Via Dolorosa(36)

“You’re sarcastic, but I think so. I think it is very exciting. What do you think it looked like, Nicholas, as all those Chinese divers drowned at the same time?”

“Probably a lot of flailing arms,” he said. “Probably a lot of screaming and shouting in a language I don’t understand.” He frowned. “How the hell should I know?”

“There were seventeen of them.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“That,” she said, “is a lot of flailing arms.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a lot of screaming in a language you don’t understand.”

“I suppose.”

“They probably grabbed at each other, tried to brave the current through the power of unity. And failed.”

“That’s cheerful.”

Isabella frowned. “Do you not like me?”

“I like you fine.”

Then she smiled just as easily. Yet her lips looked predatory. They were full, dark, mocha lips. “Sometimes,” she said, “I fill up a bathtub with water and hold my head underneath until I think I am about to black out. I see how long I can hold my head under water, and I try to experience what it is like to almost die, almost drown. I see how far along I can get, Nicholas, and how close to dying I can bring myself without actually doing it. I wait for some great change, or for something insurmountable and unimaginable to overtake me. But it is just water and it is just my head, and so far nothing has happened.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“Of course,” she said, yawning. “Of course it is. Isn’t it?”

Emma had come from the water and was heading toward them. Wet, pale, she looked cold from the water. She had her arms folded about her small chest.

“Now I feel like a complete intruder,” Isabella said, standing. Coltish legs peppered in sand, the contrast against her black skin would have made an amazing painting. Nick could not pull his eyes away.

“It’s all right,” Emma said.

“No—no. Forgive me, both of you.”

“Really,” Emma said, but she had already taken Isabella’s place at the foot of the towel. “Will we see you again?”

“Whenever you wish,” Isabella said. Her eyes were on Nick as she said it. “I am like a ghost, floating around…”

“Adios,” Emma called.

“Adios,” answered Isabella, pronouncing the d with a th sound as she proceeded to walk off. Both Nick and Emma watched her head back down toward the sea. At one point, just before crossing back into the surf, Isabella removed the top portion of her bathing suit and let it drop to the sand. Whether accidentally or not, she half-turned her body so that they could both view the taunting brown swell of her right breast. Pulling her hair up off the nape of her neck with both hands, she retreated back into the ocean—comfortably, willingly, surrendering—as if it were the only place of welcome on the planet.

“She is very strange,” Emma commented.

“She’s a righteous bitch,” he said.

“You don’t really think that,” she said.

“Oh? Why do you think so?”

“Because,” she said, “your eyes—the way you look at her—betray you.”

So I am betrayed once again, he thought.

Saying nothing, Emma spread out on the towel, took up one of her poetry books, and began to read.

That evening, alone, he worked on the mural. Very unlike him, he found himself spending too much time painting and repainting the faces of the people in the mural. What had originated as indiscriminate, expressionless figures had somehow transformed into the faces and expressions of actual people. He painted these faces without purpose. It was as though they were destined to be born, despite his personal involvement, and nothing was going to hinder the process. The fact that he was painting them, was their creator, was incidental. So he painted them and let them be, he merely the conduit of some greater purpose of which he had no value in contradicting. Only once did he become consumed in the manipulation of features, specific features, on one of the characters, and this was because, somehow, perhaps unconsciously, the figure, once completed, bore a frightening resemblance to young Myles Granger. It wasn’t until he had completed the face and backed away to view it from afar did he realize what he had done. Looking at it, seeing it, chilled him. Worse: he had commissioned the portrait of Myles Granger to stand directly beneath what he had initially intended to be a wide outcropping of glossy, volcanic stone, but what, from this same vantage, projected to be the undisputed outline of a steel-bodied military tank, its single cannon still hot and smoking.

Jesus Christ.

Without hesitation, grabbing the first brush his fingers fell on, he climbed the ladder and smeared a streaking tread of paint across Myles Granger’s face. Black paint. Again, Myles Granger was dead.

A mortar burst directly behind him, and he was suddenly back, back, back in Fallujah.

He turned, nearly spilling off the ladder. Behind him, looking up at him, stood Isabella Rosales. She was holding her camera up to her face. As he turned toward her, she snapped a second photograph, a third. The flashbulb was an insult in the mostly dark corridor.

“I have captured you,” the darkly handsome woman said, smiling up at him. “For all times,” she said, “I have captured you.” And she drummed a single finger against the housing of her camera.