Chapter Text
SEVEN YEARS PRIOR TO THE PRESENT DAY. TWO MONTHS FOLLOWING THE ACQUAINTANCE OF GERARD KEAY & MICHAEL CREW.
He hadn’t realised he was afraid of death until he was bleeding to it at speed. He usually preferred not to think about that sort of thing, because he had other things to think about that were less likely to kill a man’s mood, but in his present situation, it was difficult not to consider it. The same way you cannot ignore a horse while you are riding it, you can’t tune out your death when you’re dying it.
Gerard Keay kept his eyes open and pulled himself forward on his front, just some inches more. Lucky that he was doing his bleeding in the States; otherwise, it would have been centimetres, and he’d only have had two fifths of the progress. The pain had reached a stage where waves became fractured with uncertainty, nerves dithering on numbness, his body unsure if its rending was reality. He was thankful for it. Mercy among maulings. He blinked to free his lashes from the blood that caught in them, and another droplet began its red molasses crawl down his cheek. It was risky business. Too long and his eyes might not open again.
The front door was the same sky shade of blue on the inside that it was on the outside. Though it wasn’t far, he didn’t know if he could reach it, much less get it open. The phone might have been a better choice. Certainly it was less heavy than a door. He just didn’t trust his fingers to work the buttons, or the police to work their job, so he fought unconsciousness and crawled onward.
Despite his best efforts, he weaved out and in, like his lucidity was under the whim of a poorly-coordinated theatre crew, undecided on the curtain down. He wracked his mind for anything that might keep him awake. Passages from his mother’s books. Mastodon lyrics (the knowledge of which was a feat, considering the racket that often obscured them). The original Latin of the Song of Orion (from his cursory scan in the taxi). The note inside. I’m glad that you’re here. Not sure what I would do without you. XO. I’m glad that you’re here. XO. I’m glad. You’re here.
Sixteen, he thought, abandoning the words that were quickly growing delirious, was not a bad age to kick the bucket. Something about being spared the embarrassment of becoming an adult. He’d never have to do taxes. He fought the urge to stop moving just because of this incentive; his math was weak at best. So was his constitution, on account of the grievous wound to the head, among other things. He crawled further. The floor pulsed around him like the house was a very bad nightclub, herringbone pattern fluid in his blighted vision. Behind him a candy trail of rich scarlet. He thought he could make it. Hoped he could. He didn’t actually want to die, least of all here. Maybe outside, under the sun, where the copper crucifix on the wall couldn’t see him and pick his destination personally.
When he reached the door he heaved up what he could of his weight, and, trailing the tips of his fingers up the painted wood, quietly begged the doorknob to reveal itself to him. Through the wavering of his sight he could see the prints he’d left on the surface. Red on pastel like a jeweller’s rouge. He was growing cold, a foreboding absence that spread through him to his toes. He kept his eyes open. Finally his fingers touched metal and slipped off it wetly. Bloodless, his hand was as cold as the steel.
He willed his life to flash before his eyes; it didn’t. There was no tingling recollection of his own birth or memories of learning how to read, and in truth, he found it hard to imagine that he had ever been born. He might as well have stepped out of the void fully-formed and at his mother’s beck and call. A dye-black, ungrateful, metalhead Athena.
So. His memory, solid though it was, had deserted him. All he had was this. A doorknob slicked dark, a postcard day on the other side of the door, his head, open like a sliced pomegranate. His hand, stretched skyward. He didn’t want to die. He tried for the doorknob again, and this time his hand stayed, quivering, as he turned it, pulling the door towards himself, letting the sacred city in.
He‘d never seen that many hats in one place before California. Hung vertically in rainbows like bizarre American fruits at the shrine to the god of tourism, ready to walk the paths of the zoo atop the receding heads of foreign fathers (or the suburbs of midtown atop the black heads of teen Brits), they announced various things. GOOD VIBES. CALI LIFE. At the top of the corner of the hanging cap family there was one that said WEST COAST BEST COAST, white text on uncharacteristically sombre black, and it had been love at first sight.
The man at the souvenir stand looked horrified to see Gerry decked in his leather in the afternoon heat, and to be fair, Gerry was starting to sweat. Fresh out of the hotel lobby he’d thought he could bear it, just for the duration, but five minutes under the sun had proved otherwise. Still he dug his heels in and fixed the man with a look of equal animosity.
“Gonna buy anything?” said the man, remembering himself. He was pink from prolonged exposure, salt-and-peppery hair gelled with enthusiasm.
Gerry, too, shut his dirty looks away for a more appropriate confrontation. He cleared his throat and unleashed his other weapon. “Bloody hot, innit?”
“For you, I guess,” the man said. “Don’t get much sun where you’re from?”
“No,” said Gerry. He summoned the Sims spirit and continued. “How much for one of these?” He pointed.
“Twelve bucks,” the man told him.
Gerry recoiled physically. He selected an appropriate exclamation. “By Jove.”
“Like it or leave it. You can get two for twenty.”
“Don’t need two,” Gerry said. “Listen, I haven’t twelve. How does eight sound?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’d say that you’re the one who’s kidding,” replied Gerry, rather pleasantly.
“It’s twelve, son. No less.”
Suppressing the unpleasant chill the word sent through him, Gerry found his wallet and made a show of scouring it for cash that wasn’t there. “I have ten.”
“That’s too bad,” the man said. “You can get a magnet. Two magnets, even.”
“I’d never use a magnet,” Gerry reasoned. “Plus, the hats are brilliant. Ten’s not too far off...”
The man mumbled something under his breath and stuck a hand out. “Fine. Fine. Ten.” Glowing with self-satisfaction, Gerry passed the haste of different notes to him and watched him flick through them, counting. When he was done, he waved a hand at the mass of options. “Take your pick.”
Gerry zeroed in on his prize and tiptoed to pluck the black cap off its hook. “Cheers,” he said, beaming, and got out of there before the man could change his mind. Walking in the direction of his next stopover, he tucked the shaggy hair at the sides of his head up and put the cap on over it. It fitted him like an old friend. The clouds moved away from where they had been courting the Sacramento sun, sending the street into hellish light that made him even fonder of his purchase.
He could shield from the glare, but there was no escaping the heat. He bore the torture for a couple of blocks before he cracked. Finally he stopped under the reprieve of a dying elm, wrestled his jacket off, and stuffed it into the canvas drawstring bag, atop the several thousand dollars of cold cash his mother had portioned out for the book he was supposed to pick up, folded furtively at the bottom, outside of his wallet.
