Fearful Symmetries (8 page)

I open one of the boxes and tell the boy to put the skull inside. He does. The skin bubbles on his hands where he touches it, but he makes no sign of pain.

I close the door on it, and it’s like a light going out. Time slips back into it groove. The light recedes to a natural level. My skin stops burning, the desire to commit violence dissipates like smoke. I can feel where I’ve been scratching my own arms again. My eye is gummed shut with blood.

When we stumble back into the main room, Patrick is on his feet with the gun in his hand. Johnny is sitting on the bed, the bony rim of his open skull grown further upward, elongating his head and giving him an alien grace. The fire in the bowl of his head burns briskly, crackling and shedding a warm light. Patrick looks at me, then at the boy with the iron boxes. “You got them,” he says. “Where’s the skull?”

I take the chain from the boy. The boxes are heavy together; the boy must be stronger than he looks. Something to remember. “In one of these. If it can keep that shit out, I’m betting it can keep it locked in, too. I think it’s safe to move.”

“And those’ll get us past the thing outside?”

“If what Johnny said is true.”

“It is,” Johnny says. “But now there’s only one extra box.”

“That’s right,” I say, and swing them with every vestige of my failing strength at Patrick’s head, where they land with a wet crunch.

He staggers to his right a few steps, the left side of his face broken like crockery, and he puts a hand into the rancid scramble of his own brain. “I’ll go get it,” he says, “I’ll go.”

“You’re dead,” I tell him gently. “You stupid bastard.”

He accepts this gracefully and collapses to his knees, and then onto his face. Dark blood pours from his head as though from a spilled glass. I scoop up the gun, which feels clumsy in my hand. I never got the hang of guns.

Tobias stands in shock. “I can’t believe you did that,” he says.

“Shut up. Are there any clothes in that dresser? Put something on the kid. We’re going back to the city.” While he’s doing that, I look at Johnny. “I’m not going to be able to see. Will you be able to guide me out?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” I say, and shoot Tobias in the back of the head.

For once, somebody dies without an argument.

I don’t know much about the trip back. I open a slot on the base of the box and fit it over my head. I am consumed in darkness. I’m led out to the skiff by Johnny and the boy. The boy rides with me, and Johnny gets into the water, dragging us behind him. Fire unfurls from his head, the sides of which are developing baroque flourishes. His personality is diminished, and I can’t tell if it’s because he mourns Tobias, or because that is changing too, developing into something cold and barren.

The journey takes several hours. I know we pass the corpse flowers, the staring eyes and bloodless faces pressing from the foliage. I am sure that the creature unleashes its earth-breaking cry, and that any living thing that hears it hemorrhages its life away, into the still waters. I know that night falls. I know the flame of our new guide lights the undersides of the cypress, runs out before us across the water, fills the dark like the final lantern in a fallen world.

I make a quiet and steady passage there.

Eugene is in his office. The bar is closed upstairs and the man at the door lets us in without a word. He makes no comment about my companions, or the iron boxes hanging from a chain. The world he lives in is already breaking from its old shape. The new one has space for wonders.

Eugene is sitting behind his desk in the dark. I can tell he’s drunk. It smells like he’s been here since we left, almost twenty-four hours ago now. The only light comes from the fire rising from Johnny’s empty skull. It illuminates a pale structure on Eugene’s desk: a huge antler, or a tree made of bone. There are human teeth protruding along some of its tines, and a long crack near the wider base of it reveals a raw, red meat, where a mouth opens and closes.

“Where’s Patrick?” he says.

“Dead,” I say. “Tobias, too.”

“And the atlas?”

“I burned it.”

He nods, as though he’d been expecting that very thing. After a moment he gestures at the bone tree. “This is my son,” he says. “Say hi, Max.”

The mouth shrieks. It stops to draw in a gasping breath, then repeats the sound. The cry is sustained for several seconds before stuttering into a sob, and then going silent again.

“He keeps growing. He’s going to be a big boy before it’s all over.”

“Yeah. I can see that.”

“Who’re your friends, Jack?”

I have to think about that before I answer. “I really don’t know,” I say, finally.

“So what do you want? You want me to tell you you’re off the hook? You want me to tell you you’re free to go?”

“You told me that before. It turned out to be bullshit.”

