By Blood We Live Read Free

You’re not waiting for Vali’s return, Mahmoud had bitched to me, shortly before his suicide, you’re just addicted to
life.
You’re not a romantic. You’re a junkie.
    I dried my tears with the heel of my hand, like a woman in a movie driving away sadly but bravely from a break-up, and forced myself to think back. With every hero from every pre-Seventies horror film I said to myself: Now just calm down. There has to be a perfectly rational explanation for all this …
    Last night had been, as far as I could remember, unexceptional. Justine and I had watched
The Graduate
and
A League of Their Own
(GeenaDavis’s smile is one of the things I stay alive for, I’d said. Do you think that makes me an emotional moron?) then she’d gone out to the club and I’d gone down to the vault, drunk six O positive MREs from the cooler and read
Don Juan
for the last two hours of darkness until sleep took me just before dawn. That was all. Nothing unusual. Nothing to explain the dream, the wake-up panic, the pounding thirst, the conviction that I knew something without knowing what it was. Nothing, in short, to explain the overwhelming feeling that either I or the world had gone completely insane.
    Desert night flowed over the car. I was aware of my face, thudding, and of the Mitsubishi’s instrument panel attending to my mental wrestle with a kind of sympathetic innocence. The dream’s images tantalised: the empty beach, the sparse stars, the black water, the unknown someone walking behind me. Naturally I’d forgotten what this was like, the way a dream’s churned wake or slipstream left you groping after the dissolving fragments, what they meant, what they seemed to mean. They don’t mean shit, Oscar the analyst had said to me one night in Alexandria. Dreams are prick-teasers
non pareil.
They promise and promise but they never put out. Don’t waste your time on dreams. Oscar was dead, too, it must be seventy years. So many dead. I had not known death had …
    And, yes, back came the tears. Accompanied, this time, by the beginning of real fear, because what, what,
what
the fuck was wrong with me?
    I spent the rest of the journey going through the same amnesiac loop, but I was none the wiser by the time I made it—precarious, tender, horribly alive to my own confusion—home.
    Nor was home an end to the madness.
    Having parked the car out front I paused, arrested in spite of the unhinged nature of things by the Californian night, the scents of orange blossom and bougainvillea and the lovely odour of damp travertine where the sprinklers’ arc had rinsed the drive. My memory being what it is I got by way of association an open mass grave at Auschwitz, thrilled rats rummaging the pale limbs as if for valuables long since purloined by the master race. I stood still for a moment to let the vision fade. There’s nothing to do with these headflashes but wait them out. Which is what I would have done, had the reverie not been interrupted by a sudden human whiff,rich as a cured meats and pickles counter, that compelled me to turn and look back down the drive.
    It didn’t need night sight.
    He was standing between the gateposts, illuminated by the two outdoor lamps that sit atop them like twin full moons, a beggarly old man leaning on a single crutch. His bulk, I knew, came not from protein but from a dozen never-removed layers of clothing with an eco-system of their own. His face was gaunt—what there was to see of it amid the matted hair and health-hazard beard—and one of his large eyes was dramatically bloodshot. His hands were tanned and filthy. If one of my neighbours had seen him the cops were probably already on their way.
    He was staring at me, smiling.
    “You’re going the wrong way,” he said.
    For what felt like a long time I just stood there, looking at him. Then I said: “What?”
    But he swivelled on his crutch and hurried away.
    Angry now (too much bafflement eventually just makes you want to hit someone), I set