"My God," Tim said. "It's the Fourth Eclogue. Of Virgil."
"That's enough," Kirsten said faintly.
I thought: The old lady is reading my mind. She knows I thought about the sibyl.
Speaking to me, Rachel Garret said:
"'Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla.'"
Yes, she is reading my mind, I realized. She even knows that I know it; as I think she reads my thoughts back to me.
"Mors Kirsten nunc carpit," Rachel Garret whispered. "Hodie. Calamitas ... timeo ..." She drew herself up in her wicker chair.
"What did she say?" Kirsten said to Tim.
"You are going to die very soon," Rachel Garret said to her, in a calm voice. "I thought today, but not today. I saw it here. But not quite yet. Jeff says so. This is why he came back: to warn you."
"Die how?" Tim said.
"He isn't sure," Rachel Garret said.
"Violently?" Tim said.
"He doesn't know," the old lady said. "But they are preparing a place for you, Kirsten." All her agitation had gone, now; she seemed completely composed. "This is awful news," she said. "I'm sorry, Kirsten. No wonder Jeff caused all the many disturbances. Usually there is a reason ... they return for a good reason."
"Can anything be done?" Tim said.
"Jeff thinks that it is inevitable," the old lady said, after a time.
"Then what was the point of him coming back?" Kirsten said savagely; her face was white.
"He wanted to warn his father as well," the old lady said.
"About what?" I said.
Rachel Garret said, "He has a chance to live. No, Jeff says. His father will die soon after Kirsten. Both of you are going to perish. It won't be long. There is some uncertainty about the father but none about the woman. If I could give you more information, I would. Jeff is still with me but he doesn't know any more." She shut her eyes and sighed.
All the vitality, it seemed, had gone out of her as she sat in the old chair, her hands clasped together; then suddenly she leaned forward and picked up her teacup.
"Jeff was so anxious that you know," she said in a bright, chipper voice. "He feels so much better now." She smiled at us.
Still ashen, Kirsten murmured, "Is it all right if I smoke?"
"Oh, I'd prefer you didn't smoke," Dr. Garret said. "But if you feel you must—"
"Thank you." Her hand trembling, Kirsten lit her cigarette. She stared and stared at the old lady, with dislike and fury, or so it seemed to me. I thought: Kill the Spartan messengers, lady; hold them responsible.
"We want to thank you very much," Tim said to Dr. Garret in a level, controlled voice; he began, by degrees, to rouse himself, to take command of the situation. "So then Jeff is beyond any doubt whatsoever alive in the after-world? And it has been he who has come to us with what we call the 'phenomena'?"
"Oh, indeed," Dr. Garret said. "But Leonard told you that. Leonard Mason. You knew that already."
I said, "Could it have been an evil spirit posing as Jeff? And not actually Jeff?"
Her eyes bright, Dr. Garret nodded. "You are exceedingly alert, young lady. Yes, it certainly could have been. But it was not. One learns to tell the difference. I found no malice in him, only concern and love. Angel—your name is Angel, isn't it?—your husband apologizes to you for his feelings about Kirsten. He knows that it is unfair to you. But he thinks that you will understand."
I said nothing.
"Did I get your name right?" Rachel Garret asked me, in a timid and uncertain tone.
"Yes," I said. To Kirsten, I said, "Let me have a puff on your cigarette."
"Here." Kirsten passed it to me. "Keep it. I'm not supposed to smoke." To Tim she said, "Well? Shall we go? I don't see any reason for staying any longer." She reached for her purse and coat.
Tim paid Dr. Garret—I did not see how much, but it took the form of cash, not a check—and then phoned for a cab. Ten minutes later, the three of us rode back down the winding hillside roads to the house where we had accommodated ourselves.
Time passed and then, half to himself, Tim said, "That was the same eclogue of Virgil that I read to you. That day."
"I remember," I said.
"It seems a remarkable coincidence," Tim said. "There is no way she could have known it is a favorite of mine. Of course, it is the most famous of his eclogues ... but that would scarcely account for it. I have never heard anyone else quote it but myself. It was as if I were hearing my own thoughts read back to me aloud, when Dr. Garret lapsed into Latin."