The relief was instantaneous. Underneath his jacket he was wearing the least disreputable of his T-shirts, devoid of any metal bramble of a band name, short of any reanimated skulls, just plain flecked slate. He’d bleached a hand with its middle finger up onto the back, but it was fairly abstract, and his bag would cover it, anyway. He shrugged his drawstring bag back on and continued. In short sleeves now, he fancied himself a regular tourist, enjoying a holiday, fantastically ignorant, maybe on his way to...what was there in Sacramento, other than the zoo?
The ice cream vendor he’d scouted out the day before was still there, many hallelujahs. He bought a popsicle and ate it there on the street, then hailed a cab and got in. Sweat cooling on the back of his neck, he lifted the tail of his hair off its nape and read the address to the driver. For good measure he folded the ends up and secured them with his cap.
They spoke, here and there, and Gerry answered the usual questions. No, he wasn’t from around here, clearly, no, not technically on vacation, his mum had business. No, he hadn’t been to the zoo, wasn’t going to go (pity). Yes, the weather was jarring to him. The normalcy of their conversation charmed and repulsed Gerry. When the taxi finally pulled to a stop in the middle of a suburb as neat as a shelf of confectionery, he paid, thanked the driver, and got out of the cab, missing the chat and the air conditioning the second he shut the door.
He liked to talk, Gerry Keay, though you might never have guessed it looking at him. The pencilled-on eye-bags and the sour mouth didn’t betray any propensity for conversation, but it was there, hiding beyond the spikiness. He accepted it readily when it was offered to him, like a small god drinking libations. Americans in particular were good fun. He enjoyed the way they laid their vowels out. The supple, generous stretch to their words, the effortless irreverence they wore when they spoke. They were more willing to chat him up than the clients back home, he found.
As a kid he’d loved the trips to the States. The children his age at hotel breakfasts, the diner waitresses, the tattooed men who would tell him how much he’d grown. Any boy would have liked the pace of overseas stints, and the Keay clients weren’t all bad. He was even fond of some of them. Before they’d left London this time around he’d inquired into his mother’s buyers, to delightfully ominous answers.
“Who are you selling to?” He’d just gotten home from school, to her news. “Mayer?” When he was still light enough to be lifted Remy Mayer would throw him screaming into the air and catch him again, his arms dependable, the left coiled with wild animals and many-eyed women.
“No,” said Mary, and didn’t follow up.
He paused before he tried again. “Teller and Smith?”
Mary shut her newspaper with a rustle. “Teller has recently become...unviable.” She said this with the barest hint of amusement.
Gerry took unviable to mean presumably dead and was pleased that it was Teller and not Smith, whom he liked better, for she would gift him copies of her favourite classics whenever she met with his mother for a deal (he’d hated her Huxley, and thought Iron Maiden had done it better, but he never told her this). “Sure. And Mayer? Is he...unviable?”
“He hasn’t been in touch,” she revealed. The last Keay to Mayer transaction had been back in Gerry’s preteenhood. Mary’s new clients, from what Gerry could gather through doors left ajar, tended to veer on the stranger side. Not the Stranger side, necessarily, though he could never be sure and didn’t really want to. Once he’d passed Mary’s study and heard dozens of voices speaking at once when he’d only seen one woman go up with his mother, another time she’d called him in to have tea with her and a man whose skin writhed when he spoke. Gerry would have traded those clients for Mayers and Tellers and Smiths and Velasquezes in a heartbeat.
Gerry cast the net wider. “Okay, well, anybody I know?”
“People you should start to know,” Mary told him, though he doubted her definition of people. “If you’re to ever do a good job with this business.” She stood. He’d long outgrown her, but though she was shorter than him by a substantial amount, she had a density to her, a pooling of blood towards her gravity. “Someone’s coming by at half past six. You can begin today.”
“I have homework,” he’d lied. She gave him a look that concentrated all lectures previous into one second, and he felt the unwelcome prickle of blood to his face. “Sorry.”
“Then sort the new shipment by tonight,” she’d said.
Now he hooked his thumbs around the string straps of his bag to soothe himself and strode briskly up to the house on Whitaker Lane. The heat had ebbed, somewhat, and a taunting breeze ran its course through the strategically planted trees. He liked the look of the place, with its muted blue door and poppies in a box on the porch. It was the sort of house you might see on the telly. He wondered if they had a dog—a big one, maybe, with black fur and pointed ears, the kind Gerry liked, one that would sleep on the patio and roll over so you could pet its stomach. It didn’t make sense to have all this space and not get a dog. The lawn, lush with weeds, was barren in places, like it had been dug up to bury something precious, and Gerry allowed himself to hope.
He ascended the steps of the porch, stood in front of the door to run over his lines, and then knocked with conviction. He reached over and rang the doorbell, too, for good measure. He could hear it unwind itself inside the house. The sound was muffled, but still obnoxious. Nothing barked inside the house; his mood plummeted. Though he kept his ears pricked, he detected no movement, and hoped somebody was home even as he doubted it. He looked around at the poppies, then down at the laces of his boots, not wanting to entertain the possibility that he would return empty-handed. A small feather the colour of silt swirled in the gentle wind beside his feet.
He waited a little longer. While waiting, he doffed the WEST COAST BEST COAST cap and stuck it in his bag. Propriety could lead to notoriety, as someone said (Gerry was pretty sure it was Sting). He waited some more, now with his head bare.
Velasquez Books in L.A. had told him that someone’d ordered their single copy of the Oriad online, a month prior. Raúl had found Gerry scanning stacks and tipped him off about the book. The acquisition of the address took a shipload of bantering on Gerry’s part, but it had been worth it, for the convenience of the neighbourhood, ten minutes away from the hotel Mary picked for her Sacramento liaisons. She’d been pleased when he told her. Thrilled to see him taking initiative. The look on her face had made him feel proud enough to throw up (he hadn’t, in the end, thankfully).
He was about to hit the doorbell a second time, propriety be damned, when he heard the faint sound of a door opening inside the house. Some moments later the doorknob turned with a snick and the front door swung inwards to reveal a woman, about his mother’s age, maybe younger. She was fairly tall, upright as a willow. A pair of serious, brown-framed glasses perched on her head, liable to fly off if she so much as nodded. She did not look as glad to see him as he was to see her. She said, “Can I help you?”
