Free 2666 by Roberto Bolaño Page A

water
in the pool seemed to scale the edges, as if somewhere a squall were brewing or
worse, although where Morini was heading everything was calm and silent, and
there was no sign of a storm. Soon the fog settled over Morini. At first he
tried to keep going, but then he realized that he was in danger of tipping his
wheelchair into the pool, and he decided not to risk it. When his eyes had
adjusted, he saw a rock jutting from the pool, like a dark and iridescent reef.
This didn't seem strange to him. He went over to the edge and shouted Liz's
name once more, afraid now that he would never see her again. A half turn of
the wheels was all it would take to topple him in. Then he saw that the pool
had emptied and was enormously deep, as if a gulf of moldy black tiles were
opening at his feet. At the bottom he seemed to make out the figure of a woman
(though it was impossible to be sure) heading toward the slope of rock. Morini
was about to shout again and wave when he sensed someone at his back. Two
things were instantly certain: the thing was evil and it wanted Morini to turn
around and see its face. Carefully, he backed away and continued around the
pool, trying not to look at whoever was following him, searching for the ladder
that might take him down to the bottom. But of course the ladder, which should
logically be in a corner, never appeared, and after he had rolled a few feet
Morini stopped and turned and looked into the stranger's face, controlling his
fear, a fear all the worse for his dawning certainty that he knew the person
following him, who gave off a stench of evil that Morini could hardly bear. In
the fog, Liz Norton's face appeared. A younger Norton—twenty, if that—staring
so seriously and intently that Morini had to look away. Who was the person at
the bottom of the pool? Morini could still see him or her, a tiny speck trying
to climb the rock that had now become a mountain, and the sight of this person,
so far away, filled his eyes with tears and made him deeply and inconsolably
sad, as if he were seeing his first love wandering in a labyrinth. Or himself,
with legs that still worked, lost on a hopeless climb. Also, and he couldn't
help it, and it was good that he didn't, he thought it looked like a painting
by Gustave Moreau or Odilon Redon. Then he swung around to face Norton and she
said:
    "There's no turning back."
    He heard the sentence not with his ears
but in his head. Norton has acquired telepathic powers, Morini thought. She
isn't bad, she's good. It isn't evil that I sensed, it's telepathy, he told
himself to alter the course of a dream that in his heart of hearts he knew was
fixed and inevitable. Then Norton repeated, in German, there's no turning back.
And, paradoxically, she turned and walked off away from the pool and was lost
in a forest that could barely be seen through the fog, a forest that gave off a
red glow, and it was into this red glow that Norton disappeared.
    A week later, having interpreted the dream
in at least four different ways, Morini traveled to
London
. The decision to make the trip was a
complete break from his usual routine, since normally he traveled only to
conferences and meetings, his plane ticket and hotel room paid for by the
organization in question. This time there was no professional excuse and he
paid the hotel and transportation costs out of his own pocket. Nor can it be
said that he was answering a call of help from Liz Norton. He had talked to her
just four days before and told her he was planning to come to
London
, a city he hadn't visited in a long
time.
    Norton was delighted and invited him to
stay with her, but Morini lied, saying he'd already made a reservation at a
hotel. When he landed at Gatwick, Norton was waiting for him. That day they had
breakfast together, in a restaurant near Morini's hotel, and that night they
had dinner in Norton's apartment. During dinner, bland but praised politely by
Morini, they talked about Archimboldi, about his growing