Pitch Dark by RENATA ADLER

heart. The tense, the perfected future of it, is the clue. You can pray that things will be other than as they were, other than they are. The forbidden, the solipsistic tense is this: that things will have been other than they were. Prayer must be timely and it must be prompt. Not even in a world of miracles, and only if the world is yours alone, can you pray the past away.
    And the virtuoso, and the pachysandra, and love long ago, and the awful night of Eva dancing? “The only invitation to leave a road,” Judge Holmes once said, in a famous court decision, “is at its end.” The case involved what is called in law an attractive nuisance, something hazardous, an uncovered blade or well, an unattended piece of machinery, which might tempt a child to stray and hurt himself. The children in the Holmes case were more than hurt, they fell into a lake of chemicals and were dissolved. But the more one looks at the great judge’s words, the more clearly they are an instance of the hollow, perfectly specious aphorism. The one place at which roads normally extend no invitation whatsoever is at their ends. Every road’s invitation seems to lie either on it, as a means to reach a destination, or alongside, where its own destinations, diners, shops, and houses, are. At the end of a road, there is usually, at best, an intersection with another road. More commonly, there is nothing. Or a quarry, or a reservoir.
    The Olive Pell Bible, one of the best-selling Bibles of its time though not perhaps in history, was an expurgated Bible. Mrs. Pell had begun by crossing out and removing from the Bibles of her friends any passage with a carnal implication, including, to name just one example, the begats. The result, as it turned out, was a very short, dense text. Her friends soon urged Mrs. Pell to give the public the benefit of all the talent and industry required for such a condensation, and so the Olive Pell Bible went into the first of its many printings. It is very hard to obtain a copy now.
    An hour later, I am back, from my walk, in my own room at the castle. On the rug, in the hallway, outside a room two doors from mine, I have noticed a pail, an empty bottle of Evian water, and a towel. In discussing the routine of the castle, the ambassador said, I now remember, Kathleen will give you bottled water. There was no bottled water in my room, and the water, not just from the taps, but also in the glass beside my plate at table, I have also noticed, is distinctly brown. I don’t mind brown water, having used it on visits to friends in South Carolina and Georgia; I had even rather liked the sulphur smell. Nonetheless, there is now something disturbing, something in the nature, can it be? of a statement, or declaration, about that empty Evian bottle. I hear Celia’s voice and Kathleen’s nearby, and I think, It is nothing, jet lag maybe or a hangover. They are cleaning out a room. What could be more normal than a pail, an empty bottle, and a towel. I look around my room, rearrange a few things in the closet, put on a dry pair of shoes and socks. In the basket which holds the peat beside the fireplace, I now notice several spent, old, yellowed cigarette stubs. Though they are clearly remnants of some earlier visit, I wonder whether it will somehow be thought that they are mine. Not wanting to be thought that sort of guest, and also from an innate sense that they just don’t belong there, I start to rummage in the peat and pick them out. When I have gathered the first handful of these crumpled objects, along with their bits of loose tobacco, I become aware of what I begin now to consider a distinct air of growing conspiracy. I hope that the ambassador will remember, even on the basis of our few and short encounters, that I do not smoke. Perhaps this is the moment when the fantasy, or paranoia, or whatever it is, sets in in earnest, only in reverse, as a form of faith: faith that the ambassador, when he sees or hears about these filthy