| |
Naked flame
She stands with a naked flame
I stand with the sons of Cain
Burned by the fire of love |
 |
—U2, “In God’s Country”
1987 |
|
 |
|
he western states had entered a drought that would last six years, dryness unheard of since the Great Depression and once again accompanied by record-breaking stock market crashes. Fires had swept and scourged the wind-ramping foothills of California, in the south feeding on slopes of bleached brush, mummified trees and undeniably thirsty cacti. Some burning was attributed to human misconduct; some must have been in Nature’s agenda from the start.
The planned community of Chaparral Heights was unfazed, and perhaps strangely invigorated. Here, the local standard of living was about to peak. Here was a time of fervent growth, of prosperity and proliferation. Tract housing was being spread like peanut butter across intolerably underexploited pasture, covering those long bare-faced wilds where the counties of Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino meet, where the skin of the earth is bunched and wrinkled over an intersection of quiescent geologic faults.
It had not yet been declared a city but already contained the necessary facilities and services. The population had nearly doubled since the previous year’s development of the plateau on the south side. Many of the existing hillside homes and businesses had undergone conspicuous renovations at the same time. A new road was planned to cut through Chaparral Canyon and offer more direct access between the bustling 57, 60 and 71 freeways, encouraging even more expansion.
People anticipated the end of the year with great buoyancy, decorating brightly and consuming vigorously for days and weeks on end. Street lamps were adorned with bright bows and spiraling garlands of red and green, silver and gold; the bald branches of trees were tastefully festooned with strings of electric lights that burned from dusk to dawn. “Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!” silky banners cheered silently, rippling in the frigid breeze before sunrise.
Sixteen-year-old Genevieve Morello pulled her thick wool trenchcoat tight around her spindly frame. Her teeth chattered behind raised lapels and a sneer that hoisted her upper lip with stony gusto. Here in the abrasive cold, surrounded by the boulevard’s deserted charade of merriment, she paced for warmth and waited like some kind of prostitute for him to arrive late.
Genevieve didn’t make friends in her classes, and still blamed her mother for moving to this pedestrian suburb two summers earlier. There weren’t many students at Chaparral Heights High who could relate to her on a mature level. A few were tolerable, maybe one or two could even be called friendly; but those who truly interested her were socially inaccessible, known to interact only within closed circles of friends. In most cases, they were the ones who had grown up here, and already spent several years of school together.
So Genevieve sidled herself into the faculty lounge one day and ate lunch with Aaron Handke, her history teacher. That was in October, when he still let her call him Mister. Their relationship had since pupated into a casual but secretly thrilling familiarity.
If they were seen together now, there could be a scandal, she fantasized. People would want to ask her about it.
Finally, the headlights of his Volvo appeared over the rise, casting an icy whiteness over the neutral glow of the decorations. She decided it was the temperature that made her shiver just then. They really weren’t doing anything wrong, meeting like this. It was a perfectly innocent extracurricular activity no different from the Astronomy Club’s hilltop telescope parties, or the all-nighters in the Rattle Tail newsroom when the biweekly paper was finalized. She had no real reason to feel this girlish anxiety. It was an effect of truncated sleep, and the cold. . . .
Aaron had promised it would be worth the inconvenience. That was on Thursday, the last full day of school in the calendar year. As expected, Friday’s minimized class schedule had been a series of uncomfortable captivities with no direction or purpose. Both teacher and student had called in sick and occupied themselves individually with gift shopping. Genevieve had gone to the Brea Mall and returned with the engraved Zippo she now concealed in the breast pocket of her coat.
Brake lights glowed red against the asphalt behind the approaching car and the pale gray glint of Aaron’s teeth greeted her through the windshield. The wheels squeaked mutedly as he eased over toward the curb, leaned across to unlock the passenger door, and stopped directly in front of her.
She paused to dig under the cuff of her coat sleeve and turn her loose wristwatch around to read the time. After reading the obligatory expression of shame for tardiness on Aaron’s face, she stepped forward and pulled open the door.
“Genny-y-y!” His repentance fulfilled, he bellowed heartily in his sinus-enhanced voice and flourished his arm over the open seat. She hid an apathetic grimace behind her collar and descended into the charcoal-colored upholstery. She hated his impudent custom of reducing her name to something as common as Jennifer. What was she supposed to do, call him “Aary” in return?
Genevieve closed the door with a thump and Aaron pulled smoothly away from the curb. It was warm inside the car so she fanned open her coat. The radio was struggling to receive KROQ’s broadcast of “Girlfriend In A Coma” by The Smiths. She wished he wouldn’t try so hard to mimic the trendy tastes of his students; classic rock would have fit him better. His own school days had transpired in the ’60s and ’70s, as those attending his history classes were routinely reminded.
They glided north along the boulevard, refraining from conversation as the twinkling unmanned festivities passed into the rear view.
Genevieve predicted they would end up at the library, where Aaron volunteered his free time to assist the old librarian, a man warped and made brittle by decades of reclusive research into subjects he refused to discuss in her presence.
Regarding what was said when Genevieve was excused from the room, Aaron was apparently bound by discretion. But as her own bond with him was strengthening, he occasionally relayed morsels of information to arouse her curiosity. She ultimately resented being strung along with such baubles and now anticipated a revelation of greater substance.
“Are you wearing perfume?” Aaron asked incredulously. Genevieve’s eyebrows shot up and she ducked to inhale herself.
“From last night,” she remembered. “I was at a party.”
“You went to a party?” he teased. “Did you lose a bet?” His playful irreverence alarmed her slightly but not in a bad way. At least he tried to treat her as a peer and not just a pupil, or a teenage ingénue lacking a father figure, which she might have resembled to a less astute observer.
“At the office in Pasadena, where my mom works. I think her plan was to set me up with her boss’s son,” she admitted with a thorough absence of enthusiasm. “She’s such a climber, it’s not even funny.”
Aaron sighed thoughtfully through his nose. “Well, there’s a lot of extra competition these days. All the mergers and acquisitions, you know, some people are being pushed out of their jobs.” Then, noticing the silence, he turned to see Genevieve’s contempt in full effect, the razor-like slits of her eyes performing a calculated chiffonade of his face. “Sorry,” he tried to recover, “I just meant to say—”
“Forget it.” She swept the air aside with her hand, more dismissive than forgiving.
Aaron waited a few seconds before changing the subject. “I bet you’re wondering what I got you for Yule.”
“I was thinking the same thing, but in reverse.” She did forgive him.
He emitted a grunt of intrigue. “Mr. Arthans is gone to Australia for two weeks. We shall conduct our business in the library, minus his archaic misogynism.” He grinned with the courage to look at her again. She watched the road. Genevieve held a straight face more expertly than anyone he knew, but he had convinced himself that he could divine certain thoughts from the unruly blinking of her eyes. His readings now indicated that she was engrossed in gleeful imagination. Whether it was true or not, he felt like Santa Claus.
