The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(113)

The ancient people here were called Talayot. After the towers they left. Then came the Phoenicians, Carthaginians. Romans. Vandals. Byzantine and then Muslim cultures. In the fourteenth century Aragon. Down the beach lay a dead dolphin. The long jawbone bared and the flesh in gray ribbons. He’d collected half a handful of bits of seaworn glass, frosted pale green and opaque. He formed them into a small cairn on the flat wet sand where they would soon tumble out to sea again.

In the years to come he would walk the beach all but daily. Sometimes he’d lie at night in the dry sand above the wrack-line and like the mariners of old study the stars. Perhaps to see how he might plot his course. Or to see what enterprise might be read as favorable in their slow crawl over the black and eternal vastness. He walked out to where he could see the lights of Figuretas strung along the far shore. The black sea lapping. He rolled his trousers to his knees and waded out. The Carolina coast on such a night. The lights at the inn and along the drive. Her breath against his cheek as she kissed him good night. The terror in his heart.

Sheddan once said that evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.

And when they come through the walls howling?

In her white gown carrying the barnlantern out through the trees. Holding the hem of her gown, her slender form candled in the sheeting. The shadows of the trees, then just the dark. The cold in the stone amphitheatre and the slow turning of the stars overhead.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

In later years he’d go over to Ibiza on the ferry and have dinner with Geert Vis and his wife Sonia at Porroig. There would be a car waiting for him at the dock and at the house they would have drinks and good Spanish dishes of shellfish and chicken with rich sauces and good red wine from the mainland. Geert’s driver took him back to the ferry in the evening. He sat on a bollard and watched the lights. Laughter from a cafe across the road. Out there in the dark of the bay the dull plonk plonk of a donkeyengined smack. Vis urged him to find a woman. He spoke with concern, leaning forward and pressing Western’s arm. A rich tourist woman, Robert, he whispered. You will see.

Someone in the town had died. He’d heard the bells toll before it was even day. A certain sobriety among the darksuited men at the bodega. They nodded to him. He sat with his glass of wine. Pale woodslave lizards circled the rings of light cast upon the ceiling by the tablelamps. Stalking the moths like predators at a waterhole. Their tufted feet. Van der Waals forces. He nodded to the men and raised his glass. Coming home the sky was clear and the moon rose and squatted in the road before him. Walking up the long dark headland where the windmill stood in silhouette against the sky. He stood in the wind and studied the sweep of stars in the blackness. The lights of the distant village. Climbing the stairs, lamp in hand. Hello, he called. This cup. This bitter cup.

His father spoke little to them of Trinity. Mostly he’d read it in the literature. Lying face down in the bunker. Their voices low in the darkness. Two. One. Zero. Then the sudden whited meridian. Out there the rocks dissolving into a slag that pooled over the melting sands of the desert. Small creatures crouched aghast in that sudden and unholy day and then were no more. What appeared to be some vast violetcolored creature rising up out of the earth where it had thought to sleep its deathless sleep and wait its hour of hours.

It was his father who took her to see all those doctors. Who sat at the kitchen table in the old farmhouse and stared out across the fields to the creek and the woods beyond. He’d written in a notebook things she had said that he could not understand and he read them over and read them over until in the end perhaps he came to realize that her illness—as he called it—was less a condition than a message. He’d turned more than once to see her in the doorway watching him. Fr?ulein Gottestochter bearing gifts of which she herself would at last be no advocate.

His father. Who had created out of the absolute dust of the earth an evil sun by whose light men saw like some hideous adumbration of their own ends through cloth and flesh the bones in one another’s bodies.

He’d looked for his father’s grave in the ratlands of northern Mexico but he never found it. Talking in his bad Spanish with officials in soiled shirts who watched him wordlessly and did not even pretend to think him sane. On the streets of Knoxville he met someone from his childhood who asked with no apparent malice if he thought that his father was in hell. No, he said. Not anymore.

He’d sit sometimes in the little church at San Javier. The long quiet afternoons. The women in their black shawls would try their best not to steal a look at him. A stone font with stone infants. The cheap boards behind the altar had been painted gold and the plastered walls of the church were painted with flowers which were visited by mothlike creatures, drifting through the paneled light, one, the next. He’d thought at first they might be hummingbirds but then he remembered that there were no old world species of them. He lit a candle and dropped a peseta into the tin box.

He walked out along the headlands. In the distance the thunder rolled across the dark horizon with a sound like boxes falling. Unusual weather. Lightning thin and quick. The inland sea. Cradle of the west. A frail candle tottering in the darkness. All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction.