The Best of Elizabeth Bear

Terroir

The cidery contains smells of the earth and sweet apples. Stone walls render it cold and still. Along one is ranked long rough wooden racks laden with the products of the presses: doux, demi-sec, brut, sec. Pomme and poire. Pommeau and calvados in strange-shaped bottles—tall triangles, stacked blobs.

I feel as if I have come to a medieval alchemist’s workshop.

Outside, the autumn sun paints a heavy golden haze down the flanks of rolling hills. The blackberries are past. The cornstalks are shorn off. The hedgerows and thickets that dissect green fields dotted with Charolaise and Holsteins (and stone cottages and barns) are tattered and yellowing at the edges.

Though it’s a warm day, the long mild summer is over, and the rains of winter loom. Here, just inside the doors of the cidrerie, a chill settles into my bones. I watch the man working, unloading boxes by the spavined table, and cannot find the courage to speak.

I have driven past orchards to arrive here, on windy roads not much wider than my rental car. I have driven past signs commemorating old battles, down the same twisting highways Panzer divisions crunched to meet them. I overshot the turnoff to the cidery twice, and on the second instance, when I managed to make a woman leaving a boulangerie understand by means of my broken French what it was, exactly, that I wanted, she got into her car, waved me after, and showed me to the driveway.

I was only off by about 1500 meters, but I’m not sure I ever would have found it on my own. It was a nice reminder that I can still function without a troupe of assistants, anyway, even if it does mean casting myself on the mercy of random passers-by. It makes me feel strangely un-insulated, bare to the world as if I had shed a layer of skin.

And now that I’m here, I can’t make myself step forward, or make a sound. So I linger in the doorway like a ghost until the man notices me. He looks up and says something rapid, something not unwelcoming, in French.

“Pardon, monsieur,” I reply. “Mon francaise n’est pas bien.” Then I point to the cider—le cidre—and mime opening my wallet. “Je voudrais acheter le cidre?”

“Oui, oui!” he says. The thing I have learned about Normandy, in my two days here, is that even execrable French is better than no French, and that nearly everybody seems extremely happy to work with me to find out what I need and help me get it. Some of it might be because this is the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Normandy, and there are people still alive who remember when the Americans came like delivering angels. But some of it is undoubtedly just the character of the place and its culture—from the man at the market stall selecting your produce to order to the young man at the apothecary trying to explain what are their opening hours.

I wonder if trying to understand me is as exhausting for them as vice versa. At least they get to go home to families who understand them. All I’ve got is the sunny Englishwoman who is the landlord of the cottage I am renting.

The ciderer’s brow furrows in the same concentration of active listening that’s been giving me headaches since I got off the plane. “You like… tasting?”

“Non, non,” I say, hoping the horror doesn’t creep into my voice. It must, a little, because his brows rise. But I can’t afford to drink this in front of anyone else. “Just… to buy?”

Le mot juste is what, in our case, we have not got.

He seems to understand, however. And soon I am on my way out the ragged doorway and into the farmyard once more, a tall box loaded with six assorted ciders clinking in my arms.

Back in my car, I pause to check my messages. My executive assistant wants me to sign off on her decision regarding a big Defense Department contract for a new heads-up display for combat troops. It’s a great technology, based off one of my earliest communication designs. It will save American lives—and probably some Canadian, French, Australian, and British ones as well, if we keep getting into the same pickles together.

I call her—it’s before lunch back in California—and we talk for ten minutes to get the day’s business squared away. I miss the days when I could just create stuff—new ideas, new ways for people to interpret data and communicate with one another—but I suppose somebody has to run the company. My assistants handle most of it, but what was it Truman said? The buck stops here.

It’s my thirty-third birthday tomorrow. I’m not quite old enough to be President. How did I wind up running one of the premier communication companies in the world?

When I swipe my phone off, the sun is already setting. And I want to be back to my lodging before full night, rather than driving in a strange country on strange winding roads in the dark.

The sunset is a bloody banner snapping on the western horizon as I turn into the drive of my rented cottage. Clouds pile up against the horizon and the sky seems vast and complicated overhead—so many textured layers of dove and charcoal and periwinkle and indigo, smearing one into the next like blended pigments. Five Charolaise and one dun cow whose breed I do not know blink sleepily at me over the fence to their pasture. Chickens and the neighbor’s pig complain that it is suppertime.

I park the car, bring my box of cider inside the stone cottage with its one room downstairs and two rooms up, and tuck two bottles into an under-counter refrigerator that doesn’t come up to my waist.

At the counter, I prepare a light meal: bread from the boulangerie in town, apples and pears, Mimolette cheese, vielle. In other words, old. Aged. It’s a cow’s-milk cheese from Lille, in French Flanders.

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow.

It’s a test, of sorts. At home, I eat out of packages and freezer trays. My assistants know what to bring me, and what I can’t have. I’ve constructed an elaborate rhetoric of food allergies to conceal the truth—but my dietary limitations have only gotten more complex, the restrictions more elaborate, as I’ve gotten older. Sometimes I think it’s the price I pay for success, though I know that’s neurotic.

Here, I need to learn if I can do something different.

I carry my plate to the table and sit. I stare at the cheese, the bread. The slices of fruit.

“It’s not going to eat itself,” I say, and lay one piece of brittle orange-yellow cheese on a slice of baguette.

