At the Edge of Waking Read online

  Vronskaya shrugs, sullen. “So you’re the crazy one.”

  “Maybe. I’ve always been a gambler, and this is my game to play.”

  “It’s not a game you can fucking win!”

  “And yours is? Come on, Martiana, we’ve already lost. We lost before a shot was fired. You know it, I know it. Those damn kids know it, and so do the soldiers dying in the retreat, and so do the babyas waiting in the capital. We’re losing. We’ve already fucking lost. East and West will meet at the river and swallow us whole.” Our hero is shouting, hoarse with months, with years of frustration. Vronskaya, her driver, the checkpoint guards, are all listening with the shame-faced scowl of those caught with their worst fears showing. “We’re fucked! We’re doomed! Tell me I’m wrong!”

  In the silence that follows, they can hear a trio of small jets roaring by in the southern sky. The West has promised no civilian populations will be bombed. Even if they keep that promise, everyone knows the Russians won’t. Our hero squeezes the back of his neck, then lets his arms fall to his sides.

  “I have one card to play, and I’m playing it. What difference does it make where I cash my chips?”

  Vronskaya, long-time poker rival, long-time friend, gives him a mournful look and says, “It’s bad to die alone.”

  But our hero won’t be alone at the end.

  The old capital perches on a high bluff, a forerunner of the northern mountains, like a moth on a wolf’s nose. A wing-tattered moth on a grizzled and mangy old half-breed dog, more like, for the hillsides have been logged and grazed, and the ancient town has been starved down to its stony bones. But the river runs deep and fast in a curve around the old walls, white foam clean and bright around sharp-toothed rocks, and the castle high above the slate-roofed town still rears its dark towers against the sky. Sparrows and jackdaws make their livings there. The place might have been a museum once, but now it is not even a ruin, just an empty house with rotten foundations and a badly leaking roof. Our hero and his sister camped there for a time when the New Army was fighting to reach the modern city on the plain, and he remembers the ache of nostalgia, the romance of the past and the imperfect conviction that that past was his. But he had been younger then, and dangerous, and he could relish the pain.

  The town is quiet. No loudspeakers here, just the murmur of radios and TVs through windows left open on the soft spring evening. It has taken our hero three days to walk this far, but the news is the same. Only the names of the towns marking the army’s retreat have changed. His old comrades have managed to slow the invasion some, and along with the sting and throb of his blistered feet and the ache of his empty stomach he feels the burn of the shame he would not admit to Martiana Vronskaya, that he has been walking in the wrong direction. There must be some value to this last mad act. He must somehow make it so.

  But how will he know if he has succeeded? The thought of dying in uncertainty troubles him more than the thought of death, and he pauses in his climb up the town’s steep streets to sit at an outdoor table of a small café. His feet hurt worse once he is off them and he stretches his legs out to prop them on their heels. A waitress comes out and asks him kindly for his order. She is an older woman and he suspects her of having a son at the front: she is too forgiving of our misplaced hero. She brings him a cup of ferocious coffee and bread and olives and cheese. It all tastes delicious to our hero, and he looks up from his plate to tell his sister so, only to be reminded that she is not here. He wishes she was. He would like to see this small, cramped square through her eyes. She notices things: the sparrows waiting for crumbs, the three brass balls above an unmarked door, the carved rainspout jutting a bearded chin over the gutter. These things would tell her something about this neighborhood, this town, this world. To our hero, they are only fragments of an incomprehensible whole. The world is this, and this, and this. It is never complete. It is never done.

  Oh God, our hero thinks for the first time, I do not want to die.

  His feet hurt worse after the rest and plague him as he climbs the steep upper streets to the castle door. It is an oddly house-like castle, with no outer wall, no courtyard, no barbican and gate. The massive door, oak slabs charred black by the cold smolder of time, stands level with the street, and the long stone of the sill has been worn into a deep smiling curve by the passage of feet. Generations of feet, our hero thinks, an army that has taken a thousand years to pass through this door. The gap between door and sill is wide enough for a cat, but not a child, let alone a man. The sun has fallen below the surrounding roofs and the light has dimmed to a clear, still-water dusk. The stone is a pale creamy gray. The sky is as far as heaven and blue as his sister’s eyes. Our hero, hoping and fearing in equal measure, turns the iron latch and discovers, with horror and relief, that the door is unlocked. The great wooden weight swings inwards with a whisper of well-oiled hinges, and the boy sitting before the small fire in the very large hearth at the far end of the entrance hall calls out, “Grandfather! He’s here!” as if our hero is someone’s beloved son returning home.

