“Louiza,” the man said. “Shall we talk about Louiza?”
Malory washed quickly in the bathroom off the corridor and joined the man on the veranda. Another cup of tea, another scone. Malory was too keen on talking about Louiza to wonder whether these men had a greater variety of culinary information on him.
“My name is MacPhearson,” the man said. He was sitting back in his own wicker chair, his red knuckles wrapped around a mug of coffee. He made no attempt to rise, to shake Malory’s hand, or even to look at him, but Malory recognized the gift for what it was—a name he could attach to memories that dated back several decades. “You may remember meeting me on several occasions in the past. Cambridge, Rome.”
“Of course,” Malory said, trying to match MacPhearson’s professional coolness and masking his own eagerness with a bite of scone.
“As you are no doubt aware, I hired your friend Louiza straight out of Cambridge. She’s been working for me—doing excellent work, you can imagine—for all these years.”
“Twenty-three,” Malory said. “Nearly.”
“You’re also a numbers man,” MacPhearson said. Malory couldn’t tell whether MacPhearson was smiling beneath the mustache and beard, but he saw teeth stained with coffee and age.
“Yes,” Malory said, taking a sip, the tea too hot to say any more.
“The number of disasters your friend Louiza has prevented—do you have any idea how high it is?”
Malory set his cup down on the arm of his chair.
“But yesterday,” the man said, “she was on to something. Maybe she knew. When you saw her, maybe she was coming to tell you.”
“Tell me?” Malory said. “I hadn’t seen her in almost twenty-three years.”
“Maybe not. But she was looking for you. No question, case closed.”
“Are you certain?” Malory knew that his face was showing warmth and behind that warmth was pleasure, but he was incapable, at the moment, of discretion.
“The only thing we’re sure of,” MacPhearson said, “is that we don’t know where she is. When your friend Mr. Militaru shot himself …”
“Tibor,” Malory said.
“Tibor,” MacPhearson said. “When Tibor shot himself, all hell broke loose.”
“But wasn’t there a man with her? I saw someone chasing her, someone with you, with a brush cut?”
“A crew cut?” MacPhearson frowned.
“Yes!” Malory said, recognizing that his excitement was all about pleasing the red-headed man before him, even though this might be precisely the man who had been keeping him from Louiza for all these years. “The man with the crew cut. I saw him. I saw him with Louiza. At TiborTina, at Tibor’s house, just before.” Surely, Malory thought, this bit of information would buy him some reward. But Malory had spent the past quarter century studying physics and the internal workings of pipe organs and watching very few movies.
“I’m afraid that man is dead,” MacPhearson said, and took a sip of his coffee.
“But,” Malory said, “just the other day, the day before yesterday. At TiborTina.”
“He was in the North Tower,” MacPhearson said.
“The World Trade Center?”
“The first one to collapse.”
“He went from TiborTina to the World Trade Center?” Malory asked. “Right after Tibor?”
“He was following Louiza.”
Malory felt ill. Was this what the conversation was about? Had MacPhearson come to tell Malory that Louiza was dead?
“No,” MacPhearson said, in answer to the unasked. “We think Louiza was not in the towers. Maybe Vince was wrong.”
“Vince?”
“Louiza’s husband,” MacPhearson said, and watched Malory’s confusion with interest. “Ah,” he said, “she never told you?”
Malory said nothing.
“There’s no time to weep for poor Vince,” MacPhearson continued, far from tears. “Louiza. We have to find Louiza.”
Now it was Malory’s turn to be discreet. Louiza had married. Louiza had not married Malory. Louiza had married Vince. But Vince was dead.
“i = u,” Louiza had told Malory in the beginning. “The implications are potentially dangerous.” Vince was dead, but Malory was alive. Louiza was alive. Malory had a thought. “Mr. MacPhearson,” Malory said, and for the first time stood, “why is Louiza so important to you? What does she know?”
