Innocence Read online

  When she untied the drawstrings under my chin, she touched my face, and a new light entered my heart. Her voice soft and loving, she began to recite a poem by Poe, one of the last he had written. “ ‘Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow—’ ”

  I continued: “ ‘Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado.’ ”

  When the drawstrings were untied, I put a hand to the hood, to keep it in place, suddenly fearful of letting her see me in full light. I found it difficult to believe that I was what Father Hanlon said that I was, easier by far to believe that I was a hideous thing that a stabbed man, dying by the roadside, hated and feared more than he hated and feared dying.

  She skipped from the first stanza of “Eldorado” to the fourth and last. “ ‘ “Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied,—“If you seek for Eldorado!” ’ ”

  I lowered my hand from the hood, and she pushed it back from my head. “In every way,” she said, “you are so beautiful, and you will be beautiful forever.”

  Overcome by wonder, I kissed the corner of her mouth, where the bead had been, and the nose from which the serpent ring had hung, and her eyes that no longer needed to be concealed from a hostile world, and her brow, behind which she lived and hoped and dreamed and knew God, and loved me.

  76

  AS ALWAYS SEEMED TO BE THE CASE, BY THE TIME I began to imagine the shape of the immediate future, Gwyneth already knew what came next, what came after what came next, and what came after that, as well. Regarding foresight and wise planning, she was her father’s daughter. Before picking me up in the Land Rover, by the pond in Riverside Commons, more than eight hours earlier, she had by phone set the appointment in the Egyptian Theater, had arranged for her guardian to expect us, with the child, in the darkest hour of the night, and had suggested that he might be required, perhaps with unseemly haste, to perform a duty of his office before daybreak.

  I was honored that she should want my proposal, joyous when it was accepted, and somewhat dizzied when Gwyneth took from around her neck a delicate gold chain on which hung a ring fashioned from a nail. Either the nail must have been very old and worn or the point had been rounded with a file. The shank was bent into a smooth and perfect circle, and the head, which resembled in shape the setting for a diamond, was engraved with a tiny lazy eight, the symbol for infinity. The artist, Simon, made it for her because he believed she had freed him from the self-crucifixion of his addiction. In an accompanying note, he wrote that one day she would meet a man who would so love her that, if his sacrifice would spare her from death, he would straighten the nail and drive it through his own heart.

  “Simon was as melodramatic as he was talented,” she said, “but he was also right.”

  Father Hanlon had only begun to explain the necessary simplicity with which we must proceed when from the house above us came the hard crash and then the brittle ringing fall of shattered glass, as if not one window but three or four had exploded simultaneously.

  Not even Gwyneth, with all her foresight, had anticipated such a frontal assault in the penultimate moment.

  Regarding the basement ceiling with apprehension, Father Hanlon said, “The stairhead door locks from the kitchen, but not from this side.”

  I snatched up a chrome-and-red-vinyl chair, which might once have been part of a dinette set, and hurried to the stairs. On the landing at the top, I was relieved to discover that the door opened toward me rather than into the kitchen. I tipped the chair onto its back legs and jammed the header under the knob, bracing the door shut.

  By the time I returned to the basement, heavy footsteps sounded in the rooms above. They blundered first in one direction and then in another, as though the intruder must be drunk or confused.

  “Who is it?” Moriah asked. “What does he want?”

  I didn’t know, couldn’t guess, but judging by Gwyneth’s grim expression, she had at least a firm suspicion.

  Among the old furniture stored in the basement was a prie-dieu that had previously been in the sacristy of St. Sebastian’s but had been moved when it was replaced with a new one. The padded kneeling bench was wide enough for two. Father Hanlon stood on the other side of it, his face averted but his voice steady and full.

  In the house overhead, something crashed over with thunderous impact, perhaps a breakfront or a tall chest of drawers, and dust sifted down upon us from the basement ceiling.

  I didn’t want to delay our vows for even a minute. But if these were the last hours of the world as we had known it, nothing was less important than it had been, and in fact everything was more important than it had ever been before. And so I said to the priest, “Are you sure this is right? I’m not of your church.”

  “By your nature,” he said, evading my eyes, “you are of all churches and in need of none. Never have I conducted a marriage service with fewer doubts than I have now.”

  If a house could be eviscerated, the sound that now came from the ground floor must be guts of wire torn through cartilage that was lath and through flesh that was plaster. I imagined that someone leaped to a chandelier, his full weight depended from it, swinging like a crazed ape, the dangling crystals clinking against one another and plummeting to the floor like glass grenades amidst the cracking-knuckle sounds of chain links torquing and the hard stutter of mounting screws stripping out of the junction box in the ceiling. Again the building shook as something heavy fell from a height. The lights dimmed, fluttered, and chased flurries of moth-wing shadows across the basement, but we were not cast into darkness.

  “Addison, wilt thou take Gwyneth, here present, for thy lawful wife, according to the rite of our Holy Mother the Church?”

  “I will.”

