“Okay, fine,” Julian said through his teeth. “You told me. I hear you—finally. Loud and clear. I’m done with this bullshit. With all of it.” He glared at Devi.
“Yes,” Devi said. “By all means live out your days in bitter pity for yourself while your life passes you by.” He stood up, gathering his hat into his hands and left.
∞
After Ashton came back from Valentina’s with some precooked chicken and rice and found Devi gone and Julian back in his room, he banged on the bedroom door. “Food’s here.”
Julian sat on the sofa, Ashton across from him.
“So the man left?”
“The man left.”
“They took him back?” When Julian said nothing, Ashton said, “Who was he?”
“A cook from Great Eastern Road.”
“Cook. Great Eastern Road. Really. Well. Thanks for clearing that up.” When Julian offered nothing else, Ashton pressed further. “Is he the shaman you were asking me about a year ago? Some Hmong man who summoned the dead?”
Julian half-nodded.
“Does he have anything to do with what happened to you?”
Julian half-nodded.
“Jules, I can’t play twenty questions. I’m not Socrates. I’m going to start throwing shit by the next question. Talk to me. What happened to you?”
“Forget it, Ash. Honestly. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s in the past.” Julian clenched and unclenched his hands. “And you don’t want to know.”
“Like hell I don’t. And it’s not in the past. It’s the fucking here and now. Julian, you left home in the morning and by the afternoon you were in an ICU with smoke inhalation and electrocution burns. Does that sound like the past to you?”
“If I tell you, you won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
For interminable minutes, Julian stared at Ashton. “Short or long?”
“Short. Elevator pitch. Two sentences.”
“Devi showed me a way to go back in time to find Josephine. And I’ve gone twice.”
“Go back, like astral projection?”
“Go back, like body and soul.”
At first, Ashton was without words. “It’s a terrible pitch,” he said finally. “Based on that, I won’t be able to produce your script, I’m afraid. It’s not even remotely believable and you’ve left too many hanging questions. Have you got anything else? I’m serious now. Anything else.”
“The first time I went, she died,” Julian said. “And I was blasted back into my present life. It was just before you moved here. I went again a month ago. I thought I was leaving London for good. If she hadn’t died, I’d still be there with her. But…here I am, so.” He took a breath. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what, Julian,” Ashton said slowly. “How am I looking at you?”
“Like I’m nuts.”
“No.”
“I leap into a wormhole,” Julian said, “and float for a long time down an underground river, and when I come out on the other side, she lives.”
Ashton draped himself over the couch. “Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s time for the long version.” He shot up. “Wait!” From the kitchen he brought a bottle of Grey Goose, two glasses, some ice, and some soda water. He made the drinks, gave one to Julian, didn’t clink, and gulped down half of his. “Go.”
Julian spoke for a long time. Meridian, crystal, the Transit Circle, tear in the fabric of the universe, future tense, moongate, river, dead queen, Wales, Mary, Lord Falk, the Silver Cross, Mallory, Fabian, Margrave, murder, gold, the Fire. Body immolating and reforming at the speed of light. Correction: at the speed of light, squared.
Ashton reached over and swallowed Julian’s untouched vodka.
“I know how it sounds,” Julian said.
“Oh no, my friend. I don’t think you do.”
“Do you remember the dream I used to have of her? Where she is walking toward me, happy and smiling? Devi says it could be a vision of her and me in the future.”
“Well, if Devi says…You mean in the future that Devi just finished telling you doesn’t exist, or some other future?”
“Everything you’re thinking of, Ash, I’ve thought of,” said Julian. “Yet here it is. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m not lying. There is a difference.”
“Oh, a huge one. If you were lying, it would mean you were sane.”
In silence the two men sat in their open sunny flat. Julian was oddly comforted by the shellshocked look on Ashton’s normally placid face, as if his friend didn’t know how to begin to begin to figure out how to help him. You can’t help me, Ash, Julian wanted to say. You can’t help a husk whose fruits have fallen and rotted on the ground.
