Sourland (43 page)

Sophie saw that the single window in the room was too small for an adult to push her way out—no more than two square feet.

So tired! She had no choice but to stretch out warily on the bed.
No choice but to sink into the bed. This musty-yeasty-smelling bed. In her clothes and socks—she'd removed only the shoe-boots. It was terrible to be sleeping fully dressed but she could not risk undressing nor had she the strength to remove her clothing. She had not the strength to open her suitcase and hang up her things—she'd forgotten the suitcase entirely. The satin robe on the peg was hers to wear, she supposed. Though she would have to be naked beneath it, she supposed. She'd begun to pant, her eyeballs felt seared as if she'd been staring into the sun. She could never sleep in this terrible place! A grave-smell, wetted ashes, grit. If you breathed in too deeply you breathed in microscopic bits of skin, cell-particles. You breathed in the death of another. Her skin crawled with this knowledge. Hairs at the tender nape of her neck stirred. She felt an almost sexual yearning—the dark pit was opening beneath her, the tar pit, beneath the low-slung bed. In her haste to sleep she'd neglected to switch off the light, from a bedside lamp with a milk-glass base, an attractive little girl's-room sort of lamp which Kolk had switched on: the bulb couldn't have been more than sixty watts, not enough to keep Sophie from sinking into the tar pit which was the identical tar-pit that was beneath her bed back home…Gratefully she shut her eyes. Something black washed over her brain. Almost immediately she began to sleep. She was sobbing in her sleep, in relief. Her limbs twitched, she was gripping herself in a tight embrace, arms crossed over her chest and fingers at her rib cage.
O hold me! help me! I am so alone and I don't want to die please help me!
She saw the man approach her—the man with the melted-away face, the exposed and grinning teeth—whose name she could not recall, at the moment. It was a name she knew, but she could not speak it. He had removed his tinted glasses, his soot-colored eyes were glassy, dilated. His soot-colored eyes moved over her caressingly. She saw the mouth inside the bristling beard. It was a scarred mouth and a mutilated mouth but it was a mouth she wanted to kiss, to comfort. Yet she could not move, exhaustion so gripped her in all the cells of her being.

 

“Sophie?”

There came a man's voice, at a little distance. Someone was speaking her name through a shut door.

Now he opened the door, just slightly. Not wanting to upset or offend her he spoke through the crack, that mutilated mouth she couldn't see from where she lay.

“Sophie? Can you wake up? It's almost nine.”

In a daze Sophie opened her eyes. The lashes were crusted together with dried mucus. Her mouth was parched, aflame. In her stuporous sleep she'd been breathing through an opened mouth, for hours. How long? Nine o'clock? The wicked little two-foot-square window framed a tarry-black night.

Asprawl she lay in tangled bedclothes smelling of her body. At first she couldn't recognize her surroundings, this cave-like interior she was certain she'd never seen before. The ceiling overhead was low like heavy clouds pressing near to the earth. Tendrils of cobweb trailed from the ceiling. Something wispy crawled across her forehead—Sophie brushed it away with panicked fingers.

“Sophie—hey? You must be starving. We should eat soon. I've made us something to eat. D'you need anything?”

Quickly Sophie said
No
!
No
she didn't need anything. She was awake, she would join him in five minutes.

Her joints ached. Her neck ached. Her upper lip itched, badly. Beneath the rumpled linen shirt and sweater, a flaming sort of rash across her belly.

In a rush it returned to her—memory of where she was, and with whom. Who had summoned her.

The heavy down comforter had slid partway onto the floor. Sophie's shoe-boots were tangled in it—she fumbled to put them on. She dreaded walking on this floor, without shoes.

In the tiny lavatory that smelled of drains and disinfectant she peered at her reflection in a mirror so cheap it appeared to have warped. Its lead backing had begun to poke through, like leprosy. She saw that
her eyes were bloodshot and swollen and her mouth—her upper lip—was terribly swollen, enflamed.

Something had bitten her, in that bed.

“My God! A spider bite…”

She shuddered, in revulsion. She ran cold water into the sink, and wetted her swollen lip. How it throbbed, and burned! In the mirror she saw with dismay her dazed and sallow face, the bloodshot eyes with deep shadows beneath, the shiny-swollen upper lip.

