She drew breath to reply, but the line was already dead. In the old days, they’d had a routine of cutting each other off in mid-farewell; an asinine game, but diverting. He wasn’t playing now, however. He’d cut her off because he wanted to be away from her. Back to his grapevine, or to the doubts rotting on it.
Well it was worth a try, Raul said.
“I’m going to go see him,” Tesla thought.
We only just got here. Can’t we stay in one place for a few days. Kick back? Relax?
She opened the sliding door and stepped out onto the balcony. It was a voyeur’s paradise. She could see into half a dozen living rooms and bedrooms from where she stood. The windows of the apartment directly across the yard from her were open wide; people were partying there, music and laughter floating her way. She didn’t know the hosts: They’d moved in a year or so ago, after the death of Ross, who’d been in residence a decade when she’d moved in. The plague had taken him, the way it had taken so many others in the vicinity, even before she’d left for her travels. But the parties went on, the laughter went on.
“Maybe you’re right,” she thought to Raul, “maybe it is time I—”
There was a knock on the door. Had somebody seen her listening alone on the balcony, and come to invite her over?
“What is it?” she called as she crossed the living room.
The voice from the far side of the door was little more than a whisper.
“Lucien,” it said.
* * *
II
He had come without Kate Farrell or her sidekick Eddie knowing; told them he wanted to look up some friends in L.A. before he rejoined the pursuit of Fletcher.
“Where’s Kate gone?” Tesla wanted to know.
“Up to Oregon.”
“What’s in Oregon?”
Lucien sipped the neat vodka Tesla had poured for him, and looked a little guilty. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this,” he said, “but I think there’s more going on than Kate realizes. She talks about Fletcher as though he’s got all these answers—”
“Fletcher’s in Oregon?” Lucien nodded. “How do you know?”
“Kate has a spirit-guide. Her name’s Friederika. She came through after Kate lost her daughter. Kate was channeling her when you arrived. And she picked up the scent.”
“I see.”
“A lot of people still find it difficult to believe—”
“I’ve believed a lot weirder,” Tesla replied. “Was, uh, was Friederika specific about this, or was it just somewhere in Oregon?”
“Oh no, she’s very specific.”
“So they’ve gone looking for him?”
“Right.” He drew a deep breath, swallowed the last of his vodka, then said: “And I came after you.” He gazed up at her with those submarine eyes. “Was I wrong to do that?” She was very seldom dumbfounded, but this silenced her. “Shit,” he said, grimacing, “I thought—maybe something was going on . . . ” The words became shrugs.
“Have another vodka,” she said.
“No, I think I’d better go.”
“Stay,” she said, catching hold of his arm with a little more urgency than she’d intended. “I want you to know what you’re getting into.”
“I’m ready.”
“And drink up. You’ll need it.”
She told him everything. Or at least everything her increasingly vodka-sodden brain could remember. How she’d first gone to Palomo Grove because Grillo was there writing a story, and how circumstances had elected her—much against her will—as Fletcher’s cremator, or liberator, or both. How after his death she’d traveled down to his laboratory in the Misión de Santa Catrina to destroy whatever remained of the Nuncio, only to be shot in the attempt by the Jaff’s son, Tommy-Ray. How she had been saved, and changed, by the very fluid she’d come to destroy, and then returned to the Grove with Raul—via the apartment they were sitting in—to find it close to destruction.
Here she stopped. Getting this far had taken the better part of three hours, and she still had to speak of the most problematic part of the whole story. The party in the apartment opposite had quieted down considerably, the various rock-and-roll of earlier forsaken in favor of ballads for slow-dancing. It was scarcely the most appropriate music to accompany what she had to say.
“You know about Quiddity of course,” she said.
“I know what Friederika’s said.”
“And what’s that?”
“That it’s some kind of dream-sea, and we go there three times in our lives. Edward says it’s a metaphor for—”
“Fuck metaphors,” Tesla said. “It’s real.”
“Have you been there?”
“No. But I know people who have. I saw the Jaff tear a hole between this world and Quiddity—tear it open with his bare hands.” This was not strictly true. She’d not been in the room when the Jaff had done the deed. But the story played so much better telling it as though she had.
“What was it like?”
“I don’t want to live through it again, put it that way.”
Lucien poured himself another vodka. He’d started to look distinctly queasy in the last few minutes—his face pasty and moist—but if he needed the liquor to deal with what he was hearing, who was she to argue? “So who closed the door?” he asked her.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Doors open, doors close. It’s what’s on the other side you need to know about.”
“You already told me. Quiddity.”
“Beyond Quiddity,” she said, aware that the very words carried a palpable menace. He looked at her with his green eyes now bloodshot, breathing rather too fast through his open mouth. “Maybe you don’t want to know,” she said.
“I want to know,” he replied, without a trace of inflection.
“They’re called the Iad Uroboros.”
“Uroboros,” he said, speaking the word almost dreamily. “Have you seen these things?”
“From a distance,” she said.
“Are they like us?” he asked her.
“Not remotely.”