“No hints, then?” she proffered stoically like a combatant in a gentlemen’s duel.
“After you,” he parried, flaunting his restraint.
The two were electrically en garde for the short remainder of the drive. Soon the Volvo lurched over the driveway and into the parking lot of the library. They coasted around the side of the building and parked in a space reserved for staff, not on display to the boulevard.
The last stars had faded from the west and the sky was steadily adding definition to the landscape. In minutes, raw sunshine would hurdle the Chino Hills and breach the secluded canyons one by one.
He turned off the engine but kept his hand on the key, the key in the ignition. Assuming he was trying to hear the end of the song, Genevieve waited quietly with her arms folded as if she wasn’t thinking of him at all.
Being here brought out a strange youthfulness in Aaron, something from behind his public image as teacher and citizen. She never tired of watching that self-consciousness fall away from him like a heavy, ill-fitting suit. This was when she felt closest to him, during these visits to the library. Here they could be more purely themselves, vulnerable, willingly charmed by books and ideas into a state of opiate sincerity. Especially while inside the building, they became tuned to a frequency at which everything resonated with poetic importance.
Not even the cantankerous glowering of old Sidney Arthans could ruin that mood completely. Without his interference, they would bask in the unadulterated spirit of the place. Anything is possible, she marveled discreetly, hopefully.
Disregarding the unfinished song on the radio, Aaron twisted the key out of the ignition and turned in his seat to face her. “Maybe this requires a set-up,” he said, squinting. He shifted his jaw to one side and back again. “You’re in Mrs. Luján’s Spanish class, right?”
“Español Cuatro,” she confirmed with an Anglo drawl, extending four fingers.
“In your junior year? Not bad. Have you thought about switching to Latin?” A pause. “Español being a Romance language, of course.”
Chills of serendipity zig-zagged through Genevieve’s nervous system. She lost control of her face—it brightened, and the smarmy angle at the corner of her mouth went soft. Aaron tried to read her blinks; whatever they meant, he liked it.
All she said was, “Let’s go inside.” By the time Aaron had retracted his seat belt, she was up and out of the car. He had to watch for a moment as she strode briskly, almost weightlessly toward the front of the library, never looking back.
It was a good sign.
Genevieve made a beeline through the door to the laundry room and slammed it behind her. She couldn’t know that the way she moved was exactly like her father: an infuriating automatic smoothness that said this one wouldn’t be shaken by the likes of you. But the slamming door was a tell inherited maternally. There was more of Bernadette in the girl than there was of him. This was Bernadette’s only advantage at times like this. She knew how to hurt herself.
It could have been worse. If Genevieve had so quickly developed below the neck instead of above, Bernadette might have been a grandmother at thirty-four. They’d still be in that Windy City slum where pigeons shit on everything, instead of making steady payments on a two-bedroom condo in sunny southern California.
But things are only steady until they’re not. That’s what Genevieve didn’t want to understand. There was no reward for righteousness in the real world, but there were penalties. This one might have set them back another year of sharing the Datsun, if Bernadette read the signals right.
The garage was pitch black except for the red-lit button of the door opener mounted on the wall. It was quiet and peaceful but she had to go inside and apologize to her daughter.
“Can’t you see how trashy it is to be called a priss by your mother?” Genevieve’s arms wrapped her abdomen like she was both chilled and nauseated by the apology, nevermind the offense. “If that’s the high-class lifestyle you want, have it by yourself. I’ll stay poor and keep my dignity.”
Somehow Bernadette was caught off guard and her fight instinct welled up again. “Where do you get off judging me and my career? I got some news for you, kid: if I did things your way, we’d be up to our asses in debt right about now—and snow, I might add.” And she wished she hadn’t mentioned the last thing; she knew what was coming by the sudden deadpanning of Genevieve’s face.
“That’s another word for cocaine, I hear.”
There had been some at the party, shaped into neat little lines on the backs of CD cases. Each managerial staff member got a copy of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas along with a Kenwood player. But only the Inner Circle, as Jerome liked to call them, were invited upstairs to the Executive Lounge for a private party above the party. Bernadette was there when Genevieve ran out of patience for Jerome Junior’s martini-breath’d bumbling down on the dance floor. He had his father’s bar voucher which entitled him to unlimited free drinks while his father’s lesser employees were expected to start paying after two. Senior had slipped an extra Ulysses to each of the rent-a-tenders so they’d look the other way and let his kid have a good time. “Hell, he’s in the limo with me anyway,” he said. That and fifty bucks was good enough for the help.
Bernadette couldn’t help remembering the bar by the airport where she worked months five and six of her pregnancy. Enough was enough when she took an order from a guy who got the side of his neck slashed with a broken ashtray mid-sentence. Some people never had to be around savages like that. The baby’s father never did. Bernadette saw what she wanted and took it upon herself to get it. She shared blood with the baby and felt herself lightening, rising, graduating.
Jerome’s wife carried the square plastic platter and a tightly rolled hundred dollar bill around the room, herself partaking after each of the guests as if in reciprocation. In the fifteen minutes Bernadette was in the Lounge, Jerome’s wife served three rounds of White Christmas. Bernadette had declined twice and gauged each response carefully. No matter what, she had to look like a team player. Jerome’s wife was a signal reader too; Bernadette’s second, weaker refusal confirmed that three would be the charm. Everyone else was doing it.
The music from the dance floor came through speakers in the upper corners of the Lounge. Songs were selected in advance by Jerome’s wife; they ranged from classic Hollywood carols to popular radio hits of the year. The DJ clumsily cross-faded the end of Dean Martin’s “Winter Wonderland” with the beginning of “A Hazy Shade of Winter” done by The Bangles. It was from a wonderful Christmas-time movie called Less Than Zero that Bernadette absolutely had to see. Jerome’s wife would take her. It was a date.
“Here, honey, just try it once and see what all the fuss is about.” She made something like a wink with both eyes and abruptly occupied the inadequate space between Bernadette and the arm of the couch. “I’ll hold everything for you, and it’s just one deep breath.” It no longer seemed to be a question. Jerome’s wife was on a mission to prove or disprove something. She didn’t look as shrewd as she was.
“First, exhale all the way,” she said like a hypnotist. Bernadette was engrossed in self-consciousness and did as she was told. She closed her eyes and leaned forward, and in a moment felt the scraping rim of rolled paper enter her left nostril more deeply than she would have thought necessary. A clammy French-manicured fingertip pressed the other nostril to close it off. She thought of Mister Spock’s Vulcan mind meld technique and wondered what Jerome’s wife was trying to read.
