Good luck! Good luck! The climber is coming.
And he has his bright light at night
And he has his bright light at night,
Already lit, already lit.
-an excerpt from Das Steigerlied, a German miner's folksong
o-o-o-o
When Georgia is small, her father leaves to work near the Susquehanna River. She isn't bothered by this, even as she and her mother are gently wrapped and carried in promises to her Deitscher grandmother in the southwestern peninsula of Pennsylvania. She is sick even now; the edges blur on strangers, but in this time she can still see her parents for what they are, and recognize the craggy but kind face of her Oma. She doesn't think anything of the unmemorable people that drift through her life. Georgia is five and she remembers very little of them anyway. She's too little to recognize the importance of their blank faces.
Her father is a solid man where her mother is flighty, and the two look uncomfortable sitting on the bench seat of his old Chevrolet. Their ride to the countryside means he buys Georgia a coke, a pack of bubble-gum, and lets her wear his dusty coat that he throws into the back of the truck cab when he's not at work. It smells of him and the damp earth near the river. She loves it as she loves him.
"She going to get dirty," her mother says around a frown, watching Georgia pluck at the coal dust filled seams of the jacket. Georgia is methodically cleaning off the reflective tape that decorates the chest and arms. The flashes of yellow keep him safe. At least that's what he told her. "You know how hard I work to keep the dust out of the house."
"Jesus, let her wear it for a couple of hours," her father sighs, and cranks up the radio a little. "I'll take it with me soon enough. Mother's house is as clean as a hospital, so you get your way for a couple weeks until I come back."
She fancies that he is a great adventurer with his leathery skin and bright eyes, as tan and rough as any beast in the woods. His corn yellow hair is a shock of gold, like some sort of identifying plumage on a bird, like the tape on the jacket. She is pleased for it as she gets older; she can remember the hair when she can't remember the face. (He does not live long after this moment; you know the coal dust or the carbon monoxide gets them all in the end. You're relieved he doesn't live long enough to see you come apart.)
Her grandmother, her Oma, lives in a nice farmhouse covered in fox grape vines, meticulously white and clean with sun-blanched leaves cooling the dirt nearest to the ground where the animals crawl up to in the evenings. Georgia thinks she and her neighbors are strange; they keep horses instead of cars, and speak between each other in consonant-thick words that Georgia doesn't understand. She doesn't remember her grandfather; Dad says he died before she was born, retired and ailing early from years of prospecting and metal-smithing closer to Pittsburgh. When they pull up to the farmhouse, Georgia is excited to sleep in the old rod-iron bedroom in the attic, and tuck her chin out the window to watch the magpies talk to each other in the trees close by.
Her mother grows more annoyed with each word spoken when her father exits the truck to kiss his mother on both cheeks and greet her. They eat a hearty meal, and Oma grabs her father's hand to kiss the knuckles whenever she looks at him too long, tries to clean the black dirt from beneath his nails whenever they catch her eyes. Georgia wonders what else she sees.
"It is too dangerous for a young man with a family to run off to coal mines every couple of weeks," Oma says, and Georgia watches the rare nod of her mother's head in agreement. Up until now, she has been micromanaging Georgia's plate to avoid talking with her mother-in-law.
"Gotta help put food on the table," her father says and smiles, big and confident. "Mt. Carmel's a decent distance from Centralia, we should be fine. Wish me lots of luck before I go this evening if it lets you sleep easier."
Oma's eyes are a soft grey, rain on water. They are rheumy, but Georgia watches them and her slow and serious smile, broken only by the sad tilt of her brows. Georgia wonders how much luck they'll need. When the time comes, Oma teaches her some of her consonant-thick words 'for the proper tradition'.
"Glück auf!" Oma calls out to her father, who waves from the front seat of his old Chevy truck. "Georgia, send your father off the right way." Like there is a wrong way, and she should be afraid to do so. Georgia runs from the porch to grab her grandmother's hand and wave back. The sun is beginning to set, and the shine of the truck's grill makes her cross-eyed with light burns. When she looks back to her father, his face is just a negative of the mirrored light, crossing and red-black.
