Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

that Addie sees her Byron on the stand, and notices the feather, green against the gilded page, and opens to the place it marks.

’Tis vain—my tongue cannot impart

My almost drunkenness of heart,

When first this liberated eye

Survey’d Earth, Ocean, Sun, and Sky,

As if my spirit pierced them through,

And all their inmost wonders knew!

One word alone can paint to thee

That more than feeling—I was Free!

It is “The Bride of Abydos,” the verse that Percival prevailed on Jarry to recite to her on that first day, but there are these lines, too:

E’en for thy presence ceased to pine;

The World—nay, Heaven itself was mine….

When Addie reads this, she has a premonition that darkens into certainty when Tenah comes to tell her Jarry’s gone.

Part III

THE HOT-WET PHASE

FORTY-TWO

The old man—was it Mel?—was whispering in Ransom’s ear…. And now his voice to me was like a stream scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide…. Straining to make it out, Ran, in the driver’s seat, jerked awake in time to see the black dog in the head lightbeams. He swerved to miss it, and then he saw the tree. Holy shit! he thought as it loomed up. Holy shit! The oak spread its black arms. This can’t be it? he thought. His stomach did a pressure drop, and at the same time, he felt strangely light. When else was death going to strike but when you least expected it? What other rabbit had he thought to pull out of this hat? So this was where the clues had been leading all along, this, the journey he’d been on!

But there’s still so much I want to do, he thought. And Nemo said, not without a certain tenderness, But, really, Ran, like what? Something in him deflated then. True, he thought, too true. But on the other hand, Fuck you! As the Odyssey took wing, something else in Ran came to. He screamed the words aloud. “Fuck you!” he roared. “I want to see my children grown! At their weddings, I want to dance beneath the tent! I want to see Claire’s face when it grows old! I want to hold her wrinkled hand when I go out! The last thing I want to see when I leave this shithole world is those crème caramel eyes I helped to burn and know we made it anyway, know that we outlived it all, even our differences! And on top of that, you mocking prick, I’m going to finish ‘Nemo’s Submarine’!” Ran, aloud or in his thoughts—it no longer mattered much—said or would have liked to say all this. And Nemo answered, not without a certain tenderness, a chillier, more ethereal strain, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” singing now, doing not just Mick but the whole London Bach Choir, all the parts in the chorale that stood in Ransom’s mind beside the Ninth, an Ode to something, but not Joy. Somehow, that song was in the carousel as it came round, cueing in the changer as it changed, when all the other songs that Ransom Hill had loved, including those he wrote, went down.

The impact, when it came, was hard, but brief—hardly worth mentioning, in light of everything. Maybe, Ran thought, as he bowed his head to it, he’d underestimated God a bit.

“Where the fuck’s my airbag, though?” A consumer to the end, the question suddenly occurred to him. “Old Silver! You sonuvabitch! You sold the module on the aftermarket, didn’t you?” Ran felt a certain grudging admiration, and then somehow he was outside the car. How? Logic, continuity—neither, now, was a high priority, and Ransom understood they’d ever only seemed to be. He understood a lot of things. Not the main one, though. It was daylight. How suddenly it came! There were people on the road, a stream, like refugees, all headed in the same direction, moving fast and purposefully. Ran felt inclined to join them, felt the lonesome, longing ache you have in autumn, when you hear the honk of geese. But there, again, was Mel…was it Mel? And there was someone with him.

“Delores, is that you?” he said. She didn’t look quite like herself, taller, with deeper hollows under her high cheekbones. Her eyes were marbled and opaque, like a poached fish’s.

Standing at the bottom of the tree in a forbidding pose, she pointed back to where he’d been, looking none too pleased.

“You’re dead, though, aren’t you?”

Like a specter in a silent film, she moved her lips, and Ransom heard, as through a muffled wad of gauze, a sound, but not a word, and when he turned his head, he saw the Odyssey lying over on its side, with one front wheel still turning, and his own body slumped at the wheel, clearly dead, then, clap, he was back inside….

There was the airbag after all, clammily deployed, like a condom engineered for single use. There was something burbling like a stream, and he smelled gas, tasted something sweet and salty on his lips and then his tongue, coming not thinly, in a stream.

Caught in his shoulder harness like a paratrooper in a treetop over St. Mère Église, Ran reached for the driver’s door above. With his left hand, he tried to shove it up like the too heavy iron hatch of a too heavy iron submarine, but he lacked the proper angle and, finally, the will to open it. So, Ransom, not quite flying, not quite on the ground, suspended, rather, in his fall and not too terribly alarmed, simply closed his eyes and fell asleep.

When he opened them again, it was morning.

He did a quick internal diagnostic, like an astronaut ticking off the items on his screen. Neck, a little stiff. Hands, check. Feet, still there. Otherwise, all systems green.

With his left hand, he reached right and pressed his seat belt tab. It didn’t release.

“Don’t guess you should complain, old man,” he told himself.