Innocence

If possible, the snow fell heavier than before, as if the sky were emptying itself, so that when the last clouds shed all their substance, there would be nothing above us but blackness, no moon or stars, no sun in the morning. Right now, all was erratic wind and whirling snow, a beautiful chaos.

As we approached the Land Rover, Gwyneth said, “Death is here tonight. Not just with Simon. Death is with us. Do you feel him?”

I didn’t answer, because the answer wouldn’t have heartened her.

Once again, after six years, I had something to lose, and my fear was great.

50

THE NIGHT OF LIGHTNING, THE SKY ON FIRE, WHEN we stood exposed and survived…

During our time together, Father and I explored the city in many fierce storms, not just the one in which a dying man gave me a gold watch. On a night in July, in my sixteenth year, the heavens opened to release a sea, and we went abroad in our high boots, black hooded raincoats, and ski masks. We splashed through torrents and across flooded streets, as if we were mariners washed overboard but, by some sorcery, able to walk on water in search of our ship.

We stood in the great park, which the city surrounded, and all that would be warm and green under the sun was cold and black. The lamplight along the winding walkways silvered the rain and the faint low mist created when the droplets dashed themselves apart on the pavement. Those serpentine paths withered away past shrubs and trees, milky and vaporous before they turned out of sight. On that night, the pathways seemed mysterious and promised to lead to a revelation, but we knew them to their fullest lengths, and they did not lead anywhere except elsewhere in the park.

So near that the crash of thunder came simultaneously, a great blazing bolt of lightning sheared the sky above the mown meadow in which we stood, angled eastward, and struck the spire—which was a lightning rod—on the roof of a high-rise across the street from the park. The thousand lights of the building fluttered but did not go out, and I was certain that for a moment the spire had glowed red.

I was very afraid and wanted to take shelter, but Father assured me that we wouldn’t be taken by lightning, that no storm would finish us. If we were to die short of old age, the killing blows would come from weapons wielded by the hands of our fellow citizens. Although I did not believe that we enjoyed any dispensation from Nature’s rage, I reined in my fear as best I could and stood beside him, trusting in his wisdom.

The black shell of the sky cracked again and again, and some of the fissures zigzagged toward farther targets that we couldn’t see, while others seemed to leap from point to point in the heavens, as if there were gods who warred with one another.

Between cannonades of thunder, Father spoke of the power of nature: each storm bolt as hot as the molten sun, earthquakes that brought down buildings as if they were as fragile as termite mounds, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis. “Nature is an exquisite machine that is never violent except when contending forces within it need to be rebalanced. And then the violence is nearly always short-lived, a day or two of storm, ten minutes of tsunami, a minute for tectonic plates to shift and accommodate each other. Nature doesn’t make war for years on end, and she has no malice.”

Humankind, on the other hand… Well, that was a darker story. Adam and Eve, he said, hadn’t sought forbidden knowledge so much as they sought power, the power to be as gods. Great power could be a beautiful thing when men and women who had it were inclined to use it wisely and with kindness. But few were so inclined. When a leader used his power over the ruled for the purpose of settling scores and inflating his self-esteem, for remaking society according to his own grand designs, class warfare and genocide ensued.

I didn’t know his purpose in telling me this, and as I started to ask his meaning, one of the last bolts of the fierce display split a giant oak a hundred feet from us. Flames spurted out of the cleaved trunk, as if the core of the tree had always been molten but contained. Half the oak pulled up steaming roots and toppled, but the other half stood defiant, and the deluge quickly put out the fire.

When the pyrotechnics concluded and the sky brought forth only rain, Father said, “When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation, no time in all of history. Be ready to recognize the moment. Be always ready.”

I had many questions for him, but he would not answer them. He was finished with the subject, which clearly distressed him. He never spoke of it again in the remaining four years that we were together.