“Right here?” said Arthur. “Right now? All invisible? Demons?”
The rabbi nodded.
“On the other hand,” he said. “It could be an allegory.” He held up one finger and pointed at me. “I must tell you all the story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his adventures upon emerging from the cave. It is very important that I tell you about this before you leave. Shabbas 33b-34a. Remind me, if I forget.” Then, still to me, he added pointedly and irrelevantly, “And what of your parents, O’Hugh? Do you know the history of your parents?”
“I have no parents,” I said. “I grew up on the streets, with no name. Until I named myself.”
He stroked his beard absently.
“Just as a point of fact,” he said. “Everyone has parents. Whether one knows his own parents, their existence is simply a biological fact. But beyond the scientific nature of my observation, may I offer the likely conjecture that perhaps they held you upon your birth. Perhaps they kissed your soft infant forehead, and perhaps they loved you for a moment, or more than a moment. Perhaps their love floats about in the troposphere a bit. Maybe it keeps you a little bit warm at night, and you don’t know it.”
“Rabbi,” Billy said politely. “We need a prophesy.”
He shrugged. Prophesies he could deliver.
“The Falsturm may be defeated,” he said, “only by the hand of the daughter of a Queen, who was born Nephila.” [18]
He turned to me, and he gave me a potent look. I nodded, and he knew what I meant: I know this prophesy. Rabbi Palache was a man not unacquainted with oracles, and snowy egrets.
“I’m reasonably confident about that one,” he added.
Still looking at me.
Silence descended, as everyone thought about all this: the demons; the Falsturm; the princess born of the Nephilim.
I filled in the silence.
“So why am I here?” I asked. “Why me? Look, I know why I want to be here. Nothing more than blind hatred and foolish blood-lust. But what’s made all of you lose your senses?”
I pointed out, astutely I thought, that I was far from anonymous. I was a dime novel hero, then a Wild West star, then a wrongly convicted, although infamous, passion killer, the subject of a number of folk songs and moralistic stage theatricals. (I admit that I never really tired of explaining the ways in which I was far-from-anonymous.) What’s more, I noted, the Sidonians had tried to kill me a number of times, once by shooting me through the head in the Wyoming mountains, then again by firing squad in Nebraska.
“The Pinkertons may still care about me a bit,” I said, “but the Sidonians care more.”
Billy shrugged sadly. He was now middle-aged. This bit had apparently taken practice to get right.
“You have it in you, Watt,” he said. “You have the motive. You can taste it. You need it. There is perhaps no one who needs this more than you, who needs to fight them more than you need to fight them. And so we are sending you. We are allowing you to go. This is no more than what Hester promised on that beach in Pangaea. It is why you are here, after all.”
Had he been more honest, he would have admitted that he had seen patterns in history. I didn’t have what one might call a “destiny,” but Billy had learned that if he were to introduce me into the Sidonian capital in 1879, there was at least a possibility that one specific death would occur that could cause a chain reaction favorable to the counter-Revolution. And if he were to send me there tasting the bitter bile of revenge, that probability would increase.
Billy turned to the rabbi.
“Rabbi Palache,” he said. “Mr. O’Hugh will need a convincing disguise.”
The two of us stood before a full length mirror, the rabbi sturdy, solid and portly; the shootist a bit wobbly, veiny and confused.
Outside the window, palm trees swayed gently in the Pacific breeze.
“Here is Watt O’Hugh,” the rabbi said. “Thirty-seven years old. Tall. Weakening, but still strong. A steady aim, thanks to some supernatural help.” Here he smiled, and added, “Perhaps.
“With,” he continued, “a familiar face.” He slapped my cheek very gently with the back of his hand. “Even you, Watt, are tired of this face. You wish to ruin it before you turn forty – you weather it with sun and strong drink, and you chisel it up with your incessant scowl.”
I insisted that I still knew how to smile, and I called out for affirmation to Hester, who nodded noncommittally, her gaze elsewhere.
