A Glittering Chaos Read online

  She stares vacuously at the river far below, it looks to be a mere trickle on the Canyon bed.

  “You look very philosophical,” Gunther says, appearing next to her and sitting down. “I bought a hamburger, you want half?”

  She is flooded with happiness. “I’d love half,” she says, “as long as that won’t leave you hungry?”

  He shakes his head. “This place is fantastic, even better than the Skywalk if you ask me. I love it. Did you go to the Indian village yet?”

  She shakes her head, her mouth full.

  “Me neither. We’ll go after this. Let’s climb this mountain of rocks, right to the top.”

  He is as excited as a kid.

  “I don’t really have the right shoes on,” she apologizes. “You go. I’ll applaud your daring from the safety of solid ground.”

  He nods and finishes his hamburger. Melusine watches his figure grow tiny as he climbs the rocks and stops and waves at her from time to time. She shades her eyes and waves back.

  Later, once he has come down, laughing and breathing hard, they explore the village and crawl into a healing tent together. The walls are made of strong logs and there’s the aromatic smell of wood smoke.

  “Maybe if I say a prayer in here, then my wife will be healed,” Gunther says. “But I doubt it. I think we’re broken, she and I.”

  To her surprise, he starts to cry and she holds him, his camera in between them, jutting into her breastbone. She strokes his head and he cries like a child.

  “I can’t fix it,” he says. “I don’t think anything can fix it.”

  He finally stops crying and she digs in her purse for a Kleenex. She hands it to him and he blows his nose loudly, leaving a speck of tissue on his chin. She wants to brush it off but that would seem overly familiar despite the rawness of the moment they have just shared.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Don’t be,” she replies.

  A young boy pokes his head into the tent. “You guys making out?” he asks in English and Gunther laughs.

  “Nope. We’re just leaving, it’s all yours.”

  He explains what the boy said and Melusine admits to herself that she wishes they had been making out. They walk outside and Gunther points to a tiny antelope squirrel that is sitting up on its hind legs watching them. Drums sound from the village enclave and the sun is lower in the sky; it is early afternoon and Melusine wishes the day would never end.

  Gunther buys them each an ice cream and they sit on the edge of the Canyon. He teases her because she licks the melting bottom of the ice cream first to stop it from running down the cone, while he eats from the top. He eats quickly while she savours every mouthful.

  When they are finished, he leans back and puts one arm behind her. He does not touch her but she can feel his arm encircling the area behind her back. She is filled with a craving to kiss him and taste the salt of his sweat along with the sweet remnants of the ice cream, but she stares fixedly ahead.

  He looks at his watch and turns towards the bus. “We’d better get going,” he says, “I can see the rest of the group are already lining up. I’m sure we’ve lost our good seats near the front.”

  She stands up with a sigh. “Goodbye, Eagle,” she says and on impulse she stoops to pick up a small pebble.

  “I’m taking it home for good luck,” she says to Gunther.

  “What if it brings bad luck?” he asks.

  “Then I will post it back to the Canyon.” She looks at the pebble. “Pebble,” she asks, “do you wish to accompany me back to Germany?” She holds the stone to her ear. “It says it always dreamed of being a jetsetter,” she reports to Gunther, who grins.

  “We’d better hurry up or your pebble will miss the bus,” he says, and they run towards the driver who is waving at them.

  They find seats at the back and Melusine once again sits next to the window while Gunther stretches his legs into the aisle. She falls into a dreamlike state, hardly thinking, and it seems as if they arrive back at the Strip much too soon.

  The neon signs have just begun to come alive, more iridescent than ever against the electric blue sky. They pass through the Fremont area, the oldest part of Las Vegas.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me?” Gunther asks.

  She shakes her head. She needs time alone. Time to savour her day with him.

  “I can’t. My husband’s taking me out for dinner.”

  “I do have a suggestion for tomorrow. I’d love to see the Valley of Fire; it’s a National State Park, the one with all those red rocks. It’s about an hour and a half outside of town. I could rent a car tomorrow and we could go?”

  She is uncertain, alarmed at the thought of being alone with him. What if she behaves foolishly, out in the middle of nowhere? It is not him she doubts, it’s herself.

  “You’re perfectly safe with me,” he adds. “I just thought it would be nice. I could get the car first thing in the morning and we could set off around ten. What do you say? Come on, it will be an adventure. Our own private adventure.”

  “Yes,” she’s hesitant but she agrees. “Okay, sure.”

  He grins. “I’ll meet you at the front of the hotel at ten a.m. If I’m late, it’s because the car rental place is busy, so don’t leave, okay? Don’t leave until at least eleven.”

  “You want me to wait for an hour?” She is smiling.

  “I want to make sure you’ll be there,” he says.

  “I’ll be there.”

  The bus drops them off at their hotel and Melusine is suddenly very tired.

  They take the elevator up to the second floor and Gunther steps out. “Enjoy your evening,” he says.

  “Wait,” she calls after him, holding the door open. “What will you do tonight?”

  He shrugs. “Watch TV, read, have a shower. I’m not having any girls over if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  She blushes beet red. The elevator beeps, objecting to being held open for so long.

