Sacrament

  Today, however, those triumphs seemed very remote. Today his ink and pen lay untouched, because his hands trembled too much. Today all he could do was think about Will Rabjohns.

  “What on earth are you obsessing on him for?” Rosa wanted to know when she came upon Jacob, sitting mournfully on the verandah.

  “It was the other way about,” he said. “I hadn’t given a thought to him in a very long time. But he’s been giving some thoughts to me, apparently.”

  “I thought you read me something about him being murdered?” she said, picking up a sliver of tangerine from his abandoned plate and chewing on the bitter rind.

  “No, not murdered. Attacked. By a bear.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “He takes pictures of dead animals. You had that book of his.” She tossed the nibbled rind aside and selected a fresh one. “That’s your influence, I daresay.”

  “I’m sure,” Jacob said. Clearly the thought gave him no pleasure. “The trouble is, influence works both ways.”

  “Oh, so you’re thinking of becoming a photographer?” Rosa said with a chuckle.

  The look Jacob gave her made the rind seem sweet. “I don’t want him in my thoughts,” he said. “And he’s there. Believe me.”

  “I believe you,” she said. Then, after a pause, “May I . . . ask how he got there?”

  “There are things between him and me I never told you,” Steep replied.

  “The night on the hill,” she said flatly.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “It’s what he did to me—”

  “And what was that? Do tell.”

  “He’s a psychic, Rosa. He saw deep into me. Deeper than I care to look myself. He took me to Thomas—”

  “Oh Lord,” said Rosa wearily.

  “Don’t roll your fucking eyes at me!”

  “All right, all right, calm down. We can deal with the kid very easily—”

  “He’s not a kid anymore.”

  “In our scale of things, he’s an infant,” Rosa said, putting on her best placating tone. She crossed to Jacob’s chair, gently parted his knees, and went down on her haunches between them, looking up at him fondly. “Sometimes you let things get out of all proportion,” she said. “So he’s been rummaging around in your head—”

  “St. Petersburg,” Jacob said. “He was remembering St. Petersburg. Us in the palace. And it was more than just memory. It was as though he was looking for some weakness in me.”

  “I don’t remember your being weak that night,” Rosa cooed.

  Jacob didn’t warm to her flattery. “I don’t want him prying anymore,” he said.

  “So we’ll kill him,” Rosa replied. “Do you know where he is right now?” Jacob shook his head, his expression almost superstitious. “Well, he shouldn’t be hard to find, for God’s sake. We should simply go back to England, and start looking where we first found him. What was that little shithole called?”

  “Burnt Yarley.”

  “Oh, of course. That’s where Bartholomeus built that ridiculous courthouse of his.” She gazed off into middle distance, glassy-eyed. “That hawk of a nose he had. Oh my Lord.”

  “It was grotesque,” Jacob said.

  “But he was so tender about living things. Like the boy.”

  “There’s nothing tender about Will Rabjohns,” Steep muttered.

  “Really? What about the pictures in his book?”

  “That’s not tenderness, it’s guilt. And a touch of morbidity. There’s a hard heart in that man. And I want it stilled.”

  “I’ll do it myself,” Rosa said. “Gladly.”

  “No. It falls to me.”

  “Whatever you want, love. Let’s just do it and forget him.

  You can put him in one of your little books when he’d dead and gone.” She picked up the most recent journal and flipped through it until she reached a blank page. “Right here,” she said.

  “Will Rabjohns. Extinct.”

  “Extinct,” Steep murmured. “Yes.” He smiled. “Extinct, extinct, extinct.” It was like a mantra: a void where thought would go, where life would go.

  “I’d better make my farewells,” Rosa said and, leaving him on the verandah, went back down into the town for a last hour in the company of the Xanith.

  She arrived back at the mansion, fully expecting to find Jacob still sitting in his chair, brooding. But not so. In her absence, he had not only packed all their belongings, but had a vehicle waiting at the front gate to carry them down the coast to Masquat on the first leg of their trek back to Burnt Yarley.

  X

  i

  Will didn’t stir until a little after nine, but when he did he felt remarkably clearheaded. He got up and contemplated the shower for a few moments, wondering if he wasn’t inviting trouble by stepping in. He defiantly ran the water cold and stepped under its barrage. There were no visions forthcoming, and after a minute of this masochism, he turned the heat up a little and scrubbed himself clean.

  Dried, dressed, and on his second cup of coffee, he called Adrianna. Glenn picked up, sounding adenoidal. “I got some kind of allergy.” he said. “My nose won’t stop running. You want to speak to Adrianna?”

  “May I?”

  “No, ’cause she’s not here. She’s gone to see about getting a job.”

  “Where?”

  “At the city-planning department. I met this woman at Patrick’s party who was looking for someone, so she’s gone to check it out.”

  “I’ll call back later then,” Will said. “You take care of your allergies.”

  His next call went to Patrick, whose first question was,

  “How are you feeling this morning?”

  “Pretty good, thank you.”

  “No regrets, huh? Shit. I was afraid of this. The whole thing was a fiasco.”

