FUTURES

The future always wins

I

Maggie and Henry had given up a great deal for their dream house, but it had all been worth it, they both agreed. The mortgage was a quarter of a million pounds, that was true, but Henry’s base salary would cover the repayments and they could live off his bonuses. Henry had been a futures broker on the floor for four years now, and things were finally coming together. A few wise investments and some patience later, they were finally ready to let go of the loft. They would have the house in the country they had always dreamed about. In Hicksville, their friends said. But it was all about location and it was all about money. Think of the commute, their friends said. I couldn’t do it, they said. It was forty minutes by train from Liverpool Street, but Maggie and Henry did not intend to let that interrupt their satisfaction. So what? You couldn’t put a price on peace.

What about the money, their friends said, the money they’d never see again. After the crash in October, half of Henry’s office had been walking around bewildered. Mortgages were worth more than the houses they were secured on, and you could not sell in Hicksville, and what about the schools, and weren’t they thinking of children?

Maggie and Henry felt they knew what they were doing. They had bought their loft before the boom, when their friends were still renting and years away from buying anything at all. It was on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse at Butler’s Wharf, one enormous room with a bank of iron-framed windows over the river and an elevator that still ran on a rope. Henry’s mother called it charming, in a tone that persuaded neither of them. They had spent two years making it theirs. Henry stripped the pine floors himself on weekends, on his knees in a pair of ancient Levi’s and a jumper with the elbows going. Maggie found the bed frame at an auction and had it sent up on a van. They built the kitchen out of salvaged shelving. Henry’s father, who did not approve of any of it, came by once and conceded that the joints were better than he’d expected.

They had wanted the loft because Charles and Piper had the floor below, and the Fairbairns were two streets over, and on Sunday afternoons half their friends ended up on the roof with a cool box of Chablis and a Roberts radio. Henry came home at seven most nights with his tie already off, ready for a takeaway and a football match on the little Sony. Since the Chicago traders had come over on secondment he had also started saying honey and gonna and apartment, which Maggie found hilarious for a week, after which it simply stuck. Maggie had a desk wedged between the windows and the radiator, and in winter she wore socks to bed.

Now the loft was worth three times what they had paid. They were smart and they were lucky, it was that simple. And their luck was going to hold. They had chosen well with each other, and the loft, and the country house would be no different. They would make money just by staying put.

Maggie had to give up her job at the firm, but she was only a secretary, and her salary was less than the price of a season ticket. For three years she had worn the Jaeger skirt suits and the little silk blouses, and typed on an IBM for a senior partner, but her job had never been meant to last forever. Besides, the upkeep and renovation of the house would be a full-time job in itself.

Henry’s friend Aubrey Thorne, from their rugby days at Cambridge, was handling the conveyancing as a favor. He was a senior partner now, with an office on Chancery Lane, and a Savile Row suit in a grey so dark it was nearly blue. When Maggie and Henry arrived on the Friday afternoon he had already opened a bottle of Bollinger, and it foamed up over his hand and down the front of his waistcoat. He rang for another and for a box of cigars for the men.

“Let’s celebrate,” he said.

A young solicitor sat in the corner with the deed box open on his knee. “There are a few clauses in the deed we ought to go over,” he said.

Aubrey waved him off with his cigar. “Happens all the time with these old houses. The deeds are quirky, it’s all technicalities. The house is yours, free and clear. Those aren’t real conditions.” He took the paper out of the solicitor’s hand and held it to the light. “Never seen one quite like this, though. ‘Must Give as Asked.’ What on earth?”

“What could that mean?” Maggie said.

“Probably the ladies’ flower rota. You worry too much.” Aubrey laughed, drank heavily from the whisky on his desk, then let his free hand slide up her back. “Must give as asked. Ha. Hahaha.”

“Very funny, Aubrey.”

“Well, for this contract you can’t afford to ask.” He tossed her the keys, a heavy iron ring with three long keys. “Do you want to run out there tonight?”

“Yes, but we’re driving. You’re sauced.”

“Suit yourselves.”

Ten bedrooms, five bathrooms, four reception rooms, a kitchen the size of a tennis court with a cream four-oven Aga, a dining hall, a stone wine cellar, a back woodland, and a lake. A lake. The house had been built as a rectory in 1790 and added to twice, once by a bishop and once, badly, by a Victorian brewer who had put a conservatory on the shaded north side.

