The Breath of Suspension (3 page)

I smiled at her. Michael’s sister. Interesting. “You are quite welcome, Miss Tarchik.”

I earned a laugh from Aya, which pleased me. “You’d better hurry back, Brother Vikram. Someone will miss you.” I met her dark, somberly amused eyes and realized that further help would not be appreciated. With a slight, I hoped sardonic, bow, I made my way off the pier and up the sand trail to the monastery. Halfway up I turned, to look at two figures, the taller straight one leaning on the smaller bent one, as they made their painful way across the sand. Neither looked up at me.

Out of breath, I ran into the waste-plastic and wood building that housed the generators. Michael rested his arm on a stanchion and watched the flickering LEDs. He fussed with the flow diagram, changing the ionization balance in Number Three. Number Two was shut down, ready for me. He didn’t look happy to see me.

“You’re late, but no matter. I expected it, you see. You can work twice as fast. Into your coverall. Make sure your work is good, or you’ll be here tomorrow as well.”

He slung the coverall at me. I changed out of my cassock in front of his expressionless ruddy face. Without a further word, he shoved me into the dust-filled MHD feed tube.

❖

I saw Aya Ngomo again two weeks later.

A shrub-covered dune with a bare top rose just near the chapel. Outdoor services were often held there. One morning, as I was coming aromatically from cleaning a communal latrine, I heard shouting from behind the dune, an angry, ugly sound. I hesitated for a moment, then ran around it.

Several of the boys from the nearby town had gathered around Aya Ngomo. She lay sprawled on the ground, her back twisted, while they circled her, jays around a captive lizard. “Batty, batty!” they cried. “Fly to your cave, hang from your feet. Leave us be!”

Wild-eyed, they waved their arms like madmen. One pulled back a black-booted foot and kicked her. She rolled over silently, without so much as a gasp. Her eyes, expressionlessly black, looked up at me.

I make no claims about my physical courage, but having been seen by those eyes I could not turn away. Shouting some nonsense of my own, I waded into them. I had no plan, no idea of what I was doing. With sudden fury they turned, smashed my face, and punched me in the stomach so that I bent over, retching. A huge hand came and hit the side of my head. I found myself lying on the ground. They continued to kick me, but I took no notice. I watched the clouds roll by overhead. They were the most beautiful clouds I had ever seen.

Suddenly a large figure came into my view, picked up a boy, and flung him into outer darkness. It was Michael. Behind him came other monks, a taut, active mass. The disorganized mob of locals was swept aside like so many dried leaves. It was late afternoon. The light slanted dramatically across the monastery. I lay with the side of my face in the rough grass. The air was crisp and winy. It was a pleasure to be alive.

Brother Michael picked me up. “Are you all right, Vikram?”

To be rescued by Michael. How humiliating!

“I’m fine, thanks.” I tried to stand. He had to catch me. Two other monks came and supported me under the shoulders.

Blue-uniformed girls had gathered around Aya Ngomo. They swirled and twittered, brushing the twigs from her sweater. For a moment I could see nothing but masses of feminine hair. Then they parted and I saw Aya’s eyes on me. Standing next to her, full mouth quirked in amusement, was Michael’s sister Laurena. She looked past me as if thinking about something far away. Then my brothers carried me off.

The monastery Infirmary was on the second floor of what had once been a rustic tourist lodge, its false wood beams long since cracked and fallen away, revealing the metal that supported it. My bed was crammed into a corner behind a deeply gouged plastic partition. On the wall above my head, just under the roof, hung a glass case filled with Indian arrowheads, labeled with names like Kickapoo and Potawatomi. It had probably hung there for over a century. I imagined a boy collecting these remnants of a forgotten age, the action of someone who did not have to worry about the future. A window looked out on the monastery past the thick bough of a maple tree. I could lie in bed and watch others about their duties. Under a thick blanket yet.

A firm knock came on the partition. I looked up, half-expecting it to be Brother Michael, come heartily to rip the blanket from me and drive me out into the frost to do some labor for God. Instead, Aya Ngomo’s dark head poked around the partition. She rustled in and sat in the room’s one chair.

“I came to thank you,” she said. “That was a brave tiling you did.”

