Anil's Ghost

Between Heartbeats

It was in the Arizona labs that Anil met and worked with a woman named Leaf. A few years older, Leaf became Anil’s closest friend and constant companion. They worked side by side and they talked continually on the phone to each other when one was on assignment elsewhere. Leaf Niedecker-what kind of name is that, Anil had demanded to know-introduced Anil to the finer arts of ten-pin bowling, raucous hooting in bars, and high-speed driving in the desert, swerving back and forth in the night. ‘Tenga cuidado con los armadillos, señorita.’

Leaf loved movies and remained in depression about the disappearance of drive-ins and their al fresco quality. ‘All our shoes off, all our shirts off, rolling against Chevy leather-there has been nothing like it since.’ So two or three times a week Anil would buy a barbequed chicken and arrive at Leaf’s rented house. The television had already been carried into the yard and sat baldly beside a yucca tree. They’d rent The Searchers or any other John Ford or Fred Zinnemann movie. They watched The Nun’s Story, From Here to Eternity, Five Days One Summer, sitting in Leaf’s lawn chairs, or curled up beside each other in the double hammock, watching the calm, carefully sexual black-and-white walk of Montgomery Clift.

Nights in Leaf’s backyard, once upon a time in the West. The heat still in the air at midnight. They would pause the movie, take a break and cool off under the garden hose. In three months they managed to see the complete oeuvres of Angie Dickinson and Warren Oates. ‘I’m asthmatic,’ Leaf said. ‘I need to become a cowboy.’

They shared a joint and disappeared into the intricacies of Red River, theorizing on the strangely casual shooting of John Ireland before the final fight between Montgomery Clift and John Wayne. They rewound the video and watched it once more. Wayne swirling around gracefully, hardly interrupting his walk, to shoot a neutral friend who was trying to stop a fight. On their knees in the parched grass by the television screen they looked at the scene frame by frame for any sign of outrage at this unfairness on the victim’s face. There seemed to be none. It was a minor act directed towards a minor character that may or may not have ended the man’s life, and no one said anything about it during the remaining five minutes of the film. One of those Jacobean happy endings.

‘I don’t think the bullet killed him.’

‘Well, we can’t tell where it hit him, Hawks goes off too quickly. The guy just puts his hand up to his stomach and then drops.’

‘If he got hit in the liver he’s had it. Don’t forget, this is Missouri in eighteen-fuck-knows-when.’

‘Yeah. What’s his name?’

‘Who?’

‘The guy shot.’

‘Valance. Cherry Valance.’

‘Cherry? You mean like Jerry, or Cherry, like apple.’

‘Cherry Valance, not Apple Valance.’

‘And he’s Montgomery ’s friend.’

‘Yeah, Montgomery ’s friend Cherry.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I don’t think it hit him in the liver. Look at the angle of the shot. The trajectory seems to be going up. Popped a rib, I suspect, or glanced off it.’

‘… Maybe glanced off and killed some woman on the sidewalk?’

‘Or Walter Brennan…’

‘No, some dame on the sidewalk that Howard Hawks was fucking.’

‘Women remember. Don’t they know that? Those saloon girls are gonna remember Cherry…’

‘You know, Leaf, we should do a book. A Forensic Doctor Looks at the Movies.’

‘The film noir ones are tough. Their clothes are baggy, it’s too dark.’

‘I’m doing Spartacus.’

In Sri Lankan movie theatres, Anil told Leaf, if there was a great scene-usually a musical number or an extravagant fight-the crowd would yell out ‘Replay! Replay!’ or ‘Rewind! Rewind!’ till the theatre manager and projectionist were forced to comply. Now, on a smaller scale, the films staggered backwards and forwards, in Leaf’s yard, until the actions became clear to them.

The film they worried over most was Point Blank. At the start of the movie, Lee Marvin (who once played Liberty Valance, no relation) is shot by a double-crossing friend in the abandoned Alcatraz prison. The friend leaves him for dead and steals his girl and his share of the money. Vengeance results. Anil and Leaf composed a letter to the director of the film, asking if he remembered, all these years later, where on the torso he imagined Lee Marvin was shot so that he could get to his feet, stagger through the prison while the opening credits came up and swim the treacherous waters between the island and San Francisco.

They told the director that it was one of their favourite films, they were simply inquiring as forensic specialists. When they looked at the scene closely they saw Lee Marvin’s hand leap up to his chest. ‘See, he has difficulty on his right side. When he swims later in the bay he uses his left arm.’ ‘God, it’s a great movie. Very little music. Lots of silence.’

Gamini worked in the base hospital at Polonnaruwa during his last year in the northeast. This was where the serious casualties from all over the Eastern Province, Trincomalee to Ampara, were brought. Family murders, outbreaks of typhoid, grenade injuries, attempted assassinations by one side or another. The wards were always in turmoil-outpatients in General Surgery, floor patients in the corridors, technicians arriving from a radio store to fix the electrocardiogram unit.

