Afterward he and I stepped out onto the street. Michiko had ducked out of this last encounter, choosing instead to linger with the ladies. But we had the girl with us, little Roza, asleep on Bujak’s shoulder. I watched him without fear. He wouldn’t drop the folded child. He had taken possession of Roza with his arms.
As if by arrangement we paused at number 45. Black kids now played in the garden with a winded red football. Things were falling away between Bujak and me, and suddenly it seemed that you could say what you liked. So I said, “Adam. No offense. But why didn’t you kill them? I would have. I mean, if I think of Michi and Roza …” But in fact you cannot think it, you cannot go near it. The thought is fire. “Why didn’t you kill the sons of bitches? What stopped you?”
“Why?” he asked, and grinned. “What would have been the reason?”
“Come on. You could have done it, easy. Self-defense. No court on earth would have sent you down.”
“True. It occurred to me.”
“Then what happened? Did you—did you feel too weak all of a sudden? Did you just feel too weak?”
“On the contrary. When I had their heads in my hands I thought how incredibly easy to grind their faces together— until they drowned in each other’s faces. But no.”
But no. Bujak had simply dragged the men by the arms (half a mile, to the police station in Harrow Road), like a father with two frantic children. He delivered them and dusted his hands.
“Christ, they’ll be out in a few years. Why not kill them? Why not?”
“I had no wish to add to what I found. I thought of my dead wife Monika. I thought—they’re all dead now. I couldn’t add to what I saw there. Really the hardest thing was to touch them at all. You know the wet tails of rats? Snakes? Because I saw that they weren’t human beings at all. They had no idea what human life was. No idea! Terrible mutations, a disgrace to their human molding. An eternal disgrace. If I had killed them then I would still be strong. But you must start somewhere. You must make a start.”
And now that Bujak has laid down his arms, I don’t know why, but I am minutely stronger. I don’t know why—I can’t tell you why.
He once said to me: “There must be more matter in the universe than we think. Else the distances are horrible. I’m nauseated.” Einsteinian to the end, Bujak was an Oscillationist, claiming that the Big Bang will forever alternate with the Big Crunch, that the universe would expand only until unanimous gravity called it back to start again. At that moment, with the cosmos turning on its hinges, light would begin to travel backward, received by the stars and pouring from our human eyes. If, and I can’t believe it, time would also be reversed, as Bujak maintained (will we move backward too? Will we have any say in things?), then this moment as I shake his hand shall be the start of my story, his story, our story, and we will slip downtime of each other’s lives, to meet four years from now, when, out of the fiercest grief, Bujak’s lost women will reappear, born in blood (and we will have our conversations, too, backing away from the same conclusion), until Boguslawa folds into Leokadia, and Leokadia folds into Monika, and Monika is there to be enfolded by Bujak until it is her turn to recede, kissing her fingertips, backing away over the fields to the distant girl with no time for him (will that be any easier to bear than the other way around?), and then big Bujak shrinks, becoming the weakest thing there is, helpless, indefensible, naked, weeping, blind and tiny, and folding into Roza.
INSIGHT AT FLAME LAKE
Ned’s Diary
July 16. Well it certainly is a pleasure to have Dan come and summer with us up here at Flame Lake. I’m glad to do it. We have him till mid-August. There’ll be problems-Fran and I agree on this—but right now he seems manageable enough, though heavily haunted. Fran’s a little upset too, of course, but we talked it through, the night before Dan came, and straightened the whole thing out. I spoke on the phone with Dr. Slizard, who warned me that the extra medication that Dan’s taking would make him sullen and unresponsive for the first three or four days. And he is grieving. Poor Dan—I feel for the kid. So brilliant, and so troubled, like his father, God rest his soul. I am grieving too. Even though we weren’t that close (he was old enough to be my father), still, when your brother goes, it’s like a little death. It’s a hell of a thing. Dan hides from the heat. He keeps to his room. Dr. Siizard told me to expect this. I’m hoping the baby will amuse and distract him. Fran is nervous about that also, however. All right. It won’t be the carefree summer we were planning on. But we’ll work it out. And surely the light and space of Flame Lake will be useful therapy for Dan and may even help to ease his problem.