I explained to the cop that I had not stolen the Porsche.
I just got in the car, pressed the button to open the electric gate, and drove out of the grounds. Down the steep curvy road of the ridge, past the torii, a Shinto temple gate that stands near the gated entrance to the property next door. And overlooks the tightest hairpin turn in the area. The one that helps keep out the less skilled yet still curious.
Those who do not live all the way up here.
I navigated precisely, in the absence of a plan or any traffic lights. One normally looked to a car going the other way on this narrow road, hoping to borrow a moment of illumination. To know with sureness where the road’s edge was, where the steeper part of the drop beyond began, or what animal’s eyes might be watching you go by.
Usually it was a doe, though it might be a raccoon or bobcat. Occasionally, it was a mountain lion.
But there was nothing to use for light tonight. It was a Wednesday. Or by now it was probably Thursday.
I had not checked the time when I left.
Nor could I tell the cop how long I’d been out. How long I’d meandered at high speed before I got out to the main road, and then to Skyline.
Where I’d been eventually pulled over. In the middle of the night.
He shone a penlight in my eyes, and asked my gaze to follow it. Eyeballs right, then left, then right. Down, up.
He asked me to get out of the car. I did. I was barefoot, and I stood three feet from him.
He wasn’t that tall. He was alone. He looked at me as if he didn’t quite know what to say.
That’s not what he’d wanted to ask, I thought.
I could tell. The real question was going to come after.
With a sense that I was watching from high up in a tree close by, near but absent, and perched on a limb above. Above the two of us, the two cars, and the road we shared.
“A hundred eight, hundred nine. Something like that.”
I replied with an absence of vocal inflection. It wasn’t planned. It’s just that numbers did not need inflection. They were numbers.
We were both quiet. I waited for him to speak.
“There are some tight turns up here,” he said.
“You almost mowed down a doe back there”
“I got around her,” I replied, asking, “Did you see that?”
“I sure did,” he said, extending each word more than seemed necessary.
He looked down, slouching to the side in a way that made his body diagonal. Here came whatever was coming, I thought.
“Who taught you to drive like that?”
“Right, it’s not.” He held up his i-panel for me to see. He’d already looked up the name of the owner. And his photo. Which looked at me with a virtual sort of half-smile.
I recognized the face. The cop watched my face as I did.
“I didn’t take it. I borrowed it. I’m going to put it back.”
I sounded a bit sassy. I reminded myself to tone it down.
Sucking in a deep breath through my teeth, I pointed into the car. At the gate opener.
I sensed the cop was starting to believe me, but I did not relax. I could tell he had more questions.
“Well he was asleep when I left. When I got out of his bed he didn’t notice.”
“I see. Did you have an argument?”
“So you just took the car out.”
He was on a diagonal again. I had intrigued him. But I had not convinced him. Not yet.
Though I wasn’t at all agitated.
This was not the moment to tell him about my occasional moments of fugue. Deeply lucid, always drugless, but fugue all the same.
Phases of separateness. Of absence.
That’s what I call them. The Absences. Moments of nothing, moments when I just go somewhere. I am no longer where I am.
“I haven’t been drinking or anything.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been following you for at least twenty minutes. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said. With a mild awkwardness that I later realized had been wise.
He chuckled, shaking his head with some impressed disbelief.
“No one who’ s been drinking can drive a Porsche like that.”
He was giving me a compliment.
“You really know how to drive that car.”
If he was going to flatter me I was going to tune it out.
“You were way over the speed limit, that’s why I had to follow you.”
He said it as if to absolve himself of unmentioned lower motives. This might have been amusing, had I chosen to pay attention to it.
There was a high up rustle in the trees, from the wind and whatever creatures were watching from vantages below.
The stars looked unusually nearby, almost oppressively abundant, and I noted how much lighter it was up here than down on the lower ridge where I’d begun.
But it was dark enough too. Dark enough to see red.
