Lyla’s eyes widened in terror as she looked past him. A line of dull red had appeared across the steel shields closing the window. Beyond, no doubt, a hastily-sumpolice skimmer, cutting through with a thermic lance.
“Harry!” She tugged at his arm but he was as immoas a statue. His droning voice continued.
“-it was doomed from the start and thereafter it was inevitable-”
“Harry!”
The steel parted, and through the fine opening a cloud of pale vapor oozed.
“But they can’t just gas us without talking to us!” Lyla cried. “They-”
through drought and wildfire and bad seasons for game, ice and flood and landslide, plague and phylloxera and the eruption of the friendly neighborhood volcano;
Aryans and Hyksos and Huns, Romans and Visigoths and Mongols, Moors and Christians and Saracens, Turks and Zulus and British, Americans and Germans and French; the desecration of the holy places, the billeting of the incomprehensible troops, the silent horrid wafting of the sicknesses that ride the mists of night; huddled in a draughty cave and the fire out in the midst of winter; huddled in the tube-stations wincing as the bombs crash down; huddled in the luxury ranch-style homes of Montego Bay knowing there will be no mercy for a skin that’s merely tanned; to the music of air-raid sirens; to the drum-beat of waves on the beach; to the melancholy choir of the wolves; one keeps going somehow, one tries to say “Shibagainst all the odds, and somehow one keeps going, one at least; escaping the line before the gas-chamber door one Jew who will remember; escaping the cells beneath the Colosseum one Christian who won’t forget; escaping the mud-fields of the Marne one Tommy and one poilu and one Boche; somehow, one at least keeps going; fighting like rats over a crust in the wreckage of Hiro rising up on one knee with the other smashed to give a salute in the ruins of Dresden; despising the diplodocus, the triceratops, and the smiforgetting how many millions of years they bred their kind; imagining our great-great-great-grandchildren as pilof the faith with Bible in one hand and cross in the other; incapable of envisaging the wheel of a fast car and a skirt lifted nearly to the hip; one keeps going on the thin nourishment of illusion like watery soup; a Hundred Years War or a Six Days War; a vendetta from generation to generation or a transient moment of fury; one limps but one keeps going somehow; the army comes over the hill raping and slaughtering but one keeps going; the priest casts lots in a bad season to name the virgins who shall die on the altar but one keeps going; the torch is set to the house and the long trek starts to the unknown village with what possessions one can carry but one keeps going; somehow one keeps going; somehow; where a not buried not-Caesar bled, some long-forgotpeasant, there’s a rose; where mute inglorious Miltons held their tongues there runs a concrete road; where followers-not-leaders breathed their last a fused glass disc extends like the mirror of some distorting telelooking forward into a fearful space-time; and nothing grows on glass; except a little pond-slime on the walls of the home aquarium for snails to crop, enviable snails whose world is small and whose house is on the back; not shattered; not open to the winds with the ceiling tilted at a crazy angle and the fireplace full of cold ashes; not targeted in the gunsight of the sniper across the street; not marked on the X Patriots’ master plan as wholly inhabited by blanks; not mortgaged, not lacking tiles from the roof; somehow nonetheless one keeps going; until one comes to a sign that says stop, and being obedient, one.
They’ve already started to build the sign.
The necessary materials have been around for a long time.
Oh-years and years.
They just needed someone to come along and drive a few nails.
Anyway, one was bound to get tired eventually.
Conroy’s flight from Manitoba landed at oh-nine-fifty but he wasn’t passed through customs and immigration until ten forty-three despite being the possessor of a United States passport. Passports were a devalued cursubject to bargaining.