Galilee

  Oh Lord! A few minutes ago I was in a fine old mood about what I did, and now I’m sickened. What’s wrong with me? This bloody book, that’s what’s wrong. It’s wearing me out. I’m tired of listening to the bloody voices in my head. I’m tired of feeling as though I’m responsible to them. My father wouldn’t have wasted a day of his life, long though it was, writing about Galilee and the Gearys. And the idea that anyone, let alone his son, could sit down day upon day to report the voices that chatter in his head would have struck him as ludicrous.

  My only defense would have been to convince him that my book keeps at bay a creeping madness that I owe entirely to him. Though even as I say that I can well imagine what his response would be.

  “I was never mad.”

  How would I reply? “But Papa,” I’d say. “There were months on end when you wouldn’t speak to anybody. You let your beard grow to your navel, and you wouldn’t wash. You’d go out into the swamp and eat rotted alligator carcasses. Do you remember doing that?”

  “Your point?”

  “That’s the act of a madman.”

  “By your definition.”

  “By anybody’s definition, father.”

  “I was not mad. I knew exactly why I was doing what I was doing.”

  “Tell me, then. Help me understand why half the time you were a loving father, and the rest of the time you were covered in lice and excrement—”

  “I made a pair of boots out of excrement. Do you remember those?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “And one time I brought back a skull I’d found in the swamp—a human skull—and I told my bitch-wife that I’d been away in Virginia and I’d dug up you know who.”

  “You told her you had Jefferson’s skull?”

  “Oh yes.” He gives me a sly smile here, remembering with pleasure the pain he caused. “And I reminded her how his narrow lips had looked and put my fingers in his sockets where his watery eyes had been. I said to her: did you kiss his eyes? Because this is where they lay . . . ”

  “Why did you do something so cruel?”

  “She did a lot worse to me. Anyway it was good to see her weep and wail once in a while. It reminded me she still had a heart, because sometimes I doubted it. And oh Lord, how she carried on! Screaming at me to give her the skull. It wasn’t dignified she said. Dignified! Ha! As if she ever gave a damn about being dignified! She could behave like the filthiest gutter whore when she was in heat. But she came after me, telling me about dignity!” He shook his head, laughing now. “The hypocritical slut.”

  I remembered this now. The walls of L’Enfant literally shaking as husband and wife raged at one another. I hadn’t known what was at issue at the time; but in hindsight it’s little wonder Cesaria was so distressed.

  “Eventually she snatched the thing from me—or tried to—and somehow in the mêlée it dropped to the ground and smashed Pieces flew in every direction and she let out such a shriek and went down on her knees to gather these pieces up so fucking tenderly you’d have thought he was still in there somewhere.

  “So did you tell her it wasn’t Jefferson’s skull?”

  “Not right then. I watched her for a while, sobbing and moaning. I’d never been completely certain of what went on between them until that minute. I mean I’d had my suspicions—”

  “He built L’Enfant for her.”

  “Ah, that proved nothing. She could make men do anything, if she put her mind to it. The question wasn’t: what did he feel for her? The question was: what did she feel for him? And now I had my answer. Watching her picking up the pieces of what she thought was his bones, I saw how—oh how—she loved him.” He paused and regarded me with black and turquoise eyes. “How did we get to this?”

  “You being mad.”

  “Oh yes . . . ” He smiled. “My madness . . . my wonderful madness . . . ” He drew a deep breath; a vast breath. “I was never mad,” he said again. “Because the mad don’t know what they’re doing or why. And I always knew. Always.” He exhaled. “Whereas you . . . ” he growled.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, my son. You. Sitting there day after day, night after night, listening to voices which may or may not be real. That’s not the behavior of a sane man. Look at you. You’re even writing this down. Just take a moment and think about how preposterous that is: setting down something as if it were the truth, though you know you’re inventing it.”

  “I don’t know that for certain.”

  “But I’ve been dead and gone a hundred and forty years, son. I’m as dusty as Jefferson.”

  I fumbled for an answer to this. The thing is, he was right. It was strange—no, it is strange—to be exchanging words with a dead man the way I am now, not knowing how much of what I’m writing is reportage and how much of it invention; not knowing if my father is speaking to me through my genes, through my pen, through my imagination, or whether this dialogue is just evidence of some profound insanity in me. Sometimes I hope it’s the latter. For if it’s the former—if the man is here in me now—then that prospect he said I feared so much is close; that time when he comes back from his journey into death, leaving the door through which he passed open wide.

  “Father?”

  Writing the word on the page is a kind of summons, sometimes.

  “Where are you?”

  He was here moments ago, filling my head with his voice. (That story of the skull he showed to Cesaria; I’d never heard it before. When I see her next I’m going to ask her if it’s true. If it is, then I’m not inventing his voice, am I? He’s here with me.) Or at least he was.

  “Father?”

  Now he doesn’t answer.

