Via Dolorosa (43 page)

“I wish I could think of something profound to say,” Granger managed.

“You did that back in the elevator.”

Something akin to a smile surfaced on Granger’s thin, tired lips. “Yes,” he said eventually. “All right.”

And the bell captain left, walking out into the night and the rain and the bugs as if he never existed at all.

From behind him, the Palauan said, “Sir.”

Nick’s eyes focused on the
Palauan’s
reflection in the glass of the lobby doors. Then he turned. “What is it?”

“Sir,” said the Palauan. “I have many beautiful shells. I have—”

“Have you seen my wife?”

“No, sir, I have not. You have misplaced her?”

“Never mind.” He began walking toward the elevators.

“Sir! Please wait! You must purchase something.”

“You have nothing I want.”

“There is always something, sir. There is always something someone wants.”

Nick paused. In the semi-darkness of the corridor, he could see his mural. The painting had come alive, the painted characters actually
moving…

No; there were cicadas creeping along the wall, crawling across the mural, scaling it. Bugs. Big bugs.

“Sir,” the Palauan said again, and Nick turned.

“What?” His voiced echoed down the otherwise empty hallway.

“I have something for everyone.”

“Not for me.”

“
Ahhh
,” said the Palauan, “but I do, sir. But I do.”

And the handsome, dark-skinned Palauan held something up in one hand. He held it draped around two fingers, and it hung from those fingers, faintly swaying in a nonexistent breeze.

“What is it?” Nick asked, taking a step closer. The Palauan didn’t answer, but Nick suddenly knew what it was: strung to a length of hemp adorned with colorful seabed stones hung a small plastic card. The keycard to unlock hotel room doors.

“For you, sir.” The Palauan extended the item as Nick approached. The man brought his fingers out and let the hemp cord spiral into the palm of Nick’s good hand.

“Is this…for…?”

“Yes, my friend.”

“How did you get it?”

Quite simply, the Palauan said, “There is something for everyone.”

“How much?”

“Two dollars.”

Nick dug around in his pocket and came out with two weathered bills. He laid them on the dais.

“
Ke
kmal
mesaul
.”

“Thank you,” Nick said, and quickly headed toward the elevators.

Back upstairs, standing outside Isabella Rosales’s door, he used the keycard to gain access to her room. He expected it to be unchanged—that her clothing would be everywhere, and that her bathroom would be suffused with glossy photographs, her tub a cryptic puzzle of random items. But no—much like the rest of the hotel, the room was empty, deserted. All her belongings were gone. Had she left? Had she checked out of the hotel?

“Isabella?” He called out her name nonetheless, as if in doing so would force her to materialize before him. “Isa—”

The first thing he saw was the painting he had done of her, still tacked to the wall beside the bed. It was the first time he’d seen it, and in that instant he did not know what it was or what to think of it. Then it settled into him, and he could see it for what it was. In painting it, he had only used one color—green. This struck him as odd, for he clearly recalled using a multitude of paints. Had he simply (and mistakenly) dipped his paintbrush in the same tub of paint each time he went down to refuel? Surely…surely…

The second thing he noticed was that it was not a portrait of Isabella Rosales. The lines were more delicate, the expression less defined, the details and features more close to the center of the face. It was his wife, Emma. He had attempted to paint Isabella and it had come out being Emma.

Paint with your heart,
he could hear Isabella whispering now at the base of his skull.
Paint what comes.

Paint what comes…

The next thing he noticed was a stack of eight-by-ten photographs in the center of the bed. Nick walked around its side and gathered the photographs in his one good hand. His unsteady right hand coming up, he shuffled through each photograph one by one, digesting them all.

The first was Emma on the beach with Leslie Hansen. They were talking, looking cheerful, and it was a candid shot, presumably photographed from some distance with a telescopic lens. Each subsequent photo revealed different stages of Emma and Leslie Hansen’s conversation. Finally, in the last chill moments, the final few photographs caused in him a blossom of cold anger and trembling fury, as he saw Emma on the bow of the
Kerberos,
Leslie Hansen grinning, shirtless, in sunglasses, standing behind her.

He felt well up inside him the gritty tornado of helplessness, followed by a moist wave of panic.

Like a shadow moving through darkness, her voice filtered back to him now:
We won’t let little things ruin us, will we, baby?

He’d promised her they wouldn’t. In a time so unlike now, he’d promised her they wouldn’t. And he had let her down.

Again—a coward.

He was out the door before he even knew what he was doing. This time, for the first time, he could not wait for the elevators. He rushed through the stairwell and burst out the fire exit onto the outdoor veranda. The wind was icy cold and flecked with rain. The rain was strong and hard, pelting him like bullets fired from a gun. He struggled through it, one hand up shielding his vulnerable eyes, too conscious of the angry bite of the rain against his hand, along his arm. Then he realized it wasn’t the rain: it was the cicadas, rebounding off his body in their blind, stupid angst, straight from nearly two decades of hibernation and into furious oblivion. Almost blind himself, he shoved his weight off the veranda and dumped his wracked body into the wet sand. The wind was like heavy breathing into a microphone. Tears streaming his face, his teeth rattling against the chill, he was able to raise his head enough to look out over the black sea. He was closer to the shore than he’d originally thought. Black, rocky crags stabbed the sky; all around him sounded the crash and sizzle of the waves breaking over the shore. Out on the sea, he could see the distant yellow light glowing from the pilothouse windows of the
Kerberos.