The drive wound a quarter of a mile through pine trees and came out onto blue-grey pebbles that crunched richly under the tires of Maggie’s Volvo. Henry parked beside the front door, got out his raincoat, and said, “Welcome home.” Then he lifted her over the threshold, and the heavy wooden door swung back against the wall with a boom that went up the staircase. They slept that night on a mattress on the floor of the empty master bedroom and drank the Bollinger out of plastic cups from the Volvo’s glove box. Henry was asleep by eleven. Maggie lay awake and listened to the house settle around them.

There was so much room. Even with all their possessions, even with the housewarming gifts, the rooms were half empty. They spent the first weeks at auctions in Bury St Edmunds and once as far as Lots Road in Chelsea. The only other people in the sale rooms were dealers and designers who looked at the Rudges, Maggie thought, with a kind of grim respect. Should they have bought the Bechstein grand? The sixteenth-century refectory table from a French monastery, twelve feet long? Why not? They would keep these things forever. They wanted the best and they got the best. The Shaker chairs, the Welsh blankets, the Pendleton throws, the Frette bed linen, the cashmere from Brora, the Hermes trunks stacked on the landing like pieces of an interrupted voyage. In the kitchen went the Le Creuset in volcanic orange, the Sabatier knives, the Kenwood Chef, a brand-new Gaggia machine that Henry couldn’t work but was proud of. They put the Habitat sofas in the little morning room, so as not to wreck the good ones.

Yes, they were happy with their decision.

Maggie bought a pair of Cavalier King Charles spaniels, a boy and a girl, Ruby and Rufus. Henry got a nine-month-old black Labrador puppy and took up clay pigeon shooting at a ground in Hertfordshire on Sunday mornings. Maggie took the dogs on long walks around the lake. They held a proper housewarming.

Aubrey came up for the weekend before the party and, using champagne bottles, stood along the terrace wall for target practice, shot out one of the panes of the French doors to the library. There was an incident with him and one of the waitresses, nothing a little cash in hand couldn’t fix. Worse, the refectory table had to be French polished after one of the men from Henry’s firm carved his initials into the center of it with a Swiss Army knife. Someone keyed the paintwork of Henry’s boss’s Rolls-Royce. By midnight the lawn was full of deep ruts from the wheels of the all-terrain vehicles that the boss’s teenage sons had driven in circles on the grass. But all in all it was a very successful party.

The Vicar came up the drive on a Tuesday in a Morris Traveller, and Maggie saw him from the kitchen window a long time before he reached the door, a neat man in a green anorak. She put the kettle on the Aga while he sat with his knees together, his long body folded, his long hands in his lap.

“It’s been so long since the house was open,” he said. “The village used to have its summer fete here. Every year, since before the war. It was always held on this lawn.”

“We’d love to,” Maggie said. It seemed the right thing to do.

Henry was in the doorway in his shooting socks, holding a box of cartridges. “Of course,” he said. “Absolutely. Whatever you need.”

By the second Saturday in July it was not really the vicar’s fete any more. Henry had taken it over, and it had become a garden party. There was a white marquee on the lawn, a string quartet on the terrace, and Pimm’s in glass jugs with cucumber and mint. The guests came up from London in the afternoon, the men in linen jackets and the women in cotton dresses and straw hats, and they left their cars in the paddock. Giles and Pippa brought a case of Veuve Clicquot. Pippa kissed Maggie on both cheeks and said the house was heaven. It was a lovely day, and she was wearing a white Armani blouse and her grandmother’s pearls, and Henry kept finding her across the lawn and raising his glass.

The spaniels had refused to come out of the boot room.

“Funny old thing,” said Pippa. “Dogs don’t like a crowd.”

“They’re usually not shy,” Maggie said.

“Oh, I’m sure.”

A man she didn’t know asked if he could take the rowing boat onto the lake. Then two children asked for her sunglasses, her tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, and she handed them over, and the smaller one put them on and looked at her through the dark lenses for a long moment before running off. It was a smashing success. If it hadn’t gone well, they would have had to go into town for the shopping, a full forty minutes away, but since the party the butcher had been holding back prime cuts for Henry. They fit in nicely, no question.