"Glück auf," Georgia says and trips on her tongue around the vowels. They are mud-heavy when they spill from her mouth.
She doesn't know when he'll be back. Oma says this is how such things always are.
o-o-o-o
Will Graham is a beautifully kind man behind the skull-like mask that had hidden him in Wolf Trap, which the freshness and ozone of oxygen has breathed into her. He is sick like her; the people and walls around him are fluid in his vision, and Will walks like a man drowning on land. There's a breathless gasping quality to him that makes her think of black lung. His eyes are fever-bright and bursting with the overflows of thought. It must be exhausting to think as much as Will Graham.
He calls her pretty, and Georgia is delighted. She cradles that to her chest, hides it behind her ribcage where even the open windows of the oxygen chamber can't see it. No one can question his feelings on it if they don't know. He doesn't think a murderer is pretty. No one has to be jealous of a murderer. She hasn't been pretty in a long time; Georgia has been dead instead.
She wonders if he can recover too. Maybe if they pour him into a small box like her, he can be contained. Every child's first pet lives in a shoe box, and Georgia wonders if someone will remember to poke holes in it so he can breathe. (You don't want him to be suffocated like Beth. You didn't think that through, how the blood would choke her. You can't think much through at all without something holding you together, but you needed to see underneath.)
Inevitably thoughts of Beth are thoughts of the slide of metal through her face, even if Georgia's memory is a smooth plain of anonymity. Even on her best days, Georgia can't remember Beth before she forgot her without the lilt of her singing. She can't even remember the style of Beth's hair.
"I dreamt you killed that doctor," she says, but the geography of his face doesn't sit well with her impressions of what she recalls. It's hard to say; it's been a long time since she could recognize the topography of anyone. But there's something not sharp enough in the tracings of Will's long eyelashes and heavy brows. She can't imagine him cutting from soft cheek, to buccinator, to oris, to masseter muscle. "But I couldn't see your face."
Will's face says that he can.
"I dream a lot of things," he says after an uncomfortable pause, and turns like he means to leave. "I've reached a point that they're probably habits more than passing thoughts."
"My grandmother used to say do something thirty times, and it becomes a habit," Georgia says with a twist of a smile, but her fingers clench. She wants to hold him, like a well-loved and worn shirt. She wants him to be comfortable. "What you do is special. If you didn't think the way that you do, I'd probably be dead from exposure somewhere out in the Chesapeake Bay. It's a wonder that I lived in my skin long enough to get to Virginia. I might have shed my scales like a snake underneath your house and died, and how much more terrible would that be for you?"
"You saw the dogs. They'd probably find you first," he says with a wry grin. "Buster likes to get into the crawlspace, so you would have had company at least." She likes this about him, that he brings her comfort with his comfort, his little army of animals. She feels special whenever he brings them up.
Will looks at her like the sun is in his eyes. She's wondered a couple of times if the ache in his head is all that he can actually feel, and that the nurses and doctors and FBI just float past unrecognized. Georgia doesn't think another person more like her will ever pass by her window.
She meets his gaze. "You don't get to wander back from dark places without the light stinging your eyes a bit. It reminds you where you come from, and that you can go back to it if you want." Georgia breathes for a moment. " Our normal isn't their normal."
Will smiles, but it's tremulous. Georgia wonders how many times he's dreamed of killing a man. He goes back out into the hall like her father leaves for work: tired, ashy black. Like he's done this a thousand times. It makes her throat close, and her fingers twitch against the itch of the grounding band at her wrist.
"Glück auf," Georgia says, proper-like, though he can't hear it wrung out of her. It's just as heavy saying it now as it was then.
o-o-o-o
She dozes. There's a small analog clock on the control panel of the oxygen chamber, but it tells time in twelve hour increments, so morning and night are a singular blur. This particular moment is punctuated by the click of oxford heels, which tells Georgia it's not Will, even though she misses his company. It doesn't feel like he's been gone long.