“See that?” I said, forgetting for a moment that I was probably about to get a speeding ticket.
A telescope wasn’t needed. Mars was visible, not as a little red starlike possibility but as an identifiable planet. In the vicinity of another. Ours.
A fellow traveler. In it very own high color, spinning powerfully through absolutely nothing.
The cop looked up. Awe and inspired forgetfulness held him also, or so I hoped.
“The red one?” He said. “Is it Mars?”
“Yes.” I kept looking up. “Closest pass in sixty thousand years. Right now. It’s right next to us.”
“No way.” He said this with appreciation.
We just stood there. I was no longer thinking about whether I’d be driving home with a horrific fine I’d have to somehow explain to a naked sleeping man.
I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.
If I was, my thoughts were not red. Not red in the usual sense. Perhaps this red was a Martian sort of red.
Not one named for a god of war. Such a definition belonged to the past and to Earth. This red was quiet. Typically red has sound to it, red has blood in it, and red means beginning and end. So red has time in it.
This was a moment that wasn’t about time, or blood, or even war.
It was about something hurtling by, massively and mysteriously.
Yet still, from our vantage, you could cover it with your thumb, and it didn’t look like it was moving at all.
I recalled Hale-Bopp. A few years earlier. It looked like a smudge of glitter in the sky.
A smudge made by a thumb, covering something up, but pressing on it too hard and having it smash by mistake, the pieces spilling out of what had once been a perfect circle, forming a tail that glistened in a way suggesting motion. Motion that we could not quite see, but still trusted was there.
We lived in a dynamic space, not a fixed one; things disruptive and disrupting were the natural way. A black Porsche, polished not by the one who possessed it by wealth or by deed, but by others both hired and housed to ensure its mirrorlike perfection.
Slicing through the night on a trip not planned, but one suited to it perfectly. Fading into a mysterious and forgotten fairytale, of the Grimm and ogred sort, but one in which magic, mist, and things nearly invisible might just stand a chance. A nightborne ghost slicing through fog, a fog which got more plentiful as the ghost traveled west .
The trees were thick overhead in places, and you could tell which way was west if you put the top down and felt the fog. Was it thickening or loosening in my hands and in my hair? It was colder and more assertive as you approached the ocean. The edge before water. The perilous drops down the rocks, the waves that roared below, playing loudly and rhythmically regardless of the hour. You could hear them from far away, on narrow roads that twisted and turned uphill. As deer or raccoon or bobcat or mountain lion surprised your path, to be captured for an instant in the theater of headlights, or the artificial color of an occasional neon sign.
I recall a moment. A band plays in a bar at night. The sign is blurry but I catch it as I fly by it. Applejacks, or something like that. A smear in my mind, of pink or red or green, though I was far less focused upon landmarks than feeling the road, and not fighting it back.
Roads, like waves, were kinder to strangers that played along with their own direction and energy. One mustn’t fight against them, I thought.
The goal, with roads or with waves, is not control. It’s not like that.
“When a dancer is on stage, she feels the music through the floor. That is how it begins.
It is much the same with a car. You don’t count. You don’t plan. You just know.”
That’s one way I would describe all of this later.
I did not drive with a sense of tyranny or order. When I drove, I did not ever check the clock or the speedometer.
I heard the cop’s foot scrape the ground. As I heard this I realized my feet were cold. Bare. On the pavement.
His voice shook me from my thoughts.
“Do you want to go to a diner?” He asked.
The question jostled me. It seemed to have nothing to do with Mars, the road, the fog, my feet or time itself.
A few moments passed before I realized I had not answered him.
He tried again, and seemed a bit embarrassed this time.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“So where am I going?” I suppose I should have asked where are “we” going, but it did not come out that way.
“Oh, I don’t usually go this late.”
Then he stood up a bit straighter. I was seated in the driver’s seat now.
“Can you please adhere to the speed limit ?”
Then I concentrated. On not attaining speed. On just getting there. This took effort.