“Good afternoon,” Gerry began, playing his weapon once more. Manners maketh man, as someone said (Sting again). “Is this the Weisglass residence?” When she nodded, he continued. “I’m with Pinhole Books, London, and we heard you have a book we’re interested in?”
She scrutinised him, and belatedly Gerry wished he’d had the foresight to take all the metal out of his ears. The piercings grounded him, kept him sure that he was still himself, but did nothing for his suburb cred. The woman said, tentatively, “What book?”
“Cassia’s Song of Orion? The Oriad, I believe the copy we’re looking for was published as.” The plural pronoun made him feel leagues more professional, so he played it on the regular. “The translation’s by John Dryden.” When the woman didn’t say anything, he added, “We estimated it could be worth a few hundred dollars.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong address,” she told him. “I’m actually busy, right now, so...” With all of the apology she could muster to her expression she began to close the door.
“Or thousands,” Gerry blurted. She stopped closing the door. He reiterated, “Possibly thousands of dollars.”
Though she didn’t move again to shut the door, she said, “I don’t know if we have any books that would cost more than twenty bucks.”
“Value can be difficult to recognise!” he exulted, thankful for the leeway she’d given him. “Do you recall any recent purchases? I was—we were told it was an online one, from Velasquez Books? Ebay listing, perhaps?”
“I don’t shop online very much,” she said (alright, lady, be that way).
Gerry, like a man bargaining while being walked off the plank, tried, “Velasquez told us they delivered it here, 19 Whitaker Lane.”
“Never heard of them,” she said, clipped. Gerry had the sinking feeling she’d had enough, and he was right.
The door began to close again. Gerry, distressed, at the end of the figurative plank and just about to drop into the treacherous water, said, “Wait!”
The door stopped. She hesitated, waiting with barely-concealed exasperation, and Gerry’s brain tipped over and emptied itself of cells. Unmanned as it was, it churned out the only question it could produce on zero capacity. He asked, “Do you have a dog?”
She regarded him, not very impressed but not entirely unamused. “I saw your lawn,” he explained, cursing himself.
“No,” she said after a moment, leaning sideways on the door to keep it open, arms crossed. “No, I don’t have a dog.” She paused, and Gerry caught the faintest stir of mirth in her mouth. “I’ve got a daughter. It’s about the same.”
Gerry’s thoughts leapt to cohesion at her words, his brain cells regrouping. “Would she—would you know if—“
She cut him off, finally, evidently on the same page as him, and said, nodding, “She’s a big reader. Yeah, she is.”
“So do you think she might have been the one to buy the book?” Gerry asked, his words rushed together like beads on a string.
“Well, it definitely wasn’t me,” said the woman. Just as Gerry asked, “Can I speak to her?” she said, “Why don’t you come inside?”
The interior of the house was pleasant, gently lived-in, and Gerry, trying to contain his excitement, had to scrub a hand down his face to wipe the wicked grin clean off it as he followed the woman past framed art prints, a tarnished crucifix, and a huge sofa the colour of an overripe peach (it had clearly seen better days than these). Someone had folded an armful of unironed laundry over the back of the couch. Gerry stood in the living room, hands in his pockets, turning an inquisitive circle, as the woman continued down the hallway to retrieve her daughter. He considered one of the art prints: the scene was the ocean, the deft colours matching the shade of the door. He supposed it was more convenient than driving to San Francisco Bay.
From where he was standing, he could hear the squeal of the bedroom door and the exchange between the woman and somebody else. There were faint beats of music, let free into the rest of the house by the intrusion, but Gerry could tell that it wasn’t anything his style. “...asking about a book,” the woman was saying. Gerry turned, his interest in the prints waning, and snooped around the laundry instead. He tugged the white sleeve of a button-down and noticed something drifting down on delicate air. It was a tiny brown feather. He grabbed for it, but missed, the action sending it further out of his reach, buoyed on the smallest of changes in the wind. He was unsure if it had followed him in or if one of the Weisglasses had recently burst a down parka.
He perked up again when he heard the woman say, “Some Ryan song.” Again, Gerry couldn’t help the grin. Song of Ryan. (More than once he’d been told that this grin of his seemed to testify to various schemes, plots, and plans, et cetera, but the truth was that he rarely schemed (though sometimes he plotted, or planned). More often, he just showed the world his teeth, and let it decide on its own what they meant. Nevertheless, for now, he schooled his face back into piousness and listened out for the rest of the conversation.) “He mentioned money...”
The girl’s voice, sharp and impatient, said “He can come in. We can talk in here.” Her music paused. A swivel chair skittered as it was pushed back. Gerry wandered down the corridor, eyeing the gradually ageing girl on the walls that smiled out of picture frames, and hovered behind the woman, trying to see over her shoulder. Judging from the progression of photos, the daughter might’ve been his age, or else they hadn’t updated the gallery yet.
Her mother sidestepped to allow Gerry into the bedroom. It was careless with stacks of books, like Gerry’s own back in Pinhole, but that was where the similarities ended. The rest of the room was wide and bright with the afternoon. The air was different inside, in that it was saturated with the overpowering scent of a floral-ish perfume. A bay window stood open with its linen curtain flapping helplessly. The girl, grey-eyed like the pictures but white-blonde unlike them, stood staring at him, one hand on the back of her swivel chair, not amiably.
Gerry, having little interest in staring back, noted the Beatles poster on the wall and curled his lip. He was about to curl his lip further at the Haruki Murakami on the bed when he remembered himself and looked back at her, then to her mother. He decided it was best to repeat the screed. “I’m from Pinhole Books, London, we heard you’ve got a book we’re interested in?”
The girl met her mother’s eye, and the two of them traded an unfathomable procedure of head movements that seemed to culminate in Leave us alone, it’s fine. Once her mother had closed the door the girl sank back into her swivel chair and looked up at Gerry through shoulder-length hair that, judging from the rise of darker roots, had been bleached mercilessly, in direct contrast to Gerry’s own work. The proof of its treatment was in its candy-floss texture; not fried, but definitely not sleek. Gerry, a little crunchy himself, could empathise.
She said, “You want my Cassia.”
“So you have it?” Gerry felt himself lift, like a herb finally granted sunlight, and willed himself to nonchalance.
“Came all the way from the You Kay for it,” the girl added in a passable Received Pronunciation, dodging Gerry’s question. “Didn’t you. What’s your name?”
“Gerard,” Gerry said, figuring that if rapport was what they needed first he could manage it, easy. “Gerard Keay. You?”
