1. It is not yet the end. Moss descends from the oaks, thick as curtains, veiling the night's secrets from the living. A wild mare and her foal are out to feed before the dawn. Seagulls bark their hunger at the sky. And Lyra, our island, remains above the sea. The ocean has not engulfed all this, even though I have woken from that dream I've had again and again over the decades. In last night's rendering, after the island had burned and sunken into the waters and all the stars had fallen into the Atlantic, I could still swim. And beneath the surface, wandering among the blue constellations like a mermaid, at last I found Gabriel. 2. But it is not the story of a drowned ghost haunting my dreams that Dr. Madera wants from me. He says I must focus on the facts. Dr. Madera has commanded that I report the story of myself, the real story, every morning. Should I get lost, he has offered me helpful mnemonic exercises: What is your age? What is your name? Where do you live? What year is it? Who is your husband? What are the names of your children? What is the weather like today? The wind smells of rain. My name is Elle Ranier. It is May the thirteenth, 1997. A voice talks at me from the radio, telling me that the market has turned for the worse, the Israelis and Palestinians are at war, snow falls late in the north. The broadcast makes it sound as if the world is finally ending. I no longer tremble at signs of the apocalypse, since my own was prophesized for me in a fluorescent medical office some time ago. At the start of the Second World War, I moved from New York City to Lyra Island, population four hundred-most of whom, until these last years, were employed by my husband, Simon. We have lived since then on this strip of sand, woolly with oak, off the coast of southern Georgia. The dunes here shimmer, white as snow. Wild horses roam, ancient and unapproachable as unicorns. Storms trample us in this part of the world; we are the midwife of the ocean's wrath. Hurricanes have ravaged my garden many times over. Until this year I have always been able to revive my rosebushes. Our home was built on the foundation of a previous one, which was built on the foundation of one before that; both houses burned to the ground a century apart. The island has never wanted us. Back in '41, the three of us-Gabriel, Simon, and I-had anchored at the dock on the river's side, rather than the ocean's, where the irreverent tangle of oak recalls the woods of some fairy tale. I knew even then that I'd become lost in them. The path to the house was scarcely marked by an ancient sandy trail; there has only ever been the one dirt road carving its way through the island, from the town in the south to the northern settlement. Our house stood on Lyra's highest ground, right in the middle. It was Elijah, at first the groundskeeper and later Simon's ship watch leader, who guided us to our new habitat, which stank of earth and ocean and fire. We were city people and startled by the sound of our own feet crushing the leaves beneath us, but it was not the land itself that would curtail our welcome. Once the house was before us, I gazed at it in awe, the stone stairways rising into a menagerie of vines veiling more windows than I could count, the grounds so spacious that a wild horse gnawing on the lawn seemed the size of a dog. Even the light overhead was of a different quality, more persistent in its splendor. I wondered to myself how a person would not go missing in such a place. After some moments engaged in this reverie, I noticed that Gabriel had indeed vanished. I turned to Elijah, mustering what composure I could, and asked after his whereabouts. "Mr. Simon says your cousin's to be staying in the old shed," Elijah responded. "So I pointed him on his way." "They've done it up for him quite nicely, Elle," Simon said. "And wait until you see the bridal quarters." I had not yet had a chance to visit even the bathroom when Mr. Clarke Senior, the mayor, materialized from the ghostly spread of oak with a rifle in hand. "Well then, Ranier, you've found our Lyra," he said by way of greeting. Back then, the island still answered to the Clarkes, as it had since the beginning of American time-that is, after Lyra was stolen by the Clarkes from its indigenous, most of whom had been driven from the earth. The family had derived its fortune first from gold and then from steel, but they had fallen out of the financial favor they once held. It was from the Clarkes, I learned later, that Simon's father had purchased the land where our new house stood. Theirs, too, had stood there once. It was not only Clarke we would meet that day, but an entire cadre of his loyal locals. One by one they emerged from the woods, armed at