Read Online Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Michael Ignatieff
Ads: Link
Because the kid knew, hey, this is show-time. Iâm on TV. The whole worldâs going to see me dance. And so it proved. He just went right past, jiving and jumping, as Jacek turned and pulled the focus tight on the kidâs dilated, bloodshot eyes. Great images. Theyâd won an award at some film festival. Jacek was concentrating so hard he didnât see the sniper in the charred upstairs window across the street. The first bullet dropped the kid, and the second one would have dropped Jacek, but Charlie got to him first and yanked him back behind the wall.
So this was what bound them together, faith in each otherâs animal instincts. And it got so that they didnât trust anybody else, or at least Charlie didnât. But he could see that Jacek had always trusted Magda, and that she was one of the sources of sound judgement, no matter how far away they were from each other. Every night Jacek would stroll away from the camp or the bivouac or the compound or the hotel and Charlie would see him on his cellphone talking to her. Charlie had no such resource at home, and he never called when he was out on the road. Well, he had called a couple of times, but the distances were just too great to bridge, him in some fucked-up dive and her and Annie in the kitchen, standing by the fridge with the magnets holding the school schedule and the photo of the three of them in the Rockies. The lines were bad, and when Elizabeth said, donât do this again, he hadnât really disagreed. But that was why he wasnât going home. Not yet, anyway.
He had been in love, Charlie knew, and there were photographs to prove it: Elizabeth in the Italian summer dress with the buttons that undid to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath; her looking across the table in the restaurant in Volterra as if there was nobody there but him.
He no longer believed his own memory, but he could see what it was like from the photographs. There actually was a shot of that half-kilo bag of cherries, soaked with juice, beginning to disintegrate, on the white sheet of that hotel bedroom in the half-light. The ones they had fed each other, smeared on each other, shutters closed, naked and wet at the very beginning of it all. Those cherries and the purple stain they made on her skin. And the cold-eyed photograph taken before. What kind of idiot takes a photograph of something like that, when he has a woman in a hotel room on a summer afternoon? Whatâs the curatorial impulse? Or worse, what accounts for the sense, from the very beginning, that one day it will be over and he will need proof that it ever took place at all?
He had never thought that he would lose all of this, that it would seem ruined by what had happened after. Werenât some things supposed to be safe from ruin? Like being in love for the first time, in a foreign hotel, on a summer afternoon? Wasnât that supposed to remain untrammelled, no matter how badly everything turned out? Werenât you entitled to remember something like that together, and just feel glad, in your separate ways, that it had been possible? He had no idea how she remembered it, only he was sure it wasnât the way he did.
Come to think of it, what did he and Annie remember in common? He could be out there, in some fly-blown billet at night and count through the time change in order to imagine where his daughter might be at that very hour: on the bus home, with her satchel, or coming through the door for a snack, or lying in bed looking up at the Day-Glo stars sheâd patched there to watch their fading when the lights were turned out. No, it wasnât about love, it was about what they had in common. Charlie sat there, Jacekâs weight on the end of the bed, and wondered why it was that when he said to Annie, âDonât you remember?â she so often didnât. Some times it was because she had been too young, some times because what she remembered was alto gether
So this was what bound them together, faith in each otherâs animal instincts. And it got so that they didnât trust anybody else, or at least Charlie didnât. But he could see that Jacek had always trusted Magda, and that she was one of the sources of sound judgement, no matter how far away they were from each other. Every night Jacek would stroll away from the camp or the bivouac or the compound or the hotel and Charlie would see him on his cellphone talking to her. Charlie had no such resource at home, and he never called when he was out on the road. Well, he had called a couple of times, but the distances were just too great to bridge, him in some fucked-up dive and her and Annie in the kitchen, standing by the fridge with the magnets holding the school schedule and the photo of the three of them in the Rockies. The lines were bad, and when Elizabeth said, donât do this again, he hadnât really disagreed. But that was why he wasnât going home. Not yet, anyway.
He had been in love, Charlie knew, and there were photographs to prove it: Elizabeth in the Italian summer dress with the buttons that undid to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath; her looking across the table in the restaurant in Volterra as if there was nobody there but him.
He no longer believed his own memory, but he could see what it was like from the photographs. There actually was a shot of that half-kilo bag of cherries, soaked with juice, beginning to disintegrate, on the white sheet of that hotel bedroom in the half-light. The ones they had fed each other, smeared on each other, shutters closed, naked and wet at the very beginning of it all. Those cherries and the purple stain they made on her skin. And the cold-eyed photograph taken before. What kind of idiot takes a photograph of something like that, when he has a woman in a hotel room on a summer afternoon? Whatâs the curatorial impulse? Or worse, what accounts for the sense, from the very beginning, that one day it will be over and he will need proof that it ever took place at all?
He had never thought that he would lose all of this, that it would seem ruined by what had happened after. Werenât some things supposed to be safe from ruin? Like being in love for the first time, in a foreign hotel, on a summer afternoon? Wasnât that supposed to remain untrammelled, no matter how badly everything turned out? Werenât you entitled to remember something like that together, and just feel glad, in your separate ways, that it had been possible? He had no idea how she remembered it, only he was sure it wasnât the way he did.
Come to think of it, what did he and Annie remember in common? He could be out there, in some fly-blown billet at night and count through the time change in order to imagine where his daughter might be at that very hour: on the bus home, with her satchel, or coming through the door for a snack, or lying in bed looking up at the Day-Glo stars sheâd patched there to watch their fading when the lights were turned out. No, it wasnât about love, it was about what they had in common. Charlie sat there, Jacekâs weight on the end of the bed, and wondered why it was that when he said to Annie, âDonât you remember?â she so often didnât. Some times it was because she had been too young, some times because what she remembered was alto gether
Similar Books