He pushed himself to his feet and flung himself forward, propelling his legs into motion. Cicadas drummed against his skull, his face, his chest and thighs. Several were caught in his hair, and he could feel them needling against his scalp, and could hear their futile, hopeless twitter as they struggled to free themselves from his wet hair. One shuttled into his left ear, and for the brief moment it lingered, all he could hear in the world was the
zzzt-zzzt-zzzt
of its furious decree.

Gathering speed, feet pounding the sand, he raced toward the sea. With his eyes open, he could see the shaky visage of the single golden light out on the water; with his eyes closed, he could still see it, projected like a filmstrip on the undersides of his eyelids. Each inhalation seared his throat; each exhalation secured in him the notion that his lungs were two tiny, shriveled raisins, and that he would die of asphyxiation before he ever even reached the water, before he ever even reached the boat—

Lieuten
—

And then he was there: crashing through the freezing surf, soaking his pants and suctioning his shoes to the sand. At one point, both his shoes were sucked off his feet, but he hardly noticed. He continued to run, not slowing down until the freezing water was too high, too high and hugging his waist, and he pushed on until he could lift his legs no more. The crash of the ocean thundered around him and filled his brain as he dove beneath the waves. Sounds filtered out; he was caught inside his own head, trapped, unable to escape. The turbine struggling to turn over was his heart in his ears. He had become nothing but heart, nothing but a single kinetic mechanism furious with the pump of blood, the grind of muscle, the contraction of impulse after impulse after impulse. The world slowed to a single frame. He could not tell if he was moving, swimming, breathing…or if he was dead and watching himself from somewhere just to the left of him…

There was a point where his head broke the surface. Gasping for air, swallowing water and choking on insects, his eyes located the yellow light of the cabin cruiser, now blurred and smeared and teasingly false. It was a million miles away. Erratically, he thought of his childhood, of growing up in Pittsburgh, and of the paintings his father used to busy himself with in the basement. He thought of the black steel locomotive barreling along the track high above the quaint New England village. He was on that train now, shuttling through a mountainside tunnel, a rift in the earth. The only passenger now, careening at breakneck speed. He could smell the burning coal from the furnace and could see the way the raw soot collected on the white of his skin. Around him, the train rattled and shuddered and threatened to break apart.
Break apart,
he willed it. A maniacal laugh wanted to burst from his lungs.
Break apart, goddamn
you. Why don’t you just break the hell apart?
And then he
did
laugh, or at least attempted to, filling his mouth, his throat, his lungs with freezing water. The train—the world—swung out of control. It was going to spill off the tracks. He would go down with it, spill with it—this fiery missile launching into the air and arching down, down, down to the tiny, quiet, unsuspecting New England village below. He could imagine the explosions, the chaos, the destruction and annihilation. He was there for it. He was there, helping pull young children from a flaming frame house—the mother screaming—the children blackened by soot but otherwise unharmed. He would spend the entire afternoon rushing from burning building to burning building, rescuing the innocent.
Are you okay? Can you breathe? Choking, choking on smoke. Watery
eyes. Breathe deep—breathe the fresh air. Can you breathe? Can you, can
you, can you? Did any of them know he had been on the train that had
crashed through their town? That he had been the sole angel fallen from
heaven to crush and burn and destroy their world? He could help them
and play nice, and they might even believe him…but he knew, he knew,
he knew the truth of it all. (Can you breathe?) And beside him, Myles
Granger began to laugh and shouted something about divers, Chinese
divers, that he’d won a parrot for shooting the most Chinese divers. How
many did you shoot? He didn’t know. Can you breathe? He wouldn’t
say. Can you? Stop laughing. He wouldn’t stop laughing. Stop it! And
he couldn’t tell if it was Granger, Myles Granger, who was laughing or himself, his own mouth, his own bitching sounds coming from his own bitching body—but no, it couldn’t be him, because he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t make the air work for him or even
find
the air, because there was only water, cold and freezing water, just water, and it was all he knew and all he had—

Lieuten
—

Have baby,
he thought.
In stomach.

It occurred to him that he had stopped thinking. And then he lost
his thought completely. When you drown, it registered with him in those
last perilous seconds, you can tell exactly when you are about to give up,
like watching a clock tick down to zero. You see how long you can hold
your head under water, and you try to experience what it is like to almost
die, almost drown, almost buy it all. He knew it now—and knew, just
as quick, that once you know it, you cannot go back to
not
knowing it,
like being told a horrible secret. You can never forget that secret, and
it will resonate with you always.
Always.
He thought,
We won’t let little
things ruin us, will we, baby?
And he thought,
Not as long as the train stays
together.
But he knew the train would not stay together—that the train
was halfway down the mountainside right now, trailing behind it like a
comet a black flag of smoke.
Always.
He thought,
Always.