“Adeline.” She turned in her swivel chair, searching for a hair tie on her cluttered desk. She found it and wrestled her hair up into something that resembled more the tail of a duck than a horse. He found himself inexplicably, immensely jealous; he resisted the urge to touch the hair at the back of his head in that way that always got flakes of hair dye on his fingers. Gerry thought she might be older than him, or at least she felt like it, carrying the flippancy, the blitheness of every older kid who thought Gerry was vaguely distasteful. Well, newsflash, vaguely distasteful was the look he was going for.
Ready to go all in for the rapport, or maybe growing delirious from all the flower-and-sandalwood fumes he’d inhaled, Gerry said after a long pause to think, “How do you make T from an I.”
She rocked from side to side, rotating her chair with her feet like it was exercise equipment. Gerry estimated that his punchline would either hit gently or miss completely, possessing the true fatherly spirit of every dad joke he had not been told. “How?” she asked, suspicious.
He smiled, mostly to himself. He would enjoy it enough for the both of them if she didn’t. “You Adeline.”
Her shoulders twitched like someone had shot her, and then they twitched again, at which point Gerry realised this was how she laughed, a full-body shake. “Fuck off,” she told him, still doing her weird tremble. Her giggles were soundless things, wheezing out a bit when they ended.
“Thought you would’ve heard that one before,” Gerry mused, pleased with himself.
“No.” As if coming to a decision, or settling on a passing grade for him, she let out a huff of a breath and reached under her desk to pull out a circular white ottoman, embroidered with tiny blooming vines. She nudged it out to a suitable distance with her foot and jerked her chin to it. “Sit if you wanna.”
As he sat, she leaned forward on the tops of her knees and launched into the first of her interview questions, beating him to the punch. “How old are you?”
Gerry, who was sure that the only time people could tell he was younger than them was in school, when he had the foul Year 11 tie on, tried, “Nineteen.”
She made a face that told him he’d aimed too high and missed. “Sixteen,” he amended, reproached by her disbelief. He was taller than her, he could tell from when they were both standing, but apparently it didn’t help.
“I’m eighteen in June,” she told him. So she was older. “Your parents let you walk around strangers’ houses alone?”
“It’s my mum’s business. I’m making myself useful.” Gerry scuffed the sole of his boot on the floor. “Why, are you about to attack me with an axe?”
“Depends,” she said, straight-faced. On what? Gerry wondered. The interrogation continued. “You read a lot? Working in a bookstore?”
Gerry, feeling quite bombarded, gave a noncommittal, “Here and there.” He moved in for his own agenda. “Say, did you like Dryden’s take on the text?”
She sat up straighter in the way Gerry had hoped she would. Her eyes moved to her desk, and Gerry’s snapped to follow her line of sight, but the only books on the table were wrapped in plastic and written by people wih PhDs in mathematics. She tapped her fingers on her knee and said, “It’s good. Surprisingly readable. It’s the only translation I’ve read, so I can’t compare.” Where she was indolent before, she was abruptly illuminated. “It stops halfway through Book Three, but the Latin keeps going. Dryden didn’t finish his work on it. If I could find a full translation, I would’ve, but basically nobody sells print copies of anybody’s Oriad, much less print copies with the original Latin. I was after the Latin, I’m learning.”
“Are you any good?” asked Gerry. “People have told me that Cassia’s a riot. Not an Ovid, but close.”
“Dryden makes her sound like Virgil,” Adeline remarked. “And no. Not very. My high school doesn’t have a Latin course. I‘m supposed to be studying the original Oriad by myself, but I’ve just been reading the English. I don’t think I’m good enough to understand any of Cassia’s jokes.” She continued with the pace and fervour of a school-popular closet nerd who had been keeping her thoughts on Roman literature shackled to a wall in the basement up till now. “Did you know they only accurately attributed the poem to her in the late twentieth century? They found her personal letters and matched the handwriting. Before that they thought it was her brother's work. My copy still says Cassius.”
“Can I see it?” Gerry asked. She was showing a concerning degree of normalcy, but Gerry had been confident about Velasquez’s tip. He wanted to hold the book in his hands so he could truly be sure.
She bypassed his question entirely, and said, “What’s your natural hair colour? I bet red.”
Gerry, stunned enough that he ceased pursuing his goal, pulled the hair of his scalp flat so she could see proof that it was not, in fact, auburn. She leaned in. He said, “It was brown.” Recalling the photos in the hallway, he added, “About the same as yours was.”
“And you dyed it,” she said, slowly, “black. Tell me what the difference is.”
“There is a difference. It used to catch the sunlight and go all gold, which, ew. Can I see your Oriad?”
“No,” she replied, blithe, decisive. She moved on swiftly. “Have you read it before? Dryden or someone else?”
“I read a bit of Meera Ehioma’s translation. Online,” Gerry said, troubled. Hers was the only version he could find on a short notice; he’d read it under the hotel blanket on Thursday while pretending to be asleep, purposely so he could have this conversation. Said conversation was going pretty poorly, though. “She takes liberties with the Latin, in the later books. But it’s spectacular.”
“They say you can tell a lot about a translator by the way they work with the first few lines,” said Adeline in what sounded like invitation.
Gerry obliged her, only a little shy. Okay, not at all shy. He cleared his throat.
I speak now of the hunt
and the man who lived it,
Born of earth and towering tall.
Urania, sing through me,
Tell of his high god-wrought
journey to the fixed stars.
When he was done Adeline nodded approvingly. “Committed to memory.”
“Anything that goes into my head commits itself to memory.” Historical dates, things people had said to him at specific times on specific occasions, the entire scripts of toothpaste commercials, down to the inflection (Fluoriclear! Clean and bright!).
“That’s useful,” she remarked. She didn’t offer Dryden’s opening. Outside the room, a phone began to wail before someone answered it, silencing its cries.
“Look,” said Gerry. “How much did you pay Velasquez for the book? I can—”
He heard the footfalls approaching and fell silent, too, out of habit. The door opened with the same screech of discontent. Adeline’s mother, hand on the doorknob, said, “Call’s for you.” There was a brief moment where Gerry thought she meant him and nearly burst an artery in panic. Then Adeline stood, graceful and exasperated. “Are you thirsty? Want something to drink?” said her mother to Gerry, as an aside.
“No! Nope,” Gerry yelped. “Wouldn’t want to impose.”
Adeline turned to him as she was taking the door out, sidling backwards so she could warn him, “Do not touch anything.” She accompanied her words with the sharp line of the back of her thumbnail across her jugular. Gerry nodded profusely to tell her he’d heard her loud and clear.
