Attempts to locate the two witnesses after years have been as unsuccessful as have the attempts to verify the names of the reputedly wealthy guests, although from time to time a guarded name surfaces. It has been conjectured that any investigation has been thwarted by powerful persons in high places in order to avoid an even greater scandal.
The Great Fire on the Lake, as it is now designated, has remained as mysterious as on the day it burst into tragedy.
Gossip persists that before the fire, rituals and practices among the selected guests were violent and vile, “unholy rituals.”
34
Unwanted images battered my mind. I had seen both the untouched portion of the house and the spectacle of the decaying island. I pushed away the account of the fire. I could dismiss it easily. Its ominous intimations were the product of a clumsy village reporter pumping up his report with sensationalized conclusions.
But Elgard’s words from his theory of evil persisted.
“Thick fog … bursting shadows … unabating heat …”
I felt cold in the heat. My head was reeling. I reached for the yellow sheet of paper scrawled with handwritten notes. The sheet was crumpled, discarded, retrieved, and restored—by the writer or someone else. I recognized Paul’s handwriting from his letters. I read:
to study him to see myself becoming as I was becoming what I am to ward him away or toward whichever is revealed by him by me away or from that goal the trap beautiful or harrowing to be found a search for him searched myself and found demonic angels I study my beloved son, my Stanty, my Constantine to find myself becoming reasons motives What one became, what the other will become …
I looked up from the puzzling words. Demonic angels—my phrase; at least some of the notes were written during our association. They seemed to echo equally disjointed words Paul had uttered when I questioned his view of Stanty. A struggle to understand himself, “becoming”?—a confrontation with himself? These notes—written for whom? to me? as an attempted answer to my question?—written and then discarded. Left by whom along with the fraudulent book? And why?
I read the last lines, the clearest entry, as if through the desultory thoughts Paul had drawn a possible conclusion.
Him, my son, my beloved son, my Constantine—release him? Shall I free him? Can I free him? Is it too late, the infernal trap sprung?
Free him? Did he mean finally to separate Stanty from him, how he saw himself and Stanty, “becoming”? If that were possible—considering Stanty’s capacity for violence that I had experienced—would Stanty let him, Paul, go? Free Paul?
Then the fleeting clarity I had grasped vanished. Through all those revelations about himself—and these tortured thoughts—would Paul be forever an enigma?
I restored his notes as I remembered finding them within the book, which I propped up as I had found it. Then I withdrew the yellow sheet with the notes. I folded that sheet and secured it in the drawer among my clothes to keep.
My head was clear. Now, to fulfill what I saw as the stern direction of this fading day, I had to resurrect in my mind the events of last night.
I see Paul on the floor. I see Sonya’s fists flailing at him. “Fuck him!” I hear her say, “Fuck him like a dog!”—and I heard Paul whimper: “Fuck me.” I throw myself over him, my body pressed against his drenched in sweat and oil. My cock begins to enter, only the tip—no, my whole body pushes—entering. He twists, uttering a sound like a moan of pain or pleasure, pain and pleasure. I push in more, harder. He winces and a moan slides into a sigh, back to a low moan. I wait, and then I thrust in and out, remain deep in, cherishing the ecstasy of this invasion that fuses our bodies into one. Spurting eruptions of my cum glue us together, his body contracts, he gasps, and still inside him, I can feel the throbbing of his cock, I feel his eruption in spurts. I pull out of him, drops of my cum spill on him. I run out past Sonya. She stands staring down at Paul.
35
Night had come over me with such insistence that I did not realize till now that I had escaped into sleep. A startling coolness had wakened me, and with it the awareness that—impossible, so soon?—this was the time of ending, the beginning of summer’s end. Only days ago, Paul had informed me of the approaching date of his departure. “You can stay here until before winter if you want,” he told me. “This is a good place to write. In winter it’s uninhabitable—the water freezes over.” I glanced about the room I would be leaving.
The strange book was gone—and, with it, the account of the island atrocity. I got up to search for the yellow sheet, Paul’s intimate notes. It was where I had hidden it. I would keep those notes.
A soft knock at the door. I slipped on my army fatigues.
Sonya came into my room. A mixture of pleasure and apprehension alerted me that this was the first time I had seen her since the infinite distance from last night.
She sat on the bed, next to me.
“I came to say—”
“No,” I interrupted. I had to speak first. “About what happened—” I was about to say I was sorry, but that was inadequate. I shifted: “I didn’t stop what was happening because I thought Paul was playing one of his games until it turned ugly and then I did stop it—please remember that, Sonya. I stopped it when”—I couldn’t say the words when he threatened to strike you. “I was a coward, but I did stop it.”
“Shhhh,” she said. She touched my lips with one finger, holding it there, removed it. “It was all a game.”
“You’re lying.”
She jerked away from me. “We played a game, John,” she said, facing me.
“But you were crying, I felt your tears.”
“Those were your tears.” She did not look away from me.
She was lying, I knew it, I had to know it, and I had to force her away from those deadly lies: “Paul wasn’t playing when he clenched his fist to—”
She raised her voice. “Goddammit, John, Paul would never hit me!” She stood up, rigid before me.
“Sonya—”
“It was a game, goddammit—and we all played it!”
