‘I swear, I’ve never seen you! I don’t know anything about you!’
The man seemed dispirited, as if he had been seeking not an admission, but rather had hoped to learn something. He started walking again, The gray light flattened things out – the hill with its two buildings resembled a painted backdrop.
‘You can call me Jefe,’ the man said. ‘That’s what everyone calls me, but it’s not who I am.’
Women peered from the windows of the pink building as they approached – one of them beckoned, soliciting a visit – yet Jefe paid her no mind and entered a door with an intercom mounted on the wall beside it. Beyond lay a tunnel with concrete walls and a ceiling less than a foot higher than Snow’s head, lit for its entire length by fluorescent fixtures. He pictured electric carts rolling along the tunnel, conveying grim uniformed men with side arms and secret orders and missile codes toward a command center. He kept an eye on Jefe, watching for a sign that Luisa’s pills were having an effect, but the man’s walk held steady and his conversation was terse and on point.
After three or four minutes, by Snow’s estimation, they came to a large paneled room with indirect lighting, a burgundy carpet, and three doors leading, he assumed, to bedrooms, kitchen, and so on. Its central feature was a long banquet table set about with high-backed chairs, the dining surface fashioned from an ancient church door carved with a complex scene that illustrated a typically Temalaguan confusion of cosmologies – anguished men and woman supplicating the angels who hovered just beyond reach, appearing both disinterested in their suffering and unaware of the doings of the less well-defined beings above them who looked to be doing a portage across the heavens with some kind of solar vessel. A mahogany sideboard stood against one wall, supporting an array of liquor bottles, ice buckets, and glasses, and mounted above it was a flat screen TV. Four photographic prints in aluminum frames hung on the opposite wall, each depicting a spectacular cloud formation. For all the luxuriousness of its appointments, the room stood two-thirds empty, far too spacious for such a paucity of furnishings, and this indicated to Snow that while its primary inhabitant might have an awareness of interior decoration, he was seriously myopic as regarded an overall aesthetic.
Jefe told him to have a seat at the table, spoke into an intercom mounted on the wall, and then said to Snow, ‘I’m going upstairs for an hour or two.’ He opened the door to reveal a stairwell. ‘Yara will bring coffee and whatever else you require.’
Snow had nurtured a faint hope that Yara had survived the disappearance of the cult, but that had been wishful thinking and now, hearing her name, her presence alluded to so casually, it was as if a bomb had gone off in his head, obliterating his ability to reason. Once Jefe had gone he stood up from the table and immediately sat back down, dizzy to the point of passing out. He stared at the two doors at the far end of the room, shards of memory falling through his mental sky, and when a woman entered, wearing a shapeless gray smock (a nightgown, his initial impression), moving stiffly, slowly, her hair close cropped, a monastic look, lines of strain on her face deeper than those he would have predicted a thirty-year-old to have . . . and when he recognized her to be Yara, his Yara, miraculously alive and still beautiful despite the attrition of time, he started up from his chair again, intending to embrace her, a great joy building, enfolding him like a garment he had prepared in anticipation of this day yet never thought to wear . . . but then he halted his approach. Her expression betrayed no trace of any kindred emotion, not an ounce of welcome or happiness. She wrangled a chair back from the table and collapsed into it, breathing shallowly. After collecting herself, she said, ‘You have some things to wash?’
‘Yara,’ he said. ‘It’s me . . . Craig.’
‘I know who you are. Show me your clothes and I’ll wash them.’
Baffled by her response, he asked what he had done to anger her.
‘Apart from running out on me?’ She sniffed. ‘Nothing.’
‘I tried to persuade you to come with me.’
‘You should have tried harder. You could at least have told me you were leaving. You didn’t have to sneak away.’
‘You don’t . . .’
‘I hunted for you everywhere. People thought I was demented, I went on about you so. You should have told me. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you and we could have said a proper goodbye.’
‘It was all . . .’ He gave his head a frustrated shake. ‘You don’t understand how much I beat myself up for abandoning you, but I was afraid. I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘I guess I shouldn’t blame you for being yourself.’
That stung him, but he reminded himself that these emotional post-mortems unfailingly began with a litany of bitterness.
