Lucia's Masks Page 18

  An ingrained housewifery had prompted her to remove the sheets before her mad attack on the bed. These she used to wrap round her and make a nest in a corner of her living room. She curled up with a relic of her childhood, a soft-bodied doll with long legs, and rocked and hummed herself into a state resembling calm. She considered, and rejected, the idea of calling a friend to solicit comfort. The fact was she did not want anyone to know what had happened to her. In part, this was because humiliation still smarted rawly within her. In greater part, it was a matter of pride and self-preservation.

  She did sleep, albeit fitfully, waking once in a panic because she seemed to have stopped breathing. “I am a rational person,” she crooned to herself. “Reason is a straight and sun-lit path.” She pressed the soft-bodied doll to her tight and aching chest, and pictured the air passages in her lungs filling freely. “Deep and even breathing is the royal road to calm and insightful action,” she reassured herself.

  Candace breathed deeply and evenly, hugging the pliant doll to her chest, so that it too seemed to inhale and exhale with her. Towards the onset of a murky dawn, she succumbed to a sleep deep enough to dream. In the dream, she saw the bodies of her five tormentors laid out in a marble-walled morgue. Under grey-white coverlets, only their rigid faces and naked feet were visible. Her dream-self strode the corridor between the two rows of mortuary slabs. In her right hand, she held a long, thin needle, like an ancient hatpin. She stabbed each corpse in the flesh of its left heel. This action left her feeling exuberant and free.

  When Candace woke, she remembered something else: that each foot had been marked with a ring of black fungus. She understood this to be an indelible sign of evil. “It is good they have been sacrificed,” she thought. “The world will be a better place for it.”

  This notion hit her with the full force of a natural law as she made ready to begin her new life. Now was the time for her to leave the City for good. The signs were clear. The corruption had gone too deep. The black fungus threatened everyone. Her skills and energy and optimism were wasted here. You cannot reclaim what is unredeemable, she told herself. Some people were beyond help. Beyond hope, even. It was folly to waste one’s time on them.

  She told herself she was ready for adventure, as few in this world are ever ready. She had her goal superbly well fixed. By the minute, her community-to-be took on a degree of detail that confirmed she had at last found a life-task matched to her abundant talents.

  Destiny beckoned. And thus Candace was not surprised when her exit from the City passed without incident. Following the track of the ancient, defunct railway that led out from the urban enclosure, she was relieved to see a few other refugees like herself. Some laboured under the weight of what seemed to be all their worldly goods, staggering with misshapen bundles on their heads or backs.

  One woman Candace passed was bent nearly double under a punishing load of sticks and twigs. From a distance, she resembled an animal with horns, a dangerously ill beast whose every step faltered. Close up, Candace shrank instinctively from the coarse, raddled texture of the woman’s cheeks and bony nose, and the rotting cloth under her armpits. She vowed then she would always keep herself fresh and clean no matter what the travails to come. It was comforting nonetheless to know the woman with the poor hygiene was somewhere close behind on the trail, should she run into trouble. Candace focused all her positive thoughts on soon meeting someone simpatico with whom she could travel in greater safety.

  Later that morning she overtook a person (man or woman, she could not tell), swathed in thick towelling despite the already scorching heat of the day. This walking bundle pulled behind it a thick plank of wood, studded with fragments of dishware. To what purpose, wondered practical Candace, for the stuck-on shards of china were of indifferent quality, in shades she associated with industrial plumbing fixtures. Broken Delftware Candace could have understood, although she doubted she would go so far as to fix even the most captivating blue and white pieces to a board to drag behind her through life. We each cling to what we consider most precious, she reflected.

  Among the precious objects Candace had in her pack was a pendant of glass microscopically inscribed with the Ten Golden Rules for a Productive Life, and the cloth doll that embodied the most pleasing of her childhood memories. She took with her as well, the cherished thoughts that nourished her fortitude and positive outlook. She was endowed, above all, with a luminous sense of purpose and destiny’s assurance that she had been born to lead.

