"Oh, and you are?" Tesia said.
From the other side of the mound came a woman's voice. "Who is it, Lucien?"
Lucien directed the question at Tesla, "Who are you?"
By way of reply, Tesia started to climb again, until she could see the questioner on the other side. Only then did she say, "My name's Tesia Bombeck. Not that it's any of your business."
The woman was sitting on the ground, in a circle of incense-filled bowls, their smoke sickly sweet. At the sight of Tesla she started to rise, astonishment on her face.
"My God-" she said, glancing back at her second associate, an overweight middle-aged man, who was lounging in a battered chair. "Edward," she said. "Look who it is."
The man stared at Tesla with plain suspicion. "We heard you were dead," he remarked.
"Do I know you?" Tesla asked him.
The man shook his head.
"But I know you," the woman said, stepping out of the circle of smoke. Tesla was now halfway down the other side of the rubble, and close enough to see how frail and drawn this woman was. "I'm Kathleen Farrell," she said. "I used to live here in the Grove."
The name didn't ring a bell, but that was no surprise. Maybe it was having Raul using up some of her brain capacity for his own memories
(and maybe it was just old age) but names and faces slipped away all the time these days.
"What brought you back?" Tesla wanted to know.
"We were-"
She was interrupted by Edward, who now rose from his chair. "Kate," he cautioned. "Be careful."
"But she-"
"We can't trust anybody," he said. "Not even her."
"But she wouldn't even be here-" Kate said. She looked at Tesia. "Would you?" Back at Edward now. "She knows what's going on." Again, at Tesla. "You do, don't you?"
"Of course," Tesla lied. "Have you actually seen him?" said Lucien, approaching her from behind.
"Not-not in the last couple of months," Tesia replied, her mind racing. Who the hell were they talking about?
"But you have seen him?" Kate said.
"Yes," she replied. "Absolutely."
A smile appeared on Kate's weary face. "I @ew," she said. "Nobody doubts he's alive," Edward now said, his gaze still fixed upon Tesla.
"But why the hell would he show himself to her?"
"Isn't it obvious?" said Kate. "Tell him, Tesia."
Tesla put on a pained look, as though the subject was too delicate to be spoken about. "It's difficult," she said.
"I can @ that," Kate said. "After all, you started the fi@' In her head, Tesla heard Raul let out a low moan. She didn't need to ask him why. There was only one fire of any consequence Tesia had started, and she'd started it here in the mall, perhaps on the very spot where Kate Farrell had been sitting.
"Were you here?" "No. But Lucien was," Kate said.
Lucien stepped into Tesla's line of sight, taking up the thread of the story as he did so. "It's still so clear," he said. "Him covering himself in gasoline, then you firing the gun. I thought you were trying to kill him. We all did, I'm sure This doesn't make any sense, Raul murmured in her head. They're talking about "Fletcher," she thought back. "I know."
But it's as though they think he's still alive.
"I didn't understand what you were doing," Lucien was saying. "But you do now?" Tesla asked him. "Of course. You killed him so that he could live again."
As Lucien spoke, Fletcher's last moments played out on the screen in her skull, as they had hundreds of times in the intervening years. His body, doused in gasoline from head to foot. Her aiming the gun at the ground close to his feet, praying for a spark. She'd fired once. Nothing. He'd looked at her with despair in his eyes, a warrior who had fought his enemy until he had nothing left to fight with but the spirit trapped in his wounded flesh. Release me, that look had said, or the battle is lost.
She'd fired again, and this time her prayers had been answered. A spark had ignited the air, and a column of flame leapt up to consume the Nunciate Fletcher.
"He died right here?" she said, staring down at the circle.
Kate nodded, and stepped aside so that Tesla could approach the spot. After five years of sun and rain, the asphalt was still darker there where he'd perished; stained with fat and fire. She shuddered.
"Isn't it wonderful?" Kate said. "Hub?"
"Wonderful. That he's back among us."
"It means the end can't be far off," Lucien said.
Tesla turned her back on the stained asphalt. "the end of what?" she said.
