Thirteen months after that—two hours ago—I walked into the museum in Hong Kong and saw her painted image, naked in death. I’m not sure what happened immediately after. The earth did not stop turning. The cesium atoms in the atomic clock at Boulder did not stop vibrating. But time in the subjective sense—the time that is me—simply ceased. I became a hole in the world.
The next thing I remember is sitting in a first-class seat on a Cathay Pacific 747 bound for New York, a Pacific Rim sunset flaring in my window as the four great engines thrum, their vibration causing a steady ripple in the scotch in the glass on the tray before me. That was two whiskeys ago, and I still have another nineteen hours in the air. My eyes are dry and grainy, stinging. I am cried out. My mind gropes backward toward the museum, but there is something in the way. A shadow. I know better than to try to force the memory. I was shot once in Africa, and from the moment the bullet ripped through my shoulder till the moment I came to my senses in the Colonial Hotel and found myself being patched up by an Australian reporter whose father was a doctor, everything was blank. The missing events—a hectic jeep ride down an embattled road, the bribing of a checkpoint guard (in which I participated)—only returned to me later. They had not disappeared, but merely fallen out of sequence.
So it was at the museum. But here, in the familiar environment of the plane, and in the warm wake of my third scotch, things begin to return. Brief flashing images at first, then jerky sequences, like bad streaming video. I am standing before the painting of a naked woman whose face is mine to the last detail, and my feet are rooted to the floor with the permanence of nightmares. The men crowding me from behind believe I’m the woman who modeled for the painting on the wall. They chatter incessantly and race around like ants after kerosene has been poured on their hill. They are puzzled that I am alive, angry that their fantasy of “Sleeping Women” seems to be a hoax. But I know things they don’t. I see my sister stepping out onto St. Charles Avenue, the humidity condensing on her skin even before she begins to run. Three miles is her goal, but somewhere in the jungle-like Garden District, she puts a foot wrong and falls into the hole my father fell into in 1972.
Greg Iles, 24 Hours
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