  Candace knew she had undermined her burgeoning leadership when she let her five travelling companions see her naked fear. But by the time they were all settled in the stone house, she had forgiven herself this lapse. She still cannot fathom the paradox: how dwelling together under one roof had driven them to their separate devices, rather than bring them together. But as she trudges on in their new exile, glaring at old Lola’s bony backside, the answer becomes startlingly clear. It was the old woman who had poisoned the atmosphere and set them at odds.

  Here is the one who should have been sacrificed, Candace determines with a grim satisfaction. This thought no sooner forms in her mind than the air around her is split by a piercing whistle. Candace looks on in numbed disbelief as Bird Girl rears abruptly, and Lola slides from her back.

  “A hit! A hit!” comes a shrill demonic cry off to their left. The Outpacer immediately sets off in pursuit of the attacker, a figure dressed all in black.

  Candace, Lucia, Chandelier, and Old Harry stand momentarily frozen at the sight of Bird Girl lying on the ground, her small face bleached and contorted, her fingers clawing at the air. A stout wooden arrow protrudes from her left breast. Lola is on her knees beside the girl, swaying and moaning.

  “Pull it out,” Bird Girl whispers. “Oh, please, pull it out.” Her eyes are rolling.

  Lucia kneels beside the distraught Lola, and looks toward the sky as if asking for blessing. She takes firm grasp on the arrow’s shaft and pulls. It comes out whole. Bird Girl’s yelp is so sharp, Candace feels her stomach lurch.

  The girl’s spine buckles and she goes rigid. Lola is beside her, rocking on her knees and moaning, plucking at her own scant hair.

  The wound is unclean, the torn flesh already discoloured. “Poison,” Candace announces, and they all see the greenish ooze still dripping from the arrow’s point. Chandelier stares open-mouthed at Candace and the arrow; then speeds off after the Outpacer.

  “I’ll save you little chick,” Lola cries. And before either Candace or Lucia can stop her, the old woman puts her mouth to the wound and sucks.

  Candace has to look away. The sight of the old woman’s mouth at Bird Girl’s bare bud of a breast sickens her to the marrow. She cannot make the parts fit. How can an act so obviously obscene be the most profound act of love she has ever witnessed?

  Chapter Eleven

  Miracles

  FOR ONE FOOLISH MOMENT AFTER I extracted the arrow, I stared transfixed at the red-black slit in the pale mound of Bird Girl’s left breast. The wound seemed to me somehow sexual. I feared death hovered nearby, eager to penetrate it.

  I immediately berated myself for this notion, as dangerous as it was unforgivable. I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second in a deliberate effort to cleanse my mind. That sliver of inattention was enough for the balance of life and death to swing abruptly.

  Lola’s mouth closes over the wound before I can stop her. She sucks and moans and sucks again. I grasp the old woman’s shoulder to try to drag her away. It is all over even as I touch her. Lola lifts her head, utters a high-pitched cry and then lies quiet on the breast of her adored girl.

  I am horrified as the old woman’s skeletal frame goes rigid, and her thin skin tightens to transparency. Her naked gums are exposed in a rictus that could be either a grimace of agony, or a grin of triumph. I choose to believe it is triumph, but my eyes tear nonetheless. I know we have to work quickly and move Lola’s body because even its slight weight is impeding the girl’s laboured breathing. We
must get on with the cleaning of the wound, although I have no doubt Lola has made a good start.

  “Help me!” I urge them, for Candace and Harry are still standing spell-bound. I think we are all under the leaden net death casts. Candace is shaking her head back and forth in heavy wonderment. Harry drives his balled fist repeatedly into his chest.

  “Help me!”

  It is Harry who comes first to assist me. Together, we pull Lola as gently as we can to a spot well away from where the young girl lies.

  Harry stays by Lola’s body while I run back to Bird Girl. Candace has at last sprung to life and fetched water, gauze, and a clean T-shirt. As I swab and bathe the wound, I hear Harry say, “Well done, old woman.”

  The silence following on his words expands to make a vaulted dome above us. Protect her, I implore this sacred arc of space. Bird Girl’s complexion already looks less opaquely white. As I sponge the girl’s wound, words come to me that I hold briefly in my mind and speak silently.