The rind, which I have pared away, looks like the surface of an arid alien worldlet, an asteroid or something—gray, pitted, mined by cheese mites. The cheese itself is wonderful: salty, sharp, bitter, muskier than cheddar. Rich with butterfat and terroir. I chase it with a bite of apple—sharp, juicy, sweet.

A swirl of impressions follows the flavor. Young men in gray or blue uniforms with rifles; younger men, without uniforms, wielding weapons improvised from agricultural tools. Red poppies tossed like whitecaps by the breeze. Mud, blood, mustard gas, diesel fuel, horse shit, and the sewer reek of spilled intestines.

Familiar old friends, all.

My phone buzzes, and I turn it over.

A man consolidates out of the swirl of impressions, real-not-real. His edges seem hazy, his outline translucent. His face is blistered with mustard gas, half his jaw shot away, tongue lolling through the gap amid shattered teeth. Un poilu, an infantryman, grubby and unshaved. His eyes bulge like a skinned rabbit’s.

He blinks at me dreamily, then reaches out one hand as if pleading. His tongue writhes; his ruined jaw opens in a welter of blood. The sounds that emerge might be meant to be words, but they don’t have the shapes of words. They’re just gabblings and moans.

I lunge away, oversetting the spindly wooden chair and falling hard to rust-colored terracotta tiles. The blow between my shoulders knocks the wind from my lungs and the bolus of cheese, bread, and apple down my throat.

The infantryman shreds as if blown through by a strong wind. By an artillery shell.

I toss the bread and cheese and the remains of the apple in the bin for the pig and pull a box of soup and a package of saltines out of the cabinet instead. The cider stares at me accusingly when I open the tiny refrigerator to get the canola oil spread out. It’s a sin not to eat butter in France, I know. But sometimes you decide to serve your time in Hell tomorrow, rather than today.

That cider is still right where I left it, come the morning. I have breakfast—store bread; instant coffee; tinned, condensed milk; and corn flakes with more condensed milk, all just as nasty as it sounds. Modern, uniform, entirely devoid of terroir: industrial products stripped of all individuality and history.

I read my email over breakfast, the better to ignore the food. I’m half a day ahead of my assistants, but they’ve already been though four hundred and sixty of the not-quite five hundred messages, responding to most. The few they left for me to deal with are issues that only I can deal with. Existential threats for the entire company, or things that could blossom into existential threats. Some design work to review. A potential encryption project for the Navy. A faster, flexibly printed ‘chip’ that could be layered into uniforms.

I miss my old shop in the garage some days. And then I remember that in those days living on bologna and Wonder Bread wasn’t a choice—even though in those days I could have eaten something better if I could have afforded it—and I hardly could have afforded to bugger off to Normandy for a couple of months.

The food goes down with only a vague swirl of unease. After I clean up, I am left staring at the blank white door of the small refrigerator, haunted by the cider within.

Fifteen minutes of that is all it takes to drive me out of the house. Nursing the bruise between my shoulders still, I walk the five kilometers into the village, my shopping bag slung over my shoulder. I’m fit, but even so the hills are challenging. The little village with its narrow streets and stone houses flanked with azure hydrangea and crimson geraniums could be a fairy-tale or a watercolor, it seems so unreal.

I pause for a long time at the door of the boucherie before I can force myself to go in. It’s really more of a charcuterie, with beautiful smoked pork and a jambon in the back as big as a fifth grader, but they do have some beef and poultry. The smiling woman within greets me, and with gestures and patois we manage to establish that I would like (je voudrais) un biftec.

She pulls a hunk of beef from the chill case—I would call it a roast—but she lays it on the counter and with admirable disregard for the continued health of her fingers plies her cleaver, severing a piece of meat that is blue-red and beautiful.

She holds it up for my approval, red a veil across her gloves like watercolor.

“Bon, bon!” I say. It looks delicious. I hope I’m hiding the fear on my face as she wraps it in paper and slips it into a bag.

The steak grills up to perfection, charred rich and caramelized on the outside and buttery red and melting within. There’s salt and savoriness and fresh thyme picked from the plant outside the door. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever eaten, and it carries with it a feeling of peace and contentment and rich green grass.

The Charolaise whose flesh I’m gnawing lived a bucolic life, it seems, and never left the patch of ground where it was raised. And that patch of earth, somehow in all Normandy, has not been a battlefield.

The potato, on the other hand, fills the air around me with the clawing ghosts of peasants starving in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. I force myself to keep chewing, to swallow, all the while thanking a God I don’t believe in that butter can serve as a lubricant.

I gag it down, closing my eyes on the emaciated woman in ragged gray linens, a stinking-dead babe wrapped in her skirts for lack of other swaddling and held up against her breast. Her eyes meet mine, beseeching.

I want to scream at her—what do you want, what do you want, why won’t you leave me alone? But I know from long experience that they will never answer.

They troubled me less when I was young, when I was the person who was going to save the world with free information and a cheap interface. You’d think the rawer conscience of a person barely out of college would result in more ghosts, not fewer. But apparently that’s not how it works.

The collapsing principles of a corporate overlord don’t seem to shield me.

This is why I’ve come to France, and to Normandy in particular. This glorious countryside with its marching hills and tanks of briary hedgerows is as blood-soaked as any place on earth. And it takes a charming and peculiar delight in food—as much concerned with the deliciousness and provenance of its diet as… any place on earth.

I am a problem-solver. I fix broken things and establish lines of communication—even when that means taking it on the nose—and that’s how I’ve made my fortune.

But when I’m the thing that’s broken, that’s getting more broken with every passing season, suddenly solutions are much harder to enforce even if I could manage to uncover one.

