From the Corner of His Eye

  Sapphires and emeralds, dazzling gems set in clearest white, ebony pupils at the center. Beautiful mysteries, these eyes, but no different now than they had ever been, as far as she could tell.

  She might have attributed his problem to eyestrain from all the reading he’d done during the past few days. She might have put drops in his eyes, told him to leave the books alone for a while, and sent him into the backyard to play. She might have counseled herself not to be one of those alarmist mothers who detected pneumonia in every sniffle, a brain tumor behind every headache.

  Instead, trying not to let Barty see the depth of her concern, she told him to get his jacket from the front closet, and she got hers, and leaving the buttermilk-raisin pies unfinished, she drove him to the doctor’s office, because he was her reason to breathe, the engine of her heart, her hope and joy, her everlasting bond to her lost husband.

  Dr. Joshua Nunn was only forty-eight, but he had appeared grandfatherly since Agnes had first gone to him as a patient after the death of her father, more than ten years ago. His hair turned pure white before he was thirty. Every day off, he either worked assiduously on his twenty-foot sportfisher, Hippocratic Boat, which he scraped and painted and polished and repaired with his own hands, or puttered around Bright Bay in it, fishing as though the fate of his soul depended on the size of his catch; consequently, he spent so much time in the salt air and sun that his perpetually tan face was well-wizened at the corners of his eyes and as appealingly creased as that of the best of grandfathers. Joshua applied the same diligence to the preservation of a round belly and a second chin that he brought to the maintenance of his boat, and considering his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and bow tie and suspenders and the elbow patches on his jacket, he seemed to have intentionally sculpted his physical appearance to put his patients at ease, as surely as he had selected his wardrobe for the same purpose.

  Always, he was good with Barty, and on this occasion, he teased more than the usual number of smiles and giggles from the boy as he tried to get him to read the Snellen chart on the wall. Then he lowered the lights in the examination room to study his eyes with an ophthalmometer and an ophthalmoscope.

  From the chair in the corner, where Agnes sat, it seemed that Joshua took an inordinately long time on what was usually a quick examination. Worry so weighed on her that the physician’s customary thoroughness seemed, this time, to be filled with dire meaning.

  Finished, Joshua excused himself and went down the hall to his office. He was gone perhaps five minutes, and when he returned, he sent Barty off to the waiting room, where the receptionist kept a jar of lemon-and orange-flavored hard candies. “A few of them have your name on ’em, Bartholomew.”

  The subtle distortions in his vision, which caused lines of type to twist, didn’t appear to trouble Barty much otherwise. He moved as quickly and as surely as ever, with his special grace.

  Alone with Agnes, the physician said, “I want you to take Barty to a specialist in Newport Beach. Franklin Chan. He’s a wonderful ophthalmologist and ophthalmological surgeon, and right now we don’t have anyone like that here in town.”

  Her hands were locked together in her lap, gripped so tightly for so long that the muscles in her forearms ached. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not an eye specialist, Agnes.”

  “But you have some suspicion.”

  “I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily if—”

  “Please. Prepare me.”

  He nodded. “Sit up here.” He patted the examination table.

  She sat on the end of the table, where Barty had sat, now at eye level with the standing physician.

  Before Agnes’s fingers could braid again, Joshua held out his darkly tanned, work-scarred hands. Gratefully, she held fast to him.

  He said, “There’s a whiteness in Barty’s right pupil…which I think indicates a growth. The distortions in his vision are still there, though somewhat different, when he closes his right eye, so that indicates a problem in the left, as well, even though I’m not able to see anything there. Dr. Chan has a full schedule tomorrow, but as a favor to me, he’s going to see you before his usual office hours, first thing in the morning. You’ll have to start out early.”

  Newport Beach was almost an hour’s drive north, along the coast.

  “And,” Joshua cautioned, “you better prepare for a long day. I’m pretty sure Dr. Chan will want to consult with an oncologist.”

  “Cancer,” she whispered, and superstitiously reproached herself for speaking the word aloud, as though thereby she’d given power to the malignancy and ensured its existence.

  “We don’t know that yet,” Joshua said.

  But she knew.

  Barty, buoyant as ever, seemed not to be much worried about the problem with his vision. He appeared to expect that it would pass like any sneezing fit or cold.

  All he cared about was Red Planet, and what might happen after page 103. He had carried the book with him to the doctor’s office, and on the way home in the car, he repeatedly opened it, squinting at the lines of type, trying to read around or through the “twisty” spots. “Jim and Frank and Willis, they’re in deep trouble.”

  Agnes prepared a dinner to indulge him: hot dogs with cheese, potato chips. Root beer instead of milk.

  She was not going to be as forthright with Barty as she had insisted that Joshua Nunn be with her, in part because she was too shaken to risk forthrightness.

