How little acceleration could she use and still keep her truck rolling? On the flat pavement a kind of perpetual motion seemed possible. Marissa made two more right turns, barely tapping the gas pedal. Across her hood, beyond the candlelit window of The Magic Carpet, she faced again the streaming cruise traffic, the sound of it going around like a loop. A gaggle of girls in a pickup bed collapsed in laughter. One of them had pulled her blouse open as if to flash the onlookers—with a bikini top, Marissa would bet, not her bare breasts, not in this backwater—but who knew?
Her truck nosed through another right turn. Marissa was cruising her own solitary circle, silent except for the night breeze ruffling through the open windows of the cab. Why was she doing it? There was no intersection with the other cruising loop, full of noise and light, where Julie must have passed some time—Marissa knew she had, in fact, from Carrie Westover.
She turned again, repeating the circuit, thinking of the hooded figure sitting calmly behind her candle in The Magic Carpet. She will receive you. Queer the way Jamal had put it. But no more queer than the way Marissa kept circling the place.
On her third pass she shut off her headlights so they wouldn’t glare in the restaurant windows and parked the truck. She didn’t think she’d shut the door hard but it banged in her ears like an explosion. She couldn’t think of what to say. If the restaurant door was not open she would get back in the truck and drive away.
But the glass door yielded smoothly inward when she pressed the metal bar. She walked directly to the booth in back, her sneakers squeaking slightly on the linoleum floor. Behind the flame of the oil lamp, Jamal’s mother sat in enviable stillness. She didn’t make any visible sign, but Marissa felt welcome to sit down, and she did.
In the mix of warm lamp’s glow and the bluer ambient light from the street, the woman’s eyes seemed large and dark and liquid. They were beautiful eyes; Marissa had noticed them before, striking even beneath the dark hood, across the meager width of the shadowed room. Marissa studied the lamp on the table between them, an orb of glass with inserted wick, such as she had seen in many restaurants before. For some reason she’d expected a slipper-shaped thing out of the Arabian Nights—a lamp that might confine a genie.
Presently the woman got up and carried her tea glass through the beaded curtain into the kitchen and after a short while returned with two fresh glasses of tea, one for Marissa.
Marissa sipped. It was minty and sweet. She had no clear notion what she was doing here. The visits to Carrie Westover made some kind of ordinary sense, she supposed. By comparison to this. In her early twenties Marissa had trained as a masseuse and she had won Carrie partway over by working on her feet: flexing the bunions and working the kinks out of the arches and the cramped calf muscle and stressed-out hamstrings. In return, Carrie showed her scrapbooks and home video and told her stories about Julie. The documents petered out when the girl was still quite small, around the same time Carrie’s husband left, Marissa gathered.
After the videos ran out they had just watched TV, an alien experience for Marissa, who for the last decade or so had preferred to read something, or try to meditate. Carrie sat on a recliner, legs up, flexing her toes inside her socks. Marissa homed in on her aura of comfort; she thought the massage work she’d done had helped. On the screen was local news; a reporter standing before the shell of a burned house festooned with police tape. Behind him, medical personnel carried away charred objects on stretchers. The image was day-lit, the hillside bleak.
Earnestly the reporter recited his script. No survivors. . . . House believed to have been abandoned. . . . Nearest neighbors more than five miles away. . . . Emergency responders arrived at the scene too late. . . . Degree of destruction makes the cause of the fire uncertain and identification of the bodies difficult. . . .
“Serves’m right,” Carrie muttered, crossing her ankles and glaring at the set. “Sketcher scumbags.”
The shot returned to the studio. “Thank you, Tom.” The same newswoman with that glossy reddish blond helmet of hair; she touched her tongue to her lips and leaned toward the camera. “No suspects and no clear evidence of arson so far,” she announced, and Marissa shifted in her seat, thinking, but— The newswoman turned her head slightly, as if to address a partner just out of the frame. “But of course these places blow up by themselves, don’t they? Meth labs are a dangerous game.” Again she faced the camera. “I’m Janice Rivington for Kay Ee El Oh.” A shuffle of papers. “Today marks the twenty-first day of apparent coma for cave girl Julie Westover. Medical—”
“Oh shut up, Janice.” Carrie squeezed the remote and the screen went dark.