“What then?”
She remembered as clearly as her own name the words Jaffe had used to describe the Iad, and repeated them now, for Lucien’s benefit, though Lord knows it didn’t help much.
“Mountains and fleas,” she said. “Fleas and mountains.”
Lucien rose suddenly. “Excuse me—”
“Are you—?”
“I’m going to—” He turned towards the bathroom, raising his hand to his mouth. She went to help him, but he waved her away and lurched through the door, closing it behind him. There was a moment’s hush, then the sound of retching, and of vomit splashing into the toilet. She kept her distance. Her own belly, which was pretty strong, weakened at the smell of puke.
She look down at her vodka glass, decided she’d had more than enough, and walked out onto the balcony. She didn’t wear a watch (the yellow dog had told her to bury her imitation Rolex in the desert) so she could only guess at the time. Certainly way after midnight; perhaps one-thirty, perhaps two. The air was a little chilly, but fragrant with night-blooming jasmine. She inhaled deeply. Tomorrow she was going to have a splitting headache, but what the hell? She’d actually enjoyed telling her story, laying it out as much for her own benefit as Lucien’s.
He has the hots for you, Raul said.
“I thought you’d gone to sleep.”
I was afraid you’d do something stupid.
“Like try to fuck him?” She glanced back into the apartment. The bathroom door was still closed. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that tonight—”
Or any night.
“Don’t be so sure.”
We had an agreement, Raul reminded her. As long as I’m in here with you: no sex. That’s what we agreed. I don’t have a homosexual bone in my body.
“My body,” Tesla reminded him.
Of course, if you wanted to sleep with a woman, I could probably stretch the
point—
“Well you might just have to look the other way,” Tesla said, “I think my celibate phase is coming to an end.”
Don’t do this.
“Oh for God’s sake, Raul, it’s just a fuck.”
I mean it.
“If you screw this up,” she said, “you’ll be sorry you ever got inside my head. I swear.”
Raul was silent.
“Better,” Tesla said, and went back inside. The shower was running in the bathroom. “Are you okay in there?” she called, but he couldn’t hear her over the water, so she left him to his cleaning up and went through to the kitchen to look for something to fill her growling stomach. All she could find was a box of year-old Shredded Wheat, but it was better than nothing. She munched, and waited, and munched some more. The shower continued to run. After a couple of minutes she went back to the bathroom door, knocked and yelled: “Lucien? Are you all right?”
There was still no reply. She tried the handle. The door was unlocked; the room so filled with steam she could barely see across it. His clothes were scattered on the floor, and the shower curtain closed.
She called his name again, and again there was no answer. Concerned now—he must have heard her, even over the water—she grabbed the curtain and pulled it back. He was sprawled naked in the tub, the water beating on his belly, eyes closed, mouth open.
Some lover, Raul said.
“Shut the fuck up,” she told him, going down on her haunches beside the tub and lifting Lucien into a sitting position. He coughed up a throatful of watered down puke.
Very pretty.
“I’m warning you, monkey—”
That was the forbidden word: monkey—the word that always threw him into a fit.
Don’t call me that! he yelled.
She didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response, so he shut up. It worked like a charm every time.
She turned off the shower, then gently slapped Lucien into opening his eyes. He looked at her dozily, mumbling something about feeling stupid.
“Have you finished throwing up?” she asked him.
He nodded, so she fetched a clean bath towel and did what she could to dry him off while he was lying in the tub. He wasn’t in bad shape. A little skinny perhaps, but meaty where it counted most. Even though he was near as damnit comatose, his dick swelled as she dried him, and she couldn’t help but stroke it a little, which brought it to full erection. It was pretty. If he had the wit to use it well he might be fun in bed.
He was as dry as she was going to be able to get him, so rather than try to lift him out of the tub, she decided to let him sleep where he lay. She fetched a pillow and a blanket, and made him as comfortable as she could, given the cramped conditions. As she tucked the blanket around him, he murmured, “What about tomorrow?”
“What about it?” she said.
“Can we . . . do it . . . tomorrow?”
“Well, that depends,” she said. “I was thinking of heading up to Oregon—”
“Oregon . . . ” he mumbled.
“That’s right.”
“Fletcher . . . ”
“That’s right.” She leaned a little closer to him, until she was almost whispering in his ear. “He’s up there, right? In . . . in—”
“Everville.”
“Everville,” she said softly.
Have you no shame? Raul muttered.
She laughed, and for a moment Lucien’s eyes fluttered open.
“You sleep,” she said to him. “We’re going to take a trip tomorrow.”
The notion seemed to please him, even in his stupor. He was still wearing a little smile when she put the light out and left him to his slumbers.
SIX
I
Grillo called the body of knowledge he’d gathered over the last five years the Reef, in part because, like coral, it had grown through countless minute accretions (more often than not of dead matter) and in part because a marine image seemed appropriate for information that pertained to the secrets of the dream-sea. But of late the name mocked him. He no longer felt like the Reef’s keeper, but its prisoner.