  “I don’t care if you have a thousand girls in your room,” she says, “I was just worried you would be bored or lonely.”

  “I’ll most probably sort through my photos of the day and get a pizza,” he says and he grins at her. “See you tomorrow.” He tips a mock cap and waves.

  She closes the elevator door and goes up to her floor. She imagines him below her and she leans over the balcony and peers down. To her surprise and embarrassment, he is there, craning his head to look up at her.

  They both burst out laughing.

  “See you tomorrow,” Melusine says and she steps away from the railing.

  She is still laughing when she opens the door and finds Hans sprawled out on the sofa, his hands behind his head, watching TV.

  6.

  “YOU LOOK VERY HAPPY,” he says. “You had a good day?”

  “Very good,” she says, startled to see him, her laughter extinguished. “I thought you’d still be at the conference.”

  “Nope, wrapped things up for the night. I said I’d take you out for dinner and here I am.”

  The last thing in the world she wants is to be with Hans. “I’d love that,” she says, her eyes turned slightly away from his. “I’ll go and take a shower and get ready.”

  “Take your time. No rush.”

  She stands motionless under the shower, trying to adjust her mindset in order to have a wifely dinner with her husband.

  She dries herself and finds a clean dress. Despite all her ablutions, she can still smell Gunther — his cigarettes, his sweat and his cologne. She can see his casual grin, and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled and how he cocked a single eyebrow when he was thinking. And how strong and warm and beautifully solid he felt as she held him while he cried.

  “I’m thinking we go to Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville,” Hans says when Melusine sits down next to him, and she is astonished.

  “Of all the places,” she says, “I never thought you’d choose that one.” But she is smiling and her tone is
affectionate.

  “I’ll get us a pitcher of margaritas,” Hans is expansive, “and we’ll misbehave so much that not even Jonas would recognize us in a lineup.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Melusine says, wishing that Hans wasn’t so pale and anemic compared to Gunther. She decides to tell Hans about her planned trip to the Valley of Fire and get it off her chest.

  “I booked a tour to see the Valley of Fire tomorrow,” she says, “can I still go or do you need me?”

  “You booked it? How?”

  “There’s a man in our hotel who speaks English and German,” she says, amazed at the smoothness of her lies. “He booked it for me. But do you need me for anything?”

  “The only thing I want or need, is for you to go and have a great time,” Hans says and she breathes a sigh of relief.

  She grabs her purse. “I’m ready.”

  They leave and Melusine is worried that Gunther will see her leaving with Hans. Then she remembers that she’d told him she was dining with her husband and so it isn’t anything he doesn’t already know. She glances at the second floor but it’s deserted.

  She and Hans walk down the Strip to the restaurant.

  “They disgust me,” Hans growls, of the card-snapping men and women. “And women too, women selling other women. They should all be ashamed.”

  It would not do to tell Hans that she finds the pictures erotic and arousing.

  Then she stops suddenly, recalling with shame and horror why he feels the way he does.

  “Oh, Hans,” she said, taking him by the arm. “It’s because of Kateri, isn’t it?”

  “No,” he says shortly. “Okay, well yes, I suppose so. It’s still so hard not knowing where she is, even after all these years.”

  Hans’s younger sister, Kateri, disappeared inexplicably one day when she was fourteen. Hans was seventeen at the time.

  Despite exhaustive investigations, no trace of Kateri had ever been found and, even some twenty-eight years later, the loss of his sister is no easier for Hans to bear. When Melusine met Hans at university, Kateri had been missing for three years. He still held a small vigil for her every Tuesday — the day of her disappearance — and Melusine knows he’s never stopped hoping to learn the truth about what happened.

  She looks at him now, as he discards the cards in anger, and she has no idea the degree to which Kateri has always been a part of their life; a third wheel on the bicycle of their marriage.

  She also has no idea what Hans is really doing in Las Vegas.

  7.

  THERE IS NO optometry conference in Las Vegas, there never was. It was all a ruse. Hans’s work colleagues had little interest in his area of lens study and simply said they would cover his appointments, no problem.

  He was initially concerned that Melusine would discover his lie but to his relief, she got caught up in the excitement of Las Vegas and hardly seems to notice that he is not around much. He thinks she is behaving rather oddly but he is convinced it is simply due to Jonas’s leaving home and her parents’ death.

  He is relieved to put her on a bus to go and see the Grand Canyon, a request that seemed far healthier than her wish to see Zumanity, which was most out of character with her generally sexually-incurious nature.

  Throughout the years of his marriage, Hans has often felt that what others considered to be a sterling example of a successful life was, in fact, no more than the high maintenance of an ultimate fraud.

  Each evening, arriving home and pulling into the driveway, he was plagued by the unpleasant expectation that Melusine would greet him at the front door, raining pots and pans down upon his head, and shrieking like a banshee all the while that he had ruined her life. Because he had. She might not know it on a conscious level, but he knew it. He had had no right to court her — or marry her.

  Hans’s life had stopped like a smashed clock on the seventh of June in the summer of his eighteenth year. He was seventeen and Kateri was fourteen.