The only cool place was the blood bank, where the plasma was refrigerated. The only silent place was Rheumatology, where a man slowly and quietly turned a giant wheel to exercise his shoulders and arms, which had been broken in an accident a few months earlier, and where a solitary woman sat with her arthritic hand in a basin of warm wax. But in the corridors, the walls mildewed with dampness, men would be rolling giant cylinders of oxygen noisily off the carts. Oxygen was the essential river, hissed into neonatal wards where incubators sheltered babies. Outside this room of infants, and beyond the shell of the hospital building, was a garrisoned country. The rebel guerrillas controlled all roads after dark, so even the army didn’t move at night. In the children’s ward Janaka and Suriya circled their patients-one had a heart murmur, another suffered from fits-but if there was bombing or a village attack they too became part of the hospital ‘Flying Squad,’ and even those in the neonatal ward worked the triage and operating room. They left an intern behind.

The specialists who came north seldom worked only in their specific area of knowledge. They were in Pediatrics one day, but might spend the rest of the week helping to contain an outbreak of cholera in the village settlements. If cholera drugs were not available, they did what doctors in another era had done-dissolved a teaspoon of potassium permanganate in a pint of water and poured it into every well or standing pool. The past was always useful. At one time Gamini tried to keep an infant alive for four days. The girl could hold nothing down, not her mother’s milk, not even water, and she was dehydrating. He remembered something and got hold of a pomegranate and fed the child the juice. It stayed down. Something he’d heard about pomegranates in a song his ayah had sung… It was legendary that every Tamil home on Jaffna peninsula had three trees in the garden. A mango, a murunga, and the pomegranate. Murunga leaves were cooked in crab curries to neutralize poisons, pomegranate leaves were soaked in water for the care of eyes and the fruit eaten to aid digestion. The mango was for pleasure.

Gamini was working with Janaka Fonseka in children’s surgery when they began hearing news in the corridors that a village had been attacked. In front of him on the operating table was a small boy, naked except for white shorts, a huge mask over his tiny face. The two doctors had been preparing for the operation all week; neither of them had attempted it before, they had been reading the text of the procedure in Kirklan’s Cardiac Surgery over and over. They had to cool the boy’s body down to twenty-five degrees Celsius by running cold blood into him, reducing his temperature until the heart stopped. Then they would operate. As they began cutting, the wounded started coming into the halls and they were aware of the Flying Squad in action around them.

He and Fonseka stayed with the boy, keeping just one nurse. A heart the size of a guava. They opened the right atrium. This was as close to magic as the two of them got in their days there. They talked frantically back and forth to be certain of what they were doing. They could hear the carts carrying equipment or bodies, they couldn’t tell which, racing down the halls. There’d been a massacre, they now heard, a village thirty miles away had been pretty well wiped out. Somebody had to be sent there to see if any were still alive. The child in front of them had a congenital abnormality, a beautiful kid, Gamini kept wanting to take the mask off and see his face again. Wanted to look at the boy’s dark black eyes, which had been full of trust, which had looked up at him as he gave the needle that had put him into uncontrolled sleep.

Fallot’s tetralogy. Four things wrong with the heart, so he would live perhaps only into his early teens if they didn’t operate now. A beautiful boy. Gamini was not going to leave him alone, betray him in his sleep. He kept Fonseka with him, not letting him go to the others as Fonseka thought he should. ‘I have to leave, they keep calling out my name.’ ‘I know. This is just one boy.’ ‘Fuck, that’s not what I mean.’ ‘You have to stay.’

The operation took six hours and all that time Gamini stayed with the boy. He let Fonseka go after three hours. The nurse would have to help him reverse the bypass. He knew her as a starting intern, the Tamil wife of one of the staff. She and her husband had come to the peripheral hospital in the last month. Gamini stood by the boy and explained what they had to do. The boy would have to be rewarmed with blood at a higher temperature, and at the key moment the bypass had to be removed. Fallot’s tetralogy. No one had ever performed the procedure in this country.

So in the fifth hour Gamini and the nurse reversed the process that he and Fonseka had set up. The young nurse watching him for any sign that what she was doing might be wrong. But she was faultless, faultless, calmer, it seemed, than he was. ‘This one?’ ‘Yes. I need you to cut a shallow three-inch line there. No, to the left.’ She cut into the boy’s body. ‘Don’t remain a nurse. You’ll be a good doctor.’ She was smiling under the mask.

As soon as the boy was in Recovery, Gamini left him with her. There was no one else he could trust. He got two beepers and told her to contact him if something seemed wrong. He washed up and then went into the chaos of the triage. There was blood on everyone except him.

