The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston

Author:Wayne Johnston
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), General Fiction
ISBN: 9780307375445
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

LOREBURN

I AM BARELY ABLE TO CONCENTRATE ENOUGH TO WRITE OR READ. My body feels as if it is mimicking that of my past self. That young woman about to leave New York for the second time in her life, exhausted in body and mind, determined to remain lucid until she made it home.

I look about Patrick’s kitchen. I look at the daybed. The last thing I want is to sleep, yet it is a long time since I have looked forward so eagerly to first light. Looked forward to it, yet dreaded what it might reveal.

After going to the front room and extinguishing the lantern, I sit on the sofa and look at the black opacity of the window.

There are no lights out there on the unseen water, not even far-distant ones. The large window faces due south onto ocean open all the way to the northeast coast of South America. Nothing between here and there but the occasional Loreburn-like island, though not ghost islands for they have never been occupied and never will be. A plumb line on a map would bypass North America. Bypass New York, where my daughter with whom I have never corresponded lives.

Upon waking, fully clothed, on the sofa, I cannot remember leaving the kitchen. I light the lantern and look about me but see no evidence, a glass, my flask, a bottle, that I’ve been drinking. I look over my shoulder at Mr. and Mrs. Trunk. The locks on both of them are still in place. I do not feel like I’ve been drinking. There is the absence of that feeling that supersedes all physical sensations, the feeling that I have lapsed, given in again, that despite the certainty I felt when my “day” began that with it my reformation had begun, my “day” ended as every day for years had done and now yet another resolution was required that I would somehow have to convince myself was sincere. I don’t feel the wearied sense of waste and loss and guilt, nor the forced hopefulness that I need to summon before I can drag myself from bed.

“I am sober now,” I’ve told myself thousands of times as I lay in bed. “Sober but hungover. In spite of yesterday, I will never drink again.”

But I have not been drinking. Months of sobriety do not lie in waste behind me. I must, blessedly, have fallen without a drink into a dreamless sleep, only for a few hours it feels like, but still.

I look at the large window. The glass is so unblemished there seems to be no glass at all. I cannot have been asleep very long, for there is still no sign of morning.

I have been careful, in the weeks since moving in, not to touch the glass, not to press my nose against it while looking out. The room might as well be wide open to the air. Passersby could not see me more clearly if they were in the room, on my side of the glass.

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