CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Julian's eyes flicked open to see the canopy of leaves above him, the light still coming in from a darkening sky that, he estimated, was in its last half-hour of light. The air hummed with that peculiar summer sound, rustling leaves and nostalgia. He'd been sleeping soundly for close to six hours. No dreams, no tossing, no turning. Just a deep, aquatic sleep. It was the longest continuous amount of time he had slept since he could remember. Months, probably, perhaps a year. He should have been stiff from sleeping in the mossy crevasse, but the rock had made way for him, it had formed to his body, as if it were built for him. This rock, cloven in two and covered in just the right amount of earth and vegetation.

It was warm out, but not hot, and he could feel that his body was about to begin losing heat, that shivering, while not an imminent threat, was possible. The frogs chirped in the pond down the hill, and a small swarm of gnats gathered above his head, a visible cloud that had yet to descend on him full force. He swatted at something mid-bite on his neck, and pulled his hand away to study a squashed mosquito, with a smear of his own blood on the heel of his hand, the red and brown and the delicate lines of an insect leg, a wing, proboscis. He picked the dead bug between the nails of his other hand and held it up for inspection.

I should be thinking about life and death, he thought to himself, about cycles, and about sustenance, how the essence of one becomes the lifeblood of another: but I am not thinking about that. I'm thinking about what an idiot I am. He remembered, too clearly, the activities that had worn him out and led to his first proper sleep in months.

What am I doing out in the woods, like a teenager, with sticks and leaves in my hair? He stood up, slapped at the leaves and moss and other assorted vegetation and minerals clinging to his pants, tried to make himself presentable – though for whom he wasn't sure.

He'd slept with his brother's wife.

He continued slapping at his legs, trying to get the last of the earth off of him, as if he could brush away that act with his hands. He brushed and swatted frantically. He realized he was trembling.

He screwed his eyes tightly closed, as if he'd been stabbed, as if a bone just snapped.

What would happen if Evan found out? The thought was too terrible to contemplate, but he couldn't help himself. He imagined violence, tears, shouting, punches thrown. Worse. The look of betrayal on his brother's face. That look was what he feared the most. It's not as if they had much to hold them together in the best of times, they'd barely spoken in five years. Evan had always resented Julian, and Julian had never been able to understand his brother. Julian had tried to make peach, he felt, over the past few days, but it was just too late now for these two men. This last affront, this colossal error, were it to come out, would be the end. A final, brutal, horrendous punctuation mark for which Julian was entirely responsible.

What am I doing? He thought to himself. What have I been doing?

He thought back to the last week, the last month, and he couldn't account for himself. He didn't recognize the man who slept with his brother's wife. What was he doing out here? Why hadn't Dominique come out yet?

He let a loud stage groan come from deep within him. He was conscious of himself acting the part of the conflicted man, could not stop the theatre, and wondered why it was that we stepped back from ourselves sometimes, in crises like this one, unsure of how we are supposed to act, what we are supposed to feel. He had felt the same way at his father's funeral, and when his team had won the hockey championship in school, after his first publication in Nature. These grand moments are supposed to feel significant, and we are supposed to react in accordance with that significance. And yet often it seems like we don't know what we are supposed to do, don't feel the way we think we should.

Maybe it would be easier, he thought, if he and his brother never saw each other again. It would be easier, yes. He should leave here, leave his brother and his young wife and let them sort out whatever was wrong between them.

When he thought back on whatever it was that led to her taking off her clothes, he had trouble imagining how he could have avoided it. He should have done something differently, he wanted to have done it all differently, but he had been pulled too strongly to her, as terrible as it was there was something inevitable about it.

At least they weren't going to do it again. It was a one time event.

He wondered when she had decided. Maybe right at the beginning, right when he'd seen her with her suitcases and asked her, in French, what she wanted. At that moment, maybe, their destiny was cast, their movements determined, their one-time (yes, one-time, that was it, no more) transgression ordained. They had been put on this course, with no choice, no way out. How could they have avoided it? How could they have done differently?

And when did he decide, not quite consciously, but when did he know (even if he did not acknowledge it in his own mind till much later), when did he know that he could, and probably would, sleep with Annabel?

