The Fires Read Free Page B

had towed the child in the cart out of his line of vision, not that he could see all that well in the dark. It was the medication he was taking. The painkiller for the ache in his hip. A climb up a high walkway over a drilling site last year in Turkey, and a simple slip, a fall of only about three feet onto a platform below, landing on his side. The pain had stayed with him.
A man takes his hard knocks, he told himself, and then climbed back into the car. Within an hour he was seated on the airplane, and in another few minutes he was flying through the dark sky, returning to Moscow—and ready for another day of meetings.
    That was when he last called her, after the long day in Moscow. So many things had changed and he wanted to tell her about them, things she’d be interested in, the new clothing, the look on the faces in the crowd, showrooms for western automobiles, restaurants and fax machines and Xerox machines and cellular telephones. The shock you once felt when arriving here after leaving the West behind, well, it had turned into another kind of shock. He had wanted to talk about it. But she had been so down. The medical problem, the menopause problem, was weighing on her so heavily that he didn’t really have a chance to talk about anything else.
    He climbed into bed that night feeling a tinge of regret—and a fiery pain in his right hip that kept him turning from side to side. Finally, he had to get up and take another painkiller. Ah, these chemicals! He couldn’t decide what was worse, knowing exactly what they did to you or knowing nothing except that they brought you some relief. He lay there a while, waiting for the stuff to take effect—hoping it would work the way it was supposed to. You are free of pain for several days, and after the first day you may wonder where it has gone, but after the second you forget about it, and another day or so goes by and you feel so normal that you don’t compare your days to the bad ones.
    And then the pain returns.
    And you lie here like this, wondering, hoping, sometimes, after a sleepless hour or two when you decide that you will break your standard oath about taking pills to help you sleep, except that you didn’t bring that particular medication along with you, stupidly, stupidly didn’t bring it….

    That’s when he might have begun to have had some real sympathy about her troubles, all of the complaints she had brought forward—the flashes of heat and sudden shifts to cold, the sleeplessness until dawn and then the deep sleep for an hour or so, and then waking up to another day of fatigue. The strange fluctuations of desire.
    Not that he didn’t always try to understand. He loved her deeply and never wanted to see her in even a moment’s discomfort or pain. It’s just that he didn’t understand the relentlessness of her unfolding condition. And she drew back from telling him the whole truth, that it was close to those years of desperate grief that they had felt after the death of the baby. It wouldn’t have done her any good, she decided, to make him feel that again simply as a way to get him to understand. She loved him deeply. She didn’t want him to have to feel the same pain that she was feeling.
    Though, yes, of course, he understood. Understood in his bones. Or in his balls, he should have said.
    The falling off of desire had been so precipitous for her that he—he had told her this once in a dark fit of desperation after returning from two weeks in Pakistan—could only compare it to a kind of death.
    â€œYes,” she had told him. “That’s it, that’s just the way it is.”
    â€œBut—well,” he said. “The cock dies. But the cock always gets resurrected. Erection, resurrection, almost the same word, isn’t it? Death in life, that sort of thing…”
    She laughed weakly. Even a month or two ago she would have found him, and his word-play,