The cider waits. One bottle of doux, one demi-sec, two of brut, one of the sec. And one bottle of poire, which does not come in various alcohol concentrations.

I rise up, go to the big refrigerator in the laundry room, and take out the bottle of doux—“soft” cider.

It’s what we in the states would call a sweet cider—slightly fermented, just beginning to “work.” Perhaps two percent alcohol, if that.

It smells amazing. As I pour it into the Ikea glassware my hostess provides, the heady scent of apples rises, dragging a swirling tail of tattered memory and shape behind. I breathe deep, trying to steel myself.

I raise the glass to my lips.

Just the fumes in my nose are enough to trigger a cascade of images, and the hesitant sip I allow to pass my lips comes like an artillery barrage. I mutter, “Gas, boys! Gas!” and swallow anyway.

There are screams—in American English and the à l’ancienne sort as well. Cries of pain and terror. Cursing, in German and in French. Older dialects, ones I cannot even identify. Voices from a thousand years ago. Belgian? I’m not sure. Who else has fought here?

Too many.

Enough.

I swallow, and the voices fade. The grief and sorrow linger. The terrible sad savagery of it all crests over me and I thrash, drowning.

I should have just bought a bottle of vodka. Something mass-produced, as divorced from the wheat plant and the potato as possible. But that isn’t the point then, is it?

So many of the houses in Normandy are this patchwork construction: raw stone, and dressed stone, and a rough beam lintel over a modern door. A patch might be stucco, a half of a second story laid in red brick, or the windows framed with it. Tile roof and slate roof and corrugated steel.

People here have built with what they had to hand, and haven’t bothered too much with making any of it match. And yet, these homes grow their own improvisational beauty. Like the place itself.

Seventy years since this land last was fought over, as it has been fought over so many times before. There’s a body in every hedgerow, my friend Lucy says. And she doesn’t mean just the hedgerows here. We live in a charnel house world: every continent except Antarctica is soaked in centuries of gore, and that one only escapes because humans cannot live there. The world is haunted, everywhere.

And everywhere, the ghosts do want something.

I just don’t know what. Or why they’ve started picking on me.

I carry my sweet cider outside to the yard, where a green plastic table sits under a sky that looks like a stained-glass rendering of storm and sun. I plunk into a plastic chair and lean my head back, looking up into the branches of the apple tree. Doves and hens coo and gabble.

All the dead men and women under my feet seem to shift, strain at their bonds. Wanting. And it’s my job to learn what they want.

If I have the courage to keep asking. To keep looking. Not to look down.

To misquote something Akira Kurosawa said, the job of the artist is to not look down. I’m not an artist, though—I’m just an inventor. Somebody who runs a company. A human being. I don’t know if I have the courage for this. I don’t know if I can keep looking.

Inside the cottage are processed bread and processed cheese. Velveeta, brought in my luggage. I could go get them.

I could go hungry, until I’m hungry enough to risk whatever it is that the land wants of me.

The glass stares at me. I stare back. Neither one of us is going anywhere.

I choose a rainy day to drive the forty-five minutes to Mont Saint-Michel. A weather sky, streaked like warring banners rendered in cloudy oils, tears here and there to reveal paler grey behind. It’s a stunningly flat landscape, land level as the sea from horizon to horizon, with the island town and abbey rising like Minas Tirith from the edge of the world. I arrive early, before the press of tourists, park the rental, and walk in, feeling like a pilgrim. If you subtracted the boardwalk and the chain link fences, you could imagine yourself in a story.

Normandy is a dream landscape. Green to the edge of the sea, the sea-fields dotted with sheep and rippling with grasses. I pause atop a white clay dike and watch the old abbey slash prison slash fortification glower down through the splintering, watery light and a rain that is more the suggestion of water falling than the certainty.

A little faint with hunger, I rest my hands on my knees and breathe.

The wooden bridge is new, and there’s a mass of construction where they are demolishing the old elevated causeway, to restore the natural water flow.

I chose Normandy over all the other possibilities for a number of reasons. Because of its bloody history, yes. Because I speak a little of the language. Because it was supposed to be beautiful, and because it was easy to find a rental with an English-speaking landlady. Because the French believe strongly in terroir, in local food and local drink.

Because I am a coward, and even were I to ignore the language barrier, Normandy has an advantage that I could not find now in Ukraine or Baghdad.

It’s safe. For now, anyway: I know better than most people that safe—as Richelieu said of treason—is merely a matter of dates.

I hike the battlements of Mont Saint-Michel, which is, even clotted as it is with tourists and creperies, one of the most beautiful places I have ever set my shoe to pavement. The stairs are steep and irregular; the walls in varying states of repair. One of the turrets has had its roof and shutters replaced; the next is left a yawning, empty column. You can glance down into it and see the corridors within the small town’s ramparts, the places where soldiers would have massed in defense before charging to the top of the wall. The sharp briny wind off the sea gusts—focused between merlons and through embrasures, cold enough to prickle my skin. In this weather, the battlements are nearly deserted, though glimpses of the streets below between the houses and businesses lining the inside of the walls show a thickening stream of tourists.

It’s fashionable to deride them, of course. To deride other tourists—one’s-self never qualifies, does one? Here they come to climb Mont Saint-Michel, and pay their nine euros at the Abbey gate.

But that is what this place has always been, is it not? The object of a pilgrimage. They still sell medallions from machines inside the Abbey. And what am I—what are all of the tourists—except modern pilgrims? Even if some of us are more hushed by history than others.

