He was bored. Terminally bored. Neither the Indian Antigone—impossible to remember names—nor the countless other big-hipped, short-legged, long-waisted, laughing, weeping, lactating girls he had auditioned in London had managed to cure him of his boredom. They had tried, all of them—he couldn’t doubt their sincerity any more than he could make fun of Ottavia’s earnest pleas. They had walked him through the meat stalls of Smithfield, through the thornier copses of Hampstead Heath and the shadowy buttresses of the flyover on the backside of Westbourne Grove. They had mixed vodkas and whiskies and ragas and rap in an attempt to entertain this foreigner who wouldn’t be entertained. They did it for money. He knew that. But that had no effect on his inability to find either joy or purpose, aesthetic or reason. And Ottavia. It was only to give Ottavia something else to do besides worry over his leaky pores that he told her about Malory and the Pip. He wasn’t sure exactly why. But he had memories of each of them, images of tranquility before something began to piss him off, as it had done with Cristina—done so thoroughly that all former happiness was chased into some distant cell of his brain and bolted shut.
In the week since his return from London, Tibor hadn’t spoken—not to Cristina, Ottavia, Nurse, Bomb Squadder, or anyone. It didn’t matter. No one really wanted to hear what he had to say. College Girl was no different. Tibor sat on a stool. The bartender, who was at some kind of college himself, studying communication, reached down into the well for the bottle of Absolut. Tibor waved him away with an index finger and pointed to the soda siphon and a lime. The bartender shrugged. Tibor set his plastic bag of clams down on the bar and lowered his mouth to the straw.
“Hey, Tibor,” College Girl called to him. Tibor looked up at the mirror in the bar, but the image of the bottom of the girl’s stilettos crisscrossing behind the bourbon was too vertiginous. He turned. “This guy’s a foreigner too. Where’d you say you were from?” Tibor looked over to his left. There was a man, the only other customer in the Seven Veils, sitting two stools away. He was sipping on a vodka and tonic and staring intently as the girl’s legs exposed then hid then exposed again, as if he was studying for a final exam.
“Jed-dah …” the man said.
“Jed-dah!” the girl repeated. “They got dollar bills in Jed-dah?”
The man didn’t understand. Tibor took out his wallet and handed him a five, making it clear with a thrust of the chin that he should carry the bill directly to the girl on the towel as Tibor had in years of defending his belief in the multiplicity of pleasure. The man hesitated. He had a bag on his lap. There was a bit of delicate negotiation before he could place the V&T and the bag on the bar and trot the bill over to the stage. He was compact—that was Tibor’s thought—Malory-sized, although his hair was cropped in short Arabian curls. Tibor had cast an Algerian in his first Dante production back in Rome—as the homosexual Brunetto Latini, if he remembered correctly. The Algerian was a Muslim, Tibor recalled that much. He’d come back to the Dacia once or twice, had a perfectly good time, Tibor thought, even without drinking the vodka or eating the prosciutto. Dora, or was it Brendushka, had taken pity on the guy—Tibor couldn’t remember the rest. The Seven Veils was a long way from Jeddah, so maybe College Girl would take pity on this poor schmuck.
“Wanna dance?” She’d raised herself up to a standing position on the stage and was lazily scratching an itch on her left shoulder blade with her rolled-up towel. On stage, in stilettos, she towered over the man from Jeddah, who held Tibor’s five in embarrassed supplication. “Whaddya doin in the Seven Veils if you don’t wanna dance?”
“Give him a dance, Rache,” the Bartender called out. “I saw his wallet. Full of Benjies.”
“Aha!” Rache—was that really a name? Tibor wondered—said. “A rich guy from Jed-dah! Where is that? Somewhere in Es-PA-ña?” She stepped off the stage and nudged the man with a practiced fingernail back onto his stool.
“Saudi,” Mr. Jeddah said, still wondering what to do with the five.
“Live around here?” She nudged his knees apart with both of hers.
“Boston,” the man said.
