Galilee

  “It’s a copying machine,” Zelim explained when he came back in. “Jefferson invented it.” He pulled out the chair. “Sit please.” I sat down. “By all means try it,” he said. There was paper on the desk, and the pen already fitted into the device. Now that I knew its purpose it wasn’t hard to fathom how it worked. I raised and dipped my pen—which, courtesy of a system of struts, automatically raised and dipped the second pen, and proceeded to scratch out my name on a second sheet. Glancing over to my right I found my signature replicated almost perfectly.

  “Clever,” I remarked. “Did he ever use it?”

  “There’s one at Monticello he used all the time,” Zelim explained. “This device he used only once or twice.”

  “But he definitely used it?” I said. “I mean . . . Jefferson had his fingers around this very pen?”

  “Indeed he did. I saw him with my own eyes. He wrote a letter to John Adams, as I remember.”

  I couldn’t prevent a little shudder of delight, which you might think strange given the divine company I’ve kept. After all, Jefferson was only human. But that was perhaps the reason I felt the frisson. He was mortal stuff, reaching for a vision that was grander than most of us dare contemplate.

  Zelim handed me my glass of brandy. “Again, I apologize for my violence. May I wash the blood off your face?”

  “No need,” I said.

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “I’m fine,” I told him. “If you want to make amends—”

  “Yes?”

  “Talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “About what it’s been like for you, over the centuries.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “You’re Zelim the fisherman, aren’t you?”

  The pale face before me, despite its lack of specificities, seemed to grow troubled. “I don’t ever think of that any longer,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to be my life.”

  “More like a story?” I ventured.

  “More like a dream. A very distant dream. Why do you ask?”

  “I want to be able to describe everything in my book. Only everything, that was my promise to myself. And you’re a unique individual. I’d like to be sure I tell it all truthfully.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell,” Zelim said. “I was a fisherman, and I was called into service. That’s an old story.”

  “But look what you became.”

  “Oh this . . .” he said, glancing down at his body. “Does my nakedness trouble you?”

  “No.”

  “The longer I live with her the more I tend to androgyny, and the less important clothing comes to seem. I can’t remember how I looked any longer, when I was a man.”

  “I’ve got a picture of you in my head,” I said. “On the shore with Cesaria and Nicodemus and the baby. Dark hair, dark eyes.”

  “My teeth were good, I do know that,” he said. “The widow Passak used to love to watch me tear at my bread.”

  “So you remember her?”

  “Better than most things,” Zelim replied. “Better than my philosophies, certainly.” He gazed toward the window, and in the wash of light I saw that he was virtually translucent, his eyes iridescent. I wondered to myself if he had bones in his body, and supposed that he must, given the blow he’d delivered. Yet he seemed so very delicate now; like a frail invertebrate visitor from some deep-sea trench.

  “I forgot her for a while . . .” he said, his voice gossamer.

  “You mean the widow Passak?”

  “Yes,” he murmured. “I moved on through my life, and the love I felt for her . . .” The sentence trailed away; his face fluttered. I didn’t prompt him—though I badly wanted to hear what more he had to say on the subject. He was in a deeply emotional state, for all the colorlessness of his voice. I didn’t want to disturb his equilibrium. So I waited. At last, he picked up the thread of his ruminations: “ . . . the love I felt seemed to pass away from me. I thought it had gone forever. But I was wrong . . . the feelings I had toward her come back to me now, as though I was feeling them for the first time. The way she looked at me, when the wind came off the desert. The sweet mischief in her eyes.”

  “Things come around,” I said. “Didn’t you teach that to your students?”

  “I did. I used the stars as a metaphor, I believe.”

  “The Wheel of the Stars,” I prompted.

  Zelim made the faintest of smiles, remembering this. “The Wheel of the Stars,” he murmured. “It was a pretty idea.”

  “More than an idea,” I said. “It’s the truth.”

  “I wouldn’t make that claim for it,” Zelim said.

  “But the proof of it’s right here. You said yourself that your feelings for Passak have come back.”

  “I think it may be for the last time,” Zelim replied. “I’ve run my course, and I won’t be rising again after this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When L’Enfant falls—as it will, as it must—and everybody goes out into the world, I’m going to ask Cesaria to put an end to me. I’ve lived as a man, and I’ve lived as a spirit, and now I want an end to it all.”

  “No more resurrections?”

  “Not for me. I think it’s what comes naturally, after androgyny. Out of sexlessness into selflessness. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Looking forward to oblivion?”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” he said with a little laugh. “It’s just one man’s light going out. And if it’s no great loss to me than why should anybody else be upset?”

  “I’m not upset, I’m just a little confused,” I said.

  “By what?”

  I thought about the question for a moment before I replied. “I suppose living here I’ve got used to the idea of things going on.”