It’s harder to drive this way.
I tried to remember where I’d specifically driven before the cop pulled me over, and I couldn’t.
I had driven down the hill to the telescope. The observatory at the community college.
I thought I could get in to look at Mars, or the summer triangle. Vega, Altair and Deneb. But the late hours were only on Friday, and no one was there. The door was bolted.
I walked around the parking lot before returning to the car, which had the observatory parking lot entirely to itself. I was on the far side where the weeds poke through the pavement, and the meeting place of earth and parking lot and tree roots and past earthquakes showed obvious buckling in places. It smelled like asphalt and manure, and dripped out motor oil and earth.
I heard a shuffling sound, and then a quiet whinny.
The far side of the parking lot was up against a field, and the two were separated by short posts and wire fencing connecting them.
A horse was walking up to me. I saw it at first as a motion, a folding or crease in the black fabric of the darkness, and then it seemed to emerge, as if from a hole in space, in reverse, now fully formed. It sneezed a bit as it approached. Then it stopped. About three feet from the fence.
I heard his breathing, and then my own.
I first felt like my lungs closed, and then opened. I did not need air as much. It was like when one is in an untimed and warm bath, and the water attains the same temperature as your skin, and heat transfer ceases, an equilibrium achieved. You don’t really feel the water anymore. The environment has adjusted to both person and water. One is not affecting the other; both just are.
I sat with the horse, who stood. We looked into each other’s eyes. And when he walked away, so did I.
The cop pulled in to Alice’s just ahead of me; I let him choose a parking space first, and chose one exactly two spaces away. We sat at the counter. There was a man next to us. He was stirring a cup of potato soup, which from its scent I imagined had onions or bacon in it. He was missing part of his arm. He saw me looking at him.
The cop guessed what I was thinking, and looked at the man.
“Yeah,” said the man, not looking up. He was young. He’d come home.
“Thanks,” the cop said. There was a silence between them, and the cop bowed slightly.
The man looked up. At the cop, then at me.
We exchanged quiet sorts of smiles, the sorts exchanged without ornament. Among those who know that compliments are cheap to those who know harm’s way, and for whom unadorned quiet means something.
Those who are grateful will never overspeak.
I ordered a chamomile tea, and the cop and I talked about cars and telescopes. It turned out we’d both had telescopes as children, but his brother took his away. He said that when the divorce happened his brother had gone with his father and the telescope had gone with him. His older brother was fourteen at the time. The cop gave clues while telling his history that he was about seven years younger than me, though he looked almost seven years older. His hairline was receding already. He was from the valley too, though a few hours south of where I had been when I was younger.
He ate a tuna melt, which he ordered to go, as if by accident, and so they brought it in a little paper carton, one from which the coleslaw dressing dripped out, ending up on the table. And on a sealed bag of potato chips that was included with the sandwich and which he saved for later.
He knew much more than I did about Porsche models. I knew much more than he did about what it felt like to drive one.
He wanted me to let him drive the car.
He nodded and let the thought go.
I could tell he was disappointed.
Not just about the car, but of meeting me under such circumstances. Under the watch of Mars, outside of the law and daylight, around a stunning black car neither of us owned.
He was surprised I brought it up.
“Are you going to argue with me on that?”
He seemed to have fun saying that.
He did a funny thing with his lips, folding them in so that his mouth looked like a line. Like he was trying to pretend his mouth was not there or could not open.
As if to hold in something that lived under his tongue.
“I’ve never seen anyone drive like that,” he said.
Compliment accepted and dismissed.
He nodded. He understood that.
He walked back to his car. I saw him pause for a moment, then walk on, and I got back into the car.
The diner had served me without shoes, I thought to myself.
I told the cop he could follow me back, and at first he did, but when I took the road up the ridge, I noted that he was not following me anymore. It was dark again. The only headlights to see by were mine.
