The Radiant City (2 page)

Kate seems to read his mind. “You’ll come home with me. We’ll have a life,” she says. “No more war zones. No more of this. You have had enough, haven’t you? Because I sure as hell have. I can’t take anymore, Matthew.”

Part of him wishes he could say what she wants him to. She is beautiful, loyal and she is a tough woman. A defence lawyer—she has to be. She believes in Matthew and things like the future and children and all that. He’s supposed to want a woman like that.

“No. You shouldn’t have to,” he says.

“So you’re done then?”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t what? You can’t
what,
Matthew?” Her head twitches. Her neck is full of tendons.

Washington. Life in that sun-drenched apartment. Kids and carpools and friends round for drinks and a nice steady job somewhere. A kitchen with a big steel fridge and an ice-maker in the door. Scented candles. Fluffy duvet on the bed. Everywhere softness, cleanliness, calm. He would go crazy from the smell of disinfectant. He would go crazy in the quiet order, with nothing to listen to except the sound of his memories scraping along the imported Italian tiles like a broom made out of bones.

It had all been fine when he had come and gone. All been undemanding and sweet when he had landed like a tattered carrier pigeon for a short rest stop. But as a permanent solution? He never intended the relationship to be forever.
I’m an asshole. Yes, well, that’s not news.
He would last a year at most. Then he would break whatever promise she wanted him to make now. Break his word. Break her heart. Better to do it now. Get it over with.

In her eyes, he sees a tiny projection of what she thinks he is, this good heroic man. He cannot help himself. Wants to feel his hands squeezing the life out of his own false image.

In his head, there is the
thing
; that glinting something, like the after-glare from a flash bulb. The burn of horror. The ghost-flare of images. What he knows is that he cannot go back to any
where
, since there is no purpose to any
thing
.

How to explain?

How to explain he may not be alive a year from now?

He leaves out the last bit. He looks her straight in the eyes and then says, “I just don’t love you, Kate.”

“You’re lying,” she says.

He shakes his head.

“You’re just saying that because you’re sick. Because you’re depressed.”

He shakes his head.

It takes three days for her to believe him.

“If I go,” she says on the third, “this is it, Matthew. I’m not going to sit waiting for the phone to ring. I’ve done enough fucking waiting. Enough sitting around. Wasted enough time on you. You’re a real bastard, you know that?”

He does.

“Fine. You’re a fool. You have no idea what you’re turning down.”

But he does.

“My life’s been on hold, waiting for you. The number of times I’ve run to some fleabag dump in some godforsaken corner of the earth so we could have a couple of days together. The number of times I’ve believed your promises. Christ. What a fool I’ve been.” She picks up her purse. “Hope you heal up okay. In every way. Leave a message at my office with Sherri. Let me know where you want your stuff sent.”

She does not glance back. He does not blame her, of course. She is absolutely right. Kate, the only woman to whom he’s talked of his mother’s death; it was ruled not to be a suicide, but what else do you call starving yourself to death? Kate, who believes in lost causes like saving the rainforests or stopping the AIDS epidemic in Africa, has no choice. At last she stops believing in him.

The next two days he spends alternately staring at the wall and at the bland expanse of white sheet that covers him. Both act as excellent projectors. All his nightmares find daytime viewing space. He simply cannot get enough sleeping pills.

The nurse comes in with the phone again. “A very insistent man,” she says.

“Tell my father I died.”

“Funny. It isn’t your father.” She puts the phone down and leaves.

He considers not answering it, and then decides it might be a diversion from the horror film playing in his head.

“Yes?”

“Matthew Bowles?” A man’s voice. He does not recognize it. The line crackles. Long distance.

“Yes.”

“Oh. My name is Brent Cappilini. I’m a literary agent.” New York accent. He says ‘Brent’ as though there were no ‘t’ at the end.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Cappilini?”

“Call me Brent. And I’ll tell you what you can do. You can write a book.”

“What about?”

“About yourself. About what got you shot.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Are you kidding? You are a hot ticket, pal. Am I the first agent to contact you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, good for me, but I won’t be the last. Believe me.” He has a deep laugh. Deeper than his speaking voice. Matthew pictures a little man with a big cigar. “I can get you six figures, on spec.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Matthew hangs up the phone and stares at the wall some more. His funds are less than limited. A few thousand. He is an independent, with no newspaper empire behind him. No long-term disability. His medical insurance will eat this up. He will never get any more. Bad risk. Very shortly, he will be destitute.
If I’m still alive. Like mother, like son?

Writing a book might at least buy time in which he can sort through things and come to a decision. The knowledge he now carries irrevocably, heavy as a sack of skulls, irrevocably changes the world. There is so little hope, and no purpose to anything. The world is exposed. It is horror, and all his belief in the power of observation proven to be folly. And if his mission fails, if it turns out there is nothing to understand, no answer, then he knows very well how to permanently stop the pain. Until then, he might as well write a book, maybe even explain a thing or two.

The agent calls again the next day. “I suppose we should talk,” Matthew says.

“Good man,” says Brent Cappilini.

Matthew wakes with a start. It is how he always wakes now, as though someone has yelled in his ear. He opens his eyes, looks out the bedroom window onto the courtyard. Dark out there, but that means nothing, it might be morning, might be afternoon, even. The bed is as hard as an army cot.
That’s the problem with furnished apartments. That and the crucifix over the bed. Must remove that
. He rolls onto his side, sits up slowly and hangs his head in his hands.
Coffee. Must have coffee.
He looks at his feet and notices for the first time the broken blood vessels around his ankles.
When had they appeared?
He feels sick to his stomach. Bathroom. The morning gag. Brush teeth. Do not look too closely in the mirror. Wash. Shaving optional. Forget shaving.

