Mount Terminus: A Novel

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Mount Terminus: A Novel Page 6

by Grand, David


  The three men whose faces Bloom had never seen. There they were, forming a dark constellation around one of the lounge chairs. Bloom’s father placed a hand on his shoulder and said again: You needn’t utter a sound. They walked in and out of shadows cast by white umbrellas, past gaunt faces lathered in zinc. Bloom noticed hands clutching handkerchiefs spotted with blood; he avoided the stare of milky eyes thick with jaundice. At regular intervals, the sickliest of the patients appeared to suffer simultaneous fits. Bodies convulsed in on themselves, rasping coughs from lungs too damaged to expel whatever invading substance occupied them. The sad noises once trumpeted into the ocean breeze acted like a contagion, setting off a percussive echo of croaks and caws into the crash of waves. I needn’t say a word, thought Bloom when he and his father halted before the humorless faces of the grim triumvirate, whose motives remained concealed in the cloudy rheum of their eyes. Lank hair fell from under the brims of their hats, dampening insipid brows; sweat gathered on the thick bulbs of their noses and occasionally dripped onto the toes of their boots. Their mouths were thin, their jaws locked, and each possessed a unique taxonomy of pink, wormlike scars fossilized on their jaws, around the orbits of their eyes, on the knuckles of their brawny hands. They held a perimeter around an invalid, passing an unlit cigar under his nose. Unlike the other infirm, this man didn’t wear the wide-brimmed hat or the cake of zinc on his face. Nor did he wear the white gown. Instead, he reclined in a cream silk robe tied off with a purple sash. While his thick arms and chest were matted with wiry hair, the crown of his head was bald and browned, and what hair remained above the ear and around the pate was white and cropped close to the scalp. His face belonged to that of a caricature. Wide nostrils. Fat lips. Heavy jowls. Hooded eyes. It belonged to a man who had inflicted, who had been afflicted by, pain.

  At the first sight of Bloom, the steely eyes of the reclining brute softened and became those of a moody, quizzical child. His cigar fell limp between his thick fingers as he said in a voice deep and graveled and full of bent foreign syllables, Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. Without breaking his open gaze, he told Bloom to come closer, to sit with him. The young Rosenbloom looked at his father, who nodded his assurance. And with that, Bloom left his father’s side and sat at the man’s hip.

  Your papa has said who I am?

  Bloom shook his head.

  No, of course he hasn’t. The old man set his cigar in his lap and rested a coarse palm on Bloom’s cheek. You’re a fortunate young man to have such a sensible papa. With his brow raised, he drew his chin to his chest. He has done good today. For you, young man, he has done good. He searched Bloom’s eyes again, this time as if he were hunting for evidence of something intimate they shared. He now withdrew his hand from Bloom’s cheek and turned his attention to Jacob. The air. The sound of the salted sea. These men of God here, they say it will do miracles for me. But they say in the same breath, I don’t help myself because I don’t believe. What do you say, Mr. Rosenbloom? Do I suffer from a lack of faith? Bloom’s father stepped forward without replying and presented the attaché to the sickly man, who lifted it into the waiting hands of the nearest member of the triumvirate. He then reached into a pocket stitched onto his robe and removed a silver pendant, half of a coin embossed with a full moon, bright and shiny on one side, dark with tarnish on the other. Give me your hand, malchik. It is for this I’ve asked your father to bring you here today. Bloom lifted his hand and in it the man placed his gift. One day soon, he said as he looked at Bloom’s father, as if he were speaking to him as much as to his son, you will know its other half. He then smiled as he closed Bloom’s fist. This world of ours, young Rosenbloom, it is a world of wondrous surprises, is it not? Bloom nodded in agreement. One never knows what astonishments await us. Isn’t that so, Papa? The old man lifted his heavy lids and once again directed his eyes at the elder Rosenbloom. Jacob didn’t answer the man. He instead tugged on Bloom’s collar, and when the young man looked up he saw his father’s chin motioning him away. At that moment, he could see in the hollows of his father’s eyes the malignant influence these dark figures held over his will. For the first time, he could see in the tightening folds of his father’s face how terrified he was of these men. As they walked off in the direction from which they had come, rather than upset Jacob’s pride by asking where these brutes derived their power, or what the significance of the pendant was, Bloom took hold of his hand and said, When we return home, shall we climb to the top of the tower and look at the sea?