  “Or rising again, like your father.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Zelim’s features fluttered again, as they had when he’d first begun to talk. His Socratic calm disappeared; he was suddenly anxious. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “Don’t apologize,” I told him. “Just explain.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. It was inappropriate.”

  “Zelim. Explain.”

  He glanced back toward Cesaria’s chambers. Was he fearful that she’d come to punish him for his indiscretion? If so, his glance reassured him that he was not being overheard. When he looked back at me, his agitation had almost gone. Apparently Cesaria was off on her way to meet with Cadmus Geary.

  “I’m not sure I could explain anything where your father’s concerned,” he said. “Explanations and gods are mutually exclusive, aren’t they? All I can do is tell you what I feel.”

  “And what’s that?”

  He took a deep breath. His body seemed to grow a little more substantial with the inhalation. “Cesaria’s life is empty here. Completely empty. I know because I’ve shared it with her, day after day after day for the last God knows how many years. It’s an empty life. She simply sits at the window, or feeds the porcupines. The only time she steps outside is when one of the animals dies and we have to go out to bury it.”

  “I have something of that life myself,” I said. “I know how wretched it is.”

  “At least you had your books. She doesn’t like to read any longer. And she can’t abide television or even recorded music. Remember this is a woman who has been the toast of every great city in the world at some point in her life. I saw her in her glory days, and they were beyond anything you could imagine. She was the very essence of sophistication; the most courted, the most adored, the most emulated woman in the world. When she left a room, they used to say, it was like a kind of death . . .”

  “I don’t see what this has got to do with Nicodemus.”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that she stays?” Zelim replied. “Why hasn’t she pulled this house down? She could do that. She could raise a storm and trash it in a heartbeat. You know she raises storms.”
>
  “I’ve never seen her do it, but—”

  “Yes you have. It was one of her storms that came in the night your father mated Dumuzzi.”

  “That I didn’t know.”

  “She was angry because Nicodemus was showing more interest in his horses than he was in her, so she conjured a storm that laid waste to half the county. I think she was hoping the animals would be struck dead. Anyway, my point is this: if she wanted to bring this house down she could. But she won’t. She just stays. She watches. She waits.”

  “Maybe she’s preserving the house for Jefferson’s sake,” I suggested. “It’s his masterpiece.”

  Zelim shook his head. “She’s waiting for your father. That’s what I believe. She thinks he’s coming back.”

  “Well he’d better be quick about it,” I said. “Because if the Gearys get here there’ll be no more miracles—”

  “I realize that. And I think so does she. After all these years of idling, suddenly things are urgent. This business with Cadmus Geary, for instance. She would never have stooped to meddle with one of the Geary family before this.”

  “What’s she going to do to him?”

  Zelim shrugged. “I don’t know.” His gaze left me; he looked off toward the window again. “But she can be very unforgiving.”

  If he had more to say on the subject of her lack of compassion, he didn’t get a chance to say it. There was light rapping on the study door and Zabrina appeared. She’d sought out, and found, some comfort for her anxieties about Cesaria. She carried not one but two slices of pie in between the fingers of her right hand, and like a card-sharp manipulating aces at a poker table, delivered first one then the other to her mouth.

  “All’s well,” I told her.

  “So I gathered,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I should have come to tell you earlier.”

  “I’m used to being ignored,” she replied, and made her departure, pausing only to maneuver the last remaining pieces of pie crust into her mouth.

  VI

  i

  As I headed back downstairs I found myself in a mingled state of exhaustion and agitation. What I needed was a little entertainment. A conversation with Marietta would have been the perfect thing, but she was off making wedding plans with her beloved Alice, so I decided to smoke a little hashish and let my mind wander over the contents of my conversation with Zelim—the talk of his love for the widow Passak, his hopes for oblivion, his reflections on the loneliness of Cesaria’s life, and what her patience really meant—and wondered, in that nonchalant, noncommittal way you wonder when you’re smoking good hashish, if I shouldn’t have spent less time with the Gearys in my book, and more time here at home. Had I trivialized what might have been a mightier work by following the story of Rachel Pallenberg so closely; been seduced by that most populist of idioms, the rags-to-riches story, when the real meat of what I should have told lay in the troubled body of the Barbarossa clan?

  Back in my study I picked up the manuscript and flicked through it, deliberately letting my eye go where it would, to see how the thing sounded when sampled arbitrarily. There were plenty of stylistic infelicities which I promised myself I’d fix later; but the matter seemed to walk the line I’d intended it walk, between this world and that other, out there beyond the perimeters of L’Enfant. Perhaps I could have been less gossipy in my accounts of the daily business of this house, but there’s honesty in that gossip. Whatever the mythic roots of this family may be, we’ve dwindled into pettiness and domesticity. We’re not the first gods to have done so, of course. The occupants of Olympus bickered and bed-hopped; we’re no better nor worse. But they were inventions, we’re not (I suspect, by the way, that in the creation of divinities we see the most revealing work of the human imagination. And of course in the life of that imagination, the most compelling evidence of the divine in man. Each is the other’s most illuminating labor.)

