He was almost at the alley mouth when he saw the form against the back wall of the building and stopped. The person pushed off the wall, tiredly. He had been waiting a long time.
“Son?” the Professor said, voice just a little fragile. He had been sleeping. Not dreaming. Whenever he fell asleep over his work he did not dream, having spent himself. Drained dry.
“It can’t have been that late,” Jeremy said. They were walking down Haro Street, their pace quick as they passed sleeping walk-up apartment buildings and the oak trees leaned in. They were approaching the park, Jeremy’s heart racing, his throat tight.
“I fall asleep early these days,” the Professor said.
“Was he sick, did you know he was sick?” Jeremy asked.
The Professor didn’t think the question was meant to be accusatory, and so he didn’t respond directly and wasn’t offended. He returned to telling his story.
Asleep, no dreams. The sunset woke him. Something he had never experienced. There had been a brilliant glow, through his eyelids. It pulled him from sleep.
He crawled from the edge of the tent to look out over the water. The sun had just emerged from under the cap of cloud, making a vein of molten orange at the horizon. Washing over everything around him. It bathed the trees, turned the needles and leaves and fronds of grass into a spectrum of apple green and incandescent violet. An amazing, filtered, vibrant last light.
“I thought of my own endings,” the Professor said. “I thought of things being finished.”
Jeremy strode along in silence beside him. He burned with a much different intensity now, the Professor noted.
“I went to find him, to talk with him,” the Professor went on. “It was suddenly clear to me that the time had come for things to be written, to be finished.” He crashed on up through the bush, past Prospect Point, across the causeway to the top of Reservoir Trail. Only by then had the light fallen so low that a uniform blue descended between the trees. The light grew particulate, grainy. You could feel it move across your skin.
In the cane of salmonberry bushes he called Caruzo’s name, their comfortable mutual arrangement. He called from the bush a short distance away. No response, do not push on. Go around or come back later.
He waited a long time there. He had never broken the rule before.
“Caruzo,” he called again. “Answer me.”
Nothing.
His camp was empty, but the Professor felt that he was not far away. He followed the trail he had been shown. Down the hillside to the secret offshoot, the side path. It split out from behind a spray of fern, disappeared into the salal. A short distance along came the mossy clearing. The trees parted, made a place. A place of silence, rest. A place to lay down. Caruzo’s holy place.
He was just off the path, short of the clearing itself. His cheek rested on the soil. His eyes closed. He looked asleep, but the Professor felt a weight drop through him. He caught his breath, knelt.
Caruzo was cold.
The Professor grew silent now. They were at the lagoon, still walking very quickly. They were in the forest, climbing Cathedral Trail.
“I always expected a day like this one,” the Professor said. He felt very still as they walked. No comparison to the black whirlpool that followed Hélène’s death. There was a certain grey tranquility to his emotional seas.
His son vibrated with energy. They were charging up the hill towards the point now, Jeremy maintaining a long, aggressive stride.
“And Siwash was there?” Jeremy asked.
“Later,” the Professor answered.
He sat in the salal nearby after finding Caruzo’s body. From this spot, the Professor noted, you could not see a single piece of sky. No blue, no stars. The children had been all the light that this place offered. The Professor leaned and touched the moss. He picked up leaves and let them slide through his fingers, brushed the nearby salal. The ancestors of these leaves had covered the bodies in this indentation. Silent and invisible
among the trees. To find them you would have had to search very gently, sifting with your hands for a very long time. Searching with tenderness and intent.
He meditated on this quest for a time, as much as half an hour, he thought. It was the green light he noticed first. A small green glow hovering in the trees. It didn’t cover any area at all, didn’t illuminate. Just made a tiny patch of green where seconds before there had been none.
“Who is it?” The Professor had been startled.
“I,” said Siwash from the darkness.
He’d been there a while, the Professor guessed. And in that instant, he wondered if Siwash had played a role in Caruzo’s death—the battling evangelists came to mind—although there had been no signs of violence.
Siwash came forward through the leaves. He crouched a few feet away in the salal, regarding the Professor. Then Caruzo’s body. He knew, he said, his voice smooth. “I knew the hour and minute,” Siwash said. “I knew the second it happened.”
He edged a little closer along the path. The leaves rustled under him. He had sheathed his strange green light in a leather holster and withdrawn a knife. Nine, ten inches long. A gleaming blade.
The Professor paid attention to this knife.
“I became unsettled,” Siwash said. The knife was extending directly in front of him, silver blade up, black handle buried in his right fist. He was running his thumb along the blade, aggressively. The Professor found himself wincing in anticipation of the cut. The spurt of blood.
“Unsettled how?” the Professor answered.
“I felt that a new wind had risen,” Siwash intoned. “And it marked a great disturbance. It marked the great imminence of shaking.” And again his deep voice resonated among the trees, shivering the leaves and pine needles. “Of distortion.”