I walk through the portcullis that guards the entry, past a bombard abandoned by the Englishman Thomas Scales when he failed to take the island during the Hundred Years War, in the 15^th century. It looks like nothing so much as a giant black iron cannelloni awaiting the cream filling.

I touch it. The metal is cold and made of longing. When I step back, two small girls scramble over it, laughing and shoving.

I take my time on the island. The Abbey itself is magnificent—built like a nautilus in concentric shells, oldest and smallest in the middle. The Romanesque church is a thousand years old, rough stone mortared around rounded doorways. A Gothic structure has accreted around it like a corals on a wreck, like narrative around a nugget of history. One buttress stretches the entire height of the island. Gargoyles and grotesques and delicate filigreed botanical carvings abound. The windows are composed of multiple tiny leaded panes, arranged like tiles in different tesseracted patterns. Their subtle tints of green and gray and sand and blue echo the shades of the ocean, beach, and farms beyond.

When I come to the chapel, a service is in progress. I hunker off to one side with the other unbelievers, faintly abashed. No one sermonizes. White-robed monks kneel before an altar—one adjusts his garments and eases himself several times, obviously uncomfortable holding his position on cold stone. The bell ringer who stands behind them strips off his outer clothing to reveal a black habit and sandals. He grasps the thick rope in both hands and rings with his whole body, starting with strong, even pulls that cause no sound, then nearly dipping to his knees as he throws his entire weight against the mighty bells. Somewhere overhead, a vast wheel is turning, a vast bell is tolling.

We built these things, I think. We—human beings—over the course of centuries and thousands of lives—managed to bury our differences and collaborate to create something like this. Or something like the Cathedral at Notre Dame. We can build these things, these amazing things, with no more than a rudimentary knowledge of engineering and the work of many hands over many, many days.

What else could we do, if we actually cared to do it?

My breath smells of salt—sea and tears—when I choke on it. I feel the pressure of the lives lost here—Normans, and Bretons, and Romans, and Franks, and English, and others. I feel it, and I try to allow it to pass over and through me, to slide against me and not to scour. I am… only moderately successful.

It’s getting worse. I don’t even have to eat the food any more. Now the place itself is seeping memories into me.

I stagger through chapel and cloister and crypt, through the gift shop and out the other side. I lean against the wall over the sea beside a cannon and I gasp in bitter sea air. The island’s bedrock peers through the pavement here and there, showing the ancient structure of the world beneath the human encrustations.

The rippled sea and sand blur into one another, stretching to the edge of the world. People drown, venturing out into the tide flats; the water comes in fast as a person can walk, and the sand is tricky.

Looking at the sea, I decide that I’m not ready for Omaha Beach just yet. It’s not cowardice, I tell myself. It’s being sensible.

I decide to drive straight home. I mean, “Home.”

On the way, I pass a house attached to a wall that used to enclose a larger house. The wall has a hole you could drive a semi through blown in it. I almost veer off the road staring at it, wondering about its provenance. Accidental damage? Did somebody actually drive a semi through it? Or a Panzer? Is it a relic of World War II?

How could I even find out?

Well, I could stop at the farmer’s market going on in the square, I suppose, and buy a cucumber. But even as the idea blossoms in me, I depress the accelerator, downshift, leave the small scarred village behind in a welter of images lost in the rear view mirror. The automated radar speed-check sign by the church urges me: prudence!

I come back to the village I’m staying in earlier than I expected. That charcuterie is just opening up again after lunch—nothing is open at lunch time, in this part of the world, except for restaurants. I walk in more boldly this time, and the little woman with the cleaver greets me with a smile.

“Bonjour,” I reply. “Je voudrais le grand jambon, s’il vous plait?”

I measure with my hands, and she knows exactly what I mean. She wields that cleaver to make thick, moist slices until I say, “Fin.” I think that’s probably incorrect, but she seems to understand, and she grins at me as I pay for the ham and some prosciutto, too.

I think of the happy spotted black and pink pig back at the cottage, and try not to feel guilty about the ham as I stop by the market booth for a melon half the size of an American cantaloupe and six times more flavorful.

I eat prosciutto and melon for lunch, each bite a shock of flavor and a rumble of tank treads punctuated by the thump of artillery and the screams of burning men.

I fall asleep to the beeping of the tiny toads that seem to want charging. The next morning, I’m awakened by golden light streaming through the mist and the drone of a hornet the length of the end of my thumb who has blundered in the screenless window. I usher her out before popping up my email again. Technically, I’m on sabbatical, but once you let yourself get wedged into the position of decision maker the only way to escape it again is to get killed by a bus—even though honestly, my assistants can hold the corporate line as well as I can. Possibly, even better.

I poke at the pile of Important Artifacts Of Later Period Capitalism in a desultory fashion before deciding that I should go for a run before it gets hot. I scarf a power bar and a glass of thinned condensed milk and pull my spandex on. I run halfs at home, and I have an idea for a ten-mile course over this pont and that pont which should shake the cobwebs out of my soul. The hill back up from the river is steep and long enough—at least four kilometers of climb—that I slow to a determined stumble. I make it, though, and at the top I pause to look at a field full of suspicious male calves that must be being raised for beef and their harried wet-nurses—about four calves per cow, at rough count.

