Shroud Read Free Page A

me then, with drunken clarity, what I would do. Odd, how this random world insinuates its sly suggestions. I scrabbled among the papers on the desk and found the embossed card that had been lying there for a week and read with a rictus of contempt its curlicued and pompous blandishments. Chiarissimo Prof essore! Il Direttore del Convegno considéra un altissimo onore e un immenso piacere invitarla ufficialmente a Torino … I had intended to decline, of course, with a curt and scornful note, but now I saw that I must go, and make her come to me there. Where better to confront my ruin, if that was what it was to be?
    When I had read the letter first my first thought had been to disappear, simply to stand up and walk out of my life, as I did once before, with remarkable, with outrageous, success. It would be less easy this time; then, I was no one, now there are people – a select band, but a band – across however many continents there are who know the name of Axel Vander; all the same, it could be done. I had my escape routes mapped out, my secret bank accounts primed, my sanctuaries sealed and waiting… I am exaggerating, of course. But for a minute or two I did entertain the thought of fleeing, and was entertained by it. It made me feel daring, dangerous; it made me feel young. I wondered if this wielder of the poison pen, whoever she might be, had known the effect her letter would have on me: was it possible she was allowing me time to cut and run? But where would I go to, really? Whatever plans I might have put in place, there was nowhere farther I could escape to beyond this tawny shore, last edge of what for me was the known world. No, I would not do it, I would not give her the satisfaction of hearing the clump and stumble of my clay feet as I fled. Better far to confront her, laugh in the face of her accusations – ha! I would lie to her, of course; mendacity is second, no, is first nature to me. All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram. And now my earliest exercises in the art, my prentice falsehoods, had come back to undo me.
    I woke at five in spectral rain-light, not sober yet. For a second I expected Magda to give her familiar moan of mild complaint and turn over in the bed with an oceanic heave. I reached out a hand beside me to where she was not; the sheet there had a special, faintly clammy chill that I knew I must be imagining and yet was convinced I could feel. I lay with eyes still shut and lit my wake-up cigarette, then rose and walked barefoot into the living room, my dead leg thumping on the maple boards. I am not of an apocalyptic disposition, having seen so many worlds seem to end and yet survive, but that morning I had the certain sense of having crossed, of having been forced to cross, an invisible frontier, and of being in a state that forever more would be post-something, would be forever an afterwards. That letter, of course, was the crossing point. Now I was cloven in two more thoroughly than ever, I who was always more than myself. On one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new I , a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar. The house had a tense and watchful aspect, as if resentful of my intrusion on its furtive doings at this unaccus-tomedly early hour. Phantoms of shadow hung about, trying not to be noticed. A window streamed with rain, and opposite it in the room a patch of wall rippled like dark silk. I stopped still and peered into the gloom, seeking a focus; there were times when Magda was there, a palpable presence, but not now, and the shadows were shadows only. From the garden I could hear the rain beating on the leaves and into the clay, and I pictured it, falling down straight and shiny as wires through the windless dawn.
    The coffee machine was still at its