“You are surprised that I am so blunt,” he said, as indeed she was. “It is my job here to help people along the path to Change, yes, but it is also my responsibility as an adept to seek out those with greater possibilities than the masses, those with iron already in their spines. Teresa was one of those. The boy Jason Delgado is another, a young man with enormous potential. And you, Ana Wakefield. It is not my habit to speak like this to a person who has not been through the Work, but you have a natural affinity even without the experience. And not just intellectually—I feel in you a person who has been through the fire more than once, and has been strengthened by it. I feel in you the willingness to be worked and tried, to submit to the refining fires and be pounded into shape. To be transformed.
“I hesitated because I thought you were too frivolous for The Process. It is a long, hard journey. It has broken men and women before this.” (Was it just her imagination, Ana wondered, or did she hear sorrow in his voice? At the nameless Japanese boy’s death, perhaps? Or a different loss?) “I want you to begin your Change. I want you to set off on your journey, and to do so, I will send you on an actual journey, not one that is ‘simply allegorical.’ I am sending some of our children to our sister community in England. You will go with them, as a teacher, and as a student.”
“What?” Oh shit, she cried to herself. Oh shit. I’m nowhere near ready to pull out of here, I can’t give Glen what he needs yet, and Jason—and Dulcie, what the hell am I going to do, oh shit—
“To England. I like you, Ana. I can’t teach someone I like. I may be further along in my journey than you, but I am not yet purified enough to overlook my own affections. It is one of the reasons we have more than one community, in recognition that none of us has attained our pure state. I want to send you to my own teacher. You will find Jonas, our Change leader in England, considerably farther along on the Path than I am. I want to send him you and Jason and one or two others whom I cannot teach properly. He will help you.”
“Jason,” she repeated, grasping the name like a straw. “What about Dulcie?”
Steven sighed. “Jason is not ready to move away from her. His sense of responsibility is admirable, but it distracts him. He must concentrate on his own Transformation.”
“He’s only fourteen.”
“There is never time to waste.”
“Is that why you’ve taken his art away from him? His ‘sacrifice’?”
Steven’s face darkened. “He should not have spoken to you about his Work. It is his alone.”
“I wanted to draft him to help with the school mural; he had to tell me why he couldn’t. Why take that from him?”
“I think you know, Ana.”
“Heat and pressure, right? And the last time you put pressure on him, look what happened. My hand is still sore.”
“He has to learn to direct his energies.”
“Steven, how many alchemists were killed by explosions when they misjudged the pressures inside their vessels? More to the point, how many of their students did they take with them?”
So there was a degree of uncertainty in him, she thought, seeing his face. However, he said merely, “He will learn. Jonas will direct him.”
Ana did not much like the sound of that, but Steven had at least opened a door. She could stay with the community as a whole and with her job. And with Dulcie and her brother. Glen would have a stroke, but if she chose, she might just stay long enough to give him a complete picture of Change. Going by what Steven just said, the center was in England, anyway.
(But—in England, where she had no authority, no Glen, no alarm bell or automatic pistol hidden inside Rocinante? No backup at all, in fact. She would be alone, and with two children on her hands. God, Glen wouldn’t bother with handcuffs—he would just straight out murder her for even considering it.)
“When do I need to decide?”
“The tickets will be purchased tomorrow morning. The names of the passengers need to be on them.”
“And when would we actually go?” she asked, reassuring herself that the end of the school year was still a long way off.
“In three days,” he said. “You do have a passport?”
Two days later, she drained Rocinante’s refrigerator, disconnected the propane tank, gave her knee enough cortisone to keep it numb for weeks, and spirited away the gun and cortisone needles from the hidden compartment to bury them in the desert. Before she pulled the tarpaulin over the bus, she stood looking at the medicine pouch that she had made from the objects in her past that meant something to her: the hairs from two dogs, the stones from her creek, and Abby’s red bead. She reached in to remove it from the rearview mirror, and slipped the smooth leather cord over her head and around her neck, where it lay beneath her shirt like a talisman.
She did not manage to speak to Glen before the plane left, although she did rip out the most recent pages of her diary and put them into an envelope addressed to “Uncle Abner,” dropping it surreptitiously into a mail slot at the airport. On the last page she scribbled a note:
No time to contact you, surprise trip to England with some kids being transferred there. I’ll write you from the U.K. when I can. Do we have any family members in the area I can look up while I’m there?
—A
5.
SEPARATIO
separate (vb) To set or keep
apart; to make a distinction
between; to sever conjugal ties
or contractual relations with;
to isolate from a mixture.
Separacion doth each part from the other devide,
The subtill fro the gross, fro the thick the thin.
CHAPTER 23
From the journal of Jason Delgado
The seats had been booked too late to enable them all to sit together, so Ana, in charge of Dulcie, Jason, and a boy not much older than Dulcie who was going to join his mother in England, sat apart from Dov Levinski, a kindergarten teacher named Margit, and their group of three children, two of whom were Margins. It suited Ana quite well, particularly as the little boy Benjamin was sweet-tempered, sleepy, and no trouble whatsoever.