It took a few more hours to deal with the crisis. In surgery they wore white rubber boots and all the doors had to be closed. Sometimes if a doctor had heat exhaustion he slipped into the refrigerated blood bank for a few minutes among the plasma and pack cells. Gamini took over in surgery. There was a small Buddha lit with a low-watt bulb in nearly every ward, and there was one in surgery as well.

All the survivors had been brought in by now. The killings had happened at two in the morning in a small village beside the main road to Batticaloa. They had brought him nine-month-old twins, each shot in the palms and one bullet each in their right legs-so it was no accident, a close-range job and intentional, left to die; the mother had been killed. In a couple of weeks those two children were peaceful things, full of light. You thought, What did they do to deserve this, and then, What did they do to survive this? Their wounds, in reality quite minor, stayed with him. It was the formal evil of the act perhaps, he didn’t know. Thirty people had been massacred that morning.

Lakdasa drove to the village and did the postmortems, otherwise relatives would not receive compensation. For everyone in the region was poor as grass. In those villages the father of a family of seven earned one hundred rupees a day working in a wood shop. That meant each of them could have a five-rupee meal a day. For that you could buy a toffee. When political entourages came up to the provinces and received tea and lunch, the visit cost forty thousand rupees.

The doctors were coping with injuries from all political sides and there was just one operating table. When a patient was lifted off, blood was soaked up with newspaper, the surface swabbed with Dettol, and the next patient laid down. The real problem was water, and in the larger hospitals, because of frequent power failures, vaccines and other drugs were being thrown away constantly. Doctors needed to scavenge the countryside for equipment-buckets, Rinso soap powder, a washing machine. ‘Surgical clamps for us were like gold for a woman.’

Their hospital existed like a medieval village. A chalkboard in the kitchen listed the numbers of loaves of bread and the bushels of rice needed to feed five hundred patients a day. This was before massacre victims were brought in. The doctors pooled money and hired two market scribes as registrars who moved alongside them in the wards listing and recording the patients’ names and their ailments. The most frequently seen problems were snakebite, rabies caused by fox or mongoose, kidney failure, encephalitis, diabetes, tuberculosis, and the war.

Night had its own activity. He woke and was attached instantly to the sounds of the world. A dogfight, a man running to fetch something, the pouring of water into a vessel. When Gamini was a boy, nights were terrifying to him, his eyes wide open till he fell asleep, certain that he and his bed had lost their moorings in the darkness. He needed loud clocks beside him. Ideally he would have a dog in the room, or someone-an aunt or an ayah who snored. Now, working or sleeping during the night shifts, he was secure with all of the human and animal activity beyond the ward’s light. Only bird life, so vocal and territorial during the day, was shut down, though there was one Polonnaruwa rooster that cried out false dawns from three in the morning on. Interns had been trying to kill it.

He walked the stretch of hospital, from wing to wing, open air on either side of him. There was the buzz of electricity close beside the pools of light as you passed them. You were aware of it only at night. You saw a bush and you sensed it growing. Someone came out and poured blood into a gutter and coughed. Everyone had a bad cough in Polonnaruwa.

He was aware of every sound. A shoe or sandal step, the noise of the bedspring when he lifted a patient, the snapping of an ampule. Sleeping in the wards, he could be one limb of a large creature, linked to the others by the thread of noises.

Later, if he was unable to sleep in the district medical officer’s building, he would walk back the two hundred yards along the empty curfewed main street to the hospital. The nurse stationed at a night desk would turn and see the look on him and find a bed for him. He would be asleep in seconds.

In the village clinic were twenty mothers and their infants. They filled out clinic records and the pregnant women were checked for diabetes and anemia. The doctors talked to each of the women, studying their forms as they moved forward in the queue. On a makeshift table a nurse wrapped vitamin pills in newspaper and gave them to the mothers. A pressure cooker was being used as a steam sterilizer for glass syringes and needles.

The screams began as soon as the first baby got a needle, and within seconds most of the babies in the small shack that served as a medical outpost were howling. After about five minutes they were silent again; breasts had been pulled out and mothers beamed at their infants and there was solution and victory for all. This one clinic served four hundred families from the area as well as three hundred from an adjoining region. No one from the Ministry of Health had ever come to the border villages.

For all of the doctors, Lakdasa was the great moral force, the rough brother of justice. ‘The problem up here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem.’ He was thirty-seven and his hair was grey. When he drank he revealed an intricate set of confabulations, as if he were steering himself through a well-mapped harbour. ‘If I drink more than seventy-two millimetres, my liver plays up. If I drink less, my heart plays up.’