It wasn’t too long after the fete that the spaniels went missing. Foxes, Henry said. Made no sense but what did Maggie know about the country? Not too much, truth be told. Maybe it was foxes. They can be clever. Henry said he would replace the dogs, look for them, but he was home less and less. Their friends said the eighties were drawing to a close, that it was all over, and that with the end of the decade would come the end of the great ride they had all enjoyed. It was the middle of the property crash. Debt was higher than the value of most homes. But Aubrey assured them that their home would always hold its value. Money was tight, but they held on to the house, and once again their luck held out. They overspent. Could they really afford the holidays in St Lucia? Christmas in New York? Those paintings? The full replacement of the lead piping and many of the house’s windows? Maybe not. Henry refused to let her see the bank statements and was in his study most of the time when he was home. He had told her in no uncertain terms a baby would have to wait. It was not the right timing.

Maggie childishly thought she might find valuables in the house: crates of vintage wine, old masters. But it was mostly junk. She went down the stone staircase into the cellar. She moved some old beaten copper lamps and copies of Architectural Digest and as she did she saw a missing stone in the wall and what looked like a pit or a well. Beside it was the girl spaniel, alive with maggots, her neck snapped.

Henry waved off her concerns. “This is the country, these things happen. Nothing we can’t handle. She probably got into some rat poison, honey. I’m so sorry.” He was calm. He wore a big drowsy smile. He told her to stay out of the cellar. He was at the head of the long table, swirling a glass of Australian Chardonnay. He looked sleek and smug and in shape. He looked evil, she thought. For just a moment he looked evil, and so did she. She caught her reflection in the wine cabinet. They both had thick heads of chestnut hair and hazel eyes that seemed impossibly large and shone strangely in the low light of the dining room.

Henry’s Lab whimpered and cried to come into the master bedroom that night. Alone and awake in the four poster bed, Maggie crossed the freezing hardwood to let him in. Henry was away, working in the city more and more often. He was talking about renting an apartment there and driving back every other weekend. The day he took his last bag she asked if she could come along, but Henry had said she was needed at home and would only be a distraction. Besides, what was he working so hard for if she could not at least enjoy the house? The Lab went missing a few weeks later. Ran away, Henry claimed.

She was needed at the house. She had the garden landscaped, repaneled the oak walls of the library, and bought Persian carpets and new sofas. They slept in separate rooms when he was home now. When she told him she was pregnant he was furious. They had screaming fights that lasted days, and she was sure there had to be someone else. She followed him in the city for two weeks and went through his credit card statements and phone bills. She had him looked at by a private investigator, but there was no proof of anyone else. What she found out was that Henry had lost his job. He blamed her, she knew that. He had said as much.

She lost the baby a few weeks later, at six and a half months. It began in the night with a pain low in her back that she took for the mattress. By morning the sheets were soaked and Henry stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves with the phone in his hand. It was forty minutes to the nearest hospital, he said, and by the time an ambulance found the drive it would all be over one way or the other. She believed him. Later she would remember how steady his voice was.

It was over by noon. She lay in the bath with the door open and listened to him moving through the house, drawers opening, the pipes knocking. He was good about everything, helpful.

He stripped the bed, threw everything in the washing machine. Made dinner. He rolled up the bloodied rug and took it down into the cellar. He was down there awhile. She heard something heavy scrape across stone, and then nothing for a long time. He brought her a glass of warm spiced wine and told her everything was going to be okay, that he would be home more, be more supportive. That he would find a new and better job. Things were better after that day, they were better for a long time. The house was quieter. Henry did find a better job, much better, in fact his new position paid about three times as well as his last had, he was working at one of the oldest firms in the City, but he still said he didn’t want to try again, that a second pregnancy was out of the question, that the timing was simply not right. He always said that.

Every fall they had a big party, it had become tradition. After Henry began at the new firm the parties were attended by Saudi businessmen, Broadway stars, authors, minor television actors.

At the first of them, Maggie stood at the top of the cellar stairs holding a tray of glasses and found she could not make herself go down. Somebody’s wife asked where the good port was kept, and Henry said, “Not down there, honey, the damp,” and steered her off by the elbow. All night the guests drifted toward that door. Near midnight Maggie found one of the Saudi businessmen standing in front of it with his palm flat against the wood and his head tilted, like a man listening for a train.

Maggie spent her time skiing in Austria, shopping in Italy. She now knew without a doubt that Henry was seeing other women, but she no longer cared. After so long, her mother had told her, a marriage is less about love and more about loyalty, and especially forward-facing unity.

