My Little Blue Dress (32 page)

August 27th—Friday

Why everything.

Michelle, . . . as I examine you this morning I find myself overcome, by all the usual fondness, obviously, but also by a degree of concern. Are you doing okay? Are you bearing up? Not crumbling a shade around the edges after all this terrible reading marathon? Sentence after sentence after sentence . . . paragraph after paragraph . . . chapter after chapter after literally chapter . . . ? Mm? Michelle? Are you okay? Can you hear me?

No no actually no
shhhhhh
, Michelle.
Shhhhhhhhh
. Don't try to speak. No fuss. Don't buck and heave. You're the tiredest little sausage in all the land, Michelle. Lie still, lie still and rest now. Nothing more is required of you. You just lie there and be still, you hot little slip of a reader. I'll do all the work, just like I've been doing it all night. I've done it all for you, Michelle, think about it. I've been your eyes, your ears, your walking stick, your nose, your fingertips, your sixth sense, your seventh, your ninth, your twelfth, not to mention, of course: your eyes, your ears, the hairs on the back of your neck, your metal detector, your smoke alarm, the thing that alerts you to wind shear . . .

Your
dawn module
.

I am your dawn module also, Michelle, in which capacity I have news:

It's dawn
.

Michelle,
dawn
is coming up. Michelle, a filament of tiny pink is breaking far away in the chilly eastern sky as I make these very words. Let the record reflect that this day began at

28 AUG--4:29
A
.
M
.

from where I stood, when I saw the dawn and reported it to you. This moment is never to be repeated and I am wasting time.

Michelle, I was telling you why everything.

 

I believe I left off with Bruno Maddox sitting in an air-o-plane in the sky pointed back toward England feeling utterly, utterly sane, despite his situation. He is on his absolute best behavior, Michelle, and it is paying massive dividends vis-à-vis his state of mind. They have told him to keep his seatbelt fastened if he isn't moving about the cabin and he has done so. They have encouraged him to eat a meal and swallow multiple beverages and he has willingly complied. Slightly above him, slightly in front of him, a drawing of a cigarette has a line through it and, Michelle, he has not smoked. Life, Michelle, has not been quite this easy and obvious for the microscopic little fellow in quite some time and as we tunnel on backward through the black of night he finds himself growing saner still.

For he has, it dawns on him, no obligation. Though Clark and Hayley are also in the air, also bound for
London's Heathrow Airport, and despite the agony and the madness of the day just exited, there is no pressure on the boy to do
anything at all
. He is merely going home. As people do. Hayley and Clark do not
know
that he is hunting them. Should he choose not to make an ambush at the airport, but instead to slip away, to become one with the crowd, to visit family, and/or friends, frequent old haunts, he is
perfectly at liberty to do so
.

And so, Michelle, the young man sleeps, with no decision made.

28 AUG--6:33
A
.
M
.

Awakening, Bruno finds that dawn has broken for him, much like it broke for us, Michelle, you and I, oh so recently. His neck is stiff but his heart is light. England can be seen below, through the clouds, that misted island of the viscous Past. Excited and bodiless I float to the porthole and peer to catch a glimpse of Murbery . . . ! But alas! The clouds are too thick, the village of my birth too nonexistent, for me to properly make it out. Captain Mazzocks prepares the flight crew for our final descent, the air-o-plane sluices this way and that for what seems like several minutes and then all of a sudden . . .

Eep
. We do land.
Rumble
. We taxi to the gate. All is serene, but with the
ping
of the seatbelt sign that serenity is broken. As all around him stand to collect belongings and he has none of his own to collect, the boy feels fear for the first time in hours, fears the old fears storming the beaches again, fear about what he might be about to do, fear about what he has already done might mean about how sane, or not, he
really is. At Immigration and then Customs, the young man yearns to be stopped, to be taken aside and have the sense kicked into him by officials . . . but no, as a lifelong Caucasian he glides through like a ghost and is borne through sliding doors into the body of the airport where he ambles down the boulevard of broken chauffeurs with their hand-lettered signs:

 

LORD KING

MULTIZONE

“MR SKINNER”

SPRUCE

 

But he is none of these. There was a time, Michelle, when he might have stopped to wonder, might have stopped to wonder whether he
was
in fact Spruce, whether this was the clue he'd always been waiting for . . .

Not today, though, Michelle.

He is in England.

This is his
home
, his turf, his demesne, his veldt. His sanity and poise resurge to hitherto unseen levels and in low-vent ash-colored embrace of his native land Bruno Maddox remembers who he is.

He is the Hunter.

And, Michelle, why not? Why not be the Hunter? Nowhere is it written in the laws of Nature that a Hunter must necessarily
confront
his prey. A Hunter's mandate is solely to hunt, to stalk, to spy, to
know
 . . .

Thinking on his feet the Hunter establishes himself in the Café Metro, a faux-French bistro-oasis amidst the madness of the world's busiest airport. With burnished wooden dais and
railings of brass, the Café Metro is a little slab of nineteen twenties Paris installed in twenty-first-century England and the Hunter quickly sizes up the place's elements and bends each one to his purpose. An upholstered booth becomes the Hunter's lair and a cappuccino his binoculars. Through its steam he scans the fresh Arrivals as they are borne through sliding doors: the weak-chinned English, sunburned in their cowboy hats and mouse ears, the Americans slick with moisturizer in their unwrinklable travel trousers . . .

Flicker flicker flicker.

Flicker flicker flicker.

The large mechanicized board emits a
flickering
sound, Michelle, as it cycles through points of departure and flight numbers and arrival times . . .Oslo, Hungary, Paris, Arabia . . . the names
become
one other, Michelle. Letter by letter they slowly transform, like the identities of characters in a dream . . .

