“Don’t demean me. It’s not just about that.”
“Me demean you? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought it would be harder for you.”
“Nothing could be harder than this,” she whispered.
“I know that now.” Kai opened his hands with a sheepish shrug. “I’m just a kid. I’m still learning.”
“But what about what’s left, Kai?” she whispered, choking on the tears in her throat.
“What’s left?”
“What about love?” Her voice was gone again. “What about the thing that’s left?”
He was silent before he said, “I’m sorry. There’s not much left, Larissa. Not like we once had.”
“Is any of it left?”
He shook his lowered head.
“You don’t love me anymore?” she said incredulously. As in, she couldn’t believe it.
“I’m sorry.” His mouth pursed. “I don’t love you anymore.”
Shiloh chewed on some dried-up scrubgrass. The sun was like fire. For a few moments Larissa didn’t speak.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” she said, suddenly and loud. “You pretend it’s all about your noble search for answers, but it’s all about that dumb bitch Cleo.”
His face hardened. “Stop. Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Don’t talk about her like what? It’s always been about her. You met her in Jindabyne, asked me to have a threesome with her, because that’s the kind of girl she is, and then sent me away like a coward, so you could come here and be with her. Tell me that’s not true.”
He twisted his mouth from side to awkward side, while his hands rubbed the saddle. He didn’t look at her.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Larissa yelled. “Why did you bring me all the way to this fucking hole where she lives to tell me? Why didn’t you tell me in Crackenback?”
“I tried to come here without you, but do you remember how insistent you were? I’ll come with you, why can’t I come, I want to come. Well, here you are!”
“Come here without me? What does that even mean? Not come here without me, you craven bastard! Not run off! I said tell me!”
“I didn’t want to have a hysterical scene like this one!”
“So your grand plan was to run to Pooncarie like a little girl while I stayed in our hotel room and then just not come back?”
Kai didn’t say anything. “I didn’t know what to do. I was desperate. This is very hard for me, too, Larissa.”
“Is it? Is it hard for you? I can’t believe what you’re doing,” she said, bending in desperation over the horn, trembling on the horse. “I can’t believe this is what you have been reduced to, have reduced me to.”
“It’s been a long time coming. You were blind. You didn’t want to see it. It was right in front of your eyes.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean her…that fucking ugly slut—oh God!”
“Don’t talk about her like that! You’re being cruel.”
“I’m being cruel?”
“To her, yes. You’re being very mean. She is not ugly,” he said by way of non-sequitur defense. “For your information, she won a beauty contest in Broken Hill last year. She was crowned Miss Silver City.”
“Oh, she is Miss Silver City!” Larissa laughed while crying. “The competition must’ve been pretty dire if a dumb doublebagger slut like that could win.”
“Larissa! I won’t listen to this anymore, stop!”
“Kai…” She kept wiping her face, struggling to stop sobbing. “But you and I…we gave up so much to be together…don’t you owe me anything?”
“I don’t know, Larissa,” he said hotly, taking off his hat, rubbing the sweat away from his head, his face. “Do I owe you something? You mean like you owed your husband and children something?”
It was like he had slapped her, hit her across the face.
“And actually,” he said, “I’m treating you better than you treated them. At least I’m telling you what’s going on.”
“How can you say this to me?” Larissa became light-headed, nauseated. Her face, despite the heat, was clammy and cold. “Oh my God, how can you be so heartless.”
“Look, you’ll be fine.” Kai sounded almost chipper. Even now he was still selling her a car. “Just go back home.”
“Good God forgive you, you don’t know what you’re doing, what you’re saying,” she mouthed numbly. “Who’d take me?”
“Oh, come now. Why not? Look at what you said about Nalini. She’s still waiting for her mother. Well, your children are still waiting for you. It’s never too late. Go home. Tell them you’ve made a terrible mistake. Tell them you’re sorry.”
“Tell them I’m sorry?”
He shrugged. “Tell them something. You can take the bus back tomorrow.”
