“I’m listening.”
“When I saw you in the forest, and I said I was going back to the church, well, I turned back for just a moment, as I was walking away.”
Edwin stares at him. “What did you see?”
“I saw you walk under a maple tree. You were looking up, into the branches of the tree, and then—well, I had the impression that you could see something I couldn’t. Was there something there?”
“I saw…well, I thought I saw—”
But Roberts is watching him too intensely, and in the quiet of this one-room church, at the far edge of the Western world, Edwin is oddly spooked. He’s still a little ill—he has a pounding headache—and colossally weary. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. He wants only to lie down. Roberts’s presence here doesn’t make sense to him.
“If Pike left last night,” Edwin says, “he must have swum.”
“But he did leave,” Roberts says, “I assure you.”
“Do you know how starved this place is for news, Father, really any news whatsoever? I live in the boardinghouse. If a boat had gone out last night, I would have heard about it at breakfast.” The obvious next thought occurs to him: “Speaking of things I should have heard about, how did you get here? No boat’s arrived in the past day or two, so am I to assume you strolled in through the forest?”
“Well,” Roberts says, “I’m not sure how my mode of transportation is strictly relevant—”
Edwin rises, which forces Roberts to rise too. The priest backs into the aisle, and Edwin brushes past him.
“Edwin,” Roberts says, but Edwin’s already at the door. Another priest is approaching, climbing the stairs that lead up from the road: Father Pike, just returning from a visit to the cannery or the logging camp, his shock of white hair all but shining in the sunlight.
Edwin looks over his shoulder, into an empty church with its back door hanging open. Roberts has fled.
2
Mirella and Vincent /
2020
1
“I’d like to show you something strange.” The composer, who was famous in an extremely limited, niche kind of way, i.e., in zero danger of being recognized on the street but most people in a couple of smallish artistic subcultures knew his name, was obviously uncomfortable, sweating as he leaned in close to his mic. “My sister used to record videos. This next one is a video of hers that I found in storage, after her death, and it’s got some kind of glitch in it that I can’t explain.” He was quiet for a moment, adjusting a knob on his keyboard. “I wrote some music to go with it, but right before the glitch, the music will go silent, so we can appreciate the beauty of technical imperfection.”
The music began first, a dreamlike swelling of strings, suggestions of static just under the surface, and then the video: his sister had walked with her camera along a faint forest path, toward an old-growth maple tree. She stepped under the branches and angled her camera upward, into green leaves flashing in the sunlight, in the breeze, and the music stopped so abruptly that the silence seemed like the next beat. The beat after that was darkness: the screen went black, just for a second, and there was a brief confusion of overlapping sounds—a few notes of a violin, a dim cacophony like the interior of a metropolitan train station, a strange kind of whoosh that suggested hydraulic pressure—then in a heartbeat the moment was over, the tree was back, and there was some chaotic camerawork as the composer’s sister seemingly looked around wildly, forgetting that she had the camera in her hand.
The composer’s music resumed, that video shifting seamlessly into one of his newer works, this one involving a video that he’d shot himself, five or six minutes of an aggressively ugly street corner in Toronto, but with orchestral strings laboring to produce the idea of hidden beauty. The composer was working rapidly, playing sequences of notes on keyboards that emerged a beat later as violin music, building the music up in layers as the Toronto street corner ticked by on the screen over his head.
In the front row of the audience, Mirella Kessler was in tears. She’d been friends with the composer’s sister—Vincent—and hadn’t known that Vincent had died. She left the theater soon after, and spent some time in the ladies’ lounge, trying to pull herself together. Deep breaths, a fortifying layer of makeup. “Steady,” she said aloud, to her face in the mirror. “Steady.”
* * *
—
She’d come to this concert in the hope of speaking to the composer, in order to find out Vincent’s whereabouts. There were certain questions she’d wanted to ask. Because in a version of her life so distant that it seemed now like a fairy tale, Mirella had had a husband—Faisal—and she and Faisal had been friends with Vincent and with Vincent’s husband, Jonathan. There were several magnificent years, years of travel and money, and then the lights went out. Jonathan’s investment fund turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Faisal, unable to live in the face of financial ruin, took his own life.