  * * *

  Neither Bloom nor his father mentioned in the following days and weeks anything about their journey to the sea or the identity of the man who had set his hand on the younger Rosenbloom’s cheek. Bloom asked no questions about what the attaché case contained or what might have been the meaning of the pendant. He was deeply curious, of course, and at times was tempted to breach the darkness his father had forbidden him to enter all his life, but Bloom sensed the questions he was keeping to himself would be answered soon enough. He intuited from the softening of his father’s manner, from the warmth he heard in the tone of his voice, from the concern he expressed for Bloom’s well-being, his forbearance would not persist.

  Bloom, now approaching the age of manhood, had become familiar enough with his father’s character to know that whatever the nature of the transaction he had witnessed on the beach, it was most certainly one marking a significant change in his association with this man. Something of consequence had transpired. Something momentous enough, his father was compelled to break from the comfort of his routines to ready Bloom for what was to come. Jacob ceased spending the entirety of his days tending to the grounds and communing with the animist spirits of his topiary; instead, he approached the courtyard each morning from a vanishing point at the end of a path dividing the dark grove of avocado trees from the bright lattices of the rose garden. His arrivals coincided with Roya’s departures: as she entered the shadows of the loggia and disappeared behind the villa’s walls, he walked between the twin cottages forming the yard’s border, bowed his head through a pergola wearing a toupee of bougainvillea, and announced his presence with a grim smile.

  In the same manner Bloom sat with his mute companion, he sat with his father, who drew their attention to the crescent-shaped building terraced onto the shelf of the short, crescent-shaped mesa. One afternoon while looking at this structure, Jacob described a place on the sluggish Belus River where in the middle of the first century a ship belonging to soda traders spread out along the Phoenician shore to prepare a meal of fish stew. He told his son they had no stones to support their cooking pots, so they placed lumps of soda from the ship under them, and when these became hot and fused with the sand on the beach, streams of an unknown, translucent liquid flowed. This, he said, was the origin of glass. This, he said, has given our eyes their greatest purpose. His father patted the air with his long fingers, indicating to Bloom that he should remain still, and off he went up the stone steps with a skeleton key dangling from a string tied to his wrist. When he reached the landing, Bloom watched him follow the curve of the building until he rounded its side. A gust of desert wind rustled the grove, through which he could hear the unmistakable cry of a long-unopened door. The sharp noise of the stiff hinges scattered the lizards on the building’s surface; they scurried and refixed themselves into a new configuration, until a few moments later, with as little ease as it had opened, the door shut, and a new pattern was formed. Around the corner his father walked, pressing to the chest of his coveralls a wooden case nearly as tall and wide as he. When he had descended the stairs and reached Bloom, he said, Today we will give your eyes greater purpose. Climb the tower after lunch and this will be waiting for you. He turned to go, and then turned back. Looking at his dusty boots, he said, You must prepare yourself, my dear.

  What for?

  Jacob tapped the case with his knuckle. With this, you will see.

  * * *

  Assembled inside the tower’s pavilion was
a reflecting telescope whose optical tube was crafted from ash and trimmed with cast iron. It was mounted to a decorative globe resting atop a pedestal whose thin base was held secure by metal supports. All was affixed to a dais that snugly fit onto the shoulders of a tripod. The lacquer applied to preserve the wood had darkened and in places was altogether stripped bare; aquamarine streaks of oxidation had begun to accrete over the iron’s surface; and whatever words had been etched into the brass plaque set onto the dais’s foundation had long since been rubbed away into a flat sheen. Old as the telescope might have been, when Bloom set the orbit of his eye against the viewing piece, the mirrors magnified into his mind a wide field of vision, full of clear images, their colors crisp and containing no aberrations, all of it so impressive and bright, when he saw what was in its sights, it summoned within the young man the thrill of being present at the focal point. But when this initial excitement wore off, and he was left to contemplate the substance of what he saw, he wanted some explanation for what was out there. His father had trained the tube’s aperture onto the section of winding road that snaked up to the estate’s gates, and there, occupying the annular frame, was a team of hulking men swinging picks, driving them in unison into the ground. Following them, a line of laborers turned over earth with shovels, and beyond them, a line pulled rakes; next rolled carts piled high with tarmac, and what was beyond that, Bloom wouldn’t see until some time later, when the men who spread the pitch onto the raked earth edged out from behind a turn on the road. It would then be some more time before he saw the stacks of the steamrollers belch black smoke as they paved the tarred macadam into a smooth surface. And there the parade came to its end, all for the three dark figures he had encountered on the beach. They casually strolled up the grade, each biting down on a smoldering cigar; the tails of their long coats, the brims of their hats, catching the steam rising up from the cooling pavement.