“We don’t know exactly who you are, Mr. Malory. I suspect we will find out, sooner or later. We know you are a physicist. We know that you know that 80 percent of what exists in the universe cannot be seen. But it’s what makes the universe stick. It’s what gives us weight, what gives us gravity. Our search used to be the same as yours—for that dark matter. But now we know that there is another force—a dark energy, an anti-gravity—that is dedicated to sending out its armies of galaxies on an endless jihad to the far corners of space, dedicated to blowing things up, as you saw yesterday, exploding towers, tumbling bodies in a perpetual freefall.
“For 13.8 billion years the universe has been expanding. And in that darkness we have never seen, sits the pitiful dribble of galaxies and stars and planets and mosques and churches and skyscrapers and gabled Victorian piles that we spend 99 percent of our time rebuilding and redecorating. But within that visible matter is one person who has a glimpse into that darkness. We have to find her.”
“Louiza?”
MacPhearson nodded.
“You think that what happened yesterday, the attack against the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, is the fault of dark matter?” Malory’s disbelief had given him a voice. “You think dark energy applies to the motives of people as well as the motions of stars and subatomic particles?”
“Do you think there’s anything else?” MacPhearson asked, and hummed the Goldberg Aria. “Come, Mr. Malory. I know who you are. I know what you’ve been looking for. I need your help.”
“My help?” Malory said. “You have been keeping Louiza away from me for twenty-three years and now you want my help?”
“Yes,” MacPhearson said. “I want your help. We are looking for the same thing.”
“And if I refuse?”
MacPhearson set his hands on his cane and shrugged. “You’re free to go.” He pointed to the far side of the gate. The Driver, Malory’s Driver, was standing at the passenger door of the car that only a few days before had driven him to TiborTina. “Your driver knows how to find me, if you find Louiza.”
Malory walked off the veranda and down the gravel path to the gate. He felt larger, taller than when he’d awakened to the sound of the Goldberg Variations. MacPhearson knew something, but Malory knew more. Without turning back, he sat in the car and waited as the Driver closed the door and returned to the wheel.
“Oh, and Mr. Malory.” MacPhearson hobbled up on his cane and motioned Malory to lower his window. “Mr. Malory,” MacPhearson said, leaning heavily on his stick to bring the remains of his red beard and his coffee-stained teeth to window level with Malory. “If you find that girl, please let us know.”
“Which girl?” Malory said, willing the Driver to back up and leave as soon as possible.
“The girl who left that fourth set of fingerprints on the gun.”
“Yes?” Malory said, thinking of those fingers wrapped around his arm in the innocence of the pasture below the Blue House, her excite ment about the stories of Haroun and Aldana and the remarkable treasure of Judar Son of Omar.
“We ran a quick DNA test on all your prints.”
“I see,” Malory said.
“Of course science requires a little more patience than just a day, but I thought you might like to know.”
“Know what?”
“The girl, you know who I mean,” MacPhearson said. “That girl—well I suspect you suspected.”
“Is my daughter?” Malory asked.
“And Louiza is her mother, yes,” MacPhearson said.
“But a funny thing,” MacPhearson interrupted Malory’s vision,
leaning down to the window of the car. “There’s more to the genetic test. It appears that your friend Tibor was her father, too. It all depends on how you look.”
The Driver pulled away from the yellow house with the gables. Malory heard the sound of a guitar, the voice of Dylan, or was it Tibor:
You could almost think that you’re seeing double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
Two fathers. Malory looked up at the sky. As MacPhearson saw it, there were big things and there were little things. Big things like galaxies, little things like the color-coded quarks that make up the cozy bits of atoms. But that only accounted for a fraction of the stuff that was maybe 5 percent of the universe on a rainy day. The rest was dark matter or dark energy. And Louiza.
3/2
T WAS A MONTH BEFORE I CAME OUT OF THE WOODS, BEFORE GRAVITY proved stronger than fear and I fell to Earth. My memory of that month includes water—streams, creeks, not all of them the same, a few ponds and September puddles, a lake perhaps. Above all, my memory includes the water that penetrates the forest in the slimmest of trickles, that blackens the bark of maples and birches, and mulches the leaves to an oaken rot that ferments into the colors of nightmares dripping onto softer wounds. My memory includes bugs and beetles, ants and earwigs, small things that wash in acorn cups, things that I followed at night into hollowed trunks, where I folded myself into knotholes, contracted into the shelter of a single leaf to escape the harsher elements and memory herself. Malory believed in One, Tibor in Seven. But the things I saw were beyond number.
