Turtledove
(Part Three of Bird Trilogy)
The balcony overlooked a swimming pool and the twinkling jewelry of the city lights distant and obscured through the evergreen pine. A remote no-name hotel circumspect at the outskirts of the highway, home to any itinerant traveler or downtrodden resident it lured in from the road like a lighthouse beckoning from the dark. It was the third night, though their number had seemed to blend all into one single twilight of equal parts lethargy and stupor. When it was day they rested, smoked, and ate petty meals like scavenger mammals. Sunglasses worn inside. Holed up with anemic frailty from the mania of the night before. As the sun set they would brandish themselves with every glamour and elegance and cut a vampiric swath through the city that left in its wake a toll they would never repay nor even consider. It was a cycle they'd fallen into, an inevitable tempest arising from the alchemy of their interaction. Two elements swilled from strangers to acquaintances to something else. They came into each other's lives like lightning bolts striking the same tree, like two boulders rolling off opposing hills to crash and explode into themselves in the nadir of the same valley.
A ballroom Advent party gussied up with tuxedos and long dresses and warm incandescence from the chandelier on silver hors d'oeurve platters. The staid bromides of the well-content attempting to charm and woo her. Here was a man among them who hadn't any interest in such charades. A man of strikingly similar interest and background, or so it seemed. There was a distinct familiarity to him and a magnetism drew her immediately. The silent looks across the gala that lasted a beat too long, the way his eyes would dart away at first when she saw them and how they'd return when she looked back. Looking not with the rapacious leer she well knew but through what windows she had opened to whatever metaphysical construct was lying inside. Before he spoke a word he'd already put his hand on her shoulder and she hadn't refused him, though surely she could've. There was a power she recognized as she neared him, the dominance he relinquished her with his replete sincerity, and she considered where a pursuit of it might lead. If a frivolous adventure taking advantage of this man's presumed wealth and resources, if living it up until the tap went dry so that she could discard him as she had with past flings would be sufficient or if this was something that was more, in a word, real. And she doubted if she would even be able to tell the difference. She followed him outside and rode passenger in his Maserati. In the digital glow of the dashboard she beheld him and agreed there she would stay on this course, his course, wherever it would lead.
They explored each other in the manner an archaeologist might mine the ruins of an ancient civilization. Uncovering secrets, concocting the narrative of history and trajectory leading to the present moment. He left nothing of himself hidden. Her questions he answered forthright, the allure of his honesty almost intoxicating in how it left one never fully satiated, always wanting more. And more he did give. An oblation he offered asking for not a thing in return, only the pleasure of her company and even that set emphatically on her own terms. He said love, if such a thing existed, was made for accommodation. But she sensed something else in him the more time they shared, something in his solemn face when he was by himself, in the far corner of his glare when he thought she wasn't looking - or perhaps when he did. Something unsaid, something ulterior. At times when she held him he would weep like a little boy in the arms of his mother. A deep longing for which there was not a word for.
When he was fifteen he discovered a malevolence within him that possessed no nomenclature or origin that it could be understood. She was two grades behind him and they had courted with the clumsy and pantomime skillset of middle school students. It was in his room, his bedroom, while his parents were away working hard jobs for humble wages. He had said it to her first and he meant it, as much as a child can mean it in that way. That way, not the way said to your family member or to a band or in appreciation of a pizza slice. That way. A spark of elation crossed over her face, her flush cheeks, whose embers burned and blew out. Sudden, swift, immediate like a lightbulb turning on and off again. A millisecond, less. She returned his affection in the same breath that was her last, no sooner passing from her lips than the filament in her irises blinking dark and her skin going cold and lifeless against his. This was not sleeping. His horror, beginning then, did not end but would mutate into a state of being more odious than was imaginable. The amalgam of fear, guilt, shame drove him from his bedroom and her body to the train yards and to hitchhiking and to grifters who taught him the art of thievery and deception and their most important lessons on the callousing of empathy and the exaltation of self-interest as the Lord God of existence. Over time his fear was sanded down to curiosity and his curse filed into a tool and he employed them both. When he demonstrated his secret talent to his cohorts they fled saying he may very well be the devil incarnate. He couldn't argue against them. He knew evil, true evil. So great an affliction to turn one's most intimate passion against them. Some part of him would leave with the passing of each of his suitors like an ocean wave eroding scintilla from the shore rock and he hated himself. Hated himself for lack of anything else to blame, be it divine intervention, nature's dictation, or some sadistic combination thereof. His rage was aimed outward toward life, toward existence itself and he set himself against it in a vocation of revenge.
