She looked me up and down, mocking, seductive. “Surely you know.”
The words thrilled me.
I had always known the truth was like this. I had always, in the back of my mind, understood that behind all good fortune was some ultimate power. I felt used, battered, and yet all I wanted for the moment was to stop having to experience the wash of such strong emotions. But that is how they—whatever They were—would want me to feel.
“Names are essential in such matters,” I said. Names, I did not add, were the key element in conjuring. The ancient scribes of Judah would stop copying and undergo ritual cleansing every time the name of the Lord appeared in the sacred text.
She spoke after awhile, as though my speech had to be translated for her. “Names are important to human beings. We are not so interested in them.”
I leaned toward her. “Where do you come from?”
“I am not here for conversation,” she said.
“Where?” I repeated.
There was another silence. I began to understand. Speech was crude, a debased communication. “What do I seem to you?” she said.
On the surface this was mere conversation. This was a late-night visit, two people sharing thoughts. I felt, however, the formal quality of the transaction as an undercurrent. This was not chat—this was a deposition, a gentle but inexorable form of interrogation. Something like a system of law had been engaged. I did not know what judges with what sensibilities might weigh my words.
I would have to choose my words with care. “My father—my real father—would not want me to trade my soul for power.”
She laughed, gently.
I continued, uttering words I could not have anticipated. “I won’t do it.”
She laughed again. She soothed the cloth over her breast, a voluptuous gesture that aroused me.
“Did you kill DeVere?”
She waited before answering, as though remembering her response from long ago. “We watched you from birth, and marked you as a friend.”
“I don’t believe it.” But I sounded stolid, sullen, even petulant, staring ahead into the fire, able only to overshadow my thoughts with a fistlike skepticism. “And I don’t want to enter into any contract.”
She was silent.
“You will find me stubborn. Not so easy to deceive.”
She watched me.
“I want to end it,” I said. “Whatever we’ve begun. Tonight. Now.”
Her eyes glittered, as though in me she saw a great prize, a pearl of price.
Then I spoke from a deep sense of what was happening, one of those bursts of truthfulness that are more than Freudian slips, a whole paragraph of honesty, like the blank frankness of a drunk or the chattering of a patient anesthetized with sodium pentothal.
I was not trying to thwart her, and I was not playing for time. “There aren’t any angels. They’re mythical, things we wish could exist but can’t. There’s no Heaven, and no Hell.”
The only answer was the snapping of the fire.
I thought for a moment, and then turned aside in my chair. The leather eased around me, ecstatic with the movement of my body. I was sickened at this sensation, and I tried to tear myself away from the chair. The leather crooned after me as I escaped, and yet when I leaned against the mantelpiece I felt the solid, glossy timber shiver at my touch.
She was waiting for me to speak. I loathed the touch of the mantelpiece, the way the floor itself stretched beneath my feet, trembling nearly imperceptibly, wanting the impress of my footsteps.
A thought snagged me. I turned away. I forced out the words. “Are you,” I said, “Lucifer Himself?”
Her laughter was lovely. “Stratton,” she laughed, “you are the most delightful human being.”
I waited. “I’m relieved,” I said, with at least a little truthfulness.
The room changed. The fire did not flicker. Each flame went up straight. She gazed at me without a smile.
“You will decide tonight,” she said, her voice throaty and low, still lovely but no longer touched with laughter.
“Please leave me.”
She did not move.
“I’ve made myself clear,” I continued. “I was told to be ready to transact some business with you. I must tell you that I am not interested.”
The house had been silent. Now it became more than silent. The stillness touched me, shrank my heart. I continued, “If this is the way the powers you represent extort the human soul, then you have lost mine. You have played for me, and failed. My father is asleep with the dead, or with God, wherever humans go when they die.”
Before I could shrink back, she had reached me and was touching me.
I could not deny my own delight. My own sense that at last I was ascending to life. Show me, I thought to her. Show me what you can do.
She touched me as my father had, on my cheek. “So lovely,” she breathed, her breath the scent of gardenias.
“So lovely,” she repeated.
Show me.
I could not think. I was experiencing a lust beyond sensation, something like agony.
“Ours,” she said, her breath in the gentle mechanism of my hearing, entering the organs of my fancy, my faith in life, my dreams.
Don’t do it, I warned myself. Keep your mind a blank.
She was a woman, and beautiful. And yet I knew that she was not female, not human. It was the fluid nature of her body that captured me, and drew me in, the sight of her nakedness arousing me, the sweep of her gown at our feet poured about, beneath us, like milk, like quicksilver.
She wasn’t real, I knew. She was a hallucination. Surely that was it. I was simply losing my mind.
The sexual arousal I experienced was painful. My mind, my consciousness was gone, pricked like a bubble.
I was falling.
There was the nonsensation of oblivion, that empty bliss. But my lust was hard, and what swept me was a wet passion, an orgasm like something an innocent would experience, a child unable to emit seed but able to discover for the first time the hook nature had given him, the pleasure that commands.