  The worst of it was that he could still remember her beauty as clearly as if he had been with her only moments before. She was the luminous and radiant star around which the planet of his life revolved. Her pale milky skin, her large light-blue eyes, and her long soft white-blonde hair that was as fine as silk, her full and luscious lips, pouting but never petulant. Her forehead, like his, was broad and smooth and her ears were tiny shells.

  He studied her beauty for hours after school, when it was just the two of them. During the heady days of summer they would be up in the tree house their father had built for them, and there, under the great canopied tree, with only the whispering leaves for company, they would lie on the mattress, face-to-face, their noses almost touching and he’d talk about his dreams and stroke her long fine hair.

  Hans dreamed they would go on adventures together; wild journeys to Africa and the Amazon and to the far northern regions of China and India where he’d find jewels and treasures and she’d be his splendid companion and his radiant bride.

  “Hush, Hans,” she would say while the light danced above them, dappling dancing polka dots of green and gold, “you know we’re not supposed to talk like that, about you and me. And besides, you’ll be a fine adventurer without me. I don’t know what my dreams are yet but one day I will. And you’ll be a great conqueror of worlds, I know you will.”

  “Kateri,” he would persist, “tell me your dreams, I know you know what they are. I know you know everything. You just won’t say. Why not? Don’t you trust me? You know you can trust me with anything, you know that.”

  “Fine. In my dreams, I’m alone,” she would say. “Alone in a white world with falling snow and it’s so quiet and there’re no voices except for the beating of my heart.”

  He never liked it when she talked like that and he wouldn’t listen, trying to persuade her to see things his way instead, and to want nothing more than to walk with him on his envisaged path of glory.

  They would lie there until their mother would call them in for supper. “What do you two do up there all day?” she would ask and Hans would shrug.

  “We talk,” he would say and Kateri would give him a secret smile and lower her gaze.

  In winter, they would escape to his room where she lay on his bed, her head on his pillow, and he held her feet in his hands and rubbed them, keeping them warm.

  “You have the most beautiful feet,” he would say. “You are the most beautiful girl in the whole world.”

  He still cannot recall with any clarity the day she vanished. He recalls only the process of becoming conscious at the end of that day, coming to, while his mother wept and cried and his father sat still like a statue, frozen in shock and horror.

  Hans summons his memories of Kateri’s disappearance as a man might recall suffering a bad blow to the head or having to swim through a dark tunnel filled with dank water to reach the light on the other side. And, when he surfaced and his mind cleared, he knew that Kateri was gone but there were gaps in his memory; he had lost time he couldn’t find.

  His friends told him that he had been with them at the time of her disappearance and he was perplexed. “Why wasn’t I with her?” he asked. “Why did I leave her all alone? I can’t believe I did that. I never leave her alone.”

  “I think she was meeting some friends from school,” Phillip, his best friend had told him.

  “What friends?” Hans was agitated. “She doesn’t have any friends apart from me.” But Phillip could not add anything more.

  The police immediately looked to lay the blame on their father and they cast doubt and suspicion upon him to the point where Hans could no longer look him in the eye.

  The only other lead was that Kateri had been seen talking to a young girl on a street corner; a girl with a white bonnet who was collecting charitable donations for a group of gypsies she travelled with.

  “They took her,” Hans insisted to the police. “The gypsies took her. Why aren’t you questioning them instead of my father?”

  The police kommi
ssar said they had investigated the group and had even searched their caravans from top to bottom.

  “But they’re hiding her,” Hans said, “hiding her until they leave. She’s a jewel, she’s perfection; of course, they think they must have her. Do you have someone watching them?”

  The kommissar confirmed that they did.

  Hans found out where the gypsies were camping and he knocked on every caravan door, begging them to give him back his sister. The gypsies were patient and kind, and explained that they belonged to the Oracle of the Sun and would never harm a soul.

  “You want her to be your queen,” Hans shouted, sounding mad even to himself. “You want her but you must give her back, you must give her back to me.”

  The gypsies looked at him sadly. “We’ll pray for the return of your sister,” they said.

  Hans knew they were lying; he was sure they were holding Kateri prisoner.

  “Then let me come and live with you,” he challenged. “Let me join you. That way I’ll know for sure that you don’t have her.”

  “You don’t belong with us,” they replied. “You haven’t been called.”

  “Convenient answer,” Hans answered harshly. “Well, I’m not leaving, you’ll have to have me thrown out.”

  And they did.

  The police kommissar took him home. “It won’t do your mother any good to lose two children,” he said. “Buck up and be a man, won’t you? We still think it was your father. We just need to break him.”

  Hans looked at him in horror. “I can’t believe that my father could have done this,” he said but the slightest hint of doubt had crept into his voice and the police kommissar looked at him.

  “My father could never have done this,” Hans said again, but this time it sounded like a question.

  When he got home he sat down at the kitchen table with his parents. “Papa,” he said, “why do they think it’s you?”

  His mother looked down at her hands and his father was silent.

  “Oh,” his mother said. “For heaven’s sake, Helmut, tell him. Or I will.”