The engines’ roar rises an octave as the plane accelerates. Alarmed, at first, she relaxes into it, and lets the g-force be a blanket. They’re probably over Utah—Deseret, now, since the fed stopped caring—and approaching the sound barrier. She imagines the jet’s sonic boom rolling over miles of dark, empty desert, echoing in the burned-out streets of Provo.
As sleep comes she remembers going to see a shuttle launch at a military airfield in Texas, out where there was nothing for miles around; the deafening pulse of the fusion boosters, the shock waves flattening the dry grass in expanding concentric rings, how she’d narrowed her eyes against the hot wind full of grit, the poison yellow sky of the rising shuttle’s dawn.
*
When she wakes it’s morning and out the window there’s water of a remarkable Aegean blue. Silver coffee service beside her, and gold-rimmed porcelain cups—it must have been laid out by an unobtrusive drone, of which there is now no sign.
An island appears, mostly bare rock and brown earth but still it has a promise and a mystery, and she wants to go there and walk on its beaches, but then it’s gone.
The engines’ roar is lower now. She sees boats down on the water, and a little Cessna passes below on a perpendicular course. The day is bright and cloudless; it’s hard to feel unhappy.
A low chime from unseen speakers. “You are now approaching … Patmos … this plane’s final destination,” says a supple and deeply relaxed female voice that could be read as either synthesized or extraordinarily stoned. “We respectfully advise that you buckle your seat belt and remain seated until the plane lands.”
The jet is low over the water now, the unbroken waves visible as a succession of ridges, low enough for her to see the fishermen on the boats, and now the jet’s shadow racing over white beaches, vineyards, jagged cliffs.
*
There’s a motorboat waiting for her at the beach by the airstrip.
The skipper is fiftyish, worn, obviously a local. He speaks no English. The day is beautiful, their wordless passage like something in a dream.
He points out what must be Iliou’s villa as it comes into view on its cliff by the sea.
She wades through ankle-deep water to the beach, shoes in hand. The villa is more fortress than chateau and looks like it’s been there for thousands of years. Sun on brown stone, smell of hot dust. It’s not yet midday but she wants to lie down in the shade and go to sleep—booze, she remembers, makes jet lag worse. She’s never flown supersonic before—what does that do to the hours lost and gained? She’ll postpone that calculation, she decides. She hears the boat’s engine behind her as it pulls away.
A woman her own age opens the villa’s door, smiles and in lightly accented English says, “You must be Irina. How was your flight?” Irina has the sense she’s being welcomed to the woman’s own home, then recognizes her from Constantin’s borrowed memories as his sister Fabienne.
Within are courtyards and a succession of gardens, and with the dust and the hard shadows and the fragments of sculpture she feels like she’s walked into a de Chirico painting. Fabienne seems kind, and gives her water while maintaining a sparkling flow of chatter about the island and the weather while asking nothing personal and saying nothing of substance, and her bright eyes and firm skin tell Irina that Fabienne, too, is a patron of the Mayo, or one of its handful of equivalents.
An approaching racket and then three children run out through an archway. She’s not good at guessing children’s ages but they might be between five and twelve, and the smallest one grabs Fabienne’s leg, grinning wildly, and clings for dear life. “My little monsters,” Fabienne says. “I’ll just disentangle myself and then I’ll take you to my father.” The children scramble off as an au pair comes through an archway remonstrating in Greek and Irina wonders what it’s like to grow up there, how villa and family would be taken for granted, as inevitable as the sea.
*
Iliou is sitting alone in a walled garden before a table with a chessboard, a book and a battered golden crown. The cyclical churring of the cicadas could be the soundtrack for a horror movie. Iliou is wearing a cardigan though the day is hot and he has a belly, which seems strange at first, but of course the physical vanity of the elderly rich is less pronounced here, and in fact outside of the U.S. generally, with the obvious exception of Brazil. The book is closed and he’s staring into space or at the stonework of the walls, and she has the sense that he’s always here, that he knows intimately how the light changes with the passing of the day, and then without haste his gaze turns to her. Fabienne comes back with little cups of aromatic coffee and he says, “Ms. Sunden, thank you for coming. I hope you’ll be my guest for as long as you’d like, and I’m sure you want to rest after your journey, but, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to talk first. The clinic told me that when my son died a lady friend was with him, and from your email I gather that was you.”
She says that it was, and explains how she’d shared his death with him.
“And how was it for him at the end?” He seems intent, neutral, his tone that of a scientist asking about the deep secrets of the cosmos.
“There was no pain,” she says. “The drugs work. And he was confused … It was like a random procession through his memory. But he knew I was with him, that I was there with him completely. He couldn’t feel most of his body, in the last minutes, but he was aware of mine, and at the very end he mistook it for his own.”
“It sounds like you bled together,” he says, which could be read two ways, both true.
“We did,” she says. “Actually, I have some of his memories. Sometimes I remember things that happened to him, and think they happened to me. Usually I notice, but sometimes they slip by, I think. It’s like I’ve incorporated his soul in some small degree.” She falls silent, unsure if this is the best or the worst thing to have said to her dead friend’s father.
“So in a sense you are my son.”
It’s one of those phrases she’d never really expected to hear. She has a sudden fear that she’s been misleading him, but still she says, “Yes, to some nonzero, extremely small degree.” She knows he’s an engineer by training, and he seems like the kind of man who would enjoy hearing a mathematician’s turn of phrase from a good-looking woman. “When I look at snow on mountains I sometimes think how I’d ski them, even though I’ve barely skied. It’s the surfacing of his point of view.”
“Does it feel like an invasion?”