Free Where She Has Gone by Nino Ricci Page A

desire, every fear, would be permitted. Then I came and it was as if we had suddenly dropped to earth again.
    We lay several minutes without speaking. Rita had wrapped herself in her robe again.
    “Are you all right?” I said.
    “Yes.”
    In the dim light our voices seemed disembodied. There was a mood between us of blank calm like the unrippled surface of a pool; but it seemed the slightest word, the slightest thought, might disturb it.
    “Maybe we should get under the covers,” I said.
    We fell asleep cradled against one another like children. In the first haze of sleepfulness what I felt to be holding her, to have her there in my bed and be able to run a hand if I wished along the whole, smooth plane of her body, was the sort of matter-of-fact elation I felt on first waking from dreams of flying: there was always a moment then when the thing seemed truly possible, because of the way in the dream it had come about not like some miracle but like the slow working out of mathematical law, something that had had to be worked toward, tested, refined, till at last my heaviness gave way to willed, precarious flight.
    But then as I fell deeper into sleep, further and further away from the place where we’d been together, where things had made sense, the horror began to take shape. It began with just a gnawing at the back of my mind like the onset of a fever dream, the scrambling search for a solution to a question that refused to take solid form; and then gradually it grew into a kind of panic. I was running, running, through deserted night-time streets, down subway stairwells, through dim, blue-lit passageways only just wide enough to slip through; and there was something I was moving toward or away from, it was never clear which, something inevitable and large, unnameable, but also, in a way, banal, all the more horrible for that.
    I awoke, with a start, toward dawn. Rita was still beside me, turned away now and sprawled face-down like someone who had fallen from a building. Her breathing was rhythmic but shallow; once she sucked in her breath as if at some sudden fright, then resumed her regular rhythm again. I could smell her there beside me, a complex mixture of sweat and sex and a soapy, milky scent that made me think of how her pillow had smelled when we’d slept together as children years before.
    I slipped out of bed to the bathroom. There was blood on me from her, I saw now. There were smears of it on my fingers, on my thighs; in the morning there would be dried stains on the covers and sheets. I tried not to think of what this meant, how dire, perhaps, this made things. I remembered the wedding jokes about bedsheets when I was a child in Italy, how strange they had struck me then, how brutal a thing they had made marriage seem.
    I went back to bed, my hand going out instinctively to test the sheets, expecting wetness; but they were dry. Rita shiftedas I settled myself, pulled herself in, away. She had turned again, so that her face was etched out in greys and whites against her pillow; what I saw there for an instant were my own features, the set of her jaw, of her cheeks, could read in the placement of muscle and bone my own genetic code.
    For a long time I lay awake turned away from her toward the window, staring into the brightening dawn. A few scudding clouds left behind from the night’s rain gradually dispersed, leaving behind a clear, northern sky that held the intimation of sunrise like a great blue-dipped bowl. For a while, before the traffic increased, I could make out a sound of birds, tiny, industrious whistles and chirps like the coming to life of some vast, miniature household.
    At some point I felt Rita stirring beside me and instinctively closed my eyes to feign sleep. The bed creaked, then the floor, and then I could feel her weight rising up from the mattress, hear the rustle of clothing as she went through the clothes on the bedside chair. She went into the living room to dress: I could picture