The door opened and suddenly nobody was talking. Bernadette opened her eyes and there was Genevieve blinking at the floor. Only The Bangles carried on in the stillness: “Seasons change with the scenery / Weaving time in a tapestry / Won’t you stop and remember me?”
A tiny, disbelieving puff of air dislodged from Bernadette’s lungs and a quadrant of the carefully arranged powder vanished into the blurry cashmere of Jerome’s wife’s sweater.
Aaron lifted open a hinged section of the hexagonal counter surrounding the staff desk at the center of the floor. He motioned with exaggerated chivalry for Genevieve to be seated, mockingly supporting her hand as she stepped onto the low platform.
The desk was her favorite place to sit in the library. The surrounding expanse of desktop was flawless, polished like glass and rarely cluttered. Several books, newspapers and maps could be examined at the same time on its generous workspace. The wood was dark, dense and always cool to the touch. Two people could put all their weight on any of its beveled edges without causing the slightest creak or bend.
“Should we flip a coin, or would you rather go first?” Aaron’s hands were flat against the desktop and for a moment Genevieve imagined that his solid form was just a reflection of a more fundamental reality contained in the wood. The library was indeed having its effect on her. Without any confirmation she knew that they were truly and privately alone, the three of them. She felt it with a certainty that transcended any empirical satisfaction to be gleaned from investigating the premises. As if the library’s genius loci spoke to the cloistered clerical center of her being: The mean old man is far away. Now it is you I wish to serve.
“Genevieve?” Condensation evaporated from where his hands had been a moment ago.
She snapped back to the calculation at hand—why they were here at this ridiculous hour. She couldn’t start melting all over the place. There remained the potential of anticlimax if Aaron went first. He must have had something really special up his sleeve which, if she were to follow it, would diminish her presentation of the little cigarette lighter. He didn’t even smoke.
“Okay,” she said and reached under the lapel of her coat. The box was like something a wedding ring comes in, sturdy and velvety with a spring-loaded hinge that whacked the lid down like a bear trap. Part of the engraving service was to dress up the rest of the package. It all punctuated the gift’s thoughtfulness which had to substitute for the extravagance she would have liked to bestow in Yuletide spirit. She set the box between the places where Aaron’s hands had left their auras of vapor. Those were gone and the box sat alone. It seemed forever before he saw it, then looked at her . . . he shifted his jaw, and finally reached for it.
Aaron’s eyebrows were up a little as he opened the box, then they were up all the way and a smile broke first around his eyes and quickly spread to the rest of his face. Genevieve’s heart doubled in delight. If only in that snapshot, it was clear to see that Aaron was genuinely thrilled. He knew the thing’s meaning and it lit him up from the inside. She was successful and gloriously relieved; the seconds were no longer minutes. Nothing could go wrong from here.
“You’ve been paying attention.” His voice had something new in it. “More than I thought, and certainly more than The Terrible Old Man could ever guess.” It made Genevieve shiver, this thick sound riding low on the back of his words. It connected in her mind with the chill she had felt out there on the sidewalk, the compulsion to justify the circumstances to herself. His voice now was the same as the voice in her head had been, sly and persuasive in veiled naughtiness. Misbehavior was indeed happening between them. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said, “and you know, maybe it’s time for us to shift gears. I mean, we’re totally friends. The teacher-student thing is just a temporary situation. At some point we’re just going to be two citizens of America, right?”
She quietly ignored her thrashing pulse and allowed a coy smirk, pleasant but almost neutral in expression. “And?”
“And . . . well . . .” Aaron plucked the mirrored brass Zippo from its nest of molded felt-plastic and laid the open box on its side like the mouth of a sacrificed bull. Taurobolium, said the library over his shoulder. Renatus in æternum. He paused to observe what he had done—maybe to hear the same words Genevieve heard. Then his eyes and his thumb were going down the four engraved letters, and up again, and back down. Before Genevieve could blush, he flicked the lid open shtink! with an oddly practiced flourish of the wrist and almost in the same moment ground the wheel against the flint. Sparks met the fertile wick and the fire started.
“Igne Natura Renovatur Integra,” he recited. “I knew you were special before you ever talked to me outside of class. Did I ever tell you? No, I’ve held so much back. I was afraid of . . . unintended consequences. I was blind. But from right here I can see that it’s all been on purpose!”
He stood the stalwart little torch next to the vanquished box. Their eyes met and reflected light-upon-light into each other. The flame itself was doubled by the lacquered desktop, and again twice in two pairs of eyes, the image multiplying exponentially like zygotic cells.
“From now on,” he said, “you will know everything I know.”
Genevieve grinned. “I already knew that.” A single lustrous tear perched on her eyelashes until she laughed and leaned more forward than ever before.
[from Latin]
Of Ferrymen.
Until life releases you, the Beyond is distorted to your senses. Therefore summon a helpful denizen of the realm to carry you. These creatures respond to Song, so called though it forms by no voice of breath. . . .
Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? the glistening, half-ethereal figure moaned and gyrated before him. It wasn’t much threatening in appearance, but Sidney Arthans had not attained his age by letting his guard down. The Præterea was not a place to tempt fate. He held his position and watched, and noted the similarity between this creature’s wailing and that of a Maori shaman he once limbed with the silk of a shearing-worm. The odds against meeting that one again were beyond astronomical. No, this had to be the scout he sent for.
If you’re the one to lead, then lead, Arthans spoke in the telepathic language of the Præterea. It was not a stirring of air, as sound is manifested physically, but a controlled agitation of a medium that contained his consciousness and the other entity. By what means he effected the agitation, he could not aptly visualize. Empiricism was not among the Præterea’s useful features. His travels through the realm had depended largely on faith and risk.
He trusted his books above all, even above his own judgment. And for the first time in decades he had left the books behind. The sense of oblivious disadvantage was intolerable.
His scout began to try his patience. Where do we go-o-o? Where do we go now? Now now now now now now now! It danced serpentine and kicked up clouds of emptiness. Sweet child! it declared, then repeated with tantrum-like sustain. Just as Arthans considered possible methods of slapping it in the nebulous head, it projected its tether in the fashion of a chameleon’s tongue. The tether attached itself to Arthans and the scout flipped away into the distance. For a moment Arthans perceived a building tension, then a fantastic acceleration nearly tore his perceptions to tatters. He was hurtling and tumbling in something that might be called a direction. The ride was hired.
As always in those scrambling intervals of brute velocity, he lost the struggle to hold his mind together. Every thought was flung free of him as if by centrifugal force. Through the void he reeled, hardly more than a void himself. Before it was over, all of his characteristics would be reduced to one: a dumbstruck fear of annihilation. There was room for no other awareness in that last elemental shard of instinct. Mercifully, other than the barest traces of subconscious abstraction, he would record no memory of the journey. He could never be sure how many times he had done it.
