The crowd surged out of the hall, forcing Michael and Kristine with it. It stood on the grass and sidewalks outside, shouting and arguing. Kristine beamed. “It’s like when they played Stravinsky and Milhaud,” she said. “It’s really happened!”
“I thought they threw the seat cushions around for Stravinsky,” Michael said.
“Our crowd is much too with it to do that,” Kristine said. “Let’s find Berthold and Edgar.”
The gathering at Macho’s was crowded and noisy. Michael stayed on the sidelines, letting others enjoy their triumph; he had really had so little to do with it. Flushed, Crooke carried a beer in one hand and a glass of sparkling water in the other, sipping from them alternately and smiling at a short, very shapely woman who had attached herself to him. Moffat held court from a large round table, regaling his audience of students and formally dressed alumni with tales of Hollywood in the fifties.
“Maybe everything’s going to be all right, hmm?” Kristine suggested as she passed Michael in one of her orbits. She made frequent eye contact with him, smiling reassurance. It suddenly occurred to Michael that she was uncertain about him, a little afraid he might leave without her.
Little chance of that. Even Songs of Power and the sway of dying and birthing worlds seemed pale compared to what he anticipated.
He ordered and drank a beer, enjoyed it immensely and almost immediately regretted it; his hyloka, held at a constant simmer under all his careening emotions, fluctuated wildly under the influence of the alcohol. He felt excessively warm —as he had for a time during the concert—and looked for ways through the crowd to a restroom in case things got out of control and he had to doff his clothes.
But the hyloka settled down, and he felt a simple, direct sensation of well-being. Everything had gone beautifully. Clarkham—wherever and whatever he was now—had failed again.
Kristine hooked her arm through his on her next orbit and took him with her. “Let’s find a door,” she said. “It’s getting late.”
They went to the Waltiri home, and Michael took Kristine into the upstairs bedroom. As he held her warmth closely, still fully dressed, he felt that nothing could possibly go wrong, ever.
He could feel her nervousness, her tension, and he eased it away expertly with his fingers, drawing a line down both sides of her spine, searching for and finding the physical centers of her anxiety and releasing them.
More things he had not known he could do.
More growth.
She started to undo the eyes and zipper of her dress, and he finished the task for her, pulling it away from her shoulders, letting it slide past her hips. He lowered her half slip a few inches with his index fingers and kneeled, rubbing his cheek against her stomach, feeling the warmth and softness of her skin.
They made love as if lost deep in woods, and nothing mattered or could interfere: nothing improper or suspect, nothing to hold him back or bring an edge of dismay to his enthusiasm, nothing tragic.
Michael found the crescented outline of Kristine beneath the sheets more beautiful than anything he had ever hoped to see, much less have. He propped himself on one elbow and stared at her as she lay in the ghost-glow of the window. Her eyelids fell; drowsy, she was content as a tree is content after a day full of sun. He probed her aura gently and found a smooth continuity, near slumber, mellow.
He lay back on his pillow. He would sleep with her tonight. They would dream beside each other. For the first time in a great many months, he would be merely a young human being, not in the least important.
The unplayed fourth movement came back to haunt him just before sleep, making a cold, hard circle at the center of his contentment. In the silence of the old house, in the darkness, the music was almost audible.
The bomb had not gone off.
Not yet.
But
Chapter Fifteen
Michael.
A voice in his sleep. He cannot struggle up out of slumber, and he feels as if all his senses have been smothered in thick clouds of wool. He struggles without moving or waking.
I’ve been right here for weeks.
He feels the hidden foulness. It fills his mind like a mist of sulfurous gas and ammonia.
Waiting.
The wool lifts but not enough to allow him to awaken or put his discipline to use. He cannot sense Kristine beside him.
I’ve taken her. But that isn’t enough. You must go as well. You’ve become entirely too dangerous, too skilled. Look to your ancestry, Michael.
The words fade.
Look to your ancestry. And calm, assured laughter.
Downstairs, a few sharp measures from the second movement of the Infinity Concerto are pounded out on the piano, then more laughter. Michael tries to struggle up out of sleep, but he knows he is much too late. He has let his guard down; he has been happy, and he has let his happiness and his wish to be normal obscure all the defenses the Crane Women had instilled in him, overtly and otherwise.
Clarkham has been in the Waltiri house, or very near by as worlds are concerned, for weeks. Has played the piano when Michael was out; has perhaps even used the house phones to call Kristine. The house has been Clarkham’s base of operations.
Michael feels all of these realizations blur, break up, scramble. He opens his eyes in time to see everything in the bedroom suffused in sepia. When the sepia brightens, he—
Chapter Sixteen
—felt a pang of grief so sharp it made his stomach twist. Another morning. Another day of living with the loss and the sheer misery of his aloneness and vulnerability.
He closed his eyes and silently rolled his face into the pillow, trying not to weep.
No.