Lakdasa lived mostly on potato rotis. He smoked Gold Leaf cigarettes in his jeep where a fan rotating air was glued to the dashboard. He kept his sarong in the glove compartment and slept wherever he had to-the DMO’s office, a sofa in the living room of a friend. There were months when his weight would suddenly drop ten pounds. Obsessed with his blood pressure, he tested it daily, and any session at a clinic ended with his weighing himself on the scales and checking his blood sugar. He noted the bell curves and continued as usual driving through jungles and garrisoned land to meet his patients. It didn’t matter what state he was in as long as he knew what state he was in.

On Saturday mornings Gamini and Lakdasa drove back to Polonnaruwa listening to the cricket. A long day at a clinic. Sometimes along the road, now and then, there were thirty-foot strips of grain being dried on the tarmac, strips laid so narrow a car could pass over them without having the wheels touch the drying grain. A man with a broom stood nearby to signal to passing cars to be aware of it, and to sweep the grain back to the centre if they were not.

In the cafeteria of the base hospital-a half-hour break in his shift-a woman sat down at Gamini’s table and drank her tea, ate a biscuit with him. It was about four in the morning and he didn’t know her. He just nodded to her, he felt private and too tired to talk.

‘I helped you with an operation once, some months ago. The massacre night.’ His mind wheeled back a century.

‘I thought you got transferred.’

‘Yes, I was, then I came back here.’

He hadn’t recognized her at all. She’d had a mask on when he spent the crucial long hours with her over the boy. When she was not wearing a mask, in pre-op, he had probably only glanced at her. Their comradeship had been mostly anonymous.

‘You’re married to someone here, right?’ She nodded. There was a scar at her wrist. It was new, he would have noticed that during the surgery.

He looked up quickly at her face. ‘It is very good to meet you.’

‘Yes. For me too,’ she said.

‘Where did you go?’

‘He’-a cough-‘he got stationed in Kurunegala.’

Gamini kept watching her, the way she was selecting the words carefully. Her face was young and lean and dark, her eyes bright as if it were daylight.

‘Actually, I have passed you in the wards a lot!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. I know you didn’t recognize me. Why should you.’ A pause. She put her hand through her hair and then was very still.

‘I’ve seen that boy.’

‘That boy?’

She looked down, smiling to herself now. ‘The boy we operated on. I have visited him. They… they renamed the boy Gamini. The parents. After you. It was a lot of trouble, red tape, for them to do that.’

‘Good. So I have an heir.’

‘Yes, you do… I am training now extra hours in the children’s ward.’ She was about to continue, then stopped.

He nodded, suddenly tired. What he wanted in his life now seemed a huge thing. What he wished for would involve the lives of others, years of effort. Chaos. Unfairness. Lying.

She looked at her tea and drank the last of it.

‘It was good to meet with you.’

‘Yes.’

Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him. The woman therefore slid alongside him and clattered about in the almost empty house of his heart. She became, as she had done that night of the operation, the sole accompanist to what he thought, what he worked on. When later he turned over the hands of a patient, he thought of the scar at her wrist, the way her fingers had slipped through her hair, what he wished to reveal to her. But it was his own heart that could not step into the world.

There is a break before the ward visits at six p.m. Gamini pulls down the registrar’s log from the shelf. Since the scribes have taken over, the entries are much better-the handwriting immaculate and small, green ink underlining the months and Sundays. He cannot remember the date so he looks for a flurry of entries, as there would have been around the time of the killings. Then goes down the list of interns and nurses.

Prethiko

Seela

Raduka

Buddhika

Kaashdya

He moves his fingers down the ledger to check the assignments, discovers her name.

He walks almost a mile to the event, in his only good jacket. The rest house is serving the usual bad food in the glassed-in dining room that hangs over the water. The children wait with unlit sparklers, in delirium for any kind of ceremony. Cake in one hand, a sparkler in the other. Lakdasa is organizing the fireworks display and is on the raft lining up his catherine wheels and burning schoolrooms. Gamini has caught a glimpse of her in the distance. He hasn’t seen her since the cup of tea they shared two weeks earlier.

When she is close to him later, he sees the small red earrings against her darkness. They were her grandmother’s, and the shortness of her boyishly cut hair allows him to see them clearly, the red gem on each lobe tiny as a ladybug. ‘I bury them when I am not wearing them,’ she says. They stroll towards the ruins, away from the rest house. A sign says: PLEASE DO NOT ENTER AND PUT YOUR FEET AGAINST THE IMAGE AND TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS.

Behind her are old fragments of colour, the white-red borders on the painted stone he can see even in this moonlight. From the promontory they watch the start of the fireworks. Some of the extravagant explosions are cut short, crashing too soon into the water, or they skitter dangerously like flung lit stones towards the rest house.

He turns to her. She is wearing his jacket over her ruffled shirt.

