Instead of driving him home, Eva took her charge in an opposite direction, south along the state road and past a cemetery that sat atop a drumlin in a fallow field: If not for the moon, the grouping of humble grave stones might have been missed. This mound gave way to greater elevation southward, and soon the superficies of a manmade structure, a hydroelectric dam, dominated the horizon.
Water was heard churning in the turbines once the travelers parted company with road pavement, leaving the phobic man to picture a leaping spray he could not see. The moon was now behind them where they walked together in the rough. While the tips of their shoes plowed up clumped earth, their elbows disturbed any cowering ghosts hiding in the shrubs.
His evening’s guide braved the footbridge that crossed the spine of the reservoir, but seeing the thunderous calamity below, Liam did not join her. He remained planted on the embankment, incommoded by this postscript to their unsettling adventure. Theatrics were being stretched further than his powers of concentration could endure.
The charm she held him under was not as well tended as it was previously, or perhaps her opening salvo in his comfy living room, with cookies and tea, was only the breezy first act of a tragedy. He felt he did not know her better with acquaintance, but less so.
Eva almost dissolved in the rising mist, and her illusion of transparency was likened to an encroachment of daylight, which heavy eyelids could not fend off. His kidnapper intruded on this attempt to vegetate, and the pair soon returned to the unlit lot where the car was left.
The rising fortification did nothing to quell Liam’s anxiety, and once inside the Buick, the rushing water continued to reverberate through the seat and floorboard. This was not a murmuring of dissembled words, but a pulse that carried through his body, and through chains of bodies exposed in sediment.
The area was assessed. Thorn bushes offered an ideal location for a stealthy husband to wait on an unfaithful wife. It was reasonable to fear repercussions should their meetings become known, yet the vexed suitor could not fathom Eva’s clandestinity in first taking him to a public theatre, and now to this remote place.
After a minute or two reestablished a mood, her question betrayed their element of risk. “Do you believe in fate?”
He considered the introduction of this topic warily. “I have made a life actively avoiding it.”
“But a man who puts angels in his yard nevertheless tempts it.”
“Are we tempting fate,” he interjected, “in coming here?”
His eye contact was always glancing, pulling punches, but she leaned into it and announced, “I lost my virginity in a car.”
“A car...? This car?”
“No,“ she said, “but back there.“
He peeked in the backseat. Nothing was behind them, not even a dog presumed to be a constant companion. His next words echoed with decay, though he only intended a delaying tactic. “A cousin of my father, and his wife, went camping with another young couple back in the Fifties. During the evening, the cousin and wife of the other man went to a store to buy provisions, but never returned. The next day the police found their car along a patch of remote road with the engine running. The cousin and woman were nude in the backseat, dead from carbon monoxide asphyxiation.”
Eva weighed these grisly details. “The lovers meant to add no more than a few minutes to their errand, so left the motor on. Or perhaps it was cold and they needed the heater.”
The homilist turned over the implications. “If one believes in sin, then death are its wages; but if one believes in fate, then fate does not punish every sin, or every sinner. Perhaps The Law of Averages is God’s way of meting out judgment where, like a clock that only needs to be right twice a day, consequences catch up to actions without requiring overt displays of vengeance.”
Eva withdrew to her shadowy half of the car; her thoughts sparked at his. “That makes God sound too hands-off. Too impotent. His justice cannot lack intricacy, design…”
Liam could not fault the observation. “God cannot be an impartial algorithm… true. If the Idea of God is to mean anything, there has to be an intelligent, tailored component to it.”
“Personal,” stressed Eva. “An impersonal God has never set well with me. It’s a view that lacks the sort of rich detail one sees in, well, everything else, if one pays attention.”
“Yes,” he answered, seeing the serious state to which he had reduced her spirits. “My brother’s religious belief precedes his faith (if not his reason), so his reason needs persuading. He says that, if one believes in coincidences, then they must run all the way down—to the very bottom. Once one begins to notice them—their uncanny placement and timing—they cease being coincidence and reveal a personal, even moral, dimension. With this recognition one has abandoned estrangement and entered into a dialog with God. Nothing ever again can be mundane. Choices are presented, trials and tests, and one must show deference to mysterious ways.”
“Yes,” Eva responded positively.
“In a universe supposed to be the product of accident,“ he continued, “twinges of conscience can only be more unintended things in an impossibly long chain of unintended things. This, my brother judges, is ‘Evolution’ making a fetish over an excrescence: where something of inestimable, edifying value—something that comes to build on itself like a metaphysical edifice—just happened to slip through as an afterthought. It is a variation on the felix culpa, or happy fault, where the sins of Adam allowed for the miracle of Redemption.”
His companion’s smile was at last fully restored.
The chill had put a berry color to her cheeks; and, to own the moon’s hand in it, the tint was the reddish black of nightshade. Her gaze had been on the dam for some minutes, as it had been similarly on the formidable theatre curtain and exhibition. She caressed the chain around her neck, though any response in her throat was inaudible. Simple licentiousness, or a death wish, would not explain her bringing him here. Still, the saboteur of their tryst regretted his talk of algorithms, broken clocks, and doomed lovers.
Instinctively (as instinct was rare to him), Liam reached across the seat belt latch and grazed Eva’s abdomen with his hand awkwardly extended. The iliac crest of a hip under the stiff woolen skirt was hard and arrested his flailing.
The silence between them changed instantly in character, and where his fingers continued to press into the protruding volute of a column, its architecture put her some ways toward being either a monument or sepulcher: He doubted he could alter or repair what lay beyond it.
She took his easing hand and raised it to her heart and chain, exposing a breastbone beneath a brassiere strap, as well as the healing bruise; the besotted man did not retreat from the complication.
Her evolving expression was neither lachrymal nor joyous, but there was a smile, if not the smile of his short acquaintance. The moment was relinquished, and the adventuress turned over the ignition key. She forsook the concealment of the dam’s shadow for the road, though the shadow invited itself to follow.
The captive was released as close to his house as was deemed safe, and before parting ways he made one last fumbling attempt to understand their dynamic. The space between them was again tractable, but Liam was too composed in leveraging it. “What does he do?” he asked.
“Do?” muttered she.
“Him,” he pressed his impertinence. “How will I recognize him?”
“You must not provoke him,” she gently reprimanded.
“If I knew more…”
“He’s an actor,” she explained.
“Was he in the theatre? Did he see us there together?”
Her voice searched his reaction. “Are you an actor?”
The query settled too lightly in his head. “I played a rock in a school play.”
She quailed at his flippant reply; he hurriedly amended it.
“Are you asking can I be trusted?”
“I trust you completely,” she said.
Shifting the gear on the steering column underscored her proclamation, and Eva drove away. Liam was left to walk the final quarter mile to his clapboard house, and on coming in sight of the beacon angel, it too watched her scattering trail in the first bright shaft of daybreak.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.