Part One 10 страница

That’s what is so absurd about him. He is still amazed women fall in love with him and his ego is so weak (yet so insatiable) that he treats every dalliance as the affair of the century. Each time he feels himself the object of some lady’s affections, Hugh will seize the moment with all the rashness and power of his heart. For a man as dead-on attractive as Hugh, he has been dumped by an extraordinary number of women. He holds on with such intensity that your average young lady—who like your average young man simply wishes to enjoy life, for God’s sake—beats a hasty retreat. You know nearly as well as I do how wildly serious Hugh can be. How deeply he likes to think, how exactly he likes to remember, how fine and painful the calibrations of his emotions. A brooder, the silent type, Hugh’s liable to do things like get up in the middle of dinner, come to your chair and stand you up, and then put his arms around you and embrace you with great strength and solemnity, while you try not to chew your mouthful of food. Well, most women can’t take that kind of stuff.

There comes a certain point in one’s courtship with Hugh when one realizes this is not just something Hugh does to woo you, but this is actually the way he is. The cataloguing of events—our tenth paella dinner, the fifth anniversary of finding the house, our fifth anniversary of signing the papers for the house, our fifth anniversary of moving into the house. It doesn’t stop, it’s not some stunt, it goes on and on. Seventeen years of marriage and I’d put down my book and have to confront Hugh’s earnest blue eyes, staring silently at me from across the room, trying to fathom me. “Do you want to talk?” I’d say. But he didn’t; he wanted to “communicate.” Coming from a world of The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, and adding to the general conversational din all my life, Hugh’s overwhelmingly significant silences had for me a deep sonority. And while my relationship to them gradually became ironic and subversive, I never truly tired of them. I never ceased to believe that his way was a higher path and that he had something crucial to teach me.

I used to believe that it was Hugh who pursued me, but the truth is that even his Cambridge pursuit was incurably diffident. Hugh sought me out after I published a story in a local lit. magazine called “Birth Pains.” The magazine was printed in blue ink on yellow paper and my contribution was so arch and pretentious—the usual twaddle about a me-ish young woman dying from her own cultivation and refinement—that I stayed out of sight for a week afterwards. But Hugh managed to find my piece enchanting and tracked me down. A stranger, he wrote me a formal note and asked to meet me for a daiquiri—in my story, the heroine drinks dozens and dozens of daiquiries—at the Parker House. The idea of meeting this well-mannered and apparently well-meaning stranger was too seductive to resist and I appeared at the Parker House wearing a black dress and a string of lilac-tinted glass beads. Hugh was in a double-breasted wheat-colored suit, holding a copy of “Birth Pains,” and drawling to beat the band. (He sensed I would respond to the cliché of the Southern Gentleman.) He advised me as to the extent of his admiration for my story, asked me how I had achieved my anemic, third-hand effects, and, on the whole, interviewed me rather as you yourself did many years later when you came home with those photocopies of my New Yorker stories. Except then I was a young, ornery girl in a hotel with a stranger, and a half hour into our conversation (and halfway through my second daiquiri—a perfectly horrid drink, of course) I was hoping that Hugh would make his praise complete by suggesting we take a room.

If I’d known then what I soon enough learned, it wouldn’t have been any more complicated than my saying, “Oh Hugh, I need to be with you”—Hugh would have been at the front desk in an instant, gulping so hard that his Adam’s apple would be leaping forth like a cuckoo clock. I had no idea of the depths of his shyness and susceptibility: in matters of the flesh, Hugh has always needed permission. The permission granted, he can be the goat of all goats, but before then he is withdrawn, or so tepidly flirtatious that it becomes inconceivable that a real libido lurks beneath. If it hadn’t been for his great good looks, Hugh would have been miserable: all he could do was make himself available; he could not reach out and take. But how was I to know? It took weeks of thought and frustration before I realized that if I was going to have Hugh, then I must initiate it. Thus the famous dinner party in which I announced as I lit the candles: “Abandon all hope of leaving, ye who enter here.”

God, I must be just a little bit lonelier than I thought. Going on about Hugh like this. It’s near the first anniversary of our divorce. That must be it. We sold the house, sold the ten scabby acres in Mississippi that Hugh’s father gave us on our wedding, and stood like waifs in a divorce court in Chicago, lying through our straight white teeth to the judge so our story would be less complicated and unseemly. Hugh’s girl waited outside, double-parked in her infernal van, and I splurged on a taxi to O’Hare so I could get the hell out as quickly as possible.