He gave her a tender smile. "The end to our cruelties and our trivialities," he said. That didn't sound too bad, Tesla thought. "The time's come for us to nwve on, up the ladder. But you know this already. You were touched by the Nuncio, right?"
"Much good it did me," she said.
"There's pain at the beginning," Kate said softly. "We speak to shamans across the country-" e again, Edward interrupted. "I think Ms. Bombeck's already heard too much," he said. "We don't know enough One about her allegiances-"
"I don't have any," Tesla replied plainly.
"Is that supposed to reassure me?" Edward said.
"No-"
"Good. Because it doesn't."
"Edward," Kate said, "we're not at war here."
"Slow down," Tesla said. "A minute ago he@' she jabbed a thumb over her shoulder in Lucien's direction, "was saying we were heading for paradise, and now you're talking about war. Make up your minds."
"I already made mine up," Edward said. He turned to Kate. "Let's leave this till later," he said, glaring down at the circle. "When she's gone."
"I'm not going anywhere," Tesla said, taking a seat on the rubble. "I can hang out all day." Edward smiled. "See?" he said, his voice becoming frayed. "She's a troublemaker. She wants to keep us from the work-"
"What work?" Tesla said.
"Finding Fletcher," Kate said.
"Shut up, will you?" Edward snapped.
"Why?" said Kate, her equilibrium undisturbed. "If she's here to stop us, she already knows what we're doing. And if she isn't, then maybe she can help."
The argument silenced Edward for a few seconds. Time enough for Tesia to say, "If you think Fletcher's some kind of messiah, you're going to be disappointed. Believe me."
"I'm talking as though he's alive," she thought as she spoke, to which Raul murmured: Maybe he is.
"I don't believe he's a messiah," Lucien was saying, we've had too many messiahs as it is. We don't need another guy telling us what to be. Or what happens to us if we fail." Tesla liked the sound of that, which Lucien clearly saw, because he went down on his haunches in front of her, and continued to speak, face to face. "Fletcher's come back because he wants to be here when we rise, all of us, all rise up together and become something new."
"What-exactly?"
Lucien shrugged. "If I knew that I'd have to kill myself."
"Why?"
"Because I'd be a messiah." He laughed, as did she. Then he rose, shrugging. "That's all I know," he said.
She looked up at him guiltily. There was a sweet simplicity to him she found charming. More than chan-ning in fact, almost sexual. "Look," she said, "I lied when I said I'd seen Fletcher. I haven't."
"I knew it," Edward sneered.
"No you didn't," Tesla replied a little wearily. "You didn't have a fucking clue." She looked back at Lucien. "Anyway, why's it so important you find him, if he's only here as a sightseer?"
"Because we have to protect ourselves from our enemies," Kate said, "And he can help us." "Just so you know," Tesla replied, "I'm not one of your enemies. I know Eddie over there doesn't believe me, but it's true. I'm on nobody's side but my own. And if that sounds selfish, it's because it is." She got to her feet. "Do you have any solid evidence that Fletcher's alive?" she asked Lucien.
"Some," he said.
"But you don't want to tell me?"
He looked at his sandaled feet. "I don't think that'd be particularly useful right now," he replied.
"Fair enough," she said, starting back up the slope of rubble, "I'll leave you to it then. If you see him, give him regards, will you?"
"This isn't a joke," Edward called after her.
it was probably the one remark which she couldn't let slide by. She stopped climbing, and looked back at him. "Oh yes it is," she said.
"that's exactly what it is. One big fucking joke."
FIVE
That encounter aside, Tesia's return to the Grove was a bust. There were no moments of revelation; no confrontations with ghosts (real or imagined) to help her better understand the past. She left in the same state of confusion she'd arrived in.
She didn't run for the state line, but drove back into L.A., to the apartment in West Hollywood she'd kept through her years on the road. She'd actually slept there perhaps two dozen times in the last five years, but the rent was peanuts, and the landlord a burnout case who liked the idea of having a real screenwriter as a tenant, however much of an absentee she was, so she'd kept it as a place to laughingly call home. In truth, it had grim associations, but tonight, as she lounged in front of the TV to eat her curried tofu-burger and watch the news, she was glad of its familiarity. It was several weeks since she'd paid any attention to events around the planet, but nothing of significance had changed. A war here, a famine there; death on the highway, death on the subway. And always, people shaking their heads, witnesses and warlords alike, protesting that this tragedy should never have happened. She sickened of it after ten minutes and turned it off.