Monkey mind, Melissa thought. But tonight it circled more than it scrabbled, like the cruisers orbiting the square. With an effort she brought it back to the The Magic Carpet, soft flicker of the lamp on the table, the warm cup cradled in her palm. Still, she couldn’t hold the moment, remembering now that her last sick day had been consumed twenty hours back, which meant that her previous life had expired. She, or the life she had lived before, had just that simply ceased to exist. Oh something could probably be worked out and repaired with Peg and the bosses, despite the vague and lackluster quality of the excuses she had filed by voice and email, but the idea of fitting herself back into that life was like trying to wear a pair of your old bronzed baby shoes. She had left that place, and now she was here. Where was she?
Regaining the present with a minty sip of tea, she noticed that despite her uncertainty she didn’t feel uncomfortable, but instead unusually relaxed. She was aware that a wordless something was taking place between her and the other woman. As if the smooth fluid regard of the other was melting something inside of her.
Jamal’s mother placed her hand over the back of Marissa’s hand. Marissa was flooded with the thought of the kiss she’d pressed on Jamal out in the desert. Here was another touch that somehow, against expectation, seemed to be turning out all right. The other woman’s palm was warm and dry. Against her knuckles Marissa could feel the calluses of all her kitchen work. Also Jamal had told her that his mother had made carpets as a child. She had been compelled to do it. The magic of The Magic Carpet was that there were no carpets involved at all—a sort of inside family joke.
You want to be where she is, the other woman said. Marissa didn’t know what language she had spoken, or if she had spoken out loud at all. She didn’t even know what was the native tongue of Jamal’s family or what country they had originally come from. But she did know that the other woman was quite right in what she had expressed.
She remembered the rosary, still in her pocket, but didn’t reach to touch it. Since Claude’s death, or a few days before, Marissa’s faith had been playing tricks on her. It did not mean she was losing her faith, not necessarily. Claude himself had suffered doubt; it was something they had talked about, a little. They had not talked about the probability that Claude had also deceived himself, maybe more than a little, about the nature of his interest in her.
She still practiced the Exercises sometimes, sometimes at night when she couldn’t sleep, though no longer with the strict purposefulness that Saint Ignatius of Loyola had intended. Now it was just a way to wind herself down, to still the self-conscious chatter that usually bounced off the walls of her brain, sometimes to open a passage to the wide cavern inside her psyche that Jamal had called the big part of her life.
The eye of my intention. . . . To move the feelings more with the will. As the words articulated in her head she flashed on that dream not long ago, the one that had felt more like a vision, had left her lost in that cavernous inner space. But here, she felt the other woman guiding her, as Claude had done, her hand like a hand on a tiller. As she went down, she was stabbed by the unexpected recognition that in the other life where she kept the baby and somehow raised her to adulthood she still arrived in a moment like this one, where the person called Julie tore herself free and vanished into a life of her own, leaving Marissa alone among strangers . . . th
ough a wise and sympathetic stranger in this case.
. . . an exclamation of wonder with deep feeling, going through all creatures, how they have left me in life and preserved me in it. . . .
Instead of a spark going down into darkness she was winged perception rising in clear sky.
58
The fear of it! To be hurled, naked, into high thin air, like a stone out of a sling. But after the first breathless moments she knew she could rest at the top of the arc. She would not fall.
Hawk’s eye was a flat gold disc, with a black shining circle at the center. Hawk was nothing now but eye and air. The eye transparent. . . .
Caught in its clear center was that ancient animal person, who moved, despite his staggering size, with weightless grace through a green glade. Snaking through the branches, long as a python, his trunk gathered leaves and tucked them into the shovel-lipped mouth between white ivory tusks.
She felt the solitude of Mammut in her own bones. Like herself, he was not proper to this place and time. He had returned to the People from three-lives-gone, out of the spirit stories. But in his flesh, with all its rich weight. Old and alone as he was now, with his eye like a marble, dark pearl losing itself in watery folds of skin.
