Everville

  “Hold on, Morton,” she said, as his suffering continued to mount. “You’ll bust something.”

  If he heard her, he didn’t listen. But then when had he ever listened? He went on gasping, until his body was out of power. Then he simply stopped.

  “Morton,” she murmured to him. “Don’t you dare—”

  There were nurses back at the bedside now, and a doctor spewing agitated orders, but Phoebe registered none of them. Her focus was upon Morton’s stricken face. There were flecks of spittle on his chin, and his eyes were still wide open. He looked the way he’d looked at the bathroom door—raging; raging even as the sea he’d been dreaming about closed over his head.

  One of the nurses took hold of her hand and now gently escorted her away from the bed.

  “I’m afraid his heart’s given out,” she murmured consolingly.

  But Phoebe knew better. The damn fool had drowned.

  * * *

  V

  There was always a moment at the close of day when the blue gloom of dusk had settled on the city, but the sun was still in glory on Harmon’s Heights. The effect was to make Everville seem like a ghost town, sitting in the shadow of a living mountain. What had seemed unequivocal a minute ago had now become ethereal. Folks who’d been able to read their neighbors’ smiles across the street could no longer do so; children who’d known for certain there was nothing darting behind the fence, or snaking between the garbage cans, were no longer secure in their belief.

  In that uncertain time before the sun left the Heights entirely, and the streetlamps and porch lights of Everville asserted their authority, the city bathed in doubt, and insolid souls in insolid streets entertained the notion that this life was just a candle-flame dream, and likely to flicker out with the next gust of wind.

  It was Seth Lundy’s favorite time of day. Better even than midnight, or that time before dawn when the moon had sunk, and the sun was no more than a gray hope in the east. Better than those, that minute.

  He was standing in the town square, looking up at the last of the light on the mountaintop and listening for the hammering, which was often loud at this uncertain hour, when a man he hoped at one glance he would come to know better stepped out of the murk towards him and said, “What can you hear?”

  He had only ever been asked that question by doctors. This was no doctor.

  “I can hear angels hammering on the sky from Heaven’s side,” he replied, seeing no reason to lie.

  “My name’s Owen Buddenbaum,” the man said, coming so close that Seth could smell the brandy on his breath. “May I ask yours?”

  “Seth Lundy.”

  Owen Buddenbaum came a little closer still. Then, while the city waited in doubt around them, he kissed Seth on the lips. Seth had never been kissed on the lips by a man before, but he knew the rightness of it, to his heart, soul, and groin.

  “Shall we listen to the hammering together?” Owen Buddenbaum said, “or shall we make some for ourselves?”

  “For ourselves,” Seth replied.

  “Good,” said Owen Buddenbaum. “Ourselves it will be.”

  PART THREE

  VESSELS

  ONE

  I

  Tesla had woken early, despite the late-night call with Grillo and the pukings from Lucien; early enough to enjoy the birdsong before the sound of traffic from Melrose and Santa Monica drowned it out. With the kitchen cupboards empty she ambled up to the cafe below the Health Club on Santa Monica, which had been open since five for the benefit of masochists, and bought coffee, fruits, and bran muffins for herself and her guest.

  I don’t want you screwing him, Raul reminded her as she walked back to the apartment. We agreed: No sex till we’re separated.

  “That may never happen, Raul,” she pointed out, “and I’m damned if I’m going to live like a nun for the rest of my life. Which might be, by the way, a very short time.”

  My, we are feeling chipper this morning.

  “Anyway, monkeys like sex. It’s all they ever do at the zoo.”

  Go fuck yourself, Bombeck.

  “That’s all I’ve been doing. Which you haven’t been complaining about, by the way. Did you get off on me diddlin’ myself?”

  No comment.

  “I’m going to fuck Lucien, Raul. So you’d better get used to the idea.”

  Slut.

  “Monkey.”

  Lucien was showered and sitting on the balcony in the sun by the time she got back to the apartment. He had found some of Tesla’s old clothes in the closet: patchwork jeans circa 1968 and a leather vest which fitted his skinny torso better than it had ever fitted her. Ah, the resilience of youth, she thought, seeing how quickly he’d recovered from the excesses of the previous night. Face flushed, smile lavish, he rose to help her unpack the breakfast and partook with no little appetite.

  “I feel so stupid about throwing up,” he said. “I never do that. Mind you, I never drink vodka.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “You’re teaching me bad habits,” he said. “Kate says you have to purify the body if you want to be a vessel for the infinite.”

  “Now there’s a phrase,” Tesla said. “Vessel for the infinite. What does that mean—exactly?”

  “Well . . . it means . . . you know, we’re made from the same stuff stars are made of . . . and . . . all we have to do is open our souls up . . . and the infinite, I mean, you know . . . everything becomes one, and everything flows through us.”

  “The past, the future, and the dreaming moment between are all one country living one immortal day.”

  The quote had Lucien agog. “Where’d that come from?” he said.

  “You never heard it before? I learned it from—” She paused to think about this. “Fletcher maybe,” she said, “maybe Kissoon.”