“Explain my injuries,” Julian said.
“I can’t explain them,” Ashton said, “but you entered a triathlon event without my knowledge. You spent a year growing a sick beard without explanation and shaved it off without explanation.”
“I shaved it off because in 1666 men didn’t have beards.”
“Oh, that’s why. You’re boxing, caving, fencing. I can’t explain any of those things. 1666. Is that when you became a landlord in a brothel?”
“Yes.”
“You, Julian Cruz, son of a professor and a principal, were a caretaker in a house of women who got naked and had sex for money?”
“Yes.”
“I’m supposed to believe this?”
“That’s the part you find unbelievable? Not wormholes and—”
“Frankly, yes. Okay, from the top. You fell in love with a girl, but then she died.”
“Yes.”
“And you found a charlatan who showed you how to travel back in time to find her.”
“A shaman, but yes.”
“Potato, potahtoe. You traveled into this past.”
“Yes.”
“Not once but twice.”
“Yes.”
“And you found her, and fell in love with her again, and she with you, and both times, she died.”
“Yes.”
“And you were a landlord in a brothel?”
∞
Persuasion #1: Julian showed Ashton the list of casualties from Mallory’s yellowing but intact Bill of Mortality. “Look at the paper. It’s from 1665. Why is it still in such good condition?”
“That’s your proof? How the hell should I know?”
“Because,” Julian said, “the paper is only a year old, not four hundred years old.”
Apoplexie 1
Burned in his bed by a candle 1
Canker 1
Cough 2
Fright 3
Grief 3
Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1
Lethargy 1
Suddenly 1
Timpany 1
Plague 7165
“What’s timpany?” Ashton said.
“That’s your question?”
“How does one die suddenly?”
“That’s your question?”
“How does one die of grief, I wonder.”
“To paraphrase John Green,” Julian said, uncle of nieces besotted with Hazel and Augustus, “slowly, and all at once.”
∞
Persuasion #2: Julian took Ashton to the Silver Cross, off Craig’s Court on lit-up Whitehall. It was a Friday night. They ate. They drank. They read the plaque on the wall. “THE SILVER CROSS HAS BEEN THE SITE OF A PUBLIC HOUSE SINCE THE 17TH CENTURY AND WAS EVEN THE SITE OF A LICENSED BROTHEL.”
Persuasion #3: Julian tried to hand Ashton his breeches and tunic.
“You got them in a costume store,” Ashton said, pulling his arms behind his back.
Persuasion #4: The Elizabethan gold coin.
“It’s fake,” Ashton said.
“Do you want to know how much one of these fake coins is worth today?”
“Fine, but it’ll prove nothing.”
Julian showed him the online collector’s currency markets. An Elizabeth I gold sovereign in fa
irly good condition, not mint condition, was selling for £50,000. “And there were 48 more.”
“So you say.” Ashton fake-shrugged. “Yours isn’t real. And even if it is real, so what? You found it on the street.”
“I found fifty thousand quid on the street. That sounds normal to you.”
“Jules, we left normal back at Tequila Cantina’s when you showed me a ring for a chick whose mother you’d never met.”
Persuasion #5: The pièce de résistance. Julian took Ashton to St. Giles at Cripplegate. He would unveil for his friend the ultimate proof—the gold in the wall. They went to a hardware store, purchased a hammer, a chisel, a bucket, a trowel, and some mortar.
“You know,” Ashton said, pointing to the supplies in Julian’s hands, “when someone is sick and you entertain him in his sickness, you become an accomplice in his disorder.”
“Let’s see what you say after I show you a leather purse full of ancient gold coins hidden in the London Wall.”
“After, I’ll be visiting you in jail,” said Ashton, “because it’s against the law to deface a historical monument. Douchebaggery most foul. Vandalism in the first degree. In Singapore you’d get fifty lashes.”
