Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “We weren’t always so good.”

      “Yes, that’s true,” she acknowledged in an open-ended tone. “Once upon a time I was known as the wild one. I was Sylvia Plath. I was going to draw or act or write poems.”

      “Just the other night you denied that.”

      “That was then, this is now. Are you sure you don’t want some?”

      “I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.”

      “So many things have changed, Lucius. For once, I wish you’d come down with us mortals. You’ll lower your standards for April Lindstrom, but not for me.”

      “All right,” Burling said, standing up. April’s name seared him. A puff of marijuana would not be the worst thing he’d done.

      “Here.”

      When he drew on the joint, the ember was so close and hot that he burned his fingers. “Shit!” He coughed and dropped the thing.

      “Poor Lucius.” Amelia laughed and came toward him, her arms as wide as an angel in her translucent robe. He coughed, and the blue smoke kept coming out of him in clouds. “You make everything so complicated, don’t you?” The robe fell open, and he could see her small round breasts in her nightgown. Whatever his lungs had absorbed had gone straight to his head, and he was aware of only two distinct parts of his body—the top of his skull, which seemed to have disappeared, and a gradually mounting erection, so strong that it almost hurt. He couldn’t help remembering April in the hotel in Samarkand. “Most husbands just screw their secretaries, but you had to make your affair into some kind of idea as big as you are, didn’t you?”

      “Amelia, don’t.”

      “I wouldn’t sleep with you for a couple of months because I was having a hard time. My medication was all messed up, Lucius, and I didn’t have Dr. Rose there, so I can understand you might want one night of casual fucking, I wouldn’t even begrudge you that, but instead you come up with some kind of grand design, a mission that befits a man of your great intellectual prowess.”

      “Please.”

      “You find yourself a hippie whore with an impotent husband, a folie à deux of epic proportions, and what happens? You don’t just get laid, you manage to invoke the soldiers of God—of God!” She looked up at the ceiling and laughed in a way that frightened and thrilled him. Maybe this was how it would be now, a world of sensation and vague paranoia. “They sweep down and murder your pilot and knock you on the head and carry your ideal woman away. She’s probably sitting Indian-fashion in their tent right now, like Scheherazade, part of the king’s harem, telling them stories so they won’t cut her throat.”

      “Amelia, your imagination.”

      “My imagination! It’s always my imagination. Until it isn’t.”

      “I was going to say I always loved your imagination. It’s what made me love you in the first place.”

      “Oh, Lucius,” she said, clinging to him now. “Your probity and my imagination. How did they turn on us like this?”

      “I don’t know. It’s a dangerous time.”

      “You mean our age?”

      “Ours, the age of the world, if you know what I mean. That was the problem, that I started to think like that again, about bigger things.”

      “And all I could think of was little ones. Boring, tiny annoyances and slights.”

      “April.” He couldn’t believe he’d uttered her name.

      “Yes, but not just her.”

      “She and Jack seemed to come from a totally different world.”

      Amelia was crying quietly as he held her and now she began to move her hand down his stomach and under his belt. “Is this what she did?”

      “No, sweetheart. You don’t have to talk like that.”

      “I can tell stories, too. It’s what I’m good at, you know. That’s what the children loved about me, before they grew up and started hating me.”

      “Luke and Betsy don’t hate you,” he said.

      “Elizabeth does. You run off with a woman, and all she is is ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ She was furious at me for sending her to camp when she found out you were coming home. But I couldn’t stand her for another second in this house.”

      “That’s normal, isn’t it, between mothers and daughters?”

      But Amelia had already moved on somewhere else. All along, she’d been pulling him upward with her fingers, scratching him slightly with her nails. “I could tell you a story,” she said distantly. “A story of April.”

      “Amelia, don’t. It wasn’t like that.”

      “Tell me what it was like,” she said.

      “I don’t want to hurt you again.”

      “You did, you know.”

      “I don’t want it to be that way.”

      Awkwardly, tenderly, he took her wrist and moved her to the bed. For an hour then, while the fallen joint smoldered on the chair, and for a month of nights after, Burling made love to his wife in a guilty, solicitous way, always aware that their romance was stolen from time. He often thought of April, in the high desert, riding with soldiers of God. He even let Amelia tell him stories about her, making love with the men to stay alive. For a month, chance and fate were suspended, but the king’s knife glinted beneath the pillows.

      burling didn’t witness the end of the idyll. he was summoned to London for a meeting on setting up an embassy-in-exile in Pakistan. Luke’s account of it was all that he had; Luke had never shared the details, or his feelings, with his father. The day after Burling left, Amelia swallowed a bottle of pills that her doctor had prescribed to help her sleep, chasing them with scotch. Her bedroom was locked, and Luke could feel the wind from an open window slipping beneath her door. He stood there in his bare feet, not ready for swim practice, imagining the white room beyond. He put his ear to the keyhole, but all he could hear was a car going by outside, birdsong. The firemen had to kick the door in, and Luke stared at his mother’s curled-up body, her buttocks slender and slack where the white sheet had fallen away. A paramedic was yelling into her ear, lifting and slapping her limp hand, the soles of her feet. Luke had to step aside as the man’s partner, her pockets heavy with equipment, pushed by with the stretcher.

      He moved aside until he was standing in front of the bookshelves that lined the upper hall. A strange collection of spines: popular novels adapted for movies, a marriage manual and a few self-help books, an Encyclopaedia Britannica with an entry for the Austro-Hungarian Empire that he had plagiarized for school, a Riverside Shakespeare, gilt and bound in red leather—a gift from Simon Bell. The stretcher passed with his mother on it, her hair thick and wild on the pillow, a pencil line of blood drawn from her nose. The bulky woman held aloft a plastic bag.

      “We’re losing her, Willie,” she said.

      “Where’s your father, son?” СКАЧАТЬ