French cattle are much more engaged with the world than American cattle: the milk cows have run alongside the fence beside me, or spooked and trotted away. The steers raise their heads and watch suspiciously, the biggest one in each field kind of shouldering up to the electric-and-barbed-wire fence as if to let me know I came to the wrong neighborhood.

I crouch with my hands on my knees until I get enough wind back to suck cloying Gatorade from a bottle that was in my hydration belt. My feet ache. The cows watch me and I watch them. It’s all very restful.

It flattens out here, and I pick up speed while jogging back to what I think of as “my” village. The patisserie is closed today—oh, right, it’s Sunday. A little shock of terroir prickles the bottom of my feet through my sneakers as I pass the sign that commemorates the high-water mark where the Panzers were stopped by the Allies on their way to reinforce the serene little town St. Hilaire, which was eighty percent destroyed during the war. Outside the ghost of one burning Tiger tank, the remains of a German soldier crawl toward me. He is charred, his stumps of legs still wreathed in flames as he drags them through mown hay.

I recoil. He’s not real: I can see the stalks of the hay through his blackened outline. The flames of the tank illuminate nothing and throw no heat. My skin prickles with sweat only from my run. A humane person would pause, would reach out to him.

I leap sideways across the ditch, nearly falling into the path of a speeding Fiat. I windmill my arms, wobbling, and manage to keep my feet, then accelerate away from the tank and the soldier, digging in hard as I run.

There are more—dozens, one in every field and hedgerow, their uniforms indistinguishable with blood. They cry out to me, their words incomprehensible. I run harder, feet pounding, arms pumping. They call after, but either they cannot make the words take shape intelligibly, or I cannot comprehend them.

I stumble into the cottage soaked and shivering, dizzy with crashing blood sugar and short of breath. I gulp chocolate milk from a bottle and drag myself upstairs to the shower, shedding soaked, salty clothes on the floor, peeled inside-out like snakeskin.

The hot water pounds my face, washing stinging salt from my skin and into my mouth, the corners of my eyes. It washes away grit and sweat and the stink of fear on my skin.

I’m driven from the shower by a crack of thunder. The last storm of the season, perhaps. I stump down the treacherously steep wooden stairs—half ladder, really—and open the glass doors to the garden so I can listen to the rain. Two hornets, each an inch and a half long, invite themselves inside. It’s getting to be a habit, the hornet removal dance.

I try to read my email but it’s all so many phosphor blurs. When I realize I’ve been staring for fifteen minutes at one particular note from an assistant telling me what action she’s taking in my name in an acquisition deal that happens to come with some sticky legal issues, I flip the screen closed with my fingertips and go over to the couch with a book. Camus, The Plague, picked off a shelf beside the television.

I mean to read, but I nap.

By sunset, the rain has broken. I sit in a wet plastic chair in the gloaming—l’heure bleu—and watch the bats flit overhead in pursuit of mosquitoes. They part like the Red Sea as a grander shape wings over, utterly silent, silhouetted against the last light of the sky. An owl, monarch of the evening, gone almost before I recognize what it is.

I go in to the fridge in the laundry room and pull out a bottle of cider. The sec, strong and dry. I’ve learned to open the bottles outside; I’ve barely untwisted the wire when the cork flies free, up over the rooftop. I hear it thump on the tile roof and fall in darkness.

I’ll look for it in the morning.

A curl of vapor drifts from the open bottle, barely visible in the half-light, then faintly phosphorescent. Spirits seem to seek out spirits. Dissolve in them, perhaps. Get distilled. The stronger the liquor, the stronger the impression. Like Omaha Beach, like Verdun, I don’t have the courage yet for anything stronger than cider. But this is the strongest cider I have.

I pour, and the chill on the glass gathers condensation from the moist air before I even set it on the table. I sit before it, watching more bats flit from the neighbor’s rusty-roofed stone barn as the day folds its wings. I should have stopped and tried to talk to the tanker, to the infantrymen, to the artillerymen. To the civilians wasted by bombs and ruined by artillery shells.

I should have, but I didn’t.

The Sherman tanks were no match for their German opposite numbers. One Ally who watched too many of them die in flames estimated that it took twenty minutes for an American tank to burn, and ten minutes for the men inside to stop screaming.

Somehow, we still won… that war, anyway. America’s contribution included piling materiel onto the battlefield until the Axis collapsed under the weight.

I was also too much of a coward to go to North Africa.

Or Hiroshima, for that matter.

Am I too much of a coward to drink this cider now?

It’s wet and cold and tastes of apples, of green grass, of earth. Tart, uncomplicated by the standards of wine, threaded with hair-fine columns of bubbles. In the distance, a fox screams four times, sounding more like a hawk than a mammal.

I hold the cider in my mouth, and let the dead come.

A little girl in a patched gingham dress glows faintly before the scarlet geraniums. She does not hold her hands over the gaping wound in her side. Instead, she uses them to cradle a book against her breast. I’m not good with kids, but I think she might be seven or nine. Half her hair is still braided in a pigtail; the other half is burned short and matted with blood.

She looks up at me, pleading, like all of them. She holds the book out to me, opens it. There are words written there.

I swallow the cider in surprise and she vanishes.

Hastily, I slurp more, aerating it to increase the aroma and flavor. But the girl does not return.

Still, I know what I read. Read—and understood.

Je m’appelle Solange, it read. S’il vous plaît, aidez-nous.

I finish the bottle. But no one else comes to see me that night.

In the morning I rise, nursing a mild hangover. The message light blinks on my phone—I silenced it before I opened the cider—and while I brush my teeth I listen. Every available potential crisis has blossomed, and I am entreated to call—though assured that my people are handling it as I would wish, in my absence.