And she realizes there is an emotional seriousness in this distant man. She needs to step backwards out of the maze they have innocently entered. He is content to be near her, the beauty of this ear and earring, then a comparison with the other side of her head, the way the moon is over them and also in water, the way the water holds the night lilies and their reflection. The false and true alternatives surround them.

She takes his hand and brings it to her forehead. ‘Feel that. Do you feel that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘That’s my brain. I’m not as drunk as you, so I am smarter than you. Or even if you were not drunk I might be clearer about this than you. A little.’ Then a smile from her that will make him forgive anything she says.

She talks to him, more strongly than what the scar on her wrist suggests, her shirt open in a billow at the neck.

‘You look, at some moments, like my brother’s wife.’ He laughs.

‘You are going to be my husband’s brother, then. That’s how I’ll treat you. That is a kind of love.’

He leans back against the pavilion of stone, someone or other’s cosmic mountain, and she moves forward, he thinks it is to him, but she is only returning his black jacket.

He remembers swimming later that evening, entering the dark water naked and climbing out onto the abandoned firework raft. He sees a few silhouettes in the glassed room over the water. The Queen of England came to this rest house years ago, when she was young. He sits out there clearing his head of the way she disappeared into the throng with the subtlest of courtesies. The way…

A year from now he will return to Colombo and meet his future wife. Gamini? A woman named Chrishanti will say, approaching him. Chrishanti. He knew her brother at school. It is another fancy-dress party. Neither of them is wearing a costume, but they are both disguised by the past.

T here were some passengers on the train squatting in the aisles with wrapped bundles, pet birds.

I was the one she should have loved, Gamini said.

Anil sitting beside him assumed she was to get a confession. The mercurial doctor about to expose his heart. That category of seduction. But there was nothing he did or said during the remaining journey-to the ayurvedic hospital he had offered to show her-that used the reins of seduction. Just his slow drawl as the train swept unhesitatingly into the darkness of tunnels and he would turn from looking at his hands towards his reflection in the glass. That was how he told her, looking down or away from her, and she seeing him only in a wavering mirror image lost when they moved back into light.

I saw her often. More than most people knew. With her job at the radio station, my strange hours, it was easy. And we were ‘related.’… It wasn’t a courtship. That suggests two people in a dance. Well, maybe one dance at my wedding, I suppose. ‘The Air That I Breathe.’ Remember that song? A romantic moment. It was a wedding after all, you could embrace each other. I was getting married. She was married already. But I was the one she should have loved. I was already on speed, in those days, when I would see her.

Who are you speaking of, Gamini?

I’m always awake. I’m good at what I do. So when she was brought in to Dean Street Hospital, I was there. She had swallowed lye. Suiciders decide on that method of death because, since it’s the most painful, they might stop themselves doing it. The throat is burned out, then the organs. She was unconscious, even when she woke she didn’t know where she was. I ran her through into Emergency with a couple of nurses.

With one hand I was giving her painkillers and with the other using ammonia to snap her awake. I needed to reach her. I didn’t want her to feel alone, in this last stage. I overloaded her with painkillers but I didn’t want her asleep. It was selfishness on my part. I should have just knocked her out, let her go. But I wanted her to be comforted by me being there. That it was me, not him, not her husband.

I held her eyelids up with my thumbs. I shook her until she saw who it was. She didn’t care. I’m here. I love you, I said. She closed her eyes, it seemed to me in disgust. Then she was in pain again.

I can’t give you any more, I said, I’ll lose you completely. She put her hand up and made a gesture across her throat.

The train was sucked into the tunnel and they moved within it, shuddering in the darkness.

Who was she, Gamini? She could not see him. She touched his shoulder and could feel him turn towards her. He brought his face close to her. She could see nothing in spite of the muddy flicker of light now and then.

What would you do with a name? But it wasn’t a question. He spat it out.

The train came into daylight for a few seconds, then slid into the darkness of another tunnel.

All the wards were busy that night, he continued. Shootings, others to be operated on. There are always a lot of suicides during a war. At first that seems strange, but you learn to understand it. And she, I think, was overcome by it. The nurses left me with her and then I was called into the triage wards. She was full of morphine, asleep. I found a kid in the hall and I got him to watch her. If she woke he was to come and find me in D wing. This was three a.m. I didn’t want him falling asleep, so I broke a Benzedrine and gave him half. He found me later and told me she was awake. But I couldn’t save her.

There was a train window open and the sound of the clatter doubled. She could feel the gusts.

What would you do with her name? Would you tell my brother?

Someone kicked her ankle and she drew in her breath.