And then suddenly boom.

By the looks of her, Hayley Iskender has had a sleepless, uncomfortable flight, and possibly a sleepless and uncomfortable couple of years. Her ponytail is all bulging out one side and her skin is more lined and gray and papery than usual. Her cardigan clings to her waist like an exhausted child in need of love.

Clark of course is fine, as stubby and indestructible as ever in what seems to be a
new
black leather jacket—though perhaps he has merely oiled up his old one with some secret rural unguent. The pair of youngish elopers—the
Prey,
Michelle—are trudging several yards apart, but the short, hairy Man is towing
two
sets of luggage—which
irks
the Hunter in his lair, Michelle, irks him
considerably
 . . .

And yet he keeps cool, in fact sinks fractionally back into the upholstery of the Lair. Observing them, the way they are, tired and unsure in a strange new land, the Hunter feels something approaching pity for Hayley Iskender and Mark Clark. This day will not be easy for them. Soon jet lag will gnaw at their connective tissues, strange money will scramble their brains, new standards in food preparation and general service will give them the sensation of stepping off a cliff into ice water. Hard as he is—and, Michelle, he is jungle toughened—the Hunter knows that there are times when it is wrong to pounce, when the hunting gods would prefer the prey to live to die another day. The Hunter is not the sort of person who

 

Quickly he is up, and moving, supple as water as he flows along and off his banquette, away across the burnished dais and into the crowd. The Prey are passing down the boulevard of chauffeurs and the Hunter matches their speed, so that when the railings dwindle, when it is all just unstructured and formless milling, the Hunter is right there with them, close enough to touch.

“Hey” is his quiet line. Nothing comes of it. They cannot . . . they
will not
acknowledge the Hunter, though he is inches close.

“Hey.”

Michelle, it is the girl who stops first. She stops and she turns and she sees. The other one, the Man, just keeps bareling ahead, increasingly dimly aware that over his shoulder lies a developing situation, but refusing to let it stop him. He's got the bridles of two rollables wrapped securely around his fingers and he seems to have made it his mission to keep tugging them, no matter what, much like Olaf Ver Olafson used to drag parked cars crammed with bimbos to
world's-strongest-man glory from 1978 to 1984, or like how the wise old carthorse used to tug his cart home in the dusk from Brapton up to Muffly Forge oh so many years ago. Now even he stops, though, and turns and sees.

“Welcome to England.” The Hunter's voice is cool and dark. “I have followed you here.”

And nothing comes of it, not immediately, or hardly anything. There's a very quick flash of emotion visible in the girl, a moment of rage and frustration, though it is not directed at the Hunter, necessarily. Indeed a person walking past at speed might think instead that Hayley Iskender has rage for the ten-member family of Africans loitering behind the Hunter, for it is them the rage is pointed at, but very very quickly it leaves, the rage, and like Clark she studies the Hunter, waiting for direction.

“Er . . .” says the Hunter, making a face.

His embarrassment is contagious. Hayley Iskender actually blushes. The man Mark Clark looks away and scratches his eyebrow. It feels strange to them, I reckon, the embarrassment. Is this what it feels like being English? Mark Clark might be wondering. Though then again . . .

“What are you doing?” Hayley wonders out loud.

Aping Clark, the Hunter scratches his eyebrow. “I'm having a coffee. Over there.”

“Do you need to talk to me?”

“Um. No. Yes.”

“I'm going to talk to him,” says Hayley to the suitcase man.

“Okay.”

And with a jerk of the Hunter's wingless head they are off, tunneling through the crowd like a colonial expedition through the jungle: the Hunter in front, seasoned and
machete wielding; Hayley Iskender in the middle, hot and bothered white woman, titillated by all the wildness; then of course the miniature little hired native bringing up the rear with the suitcases. Reaching his lair the Hunter pulls back the mosquito netting, shepherds Hayley inside, and gives Mark Clark a look that seems to say
go wait over there,
which Mark Clark does. In a booth across the dais the smaller man wedges his precious cargo of luggage beneath the table and sits sideways on the edge of the banquette, hunched over, fingers all multipled over his mouth, just staring. The Hunter slides into the lair and treats the girl to a toothless smile.

She just looks at him.

He looks at her back.

“I'm going to leave now,” says the girl.

The Hunter nods, then catches himself and shakes his head. “No, come on. Don't.”

“Why not?”

He thinks. “I don't know. You know. Final conversation. Or something.”

She just looks at him.

“How are you, for instance?”

She ceases looking at him, drops her eyes to his steaming binoculars.

The Hunter speaks again. “Look, I hope you don't think I'm following you. I just wanted to see if you were okay.”

“I'm not okay.”

“Sorry?”

“I'm not okay. I don't know what I'm doing anymore.”

The Hunter nods and sips casually at his binoculars. “Can I ask a stupid question?”

“Yes.”

“What
are
you doing here?”

Michelle, I hate to interrupt but I feel I really have to point out that there is something about the Hunter's demeanor that is just
undeniably
suave and intoxicating. He seems to be changing again, Michelle. He is still the Hunter but no longer is he savage. He's just a hunter of information now, a man who crossed an ocean because he was curious, a global thinker . . . and it suits the Hunter, this new reasonableness, sipping his binoculars like that and calmly blinking. In fact, he's magnificent.

Not so the girl, whose mouth has become literally an upside-down
U
of unhappiness as she stares down at the Hunter's souvenir Café Metro napkin which she has taken upon herself to rend into a thousand pieces with her long, unfeeling fingers. Oh, and periodically she is swallowing with her long throat. “I'm here with Mark. He's been offered a job and the company paid for him and a companion to fly over for an interview. He called me up at work yesterday and asked me if I wanted to come with him.”