us from the temptations of our own flesh, to keep us from hugging ourselves, bare-armed. Nothing moves in the searchlight moonlight. The scent from the garden rises like heat from a body, there must be night-blooming flowers, it’s so strong. I can almost see it, red radiation, wavering upwards like the shimmer above highway tarmac at noon.
Down there on the lawn, someone emerges from the spill of darkness under the willow, steps across the light, his long shadow attached sharply to his heels. Is it Nick, or is it someone else, someone of no importance? He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. Nick. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it’s the same kind of hunger.
Which I can’t indulge. I pull the left-hand curtain so that it falls between us, across my face, and after a moment he walks on, into the invisibility around the corner.
What the Commander said is true. One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick. Should does not apply.
You can’t help what you feel, Moira said once, but you can help how you behave.
Which is all very well.
Context is all; or is it ripeness? One or the other.
The night before we left the house, that last time, I was walking through the rooms. Nothing was packed up, because we weren’t taking much with us and we couldn’t afford even then to give the least appearance of leaving. So I was just walking through, here and there, looking at things, at the arrangement we had made together, for our life. I had some idea that I would be able to remember, afterwards, what it had looked like.
Luke was in the living room. He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.
The cat, is what he said.
Cat? I said, against the wool of his sweater.
We can’t just leave her here.
I hadn’t thought about the cat. Neither of us had. Our decision had been sudden, and then there had been the planning to do. I must have thought she was coming with us. But she couldn’t, you don’t take a cat on a day trip across the border.
Why not outside? I said. We could just leave her.
She’d hang around and mew at the door. Someone would notice we were gone.
We could give her away, I said. One of the neighbours. Even as I said this, I saw how foolish that would be.
I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.
Luke found the cat, who was hiding under our bed. They always know. He went into the garage with her. I don’t know what he did and I never asked him. I sat in the living room, hands folded in my lap. I should have gone out with him, taken that small responsibility. I should at least have asked him about it afterwards, so he didn’t have to carry it alone; because that little sacrifice, that snuffing out of love, was done for my sake as well.
That’s one of the things they do. They force you to kill, within yourself.
Useless, as it turned out. I wonder who told them. It could have been a neighbour, watching our car pull out from the driveway in the morning, acting on a hunch, tipping them off for a gold star on someone’s list. It could even have been the man who got us the passports; why not get paid twice? Like them, even, to plant the passport forgers themselves, a net for the unwary. The Eyes of God run over all the earth.
Because they were ready for us, and waiting. The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that