“Beyond Echo and Shadow”

[Note: “Beyond Echo and Shadow” is a short story as imagined having been written by Valery Rockford after the events and timeline of the coda of The Fourth Winter. It is presented here as part of an imagined short story collection titled The Books Between Us: Beyond Echo and Shadow, possibly authored by her.]

​

“Beyond Echo and Shadow”

Valery Elizabeth Rockford

​

Kaja finished Axel’s novel, Normal Eyes, shortly after two in the morning and put it facedown on the carpet beside the sofa. This was unfair to the book. She had liked it enough to read the final hundred pages without making tea, which was something she almost never did, and enough that she had gone back twice to passages she thought she had misunderstood. The second time through they had become worse, not because they said anything different, but because she had understood them correctly the first time.

​

Axel could write. That had never been in question. She had known him for nearly five years, intermittently and pleasantly, across book launches, dinners after readings, one disastrous picnic, and a Christmas party at which someone had put gin in the punch before remembering that half the guests were driving. He was funny without needing everyone to notice it, remembered people's names impeccably, and had once spent twenty minutes carrying boxes for a bookseller he barely knew because everyone else had found reasons to be somewhere else. Kaja had liked him before she knew she liked him, which was generally how such things happened when she was not paying attention.

​

Nothing had happened between them, and the point mattered to her. Axel had never kissed her, attempted to kiss her, slept in her bed, left his toothbrush by her sink, borrowed money, disappeared, returned, asked forgiveness, or promised anything. Once, outside a restaurant in February, he had touched the back of her coat as a taxi passed too close to the curb. She had remembered the touch for three weeks and disliked herself slightly for doing so.

 

More recently there had been the suggestion of dinner, though not exactly an invitation. The two of them had been standing near the bar at somebody else's launch when Axel said there was a Lebanese place on Commercial that she would like, and Kaja said perhaps she would, and he said perhaps they ought to find out. That was all. Then his novel came out, and she bought it herself.

 

This also mattered. He had not sent it to her with an inscription that could later be used as evidence, nor had he asked her to read it. She had seen the book in the front window of a shop, recognized the jacket from advertisements, gone inside, paid twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents, and carried it home in a paper bag with two oranges and a bottle of Chardonnay.

 

Normal Eyes was about a man called Julian who believed himself incapable of lying. Not incapable of deception; Axel was too intelligent for anything that simple. Julian knew he could deceive. He knew he could withhold, arrange, omit, redirect, say true things in orders that produced false impressions. He simply believed that because he rarely uttered a sentence he knew to be factually untrue, he had preserved some essential moral distinction between himself and other men.

 

The novel knew this about him. That was the problem.

 

Kaja had spent the first half waiting for Axel to reveal Julian's blindness, then realized Axel had revealed it on page seventeen. The rest of the novel was about what happened after a man understood the central defect in his character and remained interesting enough to himself that understanding it became another way of possessing it.

​

She slid from the sofa to the floor and picked the book up again. There was a passage near the middle where Julian's lover told him that he listened to her only after converting whatever she said into something he could admire himself for understanding. Julian thought about this carefully. He recognized the justice of it. Later he repeated the accusation privately, in more exact language than she had used.

 

That had made Kaja close the book the first time. Not that he failed to understand; that he understood beautifully.

 

She opened to the passage again, read it once more, and shut the book. “Fuck,” she said, and the apartment supplied no contrary opinion.

 

By eleven the next morning she had telephoned Gwyn.

 

Gwyn answered on the seventh ring. “Someone had better be dead.”

 

“No.”

 

“Then someone had better be naked.”

 

“No.”

 

There was a pause long enough for Kaja to hear sheets moving at the other end.

 

“You do understand what telephones are for?”

 

“I finished Axel’s novel.”

 

“Oh Christ.”

 

“You haven't read it.”

 

“I don't have to. You said his name in the tone people use before explaining either a murder or a wedding.”

 

Kaja leaned against the kitchen counter. “Can you meet me?”

 

“Is this breakfast?”

 

“Lunch.”

 

“Then no one is dead yet.”