  It took a minute or two for Will to convince him that just because nobody had fallen in love or out of a window didn’t mean the party hadn’t been memorable. Patrick reluctantly conceded that maybe he was just feeling nostalgic this morning, sitting in the litter, but in the old days a party wasn’t even considered to have occurred unless somebody ended up being screwed in the bath while the guests offered a rousing chorus from Aida.

  “I must have missed that particular night,” Will said, to which Patrick replied that no, they’d both been there, but poor Will’s memory had been fried standing in the sun taking family portraits of water buffalo.

  “Moving on—” Will said.

  “You want Bethlynn’s whereabouts,” Patrick said.

  “Yes, please.”

  “She lives in Berkeley, on Spruce Street.” Will jotted down directions, warned once again not to try calling her first, because she’d almost certainly slam the phone down on him. “She doesn’t like any air of negativity around her,” Patrick explained.

  “And I’m Mr. Negativity?”

  “Well, face it, honey, nobody looks at your books and thinks, gee, what a lovely planet we live on. In fact—now, Will, I don’t want you to get steamed about this—Bethlynn took a glance at one of your books and told me to get it out of the apartment.”

  “She did what?”

  “I told you, don’t get mad. It’s the way she thinks. She sees things in terms of good vibrations and bad vibrations.”

  “So you had a book burning on Castro.”

  “No, Will—”

  “What else went? Naked Lunch? King Lear? Bad vibes in Lear, man, better toss it out!”

  “Shut up, Will,” Patrick replied mildly. “I didn’t say I agreed with her, I’m just telling you where her head’s at. And if you really and truly want to make peace with her, then you’re going to have to work with that.”

  “Okay,” Will said, calming down a little. “I’ll make as nice as I can make. Maybe I’ll offer to do her a book of sunflowers to make up for all those bad vibes. Big yellow sunflowers on every page, with a quote from the Bhagavadgita underneath.”

  ??
?You could do worse, man o’ mine,” Patrick pointed out.

  “People need some light in their lives right now.”

  Oh, there’s light in my pictures, Will thought, remembering how they’d flickered at the fox’s feet, the eyes of the hunted and the bones they’d become shining out at him. There was light aplenty. It just wasn’t the kind of illumination Bethlynn would want to meditate upon.

  ii

  Later, as the cab carried him over the bridge, he looked back at the fog and the sun-draped hills and thought for the first time in many years how fine a city San Francisco was to live in, one of the few places left on earth where the human experiment was still conducted in an atmosphere of passionate civility.

  “You a visitor?” the driver wanted to know.

  “No. Why?”

  “You keep looking back like you never saw the place before.”

  “It feels like that today,” Will said, which so confounded the man it silenced him efficiently for the rest of the trip.

  However it sounded, it was true. He felt as though his eyes were clearer today than they’d been in years, both literally and figuratively. Not only did the sights around him seem crystalline, but he was taking pleasure where his gaze would never have lingered before. Everywhere he looked there were nuances of tone and color to delight him. In the cedars, in the storefronts, in the cracked leather of the seat in front of him. And on the sidewalk, faces glimpsed that he would never see again, every one of them a burgeoning glory of its own. He didn’t know where this newfound clarity was coming from, but it was as if he had been looking through a dirty lens for most of his life and become so familiar with the grime that now, when the glass was miraculously cleansed, it was a revelation. Was this what the fox had meant by the simple bliss of things?

  He elected to get out of the cab two blocks shy of Bethlynn’s house, in part because he wanted to luxuriate in this feeling a little before he met with her, and in part to prepare a speech of reconciliation. The latter purpose, however, was abandoned the moment he started to walk the confines of the cab had been a limitation on his hungry sight. Now, alone on the sidewalk, the world rushed away from him in every direction and, in the same moment, came careening back to show him its wonders. There were clouds above his head that the wind had teased into frills and fripperies; the decaying boards of a home across the Street paraded glorious patterns of peeling paint. A flock of pigeons, dining on the crumbs of a discarded doughnut, performed an exquisite dance as they fluttered and settled, then rose in a glorious flight and swooped away.

  This was not the condition that he’d expected to be in when he went to confront Bethlynn, but as long as she didn’t misinterpret the smile he could not remove from his face, perhaps it wasn’t an inappropriate state. If she was indeed the sensitive Patrick had claimed her to be, then she’d know his euphoria was genuine. Focusing attention on the simple business of walking two blocks to her door was problematical, however. Everywhere he looked, sights distracted him. A wall, a roof, a reflection in a window: All demanded he take the time to stand and gawp. How many days, weeks, months of his life had he waited in a mud hole or a tree on another continent for a glimpse of something he wanted to put on film—and how often left the field unsatisfied?—while here, all along, on this street ten miles from where he lived were profligate glories, eager to be seen? And if he’d spent that time teaching his camera to see with the eyes he was using right now—taught it even a tiny part of that sight—would he not have converted every soul who saw his pictures to the greater good? Would they not have looked astonished, and said is this the world? And realizing that it was, become its protector?