“Elazar ben Azaryah, 10th-generation progeny of the prophet Ezra, was a brilliant scholar, but of a preternaturally youthful appearance, even for a lad of 18. When he was appointed chief rabbi of the Jews, his wife wondered if the people would take direction and leadership from a man with the face of a child, lovely and pure though that childish face might be. I am like a man of 70 years, he told her, as his head touched the feather pillow that night. His wife, a girl of sixteen, embraced a youth that evening, and she laughed at what she considered his hubris. But by morn, an old man lay beside her in bed. Elazar now displayed the wisdom that usually comes of age – the wisdom he had possessed since childhood – but he retained the energy and vigor of youth.”
By the end of this story, I had forgotten what I was doing, and I was no longer looking in the mirror, but instead at the face of the rabbi, as he spoke, quiet and firm.
“Did he continue ageing?” Arthur asked, observing from the lunch table. “Or was his visage frozen at 70? He had the strong heart of an 18-year-old.” He twirled his mustache between the pointer finger and middle finger of his left hand. “Or might this too be some type of allegory?”
The rabbi nudged me, with a small small touch, and I turned back to the face in the mirror.
The scars on my face were gone, as were the imperfections with which I had been born. My brow was unfurrowed, my eyes honest and true. My face itself was handsome and strong. It was a face I didn’t recognize, but which I loved better than my own.
Chu Ying beamed.
“The Jews are so magical!” he exclaimed. “So mysterious. So inscrutable.”
“What is the explanation for this?” I asked.
The rabbi thought for a moment.
“Consider this,” he said, very carefully. “As the Talmud notes, when two men gather cucumbers by Magic, one will be punished and the other exempt. Which man will walk free and which one will die, by the grace of God? He who really gathers them is punished: whilst he who produces merely an illusion is exempt. You see?”
I shook my head. I did not see.
“How about this?” the rabbi said, trying again. “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” And then, almost pleadingly: “Hmm? Ah?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”
The rabbi gripped my left arm in his strong, calloused hand, and we walked together out of the cabin, onto the sandy island beach that he had always called home. We stared out together at miles of ocean. The cabin was gone. We were alone on a deserted beach. Sea spray hit my face.
“When Rabbi Elazar needed a miracle,” the rabbi said, “he received a miracle. So maybe, as it was with Rabbi Elazar, we can say that sometimes, when we need a miracle, we receive a miracle. Maybe. Sometimes.”
The next morning, I sat on the bed in our room at the inn. I looked around at the furnishings for the last time, at the little desk, the polished, dark wood dressing table pushed against the northern wall, its mirror reflecting the room. My bags were packed. Outside our window, it was dark, and the moon still glowed just above the crest of the painted-backdrop mountains.
“In the jungle, I thought I could not possibly have been happier,” I said. “And along comes Lady Amalie’s magical mountain inn.”
I laughed.
Hester sat down beside me on the bed.
“You could stay here forever, couldn’t you?” And she smiled.
I nodded. My handsome, handsome new head bobbed up and down. I felt handsome, nodding that head, that handsome head.
But, she pointed
out, if I stayed here forever, there would not long be an inn to enjoy, or any world outside of the reality that Sidonia would build. And Darryl Fawley would be king, and he would live forever.
I agreed, reluctantly.
“I know the story of Rabbi Elazar,” I said, stroking my handsome new face. “But I forgot to ask Samuel Palache about Rabbi Whoozit ben Yoo-hoo. Do you think it could be important?”
I shrugged. I supposed that I would never know.
“Watt,” Hester said, as I tied my bag shut. “I have learned things about you. Before I went to the desert to find you, I learned things about you from a man who runs a shop at 11th Street and 9th avenue in New York city. Then later, I confirmed these things from a shaman in Lansford, New Mexico. These are things you don’t know. It’s why I hunted for you in the first place. Rabbi Palache filled in some of the blanks. These are facts about your life, about your past.”
