by Jonathan Dee
Tasha sent a fleet of limos to bring Milo’s audience in separate groups from the airport, and I waited outside the front door to greet each car as it arrived in a cloud of dust up the driveway. We haven’t had any rain here in at least a month; the mountains are still an unseasonable brown. Anyway, I brought them in, bore stoically the disappointment they didn’t bother to hide when I told them Mal was still in Umbria, and gave them the tour. Took them through the front hall, the main dining room, the basement studios; escorted them out the back door and through the orchard, where everything was now picturesquely dead. I saved the ballroom for last because that’s where we were going.
The corporate clients’ petulance (I’d been on the phone with some of them all week, finding new ways to explain why and how they were being asked to subsidize work that would literally never be seen outside the doors of their ad agency) eventually gave way, over lunch, to the general mood of high anticipation. A Jean-Claude Milo unveiling was a big deal indeed, and there is always something invigorating about being part of the select. All the heads of marketing were there, PR people, art-loving corporate vice presidents and their comely secretaries. Jean-Claude’s dealer from New York, her assistant, nearly all of our staff who wanted to see the happening. About forty people in all. At two o’clock exactly, I unlocked the tall ballroom doors and we all ventured in.
In the ballroom all the heavy curtains were drawn, and the computer screens glowed blankly. A larger movie screen hung from just about the exact center of the ceiling. Jean-Claude was sitting underneath it, on a small red carpet, wearing a rough brown robe like some sort of Tibetan monk. I remember thinking that this might have explained the weight he’d lost – some sort of Eastern asceticism, some sort of exploration of Buddhism, maybe. Beside him was a rectangular table skirted with a black curtain: not unlike a table you might see a magician use. Jean-Claude himself was calm, engaged, smiling at everyone who made eye contact with him. When most of the murmuring had subsided, he looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
That’s everyone, I said.
Would you shut the door then, please, John? he said.
It was his normal voice – he was not in any sort of character; still, soft as it was, the sound of it silenced everyone even before I had the heavy doors pushed shut.
Jean-Claude stretched out his arms before him, paused a few seconds, then, with an air of great ceremony, clapped his hands twice; whereupon the lights went off. Ironic laughter, at this religious-ceremony-cum-infomercial: laughter that quickly subsided, though, maybe because we were now in almost total darkness.
A smell, a strange sort of artificial smell, sweet but excessive, like an overabundance of air freshener, seemed to rise up from the floor of the room. Then, one by one, all twenty or thirty of the small video screens at the computer-editing consoles flickered to life: each showed a different sequence of still shots of various works of art, some famous, some unknown to me, some I recognized as Milo’s own. They ran in a loop, slowly, at about the pace at which an old-fashioned slide show might go, and as they did, a sound arose from speakers Milo must have concealed all around the ballroom, an empty sort of crackling and hissing that had to emanate from an open microphone with no one in front of it, turned up louder and louder – I’m sure I wasn’t the only one feeling some dread lest someone actually start speaking into it, for it would have been earsplitting.
The sequence of artworks on the video screens looped a third time. Only this time, each image, after a few seconds, was consumed on the screen by a digital image of fire, creeping from the corners, blackening the center, until it was gone and the next image took its place. A murmur, audible to me even over the taped hiss of the unmanned microphone, went through the assembled. Then, on the larger, overhead screen, a simple white-on-black text began to scroll downwards.
This is what the words on the screen said:
If you were to go into the teahouse today, on execution day, and listen to what is being said, you would perhaps hear only ambiguous remarks. These would all be made by adherents, but under the present Commandant and his present doctrines they are of no use to me. And now I ask you: because of this Commandant and the women who influence him, is such a piece of work, the work of a lifetime, to perish? Ought one to let that happen? Even if one has only come as a stranger to our island for a few days?
At this point, though we could still see almost nothing, and any noise in the room would have been lost in the ambient sizzle of the empty mike, a stronger smell began to permeate the room, a chemical smell, something familiar but not easily identified.
The screens went blank. The hiss was cut off. Then, after a moment, we heard a familiar little trill of electronic bells, followed by another voice, instantly recognizable, the voice of James Earl Jones.
Thank you for using AT&T.
Laughter.
There was a sound, a whoosh like the sound of a tablecloth being snapped, and before anyone knew what was happening the center of the ballroom was lit by a kind of pillar of flame. I heard a couple of screams. Actually, though I say the room was lit, the weird thing was that that light seemed to draw everything into it; I don’t remember seeing any other faces or even any shadows; the flame itself was steady, it held its shape, like a cigarette lighter or something. It was the shape of a pear or an inverted teardrop, rising a few feet off the floor and coming to a sort of point, smack in the center of the field of darkness that was the ballroom. A different sort of acrid smell began to reach us.
Turn on the lights! someone screamed. It was Fiona’s voice. For just a moment I thought it was a collaboration, a part of the piece. Turn on the fucking lights, somebody, please!
