Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  * * *

  You must go, said Simon after having eaten dinner at his house. They sat on the white settee facing the white window frames and looked out onto the disturbed stretch of land leading to the sea. Gottlieb is right. It’s time you saw something of the world. All on your own.

  But where shall I go?

  Wherever you like.

  When?

  It will have to be in three days. No sooner.

  Why three days?

  Because Gus has arranged for us to take a short journey tomorrow.

  Gus hadn’t mentioned his plans to Bloom. Where? he asked.

  I don’t know. All I know is that I’m to meet you at the estate first thing in the morning, and that we’ll be gone until the following evening. The day after that, you can set out on your own adventure.

  It had been some time since Bloom sat down to talk with his brother, and it had been equally as long since he’d found him to be so charming and congenial in Bloom’s company. In no small part because the waterworks had been completed: the dam had been finished, its reservoir filled, its spillways feeding the completed aqueduct. Construction in the basin was proceeding at pace, and according to Simon, every plot of land, every home he would build on it, had been sold. Soon tracks would be laid from here to the city center. They would carry families to and from town.

  You’ll see, said Simon, it will be as fertile and green as Mount Terminus, as ripe as its groves, as bright as its gardens. It’ll be a wonder to behold. Bloom’s brother spoke as if he had climbed to the summit of a great monument. Soon, he said, all the money he had taken from Bloom would be repaid, at which time, he promised, he would make amends with Mr. Stern.

  Over the course of this lazy evening, an acceptance of his brother grew within Bloom. He couldn’t fully comprehend Simon’s opportunistic nature, but he recognized that Simon’s passion for progress was on a footing with his affection and concern for Bloom. Although Simon wouldn’t be ceding the property of the plateau back to his brother, Simon explained his plans to make it his domain, his sanctuary. He would be relocating all of the studio’s production to a large plot of land at the foot of Mount Terminus, and leave the current lot in the hands of Bloom and Gottlieb, to cultivate artists like themselves, artists they thought worthy of their attention. They could do as they pleased, with no interference from Simon. Should they ever need it, of course, they would have access to the expanded grounds at the bottom of the mountain. Simon walked Bloom to the room in which Leah’s memory was preserved and there, next to the raised map of Simon’s waterworks and the grid of development, was a new table on top of which was an architect’s rendering of the new, sprawling lot. It will be a small city within the city, he told Bloom, a walled fortress in which permanent façades would reside, entire small towns, Gothic towers, medieval castles, Broadways, Parisian cafés, London squares, row houses, African jungles, anything and everything you can possibly imagine. The entire world, said Simon, will fit here. Its art and architecture, its greatest monuments, its wildest nature. Imagine, he said, everything you can possibly need at your disposal for an epic picture like The Death of Paradise. Simon now turned to the other table and stared at it for a good long while. This, he said, what I’ve built here, Joseph, I’ve thought through every need, every desire, every small convenience and inconvenience. The people who arrive here from now on, they’ll make a life all their own, on my stage. Every day they’ll breathe new life into it for who knows how many generations, for who knows how many centuries. Like your pictures, Joseph, my stage, it will last well beyond either one of us. This, he said. This is my one great work of art, one I will never surpass again in my lifetime.

  You’re still a young man, said Bloom.

  No, said Simon, not any longer. Not after this. There will be small triumphs, perhaps. But nothing quite so great as this. Simon looked at Bloom and Bloom looked into his brother’s face, and he could see it now. He could see written into the lines of his brother’s face the toll this project had taken on him; the lines around his eyes, on his brow, had deepened and grown longer, in every way Bloom had imagined they would. And Bloom now cast his gaze away from his brother’s face, back to the map, and while looking over the rows and rows and rows of red tiled roofs, at the repeating architectural forms, over the roadways and boulevards, tramways and tall office buildings his brother had pinned to its surface, Bloom was coming to realize, it wasn’t the beauty of the landscape he would miss when Simon’s plans were complete. He realized, at this very moment, what it was that had so upset Roya that night they buried Adora in the rose garden. How could he not have seen it? She feared losing the emptiness. The loneliness derived from it, the serenity one felt in it, the solitude one endured in it. She couldn’t bear the thought of the open space closing in around them. Where would their minds wander if they had to peer down onto so many restless souls? The noise, he thought. There would be such overwhelming noise and distraction. And, oh, how the mere thought of it frightened Bloom.