  * * *

  When they sat down to dinner that evening, Bloom’s mind remained fixed on the images he observed that afternoon through the eyepiece of the telescope. Seeing as it was his father who revealed to him the brigade of laborers advancing up the mountain, he assumed he would explain the circumstances of their arrival. But the elder Rosenbloom deliberately avoided the subject, and, instead, spoke for the entirety of their meal about the many ways the visible world had excited his boyhood imagination. He spoke of the philosophers and men of science whose intent was to prove there was a mystical unity in all creation. He spoke of the ways in which he saw the world as ecstatically alive, to what extent he believed light to be the exuberance of God’s great goodness and truth, how mirrors and prisms divine the means to reflect that truth. He spoke of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Marlowe’s Faust, of a disciple of John Dee’s who descended into an erupting Vesuvius to study its smoking vents, of a mad fantasist who spent his life’s work disproving the Tower of Babel could have ever reached the moon. For as long as men of imagination appreciate the wonders of the mind, he insisted, they will draw inspiration from such men; throughout the ages, their spirits will continue to manifest themselves in characters we can only now dream of.

  That, my dear Bloom, was the type of man I wanted to become, Jacob said. One whose ideas and inventions had the power to shape visions.

  Here his father paused. And here Bloom looked up from his meal, and he could see a wet film had formed over his father’s eyes. But you can see in my face every day what I’ve become.

  No, said Bloom.

  Yes, insisted his father. He pushed back his chair and stood up. Come, there’s something I want to share with you in the drawing room. Something, I believe, you need to see.

  * * *

  If we lived one hundred years ago, his father said as he led Bloom to the parlor after dinner, if this were a great ballroom or cathedral, and held in it several hundred spectators, I might introduce what I am about to show you by declaring, That which is about to happen before your eyes is not frivolous spectacle. It is made for the man who thinks, for the philosopher who likes to lose his way. This is a spectacle that man can use to instruct himself in the bizarre effects of the imagination. When it combines vigor and derangement. If I were the great Etienne-Gaspard, who began all his phantasmagorias this way, I would spread open my arms in some grand gesture and you would see floating into the center of the room an apparition, or a phantom, or the head of Medusa, or, perhaps, have rising up out of Daedalus’s labyrinth the waxen wings of Icarus moving toward the radiance of the sun. And, I daresay, Jacob said with a hush, you would be dazzled.

  The elder Rosenbloom ushered his son toward a table in the center of the room and said, Open it. There on the table rested a wooden box not unlike the one his father had retrieved earlier that day from the crescent-shaped dwelling. The young Rosenbloom did as he was told: he unlatched an iron clasp and pushed open the lid, underneath which he found, immersed in fitted compartments, two copper objects with thick veins of patina running through their wear. The shape of the first resembled an oil lamp; the other was a cylindrical lens at whose base was a slot into which one could slide a silver dollar. Within the tube, Bloom saw when he pulled it out, was a configuration of mirrors; in its orbit was fixed a clouded lens. Careful now, said his father as he removed the lamp, it’s very old. Jacob took the tube from Bloom’s hands, delicately fitted the two parts together, and set them on the table. From a separate compartment, he pulled out a box within the box, and when he opened it, he asked Bloom to extinguish the drawing room’s flames. As soon as Bloom had done this, and they were ensconced in darkness, his father struck a match and lit the lamp, and he instructed the young Rosenbloom to sit facing the empty wall. Bloom sat down in the armchair his father slept in most evenings and heard the first of the slides slip through the slot. When it was illuminated by the lamplight, he saw an image of his mother standing before a window in which he could see, reflecting back, her profile. She painted these, said his father. With a very fine brush and a magnifier, she reduced herself into miniature. Always with a shadow image standing somewhere nearby, watching, observing. Do you see, my dear? It’s important that you see.

