Via Dolorosa(69)

In less than an hour, all but two of them would be dead.





—Chapter XIX—





The shimmer of light…

A voice in his ear: “Usted se despierta de la muerte.”

Slowly, his eyelids unstuck and slid open. The world was vibrating beneath him. His flesh was clammy; he felt both sweaty and frozen simultaneously, and overall sick to his stomach. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he made out the shape of a figure directly opposite him, standing against the wall. The figure radiated light. It was a ghost, an angel.

He waited for his mind to thaw, to catch up.

Across the room and against the wall: it was himself.

“My Nicholas,” a female voice spoke up. It was not Emma. He couldn’t remember anything. And he did not trust his memory enough to believe anything he could remember, anyway. He stopped trying.

“Where am—” he began. Winced. There was construction work, heavy drilling, rattling off in his head.

“Limbo,” she said. Though invisible to him for the moment, he could tell her full lips were turned up in a smile. He could almost smell her body, too, the scent coming in invisible, undulating waves. It was impossible to tell where she was in the room.

Naked, he was on a bed. There was a dull, aching throb running the length of his right arm. He tried hard not to think about it.

Isabella floated toward him straight out of the darkness. As she had been on the night he’d come to her room to paint her portrait, she was wearing only the white terrycloth robe from the hotel bathroom, wrapped loosely around her brown-black body. An embroidered script P covered the right breast. In the lightlessness, her face possessed the nontextured, non-blemished contours of a Greek bust. Reality began to slide back into place…

“We’re in your room,” he managed, and just talking inaugurated a fault-line crack that split down the center of his brain and continued up and over and down the back of his head. The tremor settled at the base of his skull, where his head met his neck, and seemed to expand in a soundless burst of white fire. Rockets went off behind his eyes. Still, despite the agony, he spoke again: “We’re back at the hotel.” In his stupor, he found it impossible to inflect his voice to make his sentences sound appropriately like questions.

“There is some water beside the bed,” she said. “Drink it. You are dehydrated.” She did not approach him, as he had anticipated; rather, she went into the adjacent bathroom, the naked soles of her feet padding whisperingly on the linoleum tiles. No light was turned on but he soon heard the soft run of water at the sink.

He reached for the glass of water on the nightstand with his right hand. The slight movement and extension of his arm quickly made clear to him the tremendous amount of pain that had been waiting in dormancy. He could not grasp the glass. He could do nothing, it seemed, but gently rest his arm back down on the bed.

“My arm,” he heard himself say. Even speaking, he did not know if he was doing it for Isabella’s sake or for his own. “Shit.”

Gathering sheets about his waist with his one good hand, sitting up carefully (and sending the world on a tilt once more), he stared ahead at the glowing figure that was his identical twin on the opposite wall. It was a photograph, he saw, projected from a small unit on the desk at the other end of the room: a slide projector. It took him a few seconds to place the photograph—but then he remembered: it was the picture Isabella had taken of him that night at the Club Potemkin as he gathered for her Goat-Man Claxton’s used joints from the bandstand, his left hand lifted to block the flash from his eyes. It was not possible to make out his face.

A moment later, smelling like sea salt and the deeper, headier aroma of female, Isabella returned and sat very close to him on the side of the bed. Without a word, she kissed the side of his face. Something stirred within him.

“Here,” she told him. “Lay out your hand.”

He did.

“No,” she corrected, “your other hand. Your injured hand.”

“It’s stiff.”

“It hurts, yes,” she said.

“Stiff.” It was his turn to correct.

“Lay it out, whatever it is.” She placed a pillow across her lap and patted it with some affection. Held in one of her hands was a tight wrap of bandage.

Carefully, slowly, he extended his ruined right arm and held it out straight on the bed until the feeling rushed back to his fingertips. Then he lifted it and brought it down squarely on the pillow in Isabella’s lap. The bandage unraveled itself in the darkness and Isabella began to dress his arm. The act was done with care and precision, an attribute Nick would have previously thought alien to her. As his eyes grew accustomed to the lightlessness, he watched her dress his arm. The bandage came up and around, up and around. The tightness of the wrap caused the tips of his fingers to tingle. Certain places hurt worse than others. He forced himself to talk while she worked; otherwise, at integral moments, he would have bitten through his tongue and ground his teeth into powder.

“Did we have sex?” he asked.

“No.”

“We didn’t?”

“No.”

“My clothes…”

“Are in the bathtub. You were filthy from sliding down the hill.”

“Sliding—?”

“You fell and slid down a hill in the mud, just outside the hotel.”