If anybody didn’t believe in fate, it was because they were on the wrong side of it. Gerry rocketed to his feet as soon as they were out of the room. Adeline had left the door half-open, so he toed it as far shut as it could go without closing. A true ally, it didn’t creak swinging shut, only open. He listened close and could hear Adeline’s voice out in the living room; he’d know if the call ended. Hopefully. Then, first things first, he hovered in front of Adeline’s black vanity, put on the stormiest expression he could manage, and tried the slit-throat action himself. He did it first with his pointer, then his thumb, the way Adeline had, and concluded that the thumb was more threatening. He made a mental note to put the gesture into play more often.
Next he swept a glance over the entirety of the room. Her bookshelf was the obvious place, and he gave it a perfunctory look that yielded nothing and moved on. He’d spent most his life with his head tilted and neck straining, looking sideways at the titles of books, and he’d gotten very good at clearing shelves at speeds that would make most people raise an eyebrow and ask Are you sure? (Answer: yes, he was sure.) He crossed the room and lifted the pillow off the bed, under the off chance that Adeline kept her epics for bedfellows, but there was nothing underneath. He let the pillow go; it slumped back into position, sending a pair of tiny silt-coloured things swirling across the sheets. He checked her desk and found nothing but the culprit of the room’s odour, a nearly-empty citrine vessel of Daisy by Marc Jacobs, and a 99 cent pencil eyeliner, choked with dust behind a mound of school notes.
He pocketed the pencil. Likely that it wouldn’t be missed. Before he continued he took a moment to stick his head out of the open window and suck in a couple breaths of non-Daisy by Marc Jacobs air. The effect was instant; he stopped feeling lightheaded right away, and he slid off the seat of the bay window to his feet. Time was of the essence.
So she’d taken pains to keep her Oriad safe. That wasn’t a problem for him. A thing-hider too, by habit, he knew enough of the tricks to have a foot to stand on. Most important: levels. Anything anywhere near eye height was already dead. He stood on tiptoe first, but the top of the bookshelf was empty save for another thin layer of dust. She didn’t have much in the way of cabinets, and he didn’t want to pull a chair to check the top of her closet and risk getting caught red-handed. Ultimately his explorations into heights were concluded by a cramp in his foot. He dropped back to his heels and went low instead.
“C’mon, Cassia Tacita,” he muttered under his breath, crouching. “Show yourself...” He swung his gaze around, fixing on a stack of books under her table. He brightened. Some of them looked about the correct size, pages the right shade of brown. He crawled quickly underneath the desk to scan the titles, praying to every wretched old god out there that whoever was on the other end of Adeline’s call was garrulous. In the shadow, the letters were harder to make out, but he squinted and found that none of them were what he was looking for. The few non-textbook volumes, wedged between more large plasticky tomes in the stack, were old novels, and at the top of the stack, some Virgil, Robert Fitzgerald. Gerry removed himself from the desk, disappointed.
Still kneeling, he turned. Her bed was the sort with drawers built in underneath, for bedsheets or diaries or whatever else a girl might need to stow away. Gerry didn’t bother to fight the grin down. He hopped to his feet again and bent down at the drawers, about to open the first on the left when he noticed something about the third.
It was sealed shut, not permanently, just a haphazard strip of clear Sellotape that he might have missed if he wasn’t so close. He set himself upon it savagely, fingernail peeling at the end and pulling it off with a classic crunchy rip. He noticed, belatedly, as he left the other side stuck on for ease of replacement, that something was caught on the adhesive. He’d seen many like it previously. He freed the feather from its fate and let it escape on the slight breeze coming in from the window.
And he opened the drawer. The smell was immediate, even with the shallow pool of (was that more fucking Daisy by Marc Jacobs?) liquid caught in the cling wrap Adeline had lined the drawer with, foetid under the frantic cloak of wildflowers and cedar. The reason for the saturation of the room in scent laid itself apparent. Gerry did not feel any less dizzy.
He counted seven dead birds. Steeping in their own bath, they laid with their tiny legs upward, flightless wings splayed out behind them, or on their front, like in rest. Their feathers slicked together and shining with perfume, they looked wrong, poorly shaped, and he realised with a lurch that the word he was looking for was crushed. They were sparrows, or wrens, small enough to hold in your hand. He raised his and motioned closing it into a fist.
He supposed that this was his lucky break. The shape of things began to piece together in his mind. He was disquieted enough that he didn’t hear the click of the receiver in the living room, only the footsteps and the creak of the door. The drawer, tape unstuck and miniature avian graveyard unhidden, stood open incriminatingly. For both of them. He turned and did his best to keep his cool even under discovery.
They regarded each other. Adeline was livid white, nigh the colour of her hair, but her face was a mannequin mask of calm. She shut the door behind her. Despite himself, Gerry felt a curious twinge of what felt like fear.
Resisting the urge to sing the question as the 70s disco it belonged in, he asked, “Does your mother know?”
Adeline looked like she appreciated the restraint. “She thinks I stopped,” she said. “You are a lying, sneaking piece of work, you know that?”
“I’m not the freak dousing my dead birds in perfume, am I?” Gerry shot back.
“The ethanol,” she began, then stopped, unsure exactly what the science behind it was. “Does something. And I need it to hide the smell. Surely you’re not so stupid that you don’t realise that rot smells bad.”
“The point isn’t the perfume! The point is the bird corpses!” Gerry hissed. He caught himself before he could say anything else, chanting in his head, Rapport, rapport, rapport, rapport, rapport. “Look, I want to help.”
“No, you want to pawn my book off to some rich man’s collection,” snapped Adeline. “Don’t act like you’re some sort of hero.” Fuck, she had him down cold. Rapport was quickly slipping between Gerry’s fingers. “Close that. It’ll stink.”
Gerry ignored her direction and played for logos. “Yeah, maybe I just want your book. But it’s better for both of us that way. What, do you like killing small things like some kind of child psychopath?“ Okay. No more rapport for Gerard Keay.
“You don’t understand anything about the Song,” Adeline said. “It’s not for sale.” Her anger, cold and placid to begin with, had transfigured into something else, something keener. “But I can show you. You’re a weirdo, you’ll like it.”
He’d expected her to move for the closet, or the other drawers, for her hidden treasure, but she walked instead to the middle of the room, facing her window. “Stand behind me. Or you’ll ruin it.”