“Yeah, well. That’s the world we live in, right?”

“You’re on notice, Eugene. Leave me alone. Don’t come to my door anymore. I’m sorry things didn’t work out here. I’m sorry about your son. But you have to stay away. I’m only going to say it once.”

He smiles at me. He must have to summon it from far away, but he smiles at me. “I’ll take that under advisement, Jack. Now get the fuck out of here.”

We turn and walk back up the stairs. It’s a long walk back to my bookstore, where I’m anxious to get to work on the atlas. But I have a light to guide me, and I know this place well.

The Black Witch moth can grow up to 16 cm. and is known as “La Mariposa de la Muerte.”

—
Encyclopedia Americana

The Black Witch moth should be seen at night when it cannot be seen because it is so black. In the daylight it is a hole in the universe, one that leads to a world where there is no light.

The first Black Witch moth I ever saw was in the sunlight of Balboa Park, when I went there for a dahlia show to keep my grandmother company—which I did often when I was ten because my grandmother’s love kept me from darkness in my family, where my mother’s spells could reach us all.

The moth flew from a hydrangea bush I had rustled with my hand, hoping something might burst from it—a lizard or butterfly perhaps. At first I didn’t understand what the darkness was. A small rubber bat on the end of a child’s string? A black handkerchief given life by a spell? Or was it just my eyes playing tricks on me, blinded by the sunlight that made the flowers so bright?

It limped through the air and disappeared into the hole it had made in the universe. My grandmother had stopped because I had. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered. I often said such things to her, but she didn’t mind. She knew that all light carried shadow and that there were things in the world—and in every family—you couldn’t see even if you had the entire sun to see them by.

“You saw something,” she said, as if she knew exactly what it was and where everything was going to end.

“Yes.”

“I’m sure you did, but if it’s important you will see it again; and if not like this, then later, when you need it even more. Let’s go look at the dahlias now. We can come back here later if you want, if you haven’t seen it somewhere else in the park by then.”

I nodded. She was right. I would find it again if I needed to, and if not today, then sometime, in some way.

Some people who love see only the light. My grandmother saw the darkness, too, and still loved. That made me feel safe in a world where, she’d once told me, “There are more witches than even the witches know. . . .”

Because we lived on a Navy base, one that hugged the bayside of the peninsula, I took my little brother, who was six, with me when I went to the tallest piers, to their oily pilings and oily planks, which you could smell. He felt safer when we went to the floating docks, because the water was close to you. You didn’t have far to fall. But the boats there were small—patrol boats, skiffs, and a sailboat or two for the personal use of officers. We both liked the great steel ships—which could only dock at the tallest piers—and if I promised we would stay in the middle when we walked on them, Tommy could come with me. I held his hand so tight it hurt him sometimes, but I did it because I was scared for him. I didn’t want him running to the edge of the pier and falling to the water far below, which sometimes happened when I dreamed. I wouldn’t be holding his hand tight enough in the dream. He’d pull away and, screaming, run to the edge and not stop running. He’d go over, and the screaming would stop only when he hit the water. It was as if this was what someone wanted (and I knew who). To drown him. To make him go away. To make
us all
go away.

Even when we walked down the very middle of the pier, he could look down and see the green, oily water far below through the narrow cracks between the planks. I’d tell him not to look, but sometimes he would, and it would stop him. He’d sit down on the planks, oily as they were, and he wouldn’t move no matter how hard I pulled. He’d start crying. “She’s going to get me, Jimmy!” he’d say. “She’s going to put me in the trash cans, or drown me.” He meant our mother, and he was right—spells can pull you through cracks—but what could we do? She was our grandmother’s daughter, and (so our grandmother said)
a witch who didn’t know she was one—or didn’t want to know . . . because it was easier that way
.

I thought he might start screaming, like the dreams, but he didn’t. He would instead cry in hopelessness, in the most terrible sadness I had ever heard. I’d have to pick him up and carry him a ways to get him to forget the water.

When I told our grandmother, who lived with us, how Tommy behaved on the pier, she stopped her ironing and said to me: “My little brother did the same thing. His name was Ralph. He had curly hair and died when he was six, taken away by a stranger. He was adorable, and I loved him very much. I don’t think I’ve ever told you about him, have I?”