Evidently, his debris was carried along behind him in a sort of slipstream vacuum, for at the end he would regain mindfulness in layers as his various homogenous components fell into place and fused like sedimentary rock. First, memory was resolved, and thus his perceptions could be oriented in context; then the physical senses would activate, usually one by one, in no consistent order. In that respect it was not unlike waking from sleep.
To observe the unconscious repose of his body in the Brisbane hotel room, nothing could be said of awakening or of traveling. In all forensic practicality, Sidney Arthans had not once moved from his bed. But he knew different.
Sometimes upon waking, one realizes a feature of the physical environment that must have been responsible for part of a dream. Now Sidney Arthans heard with ears the basis of his scout’s frivolous antics. “Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place / Where as a child I’d hide / And pray for the thunder / And the rain / To quietly pass me by.” It was a song to be heard blaring from the open windows of cars. Now it seemed to come from a small radio in a room where he was. “Whoa-oh-oh, sweet child o’ mine.” He wondered if the singer had Maori blood. Then came the refrain: “Where do we go? Where do we go now? . . .” Arthans began to feel the action of the lungs and heart just as a sparkling blur established vision through the eyes. As soon as he could walk, he would discover where exactly he had gone now.
“That’ll be hard to beat,” Aaron said once the Zippo was in his pocket. “But I’ll do my best. Let me show you something.” He took her hand again—it was cold—as she stepped out from the desk and down from its dais, gently pulling her a few paces away. “Wait right here, don’t move.” He trotted energetically—something Genevieve had never known him to do. He loped up the main staircase and looked out through the front entrance. His keys then jingled in his hand as he approached the upstairs office, opened its door and disappeared inside.
She waited a few seconds and heard a curious noise that made her think of a baby elephant. It was under the floor—under the desk, more precisely. She started to call out but fell utterly silent and still. Her mouth and posture froze in the middle of inhaling. No amount of blinking could break the surreality. The great central desk, their altar of devotion, was growing taller. It rose out of the floor with just a whisper of friction against the carpet’s edge. As the five walls gained height, the open side of the hexagon facing the main stairs became a deep entrance into a wooden chamber like the cell of a honeycomb. But as the structure rose further, Genevieve saw the carvings. Her voice returned; she stammered into her fingertips, staring, until Aaron was back at her side.
“It’s okay,” he said with a hand on her befuddled shoulder. “Don’t worry. That disturbed me too. Old Sid got a kick out of it. He was friends with the woodcarver who did most of the decorations here. Eccentric. Bizarre sense of artistic license.” What most jogged Genevieve out of her lapse was Old Sid—another thing Aaron wasn’t known to do. He usually kept up an air of polite restraint regarding the librarian, not once using any nickname in reference to him. It was almost always Mister Arthans, sometimes Sidney, but never Old Man or Old Sid. Genevieve saw a dry husk of pretense peeling away from all surfaces. She was becoming less separate from the truth of things.
But those carvings did not speak to the true soul of the library, not in Genevieve’s mind. She decided that they were merely ornaments, intentionally pungent in their renderings, perhaps to suggest that no great revelation can be had without a little madness. Art was always to be given benefit of the doubt, after all. And so was Aaron.
“The switch is in the office, behind the punch clock on the wall,” he told her. “I’ll show you later. How much do you know about local history?”
The question came out of nowhere; she could only balk expectantly.
“Well, let’s take a look at it. Come on.” His hand skidded lightly from her shoulder down the length of her arm and closed around her fingers again. He stepped ahead of her into the desk-booth, anticipating her reluctance. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Genevieve . . . thought you would have known that already.” His smirk then was enough to prod her courage.
There was room for at least four to stand comfortably inside. It was unlit but for the unobtrusive library lamps glancing softly, a furtive investigation, into the open side. The air within smelled of treatments for wood furniture. Genevieve expected that by touching the walls she might smudge herself with some oil or stain, or adhere to a tacky coat of varnish which might capture evidence of her.
Looking straight up she saw the library’s six-spined pyramid and the ring-shaped sextet of curved overhead light fixtures on chains whose thick eye-bolts peered down from the ceiling’s triangular wedges. The lights, the chains, the spines and the central vertex aligned concentrically from her perspective. If not for the plastered opaqueness of the ceiling, the whole thing might have been a rifle scope for a giant sniper hiding inside the earth to assassinate something in the sky. They stood where the great eye’s pupil would be. Their descent began so gradually that Genevieve was not aware of it until the chained lights were obscured by the walls of the chamber.
“How did you do that?” she blurted, having noted the absence of controls within reach.
“Sensors built into the machine. Did you know that this library was the first bit of construction that became Chaparral Heights?”
“No,” she said, more entranced by her surroundings than by the subject of real estate development. The wooden walls ended and a cross section of the floor crawled up around them like the end credits of Reality, a trite and predictable movie for which the theater would now offer an extravagant refund.
“Sid Arthans was one of the group that laid the plans. He had a lot of connections with crafty people: architects, artists, inventors . . .” Under the floor was an empty space whose dimensions couldn’t be seen by the meager trickle of light from above.
“Alchemists?”
He smiled in the dark. “Them too. I guess you must have heard of the Rosicrucians, right? Where else would you pick up that Latin motto? Well, they’re just the frost on one exposed point of an iceberg so deep that no one has found the bottom. Heresy, it’s called. What does that word mean to you?”
Before she could answer she had to giggle under her breath at his theatrics. In the acoustics at the bottom of the hexagonal shaft, Aaron’s voice bore an unmistakable resemblance to Vincent Price in Thriller. He must have planned the timing of this. She played along, not wanting to be a hitch. “It’s when the church says you’re way out of line.”
“Okay, fair enough. That’s what most people think, so maybe that’s what the word means now. But when you follow history, you can’t miss the fact that modern English words all come from older languages.” Genevieve’s genial sigh alerted him that he had slipped into lecture mode. “But I forget who I’m talking to,” he added with a stifled chuckle. Before the ride ended she nudged him from the side with her hip, softly so as not to push him off balance. For a split second, unless Aaron was mistaken, she had lingered against him.
[from Spanish]
To Vouch for the Initiate
Those of false faith trade in coins and seashells. No earthly goods will buy the truth we seek underground. To walk wakefully among our shining Cousins is to possess a second life. Only by willing sacrifice can new eyes open in the depths. . . .
The voice startled him; he hesitated before looking up, trying to concoct an instant disguise for the situation. “I said how’s it on ya, mate?” He steadied himself. Cold crystallizing peril fanned like fern leaves across his skin. Something in the voice was wrong, but he couldn’t hold any real doubts about who spoke.
