The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [134]
He paused again. Though his eyes were wet, he didn’t cry. Lifting the story out of himself seemed to require all the energy he had. “I tore into town hollering and screaming, got it across pretty quickly that I’d seen a girl jump off the cliff. My hair was cut short for the factory, so I didn’t look too much like a maniac. A few guys started climbing down the cliff where it wasn’t so steep. They knew what they were doing—I got the feeling it wasn’t the first time someone had ended up on those rocks. I followed them down—the whole time thinking, Maybe she’s alive, please God, let her be alive—but when the first guys reached her, I could tell by the way they leaned over, I just knew. Still, I thrashed my way over there, half swimming, and then I really knew.”
“How?” Phoebe whispered.
“Her neck.” He could hardly speak. “Her neck was wrong. I put my hand on her chest …” He began to weep. The sound was wrenching, unpracticed. “I can’t remember,” he said. “I can’t talk about this.”
All hell had broken loose in the town, meanwhile. People streamed down the cliffs, some weeping, most just excited, as if it were a holiday. Wolf stood half freezing in water up to his chest, and only then did it hit him that what had happened up there was his fault, that he could have stopped it. He imagined Gail and Barry and Phoebe, having to face them, explain what had happened—no, his mind veered away, it was impossible, he could take almost anything but he couldn’t face them, couldn’t bear having anyone know. Finally, in a last mad effort, he’d sprinted back up to this spot, made sure Faith’s stuff was all where they would find it, backpack, passport, all that, right by the wall. Then he’d fled back down the way they’d come, back to Manarola, stood on the train station platform heaving from exhaustion, thinking, What the fuck am I doing? Nothing seemed real, Faith dead, him running—to what? His head was about to explode; he thought he might actually lose his mind right there, just fly away, but then he heard a train coming through the mountain and in that moment Faith seemed to come to him, so clear, nothing to do with that body bent on the rocks. She was smiling, saying, Wolf, go on, are you nuts? Get on the train! Don’t you see? she said. We’re free, both of us. Get on the train, baby, what’s the matter with you, go on! Urging him, her voice rising with the noise of the approaching train until they merged, the pounding train and Faith’s voice, and when it pulled into the platform, Wolf got on feeling weirdly uplifted, elated almost, as if he and Faith were escaping the disaster together, one more hair-raising exit.
The feeling didn’t last. By the time he got back to Munich, he was a zombie—Faith dead, his own fault, everything shrunk to dust beside the enormity of these facts. He’d been certain someone from the town who remembered would come after him with handcuffs. But no one did. Hell, maybe they’d never given him another thought.
Each time Wolf spoke to Faith’s mother he would think, I’ll tell her now, I can’t go one more second without telling her, but he was always too afraid. He’d promised Faith he would never tell anyone about the bomb or the dead man—her last wish, it now seemed, and he couldn’t bring himself to violate it. But without telling that, how could he explain the rest? So he’d find himself saying, “I’m sorry, Gail, I’m sorry, I’m so goddamn sorry,” going on like that until finally she would break in. “Stop Wolf,” she’d say gently. “Stop. What could you have done?”
Perversely, he’d found this comforting.
Wolf fell silent. “I don’t see how you lived,” Phoebe said. “After that.”
He gave a mirthless laugh. “Tentatively,” he said. “I lived—I live—very tentatively.”
For years, he said, his life had felt to him like a kind of experiment. The question being, How long could he hold out before the whole thing came crashing down on his head? He’d pictured himself looking back on the present day or week from his jail cell, or while