“No, Grandma. He must have been special.”

“He was. He would get scared of falling through the cracks. He would carry on and on, sitting there on the pier and looking down through them.”

“It’s so silly, isn’t it. Grandma. To be scared like that.”

She looked at me. “No, it isn’t. Your little brother has reason to be scared. I do what I am able, but she never stops. She does it in her sleep, too. She’s just too strong.”

“I hold Tommy’s hand so hard it hurts him.”

“I know, Jimmy. You love him, but sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes they die anyway, even if you don’t want them to. Sometimes people take them away, if not in a stranger’s car then in a dream that is no dream—one you don’t know is coming. . . .”

We would go out to the end of the biggest pier, Tommy and me, because there we could look out at the whole bay and to our right and left the steel ships were tied with immense ropes to metal cleats taller than I was. Sometimes a sailor would be there, one we got to know. He would be at the end of the pier looking out at the bay, too, but he would be waiting for something.

He had a rope tied to a cleat that no one used for anything. He wanted something to take what was on the end of it. The first time we met him he said: “Know what’s at the end of this rope?”

“No,” I answered.

“They shouldn’t be this huge this far into the bay, but surfers down on the Strand disappear every once in a while. You never know what’s in the sea—even in a bay.”

“I guess not,” I said.

Tommy seemed scared of the sailor, but I held his hand tight and finally he stopped pulling.

“You live in one of the quarters by the banyan tree?” the sailor asked.

“Yes.”

“Must be nice.”

It was—except for the smells at night, and how our father cried. But I didn’t say this. I wanted him to tell us more about the rope and what was down there in the water.

He kept looking out at the bay. His hands were slick with something I’d seen on my own hands before. Fish scales and fish slime. You couldn’t fish without getting it on you, but where was his catch?

“I’ve got a tuna hook on that rope, and I put a whole mackerel on it, case you’re interested. You boys fish?”

I nodded.

“Thought so. I’ve pulled in a lot of leopards and blues out here. Eight-footers and ten-footers. Even a twelve-foot mako. There’s a four-foot steel leader. They can’t get through it—even the big ones.”

I nodded again. I didn’t know what else to do. I loved to catch things. I loved fishing, even if it smelled. It was a different odor from the one that filled the streets around our quarters at night, under the biggest banyan tree anyone had ever seen.

The next time we went, the sailor wasn’t there. It was as if he’d never been there—never existed—but I knew that wasn’t true. I knew what was real and what she could take away. I’d always known. That was why (Grandma said) she hated me so.

Tommy was frightened of how empty the end of the pier was, so we came home.

The time after that, the sailor was putting a live mackerel on a hook that was wider than our father’s hand. He let Tommy touch the hook. Tommy touched it without getting scared. He just stared at it, eyes wide, and touched it more than once.

I knew she would have put Tommy on that hook if she could, but I was watching Tommy, and my grandmother was watching me even when she wasn’t around.

The next time, the sailor was leaning over and making a sound. When we got up to him, we almost left. He was throwing up.

He looked at us and straightened up, embarrassed. His eyes were red, like he’d been crying.

The rope was gone.

He looked so sick.

“You all right?” I asked. My parents and grandmother had raised me to be courteous.

He didn’t answer that. Instead he said: “I found a dog, a pretty big one, over by the barracks. He was starving to death.” He stopped talking and bent over again, but didn’t throw up. “That’s what I used. He didn’t fight me. He was weak. I don’t know why I did it. I knew something was out there, something bigger than twelve feet, and I wanted it. . . .”

He pointed to the cleat where the rope had been.

“It took the whole thing. What would it have to be to take the rope, the whole thing, like that?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I keep seeing that dog. I had a dog once when I was little. . . .”

I saw Tommy on the hook—because that was what she wanted. But she’d have to find another hook. This one I was watching.

The next time we went out, and the four times after that, the man was gone. When I asked another sailor—one that worked in the metal shops by our quarters—he said he didn’t know any sailor like that.

“He was out at the end of the first pier a lot,” I said.

“A swabbie catching sharks?”

“It was after work,” I said. “On weekends, too. I think his name was Curt.”

“He’d have been with the metal shops. No one by that name here. You sure he was a sailor?”