“Sorry, the library’s closed for the day,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster. A cursory glance up the stairs caught him in a double-take. It wasn’t who he expected. “Oh, hi. You . . . work at the video store, don’t you?”
The video store clerk began plodding leisurely down the stairs. “Look around you, mate. All the world’s knowledge and dreams, and then some. Hell of a bridge to burn, isn’t it?” He was a shy Bangladeshi teenager. He had no business using that faded Australian accent, mimicking the mannerisms of Sidney Arthans so precisely that Aaron couldn’t move from his seat.
“I’m afraid I don’t know quite—” He stopped himself with a quizzical grimace.
“There’s a lot you don’t know, mate. That’s natural. And it’s natural to sneak a peek on your own time, so I don’t fault you there. Maybe you can guess what my complaint’s gonna be.”
“What the hell is this?”
“Come off it, Handke! Playing dumb is beneath you. You know good and well who you’re looking at.”
“Sidney!” Aaron’s face betrayed sudden anger at having been confused. “Well! Another technique you’ve kept to yourself . . . so to speak. This explains a few things I’ve wondered about.” Now he realized that he had been covertly preparing himself for this moment. Aaron’s loyalty had been squandered on the old secret-keeper, and he meant to expose the inequity now.
The kid chuckled—or was that an involuntary spasm of the torso? If so, Sidney smoothed it over with a swarthy, short-toothed version of his own smiling face. “You talk as if you’re owed something, Handke. As if you didn’t just shuffle into town a few years ago because they were hiring public babysitters. How time flies! Now you’re looking for a way to take your little waif downstairs and charm her panties off with parlor tricks.” He was at the bottom of the stairs, looking at Aaron with curiously unfocused eyes.
Aaron paused, but felt his resolve steadily cementing. “You told me yourself, Arthans, that every mind is its own sovereign, and that only two in willing cooperation can begin to read and write each other. Or was that just one more lie? You obviously have other tricks up your sleeve.”
“It’s not what you know, mate.” He pressed ashen elbows on the desktop and leaned forward lasciviously. “It’s who you know. See, a little birdie heard it on the grapevine and then he painted me a picture. It was a simple shape set on fire. Can you guess the shape?” Aaron took him to be describing an episode of technical clairvoyance. That was nothing new with Sidney, but the terms of his metaphor suggested more complex methodology than he had ever bothered to disclose.
“A hexagon,” Sidney answered his own question with grating rhetorical sarcasm. “And I thought to myself: What has six sides and is flammable? . . . And I looked closer at the canvas, and down in the far corner, down under, reclining unawares, was me. And I got my nose right up close to the paint, and it smelled like a smoker’s breath, and the hexagon was a mouth and it SCREAMED AT ME!” Aaron flinched at the shrill and warlike demonstration and irately bolted to his feet; the backs of his legs knocked his chair across the interior of the hexagonal desk.
Coming through that adolescent face, the smugness of Sidney’s laughter eliminated prudent retreat from the options in Aaron’s mind. He might have simply taken a condescending rebuke and gone to align with other comrades, but crass schoolyard gloating was not an acceptable term of this apprenticeship’s dissolution. Despite his relative inexperience, Aaron had come too far to subject himself to this arrogance. There would be war between them now.
“You’re not the only shop in town,” Aaron said. “I know someone you don’t know.”
Heresy descends through Old French and Latin from the Greek hairesis which meant choice. The word we know today is a perversion of its original form. Self-determination never was a crime until it inconvenienced the powerful. Rulers of dark ages were always the greatest of criminals; vainglorious brutes suffocating the rights of others, scheming bridge-trolls whose menace forbade free passage to destiny.
“Lovely abyss you have here,” Genevieve quipped impatiently. “You must save a lot on light bulbs.” It had been a few seconds since the platform arrived at its lower terminus.
Aaron returned to the mood with a subdued snicker. “Just a sec.” He left her side and she listened to his feet on the floor: five or six steps across ceramic, or something like it. It was a big enough space to host a modest echo. “Okay, close your eyes.”
She did and felt a surge of expectation. But when she opened them again, the room was revealed to be plain, rectangular and devoid of anything but utilitarian track lighting mounted along one wall. The platform had descended into a corner opposite. There might have been room for a volleyball court if no spectators attended and nobody bumped too high. The floor was minimally remarkable: the tiles were hexagonal, the gaps between them narrow as coin slots and empty of grout.
“Ta-daa!” Aaron gesticulated lavishly. “So what do you think, huh?” Genevieve looked around one more time and then just stared at him blankly, unwilling to express disappointment. He held his pose for a couple of breaths and then wilted with laughter. “I’m messing with you; it’s over here.” She followed him across the empty room with bemused reluctance.
He stopped at an apparently predetermined spot, though Genevieve could not see why. She stood next to him and waited with her eyebrows arched.
“Romance languages,” he said. “You know Spanish and a bit of Latin. Learn more Latin if you can—Greek won’t do any harm either, but that’s another matter. A little story before we continue, about local history. Just the abridged version.”
Her face was placid. “I’m listening.”
“Okay. Colonial times. The United States were popping up on the other end of the continent, and over here, the Spanish had control. The Catholic missions they built were like regional processing plants for the indigenous people. In this area, the San Gabriel Mission dealt with a tribe called Tongva. Ever heard of them?” Genevieve shook her head. Aaron nodded. “Not many people have. Mission Indians is the term you hear most often, but more specifically, Gabrieleño. History is written by the victors, right?”
“I may have heard that somewhere.”
“It’s almost always true,” he said. “Almost.” He took another step toward the far wall. Genevieve gasped.
The tiles ahead of him silently broke ranks and began to sink. Nearest the wall they sank faster and deeper while those at their feet conceded only a few slow inches. Eventually all the hexagons came to rest in a succession of broad, jagged stairs. The lightheartedness of Aaron’s jest was flushed out of the room, down through an archway uncovered in the bedrock below the nondescript wall, riding a new current of air delivered through the shaft in the ceiling behind them. In return for the swallowed atmosphere the underground emitted a subtle radiance that Genevieve’s eyes tried in vain to recognize as a color.
Caught in a dreamlike allure, she found herself wanting the track lighting turned off. Aaron obliged without any prompting. When he returned to her side she was holding her hand out and he took it again. With small, tentative steps she allowed his easy tug; they moved onward and downward into the inhaling throat of the earth. The soft, elusively colored light gathered on their faces like a dusting of celestial talcum.
The last words Arthans pushed through the kid’s mouth were “mutinous son of a bitch,” just before his grasp went numb in a shuddering darkness. Then the darkness also faded, unveiling the Præterea. For once, Handke had done something unexpected; Arthans had no immediate recourse. But the underestimation had gone both ways. Each was more resourceful than the other knew. Arthans now felt an anxious urgency to make his way back to Queensland and begin the physical task of exorcising this gremlin, with outside help if necessary. Feeling big with a fawning schoolgirl on his arm, Handke wouldn’t know what hit him.