When Leaf left Arizona Anil didn’t hear from her for more than six months. Although during every moment of her farewell she had promised to write. Leaf, who was her closest friend. Once there was just a postcard of a stainless-steel pole. Quemado, New Mexico, the postmark seemed to read, but there was no contact address. Anil assumed she’d abandoned her, for a new life, for new friends. Watch out for the armadillos, señorita! Still, Anil left a snapshot on her fridge of the two of them dancing at some party, this woman who had been her echo, who watched movies with her in her backyard. They’d sway in the hammock, they’d consume rhubarb pie, they’d wake up at three in the morning entangled in each other’s arms, and then Anil would drive home through the empty streets.

The next postcard was of a parabolic dish antenna. Again no message or address. Anil was angry and threw it away. A few months later, when working in Europe, she got the phone call. She didn’t know how Leaf had found her.

‘This is an illegal call, so don’t say my name. I’m cutting into someone’s line.’

(As a teenager Leaf had made long-distance calls on Sammy Davis Jr.’s stolen phone number.)

‘Oh Angie, where are you! You were supposed to write.’

‘I’m sorry. When’s your next break.’

‘In January. A couple of months. I may go to Sri Lanka after that.’

‘If I send you a ticket, will you come and see me? I’m in New Mexico.’

‘Yes. Oh yes…’

So Anil returned to America. And she sat with Leaf in a doughnut shop in Socorro, New Mexico, a half-mile from the Very Large Array of Telescopes, which minute by minute drew information out of the skies. Information about the state of things ten billion years ago, and as many miles out. It was here, in this place, that they caught up with the truth in each other’s lives.

Originally Leaf had said she had bad asthma, that was why she had moved into the desert for a year, disappearing from Anil’s life. She had got involved with Earthworks and was living at The Lightning Field near Corrales. In 1977, artist Walter De Maria had planted four hundred stainless-steel poles high in the desert on a flat plain a mile long. Leaf’s first job was to be a caretaker of the lodge. Powerful winds swept in from the desert and she got to witness storms, because during the summer the poles drew lightning onto the plain. She stood among them, within the electricity, the thunder simultaneous around her. She had just wanted to be a cowboy. She loved the Southwest.

Now Leaf met Anil near the Very Large Array-the telescope assembly that picked up languages of data out of the universe above the desert. She was living alongside these receivers of the huge history of the sky. Who was out there? How far away was that signal? Who was dying unmoored?

Well, it turned out Leaf was.

They sat facing each other during the meals they had together every day at the Pequod. Anil felt the giant telescopes in the open desert belonged to the same genre as Leaf’s beloved drive-ins. They talked and listened to each other. She loved Anil. And she knew Anil loved her. Sister and sister. But Leaf was ill. It would get worse.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just keep… forgetting things. I can diagnose myself, you see. I have Alzheimer’s. I know I’m too young for this, but I had encephalitis as a kid.’

No one had noticed her illness when they had worked in Arizona. Sister and sister. And she had left without telling Anil why she was really leaving. With all the solitary energy she could draw on, she had gone east to the New Mexico deserts. Asthma, she said. She was starting to lose her memory, fighting for her life.

They sat at the Pequod in Socorro, whispering into the afternoons.

‘Leaf, listen. Remember? Who killed Cherry Valance?’

‘What?’

Anil repeated the question slowly.

‘Cherry Valance,’ Leaf said, ‘I…’

‘John Wayne shot him. Remember.’

‘Did I know that?’

‘You know John Wayne?’

‘No, my darling.’

My darling!

‘Do you think they can hear us?’ Leaf asked. ‘That giant metal ear in the desert. Is it picking us up too? I’m just a detail from the subplot, right.’

Then a splinter of memory returned and she added, awfully, ‘Well, you always thought Cherry Valance would die.’

…

And did she? Sarath had asked, when Anil told him about her friend Leaf.

‘No. She called me that night when I had fever, when we were in the south. We always would phone each other and talk till we fell asleep, laughing or crying, trading our stories. No. Her sister watches over her, not far from those telescopes in New Mexico.’

Dear John Boorman,

I do not have your address but a Mr. Walter Donohue from Faber & Faber has offered to forward this to you. I write on behalf of myself and my colleague Leaf Niedecker about a scene in an early film of yours, Point Blank.

At the start of the film, the prologue as it were, Lee Marvin is shot from a distance of what looks like four or five feet. He falls back into a prison cell and we think he might be dead. Eventually he comes to, leaves Alcatraz and swims across the So-and-so Straits into San Francisco.

We are forensic scientists and have been arguing about where on his body Mr. Marvin was shot. My friend thinks it was a rib glance shooting and that apart from the rib break it was a minor flesh wound. I feel the wound to be more serious. I know many years have passed, but perhaps you could try to remember and advise us of the location of the entry wound and exit wound and recall your discussions with Mr. Marvin as to how he should react and move later on in the film when time had passed and his character had recovered.

Sincerely,

Anil Tissera

A rainy-night conversation at the walawwa.