Maggie’s mother passed suddenly that fall while Maggie was at a country house they had recently bought in Tuscany. She hadn’t seen her mother in almost five years. Her parents were liberals and had never quite taken to Henry. The last time they had all been together was shortly after their wedding.

She was supposed to meet Henry at the house in England in a few days’ time. She decided to wait to tell him when he arrived rather than calling him. When she pulled up she was exhausted. She’d had two flights and a very long cab ride. Henry’s Mercedes was out front on the lawn, the boot was open. Inside the house one of Henry’s Armani suits was draped over two kitchen chairs. His wristwatch on the mantelpiece. She walked the rooms, looking for her husband. The house was freezing cold, all the windows were thrown open. In the kitchen the marble floor was black with what looked like old blood.

She found Henry in the cellar, naked save for a pair of cotton shorts. In a chair from the kitchen sat a naked, bound woman, passed out and bleeding from her mouth and nose. The floor was covered with pictures from magazines, some of their Polaroids and vacation photos, glossy porno centerfolds, credit card statements, pictures of burning oil wells, autographed photos of Bush and Reagan. Henry was smiling. “I’m so glad you’re here, Maggie. Do you have any idea how difficult this has all been for me?”

He was so calm. He stepped over a fax machine. “I wanted to tell you so many times. I truly am sorry about your mom and about the baby, honey.”

“What are you talking about, Henry? For God’s sake, who is that woman?”

“She’s no one. She is no one, okay. These people, I think sometimes I think they want to die. They’re certainly asking for it. She was, she’s fine. She’s high, how do you think I got her here? No matter what you think, I was never unfaithful to you. In fact, I did all of this for you.”

“What?”

“I can explain, okay. I think you know, on some level you know, Maggie. The clause, in the deed. I have made so many sacrifices to give you this life, the life you deserve. It started with the spaniels. That was an accident, I didn’t know then. I tried to stop.”

“When we went to the coast?” She remembered. They had stayed away a long time, felt so close, just playing cards and chess and swimming together, cooking elaborate meals and talking.

“Yeah, it was then. I thought I could stop giving the house whatever it wanted, but it doesn’t work that way. That was right before I lost my job, remember?”

She did remember. “I never wanted this.”

“Sure you did,” Henry said. “And besides, once I started I had no choice. I had to continue. The Gulf War started, then there was the election. We just couldn’t afford to take any chances.”

She looked at the woman. Henry met her gaze. “She’s dead. But trust me, no one is gonna miss her.” He placed the woman into the empty place under the staircase, near where she had found the spaniel all those years ago.

She told him to leave and not come back. Leave, or she would go to the press, and he had his career to think of. She buried her mother, got a protective order, divorced Henry and split the assets, but she insisted on keeping the house.

He phoned a few weeks later, crying hysterically. She had read in the papers about the bank buyouts.

“Please, Maggie. Let me make one more payment. I can do it fast. These people do not value their lives. You have to believe me, I am only speeding up the inevitable. Can’t you see that?”

She let him talk. But she never let him come back to the house. Henry had bought millions of dollars in futures on the Tokyo exchange and lost it all. He was bankrupt. They were going to lose everything except the house. The company he worked for was belly up, paying claims to workers in the asbestos industry. It was over. Henry had driven out to the town he had gone to university in and shot himself looking out over the rugby pitch. It didn’t work as payment. It didn’t work as planned. It had to be inside the house. She was going to lose everything and she just could not, don’t you see? For so long they had sunk everything into that house, and she could not let it go.

II

England, the seat of arts, be only known By the grey ruin and the moldering stone;

That Time may tear the garland from her brow

James stood at the window shirtless in black jeans, seemingly indifferent to anyone who might see him. Jess pulled on her clothes and hurriedly lit a Marlboro. Her neck ached. Her head felt thick. Her tongue felt thick. She was eager to be gone, back in her own flat, up to her neck in a hot bath. James’ place had only a narrow stall of a shower. And it was cold. Something about the set of his jaw disgusted her briefly then was gone as quick as it came. His back looked ugly to her and bare, its spotted shoulders. He had a good, long line, though. She wasn’t being fair. She just hated him when he was like this. Which was more and more often.

“Someone’s going to see you like that.”

“I doubt it,” he said, his voice dull and indolent.