“And completely ineffective.” I waved my hand in dismissal. I had already learned how effective being casual could be.

“It was still brave. Such a helpful man you are. Is there anything I can do for you?” She was made to be painted as an icon. Her scrutinizing black eyes dominated her face. Her words, as they so often did, seemed to contain a sardonic barb.

I was suddenly hot in my bedclothes, prickling sweat all over my skin. I reached under my pillow and pulled out an envelope. It contained a love note to Laurena Tarchik. I had labored long over this work, sitting up in bed under the arrowheads. In it I proclaimed my love for her, my undying passion, my longing for one single word from her lips... well, it was new to me then. I also cited my family’s connections and my future prospects. A sturdy bank balance is often as much of an aphrodisiac as flowers and honeyed words. I begged for a meeting with her, at the corner of the Chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damien, in two nights.

I handed the letter to Aya. “This is a letter to Laurena from her brother Michael. Could you take it to her?”

She balanced it on her palm as if weighing the truth of my words. Her eyes looked past me.

“There’s one sort of intelligence,” she said. “It helps you get what you want. Laurena has it. So do you, I think. There’s another: the kind that tells you what the right thing to want is.” She slipped the envelope into her sleeve. “It’s lovely of Michael to write his sister. She doesn’t like him much. That’s too bad. I’ve always thought about how lovely it would be to have an older brother.” She stood up, as far as she could, her back bent. “Get better, Vikram. Even if you don’t want to.” She left with a sound like blowing dried leaves.

Two nights later I edged out of my window into the cold air. The maple had been pruned away from the building, and I had to lean over to grab the bough. The drop below pulled at me as I tilted out of the window. I seriously considered climbing back into bed. Perhaps the career of a lover was not for me. I let myself fall outward. I felt the rough bark of the tree in my hands and swung my legs around the bough. After that it was easy. I slid down the trunk to the ground. My dimly lit window hung high above me.

I felt exhilarated. I breathed not air but light. The ground rocked under my feet as if I walked on the surface of Lake Michigan. I ran off through the darkness.

The chapel corner was deserted, the moon peeking over the ramshackle plastic building that housed the MHD generators. Two huge concrete cherubim with snarling faces and winged wheels supported the chapel. I pulled myself into the shadows by their heads.

The cold wall behind me sucked my heat. I shifted weight from foot to foot but didn’t dare move much more to stay warm. Footsteps crunched on the gravel walk. I almost turned and ran then. Heart pounding, I stepped forward into the moonlight.

Laurena turned. “Ah, Brother Vikram.” She stood before me in a long dress, not a school uniform at all, but a real gown flaring out over her hips and tumbling down to the ground. Her hands were clasped like a suppliant’s, her hair loose around her shoulders. For a moment I thought she was there to make mock of me, but she was clearly as nervous as I was.

“I’m glad you came,” I said.

“I almost didn’t,” she said. “Aya didn’t want me to. She didn’t say that, but it wasn’t so hard to figure out what she thought.”

I didn’t ask her if that was why she came. Instead, I took her arm. She pulled her arm back against my hand in acknowledgment of its presence. I felt joy.

“So what do you think rescuing me on that stupid pier entitles you to?”

I ignored her tone and paid attention to the pressure of her upper arm. “Just a few words. The ones you wouldn’t give me before.”

She snorted but said nothing else. We walked along the low wall that tried vainly to stop the encroachments of dune sand and finally stood on the slope overlooking the villages that clung to the edge of Crystal Lake, the dune-trapped body of water behind St. Theda’s. Her family lived down there somewhere, save for her tedious brother Michael, who had moved up to the monastery, where he worked providing his town with electric power. Though surely her ankle had already healed, she still limped.

“I was in Chicago once,” I said, naming the most romantic place I could think of. It helped that I actually had seen it.

She took my arm in her turn but did not look at me. Was she seeking, somewhere among the twinkling lights around the lake, the single light of her family’s house? Escape. Laurena Tarchik wanted escape. I was going to give it to her. “The Drowned City. I wish I came from a drowned city. I wish Lake Michigan would pour across the dunes and fill Crystal Lake to overflowing.” She was imagining water pouring in through the windows of her house, drowning her mother as she fixed dinner. I didn’t need to read her mind to know that.