We were a crowd, and we reacted as a crowd, even though we were still invisible to each other. All of us moved at the same time. I turned to grope my way back to the wall where I knew the switches were, and as I did I fell right over one of the corporate visitors, who had probably just stumbled over someone else. I heard the air escape from her with a little cry as my knee went down right into the center of her back. We were in a panic, and I will leave it to others to interpret at what point we were officially outside the boundaries of poor Jean-Claude’s masterpiece, if indeed we made it out of there at all.
The stench was unbearable, and it only seemed to feed the animal quality of our fear as we knocked each other down and banged our hands against the walls, searching no longer for the light switch, but for the door. Stand back! I screamed. Get away! Back off! but I have no idea if anyone heard me. By the time I got to the door and opened it – I dared to look behind me only once the light from the rest of the house had flooded in there – the fire had reached the heavy, floor-to-ceiling drapes and from there you pretty much knew that the whole old house was bound to go up.
Someone else called 911. Someone else at least had the presence of mind to run into the pantry for the fire extinguisher, though by that time the ballroom was like a furnace; the door to it couldn’t even be approached. Me, I ran like someone being pursued by the hounds of hell across the living room, through the front hall, and up the stairs. Colette was out on the third-floor landing, an inquiring look on her face, waiting, I suppose, for someone to come and explain to her what all the commotion was about. I pushed her out of my way as I turned on the landing and headed for the fourth floor.
Molly! I screamed. Molly! Get out of there! The bedroom door was locked; I pounded on it. Molly! Get out! I’m not kidding! It’s John! I pounded once more; then I took a step back, kicked right beside the doorknob, and splintered the wood around the lock. One more kick and I was in.
Molly!
She wasn’t there.
Like an idiot I wouldn’t believe it, I looked in every room up there and then I looked again: she was gone. By now I had gone through the panic, I suppose, come out on the other side of it. I was calm, but not in a level-headed sort of way. It was a stupid calm, one that caused me to walk rather than run to the fourth-floor landing and peer down the stairs as if I we
re waiting for the distant light of a train. My eyes smarted. Smoke was already finding avenues to the top of the house.
I went back into the bedroom and pushed open the doors to their balcony. The first fire engines had already arrived. I could see people, a lot of people, standing or sitting or doubled over coughing on the great lawn, staring up at the catastrophe, up at me, though they didn’t seem to see me. I wondered if they thought I was planning to go down with the ship. Then a firefighter pointed to me, the others pointed too, and as I stood on the balcony, smoke beginning to frame me as it made its way through the balcony doors and disappeared in the daylight, I watched them run to one of the rescue vehicles, drag what looked like a huge tarpaulin out on the grass, and connect some sort of generator-run air pump to it. In just a couple of minutes it had inflated into a huge soft target, like a pillow, like those landing areas stuntmen use, just outside the frame.
Cracking noises were now audible somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t feel any heat yet apart from the strong heat of the day. With my hand as a visor I took a look all around, from this view I had never before enjoyed and never would again, at the grounds, at the tiny featureless figures of the people with whom I had worked and of the people who would save me, at the lawns and orchards and hedges, at the shadows of the clouds pouring over the scorched contours of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When the firefighters finally signaled that they were ready I put one leg, then the other, over the iron railing of the balcony. It’s no easy thing to make a drop like that, even when you have no choice, even if you’ve seen it done before. My fingers were tight around the balustrade. But I wasn’t ready to die yet, that’s all it really comes down to if you wait long enough, and so I closed my eyes, opened them again, and with one last loud exhalation to calm myself, I jumped.
3
HOURS LATER, SORE and still a bit lightheaded from the impact of the fall, John sat apart from the others on Palladio’s broad front lawn and watched the firefighters pounce expertly on each last small stubborn flare-up of the great conflagration. The western end of the house was burned close to the ground; the columns at the entrance were blackened but apparently intact, and the east wing, though gutted to near-transparency on the bottom two floors, had not collapsed at any point. In just the past few minutes the whole ruined structure had seemed to take on, as the twilight smoothed it into silhouette, a more abstract wedge shape. During the lulls in all the shouting, John could still hear the fierce, diminishing hiss of water on embers, and an occasional ominous tick or crack. Smoke – dark at first, then whitening once it reached the heights still lit by the last of the sun as it dropped behind the mountains – rose straight as a chimney in the hot, motionless air.
He wondered if he might have a slight concussion. Red emergency vehicles of every description had torn a rough circle in the manicured grass around the mansion; they were idle now, though their engines had been left running and the flashing lights stuttered more vividly in the growing darkness. The Charlottesville police had set up a barricade at the driveway entrance, primarily to keep out the press. Of course, some of those guests still sitting on the lawn, or lying down or coughing or breathing through portable oxygen masks brought to them by the EMTs, were invited press themselves. John could make out several people talking into cell phones. Part of the general dreaminess that was overtaking him, as he sat on the grass with his arms around his knees, had to do with the knowledge that the whole thing had escaped his control once and for all.
Near his hip he felt an insistent pulsing, and he thought for a moment he might be bleeding; but in fact it was his own cell phone still clipped to his belt – he had set it on vibrate for Milo’s premiere. He knew who was trying to reach him. More than he could ever remember wanting anything, he wanted not to answer Mal’s call: but though the place was now gone from under him he still had a sense of stewardship about it, and so – after standing and walking a safer distance away from Fiona, who was being held upright under the arms by Jerry as she shrieked (that was the only word for it) into his chest – John answered.
