Darwinia

Fayetteville was not the largest settlement hugging the bay. It was less an independent town these days than it was a finger of Oro Delta stretched down the coast, catering to farmers and farmworkers. The lowlands produced rich crops of corn, wheat, sugar beets, olives, nuts, and hemp. The sea provided docketfish, curry crabs, and salt lettuce. No native crops were cultivated, but the spice shops were well stocked with dingo nuts, wineseed, and ginger flax foraged from the wildlands.

Guilford approved of the towm. He had watched it grow from the frontier settlement it had been in the twenties into a thriving, relatively modern community. There was electricity now in Fayetteville and all the other Neapolitan townships. Streetlights, pavement, sidewalks, churches. And mosques and temples for the Arabs and Egyptians, though they mainly congregated in Oro Delta down by the waterfront. A movie theater, big on Westerns and the preposterous Darwinian adventures churned out by Hollywood. And all the less savory amenities: bars, smokehouses, even a whorehouse out on Follette Road past the gravel pit.

There was a time when everybody in Fayetteville knew everybody else, but that time had passed. You were liable to see all kinds of strange faces on the streets nowadays.

Though the familiar ones were often more disturbing.

Guilford had seen a familiar face lately.

It paced him along the hilly roads when he went walking. All this spring he had seen the face at odd moments: gazing from a wheat field or fading into sea fog.

The figure wore a tattered and old-fashioned military uniform. The face looked like his own. It was his double: the ghost, the soldier, the picket.

Nicholas Law, who was twelve years old and keen to enjoy what remained of the summer sunlight, excused himself and bolted for the door. The screen clattered shut behind him. Through the window Guilford caught a glimpse of his son, a blur in a striped jersey heading downhill. Past him, there was only the sky and the headland and the evening blue sea.

Abby came from the kitchen, where she had taken dessert out of the refrigerator. Something with ice cream. Store-bought ice cream, still a novelty in Guilford’s mind.

She stopped short when she saw the abandoned plate. “He couldn’t wait for dessert?”

“Guess not.” Stickball at twilight, Guilford thought. The broad green lawn in front of the Fayetteville school. He felt a pang of dislocated nostalgia.

“You’re not hungry either?”

She was holding two desserts. “I’ll take a taste,” he said.

She sat across the table, her pleasant face skeptical. “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

“A little. Not necessarily a bad thing.”

“Off by yourself too often.” She sampled the ice cream. Guilford noticed the fine filaments of gray at her temples. “There was a man here today.”

“Oh?”

“He asked if this was Guilford Law’s house, and I said it was, and he asked if you were the photographer with the shop on Spring Street. I said you were and he could probably reach you there.” Her spoon hovered over the ice cream. “Was that right?”

“That was fine.”

“Did he come to see you?”

“May have. What did this gentleman look like?”

“Dark. He had odd eyes.”

“Odd in what way, Abby?”

“Just — odd.”

He was unsettled by the story of this stranger at the door and Abby alone to greet him. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not worried,” Abby said carefully. “Unless you are.”

He couldn’t bring himself to lie. She wasn’t easily fooled. He settled for a shake of his head. Plainly she wanted to know what was wrong. Plainly, he couldn’t tell her.

He had never spoken of it — not to anyone. Except in that long-ago letter to Caroline.

At least the man at the door had not been Guilford’s double. You forget, he thought, after so many years. When a memory is so strange, so foreign to the rigor of daily life, it falls right out of your head… or it rattles there, half-noticed, like a pea in a whistle. Until something reminds you. Then it comes back fresh as an old dream stored in ice, unwrapped and glinting in the light of day.

So far there had only been glimpses — harbingers, perhaps; omens; rogue memories. Maybe it meant nothing, that youthful face tracking him in a crowd and then gone, gazing like a sad derelict from evening alleyways. He wanted to think it meant nothing. He feared otherwise.

Abby finished dessert and carried away the dishes. “Mail came from New York today,” she said. “I left it by your chair.”