25
I could hear something. Something steady, and indistinct. There it was again, that sound of continuous rise and fall.
Breathing.
That much was certain. There was the sound of breath, and the sensation of it, too. It was the lift and swell of an easy surf, comforting, but resonant, too, promising something more than simple calm.
This was the sound of my own respiration. This was the sensation of my life continuing.
Continuance. This was what nourished, not triumph, not vengeance, or knowledge. I lifted a finger. I lifted my entire hand, and bunched it slowly into a fist. I would not open my eyes—not yet. But soon, very soon, I would make that effort.
I said Nona’s name, or thought it so strongly that my tongue shaped the syllables. One eye opened. It beheld a flutter of russet and auburn colors, golds and autumn browns playing across what looked like a blank screen above me where there should have been sky: the ceiling of my house. The screen was marred, or defined, by the stiff swirls of a trowel, a plasterer’s application some time in the past, perhaps long ago.
I was on my back. I was naked. When I tried to lift my head it was too heavy. But I knew enough. I was in my own house, alive, unhurt, and the sense of an impending crowd, of a spectacle in progress, was finished.
I rolled over. I climbed to my feet, moving cautiously, expecting with every movement to feel the pang of injury.
I was wobbly, but I was unhurt.
Alone.
Was that a trace of dried sperm on the carpet? I found a sponge in one of the bathrooms, one of the large, natural yellow sponges, and used it to wipe away what might have been semen.
I dressed in the clothing that was scattered on the floor. The dustcovers had returned to the furniture. I examined the plastic coverings carefully. There was a sift of dust in the folds of the plastic. These coverings had not been removed recently.
I touched the chair where my father had appeared.
I closed my eyes. “Father—you wouldn’t do that,” I said.
Would you?
I felt comforted by the sight of dawn seeping into the house. The fire in the hearth had vanished, leaving a white residue, like the haze breath leaves on a cold window.
The sight of morning made me hope that the entire night had been a train of illusions, a hallucination that had stretched from horizon to horizon. Maybe, I thought, none of it had happened.
Maybe DeVere wasn’t really dead.
And then I felt it, supple and stiff at the same time, a presence near my heart. I slipped it from my breast pocket, and looked at it as it rocked in my hand, responding to the unfelt currents of the air.
It was easy to forget how beautiful it was. Visual memory could not store such an array of colors.
This was not a feather anymore. It was a quill—a writing instrument. I examined the point, and saw how it had been sharpened, pared, readied for the ink. Had it always looked like this?
I could picture it vividly—signing my name. That’s what this was for.
But there was no ink in the bone-gray shaft. This plume had never been used for writing.
The fact of this feather in my hand meant that they still had, however feebly, a claim on me. The feather, insensate, rich with color, shifted in my hand as though it knew.
The thought was a sour flavor in my mouth, but I knew what I had to do.
I found a match, one of the thick, lavender-and-white-tipped matches that fit the silver Hoffman-designed box. I returned to the fireplace.
I struck the match on the brick of the hearth. I let the flame touch the softest down at the spike of the quill, perhaps hoping that this star of filament would not ignite.
The walls seemed to step back. The room became a huger place, and darker, despite the dawn. The feather twitched, writhed in the palm of my hand. And then as instinct forced me to whisk my hand out from under it, the feather was made of flame.
Each filament was gilded. The feather spun, dancing, lofted upward by its own heat and its growing weightlessness, following the spire of its own smoke up the vault of the chimney.
And then it was gone.
26
“You look different,” said my brother, gazing straight ahead at the road.
“Better than usual, or worse?” I said, trying to make easy conversation.
“For a second there I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“I must look really great.”
“You look good, actually.” He shrugged. “Just a little strange. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
It was later that morning, and Rick was driving me north at my request. He looked bruised, slightly puffy.
I was still shaken. Burning the feather had been the right thing to do, a final, capping farewell. But I sensed that it might have been a galling insult.
If the Powers existed. Here I was, thinking such thoughts. I needed help.
“Terrible about DeVere,” said Rick.
I went cold.
Rick sighed. “He always looked so sure of himself.”
I heard myself utter the words, “The news stunned me. I’m a little tired—wasn’t really able to sleep.”
“You don’t look tired so much,” said Rick.
“Haunted? Fugitive? Demented?”
He took his eyes off the road and took me in, studying me with a glance, a brother’s glance, both knowing and affectionate. “You look like you could sleep for a week. But on you that’s a good way to look. The rumpled bon vivant.”
I thanked him, a bit of mild sarcasm that made him smile.
I was trembling. I gripped my hands together so he wouldn’t notice.
Rick drove fast, working the little Alfa through its gears. We were heading through wine country, but skirting the more celebrated vineyards. The countryside that whipped past us was nearly Tuscan, the gnarls and stumps of grapevines, intermingled with an appearance that was quite western, men in white straw cowboy hats leaning against pickups, horses nosing grass behind barbed wire.
