Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

Out in the cold, the smell from the trash was thinner, almost fragile among the smells of wood smoke and snow as I walked past our stuffed and sealed garbage cans, through the hedge to the neighbors’ drive. Their house has been dark three weeks. They left their car, which I use as a temporary dump. I would use their house, if I could bring myself to try the door. Their car is starting to fill, and even in the cold stinks dangerously, but it will be enough.

WE FOUGHT THE next morning instead. I had thrown something away — a magazine, the last number of a subscription that expired in November — before she had finished with it. She complained, I snapped, she turned and left the room. The fight continued as a mutual silence that went on throughout the afternoon. When I could no longer bear the rising tension, I brought her a cup of tea. She was reading in the upstairs room — the light was bad again — and when I set the tea beside her, she did not look up.

As I turned to leave, she cleared her throat. — I was afraid you were going to go through the trash.

I turned, and she was smiling at me over the brim of the cup. — I wouldn’t have wanted it, you know. It would have stunk. Her smile broadened as she spoke, but before she could sip the tea, she was crying. I tried to comfort her, and felt ineffectual as I always do, at a loss for words. I patted her back, and wondered at the empty sound.

THE SAME DREAM has come to me these three nights. It starts in a scene I cannot forget, two faces I still see when I close my eyes. They were the first to fall into the gorge. We found them at first light, the car absurd among the boulders. The twin stars in the windshield told us what we would find inside. Perhaps it was the shock of finding them still so young, so peaceful behind the shattered glass, that reverberates now in my dreams; they looked asleep, their faces almost touching.

In my dream they wake, they speak to us, and as they tell us their story weep — whether for each other or for us I cannot say. As they speak, their words live, showing us their last moments: the guardrail flying away, the slow, looming tilt of the far wall, and then the rocks uprushing. On the seat beside me, Ellen hovers at the corner of my eye. There is something I must tell her, but before I can speak, there is a noise, and then silence, which continues for a long time.

Ell wakes me. — You were crying.

Sitting up in the cold room, by the pale light the curtains cannot cover entirely I turn and tell her the words the dream would not let me say. But as I speak, Ellen grows smaller, the room lengthens, the distance between us grows and still she lies only just beyond the farthest stretch of my arm. My voice makes no sound. Her lips move. Each object in the room is isolated, meaningless, and I think, This is the end, it has happened, and Ell diminishes still farther, contracting to one clear point in the deepening gloom.

When I finally awake, the world is still, and Ellen still beside me.

Her face relaxes every night, so that by morning the angles and the lines have vanished, her nose is round and freckled, and her lips are parted. Every morning the urge to clutch her, shake her awake, almost overpowers me. I want to ask her something — just what, I still can’t say. But this morning, as every morning, I let her sleep. The aching in my chest ebbs slowly, and the daylight grows around us.

AT THE NEIGHBORS’ back door I looked in the curtained window: dishes in the sink, a dinner for four spread on the table. One of the chairs lay on its back, legs up in an expression of helpless surprise. The door swung open as I pressed, and a burst of hot, fetid air swept past me. Dinner had spoiled, filling the kitchen with a high, wild sweetness. The room was so hot the air seemed gelid: sweat burst out on my face. From the basement I heard the furnace roar. To leave in the middle of dinner seemed unremarkable; but why turn up the heat? I stopped amid the ruins of the meal, stooped, and righted the chair. As I bent, I saw in the far doorway another leg stretched out on the floor, and beyond it a room where nothing was right.

I am afraid I understood. I could deduce — I could not stop myself from observing — the tools they had used, and how. Who must have gone first. Him last. But more than that I am afraid I knew exactly how they felt, as the moment came on them over dinner, and they rushed — in some terrible parody of joy — into each others’ arms.

I locked the door behind me, and wondered how long I could keep this to myself.

THERE IS A sound that comes at dawn. I have never heard it. I wake in a room full of echoes, holding my breath, and lie beside Ell sleeping, and watch the light change in the room. I cannot escape the sense that I have missed something important. But as the light grows, the room around me is utterly ordinary.

I rise from the bed, the cold floor at my feet telling me again I am awake, the world is real. Through a silence fragile as old age I inspect each room, and everything is as we left it. But in each room, the objects I find — the chair with the book face-down upon its arm, my binoculars on the windowsill — seem to be holding a pose, waiting for my back to turn. Only the kitchen clock confesses, filling the room with the catch and release of its cogs. In a distant, unconscious way I hear the sound of water flowing in the gorge, whispering dimly. The falls are almost frozen over.

I wring back the curtains, snap up the shades, flush the rooms with light and nothing moves. In the kitchen I heat the kettle to a scream, bang pots, and overcook the oats. Upstairs, Ell is moving slowly; she showers, the pipes shudder and groan, the wind picks up outside. In the feeders, finches hiss and flutter, fighting for a perch. A dog lopes hip-deep through the yard, barking bright blue clouds of breath at the treetops, where four crows cling to the waving limbs. They flap and caw, caw a senseless monody. Over all of us, gray clouds pour ceaselessly into the east.

The wind has blown for days. I wonder how much longer it can blow before the country west of us lies in a vacuum, and dogs and crows, finches and clouds freeze solid, and the trees’ metallic branches thrill faintly against the stars. I have dreamed this. I have been dreaming of the stars as they once were, as I will never see them again, unless there is after all another life after this one, in a cold and airless west.

I woke again this morning among the booming echoes. Through the window I saw the morning star, failing, dim in the sick gleam that made my hand a skeleton on the curtain. Between my ribs my heart was thunderous in its hollow, ticking off the seconds of the dawn.

A RESTLESSNESS TOOK me out of the house today, on a final, senseless errand. I took the car downtown to fill its tank, though I have nowhere left to go, no errands left unrun.

As I coasted down the long hill into town, I noticed that the odometer was less than ten miles from turning over. This fact — this string of nines rolling up under the quivering needle — loomed before me much larger than I wanted it to. The windshield hazed, and the large, familiar hands that held the wheel seemed not my own. They are older than I noticed them last — the skin is drier, nicked with scars I don’t remember, and a gold band glints at one finger.

As I came down the block I saw a banner over the pumps.

FREE GAS

it read, in hand-drawn black. The sign sighed and billowed in the breeze, but nothing else moved: the pumps were deserted, the street beyond stretching silent and empty down to the frozen lake.

By the time I stopped the car, I was almost laughing, glad to have my mood broken by this sorry joke. I have given over too often to self-pity: it is only a car. Through the glass, still decked with offers of anti-freeze, I saw the owner dimly, seated at his desk, and thought I saw him smiling.