‘You like to remain cloudy, don’t you, Sarath, even to yourself.’

‘I don’t think clarity is necessarily truth. It’s simplicity, isn’t it?’

‘I need to know what you think. I need to break things apart to know where someone came from. That’s also an acceptance of complexity. Secrets turn powerless in the open air.’

‘Political secrets are not powerless, in any form,’ he said.

‘But the tension and danger around them, one can make them evaporate. You’re an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It’s in the bones and sediment.’

‘It’s in character and nuance and mood.’

‘That is what governs us in our lives, that’s not the truth.’

‘For the living it is the truth,’ he quietly said.

‘Why did you get into such a business?’

‘I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there’s a story.’

‘A secret.’

‘Yes, a secret… I was selected to go and study in China. I was there a year. And all I saw of China was this one area about the size of a pasture. I didn’t go anywhere else. That’s where I stayed and where I worked. Villagers had been cleaning a hillock and had come across earth of a different colour. Something that simple, but teams of archaeologists came. Under the different-coloured grey earth they found stone slabs, under these they found timbers-huge timbers that had been cut and stripped and nestled together like a great floor in some mead hall. Only of course, it was a ceiling.

‘So it was, as I said, like an exercise in a dream where you are made to go deeper and further. They brought in cranes to lift the timbers out and underneath them they discovered water-a water tomb. Three giant pools. Floating there was a lacquered coffin of an ancient ruler. Also in the water were coffins with the bodies of twenty female musicians along with their instruments. They were to accompany him, you see. With zithers, flutes, panpipes, drums, iron bells. They were delivering him to his ancestors. When they removed the skeletons from the coffins and laid them out there was no damage to any of the bones to reveal how the musicians had been killed, not one fractured bone.’

‘Then they were strangled,’ Anil said.

‘Yes. That’s what we were told.’

‘Or suffocated. Or poisoned. A study of the bones could have told you the truth. I don’t know if there was a tradition of poisoning in China at that time. When was it?’

‘Fifth century B.C.’

‘Yeah, they knew poisons.’

‘We soaked the lacquered coffins with polymer so they wouldn’t collapse. The lacquer had been made out of sumac sap mixed with coloured pigments. Hundreds of layers of it. Then they discovered the musical instruments. Drums. Mouth organs made from gourds. Chinese zithers! Most of all-bells.

‘By now historians had arrived too. Taoist and Confucian scholars, specialists in musical chimes. We pulled sixty-four bells up out of the water. Till now no instruments from this period had been found, though it was known that music had been the most significant activity and idea of this civilization. So you would beburied not with your wealth but alongside music. The great bells removed from the water turned out to have been made with the most sophisticated techniques. It seemed each region of the country had its own method of bell-making. In those regions there had been, literally, wars of music…

‘Nothing was as important. Music was not entertainment, it was a link with ancestors who had led us here, it was a moral and spiritual force. The experience of breaking through barriers of slate, wood, water, to discover a buried women’s orchestra had a similar mystical logic to it, do you understand? You must understand their state of acceptance somehow of such a death. The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.

‘Before I left they had an event where everyone who had worked there came to hear the bells being struck. It was at the end of my year. It took place in the evening and, as we listened, we felt them physically, lifting into the darkness. Each bell had two notes to represent the two sides of the spirit, containing a balance of opposing forces. Possibly it was those bells that made me an archaeologist.’

‘Twenty murdered women.’

‘It was another world with its own value system that came to the surface.’

‘Love me, love my orchestra. You can take it with you! That kind of madness lies within the structure of all civilizations, not just in distant cultures. You boys are sentimental. Death and glory. A guy I know fell in love with me because of my laugh. We hadn’t even met or been in the same room, he’d heard me on a tape.’

‘And?’

‘Oh, he swooned over me like a married man, made me fall in love with him. You’ve heard the story. How smart women become idiots, ignore everything they should keep on knowing. By the end I wasn’t laughing too much. No bell-ringing.’

‘Was he in love with you before he met you, do you think?’

‘Well, that’s interesting. Perhaps it was the habit of my voice. I think he’d listened to the tape two or three times. He was a writer. A writer. They have time to get into trouble. I had been asked to chair a talk at a conference given by a teacher of mine, Larry Angel. A lovely, funny man, so I was in fact laughing a lot at the way he thought and put things together with his nonlinear mind. We were onstage sitting at a table and I introduced him, and I guess my microphone was on and I was chuckling as he gave the lecture. The old guy and I always had a good rapport. Favourite-uncle atmosphere, slightly sexual but definitely platonic.

‘I guess the writer, my eventual friend, also had a nonlinear mind, so he was getting the jokes. He had ordered the tape because he was interested in researching burial mounds or something, a rather serious subject, and he wanted information, and details. That was our meeting. In proxy. Not a big moment across the universe… We were on a high wire for three years during our relationship.’

