Via Dolorosa(45)
“You want more?” she asked him, hefting the carafe. “Well,” she said, “it’s empty. Where is that little waiter, anyway? Did he vanish into smoke?”
“It’s not a big deal,” he told her. “The mimosa is fine.”
“No,” she said. “Every time we eat out here they forget to refill the coffee.”
“They’re busy inside.”
“I’ll get some more coffee.”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“It is,” she said, rising with the carafe and walking back into the hotel.
He watched her walk. When she had gone, he turned his gaze back on the little girl in the blue-and-white checkered sundress. She was young—perhaps five or six—with cream-colored skin and dark, raven-colored hair long and straight down her back. A very pretty little girl, he thought.
Still giggling, she turned and looked at him from across the pools. Uncertain as to his response, he raised a hand and offered a clumsy wave. This made the girl giggle some more. She pointed at him, which caused him to wave further, feeling playful but a bit foolish, too…and then she turned and said something to whoever was hidden on the other side of the hotel. Looking at her invisible friend, the girl began pointing in Nick’s direction. Still talking to the hidden person behind the corner of the hotel, Nick could see she was doing so with some urgency now. As kids will, he supposed. But no—there seemed a bleak desperation in her eyes, and he was suddenly discomforted by her previously innocuous stare when she again turned to look at him. This time, there was a flicker of fear in her eyes, a presentiment of distrust and confusion.
He thought, What the hell?
From behind the hotel ambled a stooped, burka-clad figure, undeniably female despite the amass of robes, with only a narrow panel of brown face and piercing black eyes staring directly at him from within her robes. Nick shuddered and knew immediately that he had seen this woman before—had seen her in the hellish ruins of the outskirts of Fallujah, where she had cried and pleaded and said something—something directly at Myles Granger—in a language Nick himself had not understood. That woman. That little American girl…
He was not in control of himself. That was so clear to him now. How long had he been functioning this way? How long had he been driven to the brink of the ruinous and the fantastic by some unseen and preternatural force? He was powerless to choose his actions, and powerless to choose his feelings, too; like in war, he could not choose his battlefield, could not choose his stance. And now the goddamn war was in his head. He was merely led and thusly functioned, broken, automatic, at a whim, aimless and pitiable. Aimless? Perhaps his aim was predestined after all. Perhaps (it occurred to him) his path had been chosen long before he’d ever appeared as a reddened, blind, squealing infant, wet and sticky from the womb. There was no aimlessness here; no whimsy. Here, in this island purgatory, he was simply going through the motions, and his actions were not his own. He felt dazed, lost, suspended in a colorful animation of wakeful dreamlessness, executing the precarious act of balancing—vertiginously—on the cusp of some undefined void, his entire body frozen at the zenith of his most important hour, hesitant, the physical and mental caesura before the final physical and mental exhalation. It was watching speed freeze. Speed, he thought, as a noun, as time, moving time. Like the biblical wandering through the desert, he could no longer find himself, walking lost and destitute in a Heliopolis mind, scorched by sun and ruined and parched by the unforgiving dry heat.
Looking out across the pools, he saw that both the Islamic woman and the little American girl were gone. And for a split second, he was confused as to what brought him to this point. Where am I? Who am I? What the hell happened to me? But then he remembered it all over again, all of it, and it was abruptly, fiercely too much. All of it was too much…
Women with their memories of their first lovemaking experience, and how many things in their lives inevitably and uncontrollably spiraled further and further away from where they’d always truly wanted to be, with only a few times finding their way back; and men, stupid men, consumed by war, both inward and out, and how there was an underlying sense of hopelessness in the doing and undoing of those very women whom they would both come to love and hate simultaneously. Everyone had their cross to bear. On Christ-less shoulders, Nick had borne his through tumultuous desert landscapes while riding on a confession of faith, and now, here and now, with the undoing of his and Emma’s marital compromise—that traitorous misalliance—he continued to carry that horrid thing through this island paradise fa?ade.
And it is not wholly mine this time. It was not only about the war. It was about Emma, too. She has forced me to carry hers, as well.
He could recall Emma’s small voice, wanting to weep but somehow unable to do so: I can’t live with myself if you don’t know, Nicky. I can’t live with myself if I keep this from you…
And young Myles Granger’s croak: Lieuten—
He felt himself jerk back from the table. His fork clattered to the pavement at his feet. Looking down, he saw his right hand begin to spasm in his lap. He tried to lift it but found that he couldn’t: it no longer belonged to him. Wincing, he forced himself to make a fist. It hurt like hell. Yet he made the fist, and it was with much difficulty, and held it. In his mind, he willed his muscles to relax, willed his arm to cease moving. Stop it, you lousy goddamn bastard. Stop it, or so help me God I will cut you off with a saw. And he could see that as his surprise ending, as the grand finale to this romantic but terminally plagued getaway scenario: back in the room, hearing the slow creak of the bathroom door as Emma catches a glimpse of red splashed along the basin of the sink, reflected in the mirror just above it, while he stands huddled and now abbreviated but free of the torment, the metal glint of flesh-flecked saw teeth on the basin, the saturated cling of bloody hotel towels balled into wet afterbirth—