  He has no idea who these people are.

  The old man and the boy share a name, so they are Old Bradvi and Young Bradvi. They stare at our hero with the same eyes, bright and black and flame-touched, like the tower’s birds. Our hero has heard the jackdaws returning to their high nests, their voices unbearably distant and clear through the intervening layers of stone. He remembers that sound, the mournful clarity of the dusk return, and misses his old friends, the lover he had embraced in a cold, cobwebbed room, his sister. He misses her so intensely that her absence becomes a presence, a woman-shaped hole who sits at his side, listening with her eyes on her hands. The boy explains with breathless faith that he and his grandfather have been waiting since the invasion began.

  They live in the town. “My mother is there, in our house, watching the television, she wouldn’t come, but we have been here all the time.”

  All the time our hero has been walking, this boy and his grandfather have been here, waiting for him to arrive. Despite himself, our hero feels a stirring of awe, as if his and his sister’s despair has given birth to something separate and real.

  Old Bradvi says, “Lord, we knew you would come.” He makes tea in a blackened pot nestled in the coals, his crow’s eyes protected from the smoke by a tortoise’s wrinkled lids. In the firelight his face is a wizard’s face, and our hero feels as though he has already slipped aside from the world he knows, as though he has already stepped through that final door. When the boy takes up a small electronic game and sends tiny chirps and burbles to echo up against the ceiling, this only deepens the sense of unreality. Or perhaps it is a sense of reality that haunts our hero, the sense that this is the truest hour he has ever lived. The old man pours sweetened tea into a red plastic cup and says, “Lord, it is better to wait until dawn.”

  Who is this man? How does he know what he knows? Our hero does not ask. Reality weighs too heavily upon him, he has no strength for speculation, and no need for it: they have all been brought here by a story, lured by the same long, rich, fabulous tale that has ruled our hero’s life, and that now rules our hero’s death. At least the story will go on. Stories have no nations, only hearts and minds, and as long as his people live, there will be those. He drinks his tea and listens beyond the sounds of the fire, the game, the old man’s smoker’s lungs, to his sister’s silent voice.

  Late in the night he leaves the old man and the sleeping boy to take a piss. Afterward, he wanders the castle in the dark, finding his way by starlit arrow slits and memory. It is a small castle made to seem larger than it is by its illogical design. It seems larger yet in the darkness, and our hero’s memory fails. He stumbles on an unseen stair and sits on cold stone to nurse a bruised shin. He wants to weep in self-pity, and he wants to laugh at the bathos of this moment, this life. He curses softly to the mice, and dozes for a moment with his head on his knee before the chill rouses him again. He climbs the stair, and realizes it is the stair to the tow
er. The floors are wooden here and there is a cold, complex, living smell of damp oak, bird shit, feathers, smoke. He crosses to a window, his muffled steps rousing sleeping birds above his head, and squeezes himself onto the windowsill. There are few streetlights in the town below, but there are windows bright yellow with lamplight or underwater-blue with TV light. There are lives below those sharp, starlit roofs. There is history out there in the cold, clean air. And there is the moon, a rising crescent that hangs in the night sky no higher than our hero’s window, as if it means to look at him eye to eye. A silver blade, a wink, a knowing smile, close enough to tempt his reach, far enough to let him fall if he tried.

  Sitting above the town with no company but the moon and the sleeping birds, our hero feels alone, apart, and yet a part of all those lives, all that history taking place right now, here and everywhere, with every beat of every heart. The paradox of loneliness is a black gulf within him, a rift between the broken pieces of his heart. The moon casts his shadow into the room behind him, and there, in the moonlit dark, the shadow of his sister’s absence puts her arms around his neck and lays her cheek against his stubbled head, and he turns and leans his face against her breast, wraps his arms about her waist, and finally weeps.