He did as told, curiosity sparked. She brushed lint off her shirt. There was no change that Gerry could see, and she began to speak again, perhaps filling the time, eyes still fixed on the window. “I didn’t like Dryden’s style when I first started, you know. I thought the rhyme was unnecessary. I thought the rigid syllables made the poem stale. But there’s a genius in it,” she said. “A purpose. He knew his subject as well as Cassia did, but he perceived it in his own way.”
“There’s a rhythm to every hunt,” she finished. “Even when your feet don’t make a sound.”
From behind Adeline, Gerry saw it swoop in from the distance. The bird landed on the sill with a flutter of little wings, a short tangle of talon against metal. It was brown, ordinary, identical to those in the drawer as far as Gerry could tell. Adeline began to move.
She spoke, soft enough that Gerry had to strain to hear. The lines of the epic walked a sure-footed meter. Orion was unmatch’d in plain or brush, her passage began. The bird ruffled its feathers on the sill. Groomed itself. Grasses under his feet went soft with hush. She was slow, almost floating in her procession.
Nymphs halt’d talk, trees rustl’d not, for chase—Gerry found himself holding his breath—Beasts mov’d their ears and never saw his face.
She was right at the window. The bird hopped along to the other side of the windowsill. She continued, volume rising, but it didn’t seem to notice her. He crept in cloak, steady Diana’s hand, she said, her tone growing cavalier. When she reached out, just the way she would pull a book from a shelf, it didn’t even startle. She closed her fingers over it and lifted it, and only then did it begin to flail, pinned wings beating, legs circling.
She ended the last couplet as she turned back to Gerry, holding the bird fast the way men on Tinder hold moderately-sized fish. And forests went hollow all through his land.
Gerry, perturbed for the animal, overjoyed for his own prospects, said, “You’ve shown me. You can let it go.”
She didn’t hear him, or didn’t intend to release it. Her grip tightened imperceptibly. The other thing, the keen light from before, had not left her eyes. Gerry crossed the room to her, swung his own palm up, and hit her on the wrist as hard as he could (not very).
It was enough. She let go, and the bird flapped and shrieked to the floor of the bedroom, unhappy but unhurt. Adeline’s face changed in annoyance. She dusted feathers from her hand; they danced their way down after their source. To Gerry’s surprise, she said, “Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” he replied weakly, and watched the bird totter around her room. It circumnavigated the interior, making a grand flapping racket, until it located the window and made its escape.
“I didn’t mean to kill any of them,” Adeline said. She sat back in her swivel chair and reached for the jar of perfume. She spritzed a pump onto the hand that had held the bird, then ran it over one side of her neck and the other (Gerry walked to the window and had a few more fresh breaths). “It’s just that catching them never feels as good as the stalking. I always think I can get that feeling again, when I kill them. And then after I just feel like shit.”
“Are those—” Gerry, body still pressed to sill, motioned with his head to the open drawer.
“Those are from this morning,” she revealed. “Weekends I can get the early birds.” She smiled at her own joke. “Literally.”
The Demon Teenager of Whitaker Street. Decimating the local fauna as an extracurricular. Gerry turned to sit on the bay of the window, kicking his heels. “You said your mum thinks you stopped.”
“I promised my mom and dad that I would,” she explained. “They made me bury the first batches. To teach me the sanctity of their lives.” Her voice dropped to an incredulous hush. “Dad wanted to hold funerals.”
“You should’ve. You could’ve grabbed all the little feathery attendees, too.”
She began her shaky, silent laugh. Gerry felt his own smile spread over his face. She said, through the spasms, “I trash them once my parents fall asleep. I’ve got a good system going.”
Gerry put his elbows on his knees, rested his chin in his hands. “Things always escalate with these books. Tomorrow it might not be birds.”
“Orion dies at the end,” Adeline said, in lieu of Gerry’s words. “I’m sure you know that. He does make a nice batch of stars, though.”
“You’re not Orion,” Gerry said, irritated with her sudden morbidity.
“Maybe not,” she agreed. “I’m supposed to be a lawyer, you know. I’ve got my testimonials written and everything. I feel like omitting the fact that I crush animals in my free time is pretty duplicitous.”
Gerry leaned back out of the window for his regularly scheduled breath of fresh air. “Not a classicist?”
“You can’t eat poems, Gerard.”
“Gerry,” he corrected, gulping uncontaminated oxygen.
“That’s significantly worse than Gerard,” said Adeline with the haughtiness of somebody who would maul anybody who tried to call her Addy.
“It’s my name,” said Gerry, looking down at the grass at the bottom of the other side of the window. Daisies, real daisies, swayed in the breeze among the green. He watched the white velvet petals move, their centres the same yellow as beaten egg yolks. Then he sat up and quit stalling. “This will end if you separate yourself from the book. You can forget about me and Cassia and still go to your Harvard or whatever the fuck. I’m offering you a way out.”
Adeline, thinly, said, “What if I don’t want it?”
“Start wanting it,” he told her. “How much did you pay Velasquez for your Oriad?”
“About a hundred and fifty,” she confessed, like it had been a splurge for her.
Gerry, thrilled beyond words at the perfect value for dramatics, said, “I’ll pay ten times that.” Mary, too, would be ecstatic, he thought. “If you don’t want the way out, at least want the thousand and a half dollars, mate.”
Her mouth twisted. She left a charged silence as she tapped her foot on the floor in thought. “I’ll give you my email,” she said, finally, meeting Gerry’s eye. “So you can send me that other translation you were reading.”
Gerry found, with significant disorientation, that he liked Adeline Weisglass, feathers and all. Looking into her quicksilver eyes, he felt the rise of something that rarely reared its head in him: recognition. Kids his age didn’t often brush up this close with his world. “I will,” he promised. Then, aiming for levity, he said, “Maybe stick to Murakami for a while first. Though I’m not sure if he’s much better.”
Hatred flickered on her face. “Fucking hell he isn’t. Jordan got me 1Q84 and now I have to read it.”
Before Gerry could grin, he heard the approach. The handle of the door turned, and before either of them could intervene, it swung inwards with a damning creak. Gerry winced. Adeline’s head whipped to the cling-wrapped drawer underneath her bed, then to her mother, standing in the doorway, brown glasses on her face about the same shade as the birds lying dead in Daisy by Marc Jacobs. Weisglass, elder, put a long white hand over her mouth.
Gerry, once it became clear that neither would be saying anything for a while more, said, “Do you want to sit down?”
