Free Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis Page A

onto a side street that barely managed to harbor six buildings and a building-size, overgrown parking lot before surrendering to the chaos of kudzu and what people hereabouts called woods . I’d had similar feelings once on a brief assignment in Midland-Odessa, Texas: this sense that three paces out from the city I’d step abruptly off the continental shelf, into quicksand and nothingness—as though aliens had carved the city from its environs and deposited it here.
    â€œDo you remember a morning in the fall of ’71, on Cyprus?” my companion said after a time.
    A woman’s face floated into my mind. The smell of lemon trees, kerosene.
    â€œI do. But there’s no way you could.”
    He went on. “Because of your presence, because of what you did, or caused to happen, there—I don’t know the details of this, and you yourself may or may not recall them—a woman selected to die instead was reunited with her children.”
    Oh, yes: I remembered.
    â€œYears later, far from those islands, in a far different life, in a different world, that woman again found love and remarried. Her husband was a Russian émigré, a childless widower who had long believed his life over, his family name never to be forwarded, his fortunes at an end.
    â€œDmitri was at first astonished, then grateful, to find love and family so late in his course. Gratitude did not come easy to him, you understand. He had clawed his way up from the rudest dock work. It was difficult for him to credit fortune, chance, destiny—to credit anything but his own determination and labor—for what happened in his life. And because that recognition, that gratitude, came with such difficulty, it was taken most seriously. Taken to his heart, as he himself might say. It became one of the central facts of his life.
    â€œIn time that gratitude extended itself to the person he knew to be responsible for his wife’s survival. And so, declaring someday that person would be properly thanked, Dmitri turned his considerable resources towards discovering the man’s identity.”
    My companion paused, watching an Amish buggy make its plodding way along the road’s shoulder.
    â€œIt was, as I’m sure you know, a for mid able task.”
    Stressed on the second syllable, as the British do.
    â€œI’d think so.” Hope so.
    â€œOne fraught with false trails, laden with dead ends, blinds, misdirections. And impossible to say, finally, whether it was dogged persistence, money—vast sums of it, pirate chests full of it—or simple luck that’s carried me at last to this long-desired end.”
    â€œThis is the end, then? Here?”
    â€œThe Russian, Dmitri, died many years ago—as good a man as will ever see this world. His wife, the woman you knew as Cybelle, followed shortly after.
    â€œIn thanking you now, I discharge both my father’s gratitude and the vow I made to him.
    â€œSpaseba,” he said, holding out his hand. “I am Michael. And now, I suppose, finally, I can get on with my life.”
    Thinking of his obvious professionalism, I said:
    â€œBut surely this is your life.”
    â€œNo. I’m an engineer, a shipbuilder, actually. Not that I’ve had much chance to practice that profession.”
    We had come back around to the truck stop.
    â€œFor all his efforts and dedication, the old Russian was never able to discover your identity. In fact he learned almost nothing. What else was there for me, then, but to become, myself, what we knew you to be? If you wish to find wolves, become a wolf.
    â€œThis is what I did. I trained and had myself sent out as a field agent and before long in that clandestine, circumspect world I began encountering certain…stories, I suppose you would say. You may or may not know: a kind of myth, a hollowness, exists in the place you once occupied. As in Voznesensky’s poem for Robert