  “Who’s Kissoon?” Lucien said.

  “Somebody I don’t want to talk about,” she said. There were few experiences in her life she still kept filed away under untouchable, but Kissoon was definitely one of them.

  “I want you to tell me, when you’re in a good space to do it,” Lucien said. “I mean, I want to share all the wisdom in you.”

  “You’ll be disappointed,” Tesla said.

  He laid his hand over hers. “Please. I mean it.”

  She heard the monkey make a retching sound in her head, and could not keep a smile from her lips.

  “What’s so funny?” Lucien said, looking a little hurt.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Don’t be sensitive. If there’s one thing I can’t bear it’s sensitive men.”

  * * *

  II

  They were heading north by seven-thirty, and made good time up the coast. Either Tesla, or Raul, or perhaps a combination of them both, had developed an uncanny instinct when it came to the presence of cops, and she gunned the cycle to a hundred, a hundred and ten when they were certain they were unwatched. By Thursday evening they were across the state line, and about ten at night decided they’d come far enough for one day. They found a motel and checked in. One room, one bed. What this meant went undiscussed.

  While Lucien headed out for food, Tesla called Grillo. He sounded glad to hear from her. The conversation with Howie had not gone well, he told her, and suggested she might have to put a call in to the couple herself, to offer some support for his warning.

  “What the hell happened to D’Amour?” Tesla wanted to know. “I thought he was supposed to be watching over them?”

  “Want my best guess?” Grillo said.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “He was closing on something big—he wouldn’t tell me what—then he just ceased communication.”

  The news shook Tesla. While her relationship with D’Amour had never been that close—she’d met with him one time only since the Grove, when her trek through the Americas had taken her up to New York—she’d vaguely thought of him as both a backstop and a source of esoterica, as someone who would always be in the pi
cture. Now it seemed that this was not the case. And if D’Amour, who’d been fighting this fight for fifteen years and had defenses against the enemy in every corner (including several tattooed on his person), had lost the battle, then what hope did she have? Little or none.

  Lucien had not taken her hint about sensitivity, thank God; he knew the moment he saw her face that she wasn’t as blithe as she’d been. He gently inquired as to why, and she told him. He reassured her as best he could with words, but she quickly made their inadequacy plain, and he turned instead to touches, and kisses, and before long they were getting naked and he was warning her that he was no great lover and that she shouldn’t expect too much.

  She found his modesty disarming, and, as it turned out, unnecessary. He was no great experimenter, to be sure, but what he lacked in range he made up for in depth, which wasn’t to be despised. They coupled with the kind of fervor she’d not experienced since her college days, all of twenty years before, the bed squeaking under them, the headboard deepening a groove in the wall made by those who’d loved here before.

  Raul kept his silence for the first bout. She heard not a peep from him. But when, after she and Lucien had eaten a couple of slices of cold pizza, the nuzzling began again, he piped up.

  He’s not going to do it again.

  “He can do it all night,” she thought, “if he’s up for it.” She put her hands down between their legs, and guided him inside her. “And it looks like he is.”

  Christ! Raul sobbed. How can you bear this? Make him pull it out!

  “Shut up,” she said, staring down at her and Lucien’s locked groins.

  At least close your eyes, Raul said.

  She was far too intrigued to do that. “Look at that,” she thought, raising her hips to welcome his length. “Him meeting me meeting him—”

  Damn you—

  “Like crossroads.”

  You’re raving, woman.

  She looked up into Lucien’s face. He had his eyes half closed and his brows knitted.

  “Are you . . . all right?” he gasped.

  “Never better,” she said.

  The ape continued to sob in her head, the words expelled upon Lucien’s thrusts. It’s like—he’s stabbing—us. I can’t—take any—more!

  As he spoke she felt his will impinging on hers, crossing the divide they’d established at the beginning of their co-tenanting. It hurt, and she let out a moan, which Lucien took for a sigh of appreciation. His embrace became tighter, his jabs more frenzied.

  “Oh yes,” he started to chant, “yes! yes! yes!”

  No! Raul hollered, and before Tesla could demand her body back he took control of it.

  Her arms, which had been languishing on the pillow, suddenly flew at Lucien, her nails raking his naked back. From out of her throat came a bestial din she’d never known she was capable of making, and as he recoiled in mute shock her legs rose behind him, hooking beneath his armpits and pulling him back. All this in such a blur of noise and motion Tesla wasn’t even certain what had happened until it was over, and Lucien was sprawled on the floor beside the bed.

  “What the hell was that all about?” he said, finding his voice now.

  Satisfied with its efforts, the monkey’s hold relaxed enough for her to say, “It . . . it wasn’t me.”

  “What do you mean, it wasn’t you?” Lucien said.

  “I swear—” she said, getting up from the bed. But he wasn’t going to allow her near him again. He was up on his feet in a flash, retreating to the chair where he’d thrown his clothes.

  “Wait,” she said, not making any further attempt to approach him. “I can explain this.”

  Watching her warily he said, “I’m listening.”