I did my best to shut out memory. But at night the music came at me. And it came not just with electric girls in polyethylene thigh-highs and strap-on Fenders, but in a hail of falling leaves, falling branches, falling limbs more present, more horrible than any memory of Tibor’s exploded mind. The unimaginable had happened, although I couldn’t have known it at the time. Unimaginable not just to me and Tibor and Cristina, but to the world outside the forest. And the music of the unimaginable drove a wedge between sleep, thought, and imagination itself.
I don’t know how I coped that month, but cope I did. I swallowed bugs and mushrooms, licked the nighttime moisture from the naked trunks of my fortress. One tree at a time, I began to wander away from my knothole. One dawn, one week—although it could have been two or twelve—after the explosion, I found myself sitting at the edge of my creek, a hundred yards from my cabin, watching the water carry bits of TiborTina to me. I watched as cars came and went, up and down from River Road, policemen, others. And I waited. I don’t know how long I waited—hours, days, with the music louder, if that were possible, than it had been deep in the woods—sitting there on a boulder on the far side of the creek, through the sirens of the day and the Stratocasters of the night. Until one morning …
“So.”
I opened my eyes and looked around. No one. Across the creek, the morning had risen halfway to noon.
“So.” I didn’t turn around this time. “Did you find it, Ottavia?”
I didn’t need Tibor’s voice, real or imagined, to remember when I’d first heard that question, the day when Sister Francesca Splendida led us down past Mussolini’s Rose Garden to the Circo Massimo. There were twelve of us, hopping like sparrows behind Sister, down the granite steps and across the dusty oval. Along the middle of the Circo stood a crane with a cameraman on a seat. Below the crane, the most wonderful women—gowns, faces painted brighter than any in the frescoed chapels of Santa Sabina. And in front of them all, black and as large as a statue, sat a man. Sister Francesca Splendida led us up to him and stood to the side to present us for inspection. Immediately he looked at me. I knew he was looking at me.
He was different from the few men I had seen in my ten years at the convent, in spite of the black. The hair on his head was pulled back behind his ears. His beard climbed high up to his cheekbones. The whites of his eyes shone clear and direct. None of us could look away as he spoke, as he told us of seven treasures that were buried in the Circo Massimo—seven treasures that only we could find.
“Girls,” he said, “you have grown up your entire lives here in Rome, no?”
We all looked at Sister Francesca Splendida for guidance and nodded our heads.
“And you are good girls, no?”
Again a look and a dozen vigorous nods.
“But Sister Francesca Splendida and your other teachers have told you about sin, haven’t they?”
We were used to nodding by now, but did so with a little more hesitation.
“I am directing a spectacle in Rome, beginning right here in the Circo Massimo. It is a spectacle about sin, about a man in despair.” He saw our puzzled faces. “A man,” he explained, “who is confused. A man who doesn’t know which way to go. And so a teacher, someone perhaps”—and his eyes grew whiter—“like Sister Francesca Splendida, takes him on a walk. He takes him to a very special place where he sees all kinds of sin. But really, when it comes down to it there are only a few major, a few deadly sins.”
“Seven!” I didn’t raise my hand—I rarely did. Sister looked back at me fiercely, but Tibor smiled.
“So,” he said, “so small and already you understand the connection between sin and mathematics.” I didn’t understand what he meant until years later, when he repeated the story to others in an effort to make me blush. But that day, I was guilty only of the sin of pride. He was looking at me, talking to me. “Seven sins,” Tibor said. “Seven deadly sins. So girls. I need you to help me. I need you to look around the Circo Massimo, go exploring if you must. But come back to me once you’ve found an example of …”
“Lust.”
“Gluttony.”
“Greed.”
“Sloth.”
“Wrath.”
“Envy.”