And I—I, too, had experienced that, I realized. Tim had expressed it perfectly. Perfectly and precisely.
"Tim," I said, "did you say anything to Dr. Mason about the Bad Luck Restaurant?"
Eying me, Tim said, "What is the 'Bad Luck Restaurant'?"
"Where we met," Kirsten said.
"No," Tim said. "I don't even remember the name of it. I remember what we had to eat ... I had abalone."
"Did you ever tell anybody," I said to him, "anybody at all, at any time, anywhere, about Fred Hill?"
"I don't know anybody by that name," Tim said. "I'm sorry." He rubbed his eyes wearily.
"They read your mind," Kirsten said. "That's where they get it. She knew my health was bad. She knows I'm worried about the spot on my lung."
"What spot?" I said. This was the first I had heard about it. "Have you been in for more tests?"
When Kirsten did not answer, Tim said, "She showed a spot. Several weeks ago. It was a routine X-ray. They don't think it means anything."
"It means I'm going to die," Kirsten said bitingly, with palpable venom. "You heard her, the old bitch."
"Kill the Spartan runners," I said.
Furiously, Kirsten lashed at me, "Is that one of your Berkeley educated remarks?"
"Please," Tim said in a faint voice.
I said, "It's not her fault."
"We pay a hundred dollars to be told we're both going to die," Kirsten said, "and then on top of that, according to you, we should be grateful?" She scrutinized me with what struck me as psychotic malice, exceeding anything I had ever seen in her or in anyone else. "You're okay; she didn't say anything was going to happen to you, you cunt. You little Berkeley cunt—you're doing fine. I'm going to die and you get to have Tim all to yourself, with Jeff dead and now me. I think you set it up; you're involved; goddamn you!" Reaching, she took a swing at me; there in the back of the Yellow Cab she tried to hit me. I drew back, horrified.
Grabbing her with both hands, Tim pinned her against the side of the cab, against the door. "If I ever hear you use that word again," he said, "you are out of my life forever."
"You prick," Kirsten said.
After that, we drove in silence. The only sound was the occasional racket of the cab company's dispatcher, from the driver's two-way radio.
"Let's stop somewhere for a drink," Kirsten said, as we approached the house. "I don't want to have to deal with those awful mousy people; I just can't. I want to shop." To Tim she said, "We'll let you off. Angel and I'll go shopping. I really can't take any more today."
I said, "I don't feel like shopping right now."
"Please," Kirsten said tightly.
Tim said to me in a gentle voice, "Do it as a favor to both of us." He opened the cab door.
"Okay," I said.
After giving Kirsten money—all the money he had with him, apparently—Tim got out of the cab; we shut the door after him, and, presently, arrived at the downtown shopping district of Santa Barbara, with all the many lovely little shops and their various handcrafted artifacts. Soon Kirsten and I sat together in a bar, a nice bar, subdued, with low music playing. Through the open doors we could see people strolling around in the bright midday sunlight.
"Shit," Kirsten said as she sipped her vodka collins. "What a thing to find out. That you're going to die."
"Dr. Garret worked backward from Jeff's return," I said.
"How d
o you mean?" She stirred her drink.
"Jeff had come back to you. That's the given. So Garret summoned up a reason to explain it, the most dramatic reason she could find. 'He returned for a reason. That's why they return.' It's a commonplace. It's like—" I gestured. "Like the ghost in Hamlet."
Gazing at me quizzically, Kirsten said, "In Berkeley there is an intellectual reason for everything."
"The ghost warns Hamlet that Claudius is a murderer, that he murdered him, Hamlet's father."
"What's Hamlet's father's name?"
"He's just called 'Hamlet's father, the late king.'"
Kirsten, an owlish expression on her face, said, "No, his father is named Hamlet, too."
"Ten bucks says otherwise."
She extended her hand; we shook. "The play," Kirsten said, "instead of being called Hamlet should properly be called Hamlet, Junior." We both laughed. "I mean," Kirsten said, "this is just sick. We're sick going to that medium. Coming all this way—of course, Tim is meeting with those double-domed eggheads from the think tank. You know where he really wants to work? Don't ever say this to anyone, but he'd like to work for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. This whole business about Jeff coming back—" She sipped her drink. "It's cost Tim a lot."