Tibor turned back to his water. He knew that in seven and a half minutes, College Girl would have the guy’s passport number and two, if not three of the hundred-dollar bills the Bartender had so expertly spied. Except for the Algerian, Tibor couldn’t remember knowing any other Arabs, any other Muslims. Rumania in the days of the Sheikh and Sheika Ceauşescu wasn’t comfortable with any show of obeisance except to the holy couple. There had been a few Iranian refugees in Rome before he and Cristina left, but then, they weren’t really Arabs, were they? He had been happy in Rome, hadn’t he? Cristina had been happy too, even with her mopping and dusting and burping babies that belonged to other people. And she had been happy again when he’d discovered Ottavia in the godforsaken icebox of Santa Sabina. There had been chances—even after he had run off to an organ loft to hide from a terror worse than any he’d felt searching for mines in the delta of the Danube. There had been chances, even after Fatebenefratelli, even after the red-bearded doctor lost their child and disappeared. Malory would bring another chance. After all this time, maybe Malory was right and he was wrong. Malory would bring the Pip. The Pip would show him the answer.
“We Muslims believe,” Mr. Jeddah said, with a muffled sound that told Tibor exactly where his mouth was. “We believe there is a body and there is a soul.”
“Really?” Rache said, and Tibor could hear her voice descend in pitch and placement. But the man continued.
“The soul is connected to the body in four different ways: as a fetus in his mother’s womb.”
“Ah …”
“After birth.”
“Mmm …”
“When a person is asleep.”
“That’s three …”
“And …”
“And …?” Tibor could hear the rustle of money exchanging hands.
“And on the Day of Resurrection, soon to come, insha’allah, after the Caliph of all Islam reveals himself.”
“But tell me, Mister Jed-dah,” Rache went on, “in case I missed something. If I’m not mistaken, at this moment, you aren’t being born or sleeping. And the Mahdi isn’t hanging around this joint. Am I right?”
“Yes,” the man said, with a glance over his right shoulder at Tibor. “That is correct.”
“So while the soul is AWOL, whaddya say we take a trip back into the VIP room and check out the body?”
Tibor continued to stare at the water. But he could tell that the man was standing, the man was walking.
“Let me just clear out the mop,” the Bartender said, and ran down the far end of the bar and out the back.
Tibor looked down the bar. Rache had locked her arm in Mr. Jeddah’s—these may have been the first V&Ts in his life—and was whispering something in his ear that Tibor was sure signaled the exchange of a few more hundred dollars.
And then Tibor saw the bag.
The man had left his bag on the bar, the plastic bag he had been cradling in his lap until College Girl came along and began her dance. And through the opening of the bag, Tibor could see a barrel, a handle, a trigger. Mr. Jeddah had a gun. Tibor thought of saying something—to the Bartender, to Rache, to Mr. Jeddah himself. But that would involve speaking.
He also thought about taking the gun.
He looked back at his water glass and up to the bottles of liquor ranged along the mirror at the back of the empty bar. He looked up into the mirror. And that’s when he heard the music change.
A guitar. An electric guitar, a low note, a slow trill, approaching from a distance, like a Ducati along the Lungotevere, or the first notes of “Foxey Lady.” As it grew closer, the guitar was joined by the treble tattoo of a light stick against a ride cymbal, tinsel and sparks. And then a pulse—not too fast, slower than a heart, but insistent, warming. An electric bass pushing rhythm into song. Tibor looked up into the mirror.
There were four of them, on the stage where Rac
he has been crossing and uncrossing her legs, four girls. The guitarist was a very young Charlotte Rampling starring in The Sound of Music—all dirndl and translucent eyes. The bass player was a female David Hemmings—Carnaby Street cream shirt open past her delicate cleavage. The drummer was knee socks down to the bass pedal and tartans past the snare—the kind of Japanese anime porn outfit that always made Tibor’s visits to Ottavia’s Scottish academy more interesting.
And then there was the bulletproof lead singer of the group, Ramboed to the nines, booted to the max, with a hat from a lost Ark big enough to disguise a meter-long plait of raven hair bound up in a double-helix with a jackknife and a bungee stick.
