Via Dolorosa (37 page)

“Cool it, Vic.” Nick nodded at Myles Granger. “You okay?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant. Yeah.”

But Myles Granger was not all right. Something inside him had been knocked funny by that woman, and nothing was all right. He spent the rest of the afternoon in an unnerving, reflective haze, his eyes always just slightly out of focus. By dusk of that same day, they had established camp within the protective embrace of what structures remained standing just outside the city’s marketplace. Sporadic radio transmissions warned of gunfire less than a half-mile from where they now camped, on the other side of the market square. Their packs off, he watched Granger for a few moments as the kid stood aloof and apart from the others, staring off into the distance. He went to Granger, smoking a hand-rolled cigarillo, and paused beside him.

“Looking at anything in particular?”

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Myles Granger said. It was an utterance—hardly a voice. He seemed embarrassed, caught off-guard.

“Why don’t you stick around here with the others,” he told Granger, and ambled back toward camp where he bedded down beside
Bowerman
and tried not to smell the grease and fuel burning.

Come morning, they were ready to cross the marketplace. The men were ready.
Karuptka
was bulletproof, his face a patchwork of pale and pasty
leukoderma
and deep brown sun-poisoned turrets. Angelino’s eyes were squinty but watchful, creased at their corners like folded newspapers.

“Granger,” he said. He had to say his name twice. “You awake?”

Granger had been
staring
off into space. At the second call of his voice, the kid snapped his head up and looked temporarily startled.

“Get up, kid,” Nick said.

Myles Granger didn’t say much of anything. He simply stood, strapped on his gear, shouldered his M-16, and looked as though he were in the process of being swallowed alive by his helmet.

“Walk with me for two seconds,” Nick said, hanging back until Granger looked sturdy enough to take a step.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?”

“What’s with you?”

“Sir…?”

“What the hell happened to you, man?”

“Nothing, sir…”

“You feeling okay?”

“Sure.”

“Because I really need you to feel okay. You got me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All these guys, they need you to feel okay.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You got something on your mind? Something bothering you?”

In the split second before the kid answered, he could tell that yes, something was bothering young Myles Granger very much. “No, sir,” Myles Granger lied. “I’m fine, sir.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Turning away from the kid, Nick shook a cigarette out of his pack and held it out toward him. “Smoke this,” he told Granger, “and try to get a grip.”

Smirking, once again embarrassed, his head tilted down, Myles Granger pulled a cigarette from the pack and poked it between his thin, white lips. “Yeah,” the kid said. “Thanks.”

In less than an hour, all but two of them would be dead.

—Chapter XIX—

The shimmer of light…

A voice in his ear:
“
Usted
se
despierta
de la
muerte
.”

Slowly, his eyelids unstuck and slid open. The world was vibrating beneath him. His flesh was clammy; he felt both sweaty and frozen simultaneously, and overall sick to his stomach. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he made out the shape of a figure directly opposite him, standing against the wall. The figure radiated light. It was a ghost, an angel.

He waited for his mind to thaw, to catch up.

Across the room and against the wall: it was
himself.

“My Nicholas,” a female voice spoke up. It was not Emma. He couldn’t remember anything. And he did not trust his memory enough to believe anything he could remember, anyway. He stopped trying.

“Where am—” he began. Winced. There was construction work, heavy drilling, rattling off in his head.

“Limbo,” she said. Though invisible to him for the moment, he could tell her full lips were turned up in a smile. He could almost smell her body, too, the scent coming in invisible, undulating waves. It was impossible to tell where she was in the room.

Naked, he was on a bed. There was a dull, aching throb running the length of his right arm. He tried hard not to think about it.

Isabella floated toward him straight out of the darkness. As she had been on the night he’d come to her room to paint her portrait, she was wearing only the white terrycloth robe from the hotel bathroom, wrapped loosely around her brown-black body. An embroidered script
P
covered the right breast. In the lightlessness, her face possessed the
nontextured
, non-blemished contours of a Greek bust. Reality began to slide back into place…

“We’re in your room,” he managed, and just talking inaugurated a fault-line crack that split down the center of his brain and continued up and over and down the back of his head. The tremor settled at the base of his skull, where his head met his neck, and seemed to expand in a soundless burst of white fire. Rockets went off behind his eyes. Still, despite the agony, he spoke again: “We’re back at the hotel.” In his stupor, he found it impossible to inflect his voice to make his sentences sound appropriately like questions.