"He doesn't have to bring out the book. He could drop the project."
As if thinking aloud, Kirsten said, "How do those mediums do it? It's ESP; they can pick up your anxieties. Somehow the old biddy knew I have medical problems. It goes back to that damn peritonitis ... that's public knowledge that I had that. There's a central file they keep, mediums of the world. Media, I guess, is the plural. And my cancer. They know I'm plagued with a second-rate body, sort of a used car. A lemon. God sold me a lemon for a body."
"You should have told me about the spot."
"It's none of your business."
"I care about you."
"Dyke," Kirsten said. "Homo. That's why Jeff killed himself, because you and I are in love with each other." Both of us had begun laughing, now; we bumped heads, and I put my arm around her. "I have this joke for you. We're not supposed to call Mexicans 'greasers' any more; right?" She lowered her voice. "We're supposed to call them—"
"Lubricanos," I said.
She glanced at me. "Well, fuck you."
"Let's pick up somebody," I said.
"I want to shop. You pick up somebody." In a more somber tone she said, "This is a beautiful city. We may be living down here, you realize. Would you stay up in Berkeley if Tim and I moved down here?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You and your Berkeley friends. The Greater East Bay Co-Sexual Communal Free Love Exchange-Partners Enterprise, Unlimited. What is it about Berkeley, Angel? Why do you stay there?"
"The house," I said. And I thought: Memories of Jeff. In connection with the house. The Co-op on University Avenue where we used to shop. "I like the coffee houses on the Avenue," I said. "Especially Larry Blake's. One time, Larry Blake came over to Jeff and me; downstairs in the Ratskeller—he was so nice to us. And I like Tilden Park." And the campus, I said to myself. I can never free myself of that. The eucalyptus grove, down by Oxford. The library. "It's my home," I said.
"You'd get accustomed to Santa Barbara."
I said, "You shouldn't call me a cunt in front of Tim. He might get ideas."
"If I die," Kirsten said, "would you sleep with him? I mean, seriously?"
"You're not going to die."
"Dr. Spooky says I am."
"Dr. Spooky," I said, "is full of it."
"Do you think so? God, it was weird." Kirsten shivered. "I felt she could read my mind, that she was tapping it, like you tap a maple tree. Reading my own fears back to me. Would you sleep with Tim? Answer me seriously; I need to know."
"It would be incest."
"Why? Oh; okay. Well—it's already a sin, a sin for him; why not add incest? If Jeff is in heaven and they're preparing a place for me, apparently I'm going to go to heaven. That's a relief. I just don't know how seriously to take what Dr. Garret said."
"Take it with the entire output of salt from the Polish salt mines for one full calendar year."
"But," Kirsten said, "it is Jeff coming back to us. Now we have it confirmed. But if I'm going to believe that, don't I have to believe the other, the prophecy?"
As I listened to her, a line from Dido and Aeneas entered my head, both the music and the words:
"The Trojan Prince, you know, is bound
By Fate to seek Italian ground;
The Queen and he are now in chase."
Why had that come to mind? The sorceress ... Jeff had quoted her or I had; the music had been a part of our lives, and I was thinking about Jeff, now, and the things that had bound us together. Fate, I thought. Predestination; doctrine of the church, based on Augustine and Paul. Tim had once told me that Christianity as a Mystery Religion had come into existence as a means of abolishing the tyranny of fate, only to reintroduce it as predestination—in fact, double predestination: some predestined to hell, some to heaven. Calvin's doctrine.
"We don't have fate any more," I said. "That went out with astrology, with the ancient world. Tim explained it to me."
Kirsten said, "He explained it to me, too, but the dead have precognition; they're outside of time. That's why you raise the spirits of the dead, to get advice from them about the future: they know the future. To them, it's already happened. They're like God. They see everything. Necromancy; we're like Dr. Dee in Elizabethan England. We have access to this marvelous supernatural power—it's better than the Holy Spirit, who also grants the ability to foresee the future, to prophesy. Through that wizened old lady we get Jeff's absolute knowledge that I'm going to kick off in the near-future. How can you doubt it?"
"Readily," I said.