  * * *

  Come, said Simon, interrupting Bloom’s thought, I have a gift for you. To get you where you’re going. Simon walked Bloom out to the cul-de-sac and there parked at the front of the house was a white roadster similar to the roadster Simon drove. It’s yours, said Simon as he handed Bloom the keys. In three days’ time, you need only choose a direction.

  But I don’t know how to drive.

  It’s easy enough. Here, get in.

  I don’t know …

  Just get in. We’ll practice all night if need be.

  But they didn’t need the night. Bloom took to it rather easily. He liked the feel of the gears in his hand, coordinating the clutch with the accelerator and the brake. He drove in circles at first and then motored off the studio and up to the estate, and there, circled about outside the front entrance of the villa. And when he had mastered that much, Simon said to him, I will see you in the morning.

  * * *

  In the morning, Bloom awoke to the sight of Gus standing over his bed. It’s time, he said. Let’s go.

  Where are we going?

  Tomorrow is the High Holiday. Tomorrow, you, Simon, and I will be written into the Book of Life.

  It’s been so long.

  I know, said Gus.

  Everything was prepared. Gus had spoken with Meralda and she told him what to collect. He uprooted three juniper trees that had been growing since the time Jacob Rosenbloom planted them for his final trip to Pacheta Lake. He gathered lanterns, the yahrzeit candle, the camping gear, a hearty meal they would eat when they arrived, a hearty meal they would eat to break the fast, and trimmings from the estate’s gardens and groves. All was loaded into the back of a truck.

  When Bloom and Gus stepped out onto the drive, Simon was there waiting, and the three men set off on their long drive down the switchback to the boulevard, up through a canyon pass, to a mountain road, on which they followed the line of the aqueduct, its sluiceways and spillways, past its smaller reserve ponds and catchments. They drove parallel to the stream, against the current of water. Bloom was mesmerized by the way the aqueduct dipped and turned to create the optical illusion of an invisible wavelength. For hours they drove until they arrived at a vista, where Gus parked, and the three of them stepped out of the car and walked up to a rail, and there Bloom saw himself standing over the massive pour of concrete whose arc filled the natural boundaries of the canyon pass he had ridden through with Jacob on their buckboard; now held back by the enormous barrier was a great mass of water. Simon pointed out its outlets to the aqueduct, and Bloom, upon seeing this incredible sight, felt proud of his brother for having performed this godly feat. It’s sublime, he told Simon. It was truly sublime and wondrous. The sheer enormity of it.

  They continued on the road, and he admitted to Simon when they arrived at the confluence of the river and the lake, and Bloom saw how little seemed to have been altered in the graben of the rift valley, that he had expected to find the land more disturbed, the farms and ranch
es in the distance laid to waste on the order of the basin. And Simon pointed to the green fields and the irrigation ducts in the distance, and he asked Bloom if he could recall what had changed since he was last here. Perhaps the lake’s water table was lower than it had been. The juniper trees Jacob had planted had certainly grown out and produced more berries. Otherwise there was no discernible difference. Except, of course, for the sound of the manned pumping station, its combustion, its gears, turning over at regular intervals, to push water into the channel that led to the reservoir. The sound started and stopped throughout the night. It echoed and reverberated against the cliffs and the escarpment. It was present at the shore when Gus and then Simon and then Bloom recited the kaddish. Gus for his mother and his baby sister. Simon for his mother and for Sam. Bloom for his mother and Jacob. And a special recitation for Isabella. In the morning, they climbed to the junipers Jacob had planted, and there they sat staring up and over the current of the river, to the mountains, and there they sat in the heat under the heraldic poses of the buzzards, and there Bloom imagined the ice melt and the ice floe, the cascading waters falling through the maw of volcanic craters, and he grew weak and weary, and he slept and he woke and he slept again and awoke again, until the sun kissed the top of the mountain range, and only then did he and his brother and Gus stand up and walk to the lakeshore, where they opened the meal packed by Gus’s beloved Meralda, and they ate and they drank, and Simon placed his hand on Bloom’s shoulder, and he placed his hand on Gus’s shoulder, and he promised he would try to be a better man. And you, Joseph, you, go be a man of the world. The motion will heal you. You’ll see.