Rick changed lanes to leave a slow delivery truck, painted to advertise a popular brand of corn chips, far behind us. He took a curve with either careless skill or recklessness, and his tires complained. I wasn’t certain whether Rick drove this car out of special fondness for it, or if it was the last car he owned, all the others sold off—or wrecked. “I’m glad you decided to see Mom,” he said. “Not just because I think it’s a good thing to do.”
It was odd, in my ears, the way he called her “Mom.” It was so casual, affectionate, ordinary. I thought of her as “Mother.” On this day, more than any other, I needed to see my surviving parent. “You want to compare notes on her.”
“I think it’s a good thing you’re going to see her.” He had said this so often that I was beginning to wonder if it were true.
“You think she’s …” I hunted for a kind word, and couldn’t think of one. “Hopeless?”
He gave a tilt of his head. “What made you want to come and see her so suddenly?”
I considered my answer.
“I know I encouraged you to come,” he continued. “But I’m just wondering what made you change your mind.”
There was something about his tone I did not understand. “I worry about her all the time,” I said. “That’s why I can’t stand to see her. To see her makes it impossible to deny the truth.”
“When you’re away from her,” Rick suggested, “you can pretend that she isn’t really so ill.”
Sometimes I find it impossible to use words. They stick to the truth like labels the post office applies to packages, as though a red-and-blue sticker means safe passage. “‘Ill’ is a good way to put it,” I said, and gave no hint of the inner debate I was experiencing, questioning my sanity, the sanity of the world. “Tell me, Rick—do I look like someone who could kill another human being?”
“Sure.”
“I do?”
He laughed at the concern in my voice. “Anybody could be a killer, Strater. What sort of person would you be if I thought you absolutely could not hurt anyone?”
“What’s good about hurting people?”
“It’s horrible to hurt people. A terrible habit to get into. You’re very peculiar today, Strater. Even your voice is different.”
“You think that I’m the sort of person who could kill someone to further his career?”
“I don’t know about that. But you could definitely protect yourself, if you had to.”
“It’s a matter of masculinity, isn’t it? A man is supposed to seem capable of homicide.”
“Doesn’t it say something like that in the U.S. Constitution?” He drove for a while, and then said, adjusting and readjusting his hands on the wheel as he spoke, “You know what people are going to think? Not everyone, but the DeVere people. They’ll think we hired someone to dump DeVere out the window.”
Maybe I did it, I thought. Maybe I am so sick that I could do something like that and not know it. The thought was nauseating. I cranked down the window to let air stream over me.
“Those people who are after me,” said Rick. “The people who are after me for money. My creditors.” He said the last word with what he had intended as an ironic edge. “That’s what they’ll think.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“These are serious men, Strater.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“It definitely will not be all right. You’re just like Dad—so optimistic I think life ought to slap you around a little. I love you dearly, Strater, but sometimes I think you have no idea what the world is all about. You expect life to be good. It isn’t.”
I let the rolling scenery answer for me, corrals, tractors, the occasional barn. From time to time there was a circling pair of wings high above a rocky creek.
My father had known an ambassador from a Middle Eastern country who enjoyed after-hours blackjack and, at th
e same time, grew overfond of the wrong set of women. This gentleman, who had visited our family at Christmas over the years, had been found in a canyon in Big Sur punched full of small, twenty-two-caliber holes. My teenage years had been shadowed by only partly apocryphal tales of rich kids who got tangled in drug stakeouts, blackmail capers, wee-hours contretemps with private detectives.
“I’m going to make lots of money,” I reassured him. “Big commissions. We’ll pay your debts.”
“It’s not a matter of money. The DeVere people will want us dead.”
“I’ll arrange things,” I said.
“How?”
I didn’t know how, but my silence seemed to express confidence.
“I don’t want to think about it,” he said. It was his way of expressing gratitude for what he interpreted as my easy attitude. “Look at this scenery. This kind of place makes me happy. It makes me believe in things. I can’t believe the kind of people I’ve ended up dealing with.”
It was characteristic of my brother that when he did deal with philosophical matters he used bold, unmixed colors—mortality, faith. He had the stout, simple diction of many people I knew, the sort of man who has such conversations only while driving fast, or while drinking.
When we approached the Place he began to slow, downshifting, delaying.
It made both of us quiet, the sight of the iron gate swinging inward after a videocam had observed us for awhile. The road was well tended, hills and oaks, and new blue-gray gravel spread on the verge of the road.
My brother and I called it “the Place,” but it was a private hospital for a few patients, the most distinguished being Mother, widow of the man who had served for years on the board of directors. Los Cerritos Sanitarium never displayed its name, nor did it have any of the outward trappings of either a hospital or a prison, except that after a long drive there was a chain-link fence surmounted by a long spiral of barbed wire and then, at the distance of a stone’s throw, another, parallel fence.
It had been part of the deal: we had paid to have the Place made maximum security, or at least as secure as the state hospital for the criminally insane at Atascadero, where the prosecution had been eager to deposit her.
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