Via Dolorosa(64)

“Isabella!”

He chased after her, out into the street.

Lieuten—

Outside was dark, cold. A few people were making their way across the avenue and down toward the water. The last of the fireworks were dying in the night, their spectacle reflected in the black surface of the sea. They were shooting from many boats now.

She grabbed him from behind, spun him around, kissed him hard again on the mouth. Despite the ambush, this time he was better prepared: he savored the kiss and familiarized himself with it. It was like no intimacy he had ever known. The sheer wrongness of it made it all the more right. Silently, suddenly, fervently, he wished himself to die right then and there. What better way to die?

In his ear, Isabella said, “You are tipping.”

“Yes,” he said, “I know.”

“Like a boat on the water.”

“Yes.”

“What is wrong?”

“Where’s my wife?”

“She is not here. She vanished like a ghost. Don’t you remember?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember things as they really are, is what I mean. Everything’s muddy.”

“It’s the absinthe,” she assured him.

“No, it’s not. It’s in my head. Something is wrong with everything. Something has happened and nothing is right.”

“Funny talker,” she said.

At one point, he found himself back inside the bistro, searching the crowd for his wife. Pulling people around, staring at faces hidden in shadows; calling her name. But he could not find her. Then, at another point, he was back out in the street, standing like a guardian angel above the old black man strumming chords on his ukulele. When the old man looked up at him, his eyes brown and wet and sloppy and like the eyes of a diseased basset hound, and asked for some spare change, Nick felt himself grimace at the man and mutter something about prayers for the dead. At his side, Isabella laughed.

“That’s true,” she said from nowhere. “Prayers for the dead. Where are your prayers, Nicholas?”

“I’m prayerless,” he admitted. “I am without prayer.”

“And what else are you?”

“Drunk.”

“That’s true, too.”

The absinthe was working over him pretty heavy now.

“Nicholas,” he heard Isabella say from somewhere behind him.

“The G.I.,” someone said. A man. “The famous G.I.”

Looking up, he could see the three oxford-shirted men standing, smoking, beneath a streetlight. Outside in the dark, smoking under the spread of orange sodium light, they did not look as handsome or straight-laced as they had beneath the rustic lights of the bistro. Here, on the street, they had been dulled.

“Mr. G.I.,” the man continued. It was Joseph, Pygmalion, the drunken bastard. White stick of cigarette poking from his lips, his eyes were directly on Nick. “Mr. G.I.! Private Slovak, sir!”

“Son of a bitch,” Nick shouted. “You sons of bitches!”

Pygmalion pushed himself off the lamppost and swaggered down the curb and halfway across the street. Wavering, unsteady, his shadow looked as drunk as he did. His twins did not budge from their perch beneath the lamppost.

“We been standing, G.I., discussing how many little Muslim kids you must’ve killed over there,” Pygmalion was saying. In full blossom, he sported one hell of a shiner now. The sodium streetlights did it no justice. “We been talking about all sorts of things about you, Mr. G.I., Mr. Private Slovak, sir.” Pygmalion executed an awkward salute. “Ahoy. Over and out.” Sputtering, laughing. “To the shores of Tripoli!”

Isabella started laughing. This made Pygmalion look. And, subsequently, this made him start laughing, too—stupidly, drunkenly, haughtily. The kind of angry, ignorant laughter that always ends poorly. Through Nick’s inebriated gaze, the colors of the man’s clothing and the reflected light on his face seemed to blur and bleed out from him and into the night. In that moment, nothing, it seemed, was confined to anything. It was akin to watching a dream dissipate just as wakefulness comes, and in that instant it was perhaps the saddest thing Nick had ever seen.

“Hit him,” Isabella said. “Hit him good and hard, Nicholas.”

“Out of my mouth,” Pygmalion was saying. Stork-like, he had his head hinged forward on his thin neck, his lower lip protruding to exaggeration. The cigarette, its ember slowly dying in the night, thrust up and out and right at him: a lighted beacon. “Out of my mouth,” Pygmalion continued through half-closed lips. “Come on, Private Slovak—knock it out of my mouth.”

“Go to hell,” he said back. Yet he could feel his fists clench.

“Where’s your wife, anyway, Private Slovak, sir? Hansen over there, he really took to her.” The slob chuckled. “In, you know, the spiritual sense. Grace…beauty…men taking the women of men. I think that if he happened to see—”

A blur—of white fist, white arm. It was a tight, close-to-the-body throw. It left trails of light behind it in the air. And when it struck the man’s face, Pygmalion’s face, there was a sense of eruption, of expulsion, and Nick could not tell if the sensation was purely in his arm or purely in the man’s face—or, perhaps, both at once. But it was a strong throw and there was nothing drunk about it. He felt his entire weight behind it and carried it through, followed it through. Strong. But there wasn’t any reason to follow anything through. None at all. The hit angled Pygmalion’s head awkward on his shoulders. His neck seemed to stretch two feet. It happened in slow motion and Nick could see each individual bristle of beard stubble sprouting from the man’s neck and chin: he could see the non-uniform way it grew in wild, erratic directions, like scrub-grass, and the way there seemed to be very little of it covering the smooth red knoll of Pygmalion’s Adam’s apple.