That night maybe, when she was sleeping in the chair in the living room. When he had told her how happy he was that they had come, which had not been a lie, it was true, that night, he had been filled with joy at Evan's presence, thrilled at her presence. Thrilled that they were both here.

He imagined, again, what he would say to his brother if this came out. Tried to imagine the words: nothing serious, mistake, a stupid error, it meant nothing to either of us... and all those words rang empty to him, they were all lies in their way, because if any of them were true, they wouldn't have done it. What would be honest? How could this be explained? I like your wife's tits? I was horny? She was horny? We couldn't help ourselves? We are weak? We are humans, and like Adam, like Eve, we are fallen? Your wife is an evangelical, and God has spoken to me, and still the two of us could not avoid the apple. If Eve couldn't; if Adam couldn't, how do you expect us to?

And anyway, Evan, I have heard the voice of the Universe, and hark: all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

No, this wouldn't be well. Sleeping with Annabel was not encompassed in the all-encompassing "all" that shall be well.

If Evan found out, nothing would make things well. And there was nothing Julian could do about it.

He thought again about these visions, about the typewriter and the pages that had accumulated on the floor. He had a sudden need to read those pages, to see what he was writing, to understand what he'd been doing out here.

The only thing to do about Annabel was to keep quiet. A confession would help no one. Not Evan. Not Annabel. Not him. Not Dominique. The only reason to confess would be out of some self-centred desire to absolve himself, to cleanse his soul of the transgression... confession would be a selfish act of benefit to no one but himself. And absolution would not come, cleansing of this kind of sin was impossible. Confession would do more damage than good.

Oh shit shit shit shit shit. He laughed at himself, a hateful kind of laugh. The idiot who speaks to God. When was the last time he had laughed? He could not remember.

Julian started towards the house. As the light continued to drain out of the sky, the trees and rocks grew around him. The certainty associated with them in the daytime (this is here, that ends there) was quickly receding into probabilities. He was cautious with his footfalls, probing the forest floor in front of him with a toe, hanging onto thin tree trunks and branches as he walked. He could see the light of the house through the trees, and he remembered the feeling as a boy, walking up the road at night, watching the bright, silent action inside the house, his mother in her apron washing dishes in the kitchen, his father sitting in his big easy chair, book in hand, listening to a baseball game floating through the sky over the flat AM airwaves.

Yet there was no mother, no father to be seen in the house now. They were gone, first one then the other, whatever them meant, that collection of memories, and molecules, the accomplishments and idiosyncrasies, the flesh and synapses and white and red blood cells, the protein receptors and neurotransmitters, the marrow and history and friendships and ideas and fingernails and desires. They were all gone now, nothing but water vapour floating through the atmosphere and carbon particles mixed in the soil.

Water vapour, carbon, and whatever was left in Julian. And in Evan.

He was standing just outside the garden, and instead of continuing up to the house, he opened the gate and entered.

He knelt down and examined the tiny green sprouts pushing up through the soil. He brushed his fingers against the delicate green, these tiny lives reaching up to the sky. Such a simple, miraculous thing: with a bit of dampness, some sun, and millions of years of coded information, the grains knew what to do and how to do it. There were no dilemmas here, no mistakes, no brother's wives. No visions of God.

He wondered where Evan and Annabel were – in bed already perhaps. He hoped that Annabel had the wisdom to keep her mouth shut. To keep her sins between her and her evangelical God where they belonged. The Catholics, for all their faults, had it right. Let God and the parish priest hear of your missteps, mortal and otherwise, let those two professional absolvers have the task of hearing and forgiving, in the quiet privacy of a confessional. No need to parade this stuff in front of the congregation, especially not in front of those directly connected. There was a congregation of one who would not benefit from knowing about Julian's and Annabel's recent sins.

She was a smart woman – that's what attracted him he realized now, the discord between her vapid looks and the intelligent creature underneath. She was smart enough to know her marriage would be over – not to mention Julian's relationship with Evan – if she told Evan about their mistake.

His thoughts wandered to Dominique; he could barely remember what she looked like. It seemed as if his life with her was from another geological era, a time when he was a professor and lived in Montreal, a different strata preserved somewhere in the volcanic dust and petrified clay of the past few weeks.