You don’t want to know what I pay for phone service in France.

I brush the call-back icon with my finger, anxiety and irritation at war in my gut. Je m’appelle Solange. Before the first ring finishes, I hit the red icon and break the connection.

My executive assistant calls me back not thirty seconds later, though I must have woken her from a sound sleep with that half of a ring.

I swipe the call to voicemail, run a comb through my hair, stuff my feet into sandals, and set off for the beach.

Mortain is along the way. Poking up the steep curves of Rue de la Petite Chapelle, I see the sign for the Hill 314 panorama. I park in an unmarked public lot across the street. Before I walk to the hilltop, I follow the pale gravel path to La Petite Chapelle de Saint-Michel, a little dark grey stone church with Gothic stained glass in glorious shades of blue that commands one stony bluff. Before it, to the right of the path, is the memorial for the Americans of the 30^th Infantry Division who held this hill from August 6^th, 1944 to August 12^th, 1944 when the lowlands on every side were a sea of Panzers.

The heavy trees give cool shade. The sky above is scattered white and blue and gray as the chapel. Surprising me, there are no unquiet memories here.

I walk around the church to enjoy the view from the bluff beyond it, and return to the car the way I came. Walking past it, I pick my way along a lane on foot toward the panorama. I come to a grove of trees and great gray stones wound by clear foot trails and marked with signs. It’s posted private property, but it’s obvious that whoever owns it wishes it to remain as a piece of living history.

I climb the trail to its commanding height. Here, scrubby trees break away around tall gray rocks, a sort of natural pillbox. I scramble up to peer between them, and realize I can see over the rolling countryside to the sea, and the unmistakable outline of Mont Saint-Michel like a thorn above the horizon—roughly fifty kilometers from here.

Saint Michael gets a lot of traction here, it seems. A great prince who stands up for the children of your people. I can see why Normandy might want a warrior angel on its side.

When I turn back, the hilltop below me is alive with rank upon rank of ragged Americans and tattered Germans, interspersed with French farmers in their softly worn flannels and faded caps. They are all gaunt. They all stand at attention, their eyes gazing through me without moving as if standing for review by a passing general. They say nothing: they stand and wait.

They wait for help.

How can you help someone who is already dead?

It’s another hour and a half to Omaha Beach. I follow twisting sunken lanes more often than motorways. Cornfields—relics of the Marshall Plan—march across hillsides. My ankles ache by the time I pull into the parking lot. I climb out and stretch, then follow signs and the walkway until the long warm golden arc of the strand comes into view. Waves hush over, combing their fingers through the grains of sand. The sun glitters on the arcing sculptures like great steel splashes, and the flags of the Allies snap in the wind. Normandy sure as hell beat Britain in the coin toss when it came to Beaches Of The English Channel.

It isn’t what I expected.

On a warm September weekday, the beach is dotted with bathers. Someone throws a tennis ball into the water for a happy springer spaniel. Three children shriek and chase each other around a sand castle. There is no hush, though people stand before the monuments with bowed heads and respect, no few of them with sparkling eyes. The sea stretches to the horizon: England is over there somewhere, too far to see but not too far to swim. This could be any holiday beach anywhere.

I pull my shoes off and walk along the sand, toes in the water. It’s warm and shallow, the breakers gentle. Four percent of the sand on this beach is made of microscopic shards of shrapnel and impact spheres. And yet, what I see is peaceful and serene. Houses shoulder up to the road at the top of the seawall, green bluffs windswept behind them. All are new: the Germans razed what was here before when they built their defenses. There’s a warm yellow wood contemporary in among the half-timbered and stone cottages, and a few manor houses with sweeping lawns.

It could be a town in New Hampshire, in California, with a few slight changes of detail.

And there are… somehow… no dead.

At the far end of the beach, just before where the pier stretches out—and beyond it, the tall golden cliffs that separate this place from Utah Beach—is the National Guard Memorial, built atop a battered German pillbox that cost so many of those men their lives.

One of those rainclouds sweeps in; you can watch it come across the water trailing its tail, like a patter of artillery fire. People scatter for cover under beach umbrellas and the like; I might duck into a casemate if they weren’t cemented closed. There’s a few further up the hill that you could probably get into—their open mouths snarl out to sea even now—but it would be easier to run to the creperie across the street.

The rain escalates into a punishing downpour. I have not brought an umbrella. Water puddles around my boots, reflecting the angled concrete walls of the pillbox under the memorial. I peer out through the mist and falling water; the sea and sand and sky are indistinguishable. Only those abandoned concrete fortifications remain to show that this place was ever a battlefield, that this place is something more than one of the nicest beaches I’ve ever seen. For a moment, all is soft and serene…

I think, all things heal. I think, for a moment, that there is so much more to Normandy—to this place—than war and the legacy of war. I think that the world moves on, and scars fill in, given time. I think I have been unfair, and brought my own preconceptions with me, and not been ready to accept what the world really is because I have been focused on my own damage, my own haunting.

Then the curling mist becomes the curling smoke rising from a landing craft, and the combers throw up the bodies of men. The waves rise and fall, heaping the dead on the beach like stormwrack with each iteration. These dead do not rise; they do not speak; they do not supplicate. They just pile up, higher and higher, by the dozens. By the shipload.

