The Cabin at the End of the World(27)
Eric says, “Wait, stop, you don’t have to do this.” He strains and struggles in his chair, but there isn’t much strength behind his efforts.
“Hey, you don’t need those things. You said you couldn’t hurt us.” Andrew strains to pull his legs free, to peel his arms apart; they feel looser in his restraints but not close to free. He yells names and no and stop and he vibrates in his seat. He pushes up onto his toes, and the tipping point is close; one twitchy push-off and he’ll fall over backward.
From behind him Adriane puts a hand on his shoulder and anchors him and the chair flush to the floor without any struggle at all. One hand and that’s all the pressure needed to keep him pinned to where he is, no matter how much thrashing he does. He throws his head back, trying to hit her but he doesn’t make contact.
Her hand leaves his shoulder and Wen screams, “Leave me alone!”
Andrew yells for Wen and twists to see where Adriane went, to see what she’s doing. Legs suddenly appear in front of Andrew’s face, kicking and waving as though attempting to swim up from a great depth. Adriane is lowering his daughter onto his lap.
“Don’t touch her! Let her go!”
Wen twists free and hugs Andrew tightly around the neck. Her cheek is hot and wet against his. He says her name repeatedly and whispers into her ear that she has to leave, to run, to push the screen slider out and run onto the deck and run and run.
Redmond loudly bangs the sledgehammer end of his double-ended staff on the floor. Then he gives Leonard the weapon without an exchange of words. Their movements are choreographed, ritualized. Leonard flips the ends of the staff so that the arrangement of shovel and trowel blades is pointed at the floor.
Redmond scratches the back of his head and fidgets with his empty hands. He kneels on the hardwood floor, making a triangle with Eric and Andrew.
He says, “Aw, fuck. Okay. Come on, come on, here we go,” and claps his hands, wipes his face, laughs once, shakes his head, and grunts like a weight lifter gearing up for an inhuman feat of strength.
Andrew isn’t whispering anymore. “Run, Wen, run!”
Wen shakes her head and says, “I can’t.”
Redmond abruptly quits his routine, stops moving, and stares at Andrew with his head tilted.
Andrew maneuvers his face around Wen’s head so he can see this, whatever it is.
Redmond’s face has drained of color, and sweat darkens his receding hairline. He licks his cracked, bleeding lips and blinks rapidly. He’s scared and it makes him look younger. He could be one of Andrew’s students, hundreds or thousands of miles from home, in his office to plead for an extension on a paper or for a better grade in the class to ensure he doesn’t lose his performance-based grant money.
Redmond reaches into the front pocket of his jeans and pulls out something white. It practically glows as he unfolds it in front of his red shirt. Larger than the dressing on the back of Eric’s head, it appears to be a swatch of thin cloth, ribbed or waffled like thermal underwear. He lifts it high over his head, stretching and extending his arms as far up as they will go.
Redmond winks at Andrew and grins, the kind that makes any face ugly. Andrew has been the recipient of this version of the smug, judgmental, nonverbal fuck you countless times, and it nags at him that perhaps he’s seen this smile on this particular face before today.
Eric says, “Please God, just let us go, let us go,” in a continuous loop.
Wen has stopped crying. “What is that? What is he doing?”
Andrew tells her not to watch.
Redmond pulls and stretches the material over his head, face, and halfway down his neck. It’s formfitting, like a sock over a foot. The lump of his nose protrudes below his prominent brow and from between the uncanny valleys of his concave eye sockets. A star of red blooms in the cloth over his split lip. He drops his arms to his sides.
The sun breaks through the clouds, a promise that will one day be broken, and shines into the cabin via the deck, illuminating this reluctant summit. The players are momentarily as still as stone obelisks and their ancient shadows.
Although Redmond’s face is concealed within the blank, white mask, Andrew feels the man’s stare, and like all stares, it accrues mass with passing time.
Then, finally, there are two words.
“Thank you.”
Eric
Eric’s litany of please-Gods cuts out and he shrinks from the return of the sun like a vampire. His head is one of the old hot water radiators from their condo and it hisses with pain.
Redmond in the supplicant’s eternal pose, awash in golden light, is transformed. The red of his shirt is no longer confined to the cloth and slicks into the air like oil in water. Red mists beyond the boundary of Redmond, forming an aura, as amorphous as a storm. There’s a darker spot of red clinging stubbornly to his white mask, a different kind of promise; all will be red eventually.
Redmond says, “Thank you.”
Sabrina, Leonard, and Adriane drift into the center of the cabin, creeping delicately, hunters stalking elusive, skittish prey. They form a half circle around Redmond, their gnarly, improvised staffs aloft.
Something shimmers in the nowhere between Redmond and the doorway to the deck. Like heat waves on summer-baked pavement, the shimmer is whiter and brighter than the surrounding solar light. Eric blinks and the strange refraction realigns, finds a focus, coalesces into a shape, a form, and for the briefest of moments there is an unmistakable contour of a head and shoulders, an outline of another person, a fourth (or another fourth) joining the semicircle encompassing Redmond.