The man would not find her attractive, sexually. Yet that morning early when she'd set out on her journey—her pilgrimage?—she'd been an attractive dark-haired woman with a ready if unfocused smile of whom it was said by those who wished her well
How rested you're beginning to look, Sophie! How young.

How rested
was a sort of code, Sophie supposed. Such words were only pronounced to widows, convalescents, survivors of terrible disasters.
How rested
and not rather
how devastated.

How rested
and not rather
how dead.

Hurriedly Sophie combed her hair, that was snarled at the nape of her neck. She fumbled to put on makeup squinting into the leprous mirror. Her fingers were oddly clumsy, she dropped the tube of lipstick not once but twice onto the grimy linoleum floor.

Blood rushed into her face as she stooped to retrieve the lipstick. Groping in the cobwebby corner of the tiny lavatory.
So it has come to this, Sophie! Such desperation.

No time to unpack her suitcase. Kolk was waiting for her. She could hear the panting little pig-dog snuffling and clawing at the base of the door she had no choice but to force open.

“
S'reebi
! Come over here, damn you
sit.
”

Kolk growled at the dog, that reluctantly obeyed him. How like a TV sitcom this was—was it? Sophie's mouth smiled, hopeful.

Kolk had lighted a fire in the fireplace. He'd laid cutlery, plates, swaths of paper towels on a crude wood-plank table in front of the fire
place. Not a TV sitcom but a romantic scene, this was. In the Sourland Mountain Preserve, in snowy April.

Sophie would have thought that the prospect of eating would nauseate her. In fact, the aroma of something meaty and gamey stewing on the stove made her mouth water.

Kolk said, with forced exuberance: “Soph-ie! How d'you feel?”

“I—I—I feel—wonderful.”

Was this so? Light-headed with hunger Sophie leaned against the table smiling. Wonderful! Wonderful. Wonder-ful.

Her joints still ached, she felt as if she'd been hiking for hours in her sleep. But she would betray no weakness to the man. Glancing about for something useful to do, some task to which she might be put—setting the table. And there were stubby candles she located on a shelf, to set on the table and light with trembling fingers.

How romantic, candlelight! Sophie was thinking how, at home, a thousand miles away, she and Matt had eaten their evening meals by candlelight.

Maybe at this very moment—was this possible?—the Quinns were sitting down to dinner, in that house in Summit, New Jersey. There was Sophie, and there was her husband Matthew Quinn. Could this be?

“What happened to your face?”

Kolk was staring at Sophie. He'd removed his dark glasses.

“A spider bit me—I think.”

“A spider? Where?”

Where do you think? Where have I been?

“While I was sleeping, I think.”

Kolk came closer, peering at Sophie's face. He was embarrassed, chagrined. His eyes were dark, puckered at the corners, deep-set and bruised-looking. It was something of a shock to Sophie, to see Kolk's eyes, without his glasses. The man's eyes fixed on her face. “Christ! I'm sorry.”

“Oh no, no—it's nothing. Really it's nothing.”

Sophie laughed, certainly it was nothing. She touched her lip that had swollen to twice its size. Beneath her clothes other bites itched violently, she dared not scratch for fear Kolk would be embarrassed further.

Muttering to himself Kolk stomped into the other room, Sophie saw him on hands and knees peering beneath the bed, cursing and grunting. With a rolled-up newspaper he swatted at something beneath the bed.

When he returned Kolk was flush-faced, frowning. He said that Sophie could sleep in his bed that night—he would sleep in the “guest room.”

Now it was supper! A romantic supper by firelight.

Kolk brought the stew-pan to the table. Self-consciously he ladled the rich dark liquid into bowls. There was also multigrain bread, he'd baked the previous day. And dark red wine, Kolk served in jam-glasses. Sophie thought
I won't drink, that would be dangerous.

The stew contained chunks of fibrous root vegetables, onions and pieces of a chewy meat, a dank-flavored meat Sophie couldn't identify. Hesitantly she asked Kolk if it was—venison?—and Kolk said no, it was not venison; she asked if it was—rabbit?—and Kolk said no, it was not rabbit.

Other possibilities Sophie could think of—raccoon?—groundhog?—she did not want to ask about.