An incantation formulated itself in her brain at some point indeterminate in the blended haze of the long nights. Short. Three little words she knew percolating up from the well of her inebriated subconscious in between various shots and lines, stopping with all the weary sobriety she could muster just at the tip of her tongue and no further. She didn't want to speak them, never sure of their meaning. A hazard they were, a live grenade dropped in the middle of both parties, and every instance they were spoken she remembered ringing false, exchanged like a piece of fool's gold for a scrap of closeness or assurance prone to expiration. So she resolved herself against the words and pushed them down when they arose, but like driftwood they would always bob back up to the surface, that magic phrase of her own invention. But was it really her own? His careful tempered actions and honeyed tongue prodding, nudging. A constant monitor, his ear attended to her voice. To hear and hope for it to be over, for this to be the remedy at long last.
The night air was cool and a family of tourists were swimming below. The husband and the wife reclining, shouting at their kids. Pale light from the chlorine water reflected as high as the balcony on which they watched. His fingers were locked in the short crop of her hair, her blonde curls almost blue against the black matte. They had kissed, had touched, had had each other in every manner a man and woman could, and still their time together was not up. No, nor did it have to be. Didn't have to break away, to run, to go back to how it had been before. It could last eternal, this perfect moment. She turned to him and put his face in her hands and spoke aloud the words that had broken promises and scarred irreparably. She meant them, their truth the foot extended out on the high wire. Like falling. When she went limp and the flicker of life clouded from her eyes he buried his face in her neck. Still there; still with the pillory heavy on his shoulders pulling him down, down. In the hotel room there would be found the body of a young woman, a suicide note, an assemblage of emptied liquor and pill bottles, and only the reports of a male companion seen with the deceased. There would be no fingerprints or stray hairs that could lead them back to his person. He was a ghost riding the highway with his coffers filled, his mind empty. Without rage or spite or any feeling at all except what lied at the far end beyond misery. Numbness. Whatever piece of him that remained perished with her as so it had been before and, he knew, would be again. Another heart stolen from the world into himself. The thief. Assassin. The loneliest creature on the face of the earth. He would not forget and he sought no forgiveness. He drove with the night wind about his hair and the collar of his shirt and he drove until dark saw him away.
The balcony overlooked a swimming pool and the twinkling jewelry of the city lights distant and obscured through the evergreen pine. A remote no-name hotel circumspect at the outskirts of the highway, home to any itinerant traveler or downtrodden resident it lured in from the road like a lighthouse beckoning from the dark. It was the third night, though their number had seemed to blend all into one single twilight of equal parts lethargy and stupor. When it was day they rested, smoked, and ate petty meals like scavenger mammals. Sunglasses worn inside. Holed up with anemic frailty from the mania of the night before. As the sun set they would brandish themselves with every glamour and elegance and cut a vampiric swath through the city that left in its wake a toll they would never repay nor even consider. It was a cycle they'd fallen into, an inevitable tempest arising from the alchemy of their interaction. Two elements swilled from strangers to acquaintances to something else. They came into each other's lives like lightning bolts striking the same tree, like two boulders rolling off opposing hills to crash and explode into themselves in the nadir of the same valley.
A ballroom Advent party gussied up with tuxedos and long dresses and warm incandescence from the chandelier on silver hors d'oeurve platters. The staid bromides of the well-content attempting to charm and woo her. Here was a man among them who hadn't any interest in such charades. A man of strikingly similar interest and background, or so it seemed. There was a distinct familiarity to him and a magnetism drew her immediately. The silent looks across the gala that lasted a beat too long, the way his eyes would dart away at first when she saw them and how they'd return when she looked back. Looking not with the rapacious leer she well knew but through what windows she had opened to whatever metaphysical construct was lying inside. Before he spoke a word he'd already put his hand on her shoulder and she hadn't refused him, though surely she could've. There was a power she recognized as she neared him, the dominance he relinquished her with his replete sincerity, and she considered where a pursuit of it might lead. If a frivolous adventure taking advantage of this man's presumed wealth and resources, if living it up until the tap went dry so that she could discard him as she had with past flings would be sufficient or if this was something that was more, in a word, real. And she doubted if she would even be able to tell the difference. She followed him outside and rode passenger in his Maserati. In the digital glow of the dashboard she beheld him and agreed there she would stay on this course, his course, wherever it would lead.