He was probably right. The row of houses opposite had their windows blacked out and boarded up. They were largely abandoned. He was probably thinking of Jon. She had thought that once the police found his body it would stop James’ brooding, but if anything it was worse.

“You’re ashing on the carpet,” she said. It was too early to be awake on a Saturday. Way too early.

James lived in one of those weird parts of town: ugly warehouses, derelict land, a shabby, pathetic feel to his barren street. You never saw anyone out. Just closed doors. Broken windows. She often felt uneasy traveling home on the train. It wasn’t until she reached the outskirts of her relatively normal neighborhood that the feeling would begin to fade.

She should go. Whatever she said to him, he would greet it with the same sullen silence. Moments like this made her wish, and not for the first time, that she were away from him.

“Do you want tea or anything?” he asked.

“I should go soon. Have you heard anything at all from Jon’s family?”

“No, I haven’t,” he said blankly.

“What about any of his friends?”

“Not a one.” He pulled a sweater over his head. Jon had been James’ flatmate, but they had never seemed close, not close enough to explain James’ reaction. She had scarcely seen them speak to one another or go out together. Jon had been dead a few weeks, and she hadn’t known him at all. James asked her to follow him, and the two of them walked up the landing and hesitated outside Jon’s room, then went in.

“Are they saying if they think foul play was involved?” she half whispered.

“No one knows. All I did was identify his body. The police didn’t even say where he was found.”

She had only been in Jon’s room once before but the contrast with the rest of the flat was stark. Jon’s walls were covered with his own drawings and other surreal prints, architectural drawings and blueprints, maps of the city, newspaper clippings. The shelves were lined with books. Even though it was the room of a dead man, a murdered one at that, it was more inviting and alive than the rest of the flat by a mile. Still, it seemed wrong to be in his room, and James’ attitude wasn’t helping anything. He was on his knees, riffling through a box of books and videotapes.

“Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of helping yourself to his things.”

He gave her a black look.

“Don’t be stupid. I want to show you something. Take a seat.” He took her hand and led her to a chair in front of the projector. He took a roll of film out of a chest under the bed and started the projector. This felt wrong. She had let it go on too long.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Just watch. Please, I need you to see this.”

“James, there’s nothing we can do. Let’s get out of here. Let me make you breakfast.”

“There’s a great deal we can do. That’s where you’re wrong.” His stare was fixed. It reminded her of an open, empty highway, far off and grey. The projector threw white light over the wall and clicked slowly as it turned. The screen was blank for a long while, then hazy and pink, out of focus.

Then the camera moved back so that the entire picture could be seen. It was a woman tied at the wrists and ankles, on a bed.

“Come on, James, I’m not watching it.”

“It doesn’t stay like this, just watch,” he said, not looking at her.

“You’ve seen this before?”

“Just watch.”

The woman was shaking in fear or ecstasy. She moved her hands along her body.

“This is weird. I want to leave.”

“Jon made this, or wrote it.”

“Like that makes it any better, I don’t think he meant this to be seen.”

“It isn’t like that.”

“Then what is it like?”

“It’s not a fucking porno. Just watch.”

“What is it, then? And don’t say art.”

“Shut the fuck up and watch,” he snapped. He seemed on edge. He bit at his nails and stared intently, as if what was happening onscreen were of extreme importance. He seemed on the verge of tears.

She lit another cigarette. “Fine. Fifteen minutes and not a minute longer.”

But he didn’t answer. The woman’s face was covered with a sheer black cloth, but through it she could see that her eyes were blocked out with deep indigo paint. Her nipples were deep indigo too, as if stained or dyed, as were her palms and the soles of her feet.

“I don’t get it,” she said. He turned the volume up.

The picture shifted. The camera moved out the window of the room where the woman lay and into the city: overturned cars, streets flooded with black water, headless statues. It seemed familiar to her. Sirens wailed, planes circled overhead. A woman moaned, panting and gasping. Body bags lined up below a grey sky. A large and curving steel blade.

“I need to go,” she said, rising from her chair. She glanced back at him. His vacant eyes were unsettling. “I’ll call you.” He didn’t answer. Then he turned to her with tears in his eyes. “Just answer this for me. Have you seen it before?”

“I can confidently say I have never seen anything like that, James.”

“But will you? Does it feel like something you will see?”

