the old man had changed his angle at the end of his life, suddenly. Almost—though she would never know, she thought, self-pitying—as though he had veered from his hunting trajectory, from his celebration of killing, into this plain and sad little corner. An unfinished room of people’s bones.
The room had a melancholy spareness, the end of a long fight, a battlefield desolate with the flattened—the now so modest!—remains of the dead. Above the dry winter grasses rose the pennants of friends and enemies alike, shredded and flapping in the wind.
•
Someone was saying her name; she must have nodded off. A ghost of the old man, maybe, or one of the victims in those far-off tribes, killed with measles, killed by the passion of the emissaries of Christ.
But no: it was only Jim. He was calling down from a hole in the roof of the earth. The hole in the world. He called down to her from the sky.
She got up slowly, not without some twinges of joint ache, and went through the animal room again, aware of the spectacle of their dead beauty on both sides of her as she walked, dreamily. She followed his voice toward the brick well, surrounded by the derelict loveliness. Then the half-light of the open door was behind her. She blinked and fumbled with her flashlight.
“Susan,” he was saying, insistently. “Are you down there?”
She found the switch, felt the plastic ridges under her thumb and pushed it, raising the light shakily until it captured his legs—his legs at the edge of the opening. The bottom of his shirt. He wasn’t bending down, rather he was standing. He wore pants.
Of course he wore pants. A man often did.
She liked, come to think of it, the idea of men who didn’t wear pants—Scotland men. Scottishers, Scotch. Was that what they called them? Scots, that was it. Also men in parts of Asia, including monks, possibly. And certain Arabs. They wore djellabas, for instance. Bless them, bless them, bless all those skirt-wearing men. Truthfully, the skirts looked good on them. There was nothing feminine about a skirt. Not necessarily. If more of the men, over the course of history, had worn skirts . . . but she, of course, had never been on the battlefield. She and the others of her kind were always far away—the tragedy elapsed and people like her, for much of history, remained on the sidelines. Men slew each other, they slew the animals, went slaying and slaying. Women were mostly witnesses. They were not innocent—it wasn’t that simple, not by a long shot—more like accessories to the crime, if not the principal offenders. They saw killing ravage all things beneath the sun and were the silent partner in it. You didn’t want to kill, you had no interest in killing—your very genes went against it. Possibly your hormones. Again, the molecules that governed you. But you were also far too weak to stop it. Your weakness was your crime.
Not weaker than the men, per se, just differently weak. The wanting to be liked, avoidance of conflict . . . you were profoundly and eternally guilty of this terrible weakness, this moral as well as physical weakness, the fear of being hurt, of being injured, of being embarrassed. You were crippled by the guilt of being who you were. Guilty of being yourself.
The self-help books urged you to be yourself, and yet, as it turned out, being yourself was the crime to end all crimes.
“Susan! You down there drunk? All by yourself?”
Drunk yes, but not alone.
She turned and looked back to the rectangle of light, past which the corpses lay in state. If there were ghosts here they were the ghosts of men, not of the animals, men hovering over the artifacts of their prey. They had no interest in her, none at all. Rather it was for her to be interested in them. The ghosts of men, in this case the ghosts of killers, because that was part of the atmosphere of institutions . . . a museum held, in its perfect, orderly, austere glass cases, not only the presence of the artifacts but the invisible presence of those who had hunted them, those who had dug them up or even stolen them. The unknown or the dead people—no, their desire, that was the presence that hovered there, their deep wanting, part of the sacred air.
When she was married and slept around she’d lived in the desire of men, in all that