Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  Don’t worry, said Gus when Bloom asked him the same question, the quivers hit you when they hit you, and when they do you’ll wish you never got struck by the little cherubic bastards.

  * * *

  The outer walls of Death’s fortress had been completed, and Bloom had moved on to building the exterior of the cathedral in which Death captured the souls of the dead, when he heard Gottlieb call out from the courtyard, He has come! Rosenbloom! He is here!

  Bloom stuck his head out the studio’s doorway. Who’s come, Mr. Gottlieb?

  Dr. Straight. He’s come to document your father’s collection. Stop what you’re doing and come meet him. Bloom put down his tools and met his miniature master and collaborator in the courtyard, followed him into the house and out onto the drive, where Gottlieb, who was in his usual animated state, made the introductions. Upon shaking Dr. Straight’s hand, Bloom couldn’t help but notice in what ways the man carried himself with a military bearing. He stood well over six feet tall, considerably taller than the taller-than-average Bloom. He possessed a bold nose and a sturdy jaw, wore an imposing mustache. He even had a brawny head, bald and gleaming, as if he applied a polish to it. His eyes looked at everything they beheld with such youthful intensity, they appeared as if they possessed a supernatural ability to see through solid objects. Bloom would have normally felt intimidated by a man of such overt, masculine stature—as he had felt around Gus when meeting him for the first time—but when Dr. Straight reached into the trunk of his automobile and presented to him a large box adorned with diamond inlay, Bloom saw the doctor’s robust countenance transform—as if built into the musculature of his face was a childish wonder and topsy-turvy logic—and he understood Dr. Straight wasn’t entirely defined by the body that contained him.

  Go ahead, he said. The bristles of his mustache spread like the crest of a porcupine over the bridge of his smile. Open it.

  Bloom unhooked a gilded latch and lifted the lid to find reflecting back at him his face turned upside down. He was so delighted by this, he shut the box and opened it again to repeat the experience, and upon opening it a second time he could now see there were two mirrors joined at a right angle. From somewhere behind him, he heard the voice of a woman say, Try turning it sideways. Bloom rotated the box and moved it about until he caught within the mirrors’ frame a young woman about his age. She had hair as black as the darkness leading to Salazar’s chamber and a complexion the color of cinnamon, a rich reddish brown that reminded him of the earth in Woodhaven after the rain had soaked the ground. As she neared, he could discern she stood almost as tall as he. Her shoulders were slim, neither too fragile nor delicate. She wore her hair with a flip at the nape of her neck, and short bangs that framed a face round and full in the cheeks, long and narrow in the chin. The lower half of her face provided an unusual balance to a most prominent nose that was thick along its ridges. In the shadow of this most sturdy feature, her mouth, whose lips spread tenderly when she smiled, appeared affectionate. But countering this warmth were near-translucent eyes, which, in the brightness of the afternoon, picked up the blue hue of the sky. Combined, the rich color of her skin, the pitch of her hair, the pastels of her eyes, made such an arresting image, Bloom felt something of an electric charge surge through him, and without meaning to, he clapped the box shut.

  It takes some getting used to. She laughed. It’s your true image. Nonreversed.

  Bloom reopened the box for a third time, and there within the mirror’s frame, he now saw himself looking at an image of himself he hardly recognized. She explained to him that the two mirrors joined at a right angle created the illusion of a single frame. The light hitting you refracts onto the right mirror, which then refracts again onto the left mirror. If you were looking at the right mirror alone, you would see yourself as you would ordinarily, in reverse, but once the light moves from the right mirror to the left mirror, you become reversed once again. There you have your true self.

  It’s what you and I will see when we turn to face each other, said Bloom.

  Precisely, said the woman.

  Bloom thought he looked very strange as his true self. To see his hair fall off to the left instead of the right, to find his symmetry reversed in the eyes and the cheeks, the mouth, to see reversed the slight imperfections in his teeth, was all so very disorientating, he averted his eyes to the woman, who he thought much more pleasant in comparison.

  I’ve grown accustomed to it, she said, but I still prefer to see myself in reverse.

