The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [94]
Still Kit made no answer. His mention of the night ride to Boussif had evoked the wrong memories. She saw the dim lamps swinging, smelled the coal gas, and heard the rain on the windows. She remembered the confused horror of the freight car full of natives; her mind refused to continue further.
“Kit. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. You know how I am. Really, nothing’s wrong.” She pressed his hand.
His voice became faintly paternal. “He’s going to be all right, Kit. Only some of it’s up to you, you know. You’ve got to keep in good shape to take care of him. Can’t you see that? And how can you take care of him if you get sick?”
“I know, I know,” she said.
“Then I’d have two patients on my hands—”
She sat up. “What hypocrites we are, both of us!” she cried. “You know damned well I haven’t been near him for hours. How do we know he’s not already dead? He could die there all alone! We’d never know. Who could stop him?”
He caught her arm, held it firmly. “Now, wait a minute, will you? just for the record, I want to ask you: who could stop him even if we were both there beside him? Who?” He paused. “If you’re going to take the worst possible view of everything, you might as well follow it through with a little logic at least, girl. But he’s not going to die. You shouldn’t even think of it. It’s crazy.” He shook her arm Slowly, as one does to awaken a person from a deep sleep. “Just be sensible. You can’t get in to him until morning. So relax. Try and get a little rest. Come on.”
As he coaxed, she suddenly burst into tears once again, throwing both arms around him desperately. “Oh, Tunner! I love him so much!” she sobbed, clinging ever more tightly. “I love him! I love him!”
In the moonlight he smiled.
His cry went on through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.
Chapter 24
She opened the door. Port lay in a strange position, his legs wound tightly in the bedcovers. That corner of the room was like a still photograph suddenly flashed on the screen in the middle of the stream of moving images. She shut the door softly, locked it, turned again toward the corner, and walked slowly over to the mattress. She held her breath, bent over, and looked into the meaningless eyes. But already she knew, even to the convulsive lowering of her hand to the bare chest, even without the violent push she gave the inert torso immediately afterward. As her hands went to her own face, she cried: “No!” once—no more. She stood perfectly still for a long, long time, her head raised, facing the wall. Nothing moved inside her; she was conscious of nothing outside or in. If Zina had come to the door it is doubtful whether she would have heard the knock. But no one came. Below in the town a caravan setting out for Atar left the market place, swayed through the oasis, the camels grumbling, the bearded black men silent as they walked along thinking of the twenty days and nights that lay ahead, before the walls of Atar would rise above the rocks. A few hundred feet away in his bedroom Captain Broussard read an entire short story in a magazine that had arrived that morning in his mail, brought by last night’s truck. In the room, however, nothing happened.
Much later in the morning, probably out of sheer fatigue, she began to walk in a small orbit in the middle of the room, a few steps one way and a few the other. A loud knock on the door interrupted this. She stood still, staring toward the door. The knock was repeated. Tunner’s voice, carefully lowered, said: “Kit?” Again her hands rose to cover her face, and she