The ship was still; the silence of the city spread over us. Be yond the wharf, the lights of the city were too bright to be properly seen, shedding radiance without illumination.
“Peter, wait here with me. The ship will sail in the morning.”
“You know I’m going ashore.” I turned back to look at her. She was slumped on the seat, huddling against the river winds.
“If you find Gracia she’ll only reject you, as you reject me.”
“So you admit she’s alive?”
“It was you who first told me she wasn’t. Now you remember differently.”
“I’m going to find her,” I said.
“Then I’ll lose you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
In the dazzle from the city I saw her grief. “Whatever happens, you’ll always be with me.”
“You’re just saying that. What about all the things we were planning to do together?”
I stared at her, unable to say anything. Seri had created me on Collago, but before then, in my white room, I had created her. She had no life independent of mine. But her desolate unhappiness was real enough, a truth of a poignant sort was there.
“You think I’m not really here,” she said. “You think I live only for you. An adjunct, a complement…I read that in your manuscript. You made me with a life, and now you try to deny it. You think you know what I am, but you can’t know anything more than what I made you into. I loved you when you were helpless, when you depended on me like a child. I told you about us, that we were lovers, but you read your manuscript and believed something else. Every day I saw you and remembered what you had been, and I just thought of what I had lost. Peter, believe me now…you can’t live in a fiction! Everything we talked about, before you ran away—”
She wept then, and I waited, staring down at the top of her head, rolling my arms around her thin shoulders. In the night her hair was darker, the wind had tousled it, the salt spray had curled it. When she looked up her eyes were wide, and there was a deep, familiar pain behind them.
For that moment I knew who she really was, who she replaced. I held her tight, repenting of all the pain I had caused. But when I kissed her neck she twisted in the seat and faced me.
“Do you love me, Peter?”
She was hurting because of the tenderness I was taking from her. I knew she was an extension of my wishes, an embodiment of how I had failed Gracia. To love her was to love myself; to deny her was to inflict needless pain. I hesitated, bracing myself for an untruth.
“Yes,” I said, and we kissed. Her mouth on mine, her lithe body pressing against me. She was real, just as the islands were really there, as the ship was solid beneath us, as the shining city waited.
“Then stay with me,” she said.
But we walked aft and found my holdall, then went down through the metal-echoing passages to the place where a gang plank had been slung across from the shore. We walked down, stepping over the raised wooden slats, ducking under one of the hawsers that held the ship to the quay.
We crossed the apron, passed through the line of parked ears, found an alley that led to steps, and these to a road. A train went past in silence.
I said: “Have you any idea where we are?”
“No, but that tram was going to the centre.”
I knew it was Jethra, but knew it would change. We set off in the same direction as the tram. This street that served the docks was draughty and ugly, giving an impression that daylight would only underline its dilapidation. We followed it for a long way, then came to a wide intersection where a white marble building, with a pillared edifice, stood back on lawns.
“That’s the Seigniory,” Seri said.
“I know.”
I recognized it from before. In the old days it had been the seat of government, then when the Seignior had moved into the country it had become a tourist attraction, then when the war came it was nothing. For all my life in Jethra it had been nothing, just a pillared edifice, its significance gone.
Beside the Palace was a public park, and a pathway bisected it, lit by lamps. Recognizing a short cut, I led the way. The path climbed the hill in the centre of the park, and soon we were looking down across much of the city.
I said: “This is where I bought my lottery ticket.”
The memory was too vivid to be lost. That day, the wooden franchise stall, the young soldier with the neck brace and the dress uniform. Now there was no one about, and I stared across rooftops to the mouth of the river and the sea beyond. Somewhere out there was the Dream Archipelago: neutral territory, a place to wander, an escape, a divisor of past and present. I felt the dying of island rapture, and sensed that Seri was staring too. She was forever identified with the islands; if the rapture died, would she become ordinary?
I glanced at her, with her drawn face and her wind-blown hair, the thin body, the dilated eyes.
We went on after a few minutes, now descending the hill, joining one of the main boulevards that ran through the heart of Jethra. Here there was more traffic; horse-drawn and automobile, following lanes marked away from the tramlines. The silence was dying. I heard a tram bell, then metal-rimmed wheels grating on the surface of the street. A door to a bar flew open, and light and sound spilled out. I heard glasses and bottles, a cash register, a woman laughing, amplified pop music.
In the street a tram swished past, clattering over an intersection.
“Do you want anything to eat?” I said as we passed a pavement café. The smell of food was irresistible.
“It’s up to you,” she said, so we walked on. I had no idea where we were going.
We came to another junction, one I dimly recognized without understanding why, and by unspoken accord we came to a halt. I was tired, and the holdall was weighing on my shoulder. Traffic roared past in both directions, making us raise our voices.
“I don’t know why I’m following you,” Seri said. “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?”
I said nothing until I had to: Seri looked exhausted and miserable.
“I’ve got to find Gracia,” I said at last.
“There is no Gracia.”
“I’ve got to be sure.” Somewhere here was London, somewhere in London was Gracia. I knew I would find her in a white room, one where blank paper lay scattered across the floor, like islands of plain truth, auguring what was to come. She would be there, and she would see how I had emerged from my fantasy. Now I was complete.
“Don’t go on believing, Peter. Come back to the islands with me.”
“No, I can’t. I’ve got to find her.”
Seri waited, staring at the litter-strewn pavement.
“You’re an athanasian,” she said, and it seemed to me that she said it in desperation, a last attempt. “Do you know what that means?”
“I’m afraid it means nothing to me now. I don’t believe it ever happened.”
Seri reached up to me, touched me high on my neck, behind my ear. There was still a sensitive place there, and I winced away.
“In the islands you will live forever,” she said. “If you leave the islands you become ordinary. The islands are eternal, you will be timeless.”
I shook my head emphatically. “I don’t believe any more, Seri. I don’t belong.”
“Then you disbelieve in me.”
“No, I don’t.”
I tried to embrace her but she pushed me away.
Seri said—“I don’t want you to touch me. Go and find Gracia.”
She was crying. I stood there indecisively. I was scared that London was not there, that Gracia would have gone.
“Will I find you again?” I said.
Seri said—When you have learnt where to look.
Too late I realized she had receded from me. I stumbled away from her and stood by the side of the road, waiting for a gap in the traffic. Carts and trams rushed past. Then I saw there was a pedestrian underpass, so I went through, losing sight of Seri. I began to run, clambering up to the surface on the
other side. For a moment I thought I knew where I was, but when I looked back
Christopher Priest, The Affirmation
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