“I have work in the morning. Turn this off and get yourself together.” She slammed the door and ran to the station. Once outside she felt foolish to have let the film upset her. Standard art school stuff against Capitalism or the Patriarchy. Nothing to get bent out of shape over. Meaningless. But she was still thinking of it the next day as she made her way to work. When she had watched it she didn’t have the words for it, but it did feel like something she had not yet lived but soon would. There was no other way to explain it. That cold blue light, the feeling of another world behind this one. The station walls were a mess of cack-handed drawings and symbols. A hideous Christ-like figure was nailed upside down. It was crude, but even to an atheist it cut a disturbing, blasphemous figure. The platform smelled of alcohol and urine. She slumped on the concrete steps.

She drifted through the day listlessly, riding the bus further than necessary. A man was hosing down the steps of a church while a queue for the food bank wound around the corner, every person in it silent. A billboard for a holiday company had been pasted over with a black sheet, one corner flapping. At a stop by the canal two women got on carrying a mattress between them. Nobody offered to help and nobody complained, and the driver pulled away before they had sat down.

Her office was absorbed into a Ministry contractor over the weekend, none of their roles had been carried over, that’s what they told her. She was a hospice nurse. How could none of their roles be carried over?

Further on she saw soldiers waving cars through a checkpoint at a flooded underpass, a row of shuttered shops with a black x on every door. Again she thought of James’ black eyes in the light of the projector and of the distant look on his face, of Jon’s room, the maps of the city, the strange art. She had wanted to get closer to James the entire three years they had been together. It felt like a long time, but three years was nothing. Not long enough to be serious but too long for it to be just sex. Why did he never ask her any questions? Why was he so incurious about her? Why did it feel sometimes that they were total strangers? Why, when she most needed to talk to someone, was it never him she spoke to? Why did it feel increasingly that the world was sliding into a black pit? And that he was the last person she would ever know, which was fine, but she didn’t know him, either. And if she knew they would never have children, what was the point of being a couple? It sounds cruel when it is laid bare like that, but it was true. What could they ever truly expect to have together? What sort of life?

She remembered a dream she had the last night she was with him. She had dreamed they were swimming together in a long pool of turquoise water. She had wanted to stay in that dream forever. Would virtual reality be like a dream? No, it wouldn’t be a dream. And she’d just as soon die if those were the only dreams available. There are worse things than death. Most people would be happy with a virtual reality. Most people already had a similar arrangement now. What’s a bit more? There are worse things than death.

She got off the bus in a small park near the city center. A warm rain fell. She let it hit her face, run down her chest and forehead.

James had called her that morning, sounding lethargic. She felt on the edge of a terrible dream. His words had run to vague dead ends. He had asked her to meet him at the park after work. She couldn’t make sense of him over the phone, so here she was. He had whispered about the maps, clues in the tapes, Jon’s room.

He had sent her a video. In it he stood on Jon’s bed and filmed the room. The maps and pictures were spread over the floor and every other surface, and James stared down from the bed as if trying to discern a larger pattern. He showed up at six, unshaven and bleary-eyed, and pleaded with her to visit an estate near the park.

“There’s nothing to find. Just some council houses. We’ll get mugged or killed walking around over there.”

“Please, help me. You always say you want us to be closer. Okay, this is me trying. I need help. I need you.”

“Okay, I can try.” She gave a resigned shrug. What choice did she have but to try? They set off toward the estate. At the foot of the bridge over the canal, James stopped.

“Jon was close to something.”

“What do you mean?” she took his hand. He was so worryingly thin.

“If I knew that, do you think I’d be here now?” he roared. His hair was damp and curling around his ears; it had grown long. He hung his head.

Without lifting his head, he started to cry with his eyes closed.

“I need to tell you something.”

“Okay, you can talk to me,” she said. He leaned against the wall of the bridge.

“Don’t stop me,” he said. “I have to get it out at once.”

She nodded.

“Jon and I were walking together one night, just walking, no purpose to it. We felt compelled. It went beyond restless. It was different. We rode the trains until they stopped. We walked for hours through the night.” He seemed to be catching his breath, breathless from merely thinking of that night. He was panting and gasping softly. She wanted to run as fast and as far as she could, but why not stay? James was not perfect, but he was all she had, and more importantly she was all he had. He was the closest thing to family she had. She had failed him in big and small ways, but she could be with him now.