I took the hairpin a bit more slowly, just in case he appeared again, and I pressed the button to open the noiseless gate. Without smudge or scratch, I returned the car to its carport.
I wondered if the cop had known that I did not yet have a driver’s license.
I looked at the man. He slept on his stomach.
I had no interest in crawling into bed with him again.
I mean I might, just to smooth matters over as we separated.
Which I knew we would, in not too long.
I was female and this was some version of the real world.
Apparently females in the real world had always had to do things like that. Crawl into bed. Perform by rule and rote.
“Separate. Become absent.” I added to myself. And with a giggle that always seemed to come with the word, “Fugue.”
It was my own fake swear word. I could say it without fearing ccensorship.
Sometimes the absences, whether intended or or by surprise, were about safety. Sometimes appearances.
At other times absences avoided unsettling things; things that occur when two people are negotiating matters around abundant money.
So that separation could happen. Neatly, tidily.
I’m good at separation, I told myself,sounding almost proud as I did.
I know the gig. “Be prepared,” they say, “leave no loose ends.”
I am always ready. There is always a plague, it is always imminent, and I am always ready to escape, as one persecuted, as one blessed or cursed with vision. As one chosen.
As one emboldened by fear itself. Having every choice, even as one has no choice. But to leave.
Fear works differently on other people, I thought. But it is a true friend to some of us.
It tells us when to escape, and when to be absent for a time. Absent of emotions, in preparation for that.
The three cats had noticed my return, and had gathered around me. Two females, in elegant pale grey, bearing the names of French girls. One boy, a slender black cat with probing eyes, was named after a German prince of a musical and warlike age. He went hunting at night. He bore scratches of encounters with larger competitors. He presented me, each morning, with a disemboweled bloody rodent, and gleefully awaited my review and approval.
When this happens, the younger of the girl cats never looked to the doorway. She preened herself and awaited her favorite sunbeam. The older and smaller girl cat had taken a longer time trusting me. At first she had just observed. But eventually she was watching. Her piercing eyes had a sense of gravitas which on occasion showed as intensity, absorbing the scene from a high up bookshelf, like an angel overwrought or a stone gargoyle that moved. Though she never seemed disinterested in the ungainly corpses on the doorstep. She wanted to be present as they were awarded to me.
The four of us looked at Mars.
We were in the kitchen now, where the food is; we were one room over from the laundry folding room and the little room with the litterboxes.
Where we sit in the kitchen, on the east counter, there is a breadbox, but it has no bread. It is used to ripen avocados. They are grown on a select organic farm not quite an hour away. They are hand picked and delivered by a man driving a pickup truck. He’s supposed to deliver to the door, but sometimes I meet him down at the main road, so he doesn’t have to make the teetering and slow climb in a vehicle too wide for the road.
In the kitchen, there are little clocks everywhere. Freestanding, in phones, and in watches and appliances. One is a computer that makes coffee at a specified hour. Others are alarms and others are lasers which are activated when the master is out, to detect motion or rising temperatures that are unexpected.
The lasers must have been off when I went out, I thought. I couldn’t quite remember leaving, just that I did.
I had walked out of the bedroom without shoes, though I had remembered clothes. I made it into the garden without noticing the softness of the dirt or how sharp the gravel felt when I reached the driveway.
I remember as a child I would walk slowly on the asphalt of my Gramma’s driveway. With bare feet.
I wanted to burn my feet just enough so they’d be conditioned to the heat. Sacramento summers, tests involving hot coals, or whatever else might happen to me that would be difficult to endure.
I had felt for the car door handle, not wondering if it was locked. Or if the key would be inside.
On the kitchen counter is a paper flyer of the older kind. There are flyers of many colors all over the park and the preserve, which begins at the moment this property ends.
The bright colors make sure that the flyers stand out against the trunks of trees or wherever else they were placed.
With a picture. They were teenage mountain lions, apparently.
Juveniles stayed with their mother, and mothers knew where food was. Teenage lions went to find new turf to call their own.