 

Gwyn chose a café whose principal virtue was that nobody they knew went there. Its second virtue was coffee strong enough to make the first seem less necessary. She arrived twelve minutes late wearing a green scarf, two different earrings, and the expression of someone delighted to have been invited into a problem for which she bore no responsibility.

 

“So,” she said after sitting down, “what's wrong with Axel?”

​

“I didn't say anything was wrong with Axel.”

 

“You called me before noon, Kaja.”

 

“I've called you before noon.”

 

“Your mother died that one time.”

 

“That was once.”

 

“Exactly. That’s what I just said.”

 

Kaja pushed the sugar bowl toward her, although Gwyn had not asked for it. “I don't trust him.”

 

Gwyn tore open a packet of sugar. “Did he do something?”

 

“No.”

 

“Excellent.”

 

“Don't.”

 

“No, really. This is more convenient. Men are always doing things and complicating the paperwork.”

 

“He wrote a book.”

 

“I had heard rumours. If I recall correctly, you started this particular rumor when you told me about it.”

 

“I read it.”

 

“That seems reckless.”

 

“I liked it.”

 

Gwyn stopped stirring her coffee. “Ah.”

 

Kaja looked at her.

 

“That was not an insightful ah,” Gwyn said. “I was buying time.”

 

“You could try listening.”

 

“I've been listening since you called me during a perfectly good hangover.”

 

Kaja told her about Julian. She told her about the woman whose words became most intelligible to him only after he had improved them in his mind, then about the second woman, whom Julian had loved more sincerely and injured more efficiently because by then he had learned to recognize the mechanics of his first failure. Finally she told her about the ending, where Julian understood that knowing why one destroyed something did not restore it.

 

Gwyn listened for several minutes with unusual seriousness before saying, “So Axel wrote a novel about an asshole. Is this what you’re on about?”

​

Kaja closed her eyes. “You promised to listen.”

​

“I did listen. Very carefully. He sounds fucking exhausting.”

​

“Julian.”

​

“Julian sounds exhausting.”

​

“Axel wrote him.”

​

“Yes. That is what writers do. Otherwise the books arrive blank. I bought one of those once. It was called a notepad.”

 

Kaja looked toward the window. Rain had turned the street into overlapping versions of itself: storefronts doubled in the pavement, pedestrians stretched downward beneath their feet, headlights moving in both directions at once.

 

“He knows,” she said.

 

“Axel?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Knows what?”

 

“That Julian does it.”

 

“Does what?”

 

“All of it.”

​

Gwyn considered this. “Well, that seems better than not knowing.”

​

“But does it? Really?”

​

“I don't know. Probably. I'm not qualified to determine the moral consequences of imaginary men before coffee. Too many imaginary men in my own past to be considering your—I mean Axel’s—imaginary men.”

​

“He doesn't miss anything, Gwyn. That's what bothers me.”

​

“The writer?”

​

“The writer. There are writers who create terrible men because they don't understand that they're terrible. You can see the hole in the book where the author should have noticed. Can drive a truck through some of those holes. This isn't that. Axel notices everything. He sees exactly when Julian takes someone else's pain and turns it into information about himself. He sees how self-awareness can become vanity. He sees—”

​

“And therefore?”

 

Kaja stopped. Gwyn waited but did not rescue her.

 

“There is no ‘therefore.’”

 

“Good, because I couldn't find one big enough to drive a tricycle through, let alone a truck.”

 

“That's the problem.”

​

“I thought the problem was Axel.”

 

“I didn't say Axel was the problem.”

​

“You have now told me twice that Axel is not the problem, which is suspicious. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Kaja rubbed at a water ring beneath her cup while Gwyn tore another sugar packet in half. “Do you think he is Julian?” Gwyn asked.

​

“No.”

​

“Do you think Julian is him?”

​

“No.”

 

“Do you think he has done those things?” Kaja pressed.

 

“I don't know. I’ve never dated him anymore than you have.”

 

“Do you think he would?”

 

“I don't know. Try to generalize when I answer under these conditions, I’ve only so much caffeine in me to keep going around in circles. I kind of already answered you.”

 

“This isn't funny.”

 

“No, but you are.” Kaja looked up sharply. “I mean that affectionately.”