The divorce was inevitable once the house was gone, just as precious papers get tattered and lost if you don’t have anyplace to store them. That big house on Dorchester had a domestic magnetism at its core that could keep us together—and even in a kind of ramshackle balance. It was our homeland, our space station—well, you remember the magic of that house. We were so lucky to find it and losing it was terrible for us—especially coming at a time in our lives when we needed walls more than ever before, needed the feel of familiar wood, the low comforting groans of our old house’s cellar, the mélange of sky and branch that hung so peacefully before our front window. The house was a touchstone, the progenitor of memory; it had a quality of preservation, of preserving us, our lives, our promises. Driving us out of there was like driving a tribe from its ancestral home: the rituals of community dried up like empty pods. Without the familiar doors to walk through and slam, quarrels went on and on, deepened in import and acrimoniousness. Ah, the arguments in hotels, with the maids in the next room and the Kiwanis Club in the hall. The late-night whispers in my brother’s house in Maine—even with my brother and his family in Boston and we Butterfields on our own for a few days, we tiptoed and mumbled, washing our cups as soon as we used them. We were refugees without a cause, more interested in blame than in bonds.

It’s our link, you know, mine and yours. The blame. I suppose that’s why you feel so free to contact me and why, to me, speaking to you again seems so natural and inevitable. We are, I would suppose, karmic twins. It was you—and you alone—who set the fire, but we’ll never know what could have been saved if it hadn’t been for my cousin’s Care Package from California. When my cousin’s package arrived with ten trips, ten 250-microgram doses of pharmaceutically pure LSD…Well, as I remember it, we all felt excited and privileged. We had all been curious—no, more than that: we all were committed to taking it. The only trouble had been our fear of buying it from some lunatic on the street, some flaky teen just as liable to sell us strychnine or horse tranquilizer. But with the genuine article at hand—and the weird blessing of having it come from a lab—we were set. It was my cousin, my letter, and the package had been addressed to me. But we all discussed it, all decided it would work best—be less divisive, less strange and exclusive—if we took it as a family. We were all prepared to learn something miraculous and transforming, and it was a measure, I thought, of our enduring commitment to remain a family that we wanted to take the journey together.

Yet, as it happened, we were as helpless as rabbits on a highway when the time came for us to act swiftly and well. We turned this way and that and learned something that turned out to be impossible to absorb: with life seeming to totter on the edge of oblivion, we were not a family at all—it was each for himself, in a state of panic, fear, and terrible isolation. We were not any of us really capable of holding a thought, but I’m sure all of us felt, to one degree or another, that we were being punished for our transgression against the brain’s holy chemistry, that the fire was a foretaste of the hell we had condemned ourselves to. I’ve often wondered (and lamented) why we were so godawful bloody helpless to get ourselves out of the house in good order and I keep coming back to the emotional memory of deserving the worst.

Speaking of blame. I think I’d like to defend myself against your accusation. I quote: “…when I began spending nights at your house you decided that Jade wasn’t getting enough sleep and your solution was to get us a double bed, a used bed from the Salvation Army which we sprayed for bugs and drenched in Chanel No.5.”

My idea? Perhaps the Chanel No. 5 was my idea—it was certainly my Chanel. But the bed was Jade’s idea—and, I daresay, yours. Does it seem at all likely to you that it was me who dreamed up the idea of getting a double bed? Do you have any memory of my proposing it to you? Or are you calling my lack of objection to the idea a form of advocacy? You don’t understand. I realized you two were hardly sleeping—but that seemed connected to the bizarre power of your love for each other. You made me crave sleeplessness because I recognized what it was in you two—a refusal to be separated. It was the privacy of sleep that horrified you. You didn’t want to sleep. Those long late-night walks. We thought you were trying to tire yourselves out but now I realize the purpose of those two- mile strolls. You were reviving yourselves, probably stopping at the Medici for a cup of espresso before coming home.

