Chang-rae Lee - The surrendered

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I can leave if you like.”

“That’s not it.”

“You don’t want to?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice suddenly sinking. “I don’t know.”

She began to cry, which took them both by surprise. She was weak enough that it hardly seemed to be crying at all, more as though she was having trouble breathing, her meager tears barely wetting her cheeks. But he had never seen her cry, not at the orphanage, not once since, and the sight broke open a fear in his chest: here, about to perish, was surely the strongest person he had ever known. She wiped her face roughly with her palm. “Give me another shot now, okay? I want a little more time, without it hurting so much.”

“I gave you one just two hours ago.”

“I’d like another.”

He obliged, another heavy dose. Hector drifted into an armchair across the room, trying to avert his gaze. He could have loaded up another half-dozen syringes and instantly extinguished her but he couldn’t help but think that she might somehow come back for him if he did, in a malign form, hound him for eternity for cheating her of even a few hours.

“I’m sorry, Hector. But I think now I want to rest.”

“Okay. I’ll leave you alone.”

“But just for a little while. I don’t want to fall asleep for too long. I can’t let this day pass. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything tomorrow. Where will you be?”

“Downstairs, I guess.”

“Would you come for me in an hour? We’ll go up to the church then.”

“Okay.”

“Would you bring me back something?”

“What do you want?”

“Something to eat.”

“You’re hungry?”

“I don’t know if I can really eat anything. But I want to try.”

“I can bring something. What do you want?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want this to be the last feeling I have.”

He went to close the curtains but she told him to leave them drawn open, so the room would stay awash in the light. It was good light, being reflected light, as it was now late in the day, all of it fully drenching the room, the tops of the trees and the terra-cotta roofs and stuccoed buildings illuminated by the strong, low sun, the color of their lower halves in the warm penumbra glowing in a muted scale, the white church atop the rise of land as brilliant as a lodestar. “Just an hour, Hector. Don’t let me sleep any longer. You’ll remember to come back up? Won’t you?”

“You think I wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know,” she said, the shot having settled deep into her now. From her loosened posture he could see that it had already met and quelled the harshest pain. She was almost herself again.

“I know you must hate me,” she said. Her eyes were narrowed.

“You do, don’t you? You’re the only person in the world who knows anything about me now, and I don’t want you to hate me.”

“I said in the car I didn’t.”

“Even after everything I told you?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”

“Please just say it again.”

“I already did.”

“Please say it, Hector, please!”

“What do you want?” he shouted. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“I don’t want this!” she shouted back, slapping at her own shriveled, wasted thighs. Her face was a cracked, broken mask. “Not this! Maybe you wouldn’t care if this were happening to you! Maybe you never cared whether you lived or not. But I do!”

He was about to tell her she would rot in hell when he realized he was arguing with a woman who had in almost every way disappeared. She immediately said she was sorry, trying to follow him to the door in her feeble hobble, and she might have caught him had he not leaned forward in the last quarter of a second, half-bolting onto the landing and down the steep steps of the tower; he was a world-class sprinter, at such distances. As he rounded the corner he caught sight of her ruined silhouette, halted at the end of the landing with her hands outstretched like a flightless bird, her desperate apologies echoing down the stone well of the tower after him, and though he felt ashamed for the velocity of this easy escape he kept going, his rage making him want to punish her.

Downstairs, in the bar that doubled as the hotel lobby, he slumped at a corner table. The young manager came over and asked if he wanted something and Hector didn’t answer and the manager suggested a beer. After serving him the bottle, the manager stole glances at him as he stacked cups on the coffee machine, as did an older German-speaking couple sharing a plate of cheese and salami and a carafe of white wine. The couple had been just sitting down when he carried June into the hotel, and the fleshy, ruddy-cheeked woman now regarded Hector with kindly eyes and a sympathetic purse to her mouth that made him helplessly think of Dora. He drank from his beer but after a sip he put it down, despite the fact that his insides were crying out; for once in his life he didn’t want to douse the parchedness, that driest, coldest flame. He wanted his own sentence, for all his deeds and non-deeds, for every instance when he had failed. For when had he not? If he were truly eternal, as his father Jackie madly fantasized, the sum of his persistence had so far only added up to failure. Failure grand and total. Ask Dora what she thought. Ask Patricia Cahill. Ask the Chinese boy soldier if Hector had done right by him. Ask Winnie Vogler about the collateral calamity he had wrought. Ask the Reverend Ames Tanner if his end was the one he had envisioned for himself. Ask them all if Hector had been their right attendant fate.

His failing found expression now in even the small measures, too, like the fact that he couldn’t quite summon the hatred even June assumed he should have for her. In the car, in her delirium, or perhaps under its cover, she told him what she had done. Yes, she had caused the fatal fire. Yet in his own way he had stoked it, too, with his rank, blinding want, and he had always believed that it should have been he who never emerged.

On that last night, Sylvie had begged him to let her be. Why had he not heeded her? Why hadn’t he simply stayed in his room? Once the fire started, surely he would have rushed inside the dormitory first and gotten them all out. He’d been drinking all evening, sitting in his dim room with a bottle of harsh Japanese-brand scotch whiskey, feeding his accelerating thoughts, which alternated between wanting to flay Sylvie with harangues, with the lowliest of sentimental entreaties, with self-pitying rants and outright attacks, and trying to figure out how he might lovingly convince her to stay on. To love him back. But he was useless at romance. He had no profound or pretty words. He thought she had made up her mind on the day they had all collected leaves around the orphanage, when she had followed him into the chapel. Afterward they left the chapel and headed in different directions but she met up with him as he had asked, about one hundred meters along the most southerly trail, where there was an obscuring thicket of woods. They didn’t make love but had still fallen upon each other in a primed, overdesperate state and in a matter of minutes they had clawed and tasted one another with the privation of ghouls. They had hardly undressed, and yet later, when he was bathing, he could feel the tines of her fingernails striping his back, his neck, his thighs. He’d done the same to her but with his mouth, his ravenous teeth, biting her wherever she pointed to herself, as if they were playing some curious grade school game. She had gasped with each snap, tears filling her eyes, then pointed again. It was then that Hector was sure that he had won, mishoping, misreading her erotic fervor for a deeper devotion; for he was too young and ignorant to know that she was not acting or dissembling but rather offering herself to his pure and towering want, surrendering to his great keen need, which to her was as lovely as he.