“Rabbi Palache knew things about me?” I asked.
“He did,” Hester said. “Indeed. He was not unfamiliar with you, Watt.”
“Will they help me?” I asked. “These things you know that I do not know?”
“How?”
“In my battles to come. To make money. To be a better man. Will it help me in any way to know these things?”
“No,” she said. “I am quite sure it will not help you. It will give you knowledge. But this knowledge will not be of any constructive value.”
“Will this knowledge hurt me?”
“It will not,” she said. “It will make you sad. But answering questions often makes us sad. Would you say that being a little sadder will hurt you?”
I thought about this. I took a drink of coffee with a splash of whiskey. I preferred not to be sadder than I already was.
“I do not want to know,” I said. “We have time. That is, if I live. If I do not live, it doesn’t matter. And so, if I live, you should ask me again. But for now, I do not want to know.”
“Then I will not tell you.”
“And so you know me better than I know myself?”
“Yes.”
Before I left, I realized that I would need to teach her how to make J.P. Morgan alive and not-alive at the same time, in case I never returned from Sidonia. If I were not alive to impart this particular wisdom to Mr. Morgan, perhaps her business transaction with the Great Man would implode, leaving her without the expected financial windfall and bereft of a golden kingdom.
Hester said that was ridiculous.
“Of course you will return,” she insisted.
But she took careful notes.
Hester kissed me goodbye as the day dawned over Lady Amalie’s inn.
“Is it like kissing another man?” I asked.
She smiled.
“I feel as though I am being a bit disloyal to my O’Hugh,” she said with a little laugh. “Your lips feel different. You look like a prince. I wish that I could see your real face one last time. All badly worn and human.”
“You can hear my voice?” I asked her. I couldn’t tell what my voice sounded like. “Isn’t it my same old voice?”
“It is another man’s voice.”
She nearly told me the news. She nearly said, You are to be a father, Watt O’Hugh. Billy Golden has seen his future, and he will be born strong and healthy.
But she knew that I would not leave her. She knew that I would lose my urge to avenge Lucy and the children Lucy and I would never love, and I would be overcome by a great yearning for the little lump in Hester’s womb. Hester wanted my boy to live in his own people’s kingdom, in a world where even the memory of the Sidonians has been erased from the heavens. And so instead she said, “The scroll we retrieved from the train in Nevada was a fake, a diversion. The secret of the Red Eyebrows has arrived in New York, delivered via Falsturm hawk. Your mission to Sidonia is now more important than ever.”
She caressed the side of my face. Her hand was rough and gentle.
“Return to me from the land of the enemy, and bring me back my O’Hugh. My funny-looking O’Hugh, whom I love so much.”
She pulled her shawl around her shoulders, and she went back inside, and I missed her immediately.
I mounted my horse and took my map out of my coat pocket and looked it over, and then I rode off. After a few yards, I stopped, and I turned back to the inn and glanced up at the second floor window and saw Hester looking down at me. When she realized that I had seen her, she turned and shut the curtain and she was gone.
Chapter 16
Master Yu and John Dead-Man came down out of the mountains and traveled two weeks to Varley, where they stayed at the only lodging house that would take them, a clean but rickety structure in the questionable Harden neighborhood, surrounded mostly by tents that flapped raggedly in the night. Still, it provided them with a hot bath, after which they intended to go clear across town, right across Timmons Street to Felton, where they might make acquaintance with the only saloon in Varley that would serve them. Perhaps there was a saloon or two that would serve an Injun, the old hotel clerk drawled, staring down at his thumbs. And perhaps, he also noted, there might be one or two that might serve a Chinaman, although that speculation was a bit more questionable. But a saloon that would serve an Injun and a Chinaman settin’ down together at the same bar, side by side, barstool by barstool ….