Ashton kept watch on a bench by the church, while across the narrow canal, over a hanging bridge, Julian spent the afternoon walking up and down the same fifty feet, feeling the remains of the crumbling Roman wall with his hands. When he reached the end near the circular turret, he’d turn around and creep back, inch by inch searching for the Kentish ragstone spackled by an amateur mason. Sometimes Ashton was on his phone, but mostly, he sat and watched Julian.
Hours passed. Julian, exhausted and sore from walking bent at the waist, collapsed next to Ashton. “I don’t understand why I can’t find it. It was so easy. Down the hill, in a straight line from the nave’s last window, three feet off the ground. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense.” Ashton shook his head. “Just for a second, step out of your skin and think about how you appear to me. Hunched over for the last two hours, pacing up and down the same stretch of wall, mumbling to yourself.”
“You think I’m nuts.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, Julian. Mentally ill.” Ashton wasn’t smiling.
“You think I’m obsessing over a girl and you’re afraid that eventually that obsession is going to drive me insane.”
“Eventually? And not a girl. A coin.”
∞
Persuasion #6: One Sunday Julian took Ashton to Greenwich. To show him the telescope, to introduce him to the guard.
“Hello, Sweeney. This is my friend, Ashton.”
“Hello, Ashton,” Sweeney said, turning to Julian. “And who are you?”
“The guy who threw up a few months ago,” Julian said. “You had to call me an ambulance, remember?”
“I don’t remember the ambulance, but so many people pass this way, mate, and I’m terrible with faces, sorry. Me memory’s really the pits. One time, there was a bloke who appeared in my Transit Room nekkid! I have no idea how he got through security with his junk hanging out.”
“Maybe it was so small they didn’t notice,” Ashton said to Sweeney, and to Julian he said, “Naked?!”
“Don’t know what that guy is on about,” said Julian.
He and Ashton stood for a few minutes in front of the well, the stairs, the railing, the glossy Transit Circle. They looked up at the gray sky through the retracted roof. Julian told Ashton about noon and infinite meridians and the blue halo opening to another dimension. They visited the gift shop, walked around the soaked gardens, stood on the stone plaza with the panorama of London laid out before them, today glum and obscured, the oaks heavy with rain, the river in a mist.
Ashton didn’t speak on the train back home.
11
Objects of Outrage
IN MAY, A MORE OR LESS HEALED JULIAN RETURNED TO Nextel. Reuters’ interest in buying the news agency intensified, and Ashton and Julian worked long hours trying to make the business efficient and profitable so that they could sell it. At night they went out drinking, sometimes even with Roger and Nigel.
Working was good.
Drinking, too.
It made time pass.
Something had to.
When he felt well enough in his body to no longer ignore the remorse in his soul, Julian went to Quatrang one morning before work to make peace with Devi. Not wanting to go by himself, he dragged Ashton along. “Why do we have to go see that man? You said yourself you were done with him.”
“I am,” Julian said. “But I want to apologize for the way I acted. I was rude. Plus I want to show you some things.”
“Unless it’s naked girls dancing, I don’t want to see anything.”
Devi was happy to see Julian. He said nothing when Julian walked in, he didn’t react, not smiling or even joking, but there was something in the way he had glanced up when the door opened that made Julian think the cook had been hoping Julian would return.
Ashton and Devi were even less impressed with each other on the second day of their acquaintance. They shook hands, but they may as well have been drawing swords. Barely able to fit inside the tiny Quatrang, Ashton stood in the corner by the window, tense and uncharacteristically awkward.
“You’re just in time,” Devi said. “I trust you two haven’t had your first meal of the day yet? I’ve been simmering a mohinga in a cauldron in the back. Would you like some?”
“What’s a mohinga?”
“Catfish soup with banana tree stem,” Devi said cheerfully. “A squeeze of lime, dried chilis, crispy onions. Very delicious. Can I bring you two a bowl?”
“For breakfast?”
“Of course. When else would you eat a mohinga?”
