The Book on Fire (26 page)

****

There
was no shortage of bones. No shortage of bones, days, space. Days and days he
raised his bone structures, his bone architecture, questing till the shape
surprised him, till he achieved a shape that stood apart from his endeavors,
that created its own life of shadows. He learned to recognize that surprise.
Sometimes he repeated himself and the repetition was fruitful, spawning new
forms, and sometimes the echoes died away, each duller than the last. Sometimes
he felt he was digging, with breastbone hatchet, scapula spade, digging for
some strange mineral, evanescent, and the seams dwindled, till he thought the
mine was barren and then, when he least expected it, a stroke uncovered
pockets, depths of riches. He learned to keep digging. He learned to pry into
the areas of least resistance.

He slept less, ate less. He became more enamored with sunlight and
shadow and their relationship. He looked at the shadows bones cast at different
times of day, and the shapes his own figure cast, the shadows he sometimes
thought of as an alphabet, a solitary alphabet moving through the city. In late
afternoon he stood sometimes on the balcony of his room manipulating his
shadow, a strange slow dance, arms raised, fingers joining and parting, torso
twisting this way and that, while on an interior wall shapes of light swelled
and closed, softening to suns the greater the distance between his body and the
wall.

****

He
woke from dreams of waking. He woke, and remembered waking, a dozen times, and
each time into an altered room, a room of voices, room of eyes, and he could
hear no single voice, could catch no individual glance. His memory was of the
throngs pressing about the bed. In one of his dream awakenings he had moved to
the balcony and seen the corniche crowded with souls, many more than he had
remembered, shuffling in the same direction. None looked his way. But he woke
at last into the empty room, into the sound of the sea, and realized he was
ill. The emptiness was like a pain, a cube of pain around his skull. He
shivered, though the sun lay across the floor. His eyelids scraped as though
over sand, he felt scoured by wind and sand, parched. He sat up to drink a
little water, lay back exhausted, crowned with perspiration. After a while he
vomited thinly onto the floor. He vomited again and again, the spasms twisting
his torso, pulling moans from his lips, till only strands of mucus dripped, and
still his stomach contracted. At last the spasms subsided and he lay back. He
was trembling and thought he ran a fever. His skin felt dry and finely textured
as leaves. He slept again. All that day he slept and woke and as the afternoon
wore into evening the ghosts that inhabited his dreams entered his waking
moments. He was horrified by them, by these apparitions that refused to look
him in the eye.

They stood in the corners of the room, at the foot of the bed, on
the balcony, and their faces were just beyond recall. Looking into their faces,
which were strangely hard to focus upon, he had the immediate impression he’d
seen them before, but the longer he stared the more that notion faded, so he
glanced face to face, roving to sustain the sense of recognition. They
whispered, but he could not catch their lips moving, and the words, like the
faces, never quite clarified. The evening, far from diminishing the
apparitions, filled the room with them. He slept and woke, and there were
always more, though he began to notice that as they grew more plentiful, they
grew more transparent, as if they were manufactured of a certain quantity of
their delicate substance, that spread more thinly as they multiplied. He could
see through their faces the jambs of doors, the sashes of windows, the
discolored paint of the walls. Those on the balcony bore clouds behind their
eyes, minarets in brainpans, and one stood so the moon cradled her face. They
touched only in overlapping, and they did not look at each other. The
expression of their faces, which he at first took for sadness, he found, in the
moonlight, to be cleansed of emotion, like the faces of deep sleepers. He did
not try to speak to them. They would not have answered.

In the morning the apparitions had vanished, and with them the
fever. He lay exhausted on the mattress, which was soaked with his sweat, and
after a while slept again, an uninhabited sleep, from which he woke refreshed,
though terribly thirsty. He rose from the bed, legs trembling, joints aching,
and found water and rusks, and sat on the balcony sipping and nibbling.