First it would take some hitchhiking. Arthans composed himself to the best of his ability and started to modulate the signal that would draw a scout to his position. A certain degree of calmness was required to produce the right tone and hold it steady. Vengeful indignation buzzed within him and interfered with his efforts, distorting the beacon. He began to entertain a fear that he would accidentally attract danger. The Præterea was a domain of untold violence when it wanted to be. What few stories he had heard and read were generously sufficient substitutes for first-hand knowledge.
Preliminary analysis of Codex VVI
W. G. Coyman, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, August 1973
The volume in our possession is ostensibly titled Viaticus in Veritas Inremeabilis. The front and back covers are loose tablets of petrified wood, species undetermined, comparable in size to a tabloid newspaper. Both faces of each are roughly but deliberately carved with geometric figures and patterns. The tablets are fragile beyond doubt, yet perfectly intact and ably preserving the pages pressed between them. The book is unbound, only held together by the will of its keeper. Neither are the pages numbered; it remains uncertain that the complete contents are present, or that the order in which they are found was that originally intended. The “paper” is of unknown composition, bearing traits of leafy vegetation and animal hide. Each page has ragged edges which appear to have thickened and scarred in response to cutting. No two pages are of uniform dimension; the smallest is a mere strip like a cash-register receipt, the largest is folded in half so as not to protrude beyond the covers.
The assumption of the title is based on the first page presently encountered upon removal of the front cover. Two lines of writing are centered in a bizarre filigree of floral motif. The first line exemplifies an unidentified language which is interspersed throughout the pages. These markings are not clearly alphabetical, diacritical, glyphic or otherwise, yet their situation suggests an analogy to the recognizable script directly below it. This of course is the aforementioned Latin title which means for a journey to truth from which there is no return. Featured on other pages in varying combination with Latin and the unknown cipher are passages of Spanish text. Differing consistencies of penmanship and drawing style indicate multiple authors, but no identities are recorded. It appears that the Latin and Spanish portions were penned by someone(s) either affiliated or familiar with the Catholic Church. One of the most striking illustrations near the “conclusion” of the book is a rather monstrous corruption of the image of Christ on the Cross, annotated only in that alien language which hardly resembles the work of a writing utensil. . . .
She had been affected by the first traces of light, he noticed, and so he took no chances. Down the staircase he had held her hand; through the catacomb he had also supported her elbow; as they walked out to the observation deck, her knees weakened under the magnitude of what she saw. His arm went fully around her like the binding of a splint. Her mind stumbled as well as her body. None of the library’s secretly splendid curiosities had stirred an inkling of the vastness that was concealed below.
It was an impossibly spacious cavern, vaulted above like a shallow airplane hangar, extending far and wide enough to account for a block or more on either side of Chaparral Heights Boulevard. Gaping before them, no floor but a gargantuan chasm negating the earth, hundreds of feet across, its depth obscured by the cloying density of the light—that which had traveled like a volitional mist up through the winding corridors to greet them in the staircase room. Its incognito color was all the more intoxicating here at the wellspring.
“This is as far as we go,” Aaron said. “I’ll show you the safest way to get a good look.”
Lying prone on slats of rustic but splinterless lumber, Aaron and Genevieve each gripped the base of a sturdy brass post supporting the safety rail over their heads. Air from the entrance hurried across their backs and plummeted sharply over the chasm’s edge as if compelled to hug the rocky vertical face. They pulled themselves forward carefully until the deck ended at their collarbones and their heads emerged into bottomlessness. He admired her in profile: eye glazed with vertigo, hair dancing in hellbound breeze, mouth open in a mute aria to the gloaming void below. Finally she whispered “Jesus” and the blinking of her eye slowed to a stop.
“Genevieve.” He touched her arm. “Hey.” She was dead still, but with no rigor or limpness to suggest anything but serene reverie. Her body reacted consensually when he grasped her above the ankles to pull her inward from the precipice. Her gaze was suspended in downward understanding like Mary in the Pietà when he rolled her onto her back. He shuffled to a new stance and scooped under her arms, lurching with poor balance until she sat more or less upright. She didn’t flinch or make a sound as he peeled away her coat and then, more nervously, her striped cotton shirt whose long sleeves had to be comically stretched during removal. He was relieved to discover her sensible taste in bras. The sturdy undergarment would support an argument that no gratuitous trespass had taken place. A ghost of perfume waved from the warm clothes as he gingerly coiled and deposited them under her head.
“If you can hear me, Genevieve, please trust me. I will never hurt you or lie to you.” He was modestly confident that she was simply removed from her body, floating discarnate in the chasm’s uncanny light. But his devotion would leave no room for flukes; he assured himself as he assured her. “I know you’re aware of the library’s soul. It’s not your imagination. It’s alive, and it loves us very much, and it wants us to be a family. You want that too, don’t you?” He brushed some hair from her forehead. “I hope you’re not cold. Don’t worry; this’ll be done in a minute.”
First he knelt by Genevieve’s shoulder and and arranged his supplies. From a thick wool sock he disgorged a leather bundle that was rolled like a little sleeping bag. He untied its two fastening cords and spread it out, a belt of several pouches. With two fingers he ducked under a flap and removed a slender vial of a granular substance. Upon closer inspection he noted irregular shards like ground glass that soaked up and concentrated the ambient light in a kaleidoscope of starry razors. After a moment he pulled his eyes away and set it down by his knee. From another pouch he produced an ivory flask which he rocked next to his ear; it contained enough for now, but he would have to restock. Genevieve could help him finally break into Sidney’s medicine cabinet. He smiled to himself and laid the flask beside the vial, then returned to his feet.
Run-D.M.C.’s “Christmas In Hollis” wound down and a showbizzy orchestra took its place, ushering in some tipsy crooning to satisfy the older crowd: “Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? / In the lane, snow is glistening . . .” Genevieve stood uncomfortably with her hands clasped in idleness. She missed snow. She missed everything that was not Jerome Junior.
“I wouldn’t even go under your clothes or anything,” Jerry panted, staring at the lowest point of her V-cut. He had just performed a well-lubricated if rhythmless dance medley featuring the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch, stirring the cauldron of his overconfidence. He was blissfully unaware that half a dozen other dancers had stopped to absorb the hilarity and were still watching him as he strutted back to Genevieve to begin his horny sales pitch. “It’s just, like, I wouldn’t go too fast with a woman like you. I’ve seen you around, and you’re like, you’re not the same as most girls. ’Cause they’re just girls, right? I mean, you know what I’m saying? So come on.” He nudged her squarely on the boob with the forearm of his drink hand.