Would it be so bad... ? Raul murmured. "Would what be so bad?" she said, staring at the blank screen.
to have a messiah.
"You really think Fletcher's been resurrected?"
I think maybe he was never dead.
Now there was a possibility: that Fletcher's death-scene in Palomo Grove had merely been a part of some greater scheme, a way to slip out of sight for a few years until he was better equipped to deal with the Nuncio and its consequences.
"Why now?" she wondered aloud. Ask Grillo, Raul suggested.
"Must I?" Grillo had been strange the last couple of times she'd called him: remote and short-tempered. When they'd spoken five or six weeks before, she'd come off the phone thinking maybe he was on serious drugs, he sounded so damn strange. She almost headed over to Nebraska to check on him, but she'd been feeling spooked enough without going into that apartment of his. Raul was right, however If anyone knew what was happening in the places that never found their way onto the evening news, it was Grillo.
Less than happily, she called him. He was in a better mood than the last occasion, though he sounded tired. She got straight to the point; told him about returning to the Grove, and her encounter with the trio.
"Kate Farrell, eh?" Grillo said.
"Do you know her?"
"She was the mother of one of the League of Virgins. Arleen Farrell. She went crazy."
"Mother or daughter?"
"Daughter. She died in an institution. Starved herself to death." This was more like the Nathan Grillo Tesla was used to. A clean, clipped summary of the facts, presented with the minimum of sentiment. In his pre-Grove days he'd been a journalists He'd never lost his nose for a good story.
"What the hell was Kate Farrell doing in Palomo Grove?" he asked.
She explained, as best she could. The circle of incense bowls, set around the place where Fletcher had perished (or at least done a damned good impersonation of perishing); the talk of sightings; the exchange about messiahdom.
"Have you heard anything about this?" she finished up by asking him.
There was a moment's silence. Then he said, "Sure."
"You have?"
"Listen, if it's there to be heard, I hear it."
This was not an idle boast. There in Omaha-a city built at the Crossroads of America@rillo had established himself as a clearinghouse for any and all information that related, however remotely, to events in Palomo Grove. Within a year he had won the trust and respect of a vast circle of individuals, from molecular physicists to beat cops, to politicians, to priests, all of whom had one thing in common: Their lives had somehow been brushed by mysterious, even terrifying, forces, the details of which they felt they could not share, either for personal or professional reasons, with their peers.
Word had quickly spread through the thicket where those marginalized by their experiences and beliefs and terrors had taken cover; word of this man Grillo who had seen the way things really were and wanted to hear from others who'd seen the same; who was putting the pieces together, one by one, until he had the whole story.
It was that ambition-whether practical or not-that had kept Tesla and Grillo talking to each other in the years since the Grove. Though she had gone wandering, and he seldom left his apartment, they were both engaged in the same search for connections. She had failed to find them in the Americas-it was chaos out there-and doubted Grillo had been any more lucky; but they still had the search in common. And she never failed to marvel at his ability to put two apparently disparate fragments of information together to suggest a third more provocative possibility. How a rumor from Boca Raton confirmed a hint from a suicide note found in Denver which in turn supported a thesis spoken in tongues by a prodigy in New Jersey.
"So what have you heard?"
"People have been sighting Fletcher on and off for the last five years, Tes," he said. "He's like Bigfoot, or Elvis. There's not a month goes by I don't get somebody sending me his picture."
"Any of them the real thing?"
"Shit, I don't know. I used to think His words trailed away for a moment, as though he'd lost track of his thought.
"Grillo?"
"Yeah."
"What did you used to think?"
"It doesn't matter," he said a little wearily.
"Yes it does."
He drew a long, ragged breath. "I used to think it mattered whether or not things were real. I'm not so sure any more...." Again he faltered. This time she didn't prompt him, but waited until he had his thoughts in order. "Maybe the messiahs we imagine are more important than the real thing. At least they don't bleed when you crucify 'em."