Sacrament (26 page)

i

Will didn't stir until a little after nine, but when he did he felt remarkably clearheaded. He got up, contemplated
the shower for a few moments, wondering if he wasn't inviting trouble by stepping in. He defiantly ran the
water cold and stepped under its barrage. There were no visions forthcoming, and after a minute of this
masochism, he turned the heat up a little and scrubbed himself clean.

Dried, dressed and on his second cup of coffee, he called up Adrianna. Glenn picked up, sounding adenoidal. 'I
got some kind of allergy,' he said. 'My nose won't stop running. You want to speak to Adrianna?'

'May I?'

'No, 'cause she's not here. She's gone to see about getting a job.'

'Where?'

'At the city-planning department. I met this woman at Patrick's party who was looking for someone, so she's
gone to check it out.'

'I'll call back later then,' Will said. 'You take care of your allergies.'

His next call went to Patrick, whose first question was: 'How are you feeling this morning?'

'Pretty good, thank you.'

'No regrets, huh? Shit. I was afraid of this. The whole thing was a fiasco.'

It took a minute or two for Will to convince him that just because nobody had fallen in love or out of a window
didn't mean the party hadn't been memorable. Patrick reluctantly conceded that maybe he was just feeling
nostalgic this morning, sitting in the litter, but in the old days a party wasn't even considered to have occurred
unless somebody ended up being screwed in the bath while the guests offered a rousing chorus from Aida. 'I
must have missed that particular night,' Will said, to which Patrick replied that no, they'd both been there, but
poor Will's memory had been fried standing in the sun taking family portraits of waterbuffalo.

'Moving on ...' Will said.

'You want Bethlynn's whereabouts,' Patrick said.

'Yes, please.'

'She lives in Berkeley, on Spruce Street.' Will jotted down directions, warned once again not to try calling her
first, because she'd almost certainly slam the phone down on him. 'She doesn't like any air of negativity around her,' Patrick explained.

'And I'm Mr Negativity?'

'Well, face it, honey, nobody looks at your books and thinks, gee, what a lovely planet we live on. In fact - now,
Will, I don't want you to get steamed about this - Bethlynn took a glance at one of your books and told me to get
it out of the apartment.'

'She did what?'

'I told you, don't get mad. It's the way she thinks. She sees things in terms of good vibrations and bad
vibrations.'

'So you had a book-burning on Castro.'

'No, Will-'

'What else went? Naked Lunch? King Lear? Bad vibes in Lear, man, better toss it out!'

'Shut up, Will,' Patrick replied mildly. 'I didn't say I agreed with her, I'm just telling you where her head's at.
And if you really and truly want to make peace with her, then you're going to have to work with that.'

'Okay,' Will said, calming down a little. 'I'll make as nice as I can make. Maybe I'll offer to do her a book of
sunflowers to make up for all those bad vibes. Big yellow sunflowers on every page, with a quote from the
Bhagavadgita underneath.'

'You could do worse, man o' mine,' Patrick pointed out. 'People need some light in their lives right now.'

Oh, there's light in my pictures, Will thought, remembering how they'd flickered at the fox's feet, the eyes of the
hunted and the bones they'd become shining out at him. There was light aplenty. It just wasn't the kind of
illumination Bethlynn would want to meditate upon.

ii

Later, as the cab carried him over the bridge, he looked back at the fog and sundraped hills and thought for the
first time in many years how fine a city it was to live in; one of the few places left on earth where the human
experiment was still conducted in an atmosphere of passionate civility.

'You a visitor?' the driver wanted to know.

'No. Why?'

'You keep looking back like you never saw the place before.'

'It feels like that today,' Will said, which so confounded the man it efficiently silenced him for the rest of the
trip.

However it sounded, it was true. He felt as though his eyes were clearer today than they'd been in years, both
literally and figuratively. Not only did the sights around him seem crystalline, but he was taking pleasure where his gaze would never have lingered before. Everywhere he looked there were nuances of tone and colour
to delight him. In the cedars, in the storefronts, in the cracked leather of the seat in front of him. And on the
sidewalk, faces glimpsed that he would never see again, every one of them a burgeoning glory of its own. He
didn't know where this new-found clarity was coming from, but it was as if he had been looking through a dirty
lens for most of his life and become so familiar with the grime that now, when the glass was miraculously
cleansed, it was a revelation. Was this what the fox had meant by the simple bliss of things?

