Via Dolorosa(27)

“You are still thinking,” Isabella said. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nicholas,” she went on. “Why is it men always say they are thinking of nothing?”

“Why is it women always ask what we’re thinking?” he quipped.

She laughed. “I like that. I like you calling me woman.”

“I didn’t call you woman.”

“It sounds so much like an animal pet name.”

“I didn’t…”

But she had already turned away from him, humming to herself. It was difficult now to tell if Isabella was paying more attention to him or Claxton’s CD. She moved away from the edge of the cliff and spoke half into the wind so that he had to strain to hear all her words…

She said, “Sometimes I think the meaning of life is to run through a succession of ideologies, trying each one on like a new pair of shoes. Slip, slip, slip. We are like Cinderella that way. Yes? And when you finally find the right one, the one that fits, you die.”

“That’s a hell of a reward.”

“I would think so. Why would it not be a reward?”

“Death?” he said. “Death is a reward?”

“Why not? What is so horrible about death? Do you know something I don’t? Did you see death when you were over in Iraq?”

He thought, not saying anything…then laughed. When Isabella did not laugh, he said, “Oh. You’re being serious.”

“Whether death is good or bad,” she said, “it is still something. It is still final. There is no more wondering, and no more waiting with death.”

“I feel like I’m waiting,” he said. The words were out of his mouth before he even understood them.

“Stop feeling,” Isabella told him. She crouched in the grass and withdrew the plastic Ziploc bag from her dress. “Feeling gets us in trouble, makes us malcontent. Are you malcontent? Yes, you are. Don’t bother to answer because you are, you are, you are. You sound completely ill with irritation when you speak. It is nearly overwhelming. Now come here.”

“Where?”

“Here,” she said. “Stand in front of me. The wind is coming over the hill. Stand in front of me and block out the wind, Nicholas, will you, please?”

“What are you doing?”

“Just stand for a minute,” she said. “Why do you always require an explanation? Just do it.” She had emptied the cigarette butts into the palm of her hand. From her purse she produced a fresh swatch of rolling paper. Nick stood in front of her, feeling the wind from the ocean at his back, strong and determined and chilling the sweat down his spine, and watched as she unraveled the cigarette butts and packed the tobacco into the fresh slip of rolling paper. She rolled one, licked the flap, and twisted the ends tight. It was not tobacco at all, Nick realized…and Isabella Rosales was not an eccentric fan collecting discarded cigarette butts from her favorite jazz musician. She fished a Zippo from her purse next, lit the end of the joint, inhaled deeply.

“Okay, okay. You don’t have to keep standing there,” she said to him. He was right in front of her, looking down at her hidden now behind a pall of sweet smoke. She held the joint out to him, referred to it as a muggle, and told him to take a puff. He refused. He could smell it and it smelled angry and bittersweet and he refused to touch it. Isabella pushed the joint back between her lips—poked it between her lips—and stood from the ground, brushing the dampness from her legs.

“Tell me more about the war, Nicholas.”

“No.”

“Nicholas…”

“No more,” he insisted. The stink of the marijuana was making his head spin. “Tell me something about photography instead,” he said because he suddenly could not think of anything else to say.

“You are such a man,” she told him, “with all your lines.”

“My lines?”

“Your fancy pickup lines.”

“No lines,” he said. “Just talk.”

“Photography fools your mind,” she said without missing a beat. “You can take any reality and make it better, if you want. Or worse, too, I suppose. How did you frig up your arm, my Nicholas?”

“A wall fell on it.”

“And it broke the bone?”

“In six places. Crushed my hand, too.”

“So they operated? There was surgery?”

“Several surgeries. There are metal plates and screws in the bone.”

“That is fantastic. You’re half robot. You’re, like—what is the word? You are, like, bionic.”

“Well, no, not exactly.”

“Bionic is the word?”

“No, I’m not bionic.”

“It hurts?”

“Sometimes, yes. But I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Talking about it doesn’t make you a hero.”

“I don’t care about that…”

“You do,” she said. “I can tell. You hate to be the hero. What the hell is that all about, anyway?”

“I just don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Malcontent,” she said back.

Sometime later, Goat-Man Claxton appeared as a dark shape on the horizon, strutting up the incline of the hillside and backlit by the sodium lights of the Club Potemkin. He looked like someone ambling out of a dream. The CD player was going through the last track of Mephistopheles: a number, Isabella had at one point enlisted Nick to know, titled “Slippage” which concerned itself with Claxton’s nearly fatal addiction to heroin—what Isabella called junk—when he was just twelve years old. Sounding like a schizophrenic’s cocaine nightmare, there were a lot of horns and a lot of drums and not much else.