Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  And then it happened. The unexplainable moment whose timing Bloom would marvel at for as long as he lived. Why, he would ask himself, was he not down there, but up here on the heights of the straightaway? Had Stern not stolen his money, had Elijah not felt an instinctual need to rest his heretofore unused wings, would he have been dead with the rest of them? Would he, too, have been claimed by his brother’s hubris? For this is what next came to pass.

  Some invisible, exterior force startled Elijah. He jumped from his perch and flew off down the long narrow road in the direction of the valley. The moment after he lifted away, Bloom heard what Elijah had sensed. A percussive boom, like timpani rumbling at the edge of a passing storm, echoed and reverberated against the mountain’s face, its canyons. As Elijah’s small body began to disappear from sight, Bloom felt the ground shift under him, a tremor, the mildest of earthquakes, strong enough to wobble the roadster on its metal springs. And then he heard the onrush, whose sound was equivalent to nothing Bloom knew of in nature; it was a sound that made his ears ache; as it intensified, it transformed into a vibratory hum that bathed his skin, shook the cuffs of his pants, the sleeves of his shirt, clattered his teeth. He tried to speak, but he couldn’t hear his words. Words erupted from his mouth, but the oscillation of the pitch neutralized them. There was no rush of wind, no rustle of leaves or brush, no chips or chirps of insects or birds. Before he ever saw what was producing it, there was only the blanketing sound, an ocean of it, an entire planet’s atmosphere of it. From his vista, he could see miniature figures, ranch hands, horses, cattle, all turning northeast, looking off in the same direction. None ran. None moved at all. They just stood paralyzed. And before Bloom had a chance to think a rational thought, the sound’s source arrived, and when he saw what it was that was generating what he imagined the voice of God to sound like, Bloom said, and did not hear himself saying, Oh God. Oh God. Oh Gottlieb. Poor Gottlieb. A wall of water, fifty, seventy-five, one hundred feet high, an enormous wave of tumbling brown water, lifted, splintered, devoured all of what stood fixed on the landscape. All that the water had made possible to arise was now being reclaimed. Houses and barns lifted off foundations, tractors and trucks were tossed into the air, bodies of men and women and livestock snuffed out. Like every sentient being who had beheld the maelstrom before it arrived, Bloom, too, did not move. He thought to turn over the car’s engine. He thought to turn and run, to climb the dead tree. He could see the trajectory of the water channeling through the valley in his direction. He could see its behemoth force pressing its behemoth mass up the canyon’s straight road. He could easily imagine an arm forming from its amorphous heap, and it reach up and out to him, pull him back into the vortex of its maw. Yet he still did not move. Instead, Bloom watched the muddy head of the beast, the golem, crash against the rise of sediment and rock. He watched it funnel its force up the narrow canyon road. He watched its reach extend up at an unimaginable speed, and as it ascended to him, he knew, if he survived this moment in time, what it was he wanted. If he survived the leviathan born of his brother’s ambition, from his most feverish dreams, he knew where he would go. If he survived the End of Days foreseen by his brother’s accountant, Mr. Dershowitz, if Bloom didn’t become flotsam, or some buried archaeological curiosity for some future digger, he knew where he belonged. In this arrested moment of time, he saw it in his mind. It was clear. It was true. He knew now where it was he had experienced his truest happiness. And he knew now the rarity of true happiness. And he knew now for whom his father had decided to live apart, to abandon all. In the face of the oncoming fist, Bloom could see the desk set before the window. He could see the ocean’s vast expanse, its uninterrupted view. He could see Estella looking off to the swells rolling endlessly from the horizon. And, he thought, how blissful and at peace he had been there, how easy it would be to lead a quiet life of dreaming there. A quiet life interrupted only by the sound of the sea, the sight of Estella walking the rocks, the pleasant piano music in the evenings, fishing off the coast with Eduardo. Isabella would be free to go to Simon, and Simon would need her now. He would need someone to help see him through this atrocity. He would need her to help him understand the unmerciful ways in which Death visited the world. He would need the child to distract him and comfort him. Bloom was not so cruel as to deprive his brother of these things. Yes, thought Bloom. Yes! he screamed at Death as it rushed to him. Yes! he screamed at what he believed was his inevitable slaughter. Yes! he screamed loud enough to hear his own voice over Death’s approach. And he screamed again, Yes! when the muddy fingers were only yards away. He gripped hold of the steering wheel and shut his eyes, and he waited, and he waited, to be swept away, to be pulled in, to be overtaken, consumed, and then …