It was two days before he recovered the strength to leave the hotel,
and many days passed before the night of the transparent faces lifted from his
mind. He wished he’d looked harder at them. He had been so horrified, had spent
the hours recoiling from them, but now he wished he’d looked closer. Had they
cast shadows? He did not think so, but could not be sure. When they overlapped,
did they become more solid, did they draw a thicker veil across the walls, the
sky? Could they pass through each other? Could they be touched? Could they hear
him? At first he assumed they were only the recent dead, only those whose bones
cluttered the streets and rooms of the city, but then he imagined they were all
the dead, the accumulated dead, whose bones lay like roots in the earth,
beneath every house, dense strata of bones through which beetles clambered. How
deep did they go, the layers of bones? He imagined them pressed toward the
earth’s core, crushed. How long were the leashes that tethered the apparitions
to their bones? Could they venture forth across the earth’s surface, or were
they confined to this city, or to a certain street, a certain house? Were all
of them released to wander, or only those whose work was unfinished? And what
work was that? There had been children, the young.

Now, in the stark light of day, in the midans, in the empty
restaurants, they seemed impossibly phantom. Where had they gone, the ghosts?
Where did they live in the days, in the endless rooms of light? Did they plunge
like divers, returning to their rooms beneath the earth? Or did they hide in
corners, in shadows, spawning unease? Were they in fact summoned only by his
dreams? They inhabited his dreams, he was certain of this, though they vanished
upon waking. But he felt, each morning, the unsettling notion that he had not
been alone in the room, that he had shared this space with others, and he woke
searching for eyes in the corners, glances only just faded, voices only just
mingled with the surf, passed beyond recognition. That lack of recognition
tormented him. He feared recognition, feared the gaze he recalled, feared a
voice that spoke a phrase he remembered, in a tongue and an accent he
remembered, and also he feared the lack of recognition. But as the days passed,
the memories of the faces, the voices, faded, as if the sand that drifted
across the cobbles and paving stones, gently chafing, drifted as well through
his skull, cleansing, scouring, and the apparitions, pieced of such flimsy
material at the outset, cracked, thinned, and what remained were scraps, like
the thinned tatters of curtains still moving in certain windows, like the wisps
of flags and banners that still curled from the tops of certain flagpoles, an
assortment of movement in the city, the scraps of movement. These scraps moved
in his skull, flapping gently from time to time, subsiding if he stared at
them.

****

One
morning, from his balcony, he saw, calm and stunning as a spill of blood, a
pane of seawater across the lower half of the midan, lobed into the lie of the
ground, reflecting in rippled sepia shuttered windows, ragged palms. A few
bones raised ferrules and oval slopes like islets. Among them a leaf and its
brown echo turned slowly. The breach had opened during the night, at high tide,
but the water had receded below the wall, leaving its bright token.

Walking through the city that day, eastward, he found a dozen jagged
new lakes. In one three fish flashed like rips in a brown curtain. The most
distant incursion had tumbled away one of the coral blocks, and the waves
continued to wash in. Where tram tracks passed under a road, seawater lay like
a river in a gorge, the reflected graffiti scored by drifting twigs. He found
the slim cataract where the sea entered this trough and crouched by the
creeping edges watching the water grout brick and snuggle among grass blades
and his toes. He saw how the water would enter the city, stealthily,
effortlessly, choosing the easy entrances, blue benison, blue annihilation.

The initial breaching heralded a week of dramatic changes, as the
sea welled over the retaining wall and swallowed great gulps of the littoral,
the shoreline pummeled into new shapes with each high tide. Now, descending
from the hotel each morning, he sloshed through ankle-high water before
reaching dry streets. One long morning, he moved the stores of food from the
kitchen to the second floor, hauling wheels of cheese and boxes of crackers and
dried fruit and jars of jam and olives, stacking them in the hallway.

By the end of that week, the wall had been entirely inundated, its
curve marked now only by froth where the incoming waves stumbled against it.
The seafront buildings were footed in water. In the still mornings, when the
sea was taut, the doubling of their rococo facades made an enchanted world
through which twin birds sped and he imagined the reflections were in fact the
roots of the houses, foundations so solid in seeming, but fractured by a breath
or dropped feather. Midmorning, the breezes rushed in, ruffling the sea’s
surface, tousling it into soft curls.

