“A few who were crowded around kneeled down to attend to the boy. A woman made a soft cooing sound and touched his head. I looked at the cloth-wrapped object in his hands. I carefully began to open it. The cloth was oily and filthy, as if it had passed between a thousand hands. When I finished unwrapping the thing, what emerged from the small corpse was this: a crude handwritten letter. On paper.”
Peter coughs as if his ribs are coming up. Leone shoves a cup of water to his lips. He continues. “I confess, I forgot that dead child at my feet immediately. A letter! Suddenly I was flooded with words we’d all long since forgotten, except as symbols: Paper. Writing. Books. Libraries. I started to shake. A crowd pushed in around me. I could smell human sweat, and something else—pulp, I think. I held my breath and peeled it all the way open. But you already know what was inside,” Peter says. “In place of a signature, the letter closed, ‘To you I give this Earth.’
“Some were eager to charge forgery, for anyone could be anyone at this point in history, identity being as mutable and reproducible as language or image, and everyone knew there were pits of old realities left scattered about the world in hidden and forsaken places, so it could have easily been some kind of trompe l’oeil or worse. But the letter contained things other than what may or may not have been writ in your hand.
“As I stood shaking with the thing in my hands, several of the people gathered around me saw what I saw, and gasped into the semidarkness. Inside the letter was nothing less than a human artifact: a lock of hair, so thick and black it curled like a giant ink comma before them. When I looked up, I saw one man rub his hairless head slowly and close his eyes.
“I thought for a moment I could smell the letter—something about rain. Something about sleep. We were afraid to touch it. We stared at it as if it were something sacred.
“For it was not just a thick lock of silkblack hair, miracle enough. The thick black lock of hair had a fastening of sorts. Looped around the hair to keep it intact, curled tight, as if someone had waited for the rigor to achieve perfect pliability before carefully molding it, curling it into a seashell spiral, was a pinkie finger. Only the slightest idea of life left in its grayblue skin . . .”
He pauses. He stares at Joan. “We made an acquiescent vow. We would from that day forward cease making crude, mistaken images of you. The CIEL’s plan—to ravage what was left of Earth and us—was a hair’s breadth away from success. If you were out there, you were worth finding. I’ve given this end of my life to finding you.
“When that boy arrived with your hair,” he says, winding his fingers into her long black hair, “and your finger, I was shocked, but not beyond belief. As a boy, I’d seen you walk out of fire in a wood. I’d seen you walk from the sea, glowing like the aurora borealis. I’d fought alongside you and watched you not die and not die when others—anyone else—would have. And here you are. Maybe it is enough. To see that you are still alive.”
Leone swallows. It seems the only sound for miles.
All three of them know it is not enough. Their reunion has only one aim.
Leone rises and walks a small distance away. As she cracks shrub twigs into the fire, the smell of sage and moss and peat fills the cavern. Peter stretches up and cranes his neck to see Leone. “I missed her,” he says. “Believe it or not.”
Joan looks up at him and almost smiles.
Above them, firelight paints the cave ceiling and walls. Some of the worms Joan placed on Peter’s forehead trickle down toward his eyes like little black tears. He brushes one away.
“It’s okay,” she says, “let them. They eat all sorts of bacteria.”
“What difference does that make?” her brother asks her.
And he is right. None. There is only one reason for him to be alive in that cave with them, and any time wasted on childhood nostalgia is wasted energy.
Joan looks over at Leone. Get his story, her face reminds Joan. Stories save lives. They give shape to action.
Joan suddenly hates herself for doing this to him. What can he possibly tell her that she doesn’t already know?
Leone brings over a cup of hot water filled with ginger root and belladonna. She pulls Peter back up onto her thighs while Joan feeds him sips of the hot liquid.
“Thank you,” he says. “There isn’t much time, apparently, and you’re still missing an important part of this story. Until now, it was a tragedy.” He pauses. “Come on now, don’t look so glum. I already died, remember? Besides. I have a present for you.” Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he buries his hand deep within the pocket of his pants, searching for something. When he brings his hand out between them, Joan sees a spider, a long-legged silvery little thing.
“What the hell is that?” Leone interjects, hovering over his hand and squinting.
“This has traveled a long way to find you,” he says. He reaches his hand out toward Joan, and she in turn opens and offers her hand, and the tiny silver spider crawls the bridge between them until it sits in her palm.
“Now let me tell you what I know,” he continues, “before my . . . what should we call this? Before my second leaving?”
Joan laughs. Laughter and tragedy, two sides to the same face.
Chapter Eighteen
Once, when they were children—maybe when Peter was seven, maybe younger—Peter had developed a fever so intense they thought he might die. When the doctors came to their home, they discovered that his brain was swelling. His skin grew covered with palm-size scarlet blotches, like red shadows of leaves. Then all of his hair fell out. Encephalitis. In the days just before his fever lifted he’d been delirious, and he told Joan that he’d seen her turn to fire and ascend into the night sky, like a long-missing star returning to its constellation.