“We weren’t even talking that night. It felt like something was urging us on, something before us and behind us.” The wind picked his hair up and dropped it. He shut his eyes again as he spoke, as if blocking the memory.

“At some point we realized there was some drunk guy following us, or it seemed like he was. I don’t really know now, like I said we were both in a strange mood. He wanted change for the phone, or cigarettes, he was just acting like any drunk does, but we started screaming at him, hitting him in the face, in the stomach. I held him and Jon kicked the shit out of him. He finally got away, and he ran. Once he had, I was shaking all over. I puked in the street. The weird mood faded. We would have beaten him unconscious, I think. You don’t understand, I didn’t want to stop. You’ve heard stories of people acting strange now. Stories about the youth gangs on the streets, in the camps, those weird symbols they draw on everything. Those altars they made near the hospital, under the bridge. Some people have been saying that they are sacrificing animals and even kids.”

“Those are just stories.” She shook her head. But you heard those stories every day now, knew people who had been attacked, homes that had been burned. Every day she passed those strange effigies, she’d even seen people attacking the elderly in the open. It was so easy to forget what was rumor and what wasn’t. Everything happened so fast now. With the first gang killings, everyone was shocked, but over time it became something you gradually got used to. Like the worsening storms, sweltering temperatures, crumbling infrastructure. Like the chemical dumping. Like the police on the street with machine guns. Like the cameras everywhere. The media was full of it, politicians spoke about it, but over time it became something you accepted.

“This city was one of the greatest works of art ever created. It was, at one time. It’s all gone. It was all for nothing. This world was a paradise. It’s all sliding away into the pit. It is much too late.” They walked out onto the middle of the empty bridge.

He stared at her with wide hollow eyes. Her brain felt swollen and the dura around it felt tender, all the way down her spine and into the base of her neck where it met her skull. Her cheeks burned with fever.

He continued, his face anguished.

“If we could only grasp the system. Where’s it pointing us? It can’t have all been for nothing. It’s beyond language and beyond art and science. We are dying like animals in a pit. Indifferent.”

He was right. The city was in complete decay. Tenements and flooding, everyone largely alone, unfocused, anxious. She wanted to hold him but she was tired of always being the one to reach out to him. The world was a sleeping beast, tonight and every night. The old outnumbered the young, work had ended but nothing replaced it. Love was almost impossible. Hope was painful. She turned and ran. She left James on the bridge, alone. His head in his hands. She felt a rising panic.

She passed a group of boys as she ran, twelve or thirteen.

“You’re dead,” one of them screamed as she passed. “You’re already dead, you worthless bitch.” Then she heard them laughing, the sound of glass breaking.

Her vision was dark around the edges, she was having trouble taking a full breath. The muscles of her stomach were sore from crying. Needles were strewn over the street. A thin body was hanging out of a sleeping bag and was so sick looking she was not sure they were even alive. She thought of swift ships as they moved over the oceans of the world, of skies darkened with aircraft of all kinds. Of new stars. Of trumpets calling. Low in the east was a long streak of white fire. Her heart beat rapidly, its arteries exhausted. Alarmed and overwhelmed, with disjointed memories crowding her, she collapsed.

When she came to, she had fled back to James’ flat. Her legs and stomach were wracked with deep, painful cramps. She lit a cigarette and it fell from her mouth and under the bed. She bent to retrieve it. Jon stared at her from under the bed, he was in a dirty combat jacket and patched jeans. Dark holes staring from where his eyes should be. He looked as if he had been dead for months.

When she looked again there was nothing there but a lockbox with a broken lock. Rusted nails poked up from the rough flooring. The box was full of James’ old photos of family and of himself with friends. There were inexpensive gifts, inarticulate, inexpressive letters, she looked at them and quickly put them back.

James had not come back, and it was likely he wouldn’t. She had abandoned him on the bridge. She considered going back for him or waiting for him. It could always be worse. She walked to the station.

An ordinary-looking couple stood handing out flyers. “Have you seen our son?” it said under a picture of a small child. She put it into her pocket. She could not throw it away.

What would be waiting for her at home? Maybe the door would be kicked in. Maybe it would be padlocked shut. Maybe it would be the same as it ever was. For all she knew, it was. The memory is beautiful, but it just isn’t enough. Today is all any of us has, but it isn’t enough.

-- C. Hightower would be nothing without her steady hands.