his side, as if our puny party represented the German invasion feared along the Atlantic coast. Whatever sudden inferiority they might have felt toward Simon, with regard to financial standing on the island, was upstaged by this display in military might. Simon's stature seemed to shrink, from its former six feet to something less, as he stepped behind Elijah and then very nearly behind me, his slender and helpless wife. It was Gabriel who spoke at last, reemerging a wraith from Lyra's wild. He stood before the militia in the manner of an immortal, unarmed and grinning. "Who knew paradise was so easy to find?" he replied, on our behalf. And so ended the short-lived standoff. Simon retired early that evening, claiming exhaustion, so Gabriel and I walked through the grounds toward the sea, which I had not yet seen. The island was more feral back then. Or perhaps it is only so in memory. Moss tickled our shoulders as we walked; above it the stars were bright as fireflies, a dream of the trees. "Simon is still shaken up over that reception from Mr. Clarke this afternoon," I said. "He even said something about returning to New York. Wondered if he should write his father." Gabriel shrugged. "Clarke was only trying to spook him, Elle. Show Mr. Simon he might be the boss right now, but not for long." "So that's what their whole circus was about?" I asked. "I was hiding in the woods listening in on 'em before they ever approached. They were goin' on about not letting any Yankee take what's here," Gabriel replied. "I heard one of 'em say it's blue ground, Elle. That there's diamonds in the water-or maybe some kind of jewels even prettier than diamonds. 'Course then another said that was all just an old slave story." "There it is," I said, distracted as the trees parted. Before us suddenly were the iridescent dunes, and beyond them, that canvas of impassive, violet sea. Nothing would ever be so magnificent as that first glimpse. "Yes, there she is," Gabriel said, drawing me into him. "My sham cousin, alone with me at last." That was our first day on Lyra, a far more poetic day to die. Instead I've lived to hear Dr. Madera diagnose me with a disease that befalls the old, that destroys memory-my own, surely, but also the memory of the world as it once was. I stare out the window and imagine all my most beautiful memories, stretching vast and deep as the ocean, shimmering blue as a mirage beyond the scrum of oak. I am losing the Atlantic, losing all that makes me Elle: my facts. 3. The first fact that left me, as far as I can recall, was the existence of my keys. It wasn't as if I couldn't find them. One afternoon, suddenly, it was as though they'd never existed at all. It was scorching already, the rite of southern spring, and the mosquitoes had laid waste to my calves. As I stood there at my front door on my pockmarked legs, struggling with the doorknob, I thought someone was playing a cruel joke on me. I understood that the door was locked, but not how to undo the state of it being so. I felt like the dreamer whose mouth won't sound though she is screaming. Finally, I thought to go around to the garden and call for Elijah. I was screaming for his assistance when Ethel appeared. I hardly recognized her-her hair was nearly all white. "What are you goin' on about?" she asked. I explained to her that I could not get into the house, that the door was standing in my way. "Where is Elijah?" I demanded again. "My Elijah?" Ethel was frightened, as if I'd pointed to some specter in our midst. Then the fear passed and a curious expression formed on her face. "Well, what's taking him so long?" I asked. Ignoring me, she pulled a large chain of keys out from the pocket of her dress and walked me like her darling through the front door. "You forgetting things again?" she asked. "Go on and sell my soul to Satan if my own Elijah was resurrected for your eyes to behold before my own." Outside I hear sirens. The oaks do not mind the interruption. Only we humans are given pause by the reminder of death. Perhaps everyone on the island is dying. It is happening to all of us, all at once, the planet over. The rain finally begins. The morning review of my facts disintegrates beneath the ambulance's wailing soundtrack. I hope there is a little room somewhere in the universe where all the lost bits have gone to hide. 