“Now that’s out of the question in most places,” he concluded. “Except for the one across Felton Street, the one that never bothered to come up with a name. They may hesitate. But tell them I said you were OK. Tell them old Barney said you were OK.”
So they crossed both Timmons Street and Felton – a terrifying stretch, with whores and vacant eyed wiry drunks and men lying bloody in the street, laughing and rolling about in the mud – all of which prompted John Dead-Man to clutch his pistol through a hole in his overcoat pocket – until they reached the no-name saloon, where indeed the bartender refused to serve them until Master Yu mentioned the message from old Barney, at which the bartender smiled a one-toothed smile and his eyes grew a touch hazy. “Good old Barney!” he exclaimed. John Dead-Man ordered a whiskey and Master Yu ordered another whiskey. At the front of the bar, sitting on a rickety three-legged stool a heavy-set Colored woman of about forty years of age sang a beautiful but truly mortifying ballad, filled with more kinds of illicit relations than one would expect to find in a single song, each followed by a horrible murder, every one more gruesome than the last. When she finished, she flashed the crowd a charming, winsome smile, and there was an excited whoop of applause, which frightened Master Yu.
He turned to the Indian, and he hesitated, and then he hesitated again. The fact was, he told his friend, that he had been there before, in that cave, many years ago. A couple of thousand years ago. When his eyes clouded over, he could see it as though it were yesterday, his visit to that cave.
“As another man,” Master Yu said. “Yang Hsiung.”
The Indian’s eyebrows rose.
“Yang Shang, bastard son of rich man poet,” he said. “Yang Shang rode a dragon over the plains.”
Master Yu cocked his head.
“Maybe,” he said, dubiously. This might have been embroidery. He wasn’t sure that it could be true. “Do Peking Indians believe in reincarnation?” When John Dead-Man didn’t answer, Master Yu explained, “In China, it is our view that when we die, we just come back to Earth and are born once more and live another life full of the same pain and confusion and ignorance. Over and over.”
“No,” said the Indian. “Peking Indians believe – believed – that we just go up to the sky.”
“Up to the sky!”
Master Yu laughed.
“I’d go straight up to the sky first if I could,” he exclaimed, still laughing, “and skip all this 屁話! The Peking Indians are very lucky.”
He held up a finger.
“But I remembered one important thing, from all those years ago. Something just came to my mind. Give me the sword.”
John Dead-
Man slid the old sword gently onto the bar, and it made a soft, melodic clang.
Master Yu tapped the handle on its left side, and the two halves of the tortoise shell slid open, and a scroll slipped out onto the bar. Master Yu unrolled it, grimaced as he analyzed the faint inscription, and then, suddenly satisfied, he looked up at his friend.
“We’re looking for a bridge,” he said. “No, not really a bridge, because a bridge just takes you across a river to the other bank, which you can see from any vantage point. We are looking for something that is more like a diversion – a weir, I think. It is not just a bridge, but it is a weir, because a weir creates its own physical reality. So it is a weir to … oh, for lack of a better expression, let’s call it a ‘weir to a new realm.’ ” He smiled. “I think that I like that. A weir to a new realm.”
He sat there for a moment by the bar, swirling his whiskey around in its glass, thinking about this little turn of phrase. Then he frowned.
“Not very beautiful, actually,” he said. “Not very poetic. A weir to a new realm.”
“Not all of life is poetry.”
“Maybe not. Maybe so. Well, I know where this weir is located. Generally at least. But I do not know how to get there. John Dead-Man, are you familiar with an ‘island of many hills’?”
The Indian laughed.
“Island of many hills,” he said. “That’s an old name. In the Peking dialect – and also, later, in the Lenape dialect – it’s Manna-hatta. It’s a small island in the Lenapehoking region of the continent. Very far from here.”
He smiled at Yu, but the Chinese poet had no reaction.
“New York City,” the Indian said gently. “Manhattan. You see? Manna-hatta: Manhattan.”
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 20