"I trust that you are feeling better, Miss Madchen? Will mentioned you seemed more lively after some time in treatment."
Dr. Hannibal Lecter holds a food warming bag when she turns her head to him, and it is delicately held away from the ground. She thinks of germs, of viral transfer, and wonders if that drives him. Maybe this ground simply isn't hallowed enough, and he allows as little as possible of himself to touch it. The severe lines of his suit are attractive and styled into perfection, and she doesn't think he knows what it is to be unpresentable.
Georgia doesn't like most doctors on principle, but her hopes for Will Graham make her look Dr. Lecter over with a startling need for him to be in good hands. His presence is somehow prying, digging. He's awfully, blindingly clean.
"Will's nice to come by," she says at length, sleepy but serious. "So are you. I don't see many people other than doctors, but you're not mine, so I suppose that makes it special. I hope Will's starting to feel better too."
Dr. Lecter tilts his head a little, but his eyes are warmed at her greeting. She doesn't think it was terribly elegant, but Georgia is honest, and hopes he can see that. "Will would be very pleased to hear it, Miss Madchen. I do worry that he isn't looking for his answers in the right place, but his talks with you may be more beneficial at the moment than mine."
She frowns, mulling the implication over. There's a reverence in how he speaks of Will that reminds her of Sunday church, of the fervency of the preacher's mouth, but the words are unexpectedly uncomfortable for her. "I don't think Will is sick like me," she says. "Not mentally ill like me. I do think he's some kind of sick though. I hope he finds what he's looking for."
"Are you so certain that there's something for him to find?" Lecter's smile is inscrutable; she thinks of the foxes eating grapes at her grandmother's vines. "Or do you think he's hoping for something to find?"
Georgia licks her dry lips; she feels hot like it's August. "Are you familiar with anthracite fires, Dr. Lecter? They're pretty common in small town southern Pennsylvania," she starts. "They're coal seam fires. People get careless in the mines, or a bad turn of weather catches a shallow deposit, and it ignites. The rocks literally burn. A lot of people lose homes to them without ever knowing the bedrock of their house is on fire. It's like a kid's idea of biblical Hell."
Dr. Lecter looks amused, but she feels his attention very keenly. It's sharp and hot. "There's a very famous one in Saarland not terribly far from Luxembourg, and another I've heard of in Australia," he says, as pleasant and airy as a spring day. "I haven't had the pleasure of seeing either, but as I understand it the smell of it is quite strong."
Georgia nods, and thinks of sulphur and manganese. The air of the oxygen chamber is sterile and harsh in her nose, but it doesn't dull the thought as much as it has everything else. "They smoke. Not in an obvious way, usually just little curls on the ground. They put off gases that kill the miners and the people who live over the seams. But you'd never know it was there until you felt the heat from the ground."
"Did your father feel the heat once, Georgia?" His eyes are startling garnets set into his head. They are dark and lurid. Still his face is no more expressive than the smallest turn of his lips. "Did it scare him? Do you often look for fires now too?"
She sits up, startled. Lecter hangs in the edges of the room, but she feels his interest behind the benign face. Georgia is literally an animal under glass, and with self-aware embarrassment, thinks that Dr. Lecter sees it for the joke it is too, but the questions feel like they're steering away from her story. She wonders if she should allow it, if this is uncomfortable for him like it is her.
"I'm just minding my breathing space. I went a long time forgetting that I needed it." Georgia says, when she finds her tongue again. "I like Will; I don't want him to make the same mistakes as me. People can't breathe for you."
And oh, Georgia sees Dr. Lecter's disagreement in the slightest fissure of emotion, the raw garnet of his eyes as hot as any forge. It's so brief, she half wonders if she imagined it.
He nods, the smile a little bit tighter but wider as well. She thinks he has the look of someone who decided something, like a child who's about to hide something. "Mind your seams as well, Fraulein Madchen."
o-o-o-o
Not long after, Georgia combs her father-bright yellow hair, and listens to the gentle whisper of the strands against one another. She doesn't know when Will can come back.
This is how such things always are.