  As the marriage service continued, the tumult overhead seemed surely to be the work of an entire wrecking crew of psychopaths, of many eager hands wielding sledgehammers and prybars, smashing glass, splitting wood, ripping up flooring, tossing furniture in a frenzy of destructive glee. A series of explosions sounded not like bomb blasts but like the whumps of aircraft breaking the sound barrier, as if numerous visitors were being imported from a distant kingdom, coming into the house at tremendous speed, great hands of air clapping to announce each arrival. But though they raised a racket, they didn’t call out to one another or curse, or rage, as if they were creatures who never spoke except to deceive and who, in this late hour of the world, no longer had any reason to lie, no purpose for their tongues.

  Yet our voices were clear through the roar, and before long Gwyneth said, “… to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

  At last, whatever beast or horde of beasts might be laying waste to the rectory, a destroyer arrived at the braced door at the top of the basement stairs and shook it more violently than the exterior door had been shaken earlier. The chrome header of the chair shrieked against the twisting doorknob. With the bone-in-socket sound of an animated skeleton, the pivot pins rattled in the knuckles of the hinge barrels, the latch bolt squealed in the plate fixed to the door frame.

  Speaking sacred names that sealed our vows, the priest joined Gwyneth and me in matrimony, that we should face together whatever might lie ahead of us, the two of us now one, always one throughout our days on Earth and ever after.

  We sprang to our feet. Pulling on her coat, small and quick and perhaps afraid, Moriah headed toward the exterior door, and Father Hanlon shepherded us after her, through bands of light and shadow, with dust descending from the cracked ceiling as if in reminder of our origins. There we paused, and Gwyneth put her arms around him and said that she loved him. If the contact tortured the priest, it exalted him as well, and if his face was wrenched with anguish and sorrow, it was also informed by hope. I said that he should come with us, and he said that he couldn’t, that he needed to remain behind to comfort the dying.

  He gave me a seal
ed envelope and said that it held a treasure, and I tucked it into an inner jacket pocket with the envelope that contained the only things I had taken from my three windowless rooms.

  The basement door opened onto nothing worse than icy wind and hurled snow. Climbing the stairs and sprinting across the yard, we didn’t dare look back to see by what bleak light the previously dark windows of the rectory might now be brightened and what grotesque forms and ghastly shadows might loom behind them.

  When the three of us were safely in the Land Rover, Gwyneth reversed into the alley, and for a moment I could see past the side of the garage, into the lamplit passage between that building and the property wall, along which we had made our way moments earlier. Snow falling in thick torrents, shuddered by capricious wind into strange writhing forms, playing tricks with light and shadow, might conjure legions of demons in the imagination, but I believe that what I saw in pursuit of us was as real as the snow through which it forged.

  If it was a man, it was a dead man with moon-pale eyes, clothed in rags and here and there strigose with splintered bones like sticks and straw bristling from rips in a scarecrow’s costume. If it was a dead man, it was the artist Paladine, for it carried in the cradle of its right arm what, seen through the veils of churning snow, might have been a marionette. If it was a marionette, and not an illusion, there were no strings for its wooden hands to pull, yet the man-sized puppet conveyed it through the storm.

  Gwyneth shifted into drive. The tires spun out wet ravelings of clotted snow, but then found traction, and we were away into a city enchanted and haunted, its towers shining high into the night, but under it a black abyss.

  77

  GWYNETH TURNED THE CORNER ONTO A BROAD avenue where skyscrapers sought a sky beyond their reach and blurred into the upper depths of a sea of snow. Before us lay a display of pageantry beyond all of our experience, a tableau vivant with a shining cast of thousands, tens of thousands, wondrous and exhilarating but also a scene of drama so dire that I was chilled.

  She had always been able to see them, of course; and she could see them now, which is why she let our speed fall. On the older towers crafted by masons, the Clears stood side by side on every ledge, aglow in their hospital greens and blues and whites, like candles in endless tiers of votive cups, and in the buildings of steel and glass, they stood at every window, in the snow on every setback. Where the roofs of the lower buildings were visible through the white veils, the Clears stood there, too, and atop the marquees of theaters, on hotel porticoes, and upon the stone pediments that surmounted grand entryways. They gazed down into the street, solemn multitudes, standing witness now and until there was nothing left to which they might attest. I knew without needing confirmation that they were arrayed like this on other avenues and cross streets, on the roofs and in the trees of residential neighborhoods, in other towns and cities and nations, wherever there were people who would fall sick and into death.

  From the rear seat, Moriah said, “I’m scared.”

  Nothing I could say to her would gentle away her fright. During whatever hours might remain for this world, fear was unavoidable, fear and remorse and grief and fierce, desperate love. In the thrall of such emotions, Gwyneth let the Rover drift to a stop in the middle of the street, and I opened the door and got out and stood in awe and terror, turning, looking up at the thousands who stared down.

  Disobedience brought time into the world, so that lives could thereafter be measured to an end. Then Cain murdered Abel, and there was yet another new thing in the world, the power to control others by threat and menace, the power to cut short their stories and rule by fear, whereupon death that was a grace and a welcoming into a life without tears became no longer sacred in itself, but became the blunt weapon of crude men. And though the blood of Abel had once cried out from the Earth, we had come now to a time when so much blood had been spilled over the millennia that the throat of the Earth was clotted and choked, and fresh blood could not raise a voice from it.

