Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow #2
“Thank God,” Arthur said. “It’s about time. So what’s your plan to get rid of King Sorrow? I’m all ears.”
Colin shook his head. “Did someone call a family therapy session and forget to tell me?” He tossed back the last of his whiskey
and grinned, moving a cube of ice around in the pocket of his right cheek, and Gwen was struck with a sudden realization:
he was pissed. She had never seen him angry before, and he was seething.
Arthur was unperturbed. “My own view is that you can’t cure evil with more evil.
I was wrong to ever think we could—but in my defense, I was desperate and scared and didn’t really understand the stakes of the game.
What I think these days is that we should deal with our own sins first and worry about someone else’s later.
The world is full of dangerous people doing terrible things.
Including us. You want to reduce the sum total of suffering and slaughter in the world? We can start with our own dragon.”
“Did you ever consider that, by crossing names off the Enemies List, we might’ve already prevented half a dozen other 9/11s? I mean, it’s impossible to prove a counterfactual, but almost everyone we’ve eliminated has had Bin Laden’s potential
to perpetrate a mass atrocity.”
“Potential is another word for something that hasn’t happened.
Most civilized nations don’t execute people for what they might do.
And have you ever turned it around? How much have we raised the potential for a mass atrocity by hounding our targets to the edge of sanity before striking them down? Horation Matthews
might be dead, but the church to which he belonged is more popular than ever. One adherent of his fucked-up version of Christianity
walked into a Sikh temple three weeks ago with an assault rifle—I guess he couldn’t tell the difference between Sikhs and
Muslims—and would’ve butchered everyone there if his gun hadn’t jammed.”
Colin said, “On the subject of Osama bin Laden, we’ve moved past the question of his potential for violence. His potential has been realized in full. Are you saying you want to let him off?”
“If it’s up for debate, then sure, make it him,” Arthur said. “Better him than anyone else. Though it’ll backfire on us somehow.
Because it always does. You sow dragon’s teeth, all you get is more dragons.”
“But it’s not up for debate,” Donna said. “I already told you. It’s my turn, and I’m not taking requests. It would’ve been Van’s turn, but he’s dead, so it’s mine. And King Sorrow already came
to me, and I already told him who’s the lucky girl this year. It’s done.”
“The lucky . . . girl?” Gwen said. It really seemed to her she had heard wrong.
“Don’t worry about Osama, Colin,” Donna said. “The New World Order will sort him out when he’s not useful to them anymore. In the meantime, I’ve got other . . . fish to fry.” And for some reason, at the word fish, a dirty little smile twitched at the corners of her lips.
3.
Wednesday night, they had three cardiac cases (one fatal), a drunk who had put his fist through a plate-glass window and nearly
bled out, a woman who had washed down so many sleeping pills with booze she almost stopped breathing, and a five-year-old
who had swallowed the contents of a glow stick because his older brother said it would make him glow in the dark. A stroke,
a car accident, a man who slipped on some ice and fired a nail gun into his own foot. Another day of people who were tired,
angry, stupid, wasted, or sad, maiming themselves and others. Another day of the American diet delivering the bill.
Gwen had nearly nine hours in the meat wagon and was as efficient and steady as ever . . . but felt oddly at a remove from
herself. Her thoughts drifted to Donna’s smug, dirty smile. I’ve got other fish to fry, with an emphasis on the word fish that Gwen didn’t like. She found herself considering the way Colin sat behind the card table, looking at each of them in
turn, as unruffled as ever, smiling even, but with that glare in his eyes she didn’t think she had ever seen before. He wasn’t
used to being undermined and he didn’t like it.
They each had their turn, deciding who would die, but when she thought about it now, it seemed to her they mostly picked King Sorrow’s meal off a menu Colin had meticulously prepared on his own .
. . which really made every choice Colin’s choice.
There had been just two exceptions: when Gwen had decided on Llewellyn and when Donna had surprised them yesterday.
When Gwen picked at it, even the idea that they were choosing something from a menu was a bit of an illusion.
Each year, Colin had a way of steering things toward one name or another.
There was no standing against his sensible calm and his carefully gathered intelligence.
It was good of him—noble, even—to do their homework for them, Gwen supposed.