  “We didn’t finish our conversation about madness.” Still silence. Ah well; another time perhaps.

  ii

  I began this passage talking about clearing my desk, and I end up with a visitation from my deceased father. That’s how it’s been from the beginning: the strange, the grotesque, even the apocalyptic, has constantly intersected with the domestic, the familial, the inconsequential. While I sat sipping tea I dreamed I was on the Silk Road to Samarkand. While I listened to the crickets I saw Garrison Geary playing the horny mortician. While I was plucking the hairs from my ears one evening I saw Rachel looking back at me from the mirror in my bathroom, and I knew she had fallen in love.

  It’s perhaps not surprising that I choose the Silk Road as an example of the strange and Garrison’s cold coupling as an image of the grotesque. But why do I think of Rachel and Galilee when I picture the apocalyptic?

  I don’t exactly know, to be honest. I have some uneasy suspicions, but I’m afraid to voice them in case doing so turns a possibility into a likelihood.

  I can only say this with any certainty: that as the visions continue to come, it’s Rachel I feel closest to. So close in fact that sometimes when I get up from a period of writing about her—especially if I’ve been recording something that happened to her in private (just the two of us, in other words)—I feel as though I am her. My body’s heavy and hers is light, my skin is Italianate, hers is pale, I move like a man who has only just regained his mobility (I’m lumpen; I stumble), she moves as though she were a silk sail. And yet, I feel I am her.

  Many, many pages ago—having somewhat awkwardly described the first liaison between Rachel and Galilee—I remember writing that I was faintly sickened by the pall of incestuous feeling that attended such description. I can honestly say now that all such concerns have disappeared, and for that I must thank the presence of my Rachel. She’s made me shameless. Taking this journey with her, listening to her weep, listening to her rage, listening to her express her longings for Galilee, I have become braver.

  Had I to tell that scene again, I wouldn’t be so puritanical, if you doubt me, wait a while. If they meet again I’ll prove the boast. Maddox will have vanished from the equation: I will be Rachel, lying in the arms of her beloved.

  III

  Rachel opened her eyes, just a slit, a
nd looked at the clock. It was just a little after six; only an hour since she’d given up on the journal and retired to bed. Her head was throbbing, and her mouth tasted stale. She contemplated getting up to take some aspirin, but she didn’t have the will to move.

  As her eyes fluttered closed, however, she heard a noise on the floor below. Her heart jumped. There was somebody in the apartment. She held her breath, raising her head from the pillow half an inch so as to hear better. There was another sound now; not a footfall this time, but a voice, a man’s voice. Was it Mitchell? If so, what the hell was he doing letting himself into her apartment at this hour of the morning; and who the hell was he talking to? She strained to hear the words. She recognized the cadence of voice, though she could make no sense of what he was saying. It was indeed Mitchell; the bastard! Walking in as though he still had the right to come and go.

  There was a short pause, then he began to speak again. He was on the telephone to somebody, she realized, and to judge by the speed of his speech, he was excited.

  She was almost as curious as she was enraged: what had got him into such a state? She got up, quickly slipped on her underwear and a sweatshirt, and went to the door.

  Once she got there she could hear him more clearly. He was talking to Garrison. Even if she hadn’t heard him say his brother’s name, which she did, she would have known from the tone of his voice: that mingling of respect and familiarity which he reserved for Garrison alone.

  “I’m coming over right now, . . .” Mitchell was saying, “just let me grab some coffee and—”

  She opened the door and went out onto the landing. He was still out of sight, but he obviously heard her coming because he truncated his conversation. “I’ll see you in an hour,” he said, and put the phone down.

  She was at the top of the stairs now, and she could hear him getting up from the table and crossing the room, though she still couldn’t see him.

  “Mitchell?”

  Finally he stepped into view, a sunny smile already fixed on his face, though his pallor was gray and his eyes bloodshot.

  “I thought I heard you up there. I didn’t want to wake you, so—”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Just dropped by to say hi,” he replied, the smile still in place. “You look like you had a rough night. Are you okay?”

  Rachel started down the stairs. “It’s six in the morning, Mitchell.”

  “There’s a lot of flu going around, you know. Maybe you should see—”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Don’t be mad, baby,” he said, the smile finally making its exit. “You don’t have to yell and scream every time we see one another.”

  “I’m not screaming,” Rachel said calmly. “I’m just telling you I don’t want you in my apartment.”

  She was three steps from the bottom of the flight. He stepped back, hands raised in surrender. “I’m going,” he said, and turning on his heel walked back toward the table. “I should have known she’d pass it on to you,” he said as he went. He was talking about the journal. It was there on the table where Rachel had left it. “Garrison said you were all bitches, and I didn’t want to believe it. Not my Rachel. Not my sweet, innocent Rachel.” He reached for the journal.

  “Don’t touch that,” she said.