Instead of stepping back with good-humored bashfulness, jostling the buffet and tipping a miniature Christmas tree into a platter of deviled eggs, Genevieve frowned in disgust and set her jaw, baring a wedge of teeth between curling lips. Jerry’s face drained of color and his leering eyes sobered instantly. A howl of mortal fright was lost in a roar of flames spewing out through his sport jacket and acid-wash jeans as if from pockets full of gunpowder. A cloud of expanding gases raced to fill the ballroom. The flames rapidly enveloped him and he collapsed on the edge of the dance floor, shriveling to a fetal crescent, a blackened pipe-cleaner puppet of himself.
The smoke seemed to condense the air into a liquid, then a hazy syrup that held everything in slow motion. Genevieve stood defiantly, covered in a crumbling layer of sooty ash and asserted with her scanning eyes that she had every right to do it. A few bystanders regarded her briefly and without further reaction before returning lethargically to their own silent activities.
Genevieve, said the library, take.
It had never spoken her name before.
Was this dream a new form of communication from the genius loci? She remembered what was said when Aaron laid the open box on the desk. Latin words pronounced with a strange, lisping accent—she had not encountered them in the course of discovering the motto for the lighter. She had privately toyed with the idea of further study, but it took Aaron to give her a real reason. But now without learning she knew that taurobolium was the slaughter of a bull in tribute to the Great Mother, giver of renatus in æternum, the eternal rebirth. Lightning and wind can destroy a forest, but instead of ancient wastelands the typical results include uninhibited regrowth, free of the competition that once crowded so dense. By fire nature is renewed whole—the abbreviated inscription on Genevieve’s gift to Aaron—I.N.R.I. . . . From right here I can see that it’s all been on purpose!
Jerry’s spontaneous combustion meant something. She didn’t make it happen; she had only scowled at him. Some viciously protective force like a mother bear had acted on her behalf. What would it mean to “take” this as an offering? She saw herself standing on the apex of the library with clenched fists, pouting like little Drew Barrymore and flinging fireballs at everything that moved. She looked down from the clouds and saw all of Chaparral Heights burning in the moonless dark like a huge hieroglyphic sigil whose outline she could almost identify. She watched from the moon’s surface as the continents of Earth flickered with amber measles through a choking soup of charred atmosphere.
He opened his eyes inside a blindfold and took deep breaths through his nose—his mouth was taped shut. The side of his face throbbed and prickled with nervous activity. His hands and feet were bound in a single junction behind his back. In a few moments his spine and joints made a chorus of sharp complaints. Tears came to his eyes. He rocked himself feebly to assuage the aches until he heard someone’s shoes in eager approach.
“Who’s there,” he groaned in pain and swiveled his neck. “Why are you doing this to me!” The words were muffled beyond coherence. “Stop! Stop it!” A starchily sleeved arm hooked him at the elbow and he was hoisted until most of his weight was off the floor. For a bruising, abrasive minute or two he was dragged clumsily through some kind of corridor, bumping back and forth between facing walls and the legs of his abductor. Then the walls subsided and he detected a breeze on his sweaty skin. If the air was moving, maybe he was where someone could hear him. In a sudden desperate exertion he screamed with all the volume his nostrils could convey. When his cry echoed back to him, betraying the cavernous gulf, he went immediately quiet.
Down again; the manhandling ogre released its grasp on him. He slumped like a sack of dead weight onto grainy wooden planks, just flexible enough to bounce him once before settling. Every bodily discomfort was present and accounted for, but his mind was in the paralysis of despair. It was simply the way of things. His number had come up.
A man’s raspy, nasal voice broke the silence, short of breath from a recent labor. “Remember what I said: there’s nothing to be afraid of. The spirit of this place is waking from a long sleep. When it finally opens its eyes, our faces will be seen first. We’ll be like its parents—or its children, maybe.”
The cord between the bindings of his wrists and ankles released its tension. Cathartic relief washed over his knees, shoulders and back, evoking a subconscious murmur of gratitude.
“And then we won’t have to fear anything . . . ever again,” the voice said.
Now two arms snaked under his and pulled him upright with much determined grunting. His tied feet met the ground as one and he wobbled, muscles sizzling with exhaustion. With all his powers of concentration he achieved an independently wavering stance. The hands left him to his task.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he hummed again into the tough adhesive membrane, more plaintively than before. “Who are you?”
The ligature around his ankles slackened and was removed. He maintained the position of his feet, though a wider stance might have been a small comfort. He dared not impose upon his own liberation. He kept still and waited for his hands to be unbound. When they were not, he could have kicked himself for raising hope. Of course the ordeal was far from over—he was stupid to grasp at his imaginings. A hand arrived on his back, clutched his shirt and pressed forward as a fist. He stepped and faltered; the hand moved to his shoulder and another arm went around his ribs. “Steady now, you’re doing fine,” the voice whispered into his ear. It sounded like a teacher’s practiced encouragement. A teacher—
Fingers pried into his waistband and hastily tucked in his T-shirt while shuffling feet circled below. After this was done and the feet stopped at his side, he felt a sprinkling of grit on top of his head. A hand rubbed it into his hair, scratching the scalp. More of the stuff was deposited around his neck; some was held in place by perspiration while the rest fell through his collar. The hands patted him down and he felt the substance roll and bite like splinters against his skin. But these pains were negligible next to the cruel urgency of uncertainty. Animalistic stimulants drizzled into his bloodstream, bracing his nervous system in anticipation of every conceivable trauma.
The blindfold came off. Something was wrong with his eyes; light wasn’t behaving normally. He squinted and blinked until the scene came into steadier focus. Before he could mumble an exclamation he felt the shove between his shoulder blades. He lumbered forward into a somersault of sheer panic. He instinctively jerked his arms to throw them ahead, but the ties dug stubbornly into his wrists. The ground went out from under him and his internal organs lifted away from each other in the dread weightlessness of falling.
But he did not fall. He floated in the tranquil embrace of the nether light.
“The ancients believed that a human soul is like a recipe,” Aaron said, watching stuporous relaxation come over the limbs of the video store clerk. The body rolled slowly away end over end, levitating over the great chasm at ground level. Each time the face rotated back toward the deck, its features were more peacefully settled.
“Things like intellect, emotion, conscience—those are ingredients for character. Identity. But it takes more than that to make something alive in this world. The formula has to be activated by a catalyst.” Genevieve lay unmoving and most likely deaf to his words, but the rehearsal would do him good. He had no lesson plan for this subject. And if he stopped talking, he might silently convince himself to stop what he was doing.