  When the stars fade and the frost-colored light of day begins to seep back into the world, the old man brings the knife, and the deed is swiftly done.

  It is the jackdaws that wake him. They have drifted down from the rafters and stand about, peering at him with cocked heads, discussing in hoarse and thoughtful tones whether he is alive or dead. Dead, he tries to tell them, but his throat remembers the iron blade and closes tight on the word. What is this? he wonders. Is he still dying? But he remembers the knife, the sudden icy tear, the taste of blood, the drowning. Air slides into his lungs at the thought, tasting of dust and feathers. What is this? Is he alive? He sits, clumsy with cold, and the birds sidle off, muttering and unafraid. Their claws make a clock’s tock against the floor. Our hero’s shirt is stiff and evil with blood. What, then, is this running through his veins?

  He is too bewildered to feel afraid.

  At first he cannot see the changes, and he thinks that he has failed, though how he could have failed and yet be alive escapes him. The dissonance between possibility and impossibility is too intense, he is numb and not, perhaps, entirely sane. He stumbles down the stairs, the same spider-haunted stairs, while the daws leave by the windows. They laugh at him as they go, he has no doubt: birds have a black sense of humor. He blunders his way through the half-remembered halls, gets lost, laughs out of sheer uncomprehending terror. When he finds the entry hall, there is a fire burning on the vast hearth, a whole log alight, filling the fireplace with snapping and dancing flames, but he does not pause. The door is wide open, and the air is bright with morning light, although the sun is still below the roofs of the town.

  There are bells ringing somewhere below, a shining tin-tanning of bronze, such a happy sound that our hero pulls off his blood-soaked shirt so as not to sully the good day. He walks bare-chested into the town, and no one stares or looks aside, although the streets are almost crowded. The people are not so happy as the bells; many seem as quietly, profoundly bewildered as our hero feels. He stops a woman about his own age, a woman with soft fair hair tousled across her face, and asks what has happened.

  “What do you mean?” she says. “Everything has happened. Everything!”

  “O God,” an older woman says beside them. “O God, do not abandon us. O God, preserve us.”

  A man across the narrow street is cursing with a loud and frantic edge to his voice. He seems to be haranguing his car which is parked with two wheels up on the pavement, and which is no doubt out of gas after all these months of the embargo. Our hero supposes that the invading armies are near, perhaps at the fragile old walls of the town, and so, although there is something odd about the man’s defunct automobile, he continues on down the hill toward the river where he might be able to see what there is to see.

  But there are other odd things, and gradually they begin to distract him from the shock of being alive. The streets are wider as they near the archaic boundary of the old wall, and the pavements here are lined with strange statues. Wrought-iron coaches with weighty and elaborate ornaments, brass lions with blunt, dog-like faces and curling manes, horses with legs like pistons and gilded springs. The people clustered around these peculiar artworks are predictably confused, but there are others in the streets who walk with shining eyes and buoyant steps, and some of these people, too, seem odd to our hero. Their clothing is too festive, their hair is strung with baubles, their faces are at once laughing and fierce. One bearded man catches our hero’s eye and bows. He sweeps off his jacket, blue velvet stiff with gold braid, and offers it to our hero with another bow. “My lord,” he says, and when our hero takes what is offered, the man spreads his arms with a wide flourish, as if to present to him everything: the people, the town, the world.

  And then our hero sees, as if before he had been blind. The tired old houses propped up by silver-barked trees hung with jewel-faceted fruit. The banners lazily unfurling from lampposts that have moonstones in place of glass. The violets shivering above the clear, speaking stream that runs down the gutter, between the clawed feet of the transformed cars. It is the new world, the ancient world, the world that had faded to a golden dream on the losing face of his sister’s hoarded coin. It is the world he died for. He has come home.