“What’s going on?” Mal said angrily. “I call your office I get no answer, I call my office I get no answer. Where are you? What’s all that noise?”
John broke it all to him as gently as he could, which wasn’t so gently, considering that there were times when he had to shout into the phone just to be heard over all the engines and indecipherable radio calls on the lawn. He told his boss that the mansion had caught fire, a fire set by Jean-Claude, whose art of self-sacrifice had culminated in what was apparently a work incorporating his own suicide. Even when John had described everything as best he could, it was clear from Mal’s tone of businesslike optimism that the magnitude of what had happened would not sink in right away.
“Well, the important thing is that everyone’s okay,” he said.
John had to explain more carefully that everyone was not okay – that, while nothing was official yet, it seemed impossible not to conclude that Milo himself was dead. The fire was now almost out, but the house was beyond saving. And there was one other person still unaccounted for.
Mal fell silent. John then asked if by any chance he had spoken to Molly that day.
“Not since last night,” Mal said. “Oh no.”
“Now look, I actually think – it’s true no one seems to know where she is – but I actually have reason to think she wasn’t here at all when it happened. I … I went upstairs and looked all through your quarters. Every room. She wasn’t there.”
“Did you look for her car?”
John winced, and hit his head softly a few times with the heel of his hand. “No,” he said, starting to sprint across the lawn toward the house, “I didn’t think of it. God damn it! Hold on.”
But the firefighters had run another barricade across that end of the driveway and wouldn’t let him through. John pleaded, phone in hand, with the commander of the emergency rescue squad, telling him that the safety of one of the house’s residents was at stake. Too dangerous, he was told; what remained of the house on the eastern end was still being examined to determine the danger of collapse. As for whether or not anyone was still inside, they had people sweeping the place now.
“Ten, twenty minutes,” the commander said, his gray hair flattened with sweat. “Try to calm down.”
When John raised the phone to his ear again, Mal was already in the back of a taxi, speeding toward the Rome airport.
“I’m going to lose you,” he said. “Keep trying me.” Then the connection was broken.
John sat down in the grass beside one of the empty ambulances, between the house and the path to the orchard. Ten, twenty minutes. No one came over to console him or to see if he was all right. They sat and stood in little knots of shadow around the lawn. Maybe they were waiting for some official word about Jean-Claude; maybe they were unable to take their eyes off such an epic disaster and were waiting only for the fire department or someone else more thick-skinned in these matters to tell them when it would be seemly to leave. At the other end of the driveway, out by the road, John saw a portable arc light snap on in the dusk, beside the satellite trucks. He told himself that even if the red Sonata was still in the driveway, it didn’t mean anything for certain.
Finally the commander let loose with a startling whistle, as one would to a dog, and indicated to John with a nod that it was now permitted to walk around behind the house. Four or five ash-dusted cars, including his own, were there in the driveway behind the kitchen – one, an airport limo, had even had its hood smashed when one of the chimneys had fallen on it – but the red Sonata was not among them. Molly was gone.
John felt a huge spasm of relief, of physical relaxation, roll through him; in his weakened state, it all but knocked him down. With his hand on one of the dusty cars for support, he stared up at the intact balcony from which he had jumped. Just then one of the EMTs, a younger man, helmet in hand, walked up to him.
“The lieutenant says you’re in charge?” he said.
John nodded. “The owner of the house is out of the country,” he said.
“Right, okay. Well, we’ve been through the whole house. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we recovered one body from the western side of the building. But everybody else got out. The rest of the house is clear. We’ve been through all of it.”
“Thank you,” John said solemnly to him, and the EMT nodded curtly and backed away. A while later John got on his cell phone and called Mal, still on the ground in Rome, to tell him that the good news was that Molly was still alive.
* MESSAGE *
No Empire Lasts For ever.
*
IN A STATEMENT he handwrote in his airplane seat on the way back from Italy, Mal announced to the world that Palladio would rebuild, that its work would go forward despite the tragic and incalculable loss of life and historical property, not to mention the loss of the artwork hung, stored, or in progress in the mansion at the time of the fire, a loss estimated to go well into the millions. John typed it up himself – Tasha, angry and traumatized, had gone home to her parents in Richmond – and distributed it via the fax machine in his room in the Charlottesville Sheraton. He felt simultaneously proud and foolish. The Sheraton had given them two whole floors, that first disastrous night; but today he and Mal were the only ones there. The rest of them had flown up to Boston, where it turned out Milo’s parents lived, for his memorial service. As for Mal, Mr and Mrs Milo had tersely requested, through their lawyer, that he not attend. Mal chose to believe that this request was made out of the understandable desire for privacy, since his presence at the service would surely provoke the attention of the media. John suspected other motives, but he kept this to himself. Nor did he share with Mal his premonition – correct, as it turned out – that many of the artists, having taken advantage of this unimpeachably somber pretext for leaving, would not return to Charlottesville when it was over.