​

“I know what you mean.”

 

“Then save us both the explanation.” Gwyn's voice softened a  little. “What are you actually afraid of?”

​

Kaja almost answered too quickly. That had been one of the things she had learned: quick answers were usually answers to easier questions. There had been another man before Axel, though Gwyn did not need his name. Gwyn had been there for the aftermath and before the aftermath, which was worse. She had watched Kaja translate absence into patience, patience into generosity, generosity into evidence she was becoming someone better. For a while, Kaja had believed endurance was a form of sophistication.

 

Eventually the man left. Not dramatically; there had been no thrown glass, no accusation worth preserving. He had simply arranged his life so completely around not being where Kaja was that one evening she understood the arrangement before he explained it. Later there had been explanations. Explanations were frequently excellent. They had not altered the furniture.

 

“I don't want to find out,” Kaja said.

 

Gwyn's expression changed, though not into wisdom. “Ah.”

 

“That one was real.”

 

“Possibly.”

 

“I like Axel.”

 

“I know. Either that or you had nothing better to do with today.”

 

“You don't know that I like him.”

 

“You bought his book in hardback.”

 

“That proves I support local publishing.”

 

“You hate hardbacks.”

 

“They're badly designed for reading in bed.”

 

“Kaja.” Kaja smiled despite herself. Gwyn pointed at her with the torn sugar packet. “There. That. You've been trying not to smile for half an hour because apparently this is a tribunal.”

 

“It isn't a tribunal.”

 

“Then stop behaving like opposing counsel.”

 

“I am not accusing him of anything.”

 

“Good.”

 

“I mean it.”

 

“I believe you, Kaja.”

 

“He hasn't done anything, and the book doesn't prove he would.”

 

“You've mentioned that,” Gwyn said.

 

“He may be perfectly capable of seeing himself,” she admitted.

 

Gwyn frowned. “I thought that was the thing frightening you.”

 

“It is.”

 

“That seems inconvenient.”

 

Kaja laughed once, more sharply than she intended, and several people turned. Gwyn looked pleased with herself. “You see?” she said.

 

“Medicine.”

 

“You're an idiot.”

 

“Widely respected in the field.” Kaja picked up her cup. The laughter had loosened something, but not the thing itself.

 

“I don't think self-reflection means what people want it to mean,” she said. “They talk about seeing yourself as though seeing were the difficult part. Maybe it is. But seeing isn't changing. And changing isn't—”

 

“Being safe?” Kaja looked at her. Gwyn raised both hands. “Accident. Don't get used to it.”

​

“No,” Kaja said, smiling again. “Being safe.”

​

“And you think Axel isn't?”

 

“I don't know.”

 

“Right. And here we go again.”

 

“I cannot know.”

 

“Also right.”

 

“And I don't have to know.” There it was. Kaja heard the distinction only after she had said it. Not he is dangerous. Not I understand him now. Not even the book warned me. She did not have to know.

​

Gwyn began folding the empty sugar packet into smaller squares. “So don't have dinner with him.”

​

Kaja stared at her. “What?”

​

“You have gone and constructed a philosophical problem around the hypothetical consumption of Lebanese food.”

​

“That's grotesquely reductive.”

​

“Reduction is one of my gifts. It also seems to be contagious, as you seem to have caught it from me. Or maybe I caught it from you in the first place. I forget.”

 

“He isn't asking me only for dinner.”

 

“Has he asked you for anything else?”

 

“No.”

 

“Then at present he is asking you for hummus.”

 

Kaja put both hands over her face. Gwyn laughed.

 

“You are unbearable.”

 

“And yet you trust me.”

 

“Only because I know exactly how stupid you are.”

 

“That must be comforting.”

 

It was. There were forms of safety no one would write sonnets about.

​

Axel telephoned two evenings later. By then Kaja had moved his novel from the floor to the shelf but had not placed it with the other books. It stood by itself on the small table beside the window, which annoyed her whenever she noticed it.

 

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” he asked.

 

“No.”

 

“You sound suspicious.”

 

“I always sound suspicious.”

 

“Not always.”