Shuffle into the kitchen. Root around in the sink for a semi clean cup. Plug in the coffee maker. While coffee brews, go into the living room. The two large windows here tell him it is morning. Turn on the pint-sized television. Blah-blah-blah. Turn it off again. Go back to the kitchen. Open the refrigerator. Steak. An old bag of salad. A wrinkling tomato. Half a dozen cans of beer. Some goat cheese. A bowl of fat green olives marinated in garlic.
Whoa. Stomach not ready for that one. Ah, milk.
Coffee in cup, milk in coffee. Cup in hand. Sip
. Ah. Coffee brain fizzle. There’s a dance in the old boy yet.

He carries the cup into the living room, to the cubbyhole on the other side of the main room. He congratulates himself again on finding a top floor apartment at 11 bis, rue de Moscou. He sees the apartment as monastic, with aspirations. He is trying to step out of the husk of his past here and wants as little as possible tugging at his sleeve. If he is going to emerge, he must do so unencumbered. If he is
not
going to emerge, he wants to leave nothing behind. The price is right and more importantly it is a top floor, so his claustrophobia is not a garrotte across his throat. There is no bang-bang-bang of overhead footsteps, and the light is good. The syrupy light of late August flows in through the open window, across the cluttered, battered old table that serves as Matthew’s desk. It soothes him, as does the view itself.

The place du Dublin is not a particularly pretty square and it is in a small corner of the 8th arrondissement behind the Gare Saint Lazare where there isn’t a single tourist attraction. Le Primavera Bistro on the corner sets up red tables and chairs and yellow umbrellas beneath the poplars whenever there is the least hope of suitable weather. There is also a green fountain that, like the quality of this morning’s light, pleases him. There is something about the miniature temple, with its steady streams of water flowing over the upturned arms of the goddesses Simplicity, Temperance, Charity and Goodness, that gives Matthew hope. The sunlight sparkling on the water is like laughter, transmuted at this distance from sound to shards of prismatic encouragement.

Matthew has seen a great deal of light in his travels around the world, and he has come to the conclusion that it has different properties in different places: the harsh glare of a frozen icefield, the sweet veil in a bamboo thicket, the distortion of distance and depth that follows a thunderstorm when the sun’s rays stab under the skin of cloud cover, the threatening gloom of a darkening prison cell. Light takes on the characteristics of the objects in its path, and this, he has come to believe, is what humans do as well. Light can blind as well as reveal. It can save someone who wanders too close to an unseen edge, but it can just as easily betray a person cowering in a hidden place. He has concluded that contrary to what religious imagery would try to persuade the populace, light is neutral, and indifferent.

The wounds in his body have closed over and physically, Matthew is as good as he is going to get. The mind is another matter. Diagnoses have been assigned. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Nervous Exhaustion. Still, the practical problem exists regardless of mental fragility: if you want to eat, you must have money. In a flurry of demented activity back in the United States the month before, he sold everything he owned. It put some money in the bank, but depressingly little. If he wants more, he must write the book. It is a simple equation, the execution of which has thus far evaded him.

And so, begin now. Start again. But first, scan the bookshelf above the desk to see if there is any inspiration to be had there or, failing that, any excuse to procrastinate.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee, which is Matthew’s bible. But not today. Some short stories by Grace Paley. A book by M.F.K. Fisher, a gift from someone now forgotten.
The Collected Stories of John Cheever,
some science fiction. Asimov, Frank Herbert, Heinlein, Ray Bradbury.
Nope. Sorry, pal. Nothing for you this morning
.
Pick up a pen and face the page.
It must be longhand, for he has long since learned the terrible temptation of the delete button. Breathe. Start where? Beirut? El Salvador? He writes about Beirut, and
Sid Cameron, the Belgian photographer who wore a brown and yellow paisley vest he never washed. About the day Sid took him to the Palestinian refugee camp at Sabra, after the Lebanese Phalangists had slaughtered thousands. About the endless swelling bodies, the wandering, weeping women, the rubble, the mutilations. About how Sid had thoughtfully turned his head away as Matthew vomited and then offered him a half-bottle of warm Coke with which to wash out his mouth. “You’ll get used to it,” said Sid, who had survived his initiation in Vietnam and told stories about what napalm and bouncing-betty landmines could do.

Sabra was such a dusty place, and hot. Like Hebron.
Don’t go there. Back away.
Next stop, El Salvador. Still hot, but wet, damp enough to flush the dust out of memory’s mouth. The pen moves. . .

El Salvador. Carl showed me the ropes. He drove slowly, thoughtfully, on his daily rounds, taking photos of all the new corpses that appear like weird night-blooming succulents, fresh each morning. Fresh too were the strange blisters that blossom on my skin, spreading like a pale parasitic vine across my hands, my arms, and my chest. The rash grew with the rising sun and receded each night only to begin again. The blisters didn’t bother me much during the day, when they were nothing more than a soft burning, but at night, as they germinated under my skin, they itched like something crawling beneath the flesh.

Carl laughed at me as the blisters spread across my face, making me look like a pimply adolescent. “You should have seen the stuff that’d grow on you in ‘Nam. It was like farm country in your boots,” he said.

Whatever happened to Carl?
Matthew wonders, back again in his body, at his desk, in this Paris apartment. Oh yes, newscaster somewhere in the American Midwest, last anyone heard. And then, knowing he should not, he reads over what he’s written. Frustration wells up from the bottom of his gut, bubbles over his chest and down to his fingertips. He thinks he should keep a large metal garbage bin next to his desk wherein he can have regular fires. It is difficult not to tear the page to shreds with his teeth. He has become, however, a very good crumpler, and his wastebasket is more than accepting.