“Unimaginable …” she sang, or said, or said and sang in a way that sounded like Patti Smith cynicism. “More than imaginary. Unimaginable …”
ACROSS RIVER ROAD, IN THE FARMERS’ MARKET, LOUIZA SAW THE GIRL and something gave out inside her. Or maybe something gave out even before she saw the girl, something that made her just want to fold her knees and settle on the hard earth of the round barn. Louiza steadied herself by one of the six poles that held up the roof of the shed and focused her eyes on what she was certain had sent a wave, a field, a beam of particles, a message of some sort to her and caused her to lose balance. She saw the girl from her right side. The girl was in profile, short fair hair hanging straight down to her earlobes, cut in a saw-tooth fringe at the forehead. She was filling a paper bushel sack with apples. She was wearing linen in a canvas color, a long-sleeved smock over rope-colored moccasins, no jewelry, no makeup. The canvas, against the yellows and greens and spotted browns of the late summer apples, was almost mathematical in the way it divided what the girl was examining from what was behind. Louiza stared.
“Hello,” the girl said. Louiza said nothing, but continued to stare. “Hello,” the girl said again. Other people turned to look. This was Louiza’s cue that she was back in the real world and that she could safely speak without being taken for a madwoman. The Unimaginables had been playing louder in recent months. Vince came to her more and more frequently with problems to solve. Mr. MacPhearson spoke to Vince in a way that Louiza wasn’t supposed to hear. There had been an exponential rise in the chatter on the Internet, on mobile phones, and even hidden within the print of major newspapers. With the help of the Unimaginables, Louiza was taking the chatter from all these key sources and from a significant number of insignificant ones as well, and with her elegant method of dividing by zero, focusing the messages into a lyric that Dodo could sing in her crystalline voice. Only Louiza could hear Dodo, of course, since Dodo was Unimaginable. But the woman speaking to her now was very real.
“Hello,” Louiza said. “Do I know you?”
“That depends,” the girl said. “Have you ever been to England?”
England? Louiza thought. What an odd thing to ask.
“No, I guess not,” the girl said. She smiled. Imperfect teeth, Louiza noticed, but a perfect smile. “Do I know you?” the girl asked. She lowered her sunglasses—Louiza realized that the girl was wearing sunglasses, very large sunglasses—and looked at Louiza. Her eyebrows were straw, almost canvas-colored themselves, but her eyes were a pale blue that … yes, perhaps Louiza did know her. The accent. The girl was a foreigner like her, but not from one nation in particular, an equation with more than one solution.
Unimaginable, she thought. Was this girl one of her Unimaginables? Louiza had lived alone with her girl band of zero-dividers for so long that she was less than completely surprised to find one of them buying Granny Smiths at the Farmers’ Market on River Road. She tried to make sense of the girl’s pale blue eyes, match them with the appropriate electric instrument, match the sound of the girl’s voice with the Unas and Dodos of the Unimaginable world. But it wasn’t the name of a girl that came out of her mouth but, unbidden, the name of a city in which she had once experienced, or so she thought she remem bered, the unimaginable.
“Rome,” Louiza said. “I know you from Rome.”
Now it was the girl’s turn to stare. It didn’t bother Louiza. It had been years since she had a chance to look at anybody. The one photograph she had of her mother among the sugar beets on the farm in Norfolk had long since stopped looking back at her.
“I grew up in Rome,” the girl said, “on the Aventino.”
“Malory,” Louiza said. “Malory,” she repeated. “Do you know someone named Malory?”
“Lou, honey?”
“Malory?” the girl said. And suddenly something in the entire shape of the girl aligned itself into an equation that Louiza recognized.
“Lou?”
Louiza felt the grip on her arm. She closed her eyes and opened them again, hoping the nightmare wasn’t real. But it was Vince and the smell of his aftershave and the pitted hollows of his cheeks.
“You’ll excuse us,” Vince said to the girl, “we have to get home.”
“Please,” the girl said. “We were having a very nice conversation.”
“I’m sorry,” Vince said, with his military politeness that ended all conversation. “But my wife hasn’t been well, and we’re pressed for time.” And quickly the world turned and River Road was in front of Louiza and they were walking to the car.
“Wait!” Vince was just buckling Louiza into the passenger seat when the girl ran up, sunglasses back in place. “You forgot your apples.” She handed Louiza the bag. Vince smiled and closed the door. Louiza couldn’t tell what the girl was thinking on the other side of the glasses. But Louiza was as certain it had something to do with Malory as she was certain that she hadn’t bought any apples.