 

She knew immediately that this was true, which irritated her more. They spoke about a mutual friend's reading. Axel had hated it less than Kaja had; Kaja accused him of professional cowardice, and Axel said cowardice in general was the foundation of civilization. She laughed, and there was no strain in the conversation until he introduced it.

 

“I was thinking about that Lebanese place.”

 

Kaja looked toward the book. It was raining again, and the jacket caught a faint reflection from the window, enough that the title could be seen twice if she stood at the correct angle.

 

“Kaja?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Thursday? What think?”

 

She could have said she was busy. She was not. She could have delayed, said perhaps next week, and next week could become another week until by winter whatever possibility existed between them had politely disappeared without either of them having to name it. She had spent too much of her life permitting silence to perform work she was unwilling to claim. Trust the silence was one of those things vacuous reviews advised. Reticence was rarely an answer.

 

“No,” she said.

 

There was the slightest pause. “All right.”

 

She waited.

 

Axel said, “Was that Thursday specifically or Lebanese civilization or cuisine in general?”

 

Despite herself, she smiled. “You.”

 

This time the pause was longer. “Ah.”

 

She almost resented Axel for sounding neither particularly wounded nor offended. “I'm sorry.”

​

“Don't be.”

​

“I don't mean there's something wrong with you,” she insisted.

 

“I didn't assume that you did.” His voice was calm, but not completely free of affect.

​

“That makes it worse.”

 

“How?” he asked.

​

“I don't know. Some things are ineffable.”

 

Axel was quiet for a moment before asking, “Did you read the novel?”

​

Kaja looked at it again. “Yes.”

​

“I wondered.”

​

“How?”

​

“You suddenly became very careful with me.”

​

She sat down. “I liked it very much.”

​

“Thank you.”

​

“I don't know whether that's a compliment.”

​

“It usually is.”

​

“You know what I mean.”

​

“I might. I can’t be certain that I do.”

​

That frightened her more than denial would have. “Do you?”

​

“I think I could guess at the very least.”

​

“And?”

​

“And what?”

​

“Don't you want to take a wild guess and defend yourself?”

​

“From my novel?”

​

“From what I think it says.”

​

“I don't know what you think it says.”

​

“You just said you could guess.”

​

“Guessing isn't knowing. Defending myself against a guess would ask me to hijack your agency on my hunch. That might be a convoluted form of strawman argument with myself, at best.”

​

Kaja closed her eyes. Of course he would say that, and worse, of course he would be right.

 

Axel continued. “And if you've decided you don't want to have dinner with me, I don't think a successful argument would improve the evening.”

 

She laughed before she could stop herself. “No.”

 

“No.”

 

“That isn't fair.”

 

“What isn't?”

 

“You're behaving well and being articulate while doing it.”

 

He laughed softly. “I'll try to correct it.”

 

“Axel.”

 

“All right.”

 

She could hear traffic at his end of the line. She wanted him to make the mistake, and only then understood that she wanted it. Nothing large or cruel; merely some small pressure that would settle the matter. He could demand that she explain herself, complain that she was judging him through fiction, remind her that he had always been decent to her, perhaps even accuse her of punishing him for the behaviour of someone he had never met. Any of these would have been useful.

 

Axel supplied none of them.

 

“I'll see you at Miriam's reading?” he said.

 

“Probably.”

 

“Then I'll see you there.”

 

“That’s it?”

 

“I think so.”

 

Kaja hated the disappointment that followed. “Good night, Axel.”

 

“Good night, Kaja. Again, thank you for reading Normal Eyes. It means a lot to me that you did.”

 

Afterward she remained beside the telephone for several minutes. The book was still on the table, and when she picked it up and returned to the passage that had started all this, nothing in it had changed. That was almost reassuring.

 

Gwyn came over on Friday with wine and a paper bag containing three pastries she claimed to have acquired legally. Kaja told her about the telephone call while Gwyn ate the largest pastry.

 

When she finished, Gwyn said, “Bastard. He accepted your answer immediately. Chilling.”

 

“I knew you would be useless.”

 

“I've been consistent.”

 

“He didn't even try to convince me.”

 

“You're devastated.”

 

“I am not devastated.”

 

“No, obviously. That's why we're drinking at four.”

 

“It is six.”