  Bloom couldn’t imagine in what way her beauty would be diminished from any perspective. He now shut the box again and turned to her, and there she was, exactly as she had appeared in the mirror.

  I’m Isabella, she said.

  I’m Joseph, said Bloom.

  They held each other’s gaze without speaking, and although he thought he was most certainly deceiving himself, he believed he saw in her expression the same fascination for him as he felt for her. And the mere possibility unnerved him.

  PART IV

  LOVE

  Over lunch in the courtyard that afternoon, Bloom learned Dr. Straight was an experimental psychologist whose sense of self-importance was equal to that of Gottlieb’s and Simon’s, as his humble aim as a practitioner was to find a means to curtail the collective impulse to wage war. He held the belief that civilization’s instinct toward violence wasn’t teleological in nature. If it were by design, he posited, why then would God provide man a conscience? Why would his creator provide him a moral imperative to nurture and sustain life, then ask him to ignore it? A soldier is trained to kill not by appealing to the best of his humanity, but by systematically stripping his humanity away from him, through a methodical act of reshaping his perception of men outside his tribe as something other than men. He had long ago concluded that if men were given the tools to see from an early age beyond the limits of who and what they were at any given time—if they were given the opportunity to foster within themselves a heightened consciousness, one that raised them closer to the aspirations their creator conceived for them—this broader perception of themselves would prevent such methods from being effective. They would more easily see with what narrow concerns authority was wielded and wars were waged. It is a matter of inhibiting the aggression inherent in men, he said, and replacing it with cold, dispassionate reason. It was his opinion that the most effective means to broaden consciousness and inspire enlightened, rational thought was through the means of visual perception.

  He’s on a mission, Isabella teased him, to achieve peace through optical illusion, to shine light into the eyes of the person living in darkness.

  Dr. Straight looked at Isabella and kindly grinned. She likes to provoke me, he said. But she understands better than most what forces—what organized interests—summon men to war, and how these men, once indoctrinated, are irredeemably transformed on the battlefield. Those who have experienced the savagery I speak of, Joseph, the variety of savagery I participated in in the Philippines when I was a soldier, they normally refuse to revisit the horror because they’re too haunted and repulsed by the memory, in some instances too regretful for the atrocious acts they’ve perpetrated, in other instances so overcome by pride they can’t admit to themselves they were ordered to act in unconscionable ways, in ways that defy explanation, and in place of shame they choose bravado. Instead of healing their conscience, they choose to lean on the fictions of past glory and dwell in the darkest of silences, leaving the people who dwell in their ignorance of war to remain ignorant. For reasons I can’t adequately explain, said Dr. Straight to Isabella, I have been affected differently than many of my comrades. I’ve been filled with a righteous indignation and am more than prepared to play the foolhardy proselytizer for peace, however naïve I might appear.

  But how, exactly, asked Bloom, does the conceit of visual perception aid your cause?

  Dr. Straight used his large hands to pantomime a barrier around him, and he explained to what extent man was a self-o
riented, self-contained being, connected to others through spoken language, through the written word, through commerce, familial bonds, communal spaces, so much of which was predicated on what the individual saw of himself in relationship to others. I’ve been asking myself, said Dr. Straight, what would happen if we began to question not what we see on an ordinary day, but the very way we see it. How do we redefine what we take for granted? If we distance ourselves from our own points of view and question our basic assumptions of the world, what then changes within us? Do we begin to question what exists beyond our ordinary range of vision? Beyond the aggregate’s accepted beliefs? Beyond its involuntary assumptions of the world?

  And now Bloom asked how one created a distance between the self and what one sees.

  That is the pertinent question, isn’t it? said the doctor. Wearing a mischievous furrow on his brow, Dr. Straight turned again to Isabella. If you’re genuinely interested, he now said, turning back to Bloom, if you’re willing to give up a few days of your time to take part in our study, I’m sure Isabella will be very happy to administer the experiment.

  For that you’ll need to consult Mr. Gottlieb, said Bloom. My time belongs to him.

