sink.’
Sink
was uttered with a worrying catch to his voice, so Marie spoke up briskly, to stop him dissolving again.

‘Let’s have a drink, yes?’

‘Oh yes.’ He stretched out his arms and legs, like a cat, stretching. ‘I’m sorry, sweet-bread, I’m sorry for losing it.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, firmly. She meant it.

So they had cocktails on the balcony, and watched the waterracers coming darting round the shoulder of Roosevelt and making the surface of the lagoon shiver. Arto talked a little more about his work with the government. Marie didn’t especially want to hear all this, but at least he wasn’t actually sobbing any more. So she listened, as politely as she could, and sipped her drink, and let herself unclench inside. She couldn’t evade the knowledge that this new intimacy made a difference to their relationship.

‘I haven’t spoken to anybody else about it,’ he said. ‘Only you. I haven’t spoken to another solitary human soul. Not since the army psychiatric debrief, I mean.’

With a little tingle of insight, she understood the ground of their new connection. It was trauma, and it was the way life’s flow gets twisted into tourbillons and eddies by the interruptions of trauma. She and he had it in common. Tentative, she explored the ground.

‘What anti-melancholics did the army give you? Not G
ē
nUp, I hope. There are much better treatments on the market than G
ē
nUp, believe me.’

‘There’s a government-only branding, Forward.’

‘What?’

‘You ever heard of that?’

‘I never have,’ she said.

‘It works pretty well.’

‘Forward,’ said Marie.

‘Sure. Forward. The trick it has: it makes it so that you don’t mind, any more; but – and this is the clever wrinkle – you do
mind
that you don’t mind. If you see what I mean. It doesn’t produce that zombie thing. That, uh, affectless blankness some of the other treatments give you.’

‘Perhaps,’ Marie suggested, ‘it doesn’t hold up so well in the case of sudden, strong emotion?’

‘Oh, well,’ said Arto, looking across the water at a dinodozer churning up some old building on the far shore. ‘I suppose none of them are too good at that.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘It doesn’t bother you?’

‘What?’

He swirled the last of his cocktail in the glass. ‘I’m not used to talking like this, you know.’

‘Does it
bother
me. You’re asking if it bothers me. Do you mean,’ Marie asked, ‘does it bother me that you’ve killed people in your time?’

‘Not that,’ said Arto.

‘No?’

‘Well, no! I know you well enough Marie. I know you. You have the soul of a warrior. You have the soul of a warrior. It was war, after all. It
is
war. You know that much, though. I’m not asking: does it bother you I
killed
people.’

‘So?’

‘I’m asking: does it bother you I had a breakdown?’ Ugh, what a word!

‘Breakdown?’ she snapped.

He nodded, mournfully. ‘Nervous breakdown, after Florida.’

That
was a cold-water shock to the soul, to Marie, and no mistake! So, so. She lost a portion of his next sentence, and when she tuned in again Arto was saying: ‘They posted me to the Queens garden project to help me recover, true, true. There are levels of stress that – well, anti-melancholics only go so far, don’t they? Sometimes the spirit is simply drowned by the weight of . . .’

‘Now,
don’t be silly
,’ she told him, fiercely.

Below them, the water was changing colour as the sun descended though the sky. There was a jellyfish tremor in the bulk of it, and the light slickly blushing. She sat next to him, conscious of the fact of this intimacy between them, a new importance. Falling in love, she thought, was a magnifying of importance. People in love were more important than people who were not in love. And the trauma they shared, she told herself, was more complex and ensnaring than she had at first thought. Because her trauma was not that she had lost her daughter but that
she had got her back
. Hers was not the misery of loss but precisely the happiness of reunion. And his trauma was not the violence. And she wasn’t a
monster
, she wasn’t interested in knowing all the horrible details, like some sort of voyeur, like a peeping-Tom, like a news-junkie. His violence was something else: not that the violence had shocked him, but precisely that the violence had not shocked him. Their affinity was more than elective.

He was what she deserved.

‘I love the way dusk comes out of the east,’ Arto said. ‘I love the way dusk comes out of the same place dawn comes. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I know what you mean.’

6

She knew exactly what he meant. This, rather than being with somebody when everything had to be spelled
out
, this was the genuine currency of love. Wasn’t it? Arto’s home was somewhere else in the Five States, Connecticut or somewhere, but he had a base in the city, in the Lower East Side, so as to be at hand for the rewilding project. A bare boxy space, uncluttered with the usual appurtenances of day-to-day. On occasion Marie would stay the night, and some sort of instinct would wake her before dawn. She might lie there, in his bed, listening to her lover breathing scrappily through his nose, as the white room filled up with light. She contemplated the way love comes into a soul, as light comes into a room. She felt a motionless horror, a sense of great misery pressing down upon her. The prospect of this new emotional greatness inside her was alarming rather than liberating. Shouldn’t it have been freeing? It wasn’t. Not that there was any mystery about what was going on. She went back to her therapist, Wiczek, who had done such a good job before, tweaking her prescription. ‘You said how great and sudden happiness is as disorienting to the psyche as great sorrow.’