As the waves broke against the walls, he was perched at the vanguard
of a city rushing into the sea, plunging like concrete golems through the
shallows, the water foaming around columns, gnashing through archways. For a
few days, as the sea scoured rooms, a surf of chairs and vases and waterpipes
rocked and smashed against the new shoreline, but then this debris sank or was
carried away to become driftwood, driftglass, and the sea’s edge was clean
again. At night the noises of water rose louder and more varied. What had been
the hush and wash of the waves against the corniche wall was joined by the suck
and boom as they plundered the caverns of the hotel and splintered on window
frames.

The wall breached, the changes again became infinitesimal, the sea’s
rise through the city so gradual he hardly noticed it, except when, from time
to time, a higher alley overnight became a brook, or a mosque where he had sat
was carpeted abruptly in saltwater. The bottom floor of the hotel flooded and
every few days the water covered another step.

He walked inland, up the street he had first walked down, past the
station where trains no longer arrived. Crossing the tracks, he saw that, in
places, drifts of sand entirely concealed them. He walked past the station and
its dark halls, into the narrower streets to the south, going downhill once
more. He walked out past the last houses and stood before the sea. At first he
thought the twisting streets must have turned him back on his tracks, but then,
seeing the shapes of distant blue, and the smokestacks planted in the water,
realized the rising sea had circled the city, had filled and joined the marshes
and left him on an island. The train tracks vanished into the water, threads of
light, and he imagined a train slipping into the depths like a jointed serpent.
Or rising, its giant headlight like a moon surfacing, the water sluicing from
its grease and paint, snorting and blowing. And what stations lay beneath the
sea? And what passengers might that train carry from the alien deep?

He turned inland and climbed the hill of gardens, among the fallen
fruit and unkempt grass, till he reached the highest point, climbed to the roof
of the villa there, up the rickety steps of the octagonal tower surmounting it,
and turned through the points of the compass, looking across his shrunken
domain and the waste beyond. From this height, he could see how general the
sea’s invasion was. Across the channel the hospital stood on its own, smaller
island, and beyond that were two more islands and then a speckling of buildings
and rooftops, and then the sea. To the south the vista was submerged under
haze, the smokestacks of the drowned factories like misty periscopes. The sea
flashed and heaved, enormous as the sky. He was suddenly dizzy, and clutched
the crumbling balustrade, then sank to his knees, forehead pressed into the
pitted stone. Vertigo, he thought, and quickly descended through the villa,
eyes on the steps. But when he reached the rubble in the forsaken garden, he
found he was still trembling, and realized his terror had nothing to do with
the height, but with the confirmation of his solitude. He walked back slowly.
Every few days he returned to the eastern shores of the new island, a shorter
walk each time as the water encroached.

He could sense now the movement of the water, the spaces it would
fill, could anticipate the shape the shoreline might acquire in a day or a
week. There was no sense of loss or diminishment, of resisting the creeping
onslaught. Rather, he felt that the city welcomed the visitor into its rooms,
succumbed peacefully to this new inhabitant, with its desire to penetrate even walls,
even floors, its touch stronger than air, softer than skin.

As the water rose and lay in green-fingered ponds here and there,
and on the tiles of the buildings, the dry air of the city was replaced by the
tang of rot and stagnant seawater. Dying fish flipped idly among their
motionless companions, and drying seaweed draped chair struts when the tide was
out. He crouched beside some of these artificial tide pools, or straddled the
windowsill of a restaurant, peering into the lively soup, the shapes of the
creatures stark against the sanded marble. After his weeks with the bones and
their static shapes, the variety and movement of the creatures pleased him. He
watched the finger-snap concord of the tiny striped fish, flickering like
candle flames blown by a breath in their minds. Shells creeping like snails,
buffing a clean stripe along the tiles. The slow tumble of sea urchins. Thick,
ponderous sea cucumbers, the bristling beauty of a scorpion fish, hiding behind
a table leg. Sardines like dollops of mercury. These he could name, but most of
the creatures he could only grip with simile. Fish like lilies, like leaves,
the colors of lapis lazuli, lemons, lovebirds. Marine beings that moved like
smoke, with great eyes or jaws out of nightmare and appendages whose utility he
could not begin to guess at. Creatures so similar to the sand or shadows he
only noticed them when they snorted, or snared a fish. The water rose, pouring
new citizens through windows and doorways.