  Please, said Gottlieb, use him in whatever manner you like. For however long you like. He’s yours for the taking.

  No, said Isabella to Dr. Straight. It’s asking too much.

  Nonsense, said the doctor. I promise you, Joseph, you’ll benefit from the experience in ways you can’t imagine.

  To Isabella, Bloom said he’d be more than happy to participate.

  You shouldn’t indulge him, she said. He’s indulged enough. Between me and his wife, he’s spoiled to the core.

  Dr. Straight ignored Isabella and began to speak of the work Bloom and Mr. Gottlieb were engaged in. He believed the art nearest to re-creating life—not as men experienced it, per se, but how they remembered it—was the motion picture. What are they, the pictures you make, if they’re not a way to dream collectively? The experience, he argued, goes well beyond the solitary act of, say, reading a novel. It’s somehow more real in its aftermath than recalling what happened between characters on a stage. He was fascinated with the way the moving images lived inside those viewing them, as if they were memories generated by the very minds they touched. I don’t know about you, Joseph, but I’ve found myself on more than several occasions dreaming of pictures I’ve seen, as if the characters in those scenarios were men and women I knew from life. The question becomes, therefore, how can one use such a dream to most effectively evoke an inhibition response in the individual who’s confronting the prospect of war? Dr. Straight believed it was imperative to bring to life for this individual, who would otherwise be seduced by glory and honor, the horrors of war in their entirety. He proposed that photographers should be sent out onto battlefields wherever war was being waged, to film its atrocities and present them to the public unadorned. He thought it imperative that artists like Bloom and Mr. Gottlieb feel an obligation to construct mimetic events in which the human spirit was shown—through the most uncompromising images—to be crushed by war’s barbarity. Damn society’s sense of propriety, he said. Damn its precious composure. Whether it should be incidental footage or artifice made real, Dr. Straight desired to introduce an innate hesitation, an instinctual pause, a deeply felt revulsion, that went beyond the hesitation of primal fear and the impulse to preserve oneself. These very rational fears had proven to be too easily overcome by tribal and national concerns. Beyond natural instinct, he argued, there was the need to root within the culture a third hesitation, a hesitation influenced by the artificial memory of violence and its haunting aftermath. On the eve of war, men should not only be reminded of the noble warriors among them, but also the monsters living in those same warriors. Only then would a new morality, a new consciousness, be born. There is no other way, said Dr. Straight, to demythologize the war hero.

  * * *

  When they had all explored Dr. Straight’s various ideas at length, and found they had exhausted all aspects of the subject, Gottlieb rose to his feet and said to Bloom and Isabella that they should get acquainted. I’ll take Dr. Straight to the library.

  Dr. Straight said to Isabella, Take your time, my dear.

  As the two men walked into the villa through the courtyard door, Isabella said of the doctor, There’s nothing he says, he doesn’t believe. And there is nothing more he enjoys than to play the gadfly.

  Don’t you believe in what he advocates?

  On the contrary, I believe in it all. Her father, Carlos Reyes, she told Bloom, died fighting alongside Dr. Straight in the Philippines. Her father had been an astronomer, and it was he, she said, and her mother, Anna Sorenson, a cultural anthropologist, who influenced Dr. Straight’s thinking. When the doctor returned from the war, he often visited Isabella and her mother, and during those visits, she recalled, the two of them would sit together in the garden, and she would eavesdrop on them talking about how they might promote the practice of a pacifist ideal. So, you see, Joseph, it’s deeply ingrained in me. It’s as much my mother speaking as it is Dr. Straight. In many ways, it’s all I have left of either of my parents.

  Why is that?

  A few years after the doctor’s return from the war, she told him, her mother left her in the care of Dr. Straight and his wife, and went on an expedition in the mountains of Central America, where she contracted malaria and died before she made the return journey home.

  I’m so sorry, said Bloom.

  Thank you, said Isabella. I know you understand what it is to be alone in the world.

  Yes, said Bloom, I do.

