Innocence

A great city is the hope of mankind. This isn’t to say that the future lies in cities. A whistle-stop is also the hope of mankind. A humble village, a county seat, a state capitol, a great metropolis: Each is the hope of mankind on Earth. As is any neighborhood. A life in isolation might be a life in preparation, as mine seemed now to be, but it is not a life complete until it is lived with others who complete it. Although I had been an outsider, welcome nowhere in its boroughs, the city was home to me, its people my people even if they did not wish to be, and this fast-falling snow might as well have been ashes from a crematorium in a death camp, its descent a piercing sadness.

The nameless girl lay blanketed and comatose in the back of the Land Rover. Gwyneth drove. I worried. Worried and accused myself for not using Telford’s gun on him, and prayed to hold off despair.

Gwyneth said, “How often do you get a cold?”

In our current circumstances, the question seemed curious. “What do you mean?”

“Only one of those words had more than a single syllable.”

“How often do I get a cold?”

“Is there any word in that you need defined?”

“I don’t get colds,” I said.

“How often have you had the flu?”

“Never. How would I possibly catch a cold or the flu? I’ve had virtually no contact with people, sick people or otherwise. I’ve lived almost in isolation.”

“What about the man you called Father? Colds, the flu?”

“Not in the time I knew him. He had no more contact with people than I did.”

“Toothache?”

“No. We floss and brush. We’re very diligent about it.”

“That must be miracle floss, a magic brush. Not one cavity?”

“What is this about?”

“Ever cut yourself?”

“Of course.”

“Ever had an infected cut?”

The Clears distracted me from answering her. We were still in a residential neighborhood, where they could be seen from time to time, as they could be seen anywhere, but suddenly they appeared in numbers. One in hospital blues crossed a lawn where, in the early hours of the storm, children had rolled together a snowman, using discs of reflective orange plastic for its eyes, a tennis ball for its nose, and what appeared to be the keys from a toy piano for its teeth. Another in whites passed through the wall of a house and came toward the street, leaving no rubble and bearing no wounds from his passage, and two in greens glided down from a roof to drift across a yard, all of them moving atop the mantle of snow rather than through it. On a branch high in a bare-limbed tree, a glowing woman in blues stood as if sentinel, and as the Land Rover approached, she turned her head to stare down at us, and in spite of the distance, though being in no danger of coming eye-to-eye, I looked away, as Father had told me always to do.

Gwyneth said, “How long do you need to ponder it?”

“Ponder what?”

“Ever had an infected cut?” she repeated.

“Not with Bactine and iodine and bandages.”

“You’re very careful about your health.”

“I have to be. I can never go to a doctor.”

“What do you fear, Addison?”

“Losing you,” I said at once.

“What did you fear most before you ever met me?”

“Losing Father.”

“And what else?”

“Father being beaten and badly hurt. Being beaten myself.”

“There must be more you feared.”

“Seeing other people hurt. A man shot in the back gave me this Rolex. It was the worst thing to watch him die. Sometimes I’m afraid to read the newspapers in the library because they contain so many stories of suffering.”

“Do you fear the policemen who killed your father?”

“No. I don’t fear anyone until I see murder in his face.”

We still hadn’t talked much about Father. I hadn’t told her that the men who killed him were police officers.

Accustomed to the prevalence of mysteries in the world and still reluctant to ask questions that, though she had professed her love, might cause her to withdraw, I didn’t inquire how she had come upon that information.

“What do you hate?” she asked.

I thought a moment. “Only what I fear.”

“What you fear. That’s a most unusual answer in this world of hatred.”

Before I could consider what she said, we turned a corner onto a major avenue, drove through three Clears, and came upon a gathering of their kind that reminded me of that night five years earlier, a year after Father died, when I encountered the grand spectacle that I called the Convocation. Now, the city lay dimmed by the seething veils of winter, and the high-rises tiered away into the obscuring weather until those beyond a block might have been only shapes in a murky mirror, mere reflections of nearer buildings. Through the white gloom, standing in air and descending slowly like glowing ornaments being hung upon the night by invisible hands, came Clears of both sexes and all races, in their white shoes and white or blue or green uniforms, from whatever other dimension and into ours. Upon touching down, each of them at once walked away, with the brisk purpose that perhaps hospital personnel displayed on a busy night in the emergency room.