driver’s door. I wanted to be at her side with the Glock in my hand as
she walked across the house to the rear porch, which was the entrance
that she always used.
An hour seemed to pass before I heard her footsteps on the back porch,
as she walked between the tables of potted herbs.
When she swung open the door, I was standing in the wide blade of
morning light that slashed into the kitchen. I pulled her into my
arms, slammed the door behind her, and held her so tightly that for a
moment neither of us could breathe. I kissed her then, and she was
warm and real, real and glorious, glorious and alive.
No matter how tightly I held her, however, no matter how sweet her
kisses, I was still hatinted by that presentiment of worse losses to
come.
With all that had happened during the previous night and with all that
loomed in the night to come, I didn’t imagine that we would make
love.
Sasha couldn’t imagine not making love. Even though she didn’t know
the reason for my terror, the sight of me so fearful and so shaken by
the thought of losing her was an aphrodisiac that put her in a mood not
to be refused.
Orson, ever a gentleman, remained downstairs in the kitchen.
We went upstairs to the bedroom and from there into the timeless time
and placeless place where Sasha is the only energy, the only form of
matter, the only force in the universe. So bright.
Afterward, in a mood that made even the most apocalyptic news seem
tolerable, I told her about my night from sundown until dawn, about the
millennium monkeys and Stevenson, about how Moonlight Bay was now a
Pandora’s box swarming with myriad evils.
If she thought I was insane, she hid her judgment well. When I told
her of the taunting by the troop, which Orson and I had endured after
leaving Bobby’s house, she broke out in gooseflesh and had to pull on a
robe. As she gradually realized fully how dire our situation was, that
we had no one to whom we could turn and nowhere to run even if we were
allowed to leave town, that we might already be tainted by this Wyvern
plague, with effects to come that we could not even imagine, she pulled
the collar of the robe tighter around her neck.
If she was repulsed by what I’d done to Stevenson, she managed to
suppress her emotions with remarkable success, because when I was
finished, when I had told her about even the fragment of the doll’s
face that I’d found on her bed, she slipped out of her robe and,
although still stippled with gooseflesh, brought me into her light
again.
This time, when we made love, we were quieter than before, moved more
slowly, more gently than we had the first time. Although tender
before, the motion and the act were more tender now. We clung to each
other with love and need but also with desperation, because a new and
poignant appreciation of our isolation was upon us. Strangely, though
we shared a sense of being two condemned people with an executioner’s
clock ticking relentlessly, our fusion was sweeter than it had been
previously.
Or maybe that isn’t strange at all. Perhaps extreme danger strips us
of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more
intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what
we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and
purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take
joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the
future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and
the past.
If the world as we knew it was this minute being flushed away, then my
writing and Sasha’s songwriting didn’t matter. To paraphrase Bogart to
Bergman: In this crazy future tumbling like an avalanche straight at
us, the ambitions of two people didn’t amount to a hill of beans. All
that mattered was friendship, love, and surf.