I stand and bear witness, because that is all I can do. I feel as if all the life and energy is drawn out of me, drowned, destroyed with these men. Shells burst silently; boats rock on the violent water; tracers quilt the gray morning with brilliant lines, arcing from the bluffs above. The blowing mist and the blowing smoke of an artillery bombardment blur into one gray presence as I watch.

We made this, too. A cathedral or an abbatoir: both require human commitment on an unbelievable scale.

I sink down on the wet sand and put my forehead in my hands. “Tell me what you want from me!” I order.

Maybe I’m too used to being obeyed. Mute, the dead pile high.

When I stagger back into my rented cottage, I am so exhausted I can barely stand. I drink a box of Knorr soupe a la Chinoise from the spout, cold, and fall asleep on the sofa because I am too exhausted to climb the stairs.

Two fevered, nearly incoherent days follow. I manage to send a message to my exec that I’ve got a bug, sign my name as needed. Still the email piles up, and the message light on my phone blinks so constantly I have to turn it face-down to sleep. When I have more or less recovered—exhausted, achy, ill—I decide to scrap my plans to go to Verdun. I think I’d kill myself or somebody else on the drive home. And I’m not honestly sure what it would show me: more death, more waste, more slaughter. They want something from me: I know it. What I don’t know is what they want, or how to find out.

It can’t just be for somebody—anybody—to bear witness. And I can’t go back and fix it for them. I have no power to make a war not have happened.

I fetch the calvados from the window ledge. Inside the dark bottle, I feel it slosh. Foil protects the cork; I free it and wiggle it from the bottle’s neck.

The half-imagined voices of the dead rise from the opening. I lean toward them, straining—but the words are as ineffable and heady as the liquor’s scent.

I lay the bottle across my wrist for better control and tilt it to my lips. I’m just about to take the first gulp when an overwhelming sense of self-disgust makes my fist clench. I yank the bottle from my mouth and hurl it through the open window. It trails a banner of golden fluid, flashing in the sun, and shatters like a grenade on the patio, amid the baskets dripping blue and yellow petunias and the red, red gardenias.

Spirits draw spirits. I need to stop playing around with half measures and get done what I came here to do.

It takes me twenty minutes to ferret out every thick shard and tiny splinter of glass. I collect my car keys and my jacket and head out into the blinking-bright morning to find what I’ve decided I need.

Not the calvados, aged and watered until it is tame. But the distilled-strength eau de vie de cidre. It requires three hours of execrable French in tiny shops to track some down, and when I do what I get for my money is a tiny bottle no taller than my spread fingers, corked with rubber like the sort of beer bottle self-consciously funky restaurants repurpose into salad dressing cruets. I bring my prize home with a baguette, some peaches so ripe they dent when you stroke them, and a wedge of ash-rinded brittle cheese that smells so good I want to cry.

In the garden of the house, oregano, thyme, sage, lavender, lemon verbena carpet the earth between the drowsy drifts of pink and yellow roses. There are bay laurel and rosemary bushes the size of Christmas trees. They are all abuzz with fat yellow bees. I find myself wondering what the honey would taste like—and even halfway regretting that I won’t ever know. Sun warms my neck and shoulders. The scents of the herbs alone are enough to cast gossamer shivers of somebody else’s memories across my awareness.

When I plunge my hands into the oregano, a vortex of rust-colored, eye-spotted butterflies swirls around me. Dozens of them rise, wings brushing my arms and face. The bees buzz in protest, but sleepily.

I come inside with handfuls of herbs, my skin absorbing the scent with the oils. There’s a mortar and pestle among the decorations on the kitchen shelves—or perhaps it’s actually intended to be used, because when I pull it down it’s dust-free and the pestle carries a spicy scent of black pepper.

I crush herbs into a green paste reminiscent of a pesto, then pour the eau de vie de cidre over it and let it steep. It’s probably a sinful use of liquor, but I tell myself that it’s for Science. Or witchcraft. Witchcraft is like science, right? After half a nervous hour, I talk myself into waiting another half an hour. After two hours, I force myself to stop waiting.

My empty stomach rumbles as I strain the algae-green tincture into one of the Ikea wineglasses provided by my landlady. Carrying the glass, I walk outside under the light of the harvest moon, its edged rays gilding the terra cotta tiles of the patio. I sit in a plastic chair and let the chill of the night raise the hairs on my neck. I should go inside for a sweatshirt, but I know if I stand up and walk away I will find task after task that needs to be completed, and I’ll somehow just never make it back outside. The dew will gather on my glass and I’ll wake up after sunrise with a crick in my neck from sleeping on the sofa.

My phone pings—new messages. It’s just about quitting time back home. Not that there’s any real quitting time when you run the company. I have my phone in my hand before I realize what I’m doing and set it back down again.

I am the supreme ruler of avoidance.

I sip my herbal cocktail and hold the fiery liquid in my mouth.

The alcohol content is so high that it scorches my tongue like capsaicin. My taste buds ache as if washed with vinegar; my sinuses sear.

As the burn of the liquor subsides, the bitter and fragrant flavors of the herbs expand to fill my senses. I hold my breath to keep the vapors in, rolling the tincture across my tongue. Musty lavender, piny rosemary, traces of lemon and anise and the complex savoriness of thyme…

The girl. The little girl. Solange. She stands before me, translucent and consequential, holding her little notebook clutched to her chest. This has never happened before—a phantom reappearing to contact me again.

Have I summoned her? Am I somehow learning how to control this thing?

If anything, perhaps I am bending to its control.