  Nothing, nothing except for a misting of water kissing his face. The kiss of Death? Or was it the kiss of life? He opened his eyes to find the muddy water receding, falling back into the valley, into a roiling whirlpool of debris churning at the base of the mountain. The road below was slicked with mud, and the twisted earthly remains of cattle and horses, of men?—perhaps they were men?—began to crust over in the sun almost immediately after the retreat. Bloom thought to look, to see, if anything at all was alive, but nothing stirred, nothing groaned. He stepped out of the car to observe the scene, but he could not bear the sight. Before any more of the grotesquerie was revealed across the valley, he turned away from it. He cranked the roadster’s engine, and without another thought, Bloom circled about and drove away from this horrible world of his brother’s making. He drove up and over his beloved mountain. He slowed for only a brief moment when he approached the estate, and when he thought of looking through its gate to bid Mount Terminus one final farewell, he stopped himself and drove on, past the road leading to the plateau, and he continued down the switchback, taking turns at precarious speeds. When he reached the bottom, he drove past the gates of Mount Terminus Studios without even taking them in, and he continued on down the long stretch of road leading to the edge of the basin. He continued on through the square blocks lined with stucco homes that once stood pinned to his brother’s map. He continued on over paved roads lined with pristine curbs and perfectly appointed streetlamps, with high-tension wires cutting across shining billboards holding his brother’s image. He continued on past people who had only just become aware of what had happened on the opposite side of the mountain. They emptied out onto the streets, looked out in the direction of the valley. More and more of them congregated on their lawns, in the street, some weeping, more speechless. They sat framed in open windows, unmoving, and on he continued through the throngs, onward to the port, where he parked his car on Eduardo’s ferry, and he stood with his friend, his true brother, his fellow lover of birds, and he told this dear man he had missed him, and Eduardo embraced Bloom, and, in an effort to lighten the mood, he said to him, I have made friends with a pelican who perches on my boat in Willow Cove, and upon hearing this, Bloom was overjoyed, and with Eduardo at his side, he continued on to Santa Ynez, and he continued on around the island road in his car, and he drove under the braided ficus trees up the lane, and he parked near the strawberry lupine and amethyst blazing stars, and he greeted Guillaume hello at the foot of his trapeze, and he walked inside the home of La Reina del Fuego, and he was greeted by her, by the beautiful, melancholy Estella, who, as he was about to tell her about what horrors he had seen only hours earlier, took hold of Bloom’s hand and walked him upstairs to a room painted with pink and yellow toucans, and there she lifted up from a small bed a little girl with dark skin and dark curls hanging in ringlets over her eyes, and she placed the child in Bloom’s arms, and said, She has been waiting for you to return.

  AFTERWORD

  Bloom would never again set foot on Mount Terminus. For that matter, he would never again leave the island of Santa Ynez. He would remain with Estella and Eduardo and his daughter, Gisele, who he came to realize the moment he held her in his arms was the one true love he was meant to protect over all other
s.

  He wrote to Isabella some days after he arrived on the island, and in this letter he explained to her the reasons why he couldn’t return, and he explained to her why he thought it best she go to Simon with the news of their child. Bloom would always love her, he wrote, but it turned out he wasn’t the man he thought he was. He was merely a man. An ordinary man capable of feeling the same ordinary jealousies and anger as any other ordinary man.

  After some weeks had passed, Bloom asked Eduardo if he wouldn’t mind collecting his belongings. Everything in his studio, his clothes, his father’s devices, the books in the library, and his birds. He wished also to have Manuel’s journals. Meralda, who chose to remain on the estate with Gus, to see Isabella through her pregnancy, had packed the former, and Roya, who chose to leave her sister for the first time in her life, would travel with Eduardo to carry the latter. Bloom added his books and his father’s devices to Estella’s library and his birds to Eduardo’s aviary. The room whose windows overlooked the oncoming waves of the sea, Estella had kept for Bloom’s return, and there he looked out onto the open expanse with no threat of it ever changing. In its mists, in its abstractions, in the infinite wonders of the sea, he would dream up island worlds for Gisele as real as any other.

  In this room, Roya would sit by his side, and together they would reflect on the ocean in the same manner they reflected on the reflecting pool, and here in this room he would watch her grow old, and together they would draw panels for hundreds of pictures that would never be produced. In this room, among the growing collection of unmade movies, Gisele would visit him, and together they would draw and paint, and like Bloom, like her grandmother, she had a unique eye and a fine hand, but like her mother, she possessed a stately calm that allowed her to control her internal flame. Estella no longer mourned the death of Guillaume. She no longer dwelled in the darkness of her past. The moment she felt her child growing inside her, she knew there was no longer room for her grief. She removed all the artifacts of her former life from the walls, closed the house to visitors, and said her final goodbyes to her long-dead husband, to her nightly rituals.

  As for Simon, like ancient rulers of old, like pharaohs and emperors, his legend would grow, for both his remarkable achievements and his monumental miscalculation. Not unlike Don Fernando Miguel Estrella’s, his city and his fortunes would continue to rise, despite Bloom’s brother being nearly destroyed by this moment of infamy. Bloom wouldn’t hear of its aftermath until Gus and Meralda, newly wed, delivered the story. No structure throughout the valley remained standing. Not one. Everything had been swept away or buried. Thousands of head of cattle, all varieties of livestock, mingled with human bodies and fence posts and shards of buildings and heavy equipment. Human limbs, feet, arms, and heads were buried in mud, not among them, to Bloom’s great relief, Gottlieb’s, nor Hannah Edelstein’s, nor Hershel Verbinsky’s, nor anyone else who nurtured Bloom for those years he spent on the plateau, as Gottlieb, God bless him, on the day Bloom was to meet them, forced his colleagues to hike up the side of the mountain and join him in the canopy of an ancient oak whose elevation was just high enough on the mountainside to miss the oncoming rush of water when it was released from the dam. And this is how they were spared. Gottlieb, who would complete Bloom’s final picture without him, the man who would be remembered best for this picture, The Death of Paradise—because the timing of its release and because its true creator had disappeared and was rumored to have been lost to the onrush of the great flood—would die much later, in a comfortable bed, in his sleep, on a Mount Terminus estate whose doorways, ceilings, windows, and furniture were built to accommodate Gottlieb’s small stature, so that when men and women of normal height visited him, they were made to stoop and crouch and look most awkward and uncomfortable in his presence, which, of course, Gottlieb took great pleasure in.