Her twinned selves floating between the worlds, touching at the coccyx and the back of the skull. She was seeing with the same eye that saw her. With shouts the hunters rolled away a boulder from points themselves three-lives gone. Black points, flaked from a glassy stone; People said the stone was found near a fire mountain away in the west. Whistling, they bound points to new shafts with fresh wet sinew.
Mammut was not mired in bog this time. He moved freely, lightly too, considering his legs were big as tree trunks. He seemed slow, or he was in no hurry. He was eating as he moved, stripping the trees of leaves and green branches.
Hawk might have reached him in an hour’s flight. But hills and valleys and streams to be forded lay between Mammut and the People. Long spears tipped and ready now, they began to move, loping north along the riverbed, and crossing where they knew it to be shallow. No more whistling among them. In silence they kept the long loping stride, which could be sustained for a long time. She was with the eye of the hawk always, and she was in the curved space between the backs of the two worlds, and also with her own spear, among the People.
Marissa fell awake; it was a giddy vertiginous fall, down the spiral of a terrifying scream till she came to herself sweating and shaking in one of those molded plastic hospital chairs. Had she screamed aloud? Perhaps, but there was no one in the room to hear it, only motionless, unresponsive Julie, feathers ruffed out on the pillow—she lunged forward, sure she had seen the harsh eyes and cutting beak of a raptor framed on the coarse hospital linen . . . but when she reached the bedside there was only Julie’s dark hair spilling over the pillow, as always.
She was alone with Julie in the greenish dim of the room, blinds drawn against the daylight, tick and burble of machines. An aquarium. She laid her fingertips against Julie’s cheek and felt the child’s warm breath come and go across her knuckles. All right then, she was here, in this world only. With a terrible headache branching toward either side of her forehead . . . from something like tree roots prying into her brain. She looked around the room for painkillers but whatever Julie got was by IV, so she covered her eyes with her hands for a moment. The pain subsided in her head but there was an odd sensation in her palm, like the haft of a tool or a weapon.
59
Bear. She had been Bear at her first awakening, and she was Bear again, along with Hawk, running, flying beside herself as she ran with the hunters and floated in dream. Bear dug in the earth, pressing the square muzzle deep in the fragrant hole, breathing in news of the underground. Bear clawed out roots and ate them, while Mammut broke branches with his trunk and stripped them of the leaves. They had, it seemed, no interest in each other: Bear doglike, small beside the greatness of Mammut, the two of them indifferent, eating the different things they chose.
The stream of running hunters divided around the glade, as yet unseen. Bear knew their presence by their scent, and grew wary, but did not stand or run. In Hawk’s eyes she saw the pattern of their movement. Leaders, who had passed the glade, finding a patch of sodden ground, growing cress and yellow flowers, soft enough, though not quite swamp.
Hunters ran into the glade. Mammut saw, but did not care. His little eye turned past them without interest, these small things. He seemed to have no knowledge of the People.
Bear had been hunted. Eaten sometimes. The heart and gall bladder, rich store of fat and flesh. After the feasting, the hide scraped and cured to make a warm robe. Bear stood up now, astonished at the hunters. Vast she would be, if not for Mammut. Bear dropping to all fours again, lumbering to disappear into the brush; Bear looking out from the stone of the cave wall curious to see frayed twigs spreading color from the horn points onto the stone: two crossed lines with a circle at the top of one made the hawk a simple flying eye while below the hunters boiled out from the bones of an animal person already killed and consumed, glossy obsidian spear points dulled with blood. She heard the clatter of the shaman’s rattle, much, much louder than before. And a growling, snarling sound was very near, as if inside her, like the splitting of roots dividing her brain—in darkness she raised her hands to her head and found it heavy, broad-boned, pelted. She struggled to lift it off, tear it off; it would not come off but light did come—the swirl of brilliant colored points, its movement driven by the rattle, the interlocking coded helix with the eyes of animal persons swimming amidst its folds. Now she saw an image reflected as in water, if water could stand upright on a wall: a woman whose bare breasts heaved as she fought with both hands the bear’s head, her head
Then just Marissa, standing before a mirror in Julie’s room, wearing only a pajama bottom and tearing at her own hair for no evident reason you want to be where she is, to—the rattle sound was above and all around her and then it stopped and she was outdoors under a dome of troubled gray sky in the midst of that same scatter of loose stones, though she saw no sign of the shaman or even the clot of brush he had emerged from.