Jade had always been such a deep sleeper. On weekends, it would be nothing unusual for her to sleep until four in the afternoon. She slept in school, she slept on buses, on family outings. Like an old man, she’d doze off at the movies. Naturally, we noted her semi-narcolepsy and realized it was an escape—from her too-rapid growing up, from all of the countless details of life that displeased her, and from us. Once, when she was nine or ten, I found her asleep in the bathtub and I shook her awake, partly because I was afraid she could drown herself like that and partly because I’d been waiting an hour for her to get out of the bathroom. She looked at me with all the defiance she could muster—which was considerable, even then—and said, “I need my sleep.” She was very possessive about her sleep and she defended it as if it were property. If she could have hidden it the way I hid my chocolates there would have been dreams and packets of unconsciousness stashed everywhere. In a household where everything was shared and talked about and where there was much more need than there was ability to satisfy needs, Jade dug her heels into a universe in which she was unapproachable, uncriticizable, and unknowable.

So after years of accommodating her semi-narcolepsy, we then, with you on the scene, had to adjust to Jade’s sleeplessness. When the first symptoms appeared—a certain icing-like quality to her eyes, as well as her own direct testimony that she was getting about twenty hours of sleep a week—Hugh took the homeopathic route and began giving her infinitesimal doses of stimulants. Herbal stimulants to begin with, brewed in with her tea, and then, relaxing his principles, he even crushed in a little bit of dexadrine. Hugh assumed that her body was keeping itself awake because of some internal crisis, some need for wakefulness, and following the homeopathic edict of treating like with like, Hugh attempted to relieve her body of its need to create these symptoms by creating them artificially—thus, he hoped, defusing the control center of her insomnia. Then he set off on homeopathic chase number two, which is a kind of folksy psychoanalysis—usually Hugh’s strongsuit, for some odd reason.

Hugh developed the suspicion that your lovemaking was leaving Jade in a perpetually excited, that is to say unsatisfied, state. This didn’t go very far in explaining your sleeplessness, but your sleeplessness wasn’t awfully much in question. This continual sexual incompleteness may have been sheer fantasy on Hugh’s part, a kind of compromise virginity, but nevertheless he tried to delicately draw her out about her “night life,” as he called it. Jade spared him the realization that he had overstepped his actual courage, that he was not a WASP Freud, willing to face the truth no matter what its content or consequence, and she simply dummied up on the topic of your sex life. She knew, I think, that Hugh wanted to hear that each night you left her dangling, yearning, and whether it was true or not it was more than she could say—her loyalty to you and the world you both now lived in was too fierce—she was virtually patriotic about the emotional ground you’d portioned off for yourselves: My love affair right or wrong! So she sidestepped his questions, the subtle ones, that is, and when he resorted to frontal attack, she screamed, “You’re taking things away from me. You’re making mine into yours.” It was Jade’s genius to use Hugh’s own language when she fought him. Jade dressed in the uniform of Hugh’s troops and fought him from the trees and bushes, whereas I fought him like the colonial British army, straight up and down in a clearing and decked out in red.

And the sleeplessness continued. The nights when you weren’t with us were no better. Jade would go to bed early, clearly anxious for an uninterrupted night, but then there would have to be at least one phonecall to you and as often as not, after an hour or two of sleep, she’d be at her desk composing a letter to you, or drawing your face, or writing a poem to you—sometimes even trying to catch up in her schoolwork. Hugh was convinced that Jade’s short-term memory was unraveling, that she had gotten paler by two full shades. He was even waffling on the question of whether or not to subtly dose her with barbiturates—he was slower to use drugs medically than he was socially.

Well, this was the climate when Jade approached us and asked for a real bed for her room, a double bed as would befit a lady who shared her sleeping quarters with a lover. It’s strange that our compliance in this small matter is what you chose to rattle in my face—and not the far more significant matter of our allowing you into our daughter’s room in the first place. You approve, it would seem, of our belief in the sexual rights of young people, but raise an eyebrow at our choice of furniture. And what about your own terribly moral parents? What was on their minds when they failed to stop you from virtually moving into our house? At least Hugh and I knew where our daughter was—could actually hear her in her room, if we listened closely enough. The truth is that no one had the heart to keep you two from being everything to each other, and the energy of your connection was strangely overpowering. Since we did not believe that making love is a sin or a crime, all we could have objected to was that you and Jade weren’t yet ready somehow for the pleasures of the flesh—but how could we say that when we were nearly mad with envy over your love for each other? You were all of our half-forgotten romantic fantasies suddenly incarnate; denying you would have been like denying ourselves.