Poor Malory, Louiza thought, as Vince turned the car and headed back up River Road. It was a combination of words that often came to her even after all these years, remembering how touched she had been, waking to the Vespers bells with her head on his chest, remembering how he’d carried her in his arms from that cold church down the streets of Rome, yes Rome! The more that Louiza lived with Una and Dodo and Terri and Quatro and all the Unimaginables, the more she began to imagine another universe in which, strangely enough, Malory continued to appear. Not as her husband, per se, although she had only the vaguest idea—no fault of Vince’s—of what a husband might be. But as a presence, a presence not always separate from her. She held conversations with the Malory in her mind, not just about Schrödinger and not just about cats, but about bare feet and snow and catching fireflies in an empty jam jar. There were long periods of the day, long days, maybe long weeks, when she heard organ music—not just faint, imagined music, the way just the buzz of electricity in the walls can make one imagine a little bit of Bach—but full-throated St. George’s, Whistler Abbey, organ music with stops out and pedals blazing and Louiza giggling, giggling—something she hadn’t done in years—with the Pip in her hand.
Louiza could barely remember Malory’s face. She could remember Malory’s number, –78, identical to hers. She could remember the sound of Malory’s voice, curled on her chest, resonating inside her like a sideways eight with its infinite regret—the regret of not saying goodbye after that day in the organ loft of St. George’s, not turning back to explain why she was leaving, why she was accepting the invitation of the Americans, why she was taking that red hand with the red hairs and stepping into that car, stepping into that Morris Minor, and then onto a plane, first to Rome—she was certain of it—and then across the Atlantic to this only imaginable world where everyone, from the beige-suited men to Vince, Mr. Kolodney, herself, and all the cats, were half-dead and half-alive.
Vince walked Louiza from the car across the porch and into the kitchen before returning outside. She heard voices. Vince was scolding somebody, many somebodies. Louiza took off her cardigan and hung it on the hook. She reached into the bag the woman gave her and bit into an apple. Uninvited, her hand began to stroke her belly. It was true what she remembered, she thought as she chewed. Her belly had once been bigger. There had been a time—she wiped the apple juice from her chin. There must have
been. Rome. The woman with the gray eyes on the other bed. The giant with the beard and the strange accent. And life. There had been life—she took another bite—there had been a child growing in her, a child born, unimaginable if not. There had been Malory, –78, carrying her across the river, over the bridge, up the stairway of the hospital. And a child, their child, her child, Malory’s child, no other possibility, but a girl? A boy? What was it Malory had said about cats? Don’t look, they told her in Rome. A girl? A boy? Don’t look!
Louiza couldn’t resist. She looked into the paper bag. There was something on top, not an apple. A slip of paper, a phone number, a name. She looked. TiborTina.
“TIBOR!” OTTAVIA HAD NEVER BEEN INSIDE THE SEVEN VEILS, NOR IN any place resembling the Seven Veils. But it was quickly apparent to her that there was a man at the far end of the bar who was very angry with Tibor, and another man with him who was equally determined to keep the first man from attacking Tibor. Much closer, Tibor was sitting on a bar stool staring at a glass of water, while a girl—possibly the same age as Ottavia but wearing considerably less—was whispering something in a consoling tone of voice in his ear and trying to encourage him to stand. “Tibor,” Ottavia said again, and everyone stopped for a moment.
Tibor swiveled his head to the left.
“Tibor, it’s all right.” Ottavia touched his wrist.
Tibor picked up his clams and walked out the door and into the light. It took a moment for his glasses to darken. He saw the Yukon. He followed Ottavia across the street. He climbed into the passenger seat and placed the plastic bag next to him, buckled his seat belt. Ottavia opened the driver’s-side door, threw a paper bag from the Farmers’ Market and a plastic bag onto the seat between them, and then jumped up behind the wheel. She sniffed the air.
“Clams,” she said, somewhat mollified. “Water?” she said, sniffing Tibor’s face, “with a piece of lime? Well, now I expect Cristina will only half kill me.”
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