Dean Koontz - Innocence

Because his daughter was musically talented, Bailey had stocked this forest home with other instruments: two clarinets, a saxophone, two violins, a cello, and more. We agreed that, by next Christmas, at least I and perhaps Moriah would have learned to play an instrument with which we could accompany Gwyneth’s piano.

ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 6, WHEN I CAME INTO the kitchen to help make breakfast, the back door was open, and Gwyneth stood at the porch railing, staring across the clearing to the woods, where the trees were skirted with lingering shadows and crowned with early sunlight.

Outside, the day was mild for that time of year, and Gwyneth was in the grip of sadness, which from time to time troubled both of us, though none of the children.

When I stepped beside her and put an arm around her, she said, “Do you feel it?”

“What?”

She didn’t reply, and after a minute or two, I knew the cause of her melancholy. Neither silence nor sound, neither scent nor the absence of it, neither the quality of the sunlight nor the color of the sky offered any evidence that an age had fully ended and a new era had begun. Yet I had no doubt that they were gone to the last, all their vast wealth without an owner, all their amusement parks and taverns and dance halls without celebrants, every city and hamlet without a single voice, every ship upon the sea a ghost ship, and the sky traveled now only by birds.

“So soon,” she said.

It didn’t bear thinking about, but it was our gift, as it was the gift of those who had come before us, to be able to think, to reason and reflect, and with the gift came the compulsion to use it.

If there were other thinkers out there in the quiet vastness of the Earth, they were like Gwyneth and me, small groups in far-flung locations, alert to the wonder and mystery that were woven throughout the fabric of the day.

The following morning, the animals came out of the woods into the clearing and some even ascended the steps onto our veranda. There were several deer and a family of brown bears, raccoons and squirrels and wolves and rabbits. And dogs sat observant or frolicked among the other species. Former predators basked in the early sun beside former prey, watched the lingering veils of mist wither up into the morning light, wrestled playfully or chased one another without fear or menace, and so it has been ever since.

During my first eight years, when I had spent much time in the woods, no animals had feared me or stalked me. If my mother had abandoned me deep in the forest, as she once meant to do, she would have been surprised to discover that even wolves would have been my good companions. At the time, that community of the winged and the four-footed had seemed natural to me, which it had been at the start of time, which it now is again.

THE FOREST DEEP AND PRIMAL HARBORS NOTHING that kills, and in it now grow trees of which there are no photographs or descriptions in the books in our extensive library. The new trees and new vines produce scores of fruits never known before or at least not in the age recently passed. Some of the fruits are sweet, some savory, and it is with these that we are nourished and on these that the dogs and all other creatures, from bears to mice, now feed. If ever we grow a little tired of the flavors and textures of what the trees and vines produce, we at once think of new ways to prepare and serve them or else new fruits appear, different but no less delicious.

Sometimes, when I glance out of a window and see a laughing child riding bareback on a brown bear, an old fear twists through me, but it does not last.

ON A DAY LATE THAT JANUARY, I READ AGAIN “EAST Coker” by the poet T. S. Eliot, and saw something that I had forgotten: the stark but beautiful metaphor by which he described God as a wounded surgeon whose bleeding hands apply a scalpel to his patients so that “Beneath the bleeding hands we feel / The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.” I wondered then if it was that forgotten metaphor that worked on my subconscious to see the Clears in hospital garb or if instead Eliot was a greater visionary even than his admirers claimed.

IN OUR NEW HOME, THE WINDOWSILLS AND THE thresholds of doors do not bear any of the words that Gwyneth printed on the entry points of her other residences, as there is no need for them anymore. The alphabet she had used was early Roman derived from the Greek through Etruscan. Expressed in Latin, it would have read Exi, impie, exi, scelerate, exi cum omnia fallacia tua , which translates into English as “Depart, impious one, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits.” If she was protected from Fogs and whatever else might take up tenancy in marionettes and music boxes and people, Ryan Telford was not stopped by words composed with Magic Markers, perhaps because nothing curled within him except his own evil.

IN ALL THE MANY BOOKS THAT I HAVE READ, THERE exists much truth and wisdom, but in not a single volume has the truth of lovemaking been revealed. When I lie in the arms of Gwyneth, in ecstasy, it is essentially not about sensation but about passion, and passion is not of the flesh but of the mind and heart. No writer ever told me that there is no self in the act, that the desire to give drives out all thought of receiving, that lovers become one, transported, that I am her and she is me, that we find ourselves not engaged in seduction and surrender but in the throes of creation, not consumed by desire but by astonishment, given for a moment the very power that brought into existence the universe, so that we, too, can create life. She carries now a child.

ON THE STEINWAY ARE PHOTOGRAPHS IN HANDMADE frames. Among them is the one I retrieved from my windowless rooms on the night when Gwyneth told me that I would never be returning there. It is a snapshot of my mother on a day when she didn’t drink too much and smiled more readily than usual. She is lovely, and you can see in her eyes and in her graceful pose the promise that was never fulfilled. I found it in a zippered compartment of the backpack that she gave to me when she turned me out.

There is, too, a photo of Gwyneth’s father, who is the very picture of kindness, whose eyes are deep with intelligence. Now and then I find myself staring at him for long periods, and sometimes when I sit alone on the porch or am hiking in the woods, I talk to him and tell him what we have been doing and reading and thinking lately, and I thank him not just then but every day, for I would have no life if he had not lived his.

Father and I never took photographs of each other. We had no camera and we felt no need to preserve memories when we were always together and were certain to keep them fresh by recalling them in conversation. But the envelope given to me by Father Hanlon in the basement of his rectory contained a photograph of Father. The priest had taken it as Father sat in an armchair, lamplit and shadowed like those artful portraits of famous individuals taken by the great photographer Steichen. He greatly resembled an actor who was once very famous, Denzel Washington: milk-chocolate skin, a crisp tight cap of hair, a broad and pleasant face, a smile that angels might envy, and dark eyes that seem to be the still points around which the universe turns eternally.

I have also framed the index card on both sides of which Father had written for me what he said was the one thing I must never forget after he was no longer there to remind me. He willed me these words: But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in a world beyond this world of time and dust and forgetting .