  Indeed, she found it difficult to talk with her son in their usual easy way. She heard a stiffness in her voice that she knew would sooner or later be apparent to him.

  She worried that her anxiety would prove contagious, that when her fear infected her boy, he would be less able to fight whatever hateful thing had taken seed in his right eye.

  Robert Heinlein saved her. Over hot dogs and chips, she read to Barty from Red Planet, beginning at the top of page 104. He had previously shared enough of the story with Agnes so that she felt connected to the narrative, and soon she was sufficiently involved with the tale that she was better able to conceal her anguish.

  To his room then, where they sat side by side in bed, a plate of chocolate-chip cookies between them. Through the evening, they stepped off this earth and out of all its troubles, into a world of adventure, where friendship and loyalty and courage and honor could deal with any malignancy.

  After Agnes read the final words on the final page, Barty was drunk on speculation, chattering about what-might-have-happened-next to these characters that had become his friends. He talked nonstop while changing into his pajamas, while peeing, while brushing his teeth, and Agnes wondered how she would wind him down to sleep.

  He wound himself down, of course. Sooner than she expected, he was snoring.

  One of the hardest things that she had ever done was to leave him then, alone in his room, with the hateful something still quietly growing in his eye. She wanted to move the armchair close to his bed and watch over him throughout the night.

  If he woke, however, and saw her sitting vigil, Barty would understand how terrible his condition might be.

  And so Agnes went alone to her bedroom and there, as on so many nights, sought the solace of the rock who was also her lamp, of the lamp who was also her high fortress, of the fortress who was also her shepherd. She asked for mercy, and if mercy was not to be granted, she asked for the wisdom to understand the purpose of her sweet boy’s suffering.

  Chapter 59

  EARLY CHRISTMAS EVE, gallery brochure in hand, Junior returned to his apartment, puzzling over mysteries that had nothing to do with guiding stars and virgin births.

  Beyond the windows, the winter night sifted sootily down through the twinkling city, as he sat in his living room with a glass of Dry Sack in one hand and the picture of Celestina White in the other.

  He knew for a fact that Seraphim had died in childbirth. He had seen the gathering of Negroes at her funeral in the cemetery, the day of Naomi’s burial. He had heard Max Bellini’s message
on the maniac cop’s Ansaphone.

  Anyway, if Seraphim were still alive, she would be only nineteen now, too young to have graduated from Academy of Art College.

  The striking resemblance between this artist and Seraphim, as well as the facts in the biographical sketch under the photo, argued that the two were sisters.

  This baffled Junior. To the best of his recollection, during the weeks that Seraphim had come to him for physical therapy, she had never mentioned an older sister or any sister at all.

  In fact, though he strained hard to recall their conversations, he could dredge up nothing that Seraphim had said during therapy, as if he’d been stone-deaf in those days. The only things he retained were sensual impressions: the beauty of her face, the texture of her skin, the firmness of her flesh under his ministering hands.

  Again, he cast his line of memory into murky waters nearly four years in the past, to the night of passion that he had shared with Seraphim in the parsonage. As before, he could recall nothing she’d said, only the exquisite look of her, the nubile perfection of her body.

  In the minister’s house, Junior had seen no indications of a sister. No family photos, no high-school graduation portrait proudly framed. Of course, he had not been interested in their family, for he had been all-consumed by Seraphim.

  Besides, being a future-focused guy who believed that the past was a burden best shed, he never made an effort to nurture memories. Sentimental wallowing in nostalgia had none of the appeal for him that it had for most people.

  This Dry Sack-assisted effort at recollection, however, brought back to him one thing in addition to all the sweet lubricious images of Seraphim naked. The voice of her father. On the tape recorder. The reverend droning on and on as Junior pinned the devout daughter to the mattress.

  As kinky and thrilling as it had been to make love to the girl while playing the recorded rough draft of a new sermon that she had been transcribing for her father, Junior could now recall nothing of what the reverend had said, only the tone and the timbre of his voice. Whether instinct, nervous irritation, or merely the sherry should be blamed, he was troubled by the thought that there was something significant about the content of that tape.

  He turned the brochure in his hands, to look at the front of it again. Gradually he began to suspect that the title of the exhibition might be what had brought to mind the reverend’s unremembered sermon.

  This Momentous Day.

  Junior spoke the three words aloud and felt a strange resonance between them and his dim memories of Reverend White’s voice on that long-ago night. Yet the link, if any actually existed, remained elusive.

  Reproduced in the three-fold brochure were samples of Celestina White’s paintings, which Junior found naive, dull, and insipid in the extreme. She imbued her work with all the qualities that real artists disdained: realistic detail, story-telling, beauty, optimism, and even charm.

  This wasn’t art. This was pandering, mere illustration, more suitable for painting on velvet than on canvas.

