The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(118)

After the long dry summer had passed he woke one night to see the high window in the wall of the grainmill appear out of the darkness. And then again. He sat at the window and watched out there beyond the blackest reaches of the sea the soundless thunder and the shuddering light beyond the rimlit clouds.

He sat at the bodega, at the small scrubbed wooden table. Reading the papers that Vis had sent on the boat from Ibiza. Jo?o went down the bar and came back with another letter and handed it to Western. Western sat looking at it. It was postmarked Akron Ohio and it was dirty and stained and looked at some point to have been stepped on. Un momento, he said. Jo?o turned and he handed him the letter back.

No es suyo?

No.

He turned the letter in his hand and studied it. Es su nombre, he said.

Western leaned back in his chair. He said that he didnt know anybody in America anymore and that he didnt want any cartas from them. Jo?o weighed this. He tapped the letter in his palm. Finally he said that he would keep it because people change their minds.

He pedaled home in the dusk. The tower was dark and damp when he entered and stood his bike against the wall. He climbed the steps with the lamp and set it on the table and sat and listened to the quiet. Sometimes at night when the winds came over the headlands he could feel something move deep in the ancient works, a low groan from the heavy olivewood complications and then silence again save for the wind circling the tower and rustling the straw overhead.

Late one evening he saw before him on the beach a small figure cloaked against the cold. He quickened his step but it was only an old woman walking the beach. Scarcely four feet tall. He passed her and wished her a good evening and then he stopped and asked if she was all right and she said that she was. She said that she was going to visit her daughter and he nodded and went on. He knew that he still hoped for that small and half forgotten figure to fall in beside him. Leaning into the salt wind with his hands in his pockets and his clothes flapping. He’d seen him one final time in a dream. God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest. Trudging the shingles of the universe, his thin shoulders turned to the stellar winds and the suck of alien moons dark as stones. A lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave.

He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.

The ages of men stretching grave to grave. An accounting on a slate. Blood, darkness. The washing of dead children on a board. The stone laminations of the world with their fossil prints unreckonable in form and number. My father’s latterday petroglyphs and the people upon the road naked and howling.

The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train.

He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods.

Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.