“Pride.”
One by one, seven girls counted down what they had learned by rote rather than experience—although later I discovered that many of them had experienced much in the days before they had been rescued and brought to Santa Sabina.
“Ready?” Tibor asked us.
Twelve vigorous nods.
“Go!” he said. And with that, eleven girls ran off. Only I stayed, looking straight up past the beard and the hair into Tibor’s eyes.
“Didn’t you understand?” he asked me, speaking more distinctly, kindly even. I nodded again, and he turned to one of the women at his flank. But I stood there, and the woman signaled to Tibor. Now when he turned, the kindness turned to impatience.
“What?” he asked.
“I have found them,” I said. “You asked for an example of the seven deadly sins. I have found it.”
Tibor’s first reaction was incomprehension. I’m not sure that at ten years of age I understood completely. All I knew was that all the human frailties that Sister Francesca Splendida and our other teachers had warned us against were bound together by spiderweb and spit and the glue that holds together bird’s nests and the insides of atoms, bound inside the dark, dark energy of the dark, dark man sitting in front of me. Tibor understood. I saw the moment when Tibor understood. It was a moment of fear, a moment of discovery. But once discovered, once uncovered, Tibor smiled. It was a smile of recognition. Recognition of his sinful frailty. Recognition that I was someone who knew him, who, perhaps, was even a part of him, a potential companion in sin, a comfort.
“So.” The voice came to me thirteen years later, as I stood on a flattened boulder at the edge of the creek, mumbling past the first chirps of the morning birds as the air began to resuscitate the waking forest. “So.” I knew he was dead. I had seen the body before I ran, had seen it at least up to the lower jaw, the loose linen trousers and shirt, the empty tumbler, the specs sightless on the arm of the Adirondack chair, and above a darkness more complete than his beard and hair had ever been. “So.” I knew he was dead, but still the voice, the breath. “Did you find it, Ottavia?” Another treasure hunt. But what was I hunting?
While Malory was sle
eping on that afternoon a month before, I took the gift he had brought me from Rome—the flash drive containing The Complete History of Septimania—and plugged it into my laptop in the cabin by the creek. I read again the Tale of Judar that Haroun had told Aldana. Like me, Judar was good at finding things. He found the three Moorish princes by the edge of Lake Karoon. And when the last of the princes survived, he traveled back to the Maghreb with him and found the treasure of Al-Shammardal, including the Magic Bag that held all the foods one could ever wish for. What did Tibor want me to find? The Magic Bag? I turned to ask him, but he was gone. He didn’t want to be found, or at least it wasn’t time.
I walked from boulder to boulder down the creek towards my cabin. Birds, early-morning shadows, water flowing slowly, still warm, even if the sun had passed into October. I opened the door and looked around my room. Muddy boot prints on the floor, powder and dust on all my books, the handles of my few pots. My toothbrush was missing. Someone had come searching for me, searching for my things.
I remembered the wheel.
Ten feet along the far bank of the creek, the shell of a Chevy 10 that had spent the past thirty years rusting into the leaves, stood wedged between a willow and a birch. Soon after I arrived at TiborTina, I realized that I needed a secret storage away from Tibor’s unexpected curiosity—the back rear wheel well of the rusting Chevy 10. The wheel was untouched, the leather pouch still there. I emptied the few contents onto my desk inside my cabin, the few things I valued—my passport, the marble apple from the Villa Septimania, a mosaic tile from Santa Sabina, the flash drive with The Complete History of Septimania.
But strangely, the treasures refused to stay still. As flat as my desk was, the flash drive slid down towards the floor, the passport flopped open, and the apple I had taken from the Villa Septimania resisted my attempts to set it down but rolled towards me, like a kitten insisting on being picked up. Only by securing them back in the leather pouch could I keep them from falling off onto the floorboards and through the cracks into the water. My treasures, I thought. Were they urging me to get out of the cabin, moving me away from the water as surely as Judar had moved away from Lake Karoon to a greater treasure? Were Judar and I adept at finding things, or were the things we’d found using us for their own purposes?
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