Cars pulled up and down the main road, all of them purposeful, none of them cabs. The asphalt underneath their tires was faded, having drunk the decades of sunlight since it had first set and washed itself to a warm, dreamy grey. Gerry ground the toe of his boot into a crack on the pavement. His patience was running out. He’d have thrown in the towel a while ago if he trusted the bus with a Leitner in his bag (he didn’t; you could call it paranoia if you wanted to).
It had been a speech that he’d drafted and un-drafted in his head before he fell asleep for many nights a year. Normally, in his imagination, the opener was There are things out there beyond our comprehension, but that had fallen victim to the context, and he’d had to start with I understand your daughter has been struggling with, uh, bird problems, which, to his British ears, sounded a lot like a male teacher gauchely reporting a student’s disastrous first period to her parents.
They’d sat in a triangle, Gerry by the window, Adeline in her chair, her mother on the ottoman. His spiel was abbreviated, Hunt-geared, and in many places factually incorrect (though he preferred the term strategically reconstructed). He could spin a pretty web when he had to. Still, it was the most genuine he’d ever been with strangers. His mother would scoff at the method, but Gerry was certain she would approve of the four and a half thousand dollars he hadn’t spent, still at the bottom of his drawstring bag, and Cassia Tacita’s Song of Orion, safe at the top of it, in between layers of his folded leather jacket.
A taxi finally materialised, taking its time in Gerry’s direction. He waved it over frantically and fell inside once it’d stopped for him. “Afternoon,” he greeted, chipper from his success.
“Afternoon,” the driver replied. “Where to?”
Gerry let him know the name of the hotel and sat back. He shrugged his bag off, dumped it in the seat next to him, and attacked the drawstring until it relented and let him dig for the book. The taxi pulled into the next lane.
The Song of Orion was just the way the junior Velasquez had described. Once its soft hide cover had probably been a navy so dark it was nearly black, like the night sky. Now it was the middling shade of dawn, speckled with star-points where it had faded. The title was embossed silver. Gerry ran a finger down its spine; it came away faintly grey-blue.
He weighed the danger and found it light. Adeline had been largely unaltered even after one month courting it. He flipped the calfskin volume open and surveyed the inner title page. Unlike the cover, the error of the poet underneath The Oriad was printed in the lisp of old manuscripts. Caſſius. Adding the inconsistency of the long lowercase and the relative sleekness of the cover together in his mind, he thought it had been printed shortly after the translator’s death, then rebound sometime recently. Typical of Leitner, considering that a book as old as Dryden’s expiry date would have been in poor form by the turn of the current century.
The plain sticker pasted where the bookplate would’ve been had the expected gummed-up and re-flattened corner. The ghost of Raúl Velasquez’s fingernail. Gerry recovered Raúl’s progress and peeled it back. Velasquez hadn’t gotten far enough to reveal any inked design, for the paper had begun to come up with the adhesive. Gerry imagined that selling a book for less profit and less ethical dilemmas was easier on the sleep than selling a Leitner for more. Not the Keay style, but still, it had worked for them anyway.
He left the sticker and went for the first pages. The words jumped at him, familiar but curious, reshuffled, bent to another translator’s fancy. I sing at once of hunt and whom it hurt. He began to flip, searching for the section that he’d liked in Ehioma’s work.
He didn’t find it. Like Adeline had said, the translation dropped off near the end. All he discovered, two thirds into the volume, was Cassia’s unerring sprawl of Latin and a folded slip of drawing paper, bookmarking the threshold between Dryden and uncharted ancient waters.
His curiosity was impossible not to listen to. It was likely that he would be opening Leitners and letters and doors until one of them refused to let him go. He flattened the letter open, its crease held by the bound centre of the book.
The handwriting had the careful unevenness of a poor penman trying their best. Here and there phrases were scratched out. It read:
Adeline:
I’m writing to tell you explain why you will not get to read my dream journal under any circumstances no matter how much you pester, wheedle, inviegle inveigle etc. Firstly it is so embarassing embarrassing I dream about Godzilla like all the time except he’s always got some modification that makes him even worse. Secondly when it’s not Godzilla it’s you.
I know it’s honestly not the best company but I’m really not a very complicated person and I spend most of my nights dreaming about the same two things. Buildings fall down a lot. Sometimes Godzilla dreams are also you dreams and we have to hide in bomb shelters or escape in helicopters or whatever. You bandaged my leg once. So ro cinematic.
Yeah so anyway if you F searched your name in my dream journal there would be like 500 hits and they would all be super embarrassing. Those I mentioned aren’t even the most embarrassing ones. Every time I see you in a dream I get so excited, and when I wake up I always think there’s no way it can get any better. And then I see the real you and it does.
I’m glad that you’re here. Not sure what I would do without you.
XO,
J
Gerry could almost feel the devil and angel shrieking at each other from either of his shoulders. The former said that Adeline ought to have remembered to take the note back if it was important. The latter, significantly louder, reminded him that he’d already stolen her eyeliner and that expanding to stealing her love letters was low of him. It was a short mental shouting match.
Gerry leaned in between the seats to bother the cabbie. “Hey, sorry, could you turn around for a second? I’ve got to return this.” They hadn’t gone far, blessedly. “19 Whitaker Lane.”
With a grunt the driver obliged him. A few minutes later they turned into the neighbourhood, past the familiar houses, and Gerry popped out of the cab. He left his bag, to be sure the driver wouldn’t strand him.
The cabbie cleared his throat. “You gonna be long, kid?”
“A minute, tops,” Gerry assured him.
“Meter’s running.” He tapped fingers on the steering wheel, watching Gerry in the rearview mirror.
Gerry passed the filled gouges in the lawn, paid silent respects to the birds, and ascended the steps of the porch once more. Somebody had knocked over the box on the lawn, and its scarlet poppies lay on their sides, like blood leaving a wound. He righted it and stopped short of scooping the soil back in.
He knocked, and when nobody answered (deja vu!) he used the doorbell. Still nothing. Effectively the saviour of this suburban family, he forfeited his manners in favour of saving his time, too. He turned the doorknob and went inside.
The living room was empty. One of the art prints had fallen from its hook, the work in its frame leaning dejectedly against the wall. The space behind Gerry’s eyes began to tingle, sharp enough to sting. He hissed in discomfort and continued past the foyer, tucking the book under his arm, pinching the letter between his fingers so he could pass it on quick and get out of there. There was a far shape bent over in the corridor to the other rooms, a man, maybe Adeline’s father.
