Everything Beautiful Began After Part 20

A mile or so from the dig, the professor started whistling. Then he skidded to a stop in the dust.

"Which one of you boys is going to find the bricks?"

George volunteered. Once the bricks were under the wheels. Henry got out and walked over to his Vespa. There was condensation on the inside of the dials. He tapped the gla.s.s.

A dog had barked once, and his brother's eyes opened for the last time.

For most of the morning, Henry worked quietly in his excavation pit, scratching the ground with little enthusiasm.

He knew that he would see her later. That a decision had to be made somehow, and that they would both stick to it.

And then, not long before lunch, another side of Henry began to emerge-a part of him that was just a little further ahead in his life than where he was now. And in his mind, he saw himself in a tweed jacket in Regent's Park, pus.h.i.+ng a stroller along some beautiful Sunday path, the child giggling with joy. He imagined packing up the car for summers in Wales. Skipping through meadows of tall gra.s.s, and the light, bubbling laughter of a child trying to keep up. Learning to swim in the cool water of Bala Lake. The wobble of first steps. He sensed closeness too. Rebecca in some heavy pocketless coat, with snow falling. A weekend in Paris. The happiness of afternoons.

He would give up his search for the dead and live for the living.

Love is like life but longer.

END OF BOOK ONE.

In my end is my beginning.

-T. S. Eliot The final moments of her life Rebecca lay crushed under tons of rubble.

The fruit she had been eating was still in her mouth.

Her eyes would not open.

She could sense the darkness that encapsulated her.

She could not feel her arms.

Then her life, like a cloud, split open, and she lay motionless in a rain of moments.

The green telephone at her grandfather's house next to the plant.

She could feel the cool plastic of the handle and the sensation of cupping it under her ear. She could hear a voice at the other end of the line that she recognized as her own.

The weight of her mother's shoes as she carried them around the house, wondering when she would come home.

The idea that she'd grow up and have to wear such things.

Running through the forest of owls with her sister.

Their white faces.

A twin.

The strangeness of a living mirror.

And then the rain of her life stopped, and she was in darkness, her heart pus.h.i.+ng against her ribs.

Muted noise as though she were underwater.

Then the rain of moments began again until she was drenched by single esoteric details: Morning light behind the curtain.

The smell of cla.s.srooms.

A gla.s.s of milk.

The hope for her mother and the imagined pressure of her arms against her.

Pa.s.sengers' faces.

Quietly beating hearts.

Wings held steady by moonlight.

Market stalls.

Orange trees.

Sandals.

Laying her head upon Henry's cool back in the morning.

It was as important as being born.

George and the street children.

Clogs.

Sweets.

Her grandfather again, but a character in his own dream-walking barefoot by the lake calling out to someone far away.

A bungalow in France.

A daughter.

Granddaughters.

His elbows as he drove them in the rain to the shops.

And then two very small hands growing inside her belly.

A small head.

Thumb body, surging.

Life knitting something in her womb.

Then Rebecca realized she could not feel her body and was unable to shout.

There was no sound. Nothing stirred but the silent movies projected on the inside of her skull.

She was not so much aware that she was dying as she was that she was still alive.

Had she more time, she might have nurtured a hope of being rescued by George and Henry. Instead, memory leaked out around her.

Mother.

This memory was not painful to her now. Her life was an open window and she a b.u.t.terfly.

If not for her intermittent returns to darkness-the body's insistence on life-she could have been on vacation, swimming in the sea, each stroke of her arms a complete philosophy.

Henry.

The morning he came back from Cambridge.

And then she smelled her grandfather's coat, hanging behind the kitchen door with a bag of bags and a broom.

On the back of Henry's Vespa.

She wondered if she had lived her entire life from under the collapsed building. That life is imagined by a self we can never fully know.

The softness of hands. A child's hands. A small house somewhere. Gloves on a cold day.

And then with the expediency of the dying, she fell in love with the darkness and the eight seconds she had left in it-each second like a mouthful of food to someone starving.

At that moment, a French girl living in Paris called Natalie fainted in the supermarket.

People rushed over.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

-T. S. Eliot

BOOK TWO.

NIGHT CAME WITH.

MANY STARS.

Chapter Thirty-Four.

You couldn't wait for the day to end. She would be delighted with your change of heart. There would be practical things to sort out, like hospitals and names, a house to live in with a garden.

But just before lunchtime it came. George was at the entrance to the tent, holding up a pitcher of water. George fell over. The water spilled.

And then it came and just battered everything.

You tried to cover your ears, but you were soon on the ground too. No one could see because of the dust. You had no conscious thoughts. If you had died, your last feeling would have been pure terror.

It seemed like hours; thought lay in a mess at your feet. Below the mountain, buildings were crumbling. People's lives were ending within a few seconds.

And when it stopped, the silence on the mountainside was deafening. You remember sprinting to the top-toward the tent-through the dust. George was standing again, but very still. His face seemed grotesque, as though it were hung upon his skull the wrong way. Then you felt each other as if to physically confirm what your eyes saw. You remember being at the edge, looking for Athens in the distance.

"Stop! Stop! Stand where you are!" screamed the professor. "Don't move, the ledge may be unstable-there's been an earthquake and there may be another any second."

But from where you were standing you could see enough.

Athens had disappeared under a cloud of dust.

The professor was shouting.

"I have to secure the artifacts. I have to secure the artifacts."

He turned to you and George.