  * * *

  Over dinner that evening, the passion of their afternoon conversation turned to Jacob Rosenbloom’s remarkable collection of optical devices. All three of Bloom’s dinner companions were well versed in the medieval world of scryers and the writings of John Dee. Dr. Straight was particularly impressed with the two items Gottlieb had pointed out to Bloom the first day he was introduced to the elder Rosenbloom’s collection. Bloom would learn for the first time that evening that the device he had used to project the slides of Death, Forlorn for his father was a seventeenth-century thaumaturgic lantern designed and forged by an optician named Walgensten, which was known to the world from an illustration drawn by an optics enthusiast and Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher, who, in the year 1646, began publishing the journal Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, all of whose editions were collected in the other item Gottlieb had pointed out. They really are remarkable companion pieces, said Isabella. What’s more, they discovered when examining the journal, Jacob was also in possession of Kircher’s magia catoptrica, a spin wheel with a peephole for viewing images on interchangeable disks. They discovered several boxes of slides specifically designed for the catoptrica—The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Son of God; The Ascent of Icarus; The Descent of Icarus; Orpheus in the Underworld; and Original Sin: The Fall of Man. They were intrigued by the Visionary Phantasmagorias of Etienne-Gaspard, and spent time viewing Apparitions, Spectres, Phantoms, and Shadows; The Drum of Eumenides; His Satanic Majesty; Medusa’s Head; Doctor Young Interring His Daughter: The Head with the Revolving Glory; The Head of the Departed Hero. They tried to imagine how he conducted his hydraulic experiments: The Turkish Smoker; The Lantern of Diogenes; The Pneumatic Pump; The Ascending Egg Upon the Point of a Waterspout; Illuminated Lustre, Upon the Jet d’Eau. Isabella, it turned out, had seen many of the modern projection devices—the phenakistoscope disk, the zoetrope, the choreutoscope, but she had never before seen a zoopraxiscope, an electrotachyscope, or a photographic gun.

  Dr. Straight explained to Bloom how meaningful it was to him to see Kircher’s journals, as it was an article on the Jesuit priest that Isabella’s father kept in his files at home that had inspired his conversations with Isabella’s mother. He, too, said Straight on the subject of Kircher, was a man who dedicated himself to a life of seeing the world anew after having wandered the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ W
ar. Like Bloom’s father, Straight drew inspiration from Dee’s postulate that light was the exuberance of God’s great goodness and truth, that mirrors were the divine means to reflect that truth. He, too, believed in the limitless magic of the mind. You must take some time with the journal, he said to Bloom. If only to see the sketches of his magnetic oracle and botanical clock, his diagrams on magnets and sunspots, the stuffed crocodiles and skeletons, geodes, and ostrich eggs. With your permission, Dr. Straight said to Bloom, Isabella and I would very much like to stay for as long as it takes to document the collection. To which Bloom said with his eyes on Isabella, Yes, please do.

  * * *

  Maybe one day, Joseph, you’ll recall the experience Isabella and I are about to give you and apply it to one of your pictures. Maybe one day in the future, you’ll recall what it is I’m about to say to you now. Which is this: out of the depths of the mind, new powers are always emerging. And with that said, Dr. Straight and Isabella strapped onto Bloom a shoulder harness, which was attached to a device Isabella had invented and named the invertiscope, an elegant contraption consisting of a series of angled mirrors that rose up in a shaft whose design resembled a periscope’s. At its highest point, its neck bent forward and then down; it could be manipulated with a system of pulleys whose cords dangled from rings just above his ears. If he pulled on the cord above his right ear, he could elevate the scope’s angle upward and turn it a full 180 degrees around to his back; if he pulled on the cord above his left ear, he could rotate his perception back around and downward. The scope, therefore, provided Bloom a field of vision extending from the front of his body, to the sky, to his back. When the invertiscope had been fully secured to his head, he could now fully appreciate Dr. Straight’s short speech in the courtyard, as he clearly understood, quite literally, the doctor’s notion of heightened consciousness. He felt himself made strangely tall and elongated, and detached. It was as if he’d stepped out of his skin altogether, released—as Straight said—from his containment to become an invisible interloper looking down on his own life.