Jack (Gilead #4)(10)

He did, and then he said, “I’m going to take my shoes off, too. That might make things less awkward, I believe.”

“Why would it?”

“We can just try it out. We’ll see. I could be right. There.” He slipped off his shoes, pocketed his socks. His feet, where they showed beyond his trouser cuffs, had a dim lunar pallor even in all that dark. They looked very naked, not quite his and startlingly his. Sometimes he thought of the naked man who lived in his clothes, that bare, forked animal. He had dreamed a thousand times that he was somewhere public, wearing less than decency allowed. That was the feeling. Utter vulnerability. Then again, the cold of the grass was sharp and pleasing, like river water.

She said, “You were right. This is better.” And laughed, which pleased him. And then they walked for a while, she holding his arm, her head at his shoulder, quiet. They were feeling that same odd cold together, and hearing the same night sounds, stranger to her than to him, he thought. He was introducing her to them, really. It was one thing to hear them from a porch or through a window screen, another to step into darkness itself where they were native and undistracted, making the dark spacious by the here and there of their rasping and chirruping. There was a soft clash of leaves when the wind stirred. Maybe another time when he was benighted he had imagined her walking beside him, more felt than seen, pensive as she was. By turning toward her he might dispel the illusion that she was there in the way of the dream, a soul, perhaps his own soul, in the now untroubled trust of her noiseless steps. The air smelled freshly come from somewhere new, if there was such a place.

She said, “Maybe everything else is strange.”

Well, this happened to be a thing his soul had said to him any number of times, wordlessly, it was true, but with a similar inflection, like an echo, like the shadow of a sound. She, the actual Della, might not have spoken at all, since the thought was so familiar to him. So he did look at her, her head lowered pensively, and he asked her what she had said. “Your voice is very soft.”

“Oh, nothing.”

That meant she chose not to say it again, whatever it was. “Nothing” was a finger to the lips, a confidence she had thought better of. A confidence. Then she realized she should not be so much at ease with him. She decided to be reticent about the kinds of thoughts she didn’t usually allow herself, after almost speaking them. If she had said those words, it meant she liked the night well enough, and he felt a tentative kind of pride in the thought. The night and the place were his own, more or less, and she was his guest in them, now that she had begun to seem a little more at ease.

She said, “It just seems to me sometimes as though—if we were the only ones left after the world ended, and we made the rules—they might work just as well—”

He laughed. “There’s a thought. Jack Boughton makes the rules! Too bad there wouldn’t be a few other people around to, you know, feel their force. Not that I carry grudges. Still. The first rule would be that everyone had to mind me. And the second would be that they could not hide their chagrin.”

Silence.

She meant to be taken seriously. He’d known that, and still, he’d made his joke. So he said, “An interesting idea, certainly.” They were strangers killing time. Remember that. Somehow he had been imagining something else, an almost wordless peace between them, a night like a ghostly presence witnessing this most improbable meeting, quiet and more quiet until she was gone and he had days to himself to remember her and nothing to regret. But she was serious, no doubt to keep their circumstance from taking on another character than detachment, from sliding into distrust or old anger. Might as well make the most of it.

She said, “I didn’t mean you and me. I meant any two strangers.”

“So long as one of them wasn’t Rasputin. I’m sorry. You mean strangers in the abstract. I’m sure they exist somewhere, for purposes of argument. None in my immediate acquaintance. Strangers in the abstract always turn out to be fairly drearily particular on acquaintance. Under the slightest scrutiny, really. A glance will destroy the illusion. In my experience.”

She shook her head, and said nothing. And why would she bother, when he kept on talking, and seemed to want to make a joke out of everything, and make the same sort of display of himself he made even when he was alone, toying with words, a sort of fidgeting of the brain. When her very hand on his arm meant that he could know a few of her thoughts if he were calm and a little tactful. “Sorry.”

“No. That’s all right. I understand what you mean about people. But they see more and know more and think about more than they would ever have any practical use for. I see that all the time. Even in children. They have their ideas about what is true or fair. About what matters. In the abstract.”

“Agreed. Yes. But could we have a slightly larger population left after Doomsday? If there could be two, there could be two dozen, I suppose. I know I’m being literal-minded. But I try to imagine these two castaways absorbing the terrible fact, and then one of them saying to the other one, in this void, in this empty world—You know what we need around here? Some rules! When they had completely outlived any need for them? The one good thing about it all. Emily Post, Deuteronomy, the entire regime gone. It’s not as if they’d want to murder, being just the two of them. They wouldn’t need to steal, since there’d be no one around to own anything. They could forget about adultery.”