The plane was scheduled for a three-forty-five takeoff. At four Ana took out the hardback illustrated Hunting of the Snark she had bought in Sedona and presented it to Dulcie. At four-ten the copilot came on the intercom and admitted that they were still on the ground, although the moment the deicer had been unclogged they would be away. By five-fifteen Ana had read Dulcie and Benjamin the Snark four times and most of the other books twice. At five-thirty the passengers heard a series of bangs and thuds from below, and those on the starboard windows were gratified to see the repair truck fill with men and drive away. In another three minutes the big jet lurched and began to creep backward, and Dulcie said she really, really had to use the toilet.
Ana had the child back in her seat and buckled in with twenty seconds to spare. They taxied and accelerated, rattling and roaring until the tons of metal and flesh gave their little hop and they were airborne. Dulcie did not notice, she and Benjamin being busy loudly discussing life in England across Ana’s lap, but Jason’s eyes shifted constantly, particularly upward to where the overhead baggage compartments were vibrating madly. If one of them drops open, Ana thought, he’s going to land five rows back, taking his seat with him.
“Have you flown much, Jason?” she asked to distract him.
“Uh, no.”
“Planes always look like they’re about to shake themselves to pieces, but as I understand it, they build the flexibility and movement in. If everything was completely rigid and nailed down, it would be too brittle. Even the wings bend a surprising amount. Much safer that way.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, looking dubiously up at the rattling bins.
“Actually, I don’t have the faintest idea if that’s true or not. It’s just what I tell myself when I fly because it’s better than believing the plane is about to fall apart.”
That did distract him, to the point o
f making him meet her eyes and smile. He leaned back, looking less nervous.
The plane leveled off, drinks and peanuts were handed out, and then there was such a delay before the meal was served that Dulcie and Benjamin both fell asleep. They woke when the food trolley bumped down the aisle, picked at the strange food, eating the cake and some noodles, but Benjamin found the milk strange after a lifetime of goat’s milk and Dulcie spilled half of hers. They then wanted to play together with the packet of games and colors the flight attendant had given each of them.
Ana got tired of the elbows digging into her thighs and the constant chatter of excited voices directly under her chin, so she changed places with Benjamin and allowed the two small kids to have the middle of the row, bracketed by her and Jason at the ends. The children colored and played with the headphones, Jason watched the movie, and Ana tried to read the Jung book she had bought in Sedona and tried not to think of Glen.
The movie ended, reading lights were dimmed, toilets were visited, and the two children attempted to get comfortable. A thousand squirms later Ana got out of her seat and arranged pillows and blankets for Benjamin over both seats. Dulcie put her head into Jason’s lap, and Ana took her book back a couple of rows, where there were a few empty seats. To her surprise, after a while Jason joined her with his own book, The Old Man and the Sea. He smiled shyly and read six or eight pages before closing it with an audible sigh.
“Are you reading that for school?” she asked. She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her tired eyes, leaning her head back on the headrest.
“Yeah. It’s really boring. Nothing happens.”
“I remember. The old man talks to himself a lot and the scavengers eat his giant fish.” There was no response. After a minute she opened one eye to see whether he had gone back to his reading, but he was looking at her with an odd expression on his face.
“What? Isn’t that what happens?”
“Don’t you like Hemingway?”
“Oh yes, Hemingway was an immensely creative and influential writer, but that’s the problem. So many writers have tried to copy his style that the original has begun to seem like a cheap imitation. Unfair, but I find it hard to get past the sense of caricature.”
This may have been the first time the boy had heard that there might be differing opinions about the great literary works he had been required to appreciate for the last few years of his life.
“Anyway,” she said, closing her eyes again, “I’d have thought the family Dumas more to your taste, or Dashiell Hammett. Someone with more flair and sense of romance than Hemingway. Romance in the sense of adventure”—she added in an aside—“not as in love story.”
He said nothing, and she allowed herself to be lulled by the noise and the vibration, drifting into a light doze.
She woke and slept and woke, each time checking on her surroundings, on Jason, and on the forward row where she could see the top of Benjamin’s head. Jason had abandoned Hemingway and was looking at Jung, reading at her marker. She slipped away a third time, and woke greatly refreshed. She stretched and looked around for an attendant, but the plane was still dim and quiet. Jason was awake, still working away at the alchemy essay. She glanced at the page, and saw that he was staring at the drawing of a fifteenth-century alembic.
“Jason,” she said. He jerked and quickly turned the page.
“Jason, look—”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“I know it’s part of the Work that Steven gave you, but—”
“I can’t talk about it,” he repeated brusquely, and started to lift himself out of his seat.
She laid her hand on his arm to stop him. “Okay, Jason, I understand. But can I say something? As a friend?”
He gradually subsided, and she took that as a yes. She thought for a minute, trying to find words that might open a door rather than shut him off.