“Take the bus back tomorrow,” she repeated like an automaton. “And you?”
“I’m staying put, like I told you.” Lightly he smiled. “Did you notice last night at the bar? Cleo’s loose clothes?” He nodded excitedly. “Larissa, she is pregnant!”
Larissa stopped breathing. She put her hand on her throat, suffocating.
He went on speaking in a ghastly cheerful voice. “I mean, I know this is hard, you…and me and everything, but from my point of view, isn’t it something? I mean, come on, can’t you be a little bit happy for me? You know about me, how hard it’s been, you know what I’ve had to live with. After Simi and Eve, I haven’t been the same. This is my second chance, to have a kid, to be a father. You know what this means to me; I don’t have to tell you. I’m so happy. I rented a house for us and the baby. Before Cleo gets too big, we’re thinking we’re probably gonna get married—”
Maybe it was the awfulness of his face, so casual while speaking truth to power, so humiliating. He could’ve been talking to her about atoms, or baking, or snorkeling practices off the coast of Wailea. So mild, not like mercy. Larissa didn’t know if it was the face or the brutal words or the vicious indifference in his eyes to the years they had spent together. Or if it was the yawning gap between his state of contentment and her state of utter despair. All these things, none of them. Maybe it wasn’t the years. Maybe it was the children. The remark about her family followed by his merry birth announcement. Whatever it was. Larissa had spent the last few months before Manila living in such lonely misery, fighting with him, extracting from him make-up love and false promises; and she stepped to the brink, to the brink of the end of herself. This cannot continue. I cannot continue. She started to scream. She didn’t know how she happened to push him. But she did. She lunged for him, making an animal guttural sound of fury and hatred and heartbreak, a sound she knew you make only as you rage at those you love who have blackly betrayed you. With the full force of her body and both fists, she shoved him, shoved him so violently in his face and chest and throat that he fell sideways off his horse, shoved him so hard she fell off her own horse—and there was that sensation—of falling out of the sky, of plunging downward. Not out of the sky, but off a horse, onto her knees on the boulders.
The next thing she knew, she was on the ground, holding her knee and screaming from physical pain this time, groaning from the raw sensation of an open wound in her body, and yet it didn’t hurt like he had savaged her, while their two excellent, adaptable horses, tough and stocky, supposedly bomb-proof, yet terrified by the sudden protracted incomprehensible human agony, bolted and loped away, the equivalent of putting pillows over their ears, far away so they wouldn’t hear her scream. She slumped in the dirt. She may have fainted.
When she came to and slowly opened her eyes, pain swallowed her. She groaned, trying to focus, lift her body up, find Kai. She saw him lying low near low lying bushes. He was convulsing.
She couldn’t figure out why he was so stiffly unnatural, lying on his side, his body gyrating, his legs flopping, his arms. He must have hit his head, broken something. This is what happens: you fall off the horse, you hit your head, and the horse
is supposed to just stand there, reins down, nose down, looking for some grass to chew in the outback. Larissa groaned again, but Kai didn’t make a sound. His eyes were bulging. He was breathing, rasping. Blood trickled from his white-foaming mouth. She wanted to be less angry, but the pain in her knee terrified her. She wished she could gallop away like Shiloh. She was afraid she had been badly injured.
Kai was only a few feet away, the width of two horses or perhaps the width of a bed they had once shared. She feared that he broke his neck in the fall. She shoved him, he fell and she fell, but she was sitting up holding her knee, while he was down on his side and couldn’t move. His eyes were moving, though, his mouth. He was whispering something to her. She couldn’t hear him through her panting, and was afraid to come near him. Not afraid. Just couldn’t.
Look at me. I’m sitting on the ground, clutching my knee because I’m afraid to look. So I look at him instead, and he looks afraid, too. So afraid. He is mouthing to me, Get help, get help. It sounds like he’s saying, I’ve been bit.
