The City of Mirrors
Page 211

He began to walk. The hems of his trousers were damp; he seemed to have mislaid his shoes, or else he had arrived in this place without them. He had no destination in mind, merely a sense that walking was something the situation called for. The unanticipated nature of his circumstances, its feeling of elastic reality, aroused in him no anxiety. Quite the contrary: everything felt inevitable, reassuringly so. When he tried to recall anything that might have happened prior to his being in this place, he could think of nothing. He knew who he was, yet his personal history seemed devoid of narrative coherence. There was a time, he knew, when he had been a child. And yet that period of his life, like all others, registered only as a collection of emotional and sensory impressions with a metaphoric aspect. His mother and his father, for example, resided in his memory not as individuated beings but as a feeling of warmth and safety, like being cradled in a bath. The town where he’d grown up, whose name he did not recall, was not a discrete civic unit of buildings and streets but a view through a window screen of rain pattering upon summer leaves. It was all very peculiar, not unsettling but simply unexpected, especially the fact that his adult life seemed almost completely unknown to him. He knew that in his life he had been happy, also sad; for a long time he had been very, very lonely. Yet when he tried to reconstruct the circumstances, all he remembered was a clock.
For a great while, in this unforeseen and generally pleasant state of un-remembering, he made his way down the broad boulevard of sand at the water’s edge. The moon, having cleared the horizon, had ceased its upward arc. The tide was high, boastfully so, the sky immense. At length he became aware of a figure in the distance. For a time the figure grew no closer; then, with a telescoping quality, the gap began to narrow.
Liz was sitting on the sand with her arms wrapped around her shins, gazing over the water. She was wearing a white dress of some diaphanous material, light as a nightgown; her feet, like his, were bare. He vaguely recalled that something had happened to her, very unfortunate, though he couldn’t say what that thing might have been; she had gone away, that was all, and now she had returned. He was happy, very happy to see her, and although she indicated no awareness of his presence, he felt very much as if she were expecting him.
“Liz, hello.”
She looked up; her eyes twinkled with starlight. “Well, there you are,” she said, smiling. “I was wondering when you’d get here. Do you have something for me?”
In fact, he did. He was holding her glasses. How curious this fact was.
“May I have them, please?”
She accepted the glasses, turned her face once again toward the water, and put them on. “There,” she remarked, with a nod of satisfaction, “that’s much better. I can’t see a damn thing without them. All of this beauty was practically wasted on me, if you want to know the truth. But now I can see everything just fine.”
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Why don’t you sit?”
He lowered himself onto the sand beside her.
“That is an excellent question,” Liz said. “The beach, would be the answer. This is the beach.”
“How long have you been here?”
She touched a finger to her lips. “Now, isn’t that funny. Even just a few minutes ago, I think I would have said for quite some time. But now that you’re here, it doesn’t seem like very much at all.”
“Are we alone?”
“Alone? Yes, I should think so.” She paused; a look of mischief came into her face. “You don’t recognize any of this, do you? That’s all right; it takes a little while to adjust. Believe me, when I first got here, I didn’t have a clue what was going on.”
He looked around. It was true; he had been in this place.
“I always wondered,” Liz continued. “What would have happened if you had kissed me that night? How would our lives have been different? Of course, you might well have, if I hadn’t gotten so drunk. What a self-pitying fool I made of myself. The whole thing was totally my fault from the get-go.”
At once he remembered. The beach below her parents’ house on Cape Cod: that’s where they were. The place where, long ago, he had let life pass by, failing to say what his heart knew.
“How are we…here?”
“Oh, I think ‘how’ is not the question.”
“What’s the question, then?”
“The question, Tim, is ‘why.’ ”
She was looking at him absorbedly. It was a gaze meant to comfort, as if he were ill. She had taken his hand in hers without his quite being aware of it. It felt warm as a cup of tea.
“It’s all right,” she said softly. “You can let it out now.”
Suddenly his mind seemed to plunge. He remembered everything. The past reared up inside him, complete. He saw faces; he inhabited days; he lived the hour of his birth and each that followed. He felt as if he were choking; his lungs could find no air.
“That’s all you have to do, is let it out.”
She had put her arms around him. He was trembling, weeping, such tears as he had never wept in his life. All his sorrows, all his pain, the terrible things he’d done.
“Everything is forgiven, my darling, my love. All is forgiven, nothing is lost. Everything you have loved will come back to you. That is why you have come.”
He moaned and shook. He cast his cries upward to the heavens. The waves moved in and out in their ancient rhythm; the stars poured down their primordial light upon him.