With the kid drifting in the corner of his eye he looked at Genevieve whose skin had erupted in goose bumps. She would not be cold for long, he thought, making a neat circular mound of the pulverized substance on the gentle arch of her sternum, a couple of inches up from the miniature bow of black ribbon concealing a clasp between the padded cups. “Excuse me—a front clasp, Genevieve?” Aaron raised one eyebrow and shifted his jaw to the side. “Does your mother know you wear this stuff?” He paused to contemplate the bizarre dynamics involved in that remark.
He hoped that he understood this procedure correctly, remembering the times when Sidney’s intervention had spared him some tragic disfigurement or death. It was Sidney who had administered this “vaccine” to Aaron so that he could stay conscious down here. Despite their stony estrangement, he found that he could not wage war on his mentor without remorse. But like everyone who clung to the letter of the law without feeling its spirit, Sidney Arthans was inevitably doomed to run afoul.
Only in the unexpected clarity of that confrontation last night, when Aaron felt the feathery nudge on his arm, did he first perceive the will of fate—the library’s will. It signaled zero hour and he struck without hesitation. Sic semper evello mortem tyrannis. Humanity would rise again from these millennia of disoriented hobbling. He and Genevieve together would light the way.
In the end, there were no set instructions for navigating destiny. There was just one unbreakable rule: No Going Back. Aaron picked up the ivory flask, removed its cap and leaned over Genevieve like a timid surgeon. He tipped the vessel’s mouth carefully over the glimmering anthill on her chest.
The fluid poured readily as water but held a stream more like thin oil, its flow marked by a suspension of miniscule bubbles or globules. When it had evenly saturated the stuff below he turned the flask upright and resealed it. He replaced it and the empty vial into their respective pockets, never moving his eyes from the soggy pile of granules on Genevieve’s skin. He thought it might have acquired a deeper tint but was far from certain.
A brief whoosh in the middle distance turned his attention toward the chasm. There was a brilliant inferno where the kid had been. A beige mushroom cloud billowed in flight from a multicolored chrysanthemum of fire. Flaming bits of clothing and rendered fat were shed into the depths. Fortunately the body succumbed to gravity as it blazed, passing swiftly down into the cool fathomless fog of light, out of view.
On Genevieve the two substances had melted into a clear solution like liquid candle wax. Aaron’s eyes widened as the puddle contracted, leaving a perimeter of faint redness to mark its original coverage. Then the redness faded inward as the fluid dwindled to a mere droplet and finally disappeared, leaving no trace of either ingredient.
He would not have time to dress her again before she was restored to lucidity. Regardless, he could not hide anything from her without breaking his word. He considered draping the trenchcoat over her like a blanket, but it was already too late. She took a deep breath and fluttered her eyes open. A healthy blush surfaced on her cheeks.
Aaron had never felt such an intense combination of relief, empowerment and epic liability. It must have been the feeling in the heart of the first hominid to wield fire for his own advantage. From that point on, he thought, we were of a new nature: us against the world. He sat beside Genevieve and slowly bundled his kit, waiting for her first question.
On Christmas Eve Bernadette sat at the dining room table and realized that she could not concentrate on paperwork, emergency be damned. It was Jerome’s fault for getting the math wrong in the first place. She should have been wrapping presents or baking cookies or something. No wonder Genevieve preferred to bury herself in another book with her bedroom door closed. If not for the potted fir with its helix of demure white lights on top of the entertainment center, it might have been any other crummy night of the year.
But the television caught Bernadette’s wandering eye and she was ensnared by pangs of innocent nostalgia. She thought of her daughter’s round little face and eyes when they watched this together for the first time, years ago. She was already dabbing at her mascara with a paper towel when Linus took the stage and commanded a spotlight. He was the weak Peanut, expected to suck his thumb and cuddle the side of his face with a blankie. Now he dangled the blue fabric at arm’s length in wide, earnest gestures and recited by heart from the Gospel of Luke.
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.”
The phone rang intrusively. Bernadette shushed it and cinched her lower eyelids to better focus on the true meaning of Christmas. The ringing went on. It was probably Jerome, in which case she didn’t want to hear it. She had her first breath of holiday spirit and was determined not to smell the fumes of shop talk.
“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.”
Ring. She regretted throwing away the manual. There was a way to make the machine answer on the first ring. Call screening, that was the name of it.
“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”
Ring.
“Oh, what the hell’s so important—” Her nostrils flared and she inhaled abruptly. She slapped the tabletop and stood up. Sure, why not? She could see A Charlie Brown Christmas again next year. Or go rent the tape on her own time, after the mood was long dead. Fabulous.
Genevieve stared at the tangled mesh of curved hatching with its intermittent outbreaks of loops, dots, dashes and smudges, and areas appearing to have been scrawled over doubly, the second time with a solvent that paradoxically subtracted an additional message into the one behind it. She could not imagine how this abstract confusion should correspond in any capacity with text rendered in the Latin alphabet; however, its mass was segmented and delineated in a maddening parody of the Spanish calligraphy at its side.
| | Here reside pagan hordes of such magnificent savagery as the Cross can never tame. With power to work terrible miracles they fear no injury or death. My trembling hand writes this of which I have no doubt. Theirs is the stronger kingdom, the more trusted ally of Heaven. | |
Above the two paragraphs was a drawing in the style of stained glass, its details assembled in a fusion of cellular enclosures. They were two armed warriors locked in combat, bodies and weapons streamed with blood. In one hand, like a shield, each figure held the severed head of his opponent. The heads smiled agreeably.
Her mother knocked at her door. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
She tucked the leathery page behind a pillow. “Yeah . . .”
Bernadette came in and looked around uncertainly. Genevieve lounged in bed with a hardcover edition of Firestarter borrowed from the library. Bernadette sighed, “It’s Christmas Eve, you know.”
“And?”
Deciding not to complicate the conversation, Bernadette said, “Listen, we just got a call. A kid from your school has been missing since Friday. His name’s Ozzy Something? Works at Small Screen Cinema?”
“Kazi Mahmoud?” Genevieve dropped the book against her chest. Kazi was in her Honors English class and belonged to the Dead Languages Club, which he encouraged her to join when they first became acquainted. “He’s missing?”
“Yeah—Kazi,” Bernadette said. “They said he walked out of the store on Friday night, and nobody saw where he went. His mom and dad are going crazy. You don’t know anything, do you?”
It was around the start of the school year. He had been sitting behind the register when she returned The Exorcist. He slid the cassette from its plastic shield and cleared his throat, calling her attention to Small Screen Cinema’s “Be Kind, Rewind” policy. It was meant to amuse Genevieve more than chide her, and she apologized with a sheepish smile and eye-roll.
“Ego te absolvo,” he said, quoting the demon from the movie. I absolve you. |
|
|