And so, yes, I did agree to it, the bed. I believed in you two, in your gestures and in the world you created. It wasn’t until the bed arrived in that Salvation Army truck and was installed in Jade’s little room that I realized Jade’s arguments were wholly based on trickery. Having a double bed didn’t make a dent in her sleeplessness. Nothing could have put you two to sleep. Love—or is it only romance?—is a psychedelic. It’s the flying carpet, the rope trick. It is that singular, and no one who sees it—which means, of course, believing it—can ever hope to be the same. You two stoned-out beasts reigning up there in your used bed. There have been times, David, when I think that just that, just the fact of you two, never minding what it all led to, but just seeing you two and feeling what you meant to each other, and knowing that love is a state of altered consciousness, has been more than I can honestly absorb. And that in certain ways it has destroyed my life.

Ann

 

 

 

January is when time begins, and spring is when life begins and, for me, the first day of spring was the day I sneaked into a travel agency on Jackson and State to buy a plane ticket to New York. It was a cold April day, gray, slushy, but the most extravagant promises turned slowly in the belly of the wind. I paid for the ticket with a new hundred-dollar bill, feeling as furtive as a spy. I bought the ticket under a false name and kept the day of departure open. I felt brilliant, brave, and absolutely imperiled. The act of stepping outside the law provoked my imagination and released torrents of fearful criminal passion. I wondered if there was a permanent all-points bulletin out on me and if the sweet-faced woman who sold me the ticket wasn’t in fact looking at a newswire photo of me taped beneath the Formica ledge of the counter. I shoved the ticket into my coat pocket and quick- stepped out with my head down.

I hid my ticket in my apartment and dreamed of my departure. I thought I was going to be quite a bit braver than I turned out to be. Like a person doomed to fail, I thought of the hundred things that could go wrong. I thought of my parole officer Eddie Watanabe making a surprise visit to my school and finding me vanished. I thought of being arrested for jaywalking on 42nd and Broadway and having it discovered I was in New York breaking parole. I thought of Ann slamming her door in my face and calling the police. These were the variables and I was right to think about them, but I could not stop myself. My imagination of disaster tormented me as if it were a separate, vicious self. I longed to stop thinking of consequences, just as we must do when we dive from high boards, leap on our skis down steep sunblind slopes, or play any of the other daredevil games we’ve invented as metaphors for love.

I tried to prepare myself. I packed my suitcase. I bought The New York Times and The Village Voice. I leafed through books of photographs of New York. When I heard a jet pass overhead, I searched the skies for it. I methodically withdrew money from my small savings account, as if it were being monitored by federal agents. I said to Dr. Ecrest, “You know what? I’d like to go to New York.” He asked why and I quickly shrugged, cursing myself for so profitlessly risking detection. I really liked him and it had been difficult all along to keep from confessing the dozens of long-distance phonecalls I’d made and the letters I’d written and the huge, nourishing letters I’d received from Ann. It was an agony often to think how I wasted my time and Ecrest’s, especially when I felt stuck and fed up with my own character. I didn’t much believe in psychiatry, but the fact was that I’d been given a chance to talk for years to highly trained, expensive doctors and I’d made very little of it because of my commitment to keep my secrets safe.

The clothing workers union had taken me off the picket line and into their regional offices, where I worked for a fellow named Guy Parker. Guy was a few years older than me and had convinced the Amalgamated to hire him to make a thirty-minute film “depicting the Union’s struggle, from the sweatshops of the past to the challenge of the future.” Parker’s approach to the film clips and snapshots in the union’s informal archives was wholly passionate. Looking at a picture of women leaping to their death during the Triangle Factory fire, Guy would tap his big ivory finger against his high, slightly flushed brow and muse, “Each one of these gals had a family. You know, parents, husbands, boyfriends, maybe kids. Each one. A life. And then out the window. Think of it.” Guy wanted every incident to work into a Big Scene. Negotiations bored him, cooperative housing projects made him practically whinny with impatience: he needed strikes, boycotts, fires, goons, death tolls. Parker’s vision of union history was one of unstinting hysteria; I suggested we call his movie Oh My God! Here Come the Bosses!