“There is some water beside the bed,” she said. “Drink it. You are dehydrated.” She did not approach him, as he had anticipated; rather, she went into the adjacent bathroom, the naked soles of her feet padding whisperingly on the linoleum tiles. No light was turned on but he soon heard the soft run of water at the sink.

He reached for the glass of water on the nightstand with his right hand. The slight movement and extension of his arm quickly made clear to him the tremendous amount of pain that had been waiting in dormancy. He could not grasp the glass. He could do nothing, it seemed, but gently rest his arm back down on the bed.

“My arm,” he heard himself say. Even speaking, he did not know if he was doing it for Isabella’s sake or for his own. “Shit.”

Gathering sheets about his waist with his one good hand, sitting up carefully (and sending the world on a tilt once more), he stared ahead at the glowing figure that was his identical twin on the opposite wall. It was a photograph, he saw, projected from a small unit on the desk at the other end of the room: a slide projector. It took him a few seconds to place the photograph—but then he remembered: it was the picture Isabella had taken of him that night at the Club Potemkin as he gathered for her Goat-Man Claxton’s used joints from the bandstand, his left hand lifted to block the flash from his eyes. It was not possible to make out his face.

A moment later, smelling like sea salt and the deeper, headier aroma of
female,
Isabella returned and sat very close to him on the side of the bed. Without a word, she kissed the side of his face. Something stirred within him.

“Here,” she told him. “Lay out your hand.”

He did.

“No,” she corrected, “your other hand. Your injured hand.”

“It’s stiff.”

“It hurts, yes,” she said.

“Stiff.” It was his turn to correct.

“Lay it out, whatever it is.” She placed a pillow across her lap and patted it with some affection. Held in one of her hands was a tight wrap of bandage.

Carefully, slowly, he extended his ruined right arm and held it out straight on the bed until the feeling rushed back to his fingertips. Then he lifted it and brought it down squarely on the pillow in Isabella’s lap. The bandage unraveled itself in the darkness and Isabella began to dress his arm. The act was done with care and precision, an attribute Nick would have previously thought alien to her. As his eyes grew accustomed to the lightlessness, he watched her dress his arm. The bandage came up and around, up and around. The tightness of the wrap caused the tips of his fingers to tingle. Certain places hurt worse than others. He forced himself to talk while she worked; otherwise, at integral moments, he would have bitten through his tongue and ground his teeth into powder.

“Did we have sex?” he asked.

“No.”

“We didn’t?”

“No.”

“My clothes…”

“Are in the bathtub. You were filthy from sliding down the hill.”

“Sliding—?”

“You fell and slid down a hill in the mud, just outside the hotel.”

“Well, then
your
clothes…”

“Isn’t this my own room? I would think I could dress as I choose.”

He nodded. Felt weak. “All right.”

“Stop moving the arm.”

There was no appropriate discussion for such a scenario. He did not bother. Instead, he turned away and faced his illuminated photograph that covered half the far wall. For now, for the moment, he did not want to think about anything—anything at all—and that worked out just perfectly, because he found it impossible to summon even a single coherent, linear thought. For what time remained in the dressing of his arm, he found some solace in the focusing of his name, his first name, just the four letters of its abbreviated form, wavering and ephemeral in his mind. The more he stared at his name the less it was a name and the more it became just four letters. And the more he stared at those four letters, the more they became symbols, odd symbols, hieroglyphics in the soup of his mind. He willed them to sink—and they did, individually and in their own time, deep and slow beneath the murk of his subconscious. Never did he realize how truly easy it was to drown one’s own self.

“There,” she said. “Done.”

Hoisting his arm from the pillow, he could feel the tightness of the bandage. It was keeping his arm together. The last time he had worn a bandage had been after the surgeries, and its purpose had been the same back then: to keep him together.

“Thank you,” he said.

“De nada,
my Nicholas.”

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said.

She ran a hand down his bare, sweaty back. “For what,
mi
novio
?”

“I have to get up,” he said, pulling the sheets deeper into the fold of his lap. Isabella was sitting on some and he couldn’t pull them out from under her.