The Upright Man (35 page)

I didn’t have an answer for her.

WE
GOT INTO
C
ANNON
B
EACH JUST BEFORE FIVE
. Drove slowly through the town, which isn’t much more than a few rows of nice wooden beach houses; a main road with a market and a couple of arty minimalls; and another street or so to the east. It was dark and still raining and off-season quiet, but at the north end of town we found a place called Dunes that looked okay. There was a lit sign saying Vacancy, which was the main thing. Judging by the empty lot, we had most of the place to ourselves.

We got a couple of rooms and turned in.

My room was on the third floor. It was big and had a wood fire on one wall. The whole of the far end was glass, pretty much, looking out to sea. I couldn’t see anything but darkness, but I sat at the table there anyway, and drank a little beer. On impulse I got out my laptop—Bobby’s laptop—and plugged the phone cable into the wall socket. I found myself kicking up a web browser, and typing in an address.

A few seconds later it was on my screen. Jessica’s website. It was still there. The web guy evidently hadn’t bothered to take the site down yet. Might never bother: a few megs up on a server somewhere, who’s going to
notice? It would join all the other stuff, the ephemeral memories, the words and pictures on the web. Was it immortality? No. Like the man said: immortality is about not dying. It was something, however, both better and worse than nothing.

There was a welcome page with Jessica’s bright, smiling face. A link to the webcam page itself, which was dead. Another page where she had written about her hobbies—songwriting, which I guess made sense of the guitar—and a few pages of specimen stills. Only one of these was seminude, and I flicked past it. It was the others that spoke. Pictures of a young woman, going about her life, watching her television and reading her magazines. The way she really had been, still there: something more than the cold body in the tray of a cabinet in an L.A. morgue. I still found it hard to rid my head of the idea that I’d seen her in the forest, but I knew it was just a trick of the mind.

I did a little hacking and got past the browser, into the folder on the server itself. Copied the contents down onto my own computer. To keep them safe, I guess, in case the guy did ever get around to cleaning out. When I’d finished I noticed there was a text file among them. I opened it up. It was short, a few brief diary entries she’d evidently decided not to link to from the site. The feds would have had it all along, and there was certainly nothing there that would have helped. The last entry was dated three days before she died. It was about some guy called Don, who she thought maybe liked her a little, wondering whether she should call him sometime.

I closed Bobby’s laptop and thought of him for a while, in his silent place deep in my head. It’s where they all go to: the cemeteries in our heads. Back there, behind your eyes, where you can’t see them whichever way you turn. But the things they did, the people they were, it’s all still true. It doesn’t have to be lonely in there. You can visit, from time to time.

THE
NEXT MORNING I GOT UP LATE
. I
T HAD
stopped raining but the wind was back in force. Out of my
window I could now see a long stretch of beach—gray sand, gray water, gray sky—between craggy cliffs.

A while later Nina knocked on my door. “You up for a walk?”

“What—because it’s such a lovely day?”

We wandered the empty streets, grabbed a coffee or two, sniggered at bad art. Spent a few hours down on the sands, alone in all the world, sometimes together, sometimes apart. We watched big rough waves crash down and around the rocks, cheered brave birds as they wheeled hectically in the stormy chaos above. In the midafternoon the wind got so fierce and strong that you could stand with your arms outstretched and lean into it, trusting it to hold you up. So we did, as sand whirled around us and the world spun.

When it began to rain again we found a place half-sheltered at the foot of high rocks and sat, a little distance apart, and watched the sea. I realized then why we respond to the sound of the waves, and the falling of rain, and wind in the trees. Because they are meaningless. They are nothing to do with us. They are outside our control. They remind us of a time, very early in our lives, when we did not understand the noises around us but simply accepted them in our ears; and so they provide blessed relief from our continual needy attempts to change our world in magic deed or endless thought. Meaningless sound, which we love against the anxiety of action, of pattern-making, of seeking to comprehend and change. As soon as we picked up something and used it for a purpose, we were both made and damned. Tool-making gave us the world, and lost us our minds.

For an hour we did nothing, two people on the edge of the world, with our backs to it all. When it got dark we went back to the hotel. I took a shower, changed my clothes, then went around the wooden walkway to knock on Nina’s door.

“Hey,” she said.

“You want to go get a drink?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is this, like, a date or something?”

“No,” I said. “It is not.”

A couple of streets away we found a place called Red’s Tavern where you could sit and drink strong beers they made upstairs. After a while the bar began to fill with locals, and eventually a pickup band coalesced down the far end. A couple of guitars, a lap steel, a violin, washboard; people sat and played for a while, wandering off and back as the whim took them. The lamps were low and warm and I realized, for the first time, that the woman opposite me had auburn lights in her hair. We listened to the music the band made, and we clapped and sang along when everybody else did, and we watched the barmaids dance and laugh behind the counter as they filled pitchers with beer as clean as stream water, and I finally got myself a bowl of chili and it was not bad at all.

The band was still playing, but more quietly, when we left them to it. We walked back to the hotel, bought a bottle of wine from the market on the way. We lit the fire in my room and cracked the window open a little, so we could hear the sound of the waves and the crackling of the wood at the same time. We sat on the floor with our backs to the end of the bed, and we talked for a long time, talked until it was late and yet didn’t feel late at all.

We kept putting wood on the fire because we didn’t want it to burn down, and in the end the room was dark and warm enough and didn’t need any more words.

She made the first move.

She’s like that.