  Dignity is one. Altruism another. And again, sacrifice.

  I remember Lola as I first saw her: a nightmarish vision, vulgar, crassly made-up, apparently senile. Love for Bird Girl steadied and transfigured the old woman. At the very end, that affection ennobled her.

  The girl’s breathing has become quieter, her pulse steadier. I feel oddly light-headed. Whether the cause is simple relief or awe, I do not know.

  A little colour returns to Bird Girl’s face. Candace is silent. These are miracles in themselves.

  Chapter Twelve

  Chandelier Heeds Snake’s Counsel Again

  CHANDELIER RUNS, SOON CATCHING UP TO the Outpacer who is hampered by the long skirt of his monk’s habit and his flapping rubber sandals. Because the boy’s soles have hardened, Miriam’s boots fashioned from strips of silk have come to serve him well enough, and he is better equipped than the Outpacer for speeding over the forest floor. As perhaps Miriam intended, the strips of fabric have melded with the help of dirt and perspiration. Chandelier can, and does, slip his fabric boots off each evening to air before he lies down to sleep. It amuses him to see them standing so solidly when he recalls Miriam’s repeated winding, round his foot, of floating silken lengths through which the light passed.

  He thinks of Miriam as he runs, overtaking the Outpacer. But then he often thinks of Miriam. The protective pouch she gave him bobs on the string about his neck. Her cut-glass earring bounces against his cheek.

  If Miriam were here, she could cure Bird Girl. The image of the crude shaft lodged in the girl’s chest pierces him again. He winces to recall the way Bird Girl crumpled to the ground, her face so deathly white, her mouth open in a silent gasp. Before he and the Outpacer took off in pursuit of the evil archer, Chandelier had paused long enough to see the ragged hole the arrow tip had made and the greenish toxin already discolouring the skin around the wound. “Poison,” Candace said.

  Candace always makes him uneasy. He dislikes her booming voice and her grand, empty gestures miming a warmth he senses she does not really feel. But he knows she is right about the poison.

  Is that why he and the Outpacer are pursuing the dark, gliding shape of the archer? Do they want to seize him and make him spit out the name of the venom so that they might know how to heal Bird Girl? But the elusive attacker is soon swallowed up by the forest. Each tree seems to cast its own heavy spell, spinning shadows thickly out of its roots and branches. The boy is wary of trees still, of their towering indifference and secretive inner life. He cannot dissociate them from a hot anguish of mind and flesh, and the way he had scored and slashed and rubbed parts of his face raw, banging his head against tree bark on the day the Egg exploded.

  The Egg. He has been thinking of the poison seeping into poor Bird Girl, and has come back to the Egg. This is always happening. He cannot stop it happening, except sometimes when he loses himself in the unbounded whiteness of Harry’s tales of Antarctica. And sometimes too, if he pays close attention to Snake’s whispered counsel; if he lets his friend curl round his throat like a necklace so that Snake’s cool, bony mouth is close to his ear.

  The effort of remembering his life in the Egg is an agonizing discipline, like prodding an open wound with a calloused thumb. Perhaps if he went into this pain deliberately now, he might remember something that would help Bird Girl. Endure, he sends out thoughts to her. Persist. With such injunctions, Snake has often kept him alive.

  Inside the Egg, Chandelier is certain he and his father could have found the cure for Bird Girl. Together in the laboratory wing, they would have speedily analyzed the poison and just as speedily found the antidote. The best of the world’s wisdom was preserved and protected in the Egg. So his father told him, and so Chandelier believed. He can still recall in sharpest detail the content of many of the Egg’s countless videos, tapes and disks, and of the real books in its vast library. He had liked to sit with a book in his lap, turning its paper pages slowly or quickly, as the narrative demanded. It was in books that he found the human and animal company that sustained him when loneliness threatened to undo his selfhood.