  Bloom, who hadn’t initially seen the shadow, now saw it quite clearly and said as much to his father. Yes, Father, I see.

  The elder Rosenbloom changed the slide to a likeness of his wife standing before a mirror in which her reflection stared past her to the ghostly double, this one’s lines better defined, bold enough that he could see expressed, in the creases of its eyes, scorn and contempt for the image reflecting from the mirror. And this one?

  Yes, Father, this one is clear.

  And then, said his father, she disposed of the windows and mirrors altogether, and, well, you can see here—again he switched the slide—and here—and again switched—and here, how the shade becomes more and more lifelike, and begins to resemble your mother in every way. You see, my dear, what she saw?

  Yes, Father, I see what she saw.

  Yes, said his father.

  But why? asked Bloom. Why did she depict herself this way?

  Bloom heard the tink of glass, and then the sound repeated, and then again, and he knew from that sound, and from the pauses between them, as much as his father wanted to continue with this, he had reached an impasse.

  Tomorrow, Father, said the young Rosenbloom. There is always tomorrow.

  Yes, his father agreed. Tomorrow.

  * * *

  The following evening, and for several more evenings afterward, Bloom’s father produced a new optical device, and with each new device, Bloom witnessed the furtherance of his mother’s peculiar preoccupation. Animated on spinning disks and carousels and drums, his mother ran away from herself through long corridors, hid from herself in dark closets, knelt before herself to beg for forgiveness.

  Do you see? was his father’s refrain.

  To which Bloom said, Yes, Father, I see.

  Do you see how she suffered?

  Yes, Father, I see. But I still don’t understand the cau
se of her suffering.

  No, said Jacob. How could you?

  And as these viewings went on night after night, Bloom said on more than one occasion, Please, Father, you needn’t subject yourself to these if it causes you pain.

  Yes, said his father, I do.

  * * *

  At home, in Woodhaven, his father told Bloom on one of these nights, Mother was so possessed by these visions she could no longer be left to her solitude. Both her doctor and our rabbi thought she should be committed to an asylum, but I couldn’t do that to her. I decided for both our sakes to take her away. I put the foundry in the hands of my associate, Mr. Geller, who you may or may not remember … I packed a few trunks and we boarded a train with no destination in mind. We traveled aimlessly for several months, wandered deeper and deeper into the heartland, and along the way, if your mother chose to be stubborn or defiant, if her condition made her listless or confused, I didn’t care—I would carry her in my arms if need be, and force her to stand on her feet, to open her eyes, to look upon the wondrous beauty we encountered along the route of our journey, and the more distance we gained from home, the more westward we moved, the more I agitated your mother to be active, the more she began to resemble the woman I had fallen in love with. By happenstance, we met a man in town who told us of this place, this estate, and one day we visited it. Mother was immediately drawn to the gardens and the groves, to the view at the edge of the promontory; on the summit of the mountain, in the quiet of the parlors, she felt at peace with her thoughts and at ease with me, so the day following, I bought it, I bought it all, the entire mountain and a great deal of the land extending to the sea, so no soul could intrude on Mother’s happiness. And not very long after we arrived, some several months had passed, perhaps, no more, Mother started painting again, and took pleasure in her work. In landscapes, and only landscapes. Absent from them were any human figures at all. I, of course, encouraged this. And to show her how much so, we periodically ventured out into the valley in search of new terrain. To inspire her eye. And when she tired of the valley’s barrenness, we journeyed beyond it. One day, while roaming trails we weren’t familiar with, we arrived at the river I have taken you to, and then at the lake, and when we reached that enormous body of water, and looked upon its calm surface, Mother saw in her reflection something of herself she hadn’t observed in a very long time. Whatever it was she saw, she felt moved to wade into that water, fully clothed, to the knees at first, then to the waist, and the neck, until she was immersed, her yellow skirt floating around the top of her head, she looked like a daisy, full of warmth and light. In that instance, on the shore of those waters we stand before on the Day of Atonement, your mother transformed. She was reborn. As if some agent of God had revived her spirit.

 

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