However, working for Guy was a lot better than pacing in front of a store, and since I was Parker’s researcher there was an implicit understanding that sooner or later my work would take me to New York, where the national office of the union had a “treasure trove” of photographs and documents and where such early union heroes as Alma Hillman and Jacob Potofsky still lived.

Guy knew nothing and cared less about my personal life—though he liked the way I listened and often asked me out for dinner or drinks. Nevertheless, because fate is not only fickle but also flirtatious, Guy incessantly referred to my upcoming New York trip, alluding to it one day, postponing it the next, until I was half-convinced that the whole deal was an elaborate trap and I refused to react to his promises any more. However, I did use the possible opportunity as a means of putting my toe into the water of consequence if I were to suddenly use my own ticket to fly east. Meeting with Eddie Watanabe, I casually mentioned that “my work” might send me to New York for a week or so. And Eddie, answering so quickly that I wondered if he hadn’t been expecting me to say this, said, “No way, David. No way on earth.”

“Why not?” I said. “Even if I got a written statement from my boss that I had to go to New York?”

“No way, no how.”

Two weeks later, I met again with Eddie. It was evening and spring had receded. A chilly rain was falling and the sky was a dark porcelain blue and looked as if a thunderclap might shatter it into a thousand pieces. Rather than meet at Eddie’s office, we were going to have our talk at the Wimpy’s in the shopping center near my apartment. Eddie was already seated in a booth when I came in. He wore a suburban car coat of a slightly gauzy wool, with long narrow wooden buttons. He’d just gotten a haircut. He was wearing his hair like a businessman now and his practically translucent golden ears looked larval and vulnerable. He smelled of peppermint and new car. As I sat down, he thrust his hand out for me to shake.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not late. I was early.” He snapped his fingers to get the waitress’s attention, like a clumsy boy trying to act tough and worldly for his date. The waitress came over and took out her order pad, making it a point not to look at us. Eddie ordered coffee and I asked for a root beer.

“How come you wanted to meet here?” I asked. Wimpy’s had been one of the principal Hyde Park hangouts for years and Jade and I had eaten a hundred hamburgers there, some of them while seated in the very booth Eddie and I now occupied.

“I like meeting outside of my office. I get depressed sitting in my office all day. And I get the idea that the place puts you up tight. I’d like you to really relax and get loose with me and maybe, just maybe, you understand, you’d have a bit more luck being honest with me if we were to have our meeting in a nicer place.”

There were not many things in the world I despised more than listening to Eddie Watanabe.

The waitress brought our order and placed it before us. Eddie dropped a saccharine tablet into his coffee and stirred it from the bottom up, as if ladling the sediment from the bottom of a pot of soup.

“You still dreaming about going to New York?” he asked.

In a moment’s confusion, I forgot I’d spoken to him about it last time and I felt exposed, panicked. But then I recalled our discussion and I shrugged.

“What’s that mean?” he asked. “A shrug could mean yes or it could mean no or maybe it means you don’t feel like answering. So?”

“It means I haven’t been thinking about it. What’s the use?”

“That’s the spirit. What’s the use is exactly how you should look at it. I was getting worried about you, if you don’t mind hearing the truth. You’re an intelligent guy, you know.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Oh, a lot. That’s been one of my theories since I got into this business, that the system doesn’t work for the guy with the higher than average intelligence. Either it breaks him into bits or he figures out a way to scout around it, but there’s no blessed way on earth the system we’ve got now, as it exists I mean, at the present time, is going to meet the punishment needs of the guy with the higher than average intelligence. That’s why a guy like yourself, David, is a personal challenge for me, professionally speaking. I can learn ten times as much about penology from an intelligent guy like yourself than I can from some goofball who gets busted trying to rob Mr. Goldberg’s grocery store.”

“Ah, do I detect a bit of anti-Semitism?”

“Screw. I’m not anti anything. If anything, I’m anti-anti and you know it. Jesus, David, you don’t know when you’ve got a good thing. Especially seeing as you’ve got a parole officer whose been doing his share of standing up for you lately.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“OK,” said Watanabe with a rather theatrical sigh, “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I may as well.” This was his customary preamble when he wanted to inform me of my lack of rights.

“Tell me,” I said.

“All right. The father was in town this week.”

“The father? Whose?”

“Butterfield’s.”

“Hugh was here?”