  Where does that leave me? I, who sit in the middle of a house of divinities talking about invented gods. It leaves me in confusion, as always; set against myself, as though my heart were divided, and each half beat to a different drummer.

  The hashish put an appetite on me, and after a couple of hours of skipping through my text I went to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich of rare roast beef on black bread, which I ate sitting on the back door step, feeding the crumbs to the peacocks.

  Then I slept for a while, thinking I would get up in the middle of the evening and continue to tinker with the text. Those few blissful hours of sleep were, I suspect, the last easy slumbers I will enjoy; for when I woke (or rather, was woken) it was not only with visions of the Geary house in New York filling my head, and my right hand twitching as if it were warming up for the challenge of setting down all I was about to see, but also with the uncanny sense that any last vestige of calm had gone from the places I was witnessing.

  The final sequence of cataclysms was about to begin. I drew breath and ink; waited, watched, and then began to write.

  ii

  When Rachel got to the mansion she was told by one of the staff, a pleasant woman called Jocelyn, that she couldn’t see Loretta tonight. The old man had been very sick since noon, and Loretta had sent the nurse away, saying she wanted to look after Cadmus herself, which she was doing. Her instructions were that they were not to be disturbed.

  Rachel was insistent: this wasn’t business that could be put off until tomorrow. If Jocelyn wouldn’t go up and get Loretta, Rachel said, then she’d be obliged to do so herself. Reluctantly, Jocelyn went up; and after ten minutes or so Loretta came downstairs. It was the first time Rachel had ever seen her look less than perfect. She looked like a painting that had been slightly smeared; her hair, which was usually immaculate, a little out of place, one of her drawn brows a little smudged.

  She instructed Jocelyn to make some tea, and took Rachel into the dining room.

  “This is a bad time, Rachel,” she said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Cadmus is very weak, and I may need to go up to him, so please, say whatever you have to say.”

  “We had a conversation in this room, just after Margie’s death.”

  “I remember it, of course.”

  “Well, you were right. Mitch was at my apartment a little while ago, and I don’t think he’s entirely sane.”

  “What did he do?”

  “You want the short version and I’m not sure there is one,” Rachel explained. “Margie had a book—I don’t know the full story, but it was a kind of journal—and it came into my hands. It doesn’t matter how. The point is, it did; and contains information about the Barbarossas.”

  Loretta showed no sign of response to any of this, until she spoke. When she did, her voice betrayed her. It trembled.

  “You have Holt’s journal?” she said.

  “No. Mitchell does.”

  “Oh Jesus,” she said quietly. “Why didn’t you come to me with it?”

  “I didn’t know it was so important.”

  “Why do you think I’ve been sitting upstairs with Cadmus, listening to him ramble for hours on end?”

  “You wanted the journal?”

  “Of course. I knew he had it because he’d told me, years ago. Never let me see it—”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess he didn’t want me to know anything more about Galilee than I already knew.”

  “It’s not very flattering. What Holt says about him.”

  “So you’ve read it?”

  “Not all of it. But a lot. And the way Holt describes him . . . oh Lord, how’s it even possible?”

  “How’s what possible?”

  “How could Galilee have been alive in 1865?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” Loretta said. “Because I’m just as much in the dark as you about how and why. And I gave up asking a long time ago.”

  “If you gave up asking, why do you want the journal so badly?”

  “Don’t come here looking for my help
and then start needling me, girl,” Loretta replied. She looked away from Rachel for a moment, expelling a long, soft sigh. “Would you fetch me a cigarette?” she said finally. “They’re on the sideboard over there.”

  Rachel got up and brought the silver cigarette case, along with the lighter, back to the table. While Loretta was lighting up Jocelyn came in with the tea. “Just set it down,” Loretta said. “We’ll serve ourselves. Oh, and Jocelyn? Would you go upstairs and check on Mr. Geary?”

  “I just did,” Jocelyn said. “He’s sleeping.”

  “Keep looking in on him will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s been a godsend,” Loretta observed when Jocelyn had gone. “Never a complaint. What were we talking about?”

  “Galilee.”

  “Forget about Galilee.”

  “You once told me that he was at the heart of everything.”

  “Did I now?” Loretta said. She drew deeply on her cigarette. “Well I was probably feeling sorry for myself.” She exhaled the blue-gray smoke. Then she said: “You’re not the only one who’s been in love with him, you know. If you really want to understand what’s happening to us you have to stop thinking from a selfish point of view. Everybody’s had their disappointments, Rachel. Everybody’s had their lost loves and their broken hearts. Even the old man.”