They crossed a line between us and them, and they got shot when they did that. Sometimes in pipes, from which escape was difficult. Sometimes they fell out of trees.
I kept the sliding glass door to kitchen open, and the cats and I watched a lonely extra bit of mist, lost from the rest, enter the kitchen and remain visible for a moment before it disappeared.
It was gone in an instant, but we’d seen it go in, so we knew it was there.
It said on the flyer in smaller print not to keep doors open at night, especially doors with ground access to a kitchen.
I knew where the guns were kept. I thought of the half-moment before I’d probably shoot the exploring famished teenage lion.
Then the awful feeling that would follow permanently. Knowing that I’d shot a lion.
Now people would assume that the man would do it.
But I was a better shot than the sleeping man was, and that would be how the matter would have to fall out, if a lion walked in right now.
I would have to protect them all.
Perhaps especially the three cats, since the lion would try to eat them first, as the man forgot them and tried to save himself.
The man, the now somewhat famous Elgin Tork, had invented Beesmilk. Actually, Beesmilk was the President’s idea, but she didn’t know how to code , and the man did. Its code name was originally “Embroidery,“ ”and Milly Bell had wanted to call it Dirty Dora. After the Queen of Spades in hearts. Felice told me that. She heard it on the golf cart. Milly Bell and his lawyer buddy Jeb Norton rode around together in the golf cart for hours. Though they actually played golf, they used the outings more for the freedom of speech they offered.
They said things about women that couldn’t be politely repeated. Not even by Felice, who usually had little fear of repeating such things.
But she told me, after I’d told her I was dating Elgin, that they’d nicknamed the new technology Dirty Dora. They knew what it was built to do. It would take others a longer spell to find out.
Even Elgin, who invented it, remained in the dark about that part.
Beesmilk seemed benign enough at first.
It asked you all about yourself.
As if you were the most important woman in the world. As if women were important.
“You are splendid. You are extraordinary. You are a woman. You are in charge”
There were messages when the program opened. Elgin didn’t write them. He wasn’t much of a poet, but he was a brilliant engineer and he knew how to create a platform that saw more of its user than its user saw of it.
The initial research had confirmed what most already knew. Most women weren’t feeling too splendid or extraordinary. But when Fern Tracy was elected, that conversation had started to change. It changed more when she’d removed the old stodgy male Chair of the Bank and brought in the smiling Lilla Ostrosny. Fern as mother, Lilla as grandmother, we joked. And the analogy wasn’t so bad.
There was a photo once of the President, the Chair and the Ministers, on the cover of a magazine I saw at a stand in the train station. I laughed because there was Dr. T in the middle, looking all jowly and grumpy, surrounded by women.
As if the whole thing was excruciating and embarrassing.
I almost felt bad for him. But that thought passed quickly.
One exposed to any sort of media couldn’t avoid hearing the President talk about the Beesmilk platform.
“Beesmilk is a platform for women. And women’s causes.”
She never mentioned Elgin. Though when we were at dinner parties, he mentioned himself, and gave every impression that he was tight with the President.
My own previous work with her was only occasionally or inadvertently mentioned.
The President’s audience was all smiles and nods. The planning was exquisite. The coordinated nods of the righteous, in every color and age and shape. I wondered who was staging the President now. The scene looked too overly manufactured to have been the work of Dex Keith, who was a genius at making the artificial look natural. And it was certainly too condescending to have come from Felice, who had since been promoted to bigger things in Fernland. Things around fundraising and deal making and not just placing the right bodies on a patchworked stage.
Whomever had planned this had wanted it to look planned, I thought.
They want to give the impression that in this administration, no thought or hair is out of place.
The nodding all started again. I looked away from the television.
Elgin and I went to dinner at Sans Souci, and he said, as he often did, “tell me what it was like.”
“To work in the District. To work with Ash, and Taps, and the President.”