'Second star to the left and straight on till morning,' I say aloud for nobody. The wall calendar says it is Sunday, and on Sundays, for as long as we have lived here, Simon attends the Baptist church on the north end of the island. There he plays piano for the congregants, most of whom are or have been his employees. And on Saturday evenings, for as long as we have lived here, I have played for him the part of the church chorus as he rehearses the list of songs he plans to play the next morning. That is, until just days ago, when suddenly I could no longer stand the cacophony of what had always been melodious music to me. In fact, all I could hear in it were sirens. I screamed at Simon to Stop, please-it's torture. He stood and closed the fallboard with little ceremony, then kissed me on the forehead. "As you wish, Elle." I rather wish he trembled with rage instead. But that has never been his way. It was never for me that Simon reserved his passion. Throughout his years of secret dalliances, there was only one I believe he loved, and that was the gentleman from Louisiana. We have never said anything about the lovers, nor about the geologist from New Orleans. I have always protected Simon, and he has always protected me. When I was young, I believed I was saving my life by marrying him. But one never knows how a life may be saved or destroyed until it is too late. So we both had lovers who were originally from New Orleans. But unlike Simon's, my affair has primarily been with a dead man. I have only the one photograph of Gabriel and me. There is so little proof he ever existed before or after that day. My body, in the photo, has turned blond from the summer. Our knees just barely touch, but I can still feel the hair on my thighs stand at the gesture. He hands me his cigarette and I can taste him on it. I have never before wanted anything so much. The smoke wanders in and out of me. And then I collapse, coughing. As the camera shutter clicks, he whispers a secret in my ear. The cigarette remains in my hand; his mouth is pressed against my hair. Desire is hardly the word. There is nothing else, in that moment, for us. I don't remember where we were, who was taking the photograph, only that we'd just recently met. I was still a girl, barely seventeen. Time began its advance with Gabriel. Memories of the time before him belong to some other child's life. Gabriel's punishment for me has been that he will always remain young, always the face in the photograph, while I've watched my body age. He is forever the man whose legs were entwined with mine that summer, who carried me out into the sea at Coney Island despite my shrieks that I couldn't swim, whose weight later pressed down on that body of mine, now long gone. It was beneath him that I first felt what it was to melt the edges of myself into another. I wonder if he had a sense then, in the picture, that he would die so young. I wonder what his secret was, stilled forever in my ear by the camera, that I will never hear again. Like the sirens before, the shrill ring of the telephone shatters my daydream. There is so much more noise in the world now than there once was. Simon announces that no one on the island has died. A kitten climbed up a tree and the ambulance-Lyra has only the one-came to rescue it. 'Thank God, right?' he says into the phone. "So, we all aren't dying?" I ask him quite seriously. "Would you like anything from town, darling?" Simon asks, ignoring me. A time machine, I want to say. My own cat, Mina, stares at me curiously, as if I were engaged in a conversation with ghosts by using the telephone. I shoo her away but she returns to my side. Before I became sick, she never paid me any attention at all. The mice and the raccoons in the garden were far more interesting. Lately, though, I have become a subject of great curiosity to her. Ever since I realized that Mina will remember me longer than I her, I have an irrational resentment toward her. I hate that she will roam among my things, my purses and coats and blouses, free to destroy them once their occupant is gone. "Your friend is okay!" I shout at her, referring to the reckless kitten of Simon's phone call. Beholding the cat, I suddenly ache from the simple fact of her pretty face. If life weren't full of so much beauty-the sweet mischief in Mina's gaze, wild horses running down the blue beaches of everywhere, a spell of spring rain, the lilac dawn and its twin in dusk, the silk of a first kiss, Gabriel's knee grazing mine, the stupidity and ephemerality and naive violence of youth, of want, and children laughing, skipping beneath the curtain call of this world-then we wouldn't cling to life so. There would be no use for memory. We would rise to eat, lie in the sun, then sleep again until it was all over. It's beauty that has grown our minds. And it is beauty that has undone us. For a long time, I have wondered whether it would exist without the end, without death. If beauty and death are coincident, codependent. I still wonder now. Excerpted from The Stars Are Not yet Bells: A Novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