They explored each other in the manner an archaeologist might mine the ruins of an ancient civilization. Uncovering secrets, concocting the narrative of history and trajectory leading to the present moment. He left nothing of himself hidden. Her questions he answered forthright, the allure of his honesty almost intoxicating in how it left one never fully satiated, always wanting more. And more he did give. An oblation he offered asking for not a thing in return, only the pleasure of her company and even that set emphatically on her own terms. He said love, if such a thing existed, was made for accommodation. But she sensed something else in him the more time they shared, something in his solemn face when he was by himself, in the far corner of his glare when he thought she wasn't looking - or perhaps when he did. Something unsaid, something ulterior. At times when she held him he would weep like a little boy in the arms of his mother. A deep longing for which there was not a word for.
When he was fifteen he discovered a malevolence within him that possessed no nomenclature or origin that it could be understood. She was two grades behind him and they had courted with the clumsy and pantomime skillset of middle school students. It was in his room, his bedroom, while his parents were away working hard jobs for humble wages. He had said it to her first and he meant it, as much as a child can mean it in that way. That way, not the way said to your family member or to a band or in appreciation of a pizza slice. That way. A spark of elation crossed over her face, her flush cheeks, whose embers burned and blew out. Sudden, swift, immediate like a lightbulb turning on and off again. A millisecond, less. She returned his affection in the same breath that was her last, no sooner passing from her lips than the filament in her irises blinking dark and her skin going cold and lifeless against his. This was not sleeping. His horror, beginning then, did not end but would mutate into a state of being more odious than was imaginable. The amalgam of fear, guilt, shame drove him from his bedroom and her body to the train yards and to hitchhiking and to grifters who taught him the art of thievery and deception and their most important lessons on the callousing of empathy and the exaltation of self-interest as the Lord God of existence. Over time his fear was sanded down to curiosity and his curse filed into a tool and he employed them both. When he demonstrated his secret talent to his cohorts they fled saying he may very well be the devil incarnate. He couldn't argue against them. He knew evil, true evil. So great an affliction to turn one's most intimate passion against them. Some part of him would leave with the passing of each of his suitors like an ocean wave eroding scintilla from the shore rock and he hated himself. Hated himself for lack of anything else to blame, be it divine intervention, nature's dictation, or some sadistic combination thereof. His rage was aimed outward toward life, toward existence itself and he set himself against it in a vocation of revenge.
An incantation formulated itself in her brain at some point indeterminate in the blended haze of the long nights. Short. Three little words she knew percolating up from the well of her inebriated subconscious in between various shots and lines, stopping with all the weary sobriety she could muster just at the tip of her tongue and no further. She didn't want to speak them, never sure of their meaning. A hazard they were, a live grenade dropped in the middle of both parties, and every instance they were spoken she remembered ringing false, exchanged like a piece of fool's gold for a scrap of closeness or assurance prone to expiration. So she resolved herself against the words and pushed them down when they arose, but like driftwood they would always bob back up to the surface, that magic phrase of her own invention. But was it really her own? His careful tempered actions and honeyed tongue prodding, nudging. A constant monitor, his ear attended to her voice. To hear and hope for it to be over, for this to be the remedy at long last.
The night air was cool and a family of tourists were swimming below. The husband and the wife reclining, shouting at their kids. Pale light from the chlorine water reflected as high as the balcony on which they watched. His fingers were locked in the short crop of her hair, her blonde curls almost blue against the black matte. They had kissed, had touched, had had each other in every manner a man and woman could, and still their time together was not up. No, nor did it have to be. Didn't have to break away, to run, to go back to how it had been before. It could last eternal, this perfect moment. She turned to him and put his face in her hands and spoke aloud the words that had broken promises and scarred irreparably. She meant them, their truth the foot extended out on the high wire. Like falling. When she went limp and the flicker of life clouded from her eyes he buried his face in her neck. Still there; still with the pillory heavy on his shoulders pulling him down, down. In the hotel room there would be found the body of a young woman, a suicide note, an assemblage of emptied liquor and pill bottles, and only the reports of a male companion seen with the deceased. There would be no fingerprints or stray hairs that could lead them back to his person. He was a ghost riding the highway with his coffers filled, his mind empty. Without rage or spite or any feeling at all except what lied at the far end beyond misery. Numbness. Whatever piece of him that remained perished with her as so it had been before and, he knew, would be again. Another heart stolen from the world into himself. The thief. Assassin. The loneliest creature on the face of the earth. He would not forget and he sought no forgiveness. He drove with the night wind about his hair and the collar of his shirt and he drove until dark saw him away.
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