East is East

Clara and Patsy were next, and then a group of minor figures who happened in the door as Ruth was guiding Brie back up to the bar, and lastly, Laura Grobian. Laura was seated alone in the far corner, as usual, a golden high-stemmed glass of sherry catching the light from the reading lamp beside her. She had her notebook with her—she always had her notebook with her; that notebook drove Ruth crazy—and she was writing in it, her head bent to the page. “Laura”—Ruth’s voice was steady, chummy, full of cheer—“I’d like you to meet Brie Sullivan, one of our new colonists?”

Laura glanced up at them from beneath the celebrated black bangs and Ruth had a shock. She looked terrible. Looked haggard, confused, looked as if she’d been drinking secretly, living on the street, haunting graveyards. Cancer —the word leaped into Ruth’s head—

an inoperable tumor. Two months. Three. But then Laura smiled and she was her old self again, regal, unassailable, the ascetic middle-aged beauty with the devouring eyes and terrific bone structure. She held out her hand to Brie. “I’m pleased that you’ve joined us,” she said.

Brie squirmed, squared her shoulders, blew the hair out of her face. She was working herself up for this one. Laura blinked at her in wonder, and then the flood came. “I’m honored,” Brie began, trying to control her voice, but it was pitched too high, unsteady with worship and excitement, “I mean, I’m blown away. I am. I mean the Bay Light trilogy, after I read it, it was the only thing I could read for the longest, for years … I think I know every word by heart. I’m, I’m—this is really amazing, it’s an honor, it’s—it’s—”

“Do you know the story of Masada?” Laura asked suddenly, glancing down at the page in her lap and then back up at them—Brie and Ruth both. “Ruth, certainly you must know it?”

Masada? What was she talking about? Was it a quiz or something? “You mean where the Jews killed themselves?”

“A.D.73, April the fifteenth. Mass suicide. I’ve been reading about it. About Jonestown too. And the Japanese at Saipan and Okinawa. Did you know about Saipan? Women and children flung themselves from cliffs, cut out their own entrails, swallowed cyanide and gasoline.” Laura’s voice was quiet, husky round the edges of its exotic ruination.

Brie puffed at her hair, shifted the glass from hand to hand: she was clearly at a loss. Ruth didn’t know quite what to say either—this wasn’t cocktail-hour banter, this wasn’t gossip and publishing and wit—it was morbid, depressing. No wonder Laura always sat alone, no wonder she barely managed to look alive. “How horrible,” Ruth said finally, exchanging a look with Brie.

“The U.S. Marines were about to land and the civilians had been abandoned. The rumor was that to become a Marine you had to murder your own parents. Can you imagine that?—that’s what they thought of us. The Japanese—civilians, women and children—leaped from a cliff into the sea rather than fall into the hands of such monsters.”

Ruth said nothing. She took a nervous sip of her second bourbon—or was it her third? What was she driving at?

“I read a story about that once—it was like the people were lemmings or something,” Brie announced, settling on the arm of the chair opposite Laura. “In fact, I think it was called ’Lemmings’—yeah, it was, I’m sure of it. I think.”

“Exactly.” Laura Grobian held them with her haunted—and, Ruth was beginning to think, ever so slightly demented—gaze. “Mass hysteria,” she said, seeming to relish the hiss of it. “Mass suicide. A woman steps up to the edge of the cliff, clutching a baby to her breast, the five-year-old at her side. People are jumping all around her, screaming and weeping. It goes against all her instincts, but she shoves the five-year-old first, the half-formed limbs kicking and clawing at the poor thin air, and then she follows him into the abyss. And all because they thought we were monsters.”

Ruth had had a rough day, what with the cabin torn to pieces, the utter collapse of her work and inspiration, the excitement of Hiro’s jailbreak and Saxby’s phone call, not to mention the scene on the patio last night, and she didn’t need this, not now, not even from Laura Grobian—but how to escape? And then, because she couldn’t help herself, because the moment was so uncomfortable, she asked the interdicted question: “You’re working on an essay? A new novel?”

Laura was slow to reply, and for a moment Ruth wondered if she’d heard her. But then, in a vague and distant way, she murmured, “No. Not really. I just… find the subject… fascinating, I guess.” And then she came back to them, shrugging her shoulders and lifting the sherry glass from the table.