“What?” Her voice trembles. It isn’t fair! One second, one moment, you’re overwrought like you’ve never been overwrought, and the next you’re both on the ground, you can’t move your leg, and he is whispering mute things to you that sound like I’ve been bit.
But he just told you he didn’t love you anymore! He just said you should take a bus back home, mosey on home, to your family! He took you, took your heart, took from you everything. You’re still panting from his unfathomable betrayal! It hurt so much you wanted to die. You wanted him to be dead. You shoved him off a horse wishing his soul harm, and suddenly he is begging you for help. He is begging you for help!
A few minutes ago, you were begging him for help. Where did that get you?
Yet…the thing you felt for him is still there. The thing that made you want him dead in the first place. The thing that is now making you struggle to try to crawl to him. Kai might as well be a million miles away.
“What’s happened?” she says.
I been bit, he mouths again. Please. Help me.
When you take your hand away from your knee, you see the source of your own physical troubles. You may not see the source of his because it’s back under black soil in the arid Ayers land, in the shrubs of that transcendental mystical wilderness he so loves, but you finally see the source of yours. You see what ails you. Your knee is ripped open to the white kneecap, oozing plasma and blood. Gloopy white bits fall off in chunks.
Larissa starts to hyperventilate. Her knee is open! And they’re miles away from anywhere. What is she going to do?
She weeps.
Kai isn’t crying. He is paralyzed, she sees that. He can’t move. He lies in his awkward bones like they have crumbled in a heap on top of his live body. The convulsions in his legs and arms become more pronounced. It’s terrifying to look at him, and yet more terrifying to look at herself. All she can do is hold her knee together with both hands, surprised it isn’t bleeding more profusely from a gash that open, that deep. If only the horses would come back. His horse has clopped away what seems like a short distance, looking for food or water. Her horse is near, just not near enough to grab on to, and in her shocked confusion, Larissa has forgotten her name.
“Maybe somebody will come soon,” she says, enervated by fear, drooping down, her head low. She is still panting but shallow now, stealing glances at his desperate and pleading eyes.
“Larissa,” he whispers. “Get the anti-venom. It’s on the horse.”
“What anti-venom?” It’s bone dry and the sun is merciless. Many things are merciless. Then she understands. I’ve been bit. “By a snake?” Now she definitely doesn’t want to crawl to him. Has it gone? Has it slithered away? What if it’s still there, close somewhere?
“Which horse?” she says. She means to say, which snake? That little leather pouch on the side of the saddle. Billy-O sure knew what he was talking about when he told them to carry a syringe in case of animal bites, particularly the reptilian chordate kind.
Was it the inland taipan? One bite can kill a hundred adult humans. She remembers that from their days of long-gone fascination with the Australian world entire.
Tick, tick, tick. Every panting ticking breath, no sound, except the slow clomping of a confused and riderless horse. Taipan, paralyzing venom. Nerve damage. Muscle damage. Kidney failure. Larissa’s hands are twisted over her open knee. She tries and can’t get up. She can’t move her leg at all. Kidney damage. Maybe this is what happened to her friend Maggie. She was bitten by a taipan and didn’t know it. What did Maggie once tell her? So long as they believe there is a God, men will go on praying to God long after they’ve ceased to pray for the changing of the wind. A very smart man had written that. Who was it?
Is it too late for Larissa to pray for the changing of the wind?
Kai’s horse, whose name is Hal, is a scrubland away with the anti-venom. A train station away. A city street. Perhaps as far as the golf course had been from her red front door. Perhaps as far as his Ducati had been from her Escalade that first winter day. Just keep walking Larissa. It’s so cold, and you’ve got a little boy to pick up from school, and a track meet to attend, and a cello recital, and Bo is looking for a new lover, and Maggie wants to teach you how to paint, and Ezra wants to tell you about Epicurus, and Jared is about to buy you a shiny metal spectacle on wheels that roars down Glenside through the Great Swamp, through the Deserted Village, to Albright Circle and Lillypond where you left your heart. The red horse with the anti-venom is that far away.