I’m not drunk yet, though the booze is peeling the membranes of my mouth apart. And I can’t swallow, because if I do, there she’ll be—and then she’ll be gone. Only as long as the taste lingers can I keep her memory.

My eyes water; my sinuses ache. But there, behind her, others rise one by one out of the night. People in olive drab, field gray, khaki, horizon blue, and Canadian green—people in tabards and tunics and mail and leathers as well. Bare-chested men in twill or tartan stand beside spatha-wielding men anonymous behind helms and oval shields. Some carry hoes, or hold books, or wear only torn shifts and night clothes. Some are not soldiers at all.

They bear the wounds of sword, halberd, ballista, bayonet, bullet, gas, fire, field artillery—a ruined body is a ruined body, but there are so many ways to ruin one. They stand in regimented lines, and again I feel as if I am meant to review them. Or rather, as if they are reviewing—judging—me.

Then behind them, others. More and more, stretching back across the pasture where the white Charolaise are blinking shadows in the darkness. Even in their faint luminescence, some are half-hidden inside hedgerows and apple trees and the old stone barn. I have grown accustomed to the range of what warriors have worn in France for the last thousand years.

These new ones do not look like the others.

Some wear black mesh unitards rippled with circuit patterns and shredded by antipersonnel weapons. Some tower inside smoking, charred powered armor that balances, spring-limbed, on moaning hydraulics. Some wear uniforms imprinted with corporate logos as heraldic devices, and some are clad in blood-stained modern combat dress, the sort of thing you’d expect to see in Afghanistan or Syria or Gaza—with their kevlar and ceramic body armor, and helmets fitted with the sort of electronic communications devices I made my fortune building.

They come from the future, I realize. These are warriors who aren’t yet dead.

I swallow, reflexively. Alcohol sears my throat, and the ghosts shimmer, fade, ripple. But this time, they do not quite vanish. I take another quick gulp of the herbal tincture. Bits of rosemary wedge between my teeth. The ghosts—the ghosts of wars past, the ghosts of wars future—

I know what they want now. Aidez-nous.

My mouth is full, burning with the strange spirit that brings them here. I cannot ask them what they want from me. I cannot ask them what they think I can do about it.

I can either speak or listen, it seems.

I can’t change the past. I can’t give Solange back her life. I don’t know how I can change the future, either. How does one person bring an end to war? What decision can I make that would save these future dead in their blasted power armor and rent uniforms?

So many have tried and failed.

I think of the beach, the long golden sand and the children and the barking joyous dogs. I think of the apple trees and sheep and cows and corn, acres upon acres where Panzers burned and artillery shells whistled.

Healing exists.

So many have tried and failed. Can I do less than try and fail as well?

But I’ve been an engineer. I know how to make things. Gadgets. Companies. How do I fix this?

Restructure a corporation or two? Found a religion? Nobel left a foundation and a trust, after his death. Not while he was alive, however. Gandhi gave over his entire life to peace and to standing against imperialism. He still died by violence.

If you change the culture, maybe you change the world. But the world doesn’t want to be changed. The world wants to pick fights, because there’s money to be made when there’s fighting.

I can’t. It’s too much. It’s too much for anyone.

They stand and watch me, the future and the past, silent, burned, and bleeding. I think of that golden beach, alight with life and joy between the two memorials, one weary and one shining. I think of what it would be like to see it heaped with bodies again.

I swallow. The tincture burns all the way down. I stand, weaving a little, and walk a step forward. Cool grass curls between my toes. I offer the glass to Solange, who is already shimmering away.

I think she smiles at me before she vanishes.

Behind her, the others ripple out of existence in sequence, once-upon-a-time to someday. It’s as if they were writ in sand and a slow wave passed over them. I watch them go, and when the last has curled away into mist, I empty the rest of my glass as a libation on the ground.

I go inside, set the glass in the sink. Cut cheese, cut bread. Slice a peach. Sit at the vinyl-covered table and eat in slow bites, watching the ghosts of old violence—and noticing, too, the other ghosts I had not previously recognized. The tastes of sun and rain and the farmer’s care. Of warm barns and kisses stolen in the orchard, of long cold winters and calves and hungry years when the sun and rain did not come in the right sequence or proportion. It’s not just misery that soaks up from the earth.

The juice runs down my chin. Crumbs scatter my shirt. My liquor-burned tongue and palate miss some subtleties of the tastes, I’m sure, but I try to savor what I can.

When I’ve finished, I think for a minute. I watch the last ghost fade.

I came here to confront the ghosts. To quiet them. I know now that they will never be quiet, because they can never precisely speak and be heard.

I take my phone outside, into the cool air, under the fragment of moon and the stars and the clouds and the high empty night. I don’t call up my exec’s number just yet, because I want to experience this moment for a little while longer. Soon, though, I’ll bother her at home. I’ll tell her to set up my travel plans, and to start coming up with a strategy for removing our dependence on military contracts. When I get home, we’ll have a little brainstorming session. Maybe she’ll have some ideas about how we can make this work.

I have resources, money, acumen, connections. I make devices that help people exchange information more efficiently. Hell, I’ve made a fortune making devices that help people exchange information more efficiently. What if I put those resources to work now on preventing and healing suffering, instead of, like Nobel, waiting until I am dead?

I’m not naïve enough to think I can end war, or hunger, or atrocity with my own hand. It’s a charnel house world, after all.

But dogs can bark and chase balls in the surf on Omaha Beach. And if that’s possible, it must also be possible that I can do something.