He elected to get out of the cab two blocks shy of Sethlynn's house, in part so as to luxuriate a little in this
feeling before he met with her, and in part to prepare a speech of reconciliation. The latter purpose, however,
was abandoned the moment he started to walk. The confines of the cab had been a limitation on his hungry
sight. Now, alone on the sidewalk, the world rushed away from him in every direction; and in the same moment
came careening back to show him its wonders. There were clouds above his head that the wind had teased into
frills and fripperies; the decaying boards of a home across the street paraded glorious patterns of peeling paint.
A flock of pigeons, dining on the crumbs of a discarded doughnut, performed an exquisite dance as they
fluttered and settled, then rose in a glorious flight and swooped away.

This was not the condition that he'd expected to be in when he went to confront Sethlynn, but as long as she
didn't misinterpret the smile he could not remove from his face, perhaps it wasn't an inappropriate state. If she
was indeed the sensitive Patrick had claimed her to be, then she'd know his euphoria was genuine. Focusing
attention on the simple business of walking two blocks to her door was problematical, however. Everywhere he
looked, sights distracted him. A wall, a roof, a reflection in a window: all demanded he take the time to stand
and gawp. How many days, weeks, months of his life had he waited in a mud-hole or a tree on another continent
for a glimpse of something he wanted to put on film - and how often left the field unsatisfied? - while here, all
along, on this street ten miles from where he lived were profligate glories, eager to be seen? And if he'd spent
that time teaching his camera to see with the eyes he was using right now - taught it even a tiny part of that sight
- would he not have converted every soul who saw his pictures to the greater good? Would they not have looked
astonished, and said is this the world? and realizing that it was, become its protector?

Oh God, why had the fox not opened his head fifteen years ago, and saved him all that wasted time?

It took him the better part of an hour to walk the two blocks to reach the porch of Bethlynn's unostentatious
bungalow, but by the time he did, he had his wits about him again, and was ready to take the smile off his face
and play the reformed reprobate. She took a little time to respond to his rapping however, during which time the intricacy of the cracks on the step drew his admiration, and when she finally opened the door, he looked up at her with an asinine smirk on his face.

'What do you want?' she said.

He mumbled the barest minimum: 'I came to apologize.'

'Did you really?' she said, her appraisal of him less than promising.

'I was ... looking at the cracks on your step ...' he said, trying to explain his smile away.
She scrutinized him a little harder. 'Are you all right?' she said.

'Yes ... and ... no,' he replied.

She kept staring at him, with a look on her face he couldn't quite interpret. Plainly she was sensing something
about him other than how well he'd cleaned his teeth this morning. And whatever it was - his aura, his
vibrations - she seemed to trust what she felt, because she said: 'We can talk inside,' and stepping back from the
door, ushered him into the house.

The interior was not what he expected at all. There were no astrological charts, no incense burners, no healing
crystals on the table. The large room she brought him into was sparsely but comfortably furnished, the
paintwork a calming beige, the walls bare but for a family photograph. The only other decoration was a vase of
camellias set on the sill. The window was open a little way, and the breeze sweetened the room with the scent of
their petals.

'Please sit down,' she said. 'Do you want something to drink?'

'Some water would be just great. Thank you.'

She went to get it, leaving him to settle into the comfort of the sofa. He'd no sooner done so than an enormous
tabby cat leapt up onto the armrest - his nimbleness belying his bulk - and, purring in anticipation of Will's
touch, vamped towards him. 'My God, you're quite a piece of work,' Will said.

The cat put his head beneath his hand, and pressed itself against his palm.

'Genghis, stop being pushy,' Bethlynn said, returning with the water.

'Genghis? As in Khan?'

Bethlynn nodded. 'The terrorizer of Christendom.' She set Will's water on the table, and sipped from her own
glass. 'A pagan to his care.'

'The cat or the Khan?'

'Both,' Bethlynn said. 'Don't be too flattered. He likes everyone.'

'Good for him,' Will said. 'Look, about Pat's party: it was my fault; I was in one of my contrary moods, and I'm
sorry.'

'One apology's quite sufficient,' Bethlynn said, her tone wanner than her vocabulary. 'We all make assumptions
about people. I made some about you, I'll admit, and they were no more flattering than those you made about
me.'

'Because of my pictures?'

'And some articles I'd read. Maybe you were misrepresented, but I must say you seemed very much the
professional pessimist.'

'I wasn't misrepresented. It was just ... a consequence of what I'd seen ...' Despite his best efforts, he felt the
same idiot smile she'd met on the doorstep creeping back onto his face as he talked. Even in this almost
ascetically plain room, his eyes were bringing him revelations.

The sunlight on the wall, the flowers on the sill, the cat on his lap; all sheen and shift and flutes of colour. It was
all he could do not to let the threads of his sober exchange with Beihlynn go, and babble like a child about what
he was seeing and seeing.

'I know you probably think a lot of what I share with Patrick is sentimental nonsense,' Bethlynn was telling him,
'but healing isn't a business for me, it's a vocation. I do what I do because I want to help people.'