“I can’t get up,” she says to him, to the skies. “I hurt my leg. I don’t know…something is wrong.”
“Larissa!” Only his bleeding mouth, only his eyes move, dart this way, that. His stiff body is shaking. She sees that his fingers have started to swell, his neck too. His lips protrude; he becomes harder to understand.
But the horse! The horse is already in the past, on the river of memory, inexorably moving toward the sea into which all rivers flow. You can’t touch the same water twice, you had one chance, that was it. The horse had gone.
“O Lord, help me…Get the horse!”
She sees him trying to get up, to sit up. Is this real? She blinks, but no, he is down, not moving, just looking at her. But there he goes again! As clear as love, Larissa sees Kai sitting up, turning around, staring at her with profound, imploring eyes. Is that his soul sitting up? She blinks. He is back down.
Limply she remains on the ground in insurmountable motionless sorrow.
It takes an eternity for him to die.
9
The Seven Ages of Larissa
What do you think of when you’re alone in the desert? Well, it depends. For the first four parcels of time? Or the last two? In the beating downward drive of the sun, or when the blackness around you is so great that you actually begin to pray. Pray! You’re begging God you have never called on for help! Oh, the trench-warfare hypocrisy of it. Dear God, dear God. Remember me. Help me.
Her father, whom she loved more than anyone before he betrayed the family, used to say to her, “Larissa, living a life is not like crossing a field.”
She never knew what that meant, but, boy, did he love to say it.
But now, she almost knows. She wants her horse. Shiloh, Shiloh, Shiloh of Cyrene…so it can help her cross the field.
This is a National Park! Like Yellowstone, like the Grand Canyon, like the Great Swamp in New Jersey near her house…where are other people, one person, one other human being…?
There are fossils of humans here, as old and far back as 40,000 years. Kai calls it time before history. Bushwalk through the sparse and shrubby mallee, through the cypress pines, hoping for a glimpse of the red kangaroo, of the wedge-tail eagle. That’s what Kai tells her, and perhaps he is right, but all Larissa sees in the gibber, the desert pavement, are rock fragments, pebble size, cobble size. She doesn’t see the goose-foot wildflowers in the scrubland, no colorful leafy chenopods. She doesn’t see
Kai moving anymore, sitting up, not even when she blinks. And blinks.
What’s happening? The heroes in their own stories can’t die. She was a theater and an English major. She knows this. You can’t afflict them with death.
Except this isn’t Kai’s story. This is Larissa’s. And she is no hero. Aside from the three children she heroically gave life to—and look where that got her. Children, behold your mother.
She turns her body away from his body because seeing him dead while she remains so precariously alive is unbearable.
Precariously alive is a good way to describe everyone. One moment on a horse, the next…If she could walk, she would. But her tendon must have been severed in the fall. She can’t walk at all. She cannot in any way stand up, put weight on the leg, move forward. She needs the horse, but the horse is not Riot. It will not come when called. It won’t come even at random, just because. Just saunter over to find some dry scrub near her. No.
Did the horses run away from her desperate cries, or did they gallop away from the snake? And does it matter?
Larissa sits on the ground, and when she can’t sit any longer, she lowers herself into the sand and drags her body sideways, away from Kai’s, drags it slowly like a foot soldier, until she is fifty feet away, a hundred. Until he is a speck, an illusion in sunlight. A mirage.
She has to get herself to the horse. Then…she will mount it, she doesn’t have to walk to do it, she just has to pull herself up to do it.
The severed tendon is like paralysis of the limb. The leg that once was is now no more. Did she sever her patellar tendon? And is this something that needs to be repaired surgically? To even think of those two words, repair and surgical, in the context that Larissa today finds herself in, is comical. On a flat unpaved terrain, as far as the eye can see dirt, bush, scraggly eucalypts. Nothing else. No phone. No hospital. No other people. Snakes, though. Heat. It isn’t that the horses had gone. It’s that there is no way to get to the horse. Damn animal!