  * * *

  The following morning, Bloom packed a small bag, bid all the birds in his aviary farewell, and asked Meralda if she would prepare a picnic for him. When she asked what he was doing with the bag, he said he was going off on his own to become a man of the world. Hearing this, Meralda disappeared for quite a long time, and when she returned, she had Gus on one arm and Gottlieb on the other.

  So, said Gottlieb, you are heeding my advice, after all.

  I am, said Bloom.

  Excellent. Have you decided where to go?

  No.

  An impromptu journey, then.

  Yes.

  Ah, I’ve been on many of those.

  For how long will you be away? asked Meralda.

  I haven’t decided.

  You want I should go with you? asked Gus with his eyes on Meralda. There’s no reason you need to be a man of the world all on your own.

  No, said Bloom. I’m going alone. Somewhere. And I don’t know when I’ll return.

  The right frame of mind when starting out for the first time, said Gottlieb.

  Please … You must stop speaking, Gottlieb, otherwise I’ll turn around and walk back to my room.

  I’ll say no more, said Gottlieb. He mimed the buttoning of his lips.

  It’s time I knew what was out there, said Bloom to Meralda, who Bloom could see was in distress over his departure.

  As you should, said Gus.

  Meralda struck the big man on the arm.

  He’s a man, said Gus. He should go where he pleases.

  I have to do this, Bloom said. You know I must.

  And hearing this, Meralda started off to the kitchen in a state.

  She notices your moods more than you know, Gus said of her. She’s concerned you’ve grown despondent. She fears you might harm yourself.

  Gottlieb unbuttoned his lips at this point and said, He is a malignant despondent.

  Thank you, Gottlieb. But I have no plans to do myself in. Not at the moment.

  I have first dibs at that, said Gottlieb.

  Stop speaking, Gottlieb.

  I will say no more.

  Here, said Meralda as she returned with a picnic basket. It’s enough to get you through the day and the night if need be.

  I’m sure it’ll suffice, said Bloom. He gave Meralda a kiss and a tight hug, and with that, Bloom set out to the drive. He placed the picnic basket in the roadster’s passenger seat and turned over the engine. Gottlieb, Gus, and Meralda lined up before the front entrance of the villa, and as he drove off, he saw Meralda bury her face in Gus’s chest.

  When Bloom drove through the gates and moved beyond them, he began to enjoy this sensation of being alone and in motion. For the first time since reading Isabella’s letter, he felt alive in his solitude. And the more alive he felt, the faster he took the turns on the mountain road. He raced his way into the canyon, and when he reached the bottom, he accelerated into the eyesore of the construction zone, appreciating for the first time in what ways forward motion was a form of escape, and he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him sooner that the landscapes portrayed to him in his reading of other’s solitary travels wouldn’t echo through his own experience of motion. As he hurtled past one open foundation after the next, he became a simplification of himself, a small quantity of immaterial parts whose image, if he were to paint it, would consist of the impressionistic streaks of his mother’s brush. To prolong this ascension of spirit, Bloom considered if, perhaps, he should remain in motion indefinitely, if he shouldn’t turn up the coastal road and continue driving north, at the very least until he tired of the thrill. But when he reached the shore and saw across the channel the mountain peaks of Santa Ynez Island, he saw in the island’s barely visible contours the mirror image of Mount Terminus, and, without wanting it to happen, the euphoria he felt only a moment earlier reversed to melancholy. And while Bloom urged himself to ignore this reversal, it appeared as if his body and not his mind were in control of his actions, as he slowed to a halt. And sat. And stared. Thinking of Isabella. Of her body warm and alive beside him. Of her dead body mutilated in a trench.

