Mysterium

She was away often enough to establish her presence in the civilians’ compound. In the evenings she came back. When Dex was awake, she talked to him. She asked him questions about the book, Huckleberry Finn.

The decision Huck Finn makes about Jim, she explained, represents a well-known heresy. To say Well, then, I’ll go to Hell … to imply that there exists some moral standard higher than Church and Law, and that this standard is accessible even to an ignorant peasant boy… that Huck Finn might have a firmer grasp of good and evil than, for instance, a Proctor of the Bureau… well, people had burned for less.

Dex said, “Do you think it’s a heresy?”

“Of course it is. Do you mean, do I think it’s true?” She lowered her voice and eyes. “Of course it’s true. That’s why I’m here.”

∞

A week passed. The snow mounted on the sill of the window and the talk between Linneth and Dex gathered a similar weight. She brought a paraffin heater to make his small rooms bearably warm, though she still had to wrap herself in sweaters and Dex in blankets. And she brought food: pails of stew, or bread with crumbling wedges of cheese.

Linneth talked about herself as the snow sifted against the window glass with a sound that made her think of feathers and diamonds. She told him about her childhood, when the forests near the family’s stone house had seemed enchanted during the icebound winter days; about mugs of mulled wine, devotions in mysterious Latin, storybooks wrapped in red paper and imported from the pagan states of southern Europe and Byzantium. Her father was bearded, devout, aloof, and learned. Her mother told secrets. Something lives in everything, her mother said, if only you look for it.

When the idolatry laws were passed and the Proctors came to take her father away, he went wordlessly. A month later they came back for Linneth’s mother, who screamed all the way down the drive to the boxy black truck. The Proctors took Linneth, too, and sent her to the Renunciates, until a Christian aunt in Boston bought her free and arranged for her education, the best education money could buy.

Dex Graham talked about a wholly different childhood: suburban, fast-paced, suffused by the glow of television. It was a freer existence than Linneth could imagine; but narrow, too, in its way. Where Dex came from, no one talked much about life or death or good or evil— except, Linneth pointed out, Mr. Mark Twain; but he was of an older tradition. Was it possible, she wondered, to suffocate in triviality? In Dex’s world one could spend one’s entire life in a blaze of the most florid triviality. It blinds you, he said, but it doesn’t keep you warm.

She asked if he had been married. He said yes, his wife had been Abigail and his son had been David. They were dead. They died in a fire. Their house had burned down.

“Were you there when it happened?”

Dex looked at the ceiling. After a long time he said, “No.”

Then: “No, that’s a lie. I was there. I was in the house when it caught fire.” She had to lean closer to hear him. “I used to drink. Sometimes I drank to excess. So one night I came home late. I went to sleep on the sofa because I didn’t want to disturb Abby. When I woke up a couple of hours later the air was full of smoke. There were flames running up the stairs. Abby and David were up there. I tried to go after them but I couldn’t get through. Burned the hair off my face. The fire was too hot. Or I was too scared of it. Neighbors called the fire department and a guy with an oxygen mask dragged me out of the house. But the question is—in the end, nobody could say what started the fire. The insurance people investigated but it was inconclusive. So I keep thinking, did I knock over a lamp? Leave a cigarette burning? The kind of thing a drunk does.” He shook his head. “I still don’t know whether I killed them.”

He looked at her as if he regretted saying it, or feared what she might say; so she didn’t speak, only took his hand and touched a cooling cloth to his forehead.

∞

She came to the apartment every day, even when his recovery made it obvious she wasn’t needed. She liked being here.

The room Dex Graham occupied was sparsely furnished but oddly pleasant, especially now that the punitive week had passed and the lights were back on. It was a cloistered space, a bubble of warmth in the snow that seemed never to stop falling. Dex tolerated her presence and even appeared to welcome it, though he was often subdued, often quiet. There was a dimple of pink flesh where the bullet had entered his arm.

The wound still hurt him. He favored the arm. She had to mind the injury when she came into bed with him.