Hunger's Brides (216 page)

[Equinox]

Gentle Reader, Gentle Don,

Come in. Come and dwell in me. I have prepared a place for you, I have opened a vein. Enter me quietly. Swim upstream, like a salmon, a virus, a bacterium. Come be my disease.

Your invitation—here I sign it, I sign with me. Come, sit down to eat. We will eat cool darkness. We will spew hot light. I am so tired now, I no longer believe. In this … it is so late for theories. But I have opened a way. Here, another. Hotter, brighter.

Will this make you come faster?

We will eat our deaths, we will vomit up our lives. We will become each other, the enemy of both sides. How I have fought to make you me, how I have fought to make me you. And now I make us both and neither.

This final test, it is exactly time. When I no longer believe, when none of this must be, when there is new life, new fire. Now, exactly now, a test of faith, when there is another way for me—here, I open one more to you.

Still you haven't come. So many times I have called. Do not be angry. Do not resent me, Gentle Don, that I have wished you other than you are. My other, the one you might have been. Have you ever seen your face? I have seen it. Here, I will burn your mask away. So you can meet him, too, face to face.

Together you will see such
wonders
.

I bring you fire. I have come to burn your house down, Don. To the ground, so you can build it new. I am so tired. I cannot wait much longer. Here, I open a new way for you. Wider, shorter, hotter. Hurry now.

Where are you? Your supper's getting cold. I have cooked meat for you, no fat no bone. Are you ever coming home?

Sheet after sheet, I have tended this small fire. To feed you my liver, baked fresh each dawn to make you strong. To feed you my heart, cupped wildly beating in your palms.

We too have loved an impossible love. Haven't we Don?

Where are you? Is that you—at the window?

Hurry please. We can go a little way together. I'll walk you to the door. Come, let's go see what's on the far shore. Of you, of me, of you and me. Do not be afraid. Bend, Don, you will not break. Bend to me. We are not made of glass. You have opened me. Now I open me to you. I am open to the future, can you be too?

You are so late now. I hoped we could talk. I have found new things for us to talk about …

But still you are not here, you haven't come. You will have to finish for yourself now.

You will be my clay. Bright Child, this is what I've waited so long to tell you. You will be my greatest art, as I am yours. We were always twins, we are ever other. We are made of dark and light, we rise to fall to earth again, through nights without end.

Bright Child, born of Night. Who are you?

You are not you, I am not I. Is it really true that two in one must die?

You walk to me through fire, through night. There is such a brightness in your eyes. That flows from us, that flows through you and me. Have you seen? See it on our hands—see? Feel it running through our hands, so
lightly
.

I hear you at the door. I call out to you.

And oh, Bright Child,
God … how I have loved you
, these long years.

E
PILOGUE
        

T
HE PLANE BEGAN
its slow descent somewhere over Montana. From six miles in the air the blond earth was like a pelt, the matted flank of an elk in spring. I knew this country, searched it now for some sign of the season. Patches of snow in gullies, the faintest green on south-facing hills. At maybe two miles up, the patterns emerged. I'd forgotten this. No two fields ploughed or cut or seeded alike. Like a factory floor of shredded wheat; or microchips on some planetary circuit board. From lower down a twisted circuitry of coils and glints, of rivers in wooded draws. Then the sprawl and jumble of suburbs as we banked for the final approach.

On May 8th, 1995, I flew back to Calgary from Mexico City, after three days in London, three weeks in Mexico, thirty-six hours without sleep.

And after having known Beulah Limosneros little more than three years. It felt like ten. Ten years up the Amazon. Things I could not begin to explain even to myself. But I needed to, more than ever now.

It felt like lives. The life before her, the time with her. The slow time of forgetting. The lifetime since she called again on Valentine's. Another since the equinox.

I drove a rental directly to the Foothills Hospital. I'd called Dr. Aspen once or twice from Mexico. She was evasive about Beulah's progress, a little defensive. She seems to have been hoping I would be of more help. I would have liked that too, but before. When it might have made a difference. Before.

I found my way to Elsa Aspen's office.

She took a long look.

“Remind me never to vacation in Mexico.”

That beautiful, reedy voice, so much richer than over the phone. Dr. Aspen was still receptive to our working together. Beulah had no friends here that either of us knew of. “Friendship,” Dr. Aspen said, “can be a powerful thing.”

I stood looking at her.“I'm the last person you should take for Beulah's friend.”

“You're what we've got. It was you she called. Maybe not the best choice…. Anyway, you won't be alone with her.”

“So—
what
, you take notes, while I sit at her bedside patting her hand—‘Wake up, Beulah, wake up, it's Don, your old friend'?”

“You don't know, do you?” She frowned slightly “Of course you don't. I'm sorry.”

I sat a long moment across from her, looking past her desk, to the hills beyond her window. I thought about the many things I did not know, no longer knew, about not wanting to hear another.

“She's awake.”

“Awake.”

“For two weeks now. But hasn't spoken. No, her mind is fine, I think. She writes. Quite a lot, in fact. She's let me see a note or two. Her mind seems fine.”

“But then you didn't know her before.”

“Which is where you come in, if you're willing.”

“She has family.”

“That she refuses to see. Except the brother.”

“And?”

“He has her trust. I don't want him to lose it.”

“Which is where I come in.”

“It's thankless, yes…. I had no idea you'd find good news so upsetting.”

“Has she
asked
for me?”

“I'm not asking you to violate her trust, just general impressions. I've decided not to talk to the brother at all.”

“So she won't wonder.”

“She knows if you're here, it's because I've okayed it.”

“And she'll know why.”

“So if she talks to you …”

But she did not talk to me. I did not go in.

I got as far as glancing through the window panel in the door, where I was to wait while Dr. Aspen went in to prepare her. No farther. I had no business being there. I could not act the friend, though it was why I thought I'd come—why I did come. We had done enough to each other. She had her whole life before her.

Two beds, one empty. One name tag at the door. I didn't get a clear look at her in the bed under the window.

Stalling, I asked Dr. Aspen why Beulah didn't have her own room—her father was not short of money. No, it was a precaution, easier for
the nurses to keep an eye on things. But never mind that now. I stopped the good doctor as she reached for the door, I told her no.

Elsa Aspen was straight about one thing: she didn't judge. Not a trace of irritation in her eyes. “I understand,” is all she said.

I hoped, just then, she might explain it to me.

On the following day, May 9, Relkoff brought me a packet, sent from Mexico. Late for my birthday by just the one day. A slight imprecision in her calendar. The packet contained Beulah's last few chapters from the Yucatán, in a tone I'd never heard. But then there was a lot I had not heard.

I wondered if these chapters really were the last, though it said they were. I wondered how many more little packets of dread she might have sent, and which of those might still reach me.

And, small parts of the story were already lost.

In the afternoons, usually, I stop work on the manuscript to take drives out through the foothills.

Once, a long time back, this land was described to me as the undulation of an ancient breath, in one of my father's rapt disquisitions on geology. These were natural histories with the texture of myth, tales of alien chronologies and inscrutable motivations—vanished seas, and inexplicable returns. Rambling chronicles of titanic uprisings and eruptions. All the hecatombs—the vast dyings. Weaving from ditch to ditch, he'd especially loved to talk about oil, as
this rot that lights and warms the world
.