Free Absolution by Patrick Flanery Page B

guess.’
    ‘Not easy.’
    ‘Naaaa. He likes it,’ he said, like a man insisting a woman enjoys being knocked around. ‘You have any kids?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Husband?’
    ‘I’m going to my mother’s. She lives near Ladybrand. You can see the peaks of the Malotis from her back door.’ I know you said this, a fact I can count on, me as the excuse, the point of destination. But I lived nowhere near Ladybrand. Is it ungenerous for me to think I was always a convenient excuse for you?
    ‘I’ll take you as far as Port Elizabeth, but you’ll have to find your own way from there.’ Bernard began to hum along to another song, a woman lamenting the loss of three husbands. He knew it by heart, anticipated each note, could not resist mouthing the words, then singing himself. ‘Your mother know you’re coming?’
    ‘I’ll phone her when we stop.’
    ‘That’s if the phones are working.’
*
    My biographer pretends to be American now, but there is something unfinished about him that I know like my own breath. Of course, I remembered Sam at once. Rather, in Amsterdam I half-recognized him, and in the weeks that followed learned to trust my memory of him. How could I forget? I do not acknowledge this to him when he sits so uncomfortably before me, squirming on the couch in my study, his palms sweating in this room that I always keep cool. It would be a lie to say I remain silent about our connection because I wish to torture him. I have no such wish. In truth, I am terrified of what may yet be revealed.
    So call it, my dear daughter, my Laura, a kind of restitution – my letting Sam in, at long last, much later than I should. I have been tardy in so many things, terrified by so much else. Perhaps in letting him in, I will begin to understand why you did what you did.
    But as the days pass and he asks ever more intrusive questions, I begin to see, just barely, the magnitude of what I have done by allowing Sam to come here, to sit in judgement before me, as my auditor, interlocutor, and elegist. I have summoned my own judge,perhaps even my own executioner – executioner of spirit and will and certainty if not in fact of life. I find it toxic to explain myself, but this is the bargain I have made – the mistake I’ve made at being intrigued by him, at recognizing someone I should have forced myself to forget, for my own sake, ignoring whatever his own needs might be, whatever my debt to him, real or imagined, might yet prove to be, and how it will be settled. What is it he needs? I sense it is not just one thing. I want to say How dare you? and know I cannot, because all this turning over of my old soil, hoping a poppy might emerge, was my idea. I wanted it, I agreed on him, which means he is, by my hand, not just conjured, but authorized . I will not be one of those who invite and then refuse to accept the consequences of that hospitality. He is my guest and I his hostage. I have invited him into my life because I was curious, because I thought, foolishly, that on my terms meant in my control . But he is always coming from more than one direction. He does not himself know what he thinks of me. I suppose there is a kind of power in that, but I am too exhausted for an exercise of power.
    Was he always so tentative? How did he behave as a child? Is your account of him accurate, or itself a performance for my benefit? What would you make of him now, Laura? In your notebook, he is always cowering and flinching, clinging and trembling. I see some of that now, but also a more sinister quality. He is like a beast that feigns vulnerability to put its prey at ease.
*
    A cloud of toxic smoke was moving along the coast, following the weather patterns. You could already see its black mass approaching behind you on the western horizon. Bernard stopped for fuel at a station that had its own generator; everywhere else along the coast was in blackout, as he had predicted. Sam was asleep in the cab, Tiger standing guard over him, panting