“Are you serious?”

“Of course. You’ve got to remember it was a lot easier not to be seen in those days: Photography was in its infancy. No television, no CCTV. Half a dozen false names kept me going through Europe—and eventually here—for thirty-five years. Again, I had money. Money and mobility, that’s how it’s done.”

“Thanks again for the twenty million, by the way. Another sentence I never imagined I’d have use for.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And the fictional wife?”

Another kite dip. The fictional wife evoked the real one. The aphrodisiacal kick Arabella’s ghost being forced to watch had given us, the promise of dark enlightenment. All apparent evil promises the same. It’s a lie. There’s no dark enlightenment because there’s no evil. Whatever it is you’re doing—raping a child, gassing a million—it’s just another thing you can do. The universe doesn’t care. Certainly doesn’t give you divine knowledge in return. All the knowledge and all the divinity is already there in you doing whatever it is you’re doing. Who knows this better than monsters?

Nonetheless my cock thickened next to the moist heat of her hand, and she took it and held it, and that was all the acknowledgement the moment required.

“Enteric fever,” I said. “Poor Emily. She was only twenty-two. And Jacob Junior barely a year old.”

“Birth and death certificates forged.”

“Exactly. I followed them into the grave myself courtesy of heart failure in 1885. I grew an impressive moustache for my return as Jacob Junior, donned a pair of specs, got a new hairdo. My accent had changed, naturally. People see what they’re told to see, by and large.”

“And real kids? You must have them scattered all over the world by now.”

Oh.

As soon as the words were out she wanted them back. These were the last seconds before something was gone forever. Very briefly I considered lying.

“We can’t have children,” I said.

I felt it go into her, find the place already there for it. Of course she’d known, and denied, and still known.

“My periods stopped.”

“I’m sorry, Lu.”

“Richard and I were supposed to start trying. Then I found out about the affair.”

For a few moments we lay without speaking. Cradle comfort of the train’s rocking. It would be peaceful segueing into death like this, I thought, the deepening lull, a tunnel that gets darker and darker until eventually you’re gone out into darkness yourself. Gone out, quite gone out. I held her, but not as if my holding her could make any difference. (The fierce male embrace is invariably patronising to the female embracee.) She still had my cock in her hand. I felt grief and anger and futility going through her and her keeping very still. It was as if she were being burned and had to bear it without flinching or making a sound.

“I knew,” she said. “Carried on taking the Pill in denial. I suppose the thing to say would be ‘Well, it’s for the best.’ ”

There were bigger patches of open night sky now. Stars.

Then suddenly the moon.

“And just to rub it in  …” she said, feeling the unignorable insinuation of ownership where its light licked our skin. Then when I didn’t speak: “At least I’ve got a guy who knows when to keep his mouth shut. I guess that’s what two hundred years does for you.”

I too had thoughts of burning, quietly and without pain as she rolled me over onto my back and climbed by degrees on top of me. Burning—or accelerated decay, like time-lapse film of decomposition, my headless trio of foxes going from plump corpses to dust via maggot orgy in grainy fast footage. It looped while we fucked (while she fucked me ), interrupted when she leaned back and the moonlight ran lewd riot over her belly and breasts. Finished when I finished. A cine reel with the end of its film strip still whipping round.

She fell asleep immediately afterwards, half draped over me. Her weight had in it the finality of the new fact, a brutal peace now the thing had been faced and taken in. We can’t have children . Somewhere in the sex she’d hated me for it, of course, and known that I’d known and made room in myself for her hatred. Somewhere in the sex was the understanding that love was among other things making room for the beloved’s irrational vengeances.

40

WE ONE-WAY HIRED a Toyota in Chicago. Stayed off the freeways. My thinking was the emptier the space the easier we’d spot a vamp or WOCOP tail. Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.

“But you’re saying there are WOCOP exorcists,” she said. “What are they exorcising?”

One returns to metaphysics, but with diminishing urgency. The assumption is that new phenomena must fill in the picture. But if the picture’s infinite, what difference can half a dozen new species make? She was seeing this already. She sat with a strange neatness in the passenger seat alongside me, knees together, hands in her jacket pockets. She’d pinned her hair up and her slender bare neck gave her a look of appalling vulnerability.

“Demons,” I said. “As far as I know, demons. That’s the idiom. That’s the terminology.”

“Which means heaven and hell, right? Demons and angels. God and the Devil.”

“You’d think I’d know one way or the other by now, wouldn’t you?” I was struck by how long it had been since I’d considered such things, how these questions had subsided. I had only a generic memory of small-hours conversations with Harley, though I knew his view well enough, that there was a transcendent realm but that it spoke in many languages. In one of its languages Isis was a word. In another Gabriel. In another Aphrodite. All we ever got was the language. We were a language ourselves. The thing behind the word remained unknown. Naturally: The Word was with God. What use would that be to her?

“But you’ve seen this stuff?” she said. “You’ve seen demons?”

“I’ve seen someone with something inside them that wasn’t them, that was definitely a separate entity. I’ve seen it— felt it, rather—go out of them.”