I stood before her. Only silence was possible for this infinity of moments.
Her voice relented: “I came to tell you that I’m returning to Paris with Paul.”
“You’re staying with him?”
“Of course. I love him,” she said as if that was the only answer. “I’m leaving now, the boat and the car are waiting.”
Today—leaving today?
“Paul is staying only to take care of some business with the village attorney. I’m meeting him in New York. We’re flying together.”
Her words sounded rehearsed, weary—or perhaps I only wanted to believe that and nothing more, nothing else she was saying, nothing she had said.
Her expression softened. She seemed about to touch me. She turned and moved away. She paused at the door. She faced me.
“Good-bye … my dear John.”
Would I ever, ever believe her? “Good-bye … Sonya.”
Appearing in my room abruptly as he always did, for surprise, Stanty stood at attention before me; he was wearing a vaguely military uniform. Before I could demand that he get the fuck out—
“I came to say good-bye, John Rechy,” he said, with a slight bow. “My father is driving me to school today.”
I did not move.
“Good-bye … John Rechy,” he repeated, almost in a whisper. He held out his hand to me.
I stared at him in disgusted fascination. Did he really believe that I would touch him—touch the hand that would have lunged out of the black water and pulled me down?
My hand extends.
He takes it. His hand is cold, bloodless.
I try to pull my hand away. He clasps it.
I yank away from the deadened flesh.
Paul stood with me on the lawn, awaiting word that the car that would take him to the airport had arrived. He had just completed his business in the village. I had not seen him—I had been avoiding him—since the dr
unken, feverish night.
“Have you considered staying longer, to write?” he asked me.
“Maybe. Briefly.”
He gave me instructions on how the house would be closed.
We walked toward the boat.
“Where will you go from here?” Paul asked me.
“A big city.” I looked across the lawn, where I had first seen the somber dark statues.
Paul took another step toward the motorboat. He turned to look at me and then walked back. “John—”
What had occurred among Sonya, him, and me, that drunken feverish night, had been left unspoken. He would speak about it now.
“John—” Again, only my name.
“Paul—”
He moved close to me, so close that I thought I could hear his heart beating—or mine. He embraced me, tightly. He kissed me on the mouth, his tongue darted about my lips to open them. My lips remained closed. When his retreated, I touched my mouth. There was no trace of blood on my finger.
“Good-bye … Paul.”
“Man? … Good-bye.”
36
I was alone on the island.
I returned to the room where, that sweaty night, Paul and I and Sonya—
Sonya …
I listened to the Bartók music that had played that night, music whose contortions had melded with spiraling dark heat.
l returned to my room.
That night alone on the island—I had not seen the gray couple since they had taken Paul to the mainland—I welcomed the lingering coolness from the open window. I slid into sleep.
I was wakened by a thrust of heat. My sweat had soaked the sheet into an outline of my body. I got up; it was still night; I went outside, hoping for a breeze; the heat followed, unrelenting. A pallid moon was retreating under a gray smear of clouds. I did what I had avoided the last few days. I looked toward the neighboring island. As the feeble reflection of the moon struggled out of the lake, I saw it. A heavy black shawl of clouds was floating from it, abandoning the neighboring island and floating over the lake. Under the drowning light, shadows swerved about the edges of this island.
I returned inside the house.
In my room, deep darkness gathered at the window, attempting to enter—an impression so powerful that I pulled back until with vast relief I realized I had dropped into sleep, lulled by the murmurs from the lake and by a sense of wearied resignation about the resurgence of heat.
I woke up startled by a sound like a smothered roar, a silent roar, fading loudly. I forced my concentration onto the restless swooshing of the rowboats against the house. Roiling waves of darkness quivered at the window, pushing in, swarming into the room, invading the house—I had left my room to verify that—heated night bursting through the windows, the doors, the crevices, flooding the island with flames of darkness.
In the morning, when the distorted shadows I had imagined invading the house—I was sure I had imagined them—had been banished by the glare of the sun, I packed my duffel bag.
I did not have to call the gray couple. Perhaps alerted by noise in my room and now by my footsteps, they appeared in the hall, waiting. My duffel bag rested beside me on the floor. The man approached, to lift it for me. I reached down to take it myself. I reared back. I saw his hand on the looped strap of my duffel bag. Fire had scorched his skin, which, long-healed, had assumed a scarred, crinkled whiteness. Sensing my stare, he straightened up but did not hide his hand. The woman glided beside him. Their eyes lifted and met my stare.
With unbudging certainty, I knew then who they were. In acknowledgement of that powerful discovery, I nodded.
They answered my nod, the slightest movement.
The man grabbed my duffel bag. We walked to the dock, where the motorboat waited. He put my duffel bag in the boat. The woman arranged it there. Both as silent as they had always been, their eyes downcast again, they started the motorboat.
Before I entered it, I gazed at the neighboring island. It was purified of all the rot, abandoned by the clouds, which—
—were lunging to invade this island with shadows so black—those words were etched into my mind—that they did not need the source of light.
The couple took me to the shoreline, where the car they had summoned waited.
Without facing back, I whispered, “Island … island,” the words fading even as I spoke them.
Then I left.
John Rechy, After the Blue Hour
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