After they became lovers, they gradually switched to English. They talked about problems, confiding with each other in an urgent rhythm of revelation and tenderness. Two years passed. Jason’s wife was in a car accident and she died. He was vague on the details of his grief.
After that Miranda ruminated, arranging and rearranging the details of their affair in her mind, spending long hours by herself trying to recover the past. When she quit her job, he seemed disappointed, but he didn’t try to dissuade her. She explained that all she had revealed about herself was a way of concealing. Now that he chose to withhold his own secrets, this gave him power that frightened her.
He had touched her lightly on the cheek as if he were whisking away tears. “Frightens you? I don’t think you’re afraid of anything.”
She had laughed. She wasn’t going to cry.
Now Miranda dropped the photograph of Professor Sandhu’s seminar onto the debris from her past; she would clean up in the morning. She fingered the letter, then unaccountably put it down. She would read that, too, in the light of day.
About an hour into sleep she became aware she was dreaming. Photographs displaced one another in random sequence. In each the image of Robert Griffin leered over the scene. Sometimes she was in the picture herself, and sometimes she was an observer. Sometimes Griffin was there as soon as it clarified, and sometimes he emerged after everything else had resolved into a static emblem of strong but elusive emotion. Sometimes he was blurred from the light, and sometimes he was blurred because water was sheeting over his features like a fluid shroud.
Then she was making love with Morgan, surrounded by a flurry of photographs. She was leaning over him; she liked the weight of her breasts pressing against her own skin from the inside as she brushed them across his face in slow, pendulous motion, though actually she had small breasts that were firm and high and she knew this was a dream, and suddenly she became frightened because she also knew that if she arched back to look at him in the oscillating waves of light emanating from their pleasure, she knew he would have Griffin’s face. It would be Morgan, but he would have the drowned features of a stranger.
Refusing the power of her dream, Miranda thrust away from the deadening embrace of her lover and surfaced into wakefulness. She turned on the light, got up, and took the letter and legal document from her desk. Walking into the kitchen, she made herself a hot chocolate, even though the night was warm and she had awakened in a sweat. She sat down to read, stood up, changed her pajama top for a dry T-shirt from a pile of folded laundry on the counter, felt to see that her breasts were small and firm, checked her hips with the flat of her hands, checked her bottom. Everything was there as it should be. She sat down, got up, dumped the hot chocolate in the sink, opened the fridge, got out a cider, opened it, drank from the bottle, held it for a moment to her temple, enjoying the cool glass against her skin, sat down, and began to read.
Miranda Quin, spelled correctly. Address. Yesterday’s date, now the day before. She squinted at the postmark on the envelope: definitely dated the day before yesterday. “My Dear Miranda.” The text was terse yet florid.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, it seems prudent to make final preparations for my death.
As you may or may not be aware, I am under an obligation to you beyond recompense. We might both find consolation, however, should you agree to act as the executrix of my estate.
You will be neither swayed nor compromised by the modest honorarium attached for your kindness. However, there may be satisfaction in the sum to be administered at your discretion for the benefit of others.
Should you decline, these bequests shall be subsumed residual to my estate and distributed as the court deems appropriate.
I hope your placement within the line of largess will allow you to find in your heart the generosity to forgive me.
The enclosed document has been signed and witnessed. The notarized application of your signature will make it legal and binding.
Yours truly,
(Signed) Robert Griffin, LL.B, Ph.D.
All this for accepting her share of a scholarship! A macabre joke? Or had a dead man given her the power of absolution for unspecified wrongs?
Unfolding the legal document, she skimmed through. It seemed authentic. She was named sole executor, and her name was repeated throughout. Griffin’s signature was witnessed by Eleanor Drummond and dated the day before yesterday. The full will would be made accessible to her upon signing. Contingent to her acceptance, respective parcels of ten and twenty-five million dollars (Canadian) were designated for the Policemen’s Benevolent Fund and to establish the Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin Institute of Semiology.
Nothing for a koi sanctuary!
She picked up the Bakelite telephone receiver from its antique cradle, the first rotary-dial phone to be installed in her mother’s family home. It still bore a label with the original number: OLive 3, 4231. This was from a time apparently before people had the mnemonic capacity to remember seven digits. We push buttons now, she thought, and still say “dial.” She remembered her father’s number from when he was a child: 557-J. He had once asked the operator to speak to his grandmother — no other information than that — and she had put him through. Every call with this phone, its innards updated, invoked a rich fluttering of images and thoughts. It was like a talisman of ancestral memories.
“Morgan,” she said when he answered.
“What?” His voice was thick with sleep.
“I’ve got to talk —”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, but —”
He hung up.
She called back. “Morgan, listen —”
“You’re not hurt, not in danger?”
“No, but —”
He hung up again.
She had once called him in the small hours of the night after wakening from a nightmare; she was weeping and residual images of violence were still flooding her mind, refusing to coalesce into the shattered narrative from which she had emerged, refusing to fade. “Morgan,” she had said into the phone beside her bed, into the darkness. “Help me.”
“Turn on the lights,” he had told her. How had he known? She was afraid the walls might be drenched in blood; she was afraid of the light.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Turn on the lights, Miranda. You’ve been dreaming.”
She tried to tell him about the nightmare. Her voice was tremulous. She could only remember shrieking, and terrible silence, fragments of horror, images of shattered flesh.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “We see too much. You can’t suppress horror forever, Miranda. Are you in bed? You relax and just listen. Did you ever consider, during surgery maybe you feel the scalpel at work? Anaesthetic isn’t a painkiller. It just snuffs out the memories of what you’ve been through. Dreams are like that — they absorb the pain. It isn’t the nightmare. It’s waking up in the middle. Doctors have nightmares about patients on the operating table becoming suddenly conscious. Ambulance drivers and firemen…”
He let his voice drone, reassuring her with empathy and morbid detachment, and then he told her to lie back with the phone on the pillow beside her and try to empty her mind.
After a while she wasn’t sure whether the sounds of breathing were her own. “Are you still there, Morgan?”
“Yeah, you go to sleep.”
And she did. And when the natural light of morning filled the room, she awoke with no recollection of further violence. She mumbled into the phone beside her, “You still there?”
“Yeah. You have morning breath.”
“Thanks, Morgan. It’s okay now. See you at work.”
“G’night,”