Still, she was hungry. Her hand trembled, holding a spoon—Kolk reached out to steady it.

Kolk said they could go hiking in the morning. Or snowshoeing, if the snow didn't melt.

“Snowshoeing! In April.”

“This is northern Minnesota. We're in the mountains.”

Sophie laughed a little too loudly. Sophie saw that her jam-glass was in her hand, she'd been drinking after all. Thinking of her husband in his grave, reduced to ashes.
She
had done that—she'd signed the document, for the cremation. And yet, she'd gone unpunished. No one seemed to realize.

On the drive from the airport Sophie had asked Kolk about his life since Madison, since he'd dropped out of school, and Kolk had answered in monosyllables, briefly. Discreetly she'd made no reference to the alleged bomb accident. She'd made no reference to Kolk's anti-war activism, that had frequently crossed the line into civil disobedience. Now, Kolk began to speak. He told her about his father—who'd “disowned” him. He told her about his older brother—who'd been shot to pieces in Vietnam. He told her how he'd incurred the wrath of Sourland residents when he'd volunteered to speak at local high schools, explaining the “imperialist designs” fueling the Gulf War. He'd been arrested, “roughed up” by Grand Rapids cops, for picketing the army enlistment office there.

“And then—?”

“‘And then—' what?”

“What happened then?”

“Nothing happened then. As much as I'd expected.”

Sophie had finished the wine in her glass. Sophie felt her swollen lip throb with heat. Inside her clothes, the spider's-bite rash pulsed and flamed.

He will touch me now. Now, it will happen.

Beneath the table the fat panting dog, that had been clambering about their feet through the meal, gave a sigh like a grunt and fell asleep.

Kolk poured the remainder of the wine into their glasses. He'd eaten twice as much as Sophie had eaten, and drunk even more. His skin exuded a ruddy heat, like the heat of Sophie's swollen lip. She found that she'd been looking at the disfigured flesh of his jaw, the exposed teeth, without feeling repelled. Suddenly she wanted very badly to touch Kolk's jaw—the soft melted-away scar tissue.

Kolk stiffened as if sensing Sophie's thoughts.

The yearning between them. Like molten wax, dripping and shapeless.

Gently Sophie said, “Your—injury. It was an accident—?”

Kolk shrugged. Kolk's face was flushed still, stiff.

Sophie said, uncertainly: “We'd heard about it—an accident. An explosion. We'd heard that you had been—killed.”

Kolk laughed. Possibly, Sophie had taken him by surprise.

“It was good, ‘believed dead.' Nobody follows you there.”

Kolk lurched from the table to fetch a bottle of whiskey—Canadian Club. Without asking Sophie if she wanted any he poured the amber liquid into their emptied wineglasses. Not what Sophie's fastidious husband would have done, this was an act of barbarism. Sophie laughed, and tasted the liquid. So strong! Sophie was not a drinker of whiskey, Scotch or gin; she was not a drinker at all; a single, small glass of wine was her limit.

In the shifting firelight Kolk's ravaged face looked like the face of a devil reflecting flames. Sophie thought
This is what the surviving spouse deserves. A demon missing half his face.

She wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a demon missing half his face. The teeth!—if only the teeth would not touch her.

Kolk drank, and Sophie drank. Kolk began to speak in a confiding manner. Sophie was curious, and moved. Sophie was eager to hear of Kolk's life, that had been hidden from her. With an air of aggrieved irony Kolk spoke of the “accident”—the “explosion”—except there are “no accidents” in the universe. He spoke of the “logic” of history. Or was it the “illogic” of history—what has happened once, cannot happen again in quite that way. Yet, it cannot happen again in any way that is very different. Kolk spoke of the “great vision” of the 1960s and of the “betrayal of the vision”—the “revolution”—by its most fervent believers. He spoke of having sacrificed a “personal life” for—what?—so many years after the wreckage, it wasn't clear what.

Sophie said, “But I had a personal life. And that, too, is gone.”

Kolk was leaning on his elbows, on the table. His forearms were dense with muscle, covered in wiry black hairs like an animal's pelt. Yet his beard was a bristly steel-color, and the short tough quills on his scalp had no color at all. The young Jeremiah was trapped inside the older man, only his eyes were untouched, baffled and wary.