“That’s right.

“You saw him?”

“No way. I’m not interested in him. My thing is you, not him. You.”

“How do you know he was here if you didn’t see him? Did he call you?”

“OK. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t sure I was going to, but since you’re asking. Butterfíeld is tight with Kevin DeSoto. You know, the D.A. who prosecuted you. DeSoto’s into that weird kind of medicine Butterfíeld specializes in. So Butterfíeld blows into town and—”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. From nowhere. What’s the difference? Anyhow, he shows up at DeSoto’s office and he says he has new information for a case against you.”

“What kind of case? My case is over. I can’t be put on trial again.”

“Butterfield wants to have your parole revoked.”

“What’s he saying? What’s his reason?”

“Who knows? DeSoto won’t say. It’s probably nothing, right?”

I nodded.

“But Butterfield is hot and bothered that you’re not locked up in a dungeon and getting nothing but bread and water. DeSoto lets him know that you’re on a tight parole and then DeSoto calls my boss and talks it over and then my boss meets with Butterfield.

“This Butterfield thinks you’re going to get mixed up with his family again. He’s pretty damn emotional, the way I hear it. You’d think it was yesterday, the fire you set. When my boss said we had no intention of revoking your parole, Butterfield practically went nuts. He said you hadn’t been punished. That the hospital we had you in was like a country club. He said you were free to do whatever you wanted. And then you know what he said?”

I shook my head, but I knew.

“He said you wrote his son a letter.”

“That’s a total lie,” I said, quickly and with great feeling.

“I figured. In fact, that’s what I called it when my boss asked my opinion. A lie. I said Butterfield was underestimating your intelligence. The guy was a little nuts, the way he was going on. There he is in my boss’s office, taking up my boss’s valuable time and just standing there beating himself on the chest and saying that he’s made himself a promise that you’ll never see his daughter or anyone else in his family for as long as he lives. My boss says, ‘That’s our job, Mr. Butterfield, not your job.’ And Butterfield screams that we’re not doing our job and that makes it his job.”

Eddie finished his coffee and shrugged. “Whew,” he said, shaking his head. “Just thinking about how the man hates you makes me worried.”

“Why does it make you worry?”

“I’m not sure. It just does. Doesn’t it you? Doesn’t it make you worry?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I wish I was that cool. It gives me the creeps.”

The next day was Saturday and I awoke in tears. The dream that usually woke me was one of meeting Jade. She would see me, turn, and flee, and I would race after her, sometimes through Hyde Park, sometimes through a forest. Soon she’d outrun me and disappear but my running never slackened.

This time, however, I dreamed I was weeping in my old room at Rockville. It was sunny and warm and I sat at my childish wooden desk with my head in my hands, crying. There was a knock at the door and I woke up, alone and in the dark because my bedroom was in the back and never got any sunlight. As I came awake, I heard my sobs like the bark of a lonely dog a country mile away.

The tears I shed that morning, rigid in the banal discomfort of my own personal neglect (the lumpy mattress, the stale sheets, the uncovered foam-rubber pillow with its refrigerated zipper), were all I could make of the catastrophic hunger I felt for Jade.

From the moment I set the fire, all of my life was an argument against keeping my love alive. I tried to hold on to what I believed was uniquely mine, fearing that when I lost it I would be nothing at all. But now, I could feel how much of my resolve was already gone. And I could also feel a part of me beginning to wish that my love would finally start to recede. It lay on me like an intolerable heat; it pressed my thoughts like a fever that wouldn’t break. It was worse than mourning because grief was corrupted by hope; I could not even turn my love into memory.

I couldn’t stop myself from longing for her. The feel of her small hard toes as I knelt before her with the tarnished-nickel nail clipper, the oak-colored birthmark on her inner thigh, the double orbit of platinum hairs that circled her belly button. “Trust me,” she said the time we made love and she wouldn’t let me come and she was on top with her hands on my shoulders, moving slower and slower like all human time running down and I was kicking at the mattress as if I were being electrocuted, and the way she said my name as if it were a secret, not softly, yet sometimes in a roomful of people only I’d hear it, which was just one of the thousand things we could never explain—all of these images I thought I was preserving so we could still have them when we were reunited, but now they came unbidden, they did with me whatever they wanted, and they ruled me with their limitless command.