Page 107 of Shadow Ticket
“Keep meaning to look into that.”
“You always said it was wrong.”
“Maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. Maybe it’s too late. Just mind what you see and hear in the sky. Ain’t likely to be wild geese on the wing. If you’re lucky you’ll have some shelter ready to jump into, someplace you can believe for a while will be safer. Please stay safe, my Carload o’ Kisses.”
“Your what?”
“I used to call you that when you were little and we kissed a lot. Carload of Kisses.”
“Don’t remember.”
“I do.”
“Long time ago,” trying to find it, maybe with just a glimpse of something blowing away into the night, something it’s already too late to chase in this windbeaten emptiness taking possession of his heart…
39
Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field. Nothing else around for uncounted miles of ocean, only the lofty figure, wind, weather, ocean. Her facial expression, hair and brow at their forbidding height undefined, an openwork visor of some darkly corroded metal protecting, some say hiding, her identity, though now and then aircraft at this altitude have reported glimpses of something like a face behind the mask, more specific and somehow more familiar than faces commonly found on public statuary, keeping a direct gaze at the viewer, as if she’s just about to speak. Like somebody we knew once a long time ago.
The U-13, surfaced, passes slowly, everybody out on deck for a look. She can be seen for miles till night unmeasurably vast falls around her.
“Statue of Liberty,” guesses Bruno.
“Nope,” Stuffy replies, “and we ain’t Gallagher and Shean either. There is no Statue of Liberty, Bruno, no such thing, not where you’re going.”
“You said you’re taking me back to the States.”
“We are, and then again we’re not.”
“Meaning what?”
“It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile.”
All night long, between watches, sleepless, not always sure what they’re dreaming and what they’ve drifted out of dreaming back into however briefly…faces turning from time to time to gaze back down their wake,turning together and drifting upward as if for signs of intention from above, if not quite yet in terror or wonder, at least put on notice—their sight lines briefly converging at the same place in the sky where clouds invisible till dawn are towering toward an altitude still to be reached, a shape as yet untaken, unimagined.
Whatever counter-domain of exile this is they have wandered into, they will be headed not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only suspected, as the days sweep over them—
—
As Hicks beginsto understand he’s not going back to the States right away, that what he thought mattered to him is now foreclosed and he’s stuck over here maybe forever, he has a moment of panic. “What’m I spoze to do, I can’t even speak the language.”
Terike zooms right in. “Time you started learning, isn’t it. Here, a tomato. Say ‘paradicsom.’ ”
“Which one, you or it?”
“Too difficult, let’s try ‘csókolj meg.’ Means ‘kiss me.’ Go ahead, try it.”
“Csókolj meg.”
“Oh all right, if you insist.” She kisses him. “Hmm, could use some work, let’s hear it again.”
“Wait, stick around, like to take a quick snort here—what is this now, ain’t Shalimar, ain’t Jungle Gardenia—”
“It’s called Mitsouko. You like it?”
“Can’t be sure till I know where you put it exactly, if you can just hold still a second—”
“Mi a kibaszott,” not entirely to herself, “what am I getting into now?”