He didn’t mention Arthur. Or Zane.
“I dunno,” I’d say, shaking my head.
“OK, let’s talk about something else,” he’d say.
“You know Lucie, when I ask about the District, you always go dark. Really dark. You never tell me anything.”
The server brought a basket of just-baked bread.
He put his hand atop mine, stopping it before I’d touched the crust. I could feel its warmth.
I thought for a moment that he was trying to comfort me, to warm my cold hands, my darkened countenance. Which happened at the mere mention of where I’d been just before.
But he took my hand away from the basket.
“No bread,” he said. “I want to keep you thin.” He did not smile.
He ordered for me. It was a sauceless version of a lower calorie fish on the menu. He ordered it while wearing reading glasses. He’d just started wearing them, and assured the server of that fact.
“I’m really not that old,” he said. “These glasses are new.”
When the fish arrived, he took off the glasses and stared at me. I took one bite and couldn’t taste anything.
This wasn’t a problem for him. He had it boxed up for the cats.
That night, after addressing the various physical needs of Elgin as was my duty, I dreamt of Zane.
He was standing next to an enormous stone pillar, which twisted hard into the ground like a perpetually turning screw. The backdrop was a stone building. It looked damp from humidity, and at risk of moss or mildew. There were guards around him, and around it. The entire palette was a charcoal greyish blue, and warm wiggly air came up from vents in the ground. A black sedan drove up and Zane got in.
If I had been visible, he had not seen me.
I didn’t feel anything, and I have to say that seemed good. I didn’t want to feel anything. I just watched the car as it drove away.
I took a good look around the kitchen, closed the sliding door to the outside, then walked through each room of the house. There were so many rooms to walk through. Some were barely used, and sheets still covered the furniture. Others had hosted parties.
Usually they were charity parties, events where those born into money nibbled alongside those who had recently obtained it. They communicated to each other in voluptuous words. Each described the other more superlatively, and the glow of mutual praise added a sparkle to the room that some found uplifting. I always thought it theatrical, the easy smiling persuasion and the writing of enormous checks to be couriered immediately to the needy in exotic places that I had never visited. Smiling children and racing beasts in the most emotive of slideshows, professionally produced, projected on triple height bare white walls to the gazes of the most generous. Those who had been invited. On the explicit understanding that the checkbooks were the guests, and the people who held them were just necessary for visual reasons.
“Optics,” as they liked to call it.
Walking through the house was my way of seeing the theater in its true sense.
I learned this when I danced. Theaters are themselves when they are empty. In quiet and in darkness, when the show is over and it is past time to go home.
When I first came in to this particular theater I felt differently, and wondered if another phase had begun. If the moon was different, if the stars might tell, if this was a new definition of life, I asked the smaller girl cat, the gravely observant, the angelically serious Vie-Vie.
But such things move along, and it seemed only moments before escape was the goal. Before the initial thrill and chaos came back into its own orbit and order. The rules were the same. There was a resignation to that, and there was a comfort to it too.
A plan made well and quietly, a plan for leaving. Part of my plan was the walk I took now, a walk in low light, into and through so many subsequent doors. Never staying in any one room, but making sure to pass through all of them.
The cats chose to follow me. The boy alongside me. The girls in leaps and jumps, as if to frame my evolving viewpoint. We left the guest bedroom, which smelled of verbena in summer and peonies in spring, where famous guests stay when they are here. There is an actress who always stayed in this room, except for the time she did not, about a month ago, when I was out to give a speech at the college about being the only woman on an elite bond desk. I came home early and I knew, padding quietly into the house, that the guest room was empty. I knew why.
Unheard, unseen, and unaffected, I eavesdropped. I listened for her voice.
She was telling him that she had a recurring fantasy, where she wore a man’s suit and ogled women in flowing dresses. She said that her mother would never have approved. Her mother, also an actress, was far more famous than she ever would be.
“But mother was betrayed,” she said. In a tone which inferred that she was superior in some way to her mother.
