A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik

Author:Alexander Maksik [Maksik, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780307962577
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

NOW JACQUELINE WAS a woman enjoying the evening.

She followed the path and soon she was walking in the light of quiet tavernas. Here she drew herself up and prepared to smile.

She did not know what she looked like, so she stopped and pretended to consider a menu board. Those who noticed gave her only a glance. The waiter raised his eyebrows and pointed to an empty seat. She smiled and shook her head. It was as much a mirror as was necessary.

She continued on. She could hear the hollow, percussive sound of people in a swimming pool behind the walls of a hotel. There were taxis waiting. Drivers standing in the streets smoking cigarettes.

And then she was out of town. The moon had come up behind her. First it was rust-colored. As it rose, it yellowed and then paled to the whitest blue.

There were no more buildings. The path turned to crushed lava rock. There was no more wall. The moonlight cast Jacqueline’s shadow before her. She listened to her sandals crunching against the path. As she walked, it was the only noise she could hear. When she stopped and stayed still, there was the faintest sound of water sloshing against the rocks below.

The path dropped away and disappeared into shadow, then it rose again and followed a steep ridgeline, marked by occasional white stone cairns reflecting the moonlight. Beyond the top of the ridge, she could no longer see where the path went, but she knew that there was that last town. And even if she’d not thought it precisely, she knew that was where she was going. As if she’d been heading there all along. As if from the beginning she’d had that town in mind.

She climbed onto a warm boulder and removed her sandals.

What beginning? her mother asked without any acid in her voice. She asked it calmly, as if she were interested and had no lesson to provide. She asked as if with hope. That perhaps her daughter had come to understand something important.

Jacqueline didn’t know what beginning she meant, but she felt it anyway. No matter how momentary this fit of certainty. It would pass. It might pass halfway up the ridge, or before she could slide her feet back into her sandals, but now, she was calmed by it. Foolish and illogical and dangerous, she was calmed by it.

She waited a while longer, drank some water, and then tried to remain as still as possible. It was not only the rock that held the heat, but the valley itself; its black walls radiated warmth between themselves. And Jacqueline in the middle. She imagined them speaking to one another—the walls, the water, the moon, her mother, herself. She could not imagine what any of them were saying, but she imagined them speaking nonetheless. She felt joyous and clear and she worried again that she might be going mad, that this was the start of lunacy.

Then she saw herself back on that beach. She was unwashed and laughing to herself, the Senegalese men mocking her, tossing her scraps of meat.

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