It was housed, this Reef, in the memory-banks of four linked computers, donated to Grillo’s strange cause by a man in Boston, who’d asked only one thing in return for his generosity: that when Grillo finally persuaded the computers to collate all the information and spit out the answer to the mysteries of America, he’d be the one to spread the news. Grillo had agreed. He’d even believed, when the gift had first been mooted, that such a moment might one day come.
He believed that no longer. The husks and shreddings he’d gathered so studiously over the years did not contain the secrets of the universe. They were worthless trash, lost to sense and meaning, and he would join them in their senselessness, very soon.
His body, which had done him good service for forty-three years, had in the last six months begun a calamitous decline. At first he’d ignored the signs; put the dropped coffee cups and aching spine and blurred vision down to overwork. But the pain had been too much after a time, and he’d gone to the doctor for something to control it. He’d got his painkillers, and a lot more besides: visits to specialists, mounting paranoia, and finally, the bad news. “You’ve got multiple sclerosis, Nathan.”
He’d closed his eyes for a moment, not wanting to look at the sympathetic face in front of him, but the darkness behind his lids was worse. It was a cell, that darkness; it stank of himself.
“This isn’t a death sentence,” the doctor had explained. “A lot of people live long, fruitful lives with this disease, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be one of them.”
“How long?” he wanted to know.
“I couldn’t even hazard a guess. The disease moves in different ways from person to person. It could take thirty years—”
He’d known, sitting there in that bland little office, that he didn’t have three decades of life ahead of him. Nothing like. The disease had him in its teeth, and it was going to shake him until he was dead.
His appetite for information had not deserted him, however, even in these grim circumstances. He researched the nature of his devourer meticulously, not out of any hope that he would defeat it, but simply to know what was going on inside his body. The coverings of his nerve fibers were being stripped, it seemed, in his brain and in his spine. Though many fine minds were working to discover why, there were no definitive answers. His disease was a mystery as profound as anything in the Reef, and a good deal more palpable. Sometimes, while he was sitting in front of the monitors watching messages come in, he imagined he could feel the beast Sclerosis moving through his body, unmaking him cell by cell, nerve by nerve, and the words appearing on the screens, tales of sightings and visitations, began to seem like just another manifestation of disease. The healthy psyche had no need of such fantasies. It lived in the world of the possible, and was content.
Sometimes, in a fury of despair, he would switch off the screen and toy with the notion of unplugging the whole system; leaving the tale-tellers to babble on in silence and darkness. But he would always return to his chair after a time, addict that he was, guiltily turn the screens back on to study whatever bizarrities the Reef had accrued in his absence.
In early spring, the beast Sclerosis had suddenly become ambitious; within the space of a month he felt twenty years of frailties overtake him. He was prescribed heavier medications, which he diligently took, and the doctor offered advice about planning for disability, which he just as diligently ignored. He would never go into a wheelchair; that much he’d decided. He’d take an overdose one night, and slip away; it would be easier that way. He had no wife to hold on for; no children to watch grow just another day. He had only the screens, and the tales they told; and they would go until the end of the world, with or without him.
And then, in early June, a strange thing: There was a sudden escalation in the number of reports, the systems besieged every hour of the day and night with people wanting to share
their secrets. There was no coherent pattern in this onslaught, but the sheer scale of it made him wonder if the madness was not reaching critical mass.
Around that time Tesla had checked in from New Mexico, and he’d told her what was going on. She’d been in one of her fatalistic moods (too much peyote, he suspected) and not much interested. When he’d called Harry D’Amour in New York, however, the response had been entirely different. D’Amour, the sometime detective whose cases had invariably turned into metaphysical excursions, was eager for information. They had spoken at least twice daily over a three-week period, with D’Amour demanding chapter and verse of any report that smacked of the Satanic, particularly if it originated in New York. Grillo found D’Amour’s faith in the vocabulary of Catholicism absurd, but he played along. And yes, there were a number of reports that fitted the description. Two mutilation-murders in the Bronx, involving nails through the hands and feet, and a triple suicide at a convent in Brooklyn (all of which D’Amour had already investigated); then a host of other more minor oddities which he was not aware of, some of which clearly supported some thesis or other.
D’Amour had declined to be explicit, even on a safe line, as to the precise nature of that thesis, until their last conversation. Then he’d solemnly told Grillo he had good reason to believe that the return of the Anti-Christ was being plotted in New York City. Grillo had not been entirely able to disguise how laughable he thought the notion.
“Oh you don’t like the words, is that it?” D’Amour had replied. “We’ll find something different, if you prefer. Call it the Iad. Call it the Enemy. It’s all the Devil by another name.”
They hadn’t spoken after that, though Grillo had several times attempted to make further contact. There were new reports from the five boroughs almost every day, it seemed, many of them involving acts of sickening brutality. Several times Grillo had wondered if perhaps one of the bodies found rotting on the city’s wastelands that summer was not that of Harry D’Amour. And wondered too what name he might call the Devil if it came looking for D’Amour’s informer, here in Omaha.