on the roof of the car as she reached for him would end. Now and then a truck hushed by, twisting light. He fought sleep. Usually he loved the letting go. When he wrote, he slipped into the page as if it were water, and tumbled on. The writer was a tumbler. (Would he remember that?) If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer’s hoods and pencils and . . . you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing. Then he would be off scouring the wetlands again. How to make a book, Anil. You asked me How, you asked What’s the most important thing you need? Anil, I’ll tell you. . . .
But she was on the night bus climbing out from the valley, locked for warmth in her grey ferren—half cloak, half serape. Her eyes inches away from the window, receiving the moments of lit trees. Oh, he knew that look in her, realigning herself after a fight. But this was to be the last time. No second chances. She knew and so did he. Their life of sparring love, tentative abandonment, the worst and best of times, all the memory of it balanced as on a clearly lit lab table in Oklahoma, the bus stirring its way up into the mist, passing the small towns in the mountains.
Anil’s body hunched into itself as it became colder. Still, her eyes did not blink, she would not miss any movement this last night with him. She was determined to underline their crimes towards each other, their failures. It was just this she wanted to be certain about, although she knew that later there would be other versions of their fatal romance.
Apart from the driver she was the only sentinel. She saw the jackrabbit. She heard the thud of a night bird against the bus. No lights on within this floating vessel. She would be cleaning up her desk for five days, and then leave for Sri Lanka. She had somewhere in her bag a list of every phone and fax number where he could reach her on the island for the next two months. She had planned to give it to him. She had circled around his fucked-up life, his clenched fears, the love and comfort he was scared to take from her. Still, he had been like a wonderful house to her, full of unusual compartments, so many possibilities, strangely rousing.
The bus climbed above the valley. Like him she couldn’t sleep. Like him she would continue the war. How would he sleep in the night with her name between him and his wife? Even the tenderest concerns between this couple would contain her presence, like a shadow. She didn’t want that anymore. To be a mote or an echo, to be a compass unused except to give his mind knowledge of her whereabouts.
And whom would he talk to if not her at midnight through several time zones? As if she were the stone in the temple grounds used by priests as the object of confession. Well, for now, they both had no destiny. They only had to escape the past.
Anil was one unable to sing, but she knew the words and the pace of phrasing.
Oh, the trees grow high in New York State,
They shine like gold in autumn—
Never had the blues whence I came,
But in New York State I caught ’em.
She said the lines in a whisper, head down, to her own chest. Autumn. Caught ’em. How the rhyme snuggled into its partner.
The Life Wheel
Sarath and Anil had identified Sailor at the third plumbago village. He was Ruwan Kumara and he had been a toddy tapper. After breaking his leg in a fall he had worked in the local mine, and the village remembered when the outsiders had picked him up. They had entered the tunnel where twelve men were working. They brought a billa—someone from the community with a gunnysack over his head, slits cut out for his eyes—to anonymously identify the rebel sympathizer. A billa was a monster, a ghost, to scare children in games, and it had picked out Ruwan Kumara and he had been taken away.
They now had a specific date for the abduction. Back at the walawwa they planned the next step. Sarath felt they should still be careful, have more evidence, or all their work would be rejected. He proposed