  Allein. That was a better word than lonely, he thought, with a keener, biting sound. For sometimes in the Egg the aching solitude had caught him and strung him up, like the rabbit in a snare he had seen once in a video and ached for. He knew himself then to be a flimsy thing, which would rattle if shaken. The rattle, he guessed, was the sound of his heart and other organs, gone hard and dry.

  Of course, he knew his father loved him. And although she did not often show it, he believed, as he had to believe, that his mother cared for him deeply.

  It still amazed him to recall how like his mother Bird Girl looked as she lay ashen and unmoving. Until the attack, he had never noticed this resemblance because Bird Girl was always in motion: fingers aflutter, head swivelling, chin tilted skyward, then lowered, elbows jutted out, then pumping up and down, as if she were making ready to fly. He thought she must be named for the hummingbird, which was a shimmering blur of purple and crimson when it hovered in the air.

  In the Egg, he had liked to watch his nature films at regular speed, then replay them in slow motion so that he could study how each living being moved in its environment. Freeze the frame and there was the tiny bird, wings out-flung, ready for uplift.

  Surely Bird Girl would not die? He has always given her quite a wide berth, mostly because he found her bright energy and quick speech unsettling. He marvelled at the ease with which she moved in the world: her “superb adaptation to her element.” This was a phrase from one of the nature films, another of the oddments his brain had stored and that would pop up, in or out of context.

  For fourteen years, the only element he had known was inside the Egg. The air was clean. Any fluctuations in temperature and light were regulated by sensors tuned to optimum conditions for the human life form. Of whom there were three in the Egg — Father, Mother, Son. And no others, as he had often mourned to himself in his echoing loneliness. No other life forms at all, not even a harmless spider.

  He had regularly asked his father for a pet, most particularly a lizard or a snake. The answer was always no. Introducing such a life form into the Egg might compromise their immune systems, his father said.

  He had absorbed enough of his father’s stoical forbearance and self-control not to give way to fits of pique. He learned to subdue his disappointment by flinging himself into physical activity. He would plunge into the blue temperate water of the Egg’s swimming pool and turn lap after lap under the watchful gaze of the robotic lifeguard. (Bird Girl would have liked the swimming pool, it occurs to him. She would have said something funny or rude about the lifeguard robot which had a face like a flattened pan.) Or he would apply himself to the punching bag, hurdles, and climbing wall of the Egg’s gymnasium, which his father called Plato’s Playroom. When his distress was most acute, when his yearning for company other than his father’s and his books became a physical ache, he would run.

  Running brought the added pleasure
of the ineffable light. For the track circled inside the actual perimeter of the Egg. There, he was separated from the external world by a mere membrane of semi-translucent material. Until the day of the explosion, this was as close as Chandelier ever came to the polluted, corrupt world from which his father had sealed his family away. So it perturbed the boy that he found so pleasing this light that had so evil a source. Soft, diffuse, with a tinge of amethyst, its sheen on the track’s air seemed a miraculous medium, buoying him up. He thought sometimes he floated, rather than ran.

  How could this be, he asked his father. This was the kind of light that bathed the faces of the people in his mother’s art books. How could it come from so impure a place?

  Was it anger he read on his father’s face as he instructed his son yet again on the dangers of illusion? The idea of danger had an instinctual appeal for the young Chandelier, who wisely said no more. But he was too much in awe of his father, too conditioned to life in the Egg, to try an assault on its confines. Besides, he had no reason to doubt his father’s description of the crimes perpetrated minute by minute in the cursed world outside. Think of the Hell-scape of Hieronymus Bosch and multiply it ten times, his father said. These were images Chandelier could not bear to contemplate for long.

  The time of the world’s healing would come, his father assured him. Every day, his father monitored the signs, filtering through the news that came to him in encrypted messages from other members of the Arêté. This was a group of intellectuals who had opted, like him, for total seclusion from the world, like the desert mystics of old. The Arêté inhabited caves, eyries, underground bunkers, or manufactured fortresses like the Egg, keeping alive the imperilled sparks of disinterested knowledge, reason, clarity, the power of mythos, and virtues like probity, honour, courage, and empathy. They saw themselves as the guardians of what was best in humankind.