He felt a sudden emptiness, a sudden sharp pain in his sternum, one he had not expected, a sudden sense of longing. Annabel's touch had reawakened something he'd forgotten about, the part that needed something more than himself and his thoughts and the grit and blister of hot days in the garden. And the occasional voice of God. Something more than the infinite reality of the Universe could provide to a man.

He thought now about his wife, about Dominique, vague in his mind's eye, dark hair, long eyelashes, slightly awkward, those big ears of hers, that she was always embarrassed about, those ears that he loved, once, to caress. Yes, this was longing in his belly now, he recognized it, longing for his wife to hold him and tell him that whatever was happening was going to be OK. That his long, frantic text made some sense, was important, was something glorious and fantastic, or at the very least, was something coherent, that people could read and say: he is not mad. He longed too for her to tell him that this stupid thing he did with Annabel was OK. He would call her when he got to the phone in the house. He started jogging now, towards the house, I'll call Dominique, he thought. I should have called days ago.

And then I will read it.

He knew he'd been writing, but he couldn't quite remember the specifics. He knew the general idea - about that experience he'd had in Montreal a couple of weeks ago. Right? The euphoria, the flash of light, that voice... He pictured the typewriter, hours at the keys, the sound of the clack-clacking, the stack of pages, remembered the hours of pouring thoughts out, transforming them into mechanical representations - thought, choice, motion, transformation, mechanical work, and an indelible symbol crashed onto a white page. But he couldn’t remember a single phrase he had written.

But what was he writing about?

What am I writing about?

What the hell is wrong with me?

He knew it was about the universe, about those visions, but everything was vague and wavering in his mind. Was the past week a dream? The lights, the sounds, the certainty. My God, he thought. Where has that certainty gone? How could certainty be temporary?

He was in a panic now ... what was he writing, what did he write?

He felt a physical need to find the book and read it, to understand how he found himself out here after dusk, running towards the house, filled with panic and fear, and frightened for his own safety, for his sanity.

The French doors were locked. Everything was wrong now. He walked over to the front door, on the deck. That, too, was locked, and he felt for his keys in his pocket - an instinct-only, he knew full well that he did not have his keys in his pocket. He wondered if Evan had locked him out because of what happened with Annabel. Surely she didn’t tell Evan? He rapped on the door, and then he turned, and noticed that in the place of Evan's big black SUV, a small red Toyota was parked. Friends maybe? Oh, God, he couldn't handle friends. Strangers. Oh, no. Not in this state. He tried the door again, to make sure it was locked, rattling the handle. It didn't budge. He pounded on the door, but no one came.

A spare key hung on a nail under the wood deck, at the back corner of the house, or at least it used to hang there, had been there for been there suspended for twenty years. He descended the stairs into the dew-covered grass, knelt down, reached under the deck, feeling, feeling blind, reaching for something that he wasn't sure was still here. I know it should be somewhere here, that nail, the key...

There. He found it.

The house was silent, and strange. Things were different, but he couldn't tell why. Hello? He called out. Hello? Evan? Annabel? Hello?

He turned on more lights. What was it? What was different? He could not say.

He went to Evan's bedroom. The door was open, the lights were off, no sign of life. He switched on the lights. No one was there.

He opened to door to the basement, Hello...? He called down the stairs, and took a step down, when he heard his name called by a voice that he recognized in his bones, in the depths of his heart and mind, in his flesh.

Julian ... ? the voice, thin, and weak called out. Julian ... ?

He was frozen for a moment, as his mind acclimatized to what his body knew already: he bounded up the stairs, to the source. The door to his bedroom was closed but for an inch, the lights off, and he gently pushed open the door.

Dominique? he whispered. He could see her outline, curled up on his bed under the covers, her body pulled into a protective fetal S with her back to him. He took off his shoes, his pants, his shirt, and slipped under the covers into the small twin bed. What are you doing here? He whispered, as he touched the curve of her hips. He felt a weight of deep sadness, as he touched the back of her head, felt her hair, hair he had loved, still loved, he realized. When did you get here? He realized she was crying, and he curled up against her naked body, his chest against her back, pulling her towards him. What's wrong? he asked, but she did not answer, only sobbed softly, and then turned towards him, put her arms around his neck and buried her face, hot and sticky with tears, into his neck.

I don't know what's been going on with me, he told her. I think I went a little crazy the last little while. I did something really stupid.

I'm pregnant, Julian.