  Studying the brochure, Junior felt that the best response to this artist’s work was to go directly into the bathroom, stick one finger down his throat, and purge himself. Considering his medical history, however, he couldn’t afford to be such an expressive critic.

  When he returned to the kitchen to add ice and sherry to his glass, he looked up White, Celestina in the San Francisco phone directory. Her number was listed; her address was not.

  He considered calling her, but he didn’t know what he would say if she answered.

  Although he didn’t believe in destiny, in fate, in anything more than himself and his own ability to shape his future, Junior couldn’t deny how extraordinary it was that this woman should cross his path at this precise moment in his life, when he was frustrated to the point of cerebral hemorrhage by his inability to find Bartholomew, confused and nervous about the phantom singer and other apparently supernatural events in his life, and generally in a funk unlike any he had ever known before. Here was a link to Seraphim and, through Seraphim, to Bartholomew.

  Adoption records would have been kept as secret from Celestina as from everyone else. But perhaps she knew something about the fate of her sister’s bastard son that Junior didn’t know, a small detail that would seem insignificant to her but that might put him on the right trail at last.

  He must be careful in his approach to her. He dared not rush into this. Think it through. Devise a strategy. This valuable opportunity must not be wasted.

  With his refreshed drink, studying Celestina’s photograph in the brochure, Junior returned to the living room. She was as stunning as her sister, but unlike her poor sister, she wasn’t dead and was, therefore, an appealing prospect for romance. From her, he must learn whatever she knew that might help him in the Bartholomew hunt, without alerting her to his motive. At the same time, there was no reason that they couldn’t have a fling, a love affair, even a serious future together.

  How ironic it would be if Celestina, the aunt of Seraphim’s bastard boy, proved to be the heart mate for whom Junior had been longing through the past few years of unsatisfying relationships and casual sex. This seemed unlikely, considering the jejune quality of her paintings, but perhaps he could help her to grow and to evolve as an artist. He was an open-minded man, without prejudices, so anything could happen after the child was found and killed.

  The sensual memories of his torrid evening with Seraphim had left Junior aroused. Unfortunately, the only female nearby was Industrial Woman, and he wasn’t that desperate.

  He’d been invited to a Christmas Eve celebration with a satanic theme, but he hadn’t intended to go. The party was not being thrown by real Satanists, which might have been interesting, but by a group of young artists, all nonbelievers, who shared a wry sense of humor.

  Junior decided to attend the festivities, after all, motivated by the prospect of connecting with a woman more pliant than the Bavol Poriferan sculpture.

  Almost as an afterthought, as he was leaving, he tucked the brochure for “This Momentous Day” into a jacket pocket. There would be amusement value in hearing a group of cutting-edge young artists analyze Celestina’s greeting-card images. Besides, as the Academy of Art College was the premier school of its type on the West Coast, a few of the partygoers might actually know her and be able to give him some valuable background.

  The party raged in a cavernous loft on the third—and top—floor of a converted industrial building, the communal residence and studio of a group of artists who believed that art, sex, and politics were the three hammers of violent revolution, or something like that.

  A nuclear-powered sound system blasted out the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and the Papas, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Country Joe and the Fish, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Donovan (unfortunately), the Rolling Stones (annoyingly), and the Beatles (infuriatingly). Megatons of music crashed off the brick walls, made the many-paned metal-framed windows reverberate like the drumheads in a hard-marching military band, and created simultaneously an exhilarating sense of possibility and a sense of doom, the feeling that Armageddon was coming soon but that it was going to be fun.

  Both the red and the white wines were too cheap for Junior’s taste, so he drank Dos Equis beer and got two kinds of high by inhaling enough secondhand pot smoke to cure the state of Virginia’s entire annual production of hams. Among the two or three hundred partyers, some were tripping on acid, some were wired on speed, some exhibited the particular excitability and talkativeness typical of cokeheads, but Junior succumbed to none of these temptations. Self-improvement and self-control mattered to him; he didn’t approve of this degree of self-indulgence.

  Besides, he’d noticed a tendency among dopers to get maudlin, whereupon they sank into a confessional mood, seeking peace through rambling self-analysis and self-revelation. Junior was too private a person to behave in such a fashion. Furthermore, if drugs ever put him in a confessional mood, the consequence might be electrocution or poison gas,
or lethal injection, depending on the jurisdiction and the year in which he fell into an unbosoming frame of mind.

  Speaking of bosoms, everywhere in the loft were braless girls in sweaters and miniskirts, braless girls in T-shirts and miniskirts, braless girls in silk-lined rawhide vests and jeans, braless girls in tie-dyed sash tops, with bared midriffs, and calypso pants. Lots of guys moved through the crowd, too, but Junior barely noticed them.

  The sole male guest in whom he took an interest—a big interest—was Sklent, the one-name painter whose three canvases were the only art on the walls of Junior’s apartment.