  Gazing up at the shining multitudes, turning, turning, I spoke to them from my heart, because I knew they could hear that even more clearly than they could hear my voice. I reminded them of the many millions of children, of the fathers who loved and the mothers who cherished, of the simple-minded who in their simplicity were without blame, of the humble and the would-be chaste and the would-be honest and those who loved truth even if they didn’t always speak it, who struggled daily toward an ideal that they might never reach, but for which they yearned. There was hatred among people, but there was also love, bitter envy but also gladness for the fortune of others, greed but also charity, rage but also compassion. No matter how ardently or eloquently I might plead the case of humanity, however, I knew that this radiant audience would not, could not, prevent what was coming, that after we had brought ourselves to this pass, they could not be guardians but only witnesses. The world was run by our free will, and if they were to step down from their ledges and rooftops to undo what had been done, they would take from humanity our free will, after which we would be nothing more than robots, golems with hearts of mud and regimented minds. If some people chose to seek the power to strip the Earth of human life and if others of good intention did not take all necessary steps to defend against such madness, the consequences were as certain as that thunder will follow lightning. These shining multitudes did not stare down with cruel indifference, but with love and pity and grief that perhaps exceeded all of the grief that would wash through the dying nations in the days to come.

  My face was stiff with frozen tears when, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the street. One Clear had come down among us for the purpose of leading three children to me. They were all under the age of five. I knew them by their bruises and their scars, by the emaciation of forced starvation that hollowed the faces of the twin boys, by the bleeding abrasion that encircled the girl’s neck, which was evidence of the coarse ligature with which she had nearly been strangled. They were like me and Gwyneth and Moriah, outcasts once hated and reviled, now heirs to all the world.

  The Clear was the same woman who had visited the ninth apartment while Gwyneth played the piano piece that she had composed in memory of her father. I remembered what she had told me the first night that we met, when she had prepared for us scrambled eggs and brioche with raisin butter. I had asked if she lived alone, and she’d said, There is one who comes and goes infrequently, but I won’t speak of that. This Clear was the one who came and went.

  The great host of Clears gathered above me were too far away for me to look into their eyes. In spite of Father’s warning, I met the eyes of this woman, and he was right when he’d told me that I would find them terrible. They were terrible in the sense that they were august and imposing and exalted, blue and yet as clear as glass, containing depths that no eyes I’d ever seen before could contain, as if I were looking through them to the end of time. By her stare, this woman settled a solemn awe upon my heart, and I was frightened by the degree to which I felt humbled and by the intensity with which I felt loved, and I had to look away.

  The three children were small, and there was room for them in the backseat with Moriah.

  We drove a block in silence, and we knew that however far we might go, we would find the multitudes shining and observant and sorrowing, sentinels to the end.

  Suddenly more traffic appeared on the streets, far less than you would expect on a night of good weather, more than I had ever seen in a snowstorm. The drivers were heedless of risk, as if all of them were being pursued.

  In Ford Square, the Jumbotron loomed like a giant window that offered a somber view of our future as it was already playing out in Asia, where the dead were lying in the streets and desperate mobs struggled to board ships already overcrowded. The news crawl listed American cities where deaths from the swift-moving plague were being reported, and the geographic spread was so wide that already it should have been clear even to the most confirmed optimists that there would be no refuge.

>   When three snow plows crossed an intersection in front of us, one after the other in a train, moving fast with emergency beacons flashing, Gwyneth said, “They aren’t serving the city now. They’re fleeing it.”

  We fell in behind them, and they cleared the way for us, though that was not their intention.

  Soon we reached the outskirts of the last borough, where we first saw looters. Bent-backed and frenzied, like figures from a nightmare of lupine predators, they poured out of shattered store windows, pushed grocery-store carts, pulled laden slat-sided wagons as if they were dray animals, loaded SUVs and cars with the latest electronic gear and all manner of luxury goods, some of them as wild-eyed as spooked horses and others as giddy as little children on a birthday-party treasure hunt.

  The Clears stood witness to this, as well.

  By the time that we were passing through the suburbs, the city plows no longer leading us, many of the sacked businesses were on fire, and the looters were stealing from one another now, defending their swag with guns and tire irons and pickaxes. A man in burning clothes ran across the street in front of us, still clutching a box bearing the Apple logo as the flames leaped from his coat to his hair and broiled him, screaming, to the pavement.

  78

  BY DAWN, THE SNOW STOPPED, AND WE WERE DRIVING through territory that had been less heavily blanketed, the roads clear except for some vehicles driven by desperate or panicked people, most of whom didn’t seem certain of where they were going, recklessly bound nowhere in particular.

  We were at first puzzled that the roads were not choked with traffic, that thousands weren’t fleeing to remote places, even though they knew escape was impossible. Then we heard on the radio that the president had ordered Homeland Security to close off major arteries out of cities that offered international air traffic and shipping, because the first wave of plague reports were coming from those metropolitan areas. The hope was to contain the disease. We had gotten out just in time.