He rolled back and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Through the still curtains over the open window he heard nothing outside, no cars, no birds, only a steady low whine of wind. The sounds of a desert. Sun faded in and out in the room as if clouds passed overhead. He glanced at the opposite side of the bed and saw pillows still wrapped in the comforter, sheets and blankets undisturbed except by his tossing.
Michael Waltiri
—no—
got out of the bed and slipped on his boxer shorts and pants, white Arrow shirt with button-down collar, slinging the suspenders over his shoulders with both thumbs. Wide-cuff baggy pants rode high on his hips. Wool socks and black patent leather shoes. Sports coat hung over the back of the chair before the vanity, the chair where just weeks before Kristine had put on her makeup, her rayon stockings, her dress and hat.
NO!
And taken the Packard to the bank. Wifely errands.
He parted the curtains and leaned out the window. Warm yellow sun fell on him. Round and puffy clouds drifted in the Wedgwood sky, regular and sheep-like.
Taken the Packard to the bank and...
He shut his eyes and bent down to tie the flapping laces on his shoes. Everything was wrong. The world was topsy-turvy.
She was gone. Quick as that. Just as his parents were gone. They crashed in a Dakota near Guam, along with other entertainers, all out to
—the war’s over, Michael; it was over before you were born—
give the troops a little amusement. And here he was. 4F. Useless. An orphan and a widower. Dead to the world, whatever world there was outside.
He went downstairs and made himself a pan of oatmeal, mechanically lacing it with oleo and Karo syrup. He ate it mechanically, mind blank and uncritical simply to avoid the pain.
As he finished, slowly pushing the last dollop of oatmeal into his mouth, the hall chimes clanged. Still chewing, Michael went to the front door and opened it. His father’s partner, David Clarkham, stood on the porch with hat in hand, wearing a very natty camel hair coat and matching pants, wide sky-blue tie covered with regular puffy clouds, sheep-like. Michael stared at the clouds and watched them move across the tie.
“Come to see how you’re doing, Michael,” Clarkham said, concern crossing his smooth, young face.
??
?As well as can be expected,” Michael replied. “Want to come in? Can I offer you a drink? Some wine?”
“No, thank you. You shouldn’t be drinking, anyway. There’s a lot of work to be done. Organizing your father’s papers, settling things down at the studio. I spoke with Zanuck yesterday. He wishes me to pass along his condolences, both for your parents and... Kristine.”
“Fine.” Numb. Pain pushed back by an effort of sheer forced blankness. “Thanks. Tell him...yes.”
“I’ll take over the work on Yellowtail. Your father would have wished that.”
“Fine.”
“Is there anything I can do for you, Michael? At the studio, perhaps? Need legal matters resolved?”
“The lawyers are taking care of all that.”
“Your parents were fine people, Michael. They would have wanted to go together. But there is nothing sensible to be said about Kristine. So much death overseas...it seems doubly senseless here.”
“I know.” He wanted the man to go away. He wanted to shut the door again and block out the sun and the sky and the regular sheep-like clouds and the faint whine of the wind.
“I’ll go now. Just checking.” Clarkham smiled, and for a moment Michael felt a black depth of corruption behind the smile that made him dizzy, that almost brought back—
“Thanks for your concern.” He shut the door and returned to the kitchen, where he poured himself another cup of tea. As he sipped it, he frowned. Why feel such antagonism toward his father’s partner? Just a symptom of his general condition: a wreck.
He considered exercising in the back yard and decided it was not worth the effort.
A blackness descended over Michael Waltiri then, numbing his senses even further, discouraging him from making any plans or thinking too deeply about anything. He loved Kristine very, very much, and they had had so short a life together (How long? Hours? Nonsense) that his own youth and upcoming three score and ten years of life seemed to conspire against him, offering a bleak desert of endless and unfilled hours, days, years.
Michael Waltiri felt as if he had been sentenced to prison. He would live it out; that was all he could do.
Chapter Seventeen
Days and weeks passed, and he ate and slept and worked in the garden in the back yard, keeping the roses trimmed. He patched and rehung the Chinese paper lanterns strung from the trellis to poles in the back yard, and he wiped down the white-enameled wrought-iron table on the brick patio. He disliked the back yard—it gave him the creeps—but he worked there nonetheless, making sure it was tidy, because (it must have been so, though he couldn’t remember specifics) he and Kristine had spent time there.
He remembered someone wearing a fancy dress sitting behind the white table at one time. That must have been Kristine. Not her style (certainly not Golda’s—his mother’s—style), and why was he so aware of having been frightened by her in the dress? Everything was jumbled by his grief.
Days and weeks. He shaved with a French razor and played records on the Victrola, Toscanini and Reiner and Strauss and Stokowski conducting, on 78s. Endless hours of music, over and over again.
The grief and numbness refused to fade.
He never saw anyone, and nobody called him on the phone. He read the newspapers and occasionally listened to the radio. None of it seemed right, but what could he do?
Michael felt as if he were in hell.