  The artist, six feet four and two hundred fifty pounds, looked markedly more dangerous in person than in his scary publicity photo. Still in his twenties, he had white hair that fell limp and straight to his shoulders. Dead-white skin. His deep-set eyes, as silver-gray as rain with an albino-pink undertone, had a predatory glint as chilling as that in the eyes of a panther. Terrible scars slashed his face, and red hash marks covered his big hands, as though he’d frequently defended himself barehanded against men armed with swords.

  At the farthest end of the loft from the stereo speakers, voices nevertheless had to be raised in even the most intimate exchanges. The artist who had created In the Baby’s Brain Lies the Parasite of Doom, Version 6, however, possessed a voice as deep, sharp-edged, and penetrating as his talent.

  Sklent proved to be angry, suspicious, volatile, but also a man of tremendous intellectual power. A profound and dazzling conversationalist, he rattled off breathtaking insights into the human condition, astonishing yet unarguable opinions about art, and revolutionary philosophical concepts. Later, except in the matter of ghosts, Junior would not be able to remember a single word of what Sklent had said, only that it had all been brilliant and really cool.

  Ghosts. Sklent was an atheist, and yet he believed in spirits. Here’s how that works: Heaven, Hell, and God do not exist, but human beings are as much energy as flesh, and when the flesh gives out, the energy goes on. “We’re the most stubborn, selfish, greedy, grubbing, vicious, psychotic, evil species in the universe,” Sklent explained, “and some of us just refuse to die, we’re too hardass to die. The spirit is a prickly bur of energy that sometimes clings to places and people that were once important to us, so then you get haunted houses, poor bastards still tormented by their dead wives, and crap like that. And sometimes, the bur attaches itself to the embryo in some slut who’s just been knocked up, so you get reincarnation. You don’t need a god for all this. It’s just the way things are. Life and the afterlife are the same place, right here, right now, and we’re all just a bunch of filthy, scabby monkeys tumbling through an endless damn series of barrels.”

  For two years, since finding the quarter in his cheeseburger, Junior had been searching for a metaphysics that he could embrace, that squared with all the truths that he had learned from Zedd, and that didn’t require him to acknowledge any power higher than himself. Here it was. Unexpected. Complete. He didn’t fully understand the bit about monkeys and barrels, but he got the rest of it, and peace of a sort descended upon him.

  Junior would have liked to pursue spiritual matters with Sklent, but numerous other partyers wanted their time with the great man. In parting, sure that he would give the artist a laugh, Junior withdrew the brochure for “This Momentous Day” from his jacket and coyly asked for an opinion of Celestina White’s paintings.

  Based on the evidence, perhaps Sklent never laughed, regardless of how clever the joke. He scowled fiercely at the paintings in the brochure, returned it to Junior, and snarled, “Shoot the bitch.”

  Assuming this criticism was amusing hyperbole, Junior laughed, but Sklent squinted those virtually colorless eyes, and Junior’s laugh withered in his throat. “Well, maybe that’s how it’ll work out,” he said, wanting to be on Sklent’s good side, but he was at once sorry he’d spoken those words in front of witnesses.

  Using the brochure as an ice-breaker, Junior circulated through the throng, seeking anyone who’d attended the Academy of Art College and might have met Celestina White. The critiques of her paintings were uniformly negative, frequently hilarious, but never as succinct and violent as Sklent’s.

  Eventually, a braless blonde in shiny white plastic boots, a white miniskirt, and a hot-pink T-shirt featuring the silk-screened face of Albert Einstein, said, “Sure, I know her. Had some classes with her. She’s nice enough, but she’s kind of nerdy, especially for an Afro-American. I mean, they’re never nerdy—am I right?”

  “You’re right, except maybe for Buckwheat.”

  “Who?” she shouted, though they were perched side by side on a black-leather love seat.

  Junior raised his voice even further: “In those old movies, the Little Rascals.”

  “Me, I don’t like anything old. This White chick’s got a weird thing for old people, old buildings, old stuff in general. Like she doesn’t realize she’s young. You want to grab her, shake her, and say, ‘Hey, let’s move on,’ you know?”

  “The past is past.”

  “It’s what?” she shouted.

  “Past!”

  “So true.”

  “But my late wife used to like those Little Rascals movies.”

  “You’re married?”

  “She died.”

  “So young?”

  “Cancer,” he said, because that was more tragic and far less suspicious than a fall from a fire tower.

  In commiseration, she put a hand on his thigh.

  “It’s been a tough few years,” he said. “Losing her…and then getting out of Nam alive.”

  The blonde’s eyes widened. “You were over there?”

  He found it difficult to make a painful personal revelation sound sincere when delivered in a shout, but he managed well enough to bring a shine of tears to her eyes: “Part of my left foot was shot off in this up-country sweep we did.”