 

“Then we're fine. Drinking at six means absolutely bupkus.”

 

Kaja poured more wine. “What if I was wrong?”

 

“About what?”

 

“Axel.”

 

“You haven't actually said anything about Axel.”

 

“You know what I mean.”

 

“I really don't.”

 

Kaja leaned back in the chair. “Suppose the book had nothing to do with him.”

 

“Seems unlikely. He wrote the damned thing.”

 

“You know what I mean.”

 

“You keep saying that when you don't know what you mean.”

 

Kaja threw a cushion at her. Gwyn caught it badly and spilled wine on her sleeve.

 

“Oh, excellent,” Gwyn said, examining the stain carefully. “Now we've had consequences.”

 

“You deserved that.”

 

“I shall reflect deeply and become a better person. I heard that’s all the rage.”

 

Kaja began laughing. Gwyn looked down at the spreading stain with a grimace. “Perhaps not immediately. Self-reflection is a dish best served next week.”

 

The laughter continued longer than the joke deserved. That was one of Gwyn's talents. Not wisdom, exactly; she could not have told Kaja what to do and would probably have become dangerous if entrusted with the responsibility. But she could make a room large enough for two contradictory things to exist without requiring one to murder the other.

 

Kaja could have been right not to trust Axel, while Axel could have done nothing to deserve mistrust. The book could reveal something true about him or nothing useful at all. He could be capable of understanding himself and incapable of changing; he could have changed already; he could have written Julian precisely because he had. There was no final arrangement of those propositions that produced certainty.

 

Gwyn dabbed uselessly at her sleeve with a napkin. “You know, there is one possibility you haven't considered.”

 

Kaja looked at her suspiciously. “That I'm an idiot?”

 

“I assumed that as a premise.”

 

“Go on.”

 

“You could change your mind.”

 

Kaja waited.

 

“Or not,” Gwyn added.

 

“That is your great insight?”

 

“I didn't say it was great.”

 

“You've spent an entire bottle of wine arriving at ‘or not.’”

 

“Most philosophy improves when shortened. You spent a whole novel and a couple of conversations with me on ‘to hummus or not to hummus.’”

 

Kaja shook her head. “What if he thinks I judged him?”

 

“He might. You more or less kind of did judge him, right in his ear, if I’ve followed this faithfully.”

 

“I told him I wasn't.”

 

“You told him there wasn't anything wrong with him. That's different.”

​

Kaja considered this.

​

“You are allowed to judge people, you know,” Gwyn said. “Everyone does. The trick is not confusing your judgment with revelation.”

​

Kaja looked at her. Gwyn froze. “What?”

 

“That was nearly wise.”

 

“Take that back. I’ve got a reputation to unfold.”

 

“I can't.”

 

“Then I deny authorship.”

 

Later, after Gwyn left, Kaja washed the glasses, wiped the table, and found the little square Gwyn had folded from the sugar wrapper sitting beside the wine bottle. She put it in the rubbish and took Axel's novel from the table.

 

For several seconds she stood between the shelves deciding where it belonged. She could have put it with the novels she admired, hidden it behind larger books, or given it away. In the end she slid it into its alphabetical place.

 

Weeks later she saw Axel at Miriam's reading. He was speaking with a woman Kaja did not know. When he saw Kaja across the room, he smiled and lifted his glass; she lifted hers. Later Gwyn found her near the coat rack and asked whether she was still alive.

 

“So far.”

 

“Was he terrible?”

 

“No.”

 

“Disappointing.”

 

“You really are a bad person.”

 

“I've reflected on that.”

 

They went outside together. The rain had stopped, leaving the streetlamps broken across the wet pavement, each light extending downward into a second city that disappeared whenever a shoe passed through it.

 

Kaja looked once over her shoulder. Axel was still inside, visible through the glass, laughing at something someone had said. For a moment his reflection stood beside him, slightly darker and not quite aligned.

 

Then Gwyn stepped into the light and blocked the window. “Come on,” she said. “I'm hungry.”

 

Kaja followed her. She did not know whether she had saved herself from anything, and she did not know whether she had lost anything either. She knew only that she’d read Axel’s novel and liked it.