  “I’m not alone in here,” she told him, knowing as she spoke there was no easy way to say what she was about to say. “There’s somebody else in my skull.” Still, she thought, he should be able to understand the principle. Hadn’t he been talking about being a vessel for the infinite that very morning? “His name’s Raul.”

  He looked at her as though she were speaking in an alien language. “What are you talking about?” he said, plainly incredulous.

  “I’m talking about the spirit of a man called Raul being here in my head with me. He’s been here for five years. And he doesn’t want us to do what we’ve been doing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well . . . why don’t I let him speak for himself?”

  What? she heard Raul say.

  “Go on,” she said aloud, “you’ve done the damage. Now explain it.”

  I can’t.

  “You owe it to me, damn you!”

  Lucien listened to the side of the argument he could hear with disbelief all over his face. She waited, leaving her tongue slack in her mouth.

  “You snarled,” she reminded Raul, “now you can damn well talk.”

  Before she’d finished the thought she felt her tongue start to flap and sounds emerged, crude at first, but quickly turning into syllables. Lucien watched and listened to this bizarre performance without moving a muscle. She suspected he thought he was in the presence of a lunatic, but she had no way of reassuring him until this was over.

  “What she’s just told you . . . ” Raul began, Tesla’s voice now in his possession, “is true. I’m the spirit of a man who . . . gave up my body to a great evil called Kissoon.” She’d not expected him to offer Lucien a guide to body-hopping, but it ameliorated her fury somewhat to hear him do so. This was difficult territory for him to discuss, she knew. Kissoon and his persuasions were a bitter memory for them both, but how much more so for him, who had lost his very flesh to the shaman’s tricks?

  “She . . . did me a great . . . kindness,” he went on hesitantly. “One which I will . . . always be thankful for.” He licked her lips, back and forth a couple of times. His nervousness had made her mouth arid. “But . . . this thing you do to me with men . . . ” He shook her head, “It sickens me.”

  As Raul spoke, Lucien instinctively dropped his hand between his legs, covering his sex.

  “I’m sure you mean to give her pleasure,” Raul cautioned. “But her pleasure is my pain. Do you understand?”

  Lucien said nothing.

  “I want you to understand,” he pressed. “I don’t want you to think this is any failing on your part. It isn’t. Truly it isn’t.”

  At this juncture Lucien plucked his briefs off the floor and began to pull them on.

  “I’ve said all I can say,” Raul concluded. “I’ll leave you two to—” Tesla leapt on his words before they were finished. “Lucien,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “Which of you is it now?”

  “It’s me. Tesla.” She got up from the bed, pulling the sheet around her as she did so, and squatted on the ground in front of him. He continued to dress as she spoke. “I know this is probably the strangest thing you’ve heard—”

  “You’re right.”

  “What about Kate and Friederika?”

  “I wasn’t fucking with Kate. Or Friederika,” he said, his voice tremulous. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think you needed to know.”

  “I’m making it with a guy—and you don’t think I need to know?”

  “Wait. Is that what this is about?” She got up from the floor, and stared down at him imperiously. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I guess I’m all out of it,” he said, hauling on her patchwork jeans.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “And where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll get a ride somewhere.”

  “Look, at least stay the night. We don’t have to do anything.” She heard the desperation in her voice, and despised herself for it. What was this? One and a half fucks and suddenly she couldn’t face sleeping alone? “Strike that remark,” she said. “If you want to go find a ride, go find a ride. You’re acting like an adolescent, but that’s your pr
oblem.”

  With that she retired to the bathroom and showered, singing loudly enough to herself so that he knew she didn’t care if he left or not.

  Ten minutes later, when she emerged, he’d gone. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her skin still wet from the shower, and called Raul out from hiding.

  “So . . . I guess it’s just you and me.”

  You’re taking this better than I thought.

  “If we survive the next few days,” she said, “we’re going to have to part. You realize that?”

  I realize that.

  There was a silence between them, while she wondered what it would be like living alone.

  “By the way, was it really so terrible?”

  Abominable.

  “Well at least you know what you’re missing,” she said.

  So strike me blind.

  “What?”

  Tiresias, he said.

  She was none the wiser.

  You don’t know that story?

  It was one of the paradoxes of their relationship that he, the sometime ape, had been educated in the great myths of the world by Fletcher, while she, the professional storyteller, had only the sketchiest knowledge of the subject.

  “Tell me,” she said, lying back on the bed.

  Now?

  “Well, you scared off my entertainment.” She closed her eyes. “Go on,” she said, “tell me.”

  He’d several times regaled her with his versions of classical tales, usually when she’d questioned some reference of his. The philanderings of Aphrodite; the voyages of Odysseus; the fall of Troy. But this story was so much more appropriate to their present situation than any he’d shared with her, and she slipped into sleep with images of the Theban seer Tiresias (who according to legend had known sex as both a man and a woman, and declaring the woman’s pleasures ten times finer had been struck blind by a goddess, irritated that the secret was out) wandering through the wilds of the Americas in search of Tesla, until he found her in the rubble of Palomo Grove, where they made love, at last, with the ground cracking open around them.