Jack (Gilead #4)(18)

“He wasn’t Presbyterian.”

“True, but he wasn’t anything else, either. My father found everything he wrote highly persuasive, which meant he must be Presbyterian, whether he knew it or not. He’d say he was joking, but if anybody pressed the issue, he’d get a little cranky.” Then he said, “My point was, though, that I memorized that to impress an English teacher with whom I was briefly in love. I was fourteen at the time. I never did recite it. It has never been my nature to do what I ought to, for my own sake, even. She’d probably have thought better of me. But I remember it sometimes, and it pleases me that it’s still in my brain. Along with not much else. So you never know what effect you might have had.”

“And I never will know. I might never be in that room again. Never even have a chance to say goodbye to them. I’m beginning to realize I liked them better than I thought I did.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“My last memory will be them laughing at me over that song.”

“Things might turn out all right. I suppose there’s something about sitting here in the dark that makes it seem unlikely. But you never know.” He laughed. “And I’ll never know. The end of this strange tale, I mean. How things work out. It will worry me. So. I will worry so.”

They were quiet.

She said, “I’ll set a book in the window.”

“Which window?”

“The one by the front door.”

“All right. Will it mean good news or bad news?”

“Good news.”

“All right. Don’t forget.”

“I promise.”

He said, “What if it’s a while before you know for sure? What if they deliberate or something? It could take weeks. No book in the window—”

“I’ll put a plant in the window. A sprig of ivy. So you’ll know I still don’t know.”

“Without the book.”

“With the book, if things seem to be going well enough.”

“Otherwise, just the sprig.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “That woman—is it Lorraine?—she might see the book there and think that’s a strange place for it to be and put it away, or walk off with it.”

“I’ll be careful to use one she’s already read.”

“All right. I suppose that could work.”

“I’ll make sure it works.”

“That will be kind of you.”

“It’s kind of you to worry.”

“So.”

“Yes,” she said. They were quiet. Then she said, “‘So’ is a word they would use after the world ended. Or maybe they wouldn’t need it anymore. Because they’d know what it means. Everything would just be what you think it would be.”

“It’s so dark,” he said. “The night is so long. We’d step across a threshold of some kind. Utter darkness and endless time. That would be the way of things. No more ‘so.’”

“Sometimes I feel like we’ve just been living on hints. Seeing the world through a keyhole. That’s how it would seem to us when we looked back.”

He nodded. “That’s how it seems to me now.”

She had leaned down, cupping her poor toes in her hands, cheek on her knee, facing him in the dark. There was an odd loveliness about it. Why did he think she seemed content? He believed her eyes were closed. Had my heart an unbroken string, your touch would set it trembling. He had almost penciled that into her book, then thought better of it. It wasn’t a very good line. Trembling doesn’t really have three syllables. And touch. What might she find suggested in that word. I will ruin this, he thought. I almost did, writing in those words, before I even imagined it would happen. I never would have imagined. If he touched her face now, ever so lightly, things would be different afterward. That’s how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed. Which meant that question was already in his mind—what would be left if the fragile were tested, pushed nearer the edge of the shelf, if that tension were sprung and the fragile thing, the essence of it, lost. This strange night lost, fallen into shivers and shards of embarrassment and dis trust and regret. It crossed his mind that if he touched her dark cheek in the dark night, an elegant curve, bodiless as geometry, objectively speaking, if he followed the curve of it with just the tip of a finger, there would be a delicacy in the experiment she would understand if he could explain it to her. Pure touch, almost undistracted. He said, “Talk about something.” Too abrupt. “Let’s talk,” he said, “about something.”

She lifted her head. “I guess I was asleep. I was dreaming.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was a pretty ordinary dream. I couldn’t find something I needed, I didn’t even know what it was. I was all worked up about it. Now I’m here in the dark, sitting on the steps of a tomb beside a strange man I can’t quite see. That’s more like a dream.”

“Hmm. It sounds like a very bad dream.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t feel like one. It’s the feeling you have that makes a dream bad. I just realized that.”

He nodded. “Interesting.” Then he said, “You know, I actually sort of enjoy my life. I know I shouldn’t. It could stand a lot of improvement. But maybe it’s the feeling you have that makes a life bad. Or makes it all right enough most of the time.” He said, “I aspire to utter harmlessness. It’s a contest I have with myself. I have no real aptitude for harmlessness, which makes it interesting.” He said, “Spiders and flies are completely safe around me. Mice. Vermin generally. I’ve learned there is a kind of pleasure in considering all the things and people I’ve never harmed. Never even made them notice me there, appraising their vulnerabilities. Which, I’ll admit, is something I do.” Then he said, “Sometimes.” What a stupid thing to have said to her. “Let’s change the subject.”