He was about to call out when his boot connected with something. It skittered over the parquet a couple of inches, and he stopped in the middle of the living room to look down. He’d kicked a pair of glasses: plain, serious, brown. He smelled it, right then, not perfume, or half-rot, but something metallic, primordial, something that had known how to flow since the first deers fled. He tore his eyes from the spectacles, stepped to look around the sofa, and saw the first body on the ground.
The bulk of the couch had hidden her from view. She was on her side. She’d been punctured, right through the gut, and she was soaking into the rug beneath the coffee table. She may or may not have been breathing, but Gerry heard a noise from the hallway and jerked back to attention before he could be certain, head throbbing.
The thing in the hallway hadn’t been a man for some time now. It hadn’t been Adeline’s father, ever. The sound came again, a low, curious greeting, a titanic thing heaving its weight forward, a hollowing of woods. It was looking at Gerry. On two legs now, it shifted away from the other body, the one it had been bent over, the one with white, candy-floss hair.
Gerry was still for too long. Beyond the second body there was another drag of crimson, a hand laid halfway out the door of a study. The real father, he guessed, the man of the feathery funerals. The thing in the hallway began to move.
The instinct of the prey to run is the only instinct keener than the instinct of the predator to give chase. Gerry remembered no advice about sudden movements. He bolted for the front door. The thing was across the house in a single scrape of claw and carapace. It slammed into him before he was anywhere near the foyer, sending him rolling into a cabinet full of dishes, no bag to break his fall. He heard porcelain crash within it, but the door held, holding back from pouring a reckoning of dinnerware onto Gerry. He forced himself to move before it could change its mind.
The thing had put itself between Gerry and the front door. It didn’t strike again, not yet. There was no doubt that it was going to make his death slow. Toy with him. He recalled Adeline’s bay window, so wide and so open it might as well have been a door, and staggered in the direction of her room. The thing caught him by the neck and yanked him back.
It was shaped like a man, but it had significantly more arms. Gerry felt it lift him, things that felt like fingers shredding at his skin and his shirt, his legs kicking in panic, before it threw him back at the cabinet. This time the impact liberated both several hundred dollars of china crockery and the top half of Gerry’s lateral incisor. Once the white screen had seared away from his vision, he rolled over to spit the chipped bit out, and it assimilated into the massacre of pale shards on the floor. The thing advanced as he struggled to stand through the pain, sprayed with white dust from broken plates.
It was two-taloned on each of its extremities, its hands ridged and veined like a man’s, the thumbs dainty in comparison to the rest of it. Gerry, too, had hands. He was not prey. He was going to be the worst fucking headache this monster had ever hunted. As it loomed over him he lunged to meet it, punching up where he thought its nose ought to be, hard. It grunted, an unnervingly human sound, and struck out again in retaliation.
He didn’t register the falling, only the being on the floor. He lay there, insensible with pain, for instants that were all infinities. His temple felt like a shattered canister of Greek fire. He would wonder, afterwards, what would have become of him if those claws had travelled one inch sideways in their ruthlessness. What do you do with half a prophet?
The thing floated above him, swimming beside spinning asterisms and visible sound waves. It was a man and wasn’t, like a holographic trading card, a double image. When Gerry was six he’d found one on the floor of the Tube and spent hours tilting it from side to side to see the character on it shoot lasers out her eyes and then unshoot them once he angled it back. The thing wore both exoskeleton and a polo shirt you’d notice if you squinted, or maybe it was the other way around, the chitin the one you had to turn the card to see.
Gerry saw one of its arms stretch down, and he curled inwards instinctively, pulling the Song of Orion close to his chest. He would die before it took the book from him. The hand that was reaching down to him looked like an original, majority flesh, rough with black quills of hair that was thick as a wolf’s at the joints and thin enough at the flat muscle of the forearm that Gerry could make out the faint cobalt of ink underneath the fur. A woman with eight wet eyes. Higher, jackrabbits mid-leap, twisting around its bicep, pursued by a procession of wild furies, woodland hauntings. Stags mid-flight. Almost gently, its dagger-tipped fingers touched the calfskin of the book, and it pried its prize from Gerry’s weakened grasp.
He put his knees together and lashed out with his feet. The kick was heavy (sponsored by Gerry’s adrenal medulla, and Doctor Martens, PhD). The thing fell away with a low of complaint, but it was too late. It had found what it had come for. It rose away from Gerry in a halting, middle-aged sort of manner. It passed its bulk over him, kind enough not to step on his fingers, and seconds later he heard the open and shut of the front door as it left, like a houseguest, like a human.
He wasn’t sure how long he lay there. The vein at his forehead seeped. Now that the adrenaline was nearing the end of its course, the dull throb of his every molecule was finally arriving to stay. Through the pain, he heard somebody’s voice, soft and garbled. He swore they’d said his name.
She spoke again, what would be her last words. He heaved over and saw her stir weakly beside the old couch. He realised, then, that it was not his name that the woman was saying, but her daughter’s: a heavy-tongued, final-breath Addy. The sacred childhood nickname. A last request that would not be fulfilled. She said nothing more.
Gerry, thinking of someone else, began to crawl.
The front door shut him onto the porch. It was still sunny outside. He’d lost enough blood that he didn’t register the warmth. He deluded himself into imagining he’d heard the slam of the cab door, the song of someone swearing. He listed onto his side, and the midday sky was full of stars, the hunter scattered into swinging pinpricks of light. He tried to hold on to the old lines, the new rhymes. I sing at once of hunt, hurt. He willed himself to move forward on the wood, to the stairs down to the lawn. Hunt and whom it hurt. A man, born, nursed of dirt. He couldn’t move any more. Oh, Urania, Oh, Muse. Tell of his plight—he couldn’t see the stars, wasn’t sure if they had ever really been there—of heaven’s stairs climbed...
The verses slipped away from him with the blood. All that was left was the certainty, and the fear, and the boy. He did not want to die, though it seemed inevitable. He didn’t want to do what he did next, but that was inevitable, too: because he was afraid, because he’d only known one woman’s version of love for all of his life, because he loved no other gods the way he loved her. Like an idiot, like a child (which, at sixteen, he still was, though he’d laugh if you told him so), Gerard Keay cried for his mother.
If anybody didn’t believe in life’s mercies, it was because they had never received them. He didn’t have the time to be embarrassed. His world drew the dark curtain over itself and dropped into the relief of eclipse.