That when it came to betrayal, she would be on the other side. She would not make her mother’s mistake.
“She was betrayed by famous men in suits, that ogled her as she walked by in flowing dresses.”
Those men had lured her to act illegitimately.
“And that was how I came to be,” she said. It was supposed to sound cute when she said that. But it always sounded so sad.
Her fantasy was about fixing all of that sadness, I thought. The sadness of thinking oneself illegitimate.
I might have felt sympathy except for her voice. I was listening through the door and she was probably naked with the man I was living with. That part didn’t much bother me. But the thought that she thought it would bother me did.
She was speaking theatrically, but not with talent or muse. Her pathos was unimaginative, held within a softly psychotic voice of one long incarcerated inside a very ample country club.
She had a pretty face that looked just slightly off kilter until it was bathed in a soft and managed light. The face sold makeup.
“I never have fantasies about wearing a man’s suit,” I assured the cats, who could not have cared less about who was famous or who was not, who was cheating on whom or selling makeup to whom, as long as the starlight and food appeared in the right places and times. I understood them, and I suppose that’s why they follow me in the dark. In this walking through rooms ritual I do.
We climbed the stairs to the great room, and from an almost endless window took in the whole valley at night.
I might miss this window, I thought.
Yet I had no memories here really, except for that brief moment of wondering if I would remember this house one day.
If this would ever be a special place, one I would mark time by. Before the house, this. After the house, that.
But I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t. Still, I was saying goodbye. A wanderer in a castle, who did not belong to it, a curious stranger almost trespassing. Who was unafraid and trespassed anyway.
This castle of a wealthy master awaited a mistress. Someone to love it? I considered that possibility, of houses needing love, and almost felt as if I should apologize. The walls seemed to sigh in resignation, realizing that I was only an interesting visitor, a kind but temporary anomaly.
The princess to be was not me. The dutiful laborer, to attend to the Master’s needs, was to be another.
I would be released, I wanted to explain, because my labor was not dutiful. Not inspired. Not sufficiently ejaculatory.
It was of a different sort. “Not contract but covenant,” I whispered to myself, my lips up next to the window.
“Touched by grace and not material ambition, it had its own sense of time.
Which here, in this place, was time itself. There was no room, no place for a second or complementary version.
“Fairy tales never tell you that,” I whispered with a knowing smile, particularly for the two female cats. So they would know.
And because that Master had wondered, I whispered up close to the cats, “what I had seen that one very, very odd morning, when I was crawling on the bedroom floor, next to the beautiful old wooden trunk.”
The carved one. From Tibet. The one that smelled of knowledge, and long journeys home from strangers and stranger places. The one that brought back a memory as I opened it, leaned up to it and breathed in what was inside.
There was nothing inside it, nothing to pick up with one’s hands. But there was a soft sort of scent, of trees and of darkness. And unanswered questions from the other side of the world filled me with memory and dream, and made me want to run away.
With my hands on the trunk’s edge, I had turned around, and I had thought I saw a note on the middle of the floor.
Under the Buddha, on whose arms a golden silk scarf was draped. An apricot gold, illumined by a spotlight, museum-like and almost too grand for a suburban master bedroom, but affording a dramatic entrance. And to me, a reminder.
Of a note from before. A note on the floor that had chilled me so deeply back then. A note I had never been sure had been real, even as it took my breath away.
I laughed a new laugh as I realized what had happened. What had changed.
I was not afraid of what the note would say. Not this time.
I pictured Zane’s note in my mind. The note I think Zane wrote, but that I’d never been able to find in my things, after I moved out West.
Things were different now. I was different now.
Back then, I’d wondered if it was true. The craving.
Whomever accused me of craving now? I would look square in the eye.
And speak with truth, authority, sureness.
My audience of three, and a red planet above awaited what I would say.
I smiled at the boy and two girls.
Email me when Fiction Excerpts publishes stories