Julian shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“It’s the most popular breakfast dish in Burma,” Devi said, sounding offended for Burma.
“Devi, how about some eggs? French toast?”
“What am I, the Waffle House?”
“I’ll try this mohinga,” Ashton said.
“Look at you trying to impress him,” Julian said after Devi disappeared behind the curtain.
“What I’m trying to do is get out of here,” Ashton said. “I’m giving this thing a half-hour. Like lunch with my old man.”
“Speaking of your father,” Devi said, carrying out two bowls of strong-smelling fish soup, “how is he?”
“Um, he’s…fine?” Ashton squinted at Julian with a sideways glare that Julian did not return.
“He must be happy having you in London with him, working with him?”
“He’s semi-retired, but…I guess.”
“You and your father have had some difficulties in the past, yes? Is it better now?”
Ashton shook his head. “Whatever. Not really. Maybe a little. It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t want what I haven’t got.”
For a moment, the three men sat in silence, absorbing this. Julian wished he could say the same.
“Your father, does he have other children besides you?”
“What, Julian forgot to mention that part? No,” Ashton said. “I was his only child, and I still wasn’t his favorite.”
“Oh, I am certain that’s not true,” Devi said. “He is your father. You’re his only son.”
“Well, that he knows of,” interjected Julian.
“No, no,” Ashton said. “I’m pretty sure I’m it.”
Devi wouldn’t let it go. “Do you spend time together? Do father and son things?”
“Father and son things? We don’t fly kites if that’s what you’re asking. We have lunch once a week.”
“Well, that counts!” Devi said. He seemed happy it was so. “He must enjoy that very much.”
Ashton glanced at Julian by his side, as in what the hell.
In the uncomfortable hush that followed, Julian took the opportunity to apologize to Devi. He hoped there were no hard feelings.
“Apology not necessary,” Devi said. “I’m used to it.”
“I bet you are,” muttered Ashton.
“I was so angry,” Julian said.
“You still are,” Ashton said.
Devi nodded. “Stage two of grief: anger. It’s to be expected. No one should take it personally.” That sounded directed at Ashton. Certainly, that’s how Ashton took it because he scowled. They finished the mohinga, had kimchi and a banana cake with brandy. Gratefully Julian drank two glasses of the proffered murky tiger water. Ashton was given sake.
“So what’s wrong with him?” Ashton blurted to Devi after a second helping of the banana cake. “What really happened to his body? I’ve never seen anything like his injuries. Smoke inhalation? Electrocution? Multiple foot fractures?”
“Possibly by traveling into another dimension,” Devi said, “he had accumulated and stored a tremendous amount of energy, and on his improbable return, all of it was released as he was hurled through the physical universe at incredible speed.”
“Can you just stop it,” Ashton said. “Can’t one of you give me a straight answer for once?”
“That wasn’t straight enough for you?” Devi said. “He’s lucky to be back in one piece. He’s doing quite well, all things considered.”
“You think this is doing well?”
Devi shrugged. “Your friend’s predicament is not going to end here, Ashton. To truly help him, you must find a way to believe him, so he doesn’t have to keep dealing with the burden of your skepticism among all the other things he has to deal with. Ease his burden, don’t add to it. And, Julian, your accomplishment is not diminished just because you perceive yourself as having failed.”
“I don’t perceive myself as having failed,” Julian said, jumping off the stool. “I actually have failed.” It was time to go. “Ashton, ready? Thanks for the grub, Devi.”
As they were leaving, Ashton said to Devi, “We’re not trying to solve a crime here. I am helping him. He’s not looking for a solution to his predicament. He’s looking for compassion.”
“He’s looking for a little bit of a solution, too,” Devi said.
∞
On the train to work, Ashton couldn’t stop talking about Devi. “The balls on that guy! Telling me what to do with you. Did I ask for his advice?”
“He’s the master of offering deeply unwanted advice,” Julian said. “It’s called being a shaman.”
A Beggar's Kingdom Page 13