  He spent what remained of the morning doing what he might have done had he never left his tower’s pavilion. He sat and watched. From the seat of his car, he observed vessels small and large moor at and unmoor from the docks. They arrived and departed at a leisurely pace, a pace that intimately appealed to Bloom’s sense of time. The more he saw of their comings and goings, the more he felt compelled to unmoor himself from his seat and take a stroll. He carried with him a tablet and a fistful of charcoals, and with the same impetus he felt to explore the docks, he felt a need to stop and sketch the watermarks and rust patterns he discovered on the nearby hulls of ships. Over and over again, he found himself rubbing into the paper the same shape. The very same blemish, he only realized later, as the mark on Isabella’s letter.

  When a group of merchant mariners saw him, they gathered around to watch, and seeing how skilled Bloom was, they asked if he would sketch them. Bloom spent the remainder of the afternoon deciphering the lines and forms of these men’s figures, hoping in the process to divine some inspiration that would set him on his way in one direction or another. And after some time of standing face to face with these men, he confided he was aimless and looking for a destination. They were bound for the vanilla plantations of Madagascar. That, Bloom said, was perhaps a little too far. The largest, most doltish of the men, screwed up his muscular face and said, Leave it to me. At the insistence of this man who reminded Bloom of Gus, he took several puffs from a pipe containing in its bowl a black, tacky substance, which, when lit, smelled edible. Sweet. And as soon as Bloom inhaled the rich smoke into his lungs, his head tingled, then turned pleasantly numb, and soon thereafter his limbs grew weary and his mind began to pattern the world into sequences of incongruous images and sounds. The seamen sat before him, their faces indifferent and still. They each pointed at him, but their eyes stared into the sun. Although their lips were shut tight, Bloom heard originating from inside their chests hearty guffaws of laughter. Each of them, one in succession of the other, then shut his eyes. And as each set of eyes closed, the sound of the laughter—as thunder from a lightning storm sounds as it passes into the distance—quieted into whispers. And then there was silence. Then darkness. Then a dream, in which Bloom was levitating over the su
rface of the ocean.

  Bloom woke up to the sway of water beneath him and felt running through his body the vibrations of an accelerating motor. He recognized the sensation of being in motion, and when his vision cleared he found himself in his car. It was parked on the deck of a ferry, and gathered around his windows was a menagerie of children costumed as swabbies, the group of them volubly discussing their disappointment with the fact that Bloom wasn’t dead. He opened the car door and stepped onto the deck, where he saw the port behind them had flattened into two dimensions. The definition of the coastline grew soft, and with the basin and the distant mountain range spreading out before him as would an eroding sandcastle, he had a difficult time locating Mount Terminus.

  Watching the coastline slip farther and farther away, Bloom turned to the nearest ferryman—a man with a topographical map of acne scars—and asked him when the next ferry would run back to the port. But this is the last ferry of the day, he told Bloom. All of us, he said, turning his head to Santa Ynez, we now all go home. The soonest Bloom could return would be first thing in the morning. Upon hearing this news he must have looked like a lost little boy, because at that moment, this unfortunate-looking man, who the others unkindly called Guapo, smiled sympathetically and patted Bloom on the back.

  He introduced himself as Eduardo and told Bloom not to worry, that there were very nice accommodations on the island. Because Bloom liked the way Eduardo spoke and thought his eyes understanding, he said to him, Have you ever met a grown man who has never spent a night alone away from home? Eduardo shook his head. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, said Bloom, but I’ll miss waking up to my birds in the morning. When Bloom mentioned his birds, Eduardo’s entire presence brightened. And then he asked if, like him, Bloom had a great love of birds. Bloom told him he loved his birds very much. Then come, he said, I show you a trick I no show many people.

  Eduardo led Bloom to the ferry’s stern, where from a compartment he pulled out a metal tub filled with minnows. He rolled up the sleeve on his right arm and in one deft motion sunk his hand into the water and pulled out a sparkling fish. He held on to it by the tail and asked Bloom, You are no’ very delicate, are you? Bloom wasn’t certain he understood what Eduardo meant, but he shook his head no. Eduardo, in turn, lifted his other hand to the struggling fish, placed his thumb and forefinger over its bulbous eyes and squeezed until the fish stilled. He wiped the pink ooze that had gushed onto his fingers on the legs of his yellow uniform, and now, with a hearty smile that revealed a mouthful of chipped teeth, he pointed the fish up to a flock of gulls trailing in the sky at the back of the boat.