"But she knew about the Bad Luck Restaurant. You see, Angel, we either reject it all or accept it all; we don't get to pick and choose. And if we reject it then Jeff didn't come back to us, and we're nuts. And if we accept it he did come back to us, which is fine as far as that goes, but then we have to face the fact that I'm going to die."
I thought: And Tim, too. You've forgotten about that, in your concern for yourself. As is typical of you.
"What's the matter?" Kirsten said.
"Well, she said Tim would die, too."
"Tim has Christ on his side; he's immortal. Didn't you know that? Bishops live forever. The first bishop—Peter, I imagine—is still alive somewhere, drawing a salary. Bishops live eternally and they get paid a lot. I die and I get paid almost nothing."
"It beats working in a record store," I said.
"Not really. Everything about your life is out in the open, at least; you don't have to skulk around like a second-story-man. This book of Tim's—it's going to be clear as day to everyone who reads it that Tim and I are sleeping together. We were in England together; we witnessed the phenomena together. Perhaps this is God's revenge against us for our sins, this prophecy by that old lady. Sleep with a bishop and die; it's like 'See Rome and die.' Well, I can't say it's been worth it, I really can't. I'd rather be a record clerk in Berkeley like you ... but then I'd have to be young like you, to get the full benefits."
I said, "My husband is dead. I don't have all the breaks."
"And you don't have the guilt."
"Balls," I said. "I have plenty of guilt."
"Why? Jeff—well, anyhow, it wasn't your fault."
"We share the guilt," I said. "All of us."
"For the death of someone who was programmed to die? You only kill yourself if the DNA death-strip tells you to; it's in the DNA ... didn't you know that? Or it's what they call a 'script,' which is what Eric Berne taught. He's dead, you know; his death-script or -strip or whatever caught up with him, proving him right. His father died and he died, the exact same age. It's like Chardin, who desired to die on Good Friday and got his wish."
"This is morbid," I said.
"Right." Kirsten nodded. "I just heard a while a
go that I'm doomed to die; I feel very morbid, and so would you, except that you're exempt, for some reason. Maybe because you don't have a spot on your lung and you never had cancer. Why doesn't that old lady die? Why is it me and Tim? I think Jeff's malicious, saying that; it's one of those self-fulfilling prophecies you hear about. He tells Dr. Spooky I'm going to die and as a result I die, and Jeff enjoys it because he hated me for sleeping with his father. The hell with both of them. It goes along with the pins stuck under my fingernails; its hate, hate toward me. I can tell hate when I see it. I hope Tim points that out in his book—well, he will because I'm writing most of it; he doesn't have the time, and, if you want to know the truth, the talent either. All his sentences run together. He has logorrhea, if you want to know the blunt truth—from the speed he takes."
I said, "I don't want to know."
"Have you and Tim slept together?"
"No!" I said, amazed.
"Bull."
"Christ," I said, "you're crazy."
"Tell me it's due to the reds I take."
I stared at her; she stared back. Unwinkingly, her face taut.
"You're crazy," I said.
Kirsten said, "You have turned Tim against me."
"I what?"
"He thinks that Jeff would be alive if it hadn't been for me, but it was his idea for us to get sexually involved."
"You—" I could not think what to say. "Your mood-swings are getting greater," I said finally.
Kirsten said in a fierce, grating voice, "I see more and more clearly. Come on." She finished her drink and slid from her stool, tottered, grinned at me. "Let's go shop. Let's buy a whole lot of Indian silver jewelry imported from Mexico; they sell it here. You regard me as old and sick and a red freak, don't you? Tim and I have discussed it, your view of me. He considers it damaging to me and defamatory. He's going to talk to you about it sometime. Get prepared; he's going to quote canon law. It's against canon law to bear false witness. He doesn't consider you a very good Christian; in fact, not a Christian at all. He doesn't really like you. Did you know that?"
I said nothing.
"Christians are judgmental," Kirsten said, "and bishops even more so. I have to live with the fact that Tim confesses every week to the sin of sleeping with me; do you know how that feels? It is quite painful. And now he has me going; I take Communion and I confess. It's sick. Christianity is sick. I want him to step down as bishop; I want him to go into the private sector."
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Valis) Page 15