Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

Let it begin now.

"No!" I do not know if I shouted aloud. I threw myself forward, shoved against the crowd like a man wading chest-deep in a river, and with my left hand grasped the bar of an unmarked side door leading into the off-limits section of the terminal. Somehow I managed to hold onto the suitcase while human forms battered against me, fingers and arms accidentally striking my face in the melee.

I pushed through the door and ran, my suitcase banging against my right leg, surprised airport workers stepping aside as I passed. The Song roared louder than ever before, bringing enough pain to make me squeeze my eyes shut.

Let it begin here. Lei it begin now.

I stopped in mid-stride, struck the wall, and stumbled backward with the force of the compulsion. My arms and legs twitched and thrashed as if I was in the midst of an epileptic seizure. I took two steps back toward the terminal.

"Fuck you!" I screamed — I think I screamed — and managed to stumble sideways against a wall that was a door, and then I was on my hands and knees in a long, dark room.

The door closed and there was silence. True silence. I was alone. The room was long and dimly lit, empty except for a few unclaimed stacks of luggage, some boxes, and trunks. I sat down on the cement floor and looked around with a rising shock of recognition. I looked to my right and saw the battered counter where the airline casket had waited.

The Song had stopped.

For several minutes I sat on the floor and panted. The emptiness in me was almost a pleasant thing now — an absence of something black and poisonous.

I closed my eyes. I remembered holding Victoria the night she was born, the other times, the milk and baby smell of her, and the thirty-step walk from the delivery room to the nursery.

Without opening my eyes I gripped the handle of my suitcase and — rising now — flung it as far as I could across the long room. It bounced off a dusty shelf and crashed out of sight into a heap of boxes.

I left the room, walked twenty steps down an empty corridor, emerged into the terminal ten paces from the only occupied ticket counter, and bought a ticket for the next flight out.

There were no delays. The Lufthansa flight to Munich held only ten other passengers when it lifted off the runway twenty minutes later. I did not even think about looking out to catch a last glimpse of Calcutta. I was asleep before the landing gear retracted.

I landed in New York the next afternoon and caught a Delta 727 to Logan International in Boston. There the last of my nervous energy left me and I could not keep my voice from cracking as I called Amrita and asked her for a ride.

By the time she got there in the red Pinto, I was shaking all over and not completely aware of my surroundings. She wanted to take me to a hospital, but I slumped deep into the black vinyl seat and said, "Drive. Please drive."

We headed north on I-95 with the evening sun throwing long shadows across the median. The fields were wet from a recent rainstorm. My teeth were chattering almost uncontrollably, but I insisted on talking. Amrita drove in silence, occasionally glancing at me with those deep, sad eyes. She did not interrupt me even when I began to babble.

"I realized that it was exactly what they wanted me to do. What She wanted me to do," I said as we approached the state line. "I don't know why. Maybe She wanted me to take his place the way he took Das's. Or maybe Krishna saved me because he knew they would bring me back someday for some other insanity. I don't know. I don't care . Do you see what's really important?"

Amrita looked at me and said nothing. Evening light turned her tan skin gold.

"I've been blaming myself every day, knowing that I'll go on blaming myself until I die. I thought it was my fault. It was my fault. Now I know you've been blaming yourself."

"If I hadn't let her in —" began Amrita.

"Yes!" I said. It was almost a shout. "I know. But we have to stop that. If we don't go beyond that, we'll not only destroy each other and ourselves, we'll destroy what the three of us meant . We'll be part of the darkness."

Amrita pulled into a rest stop near the Salisbury Plains exit. She took her hands off the wheel. We sat in silence for several minutes.

"I miss Victoria," I said. It was the first time I had said our child's name to her since Calcutta. "I miss our baby. I miss Victoria."

Her head came over against my chest. I could barely understand her through the muffling of my shirt and the beginning of her own tears. Then it was clear.

"So do I, Bobby," she said. "I miss Victoria too."

We held each other as the trucks moved by in a rush of wind and noise and the last of the rush-hour traffic filled the lanes with sunbaked colors and the sound of tires on pavement.

We live in Colorado now. In the spring of 1982 I was invited out to do a modest workshop at a mountain college here and I went back East only long enough to get Amrita. Our subsequent visit has turned into a reasonably permanent residence. We've leased the house in Exeter, furnishings and all, but the eight paintings are hanging here against the rough wood of the cabin and the little Jamie Wyeth oil sketch we purchased in 1973 comes closest to catching the rich play of light we see out the window. That quality of light obsessed us our first few months here, and both Amrita and I have — sheepishly at first — tried oil painting.

The college facilities here are primitive by Boston standards, our salaries are low; but the house we're living in was once a ranger's cabin, and from our large window we can see snowy peaks over a hundred miles to the north. The light is so sharp and clear that it borders on being painful.

We wear jeans most of the time, and Amrita has learned how to handle the four-wheel-drive Bronco in mud and snow. We miss the ocean. Even more, we miss some of our friends and the benefits of coastal civilization. Our nearest town now is eight miles down the mountain from the campus and its boasts only 7,000 people at the height of the summer influx. The fanciest restaurant is called la Cocina , and our other dining choices are the Pizza Hut, Nora's Breakfast Nook, Gary's Grill, and the 24-hour truck stop on the Interstate. In the summer Amrita and I give a lot of our business to the Tastee Freez. The town library is operating out of an AirStream trailer until the new Civic Center is built. Denver is almost three hours away, and both mountain passes are closed for days at a time in winter.

But the air seems espcially clean here, and we feel somehow lighter in the morning, as if the altitude includes a dispensation from some of the gravity that inflicts its imperative on the rest of the world. And the quality of daylight here is more than a pleasant phenomenon, it is a form of clarity to us. A clarity which heals.

Abe Bronstein died last autumn. He had just finished work on the Winter Issue, the one that included a short piece by Ann Beattie, when he suffered a massive coronary while walking to the subway.

Amrita and I flew back for his funeral. Afterwards, over coffee with other mourners in the small townhouse he had shared with his mother, the old woman beckoned for Amrita and me to join her in Abe's room.