Their first adventure together: Anil drove her unwashed white car that smelled of mildew to a Sri Lankan restaurant. It was just a few months after Cullis had heard her on the tape. They were driving through early-evening traffic.

‘So. Are you famous?’

‘No.’ He laughed.

‘A little?’

‘I’d say about seventy people who are not relatives or friends would recognize my name.’

‘Even here?’

‘I doubt it. Who knows. What is it, Muswell Hill?’

‘Archway.’

She opened the window and yelled.

‘Hey, listen, everybody-I’ve got the science writer Cullis Wright in my car! Or is it Cullis Wrong? Yes, it’s him! He’s with me today!’

‘Thank you.’

She rolled up the window. ‘We can check the gossips tomorrow, to see if you were busted.’ She rolled down the window and this time used the horn to gain attention. They were stuck in traffic anyway. Maybe from a distance it looked like a fight. An angry woman half out of the car gesturing towards someone within, trying to get passersby on her side.

He nestled back into the passenger’s seat, watching her loose energy, the ease with which she swept her skirt up to her knees and leapt out of the car once more after pulling the hand brake with a grunt. She was now waving her arms, banging on the dirty roof of the car.

He would remember other moments like this later-times when she tried to strip off his carefulness, tried to unbuckle his worried glance. Making him dance on one of the dark streets of Europe to a small cassette player she pressed against his ear. ‘ Brazil.’ Remember this song. He sang the words with her on that Paris street, their feet dancing over the painted outline of a dog.

He sat there, pressed against the back of his car seat, traffic all around him, watching her torso through the car door as she yelped and pounded on the roof. He felt he had been encased in ice or metal and she was banging on its surface in order to reach him, in order to let him out. The energy of her swirling clothes, the wild grin as she entered the car again and kissed him-she could have broken him free. But as a married man he had already pawned his heart.

She left him eventually in the Una Palma motel room in Borrego Springs. Left nothing of herself for him to hold on to. Just the blood as black as her hair, the room as shadowed as her skin.

He lay in the dark room watching the twitch of his arm muscle flick the knife into movement. He drifted, a boat without oars, into half-sleep. All night he could hear the faint whir of the hotel clock. His fear was that the beating in his blood would stop, that the noise on the roof of the car as she reached for him would end. Now and then a truck hushed by, twisting light. He fought sleep. Usually he loved the letting go. When he wrote, he slipped into the page as if it were water, and tumbled on. The writer was a tumbler. (Would he remember that?) If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer’s hoods and pencils and… you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing. Then he would be off scouring the wetlands again. How to make a book, Anil. You asked me How, you asked What’s the most important thing you need? Anil, I’ll tell you…

But she was on the night bus climbing out from the valley, locked for warmth in her grey ferren-half cloak, half serape. Her eyes inches away from the window, receiving the moments of lit trees. Oh, he knew that look in her, realigning herself after a fight. But this was to be the last time. No second chances. She knew and so did he. Their life of sparring love, tentative abandonment, the worst and best of times, all the memory of it balanced as on a clearly lit lab table in Oklahoma, the bus stirring its way up into the mist, passing the small towns in the mountains.

Anil’s body hunched into itself as it became colder. Still, her eyes did not blink, she would not miss any movement this last night with him. She was determined to underline their crimes towards each other, their failures. It was just this she wanted to be certain about, although she knew that later there would be other versions of their fatal romance.

Apart from the driver she was the only sentinel. She saw the jackrabbit. She heard the thud of a night bird against the bus. No lights on within this floating vessel. She would be cleaning up her desk for five days, and then leave for Sri Lanka. She had somewhere in her bag a list of every phone and fax number where he could reach her on the island for the next two months. She had planned to give it to him. She had circled around his fucked-up life, his clenched fears, the love and comfort he was scared to take from her. Still, he had been like a wonderful house to her, full of unusual compartments, so many possibilities, strangely rousing.

The bus climbed above the valley. Like him she couldn’t sleep. Like him she would continue the war. How would he sleep in the night with her name between him and his wife? Even the tenderest concerns between this couple would contain her presence, like a shadow. She didn’t want that anymore. To be a mote or an echo, to be a compass unused except to give his mind knowledge of her whereabouts.

And whom would he talk to if not her at midnight through several time zones? As if she were the stone in the temple grounds used by priests as the object of confession. Well, for now, they both had no destiny. They only had to escape the past.

Anil was one unable to sing, but she knew the words and the pace of phrasing.

Oh, the trees grow high in New York State,

They shine like gold in autumn-

Never had the blues whence I came,

But in New York State I caught ’em.

She said the lines in a whisper, head down, to her own chest. Autumn. Caught ’em. How the rhyme snuggled into its partner.