Cosmo Cosmolino Read Free Page B

going to drill open his head in the morning so I held my tongue, but inside me, oh! that shameful, grinding mutiny. I loved my own camera,its scratched black body, a certain inky tremor that winked on the sunken pool of its viewfinder as I raised it to my eye— my eye, this unofficial, peripheral eye of mine; but I disciplined myself, I applied the discipline that is missing from Patrick’s version, and I submitted. There was no point in explaining to him that the flash would bleach their faces and give them red dots for pupils. Natalie fetched the camera and the children, and Patrick arranged the pose with gestures and quiet orders: himself and Natalie side by side on straight-backed chairs, and the two kids bracketing them, leaning on their parents’ shoulders. It was an easy shot to take. Their mood stilled them, and they looked into the camera with identical expressions of formal apprehension. The children moved out of frame, and I took the second one: Natalie and Patrick, side by side, hand in hand, thigh along thigh. Then I stood still and waited; but nobody seemed to remember my suggestion for a third shot, so after a moment I put the lens cap on, and handed the camera back to Natalie.
    â€˜Patrick,’ said Natalie, as she zipped up the case and the children wandered away, ‘tell your dream. He dreamt last night about an angel. The angel of death.’
    I looked sharply at him, and he laughed. Patrick had that rare thing, a mirthful laugh. He always liked to recite my old dreams, as comic turns, but I had never heard him relate one of his own. I never thought ofhim as that kind of person: I never thought of him as a dreamer.
    The shabby walls, whose plaster was so thickly encrusted with the worm-casts of damp that it might have been French brocade, struck me then as beautiful, as original, because of Patrick’s illness and the danger he was in.
    â€˜My dream,’ he began mildly, taking his time, ‘this dream which my wife has so histrionically interpreted, was that I was in a pit. Not a wet pit, but a dry one, with sides of bare earth tamped hard and packed. Really it was a lion’s den.
    â€˜The lion was nowhere to be seen, but I could feel it somewhere nearby, and I was crouching there, waiting. Waiting for the person to come who would save me from it.
    â€˜And then a figure appeared on the rim of the pit, looking down at me: a black man, tall, with shining skin, and eyes that were slanted and Asiatic. He was dressed in splendid robes, very magnificent, and on his head was a kind of turban, a great feathered head-dress. He was even more terrifying than the lion. He was mighty. He was . . . in majesty.’
    The breaths we took were not sudden, but quiet, and thorough. This was not the kind of dream-telling after which one asked, ‘And then what happened?’ Patrick kept his eyes on the weave of the tablecloth. His eyes seemed further apart, and he held his mouthslightly pursed, as if restrained by modesty from saying more.
    He leaned over and turned up the volume of the radio which had been too low, all afternoon, for anything to be audible except the occasional hushed wave of applause; and the music we now began to hear was hardly more emphatic.
    â€˜A string quartet,’ I said. ‘That’s comforting.’
    It was still light. Sparrows were hopping about in the branches of a tree outside the window, and rain, earlier, had collected in the up-turned leaves with their frilled edges. In different spots, now here, now there, a load of rain would become too heavy for its leaf, and the stalk would suddenly sag and let the water pour straight down in a quick stream.
    â€˜I like a quartet,’ said Natalie. ‘It’s like a family. Or a conversation. One speaks, then another; then the other two join in.’
    â€˜No—listen,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s a quintet. It’s the one with the two cellos.’
    â€˜Two? Are you sure?’