  Oh God, why had the fox not opened his head fifteen years ago, and saved him all that wasted time?

  It took him the better part of an hour to walk the two blocks to reach the porch of Bethlynn’s unostentatious bungalow, but by the time he did, he had his wits about him again and was ready to take the smile off his face and play the reformed repro-bate. She took a little time to respond to his rapping however, during which time the intricacy of the cracks on the step drew his admiration and, when she finally opened the door, he looked up at her with an asinine smirk on his face.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  He mumbled the barest minimum: “I came to apologize.”

  “Did you really?” she said, her appraisal of him less than promising.

  “I was . . . Looking at the cracks on your step,” he said, trying to explain his smile away.

  She scrutinized him a little harder. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yes . . . and . . . no,” he replied.

  She kept staring at him, with a look on her face he couldn’t quite interpret. Plainly she was sensing something about him other than how well he’d cleaned his teeth this morning. And whatever it was—his aura, his vibrations—she seemed to trust what she felt, because she said, “We can talk inside,” and stepping back from the door, ushered him into the house.

  XI

  The interior was not what he expected at all. There were no astrological charts, no incense burners, no healing crystals on the table. The large room she brought him into was sparsely but comfortably furnished, the walls a calming beige and bare but for a family photograph. The only other decoration was a vase of camellias set on the sill. The window was open a little way, and the breeze sweetened the room with the scent of the blooms.

  “Please sit down,” she said. “Do you want something to drink?”

  “Some water would be just great. Thank you.” She went to get it, leaving him to settle into the comfort of the sofa. He’d no sooner done so than an enormous tabby cat leaped up onto the armrest—his nimbleness belying his bulk—and, purring in anticipation of Will’s touch, vamped toward him.

  “My God, you’re quite a piece of work.” Will said.

  The cat put his head beneath his hand, and pressed itself against his palm.

  “Genghis, stop being pushy,” Bethlynn said, returning with the water.

  “Genghis? As in Khan?”

  Bethlynn nodded. “The terrorizer of Christendom.” She set Will’s water on the table, and sipped from her own glass. “A pagan to his core.”

  “The cat or the Khan?”

  “Both,” Bethlynn said. “Don’t be too flattered. He likes everyone.”

  “Good for him,” Will said. “Look, about Pat’s party: It was my fault. I was in one of my contrary moods, and I’m sorry.”

  “One apology’s quite sufficient,” Bethlynn said, her tone warmer than her vocabulary. “We all make assumptions about people. I made some about you, I’ll admit, and they were no more flattering than those you made about me.”

  “Because of my pictures?”

  “And some articles I’d read. Maybe you were misrepresented, but I must say you seemed very much the professional pes-simist.”

  “I wasn’t misrepresented. It was just . . . a consequence of what I’d seen.” Despite his best efforts, he felt the same idiot smile she’d met on the doorstep creeping back onto his face as he talked. Even in this almost ascetically plain room, his eyes were bringing him revelations. The sunlight on the wall, the flowers on the sill, the cat on his lap—all sheen and shift and flutes of color. It was all he could do not to let the threads of his sober exchange with Bethlynn go, and babble like a child about what he was seeing and seeing.

  “I know you probably think a lot of what I share with Patrick is sentimental nonsense,” Bethlynn was telling him, “but healing isn’t a business for me, it’s a vocation. I do what I do because I want to help people.”

  “You think you can heal him?”

  “Not in the medical sense, no. He has a virus. I can’t make it curl up and die. But I can put him in touch with the Patrick that isn’t sick. The Patrick that can never be sick, because he’s part of something that’s beyond sickness.”

  “Part of God?”

  “If that’s the word you want to use,” Bethlynn said. “It’s a litt
le Old Testament for me.”

  “But God’s what you mean?”

  “Yes, God’s what I mean.”

  “Does Patrick know that’s what’s going on? Or does he think he’s going to get better?”

  “You don’t need to ask me that,” Bethlynn said. “You know him at a far deeper level than I do. He’s a very intelligent man. Just because he’s ill doesn’t mean he’s lying to himself.”

  “With respect,” Will said, “that’s not what I’m asking.”

  “If you’re asking have I been lying to him, the answer’s no. I’ve never promised him he’d get out of this alive. But he can and will get out whole.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean once he finds himself in the eternal, then he won’t be afraid of death. He’ll see it for what it is. Part of the process. No more nor less.”

  “If it’s part of the process, why did it matter if he looked at my pictures or not?”

  “I wondered when we’d get to that,” Bethlynn said, easing back in her chair. “I just . . . didn’t feel they were a positive influence on him, that’s all. He’s very raw at the moment, very responsive to influences good and bad. Your pictures are extremely powerful, Will, there’s no question about that. They exercised an almost mesmeric hold on me when I first saw them. I’d go as far as to say they’re a form of magic.”

  “They’re just pictures of animals,” Will said.

  “They’re a lot more than that. And—if you’ll forgive my saying so, which you may not—a lot less.” On another day, in another state of mind, Will would have been rising to the defense of his work by now. Instead he listened with an easy detachment.