The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 67

I buried $5,000 in a plastic bag beneath a cypress tree up the hill from Marin City. Would I need it? Didn’t know. Never hurts to have a backup plan.

When I returned to the apartment, the sun was rising and Byron was awake, her skin as grey as the morning sky, and I doubted she’d slept. As I stepped through the door, she rose to her feet, fast, opened her mouth, stopped herself, and for a moment, the two of us faced each other, my picture in her right hand, her lips sealing tight.

I counted back from ten slowly, and when I reached one, so did she, and she said, “Did you follow me yesterday?”

“No,” I replied.

“I saw… women. A woman. Women. Who I thought…”

“Matched the words that are my description?”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“How can I know that? How can I ever know?”

There it was. Fear in her eyes. A woman who lived alone, who has nothing but her thoughts and this instant. Terror of the thing that sits on the shoulder of all lonely travellers in the night. Am I mad? Am I mad and I don’t know it?

You — are you real?

Are you real, stranger I cannot remember?

Is this real, this moment, are you, am I, is this, is any…?

There’s a gun on the table next to Byron’s bed, and she is so scared, so, so frightened.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. Listen to your recordings. Remember my name.”

She licked her lips, and said, “The sword out-weareth the sheath,”

and the next day there wasn’t any jam at breakfast, and I had a headache.

On the seventy-third day, I realised I’d been counting the days wrong.

Not seventy-three days, not ten weeks, not three months since I’d come to San Francisco with Byron. Not at all. A storm rolled up the bay, and rain ran down the hills, and as the overcast urban yellow of the sky gave way to unrelenting, sea-soaked black, I found the ticket stub from the flight from Seoul, and the date didn’t make any sense, and I checked it against the date on the newspaper, and I’d got it wrong, I’d counted something wrong, not seventy-three days, but eighty-nine, eighty-nine days in America.

So I went upstairs and started to speak to Byron, but Byron said, “The soul wears out the breast,”

and there was jam at breakfast, but it was seedless, which I’ve never understood the point of at all.