“It’s Hell.”
Marissa turned to find Carrie, standing with the tenacity of a cypress, hands on her hips, back slightly arched, blue Crocs rooted into the asphalt as they looked. By reflex Marissa folded her arms across her breasts and discovered that, thankfully, she must have thrown on a shirt before coming outside.
It was hail—that must be what Carrie had said, and certainly that was what this stuff was. Hailstones, not those jagged rocks from the different place, the other time. Marble-size white pellets of ice beginning to melt as the sky above them dissolved into indifferent, vacant blue.
60
The gourd rattle fizzed like a rattlesnake’s tail, like a rasp of rough breathing, and the hunters spilled out of the cage of bones across the cave wall, breathing fast, though not yet winded. It had not exactly been pursuit, for Mammut had no mind to run. The first spear jabs were only pricks, not even. Stone points could scarcely pierce the pelt of matted hair, long and tangled, brushing the ground. And People had lost memory of this hunting, three-lives-gone. Bear they knew. Bison they’d begun to know. Mammut was a story told by grandmothers, who themselves had never seen Mammut with their own eyes.
The hunters circled, whistling, dancing. Some made a drumbeat, clapping hollow sticks with stones. Mammut’s huge ears fanned forward, back. The little eye revolved in the great head. In the eye of Hawk, through branches Mammut had stripped of their leaves, she saw this august animal person as if caught up in a swarm of gnats.
A hunter darted forward and thrust into a hairy flank, hard enough to sting. Mammut bellowed, and broke the spear shaft with a shudder. With the snaking gray trunk he caught a hunter by the heel and threw him altogether out of the glade. The hunter landed, rolling like a leather ball, in the patch of soft ground, and came up from the cress and yellow flowers, wet and muddy but unhurt. He caugh
t up another spear that someone passed him and thrust it now between the tusks, toward the impenetrable skull plate between the eyes, no threat, but a goading challenge.
Mammut trumpeted and made a rush at him. Others pricked at his hindquarters, and Mammut turned, sweeping his trunk along the ground, spilling several of them over. He trampled one; the others rolled away.
Now the hunters widened their circle. In turn they rushed Mammut from one direction only, jumping to prick the base of his tail, until he turned and charged them, trumpeting, the horn of his trunk drowning out all their whistles. The first hunter to be thrown danced and capered before him, drawing a charge that broke Mammut clear of the trees, out into the open where Hawk’s yellow eye saw it all plainly now. That first hunter rushed and pricked at the trunk itself with a spear point, so that Mammut’s weak little hairless tail stood up like a stick and the tusks lowered and Mammut made a thundering charge, the hunters throwing themselves clear as Mammut’s great weight hurtled ahead till he went down in the boggy ground to his front knees.
Hunters circled, uncertain what to do. The bolder of them pricked at the tough hide and tangled hair. It was good, it was what they had intended, but they could not remember anywhere among them what came next. They circled, jabbing uselessly. Mammut bellowed. He would soon free himself from the bog. His hind legs were working on solid ground, struggling to pull the forelegs free.
A hand spread color, ochre and umber, onto the shadowy wall of the cave. In the red torchlight the image flickered. The body of slain Mammut opened and hunters came out of it like a swarm of bees. The color spread across the wall and the hunters swarmed around Mammut sunken to his knees, flourishing the twig-like spears and thrusting them. Her hands wrapped around a spear shaft, driving a razor-sharp lava-stone point into the place back of the hampered foreleg, the point slipping sideways to pass a massive rib, passing that last resistance to sink home. All in a rush and a great trumpet, the air went out of Mammut then. Heart’s blood came bursting out of the wound and soaked their joined hands on the spear shaft.
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