'You think you can heal him?'

'Not in the medical sense, no. He has a virus. I can't make it curl up and die. But I can put him in touch with the
Patrick that isn't sick. The Patrick that can never be sick, because he's part of something that's beyond sickness.'

'Part of God?'

'If that's the word you want to use,' Bethlynn said. 'It's a little Old Testament for me.'

'But God's what you mean?'

'Yes, God's what I mean.'

'Does Patrick know that's what's going on? Or does he think he's going to get better?'

'You don't need to ask me that,' Bethlynn said. 'You know him at a far deeper level than I do. He's a very
intelligent man. Just because he's ill doesn't mean he's lying to himself.'

'With respect,' Will said, 'that's not what I'm asking.'

'If you're asking have I been lying to him, the answer's no. I've never promised him he'd get out of this alive.
But he can and will get out whole.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'I mean once he finds himself in the eternal, then he won't be afraid of death. He'll see it for what it is. Part of
the process. No more nor less.'

'If it's part of the process, why did it matter if he looked at my pictures or not?'

`I wondered when we'd get to that,' Bethlynn said, easing back in her chair. 'I just ... didn't feel they were a
positive influence on him, that's all. He's very raw at the moment; very responsive to influences good and bad.
Your pictures are extremely powerful, Will, there's no question about that. They exercised an almost mesmeric
hold on me when I first saw them. I'd go as far as to say they're a form of magic.'

'They're just pictures of animals,' Will said.

'They're a lot more than that. And ... if you'll forgive my saying so, which you may not . , . a lot less.' On
another day, in another state of mind, Will would have been rising to the defence of his work by now. Instead he
listened with an easy detachment. 'You disagree?' Bethlynn said.

'About the magic part, yes.'

'When I say magic I'm not talking about something from a faery tale. I'm talking about working change in the
world. That's what your art's intended to do, isn't it? It's an attempt, a misdirected one, I think, but perfectly
sincere attempt to work change. Now you could say all art's trying to do that, and maybe it is, but you know the
forces your work plays with. It's trying for something more potent than a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. In
other words, I think you have the instincts of a shaman. You want to be a go-between, a channel by which some
vision that's larger than the human perspective - perhaps it's a divine vision, perhaps it's demoniacal, I'm not
sure you'd know the difference - is communicated to the tribe. Does any of that sound plausible to you, or are
you just sitting there thinking I talk too much?'

'I'm not thinking that at all,' Will said.

'Has anybody else ever talked to you about this?'

'One person, yes. When I was a kid. He was-'

'Don't,' Bethlynn said, hurriedly raising her hands in front of her as though to ward off this information. 'I'd
prefer you didn't share that with me.'

'Why not?'

She got up to her feet and wandered over to the window, gently pinching a dead leaf from the camellias. `The
less I know about what moves you the better for all concerned,' she said. Her voice had an artificial equanimity
in it. 'I've enough shadows of my own without inheriting yours. These things pass along, Will. Like viruses.'

Not a pretty analogy. 'It's as bad as that?' Will said.

'I think you're in an extraordinary place right now,' she said. 'When I look at you I see a man who has the
capacity to do great good, or...' She shrugged. 'Perhaps I'm being simplistic,' she said. 'It may not be a question
of good and evil.' She looked round at him, her face fixed in a mask of impassivity, as though she didn't want to
give him a clue to how she was feeling. 'You're a bundle of contradictions, Will. I think a lot of gay men are.
They want something other than what they were taught to want, and it ... I don't know what the word is ... it
muddies them somehow.' She stared at Will, still preserving her mask. 'But that's not quite what's going on with
you,' she said. 'The truth is, I don't know what I see when I look at you, and that makes me nervous. You could
be a saint, Will. But somehow I doubt it. Whatever moves in you ... Well, to be perfectly honest, whatever
moves in you frightens me.'

'Maybe we should stop this conversation now,' Will said, putting Genghis out of his lap and getting to his feet,
'before you start exorcizing me.'

She lightly laughed at this, but without much conviction. 'It's certainly been nice talking with you,' she said, her
sudden formality a certain sign that she was not going to reveal anything more.

'You will keep working with Patrick?'
'Of course,' she said, escorting him to the door. 'You didn't think I was going to give up on him just because
we'd had a few sour words? It's my responsibility to do whatever I can do. Not just for him, for me. I'm on a
journey of my own. That's why it's a little confusing when I meet someone like you on the road.' They were at
the door. 'Well, good luck,' she said, shaking Will's hand. 'Maybe we'll meet again one of these days.'
And with that she ushered him onto the step, and without waiting for a reply, closed the door.