Chapter Eighteen
He finally gathered up enough energy to take a long walk. He started out at dusk, as the empty sky turned a dark and dusty blue, when the twilight seemed willing to last forever, and walked along the empty streets, past the white plaster and stucco Spanish-style houses the neighborhood favored, past the ranch-style houses and the California bungalows. He stopped with a frown and watched an electric streetlight come on with the deepening of dusk. A brown-leafed maple drooped its branches over the light as the wind whined. The stars came out and whirled like fireflies on strings and then settled. The sky became a gelatinous black.
Michael walked to La Cienega and followed its course, seeing people on the other side of the street, or walking some distance ahead or behind him, but never passing them or seeing them up close. All the shops and restaurants and even the bars were closed. The war, he decided. Not enough to go around.
Not even enough people.
The street narrowed as he approached the hills. He looked both ways on the corner of Sunset, at the houses on each side and the shops, all closed and dark, and then at the old theater rising above the roofs to his right. He headed toward the theater.
In round neon letters, the neon turned off, the name of the theater stretched around the marquee and up a tall radio tower mounted on a silver plaster sphere.
P
A
N
D
A
L
L
———
P A N D A L L
The doors were boarded over. The wind whispered between the plywood and the locked glass beyond.
The place was dead. Its hold on reality seemed tenuous, as if it were merely a memory. He didn’t like it. He walked away, glancing over his shoulder. Someone dark followed and that frightened the wits out of him. He turned onto a side street and tried as casually as possible to shake the pursuer: a tall white-haired figure in a black robe.
Michael came home and shut the door.
He felt as if he had been suspended in a jar, some museum specimen, all life drained, time and blood replaced with formaldehyde.
Chapter Nineteen
At some point he began to write poetry, though he had no memory of having ever written poetry before. He wrote about what was on his mind all the time: Kristine.
Who goes in me
The one who pulls my
Lost mind into dawn is
Innocent of guile
From cold dreams to fire at
End of day she crowds a zoo
All my animal thoughts She
Is innocent of guile Does
Not see my labyrinth More
Than flesh in space words on paper
In me she lives Once
She lived her own
Now alone in me she goes.
And after a day sitting quiet in the dark upstairs bedroom, he took out a pencil and wrote on a paper napkin:
*Watch him developing!*
But where’s his knowledge?
*See that bright little pinpoint? That’s it.*
And his maturity?
*Coming along slowly.*
I see a dark spot, too. Someone missing?
*He’s lost someone.*
Looks like he’s trying to replace the dark spot with the bright.
*He thinks he may be able to bring back the lost.*
Can he do it?
No answer; the pencil stopped at the end of the napkin. The next day, he could not find the napkin, or any of the poems he had written, and an odor like ammonia and sulfurous gas crept through the house and drove him outdoors.
He sat before a clump of gladioli, squatting on the sidewalk with nobody to see him—nobody visible, anyway—and held a leaf in his hand, concentrating on it.
Focus. Detail. Clarity. Sharpness.
Detail.
He could not concentrate on the leaf. It seemed to shy away from him, all its innermost details fuzzing and his attention drifting. That was not right.
The anger he felt was quickly damped by his dark mood.
Have to get over this. Can’t think straight.
He stood and wiped his hand on his pants for no particular reason. He was always clean; he did not sweat and had not taken a bath since
When?
He looked down the street and saw the white-haired figure in black watching him. It raised its arm. Michael ran back to the house. Even behind the door, however, he knew he could not escape this time.
Mixed with his horror was an inexplicable spark of hope. If what he saw was death coming for him, then it would take away the
burden of this dreary life, this grief-bound hell.
He stood two steps behind the door, waiting.
A light, almost casual knuckle-rap sounded on the thick dark wood.
Michael swallowed a lump in his throat and reached for the doorknob. Before his hand reached it, the lock clicked. the deadbolt slid aside and the knob turned. He retreated three steps.
The door swung open. He recognized but did not know the man standing on the porch. He was tall, slender but very strong-looking, of indeterminate age, face long and somber, hair white and fine as mineral whiskers from a cave. The collar of the robe was the color of old dried roses, cut from dusty velvet woven with floral details that seemed to blow in a wind quite different from that whining even now outside. The man’s eyes were the color of pearls, his skin pale as the moon.
“Michael Perrin. Do you know me?”
His voice hissed like a sword drawn across folds of silk. Michael shook his head, then nodded. He could feel power radiating from the man.
“Do you know where you are?” A stinging pity came to the man’s face, mixed with mild contempt.
“I’m not at home.”
“You are loghan laburt, loss-cursed. You cannot see through your pain. You have been wrapped in a large but poorly conceived almeig epon. A bad dream.”
“Your name is Tarax,” Michael said, feeling something rip in the back of his head, a shroud around his thoughts. But the name brought him no comfort. He began to shiver.
“I am Tarax. I can bring you out of here, but you must do something for me.”
“I don’t remember clearly. I can’t think straight.”
Tarax narrowed his pearl-silver eyes, and Michael felt another rip in the shroud, releasing more memory. “Music,” Tarax said. “The songs of worlds breathing in and out.”