The Way Here [1:19]

Part 1: Chapter 19

“I want to go with you,” she said one morning.

Jonathan looked at her. Her eyes were closed where she lay and he saw her dark hair and her eyelashes and her dark brows and the line her lips made. He loved her hair; the coarse thickness of it and the heavy feel of it as his fingers traced it through. He loved the touch of her closed lashes against his cheek and the steep line of her lip as she slept with her mouth softly open.

“I want you to take me,” she said again. She opened her eyes to look at him.

“You would leave here?”

“I want to be with you where you go.”

“And you would leave here to do it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Here is what you know.”

“Yes.”

“You would leave what you know?”

“I will learn something new.”

“You will.”

“Yes.”

“I cannot stay here.”

“So I will go,” she said. “What is here?”

“You are here.”

“I am only here with you.”

“You are all I am here.”

“So I will go.”

Jonathan looked beyond her dark features to the covered window, the slatted walls, the slatted ceiling. The blue light was coming in and the caramel looking walls were a dull shade with shadows in between. The wooden chest was there, colored the same candy color as the walls and the ceiling and the door too. The chest was there with his bag and his satchel and his things strewn.

“I could go with you,” she said.

“Where could we go?”

“We can go any place. Tell me where we could go.”

“We could go any place,” he said. His hand on her back, his eyes around the room.

“You don’t want me?”

“I want you.”

“You want me not to go?”

“It’s not so easy.” He paused with the light and the sounds of morning.

“And.”

“And I want you to go. I love for you to go with me. But I’m thinking.”

“What?”

“Where we’d go.”

And she, “We can go anyplace.”

“We can.”

“And anywhere we can be.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t know where.”

“Anywhere is right.”

“And you can choose.”

“We can choose together.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“That you want me.”

“Yes.”

“And that you’ll want me still.”

“Yes.”

“But you said you can’t stay here.”

“I cannot.”

“And I can’t stay here without you.”

“You cannot,” he said. “And we will go then and find someplace and it will be like it is here.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure you want to leave?”

“Yes.”

“Your family?”

“Yes.”

“What will you tell them.”

“That I love,” she started.

“That you love a man that is old?”

“That I love a man that is good.”

“And old.”

“And wise.”

“Not always.”

“Like the mountain.”

“Like the mountain.”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“And I am like the mountain and we will be together there like here.”

Jonathan sat up in the bed they shared. The blue light growing white. He got out of the bed and began to dress. His trousers. A sweater.

“You might not like an old man out of these mountains.”

“Why?”

“Because a beautiful woman can have anything.”

“I want to have you,” she said. And then, “You might not like me.”

“That could not happen,” he said.

Jonathan sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her blanket-covered side. “Are you sure you would leave here?” he asked.

“I am sure.”

“You have to be very sure.”

“I am very sure.”

“And your family?”

“Yes?”

“Your family.”

“They will want me to be happy.”

“It’s different than you think. Tradition makes a strong argument.”

“I’m not required.”

“Perhaps.”

Jonathan sat for a moment. He smelled the morning smells, the smells of two people sleeping and now waking. He listened for Nunu in the kitchen below and looked at where the window’s covering didn’t quite reach and the edge was a pale blue-gray.

The smells that met him were fleshy and sweet smelling scents. He heard nothing below and the window where he looked was a brightening strip. Dead flies on the sill.

“We should wait to say anything,” he said.

She looked at him and raised herself so that she was propped on one arm. Her hair was a mess of folds and her cheeks were flushed beneath their olive tone.

“Let’s wait and talk more later.”

She said okay and Jonathan said good. He patted her leg that was still covered and stood. We’ll talk later, he said again. Let’s think today and talk later, he continued.

He left the room with Anna watching the place where he’d sat. He left her with the sound of the door closing and his descent down the ladder-like stairs. He left the room saying we’ll talk later, whispering we’ll talk later, and Anna nodding her head and watching where he’d been.

Tragedy has its recuperative effects. Violence has its redemptive qualities. We are born of it or the pattern of regeneration is cyclical. Ugly, yes. But we are new at its cost.

Its burden is misunderstanding. Are we in a process of growth or decline? How do we know when an end is reached? A bottom? A transition? A turn? I drink this glass because I would forget. I drink this glass because I have forgotten. I drink this glass because I cannot remember. It’s all the same: I drink this glass.

Perhaps we have lost our language for these things. In the way that one loves something that isn’t perfect, there is little explaining how or why. Perhaps it is a language we’d simply not speak, like the words that say it is easier now that he is gone. He is better on his way. Like the language that says her passing left us with time to grieve, though better yet time to forget.

Violence is this language, or it is a dialect of this language. Redemptive. Cleansing. Its dictionary healing. Revolutions speak it. It is spoken without romance in schoolyards and alleys, and the chatter of greedy men think it simply theirs though the greedy are nonetheless in conversation.

A bastard language, derivative and derivative of the original sin, the first redemption. A language spoken at will by the first and then the last and in speaking, speaking so that none may speak after. So its hopes are written. So that I may be the last to shout blood upon someone unable to speak. And last spoken, wipe clean the alphabet, rewrite that alphabet so that mine is the only hold.

But the language has many letters and its fluency cannot be limited to the man whose power is writ largest. The language has many letters and its tragedies are but fodder for the birth and growth of those next.

Because of Thomas, he thought. Because of Thomas I am here. I am here because he is there now. Or because I am here, still here, he is not. And so because he is not here, I am here. And take it or leave it, do with it what you will. Take it or leave it and I have done both, he thought. And after here I cannot. I cannot both take and leave and so it is one or it is the other. It is here with Anna or it is there. Here with Anna or there where I do not know who with.

Or there and I am alone where before, always, I had to leave to be alone. And now that I am here and not alone, it is there that I go to be so. Or there that I go once and for all and there that I go to be the old man again.

What a gift, he thought, to know where you needed to be.

You were always…

He thought of the singing. He thought of the guitar and the singing and the sounds in the warm kitchen with the darkness vast outside. He remembered the looks he shared and those shared with him. He remembered the good tension the others walked through, unknowing and unsensing and unseeing. The way her brother played with his thumb and fingers strumming and his eyes closed. The way her mother sat with her head leaning or walked between them so that their stares were momentarily lost to the blurred shapes of a woman passing, space broken.

The sun was rising up the river valley or falling at its bend. It was warm or breezy or raining with heavy clouds low on the hills or absent in the blue sky. Or it was night with its stars rising and the two mountains meeting in love and worship. It was everything and nothing all at once and what was certain was that he was here. I am here, he thought. And that is what I can know.

There are two of me, he thought. Before there was only one and now there are two. Before there was only me. Now there is me here and that other me that was there and they are both real. And one is not better and each has taught the other. And between the one that was there and the one that is here is a great space and a great time. A landscape passing. A geography traveled.

Ushba, he said to himself.