“Steven is a good man,” she said, “and he cares for you. There aren’t a lot of people like that in the world, and when we meet someone like him, someone who really reaches us, our automatic response is to accept him fully, every part of him. Add to this the fact that no one your age believes that they have a lot of choices in life, and it is natural to think that you either have to accept all parts of Steven’s belief system and teaching style, or reject him completely. You don’t want to talk about what went on between you and him during those two days, and I respect that. I just want to say that if you have any doubts or even questions, if anything someone wants you to do doesn’t seem quite right or fair, you can come to me and I’ll try my hardest to keep an open mind. Okay?”
Jason gave his trademark shrug-and-a-nod, and she had to be satisfied with that. She reached down and unlatched her seat belt.
“I’m going to get a cup of coffee,” she told him. “Can I bring you anything?”
He looked up at her, his face clearing with the relief of having gotten off so easy. “Can I have a Coke?”
“You can have anything you want except alcohol.”
“I haven’t had a Coke in three months.”
“I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee in five weeks. And four days, but who’s counting?”
She found the attendants talking quietly in the galley. They exchanged a few words about the “cute kids” she was shepherding (Dulcie and Benjamin) and Ana went back to Jason with a can of Coke, a cup of ice, and two cups of stale instant coffee for herself.
“What else do you miss at Change?” she asked him when they were both settled in again with their drinks. “Your friends?”
“Nah. Most of the people I knew were jerks. I guess at first I missed all the normal stuff—you know, McDonald’s and TV and music and everything. Ice cream—me and Dulcie both miss that. I kind of got used to the place, though.”
“It’s a different life. But, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have ice cream at the English house. I remember when I was in London in the dead of winter once, I was amazed at how many people I saw eating ice cream.”
“I don’t know, I hear it’s a weird place. Not the whole country, just where we’re going.”
“What, the Change community? Weird how?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. “There was a kid in my house who just came back from there. He said they never went anywhere and it was like living in a jungle.”
Ana had to smile at the thought of a jungle set down in the civilized English countryside. “He’s probably exaggerating.”
“Maybe. Anyway, he’s kind of weird himself.”
Ana Wakefield and Jason Delgado sat elbow to elbow with seven miles of air between their feet and the ice-studded surface of the northern Atlantic Ocean, drinking their respective beverages. Jason poured the second half of his Coke into the plastic cup and glanced at the book she had stuck into the seat back ahead of her.
“Do you read a lot of stuff like that?” Jason asked with a gesture at the worn black cover. She was mildly surprised that he would raise an obviously forbidden topic, even obliquely, but she thought the best thing to do was just treat it as an innocent question. She had, after all, told him that it was up to him to talk about his experience in the alembic.
“When I’m living in the bus, I tend to read more demanding things such as that,” she said. “There just isn’t room to collect masses of books. But when I settle down for a while, I usually go a little nuts at the local libraries and bookstores, catching up on all the novels I’ve missed.”
“God, that must be so great, living in a bus. You can go wherever you want, eat when you want, pull over and sleep when you feel like it.”
The wistful tone in his voice did him great credit: Most boys of fourteen, faced with the prospect of twelve years of responsibility for a minor sister, would feel more than mild regret.
“I have to tell you, Jason, how impressive your attitude toward your sister is. Dulcie is a sweetheart, but she’s also a major burden. It can’t be easy.”
Praise on the basketball court
was easy to ignore; from a person sitting at your side it was more difficult. Jason fiddled with the contents of the seat pocket in front of his knees for a moment, and then stood up to go check on Dulcie. He came back and continued on to the toilets in the far rear of the plane, where he spent a long time.
When he returned he paused by the seat, then walked forward again to look at the sleeping children. When he was finally in his seat he looked straight ahead at the rumpled white hair of the old man in the next row and began to talk.
“Dulcie and me, we’re not orphans, you know. Our parents are still alive. At least, I know my dad is—he’s in jail, and last I heard Dulcie’s father was around. He lives in Vegas, I think. Our mom is a crackhead—or, she used to be, until about a year ago she started shooting up, and things got a little crazy. She’d bring these really creepy guys home, real narfs, you know? and they’d… Well, anyway, I finally got pissed off and told her she couldn’t do that, not with Dulcie there, and I… I kinda beat one of them up, so she started just not coming home. I had a job, just part-time at a building site, but I had to give it up because I couldn’t leave Dulcie home by herself. I mean, I know people do, but she’d get scared, and when I got home she’d just be lying in her bed shaking and she wouldn’t eat her dinner. I used to wish Mom would get arrested so the city would step in and take care of things, but I couldn’t go asking for food stamps or child care or anything because then I’d have to tell them why Mom wasn’t the one doing the asking, and then she really would get arrested.
“I got… I don’t know. I guess I got kind of fed up after a while, trying to do the school thing with Dulcie and no money. I thought I deserved a break. Some time for myself, you know? I mean, all the other guys I knew used to spend hours just hanging out, not dragging their little sisters to all the games and wondering where their damn mothers were half the time. I know most of them don’t have fathers and a lot of them have moms who work or spend time in jail, but there’s always grandmothers or the welfare or something. Dulcie and I just had us.”