She wondered why it didn’t quite feel good.
Above all, she considered Arthur. She had known how to read him once. She had known how to fit her head just so against his
shoulder. Now, though, he was as far away as England, even when he was sitting next to her at the card table. She knew that
monks took a vow of silence, and sometimes it seemed he had taken one too, even though he still spoke as he liked, offered
his thoughts when asked for them. He had retreated to a kind of inner silence, a place of watchful stillness, like a cleric
in his cell with a book of prayer.
There was more of himself in what he wrote. She had tracked down and read many of his essays. They had been written for other
medieval scholars like himself, and they weren’t exactly fun, not the sort of thing Gwen usually read for pleasure (she read Oprah books, mostly, and Patricia Cornwell, and sometimes,
when she was feeling lonely and blue, a smutty romance with smoldering men in kilts). But she liked the way he wrote a sentence.
“Dragons are not hatched from eggs, of course, but from imaginations, from rotten dreams, from night terrors.” That was one
she remembered. And “We long for dragons—if only everything we hate could be made to wear scales and be pierced through the
heart with a silver sword.” And “Courage can be found in the humblest of places: a cup of tea, a woman’s warm laughter, a
homemade chicken salad sandwich on soft brown bread.” She thought, when he spoke of the tea and the laughter and the homemade
sandwiches, he was speaking of her, and her love for him swelled so much it hurt, made an ache behind the breastbone. Of course,
there was a lot of other stuff in there, mostly about Jung, and early Catholic scholars, and the Saxons and whatnot. But she
liked when he wrote about courage and chicken salad sandwiches.
She was with Arthur in her mind all through work and after.
It was full dark, no stars, when she drove back to Gogan, although it was barely after 5:00 p.m. She was going to see him in Brunswick later, for drinks with the others, at a bar called Shepherds and Sheep—Colin said they had the deepest wine list on the whole coast, a fact that mattered only to Colin.
She meant to run home first and wash off the smell of the ambulance.
She had a black dress with golden flowers on it that she had bought in October and hadn’t worn and hadn’t consciously admitted she was saving for Arthur.
The thought of the dress, of wearing it for him, so distracted her, she almost drove by him, almost didn’t see Arthur Oakes
at all. Her route home took her past the old factory where once, in the sixties and seventies, they had made canoes. The long
hill behind it had been the sledding place in Gogan for as long as there had been a Gogan.
Her headlights swept across the scrubby gravel parking lot, behind the abandoned brick factory buildings, as she made the
turn onto North Hill Road. And there he was, standing behind the Ford Explorer he had rented for the week. He had the back
open and was pulling something out—a spare tire, Gwen thought. He was changing a flat, then.
She reversed back up the road and into the lot. His rental was still running, and he waited in the red glare of the taillights,
wreathed by exhaust. He stood behind a fat inner tube that had to be five feet across. It must’ve been a squeeze to get it
in the back of the Explorer.
Gwen met him in the space between her car and his. The cold stung her bare face.
“What are you doing out here, professor?” she asked. “Studying on ways to break a kneecap?”
He adjusted his colorful Nepalese cap. “Does that happen much here? Do you get a lot of calls out to this hill?”
“Last winter a kid named Timmy Reynolds went into some half-buried chain-link fence down there and got a steel wire right
through the cheek. We had to use bolt clippers to cut him free.”
“Good thing I’ve got a trained medical professional handy then.” He considered the hill. “If you really want to be sure I get to the bottom safely, we could go together. You can sit in front and be my human shield. What do you say, old chum?”
She took the tube away from him and bounced it a time or two. “Where did you find this thing?”
“I was driving back to the hotel and—you know that inlet, about a mile from The Briars? There’s an old windmill near it, like
something out of a Dutch painting? This inner tube was just out on the ice, no one anywhere around. I don’t know why someone
would’ve just left it. I thought maybe it was a sign.”
“Do you spend a lot of your time looking for signs?” Gwen asked.
She was joking, but he only nodded, yes, gave no sign he knew he was being teased.
She shook her head at him, as if to say there was no helping some people. Then she turned and crunched through the snow, carrying
the tube to the edge of the drop. They had the hill to themselves—it was too cold for sledding, really, the sort of cold that