“The water the towers rise from is usually still. It’s shallow and you can still see the fire hydrants and street signs under it. There’s enough glass left in the buildings that the reflected light of sunset makes the place look inhabited.” We hadn’t actually landed there. Uncle Cosmas had just swung the boat in close on our way to Milwaukee. But I didn’t feel the need to burden Laurena with that kind of detail.

“I have places to go,” I said. “Boston. Paris. Constantinople. Who knows? Moscow herself.” I whispered the names of those torn and rebuilt cities, capitals of the Orthodox Empire, for their aphrodisiac qualities.

She sighed. “Anywhere, Vikram. Anywhere but here.”

I put my arms around her waist and kissed her. She kissed me back, deeply but matter-of-factly, not melting in my arms. I ran one hand down to where her buttocks swelled out and felt her breasts against my chest.

She ground her hips against me, then pushed me away with suddenly strong arms. “I have to get home.” She said the word with disdain. “They’ll miss me.”

“When will I see you again?”

“Use Aya to send me another note.” She smiled. “I rather liked that.” She turned and, without a backward look, walked into the darkness toward her house.

I headed back toward the Infirmary, fingers and toes tingling. The moon was now shining full silver, coating the bare trees.

My return path took me past the spot at the base of the knoll where the boys had attacked Aya. There were no traces of the scuffle in the sand. The scene, with its dull-faced black-booted farm boys and its tormented cripple in their center, had receded in my mind to a medieval painting, a side panel to the Crucifixion... or a scene in the life of a saint.

I stood and looked up at the knoll. With a tightening of my scalp, I saw the silhouette of a figure sitting thoughtfully at its top. In the moonlight that ominous twisted shape showed me something of what the boys had feared, for I recognized Aya Ngomo.

“Good evening, Aya.” She had heard me clambering up the hill, and was not at all surprised to see me. That should have told me something.

“Hello, Vikram.” She looked past my shoulder at the stars. “Have you ever wanted to float away into the sky? Just to drift between the stars?”

I thought about holding my breath and slowly rising through the clouds. But it didn’t even occur to me to tell her about it; this was something so private I had never articulated it.

“There are too many places to travel on this Earth,” I said instead. “I’ve only seen a few of them myself.”

“Oh? We’re stuck here in the dunes of Michigan. What lies outside?” Her tone was faintly mocking, not at all what a crippled girl’s should have been. All these young ladies were too wise. “What wonders have you seen, Vikram?”

Her tone was interrogative in a way I didn’t like. I didn’t feel like admitting that Milwaukee was my big trip, and somehow the story I had told Laurena about Chicago seemed inadequate to Aya’s attention.

“Boston,” I said. I’d read enough about the capital of Russian New England to fake a visit there. And I’d always intended to go.

“Really?” The romantic name excited her. “Then you can tell me about the new Cathedral they’re building there. What does the bell tower look like?”

Bell tower? What a question! “Russian Second Empire,” I said. It seemed reasonable. I knew the Boston Public Library was built in that style, just across Copley Square from the Cathedral.

She frowned. “I thought they were using the remains of an old skyscraper to hang the bells—that’s what’s so interesting about it. I must have misunderstood....” Her eyes were on me. I don’t think Aya really saw the truth someone was concealing, though it often seemed that way. Instead, the way she looked at you reminded you that you yourself knew the truth, even if she didn’t, and made you ashamed for not speaking it.

“Why are you sitting out here, Aya?”

“I was waiting for you.” Aya told the truth herself, though not always all of it. It wasn’t until later that I figured out that she had understood my rendezvous with Laurena and had positioned herself to catch me on my return from it. “I wanted to show you something.”

Despite the sudden weariness that I felt, the sense that the world was too complicated and difficult to deal with, I sat down next to her on the cold ground. “What is it, Aya?”

“My mother died when I was born. My father not long after, both, I think, from the same disease that makes me what I am.” She didn’t give me time to speak some standard commiseration but rushed on. “But before he died, he told me a story. At least I remember it as being him. Perhaps it was just a dream. The sort of vision that comes to someone with a distorted nervous system.”