  It is still a four-day walk back to the new capital, and though it seems both illogical and unfair, our reborn hero’s feet still throb and sting with blisters in his worn-out army boots. He is warm enough in his old jeans and the blue velvet coat, despite the clouds that roll in from the east, but he walks with a deep internal chill that only deepens the closer he gets to home. He should have kept his ruined shirt to remind him that there is no such thing as a bloodless victory, a bloodless war. The invaders had penetrated too deeply to be shed with the nation’s old skin. Like embedded ticks engorged with suddenly poisoned blood, they—men and women of the East and the West, their weapons and machines—have suffered transformation along with the rest of them, and though harmed, they have not been rendered harmless. There are monsters in this new world. He sees one slain, a tank-dragon with bitter-green scales, a six-legged lizard with three heads and one mad Russian face, in the fields near where he had met the checkpoint guards and Martiana Vronskaya on his way north just a few days ago. Perhaps some of these confused and scrabbling warriors are those same young volunteers with their flak jackets and jeans. The jeans have not changed, nor the fearful determination, but the short spears with the shining blades are new. New, and as old as the world. Our hero leaves them to their bloody triumph on the flower-starred field, and like the veteran he is, continues on his painful way.

  The new capital has changed more than the old, its modern buildings wrenched into something too much stranger than their origins. Our hero suspects this will never be an easy place to live, not even the old quarter where his sister lives. Here, 18th Century houses have melted like candlewax, or spiraled up into towers like narwhal tusks and antelope horns, crumbling moldings and baroque tiles bent and twisted out of true. Our hero cannot tell if this new architecture is better or worse than the old, uglier or more beautiful. He is only frustrated that the landmarks have changed, and that he cannot locate the house is that once he could find blind drunk and staggering. It seems bitterly unfair. He circles the half-familiar streets, until finally a doorway catches his eye, a pale door like a tooth or a pearl, with above it a wholly prosaic glass-and-iron transom in the shape of a fan. He knows that transom, and now that he is looking, he recognizes a brass-capped iron railing, a graffitoed slogan barely legible among the creeping blue flowers on the pavement at his feet. Tears of gratitude sparking hot and wet in his eyes, he turns the corner and walks to the second door.

  His key still works, despite the rubies bursting like mushrooms from the crazed paint on the door. He enters
the old-house quiet, breathes in the intimately remembered smell of dry wood and cabbage and sandalwood incense, climbs the crooked, creaking, fern-and-trumpet-vine stairs. He knocks on his sister’s door, and she opens it, and she is just the same.

  The Rescue

  She woke at the bottom of a well.

  A squared-off well, strangely bright and lined with tiles, and with a painted door far overhead. Far, far overhead. She lay for a long time contemplating that door—it was so bright in the well she could see the flaws in the cream paint—until her other senses began to wake. She was lying as she must have fallen when they threw her in, with her head and shoulders on the floor and the rest of her body stretched up one wall . . . Gravity reasserted itself, spinning the well like a gimbal so that for an instant she was pressed like a squashed fly against the ceiling before it settled and she was lying on the floor. The floor of a room with tiled walls, and a window in the wall above her head, and a door a long way away. She went on looking at the door between her bare feet, blinking occasionally to mark the time. Gravity came and went. Finally she thought to test it, and raised her hand before her eyes.

  Raised her hand . . .

  Raised her hand, after a vast gulf of time, and left it floating in the air a while until she had encompassed what she saw. Not her hand (bony? small? chapped?) but a wool mitten strapped about the wrist and palm with dirty bandages. Was it cold? It began to seem to her that it was; that her bare feet were icy and the tiled floor beneath her was pressing a hard chill into her flesh through her clothes. While she was making these discoveries, her hand had drifted out of sight. She raised it again, with less lag time but more effort, and saw that the mitten was green.

  She rubbed her face with it, and felt the fraying wool catch on new scabs, felt the sting of the scratches, and remembered clawing at her skin to release the insects tormenting her under the surface. Drugs, she thought. (Thought was slow. She went on lying there, looking at her hand, her toes, the door.) Drugs. Withdrawal from drugs: that was the bugs. Drugs: bugs: a rhyme. And this immense lethargy: that was drugs, too: a sedative. And this slow awakening: that was the sedative wearing off.