Touch and Go

ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT by Nan Dibble A three part series Part 2 Touch and Go 1: SHARDS Noon's blaze through the skylights of Diana's new loft had faded to a dull overcast. Still they continued as they had been: Diana sitting in a scoop chair, Vincent on the floor with an arm thrown across her knees and his head bent against it. Neither of them moving, except for abrupt waves of shuddering that passed through him; except for her hands steadily rubbing at his shoulders and the back of his neck. His hair didn't end at the nape, she'd found. A thick strip continued down his spine. Not precisely hair, then: a mane. And that strip wouldn't lie flat. Erect, bristled with tension. He wasn't resting. He was holding himself in place: about midway between somebody desperately hanging onto a moving train and somebody determined to lean against a hot stovetop. Brave, sure, but with an edge of craziness, too. An edge of danger and of pain. She wished she could see his face. But she didn't lean to look. It was more important that she keep herself steady, her motions slow and consistent, offer nothing and expect nothing beyond presence, contact—in themselves, almost more than he could endure right now. Not only from her—from anybody. Another fit of shuddering began—like something urgent and uncontrolled moving close under the skin. “I want to kill them,” Vincent remarked—his voice, after so long a silence, merely meditative, announcing an unremarkable fact. “The bowers,” she responded, not because she was in any doubt but because she hoped talking might help. Like what she'd read about snakebite: open the wound, draw the poison out. So keep him talking, she thought. As long as he could talk and listen to her, nothing permanent would happen. To anybody. “I want this very much,” he continued. Not an admission, merely a fact he was reporting, allowing her to know too. “Not for myself—I will learn how to bear that —” “We will,” Diana corrected. “Yes.” He stirred, finally: joining his hands, so that her knees were clasped in the circle of his arms. He continued, “It wasn't for this, that Ursula was brought away from a man who used children for shameful pictures; nor for this that Richard learned to dance in his blindness; nor for this that Geoffrey escaped the orphanage into the tunnels and ran such a fever with the chickenpox and learned to spell perimeter and gracefully comforted Catherine in her grief, when her father died.... Not to be chosen carelessly, quite at random, to provoke me into pursuit and capture and...and what came after.... They were no one's pawns, warriors in no battle. Merely children, Diana. Children, murdered casually. Sacrificed....” Although Diana knew the facts of what he'd been drawn into, forced into by the bowers' raid, she was only beginning to grope toward what it meant—at all, and most particularly to him. Still, she knew enough to feel something of the special resonance that word, sacrificed, had gained for him. Enough to make her shiver. “I killed...perhaps 25 of them,” Vincent added in that distant, unemphatic voice. “Twenty-seven, if one includes the ambush laid for Jamie, which found me instead.... That should surely be enough. Even for me. And yet....” “Yeah,” Diana said, steadily kneading the knotted neck and shoulder muscles, deliberately not reacting to the flick of acid contempt turned against himself: time enough to deal with that when the rage cooled, when he was ready and able to listen to anything but its voice. “It's all still with you. I know.” Again, he said, “Yes,” the single word all the recognition and affirmation he had within him at the moment: accepting her right to hurt with his pain, to be part of this, ugly as it was. A different kind of trust than she'd ever imagined. More a challenge than a comfort, more like stone than silk; none of the sharp edges softened. A trust encompassing both the light and the dark, that he knew more directly and intimately than she could yet fully imagine. The dark that she mistrusted: a large adversary, but one toward which she felt no fear, only a steady wariness. But a dark that she would not disavow utterly, because it was part of him, and she loved him: not only what was gentle and forethoughtful and fitted to the light, but what in him others turned from, preserving the polite fiction that it didn't exist, though they all knew it did. After he'd killed, with maybe two quick slashes, one of a trio of druggies who'd jumped her at the Central Park threshold, he'd stood staring at her over the body. Then he'd remarked, with bitter resignation, “So: now, you've seen”: as though that were all there was to see, nothing left to know about him. Or as though he was certain that, having seen what she'd seen, it would be all she'd want to know. Instead, that resignation had freed him—as if recognizing, since she already knew the worst, there was nothing left to lose, no assumed standard he should try to live up to. No reason to be, with her, anything but what he was—all that he was. Altogether open. And therefore altogether vulnerable. How could you not love somebody like that? A large trust, that he'd given her. As large, maybe, as the darkness itself. If she had the strength to bear it, be worthy of it. She was damn well going to try. Presently he continued, “I cannot see the shape of it, this game he has summoned me into and I have no choice but to play, unless I would stand back and allow his evil to move freely against those I love... because I love them.” Vincent's arms tightened around her knees. At last lifting his head, he looked at her with eyes like dull steel. “I cannot see over the pain to the purpose. All I can see....” He didn't complete that thought and again bent his head onto his arm. The shuddering came back: stronger under her hands. Having seen it herself, afterward, she knew what vision still haunted him: a cave where 13 bower teenagers had been pulled apart in a fugue of rage and response to their focused and unanimous desires. A kind of mass suicide, with Vincent as the chosen weapon, with as little choice himself as a cocked pistol. They'd made a thing of him, and then sacrificed themselves to that thing, all according to some horrible, demented scenario formulated by the dead man who'd been their leader. Paracelsus. Who'd claimed Vincent as his son. Who, like his followers, the bowers, worshipped the dark.... “Give it a little time, babe,” she advised. “It'll be better when you get some distance from it.” “No.” Suddenly leaning away, he was on his feet and walking looping figures across her loft, fists clenched at his sides. “This cannot be ignored. Because it is not over. If I do nothing, make no answer, he will continue striking at those I care for. Unless I can see the shape of it, what he intends—” “But he's dead,” Diana pointed out, feeling dumb at pointing out the obvious. She turned her head, following him the only way she could: her legs were dead from the knees down, her shins like two numb spikes his weight, at last removed, had driven into the floor. If she'd tried to get up, she'd have fallen flat on her face. “That signifies nothing,” Vincent responded impatiently, over his shoulder. “Except that he has put himself beyond my further reach. What I could do to him, I have already done. With his consent. By his desire, his plan.... His intention lives. Carried out by the bowers, his agents. And I must know why, what it is, what it aims for, to know what I must do to answer the next gambit. No: to foresee it, prevent it.” He wheeled, began another pattern, a loop that took him away down the length of the loft. He said, “It may be that he means me to be wholly consumed by this rage and reply in kind: take what vengeance I will against the bowers. Make of myself an executioner of strangers. Pursuing a sole and arbitrary justice. Because I have the power to do it. Because I want to. Very much. And therefore I must not. I must unlearn the wanting. I do not wish to become a slaughterer of available strangers, be they willing or unwilling under my hands as I strike them down. The power to do a thing is not the right to do it. This is what he wishes me to forget. I must not.” His compulsive pacing brought him toward her again. Moving along the back of the couch as if guided by radar, not eyes, he was slowed by some thought and stopped, lifting his head to look at her with an expression she'd never seen before—a speculative bitterness, blunt and uncompromising. He said, “And yet, whatever I chose to do, who could prevent me? Who could even call me to account? Who would not find some way of excusing me, though the whole world be obliged to turn askew to make the action upright? Even you.

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