  “I’ll do what the fuck I like,” Mitchell said. He picked up the journal, and turned back to look at her. “I gave you a chance—” he said, waving his prize in front of him as he spoke. “I warned you at the gala: don’t mess with things you don’t understand because you’ll end up having nobody to protect you. Didn’t I say that?”

  “It’s not yours, Mitch,” Rachel said, doing her best to preserve her equilibrium. ‘Put it down and leave.”

  “Or what?” Mitchell said. “Huh? What can you do? You’re on your own.” His manner softened abruptly, as though he was genuinely distressed at her vulnerability. “Why didn’t you just come to me and tell me she’d given you this?”

  “She didn’t give it to me. I found it.”

  “You found it?” The softness was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “You went digging around in Garrison’s place?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “You are a piece of work,” he said. “Do you have any idea what you’re playing around with?”

  “I’m beginning to.”

  “And you thought your lover-boy Galilee was going to come and save you if you got in too deep?”

  “No,” she said, slowly walking toward him. “I know that’s not what happens. I have to look after myself. I’m not afraid of you. I know how your mind works.”

  “Not any longer you don’t,” he said. The look in his bloodshot eyes gave credence to the claim; there was something she hadn’t seen there before; something unstable. “You know what you should do, baby? You should go back to Dansky and be thankful you got out alive. I really mean that, baby. Go and don’t look back . . .”

  At the gala his threatening talk had seemed faintly ludicrous; now it carried weight. He frightened her. She was weak with sadness and confusion and lack of sleep; if he chose to harm her now, she wouldn’t be able to put up much of a defense.

  “You know you may be right,” she said, doing her best to conceal her unease. “I should go home.”

  He was clearly pleased that he’d made some impression on her. “Now you’re being smart,” he said.

  “I hadn’t realized . . .”

  “No, how could you?”

  “ . . . things are more serious . . .”

  “Than you thought. I did try and warn you.”

  “Yes. You did. And I wasn’t ready to listen.”

  “But now you see . . .”

  She nodded; he seemed to have bought her performance. “Yes, I see. I was wrong and you were right.”

  Oh, he liked that; that made him smile from ear to ear. “You know, you are so sweet when you want to be,” he said. Without warning, he approached her, his free hand reaching out and catching hold of her chin. She smelled sour sweat and stale cologne. “If I had the time . . .” he said, that volatile gleam clearer still now he was a foot from her, “I’d take you upstairs and remind you what you’re missing.”

  She wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but there was nothing to be gained from escalating things again when she’d just worked to turn down the heat. Instead she kept her silence, and let him plant a dry kiss on her lips, in that proprietorial manner that had once made her feel like a princess. He hadn’t finished with her, however. His hand dropped from her chin and lightly touched her breast. “Say something,” he murmured.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “You know,” he said.

  “You want me to ask you to come upstairs?”

  He gave her a crooked-eye grin. “It might be nice,” he said.

  She swore to herself she’d make him suffer for this one day; she’d have her foot on his neck. But until then: “Well, will you?”

  “Will I what?” he said.

  “Take me upstairs—”

  “And?”

  “—fuck me.”

  “Oh, baby, I thought you’d never ask.” His hand made one final descent, from her breast to her groin. He slipped his fingers beneath the waistband of her panties. “You’re not wet, baby,” he said. He pushed in a little. “Feels like a fucking grave.” He pulled his hand out, as though he’d been stung. “Sorry, baby. Gotta go.”

  He turned away from her and started in the direction of the door. It was all she could do not to go after him, telling him what a worthless piece of shit he was. But she resisted the temptation. He was leaving, and that was all that mattered right now.

  “One thing—” he said when he reached the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you want me to put this place back on the market for you? You’re not going to stay here are you?”

  “You can do what the hell you want with it.”

  “Whatever I get
for it, I’ll put in your account.” He glanced over his shoulder, though not far enough to lay eyes on her. “Of course, if you don’t trust me . . .”

  “Sell it, Mitch. I’ll be out of here in two weeks.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know yet I’ve got plenty of friends. Maybe back to Boston. I’ll keep Cecil informed.”

  “Yeah. Do that, will you?”

  That was his departure line: a remote echo of a man who’d once cared for her, and whom she’d been ready to call her husband to the end of her days.

  What had happened to him? What was happening to them all? It was as though everybody was shedding their skin, and revealing somebody new—or perhaps somebody they’d always been—to the world. The question that lay before Rachel was simple: who was she? She was no longer Mitchell’s wife, that much was certain. But then nor was she Galilee’s lover. Was she doomed to be one of the melancholy women she saw around town noted only for the brevity of their moment—a failed marriage to a public man, or a taste of celebrity, then eclipse? Growing old as gracefully as they knew how: preserving their place at the table with minor good works though half the time people couldn’t quite remember who they were.

  She’d go back to Dansky before she’d live a life like that. She’d propose to Neil Wilkens and if he’d take her, settle down to a life of total anonymity. Anything, rather than be pointed out as the woman who’d loved and lost Mitchell Geary.