“He wore blues,” I said.

“You must have been imagining things,” he said suddenly, and for a moment he sounded just like our mother. He
was
our mother. Her voice, her body just below his skin. Not in our heads, but completely
real
—because that is what witches do. She could do things like this, I knew, and she knew I knew.

I looked away. I didn’t want to see his eyes, which weren’t his. I took Tommy home. I led him down the street between the machine-shop Quonset huts to the dirt path, past the goldfish pond and the greenhouses, into our house with all its rooms, holding his hand tightly because he was my brother.

I missed talking to the sailor, the one with the rope and the hook, even though Tommy had nightmares about the dog. The nightmares stopped. I had bad dreams, too, but they helped me remember that I had a dog—a little one, a fox terrier named Walter. How I’d forgotten him, I didn’t know, or I did, but didn’t want to think about it—that she’d taken him away without my knowing.

I asked her—I was feeling brave—but, busy as she was with her schoolwork, she just looked at me with those black eyes of hers, the ones that wanted to kill someone or something, and I finally went away—which is what she wanted.

I didn’t tell anyone I missed the sailor, but my grandmother knew.

“You missed him because he was a piece of you, Jimmy. You’d made him one. You both loved fishing. But he wasn’t scared enough. You’ve got to be scared sometimes.”

I asked her about our dog. She didn’t know either. It bothered her. “Sometimes things die and you just don’t know they have,” she said, looking up at the ceiling as she folded our clothes, trying to remember our dog, not able to, upset. “She’s getting worse, Jimmy. She’s my daughter. I don’t know what to do. . . .”

My father would cry when he got home from the submarine warfare laboratory he directed—the one high on the peninsula, looking down on the bay.

He hadn’t always cried like this. He’d started crying a month before, the day our mother started screaming about how she had a right to be happy but how could she with all of us?

He’d take off his uniform, which smelled like him (I loved that smell), and he’d go upstairs to his bedroom, shut the door, and start crying. Sometimes he wouldn’t come down for dinner. I thought my mother would take him his meal, but she said no, he could come down if he wanted it. When I tried to take it to him once, she knocked the plate out of my hand and started shouting about how she was going to leave us one way or another.

I tried to do it another time, too, and she slapped my face. She wanted to do more than that, but Grandma’s voice—she was at her card group in town, but she was in the room somehow—said: “No, Martha.
Do not
 . . .”

Later, when she couldn’t see me, I stood by his door and listened to the crying. I wanted to think it was headaches—“migraines” could make a grown man cry—but it wasn’t. He was just very sad. Grandma said he’d never gotten over his mother’s death when he was little, in that epidemic that killed so many in the world, but we knew it wasn’t that really. It sounded, the way he cried, like someone who was dying—because she wanted him to, I knew—and he was remembering what it was like before, and he missed it, so he cried.

We had the quarters we had—a tennis court, a little beach, a sailboat tied to the floating docks, a big front lawn—because my father’s boss didn’t want them. He was an admiral and, like all admirals, liked to give parties. He wanted to live up by the laboratory, in a modern house, looking down on the lights of the bay and the long island in the middle of it where Navy jets landed and took off day and night. He could have parties on the patio there, looking down at everything, he said.

There were other quarters like ours, though not quite as nice, on the other side of the old banyan tree. Another captain and his family lived there. He had a wife and a daughter who was “slow.”

The terrible smells at night, after Taps played and night covered the base—and the sailors were in their barracks—didn’t come from the buildings or the banyan tree or the streets that wound among the metal-shop buildings, the two quarters and the great tree. They came from the gray dumpsters and trash cans everywhere.

I thought at first it was dead fish. It might have been at first, but not later. The other captain’s wife—in the other quarters—liked to fish, but she hated to clean the creatures she caught. Even when they were twenty-or thirty-pound Black Sea Bass, she would dump them in whatever garbage cans she came across that weren’t near her quarters.

This was when the bay was still young and the peninsula was still pretty wild. You could see coyotes at night moving like ghosts in packs up by the laboratory. You could catch big fish in the bay, as if no one had ever fished for them before, and so they trusted and bit and you pulled them in. But to catch something as beautiful as a thirty-pound Black Sea Bass and throw it away was a terrible thing.