The Professor nodded politely, confused. A little frightened. The blade had become uncomfortably active. Twitching
in Siwash’s hand. Blade up. Blade down. Slashing lightly at the nearby leaves.
“I have not seen it,” the Professor said. “This distortion.”
“You wouldn’t,” Siwash said, looking down at Caruzo, cheeks hard. “You need a certain perspective. And you brought it here first. This distortion of views. You brought him in first, and now he comes alone. I see him in the forest with others. I have seen him here, on this spot.”
The Professor took a minute to respond. “He’s my son.”
“The others, the ones on the seawall and in the paths,” Siwash said very slowly, rendering judgment. “They come, they go, but they are never truly here. He is not either here … or there.”
The wind was sighing among the trees. The Professor had the sense that the clouds had thickened. That they were heavy with imminent rain.
“You have reached your number,” the Professor said.
Siwash thought the idea over, the knife rotating in his fist, blade turning as if he were twisting it in a wound.
“And did he tell you?” Jeremy asked. They had made their way up into the forest and were now, very quietly, heading towards the spot off Reservoir Trail.
Siwash hadn’t said yes or no. The Professor thought he had been taken by surprise that the number was mentioned at all. He turned and disappeared into the dark.
They arrived at Reservoir Trail. Jeremy looked around them both into the same darkness. “He will be back in his place,” the Professor reassured. “He doesn’t wander as a rule.”
Jeremy turned away sharply when he first saw Caruzo’s body. He lay with his cheek smeared into the earth. His eyes closed. They both knelt. Jeremy made a move to touch the body, to look at the face and the hands.
“There isn’t a mark on him that I can find,” the Professor said. “And I had my reasons to look.”
“We’ll bury him here,” Jeremy said.
They found Caruzo’s camp a quarter mile away in the salal. They found their way through the maintenance yard first, through his front door. From there the Professor took them through the salmonberry cane, left along a worn but hidden path, between a number of tightly spaced fir trees. It was almost invisible, even standing on top of it. Caruzo had left little physical mark on this place despite his long tenure: a black plastic sheet strung low, a pile of rotting clothes, a faded blanket. A quilt, Jeremy thought, touching it. You could pick out a pattern in the soiled squares, a pattern that was once visible in boldly contrasting colours. There was some peanut butter here. Epoxy. A latrine shovel. No books, no other bags.
They buried Caruzo in the holy clearing. They dug a pit in the moss, sweaty work. They piled earth and leaves over Caruzo and his possessions. A layer of moss was last. He made a green mound in the middle of that place.
They sat on their haunches in the dark afterwards. A few respectful minutes passed. Jeremy was already thinking about what came next.
Siwash Rock wasn’t far from the Professor’s camp. Jeremy made his way across the park to the familiar cliffside encampment, then another few hundred yards around the hillside overlooking the harbour.
The Professor had strongly objected. What was the point? What could he say? After all that had happened, his father said, their work here was nearly done. Writing could be completed from home, or from Jeremy’s apartment, which was closer. So they would leave now, the Professor said, the two of them, finally. They had learned much.
Jeremy looked at his father, impressed by these words. He then impressed his father in return by producing the Fugami from his waistband. He folded back the layers of tea towel he had wrapped around it, and the knife lay darkly across his
palms. Even after Jeremy had explained the trade he had in mind, the Professor was unconvinced.
“He is not always stable. Must you have your knife back?”
“Yes,” Jeremy said. And more emphatically: “I also don’t like the idea of him having it.”
After a few minutes of searching the cliff’s edge, Jeremy found the path down to the old pillbox. He stood on the sloping grade. Assuming he was already being watched, Jeremy pulled his hands away from his sides, palms out.
He took one slow step at a time, descending the slope halfway without hearing a thing beyond the sigh and scrape of one tree against another in a rising wind. At the bottom of the slope Jeremy could make out the black metal door into the old pillbox. He thought it was ajar.
The sound came from directly behind him. A twig cracked, Jeremy spun around, scattering gravel.
Siwash was immensely strong. Jeremy was on his back, a crushing weight pressed down on his chest. Small rocks ground into his shoulder blades and the towel-wrapped Fugami dug into the small of his back inside his waistband.
“Just be still,” Siwash said, persuasive and calm. Deep tones moderated by musical intonation. “Let me have another look at you.”
And in this position Jeremy first saw Siwash: bald, serious, skin smooth and seamless as plastic, without wrinkle or pore. Expressionless round grey eyes. Ears impossibly folded, like a boxer’s, but cut and ribboned, the earlobe of the left split into two distinct pendants.
The weight on Jeremy’s chest shifted painfully. One knee rested squarely on his sternum, the other in his groin. A cold sliver across his Adam’s apple remained as well. Jeremy knew the edge.
Jeremy whispered his message. “I brought a gift.”
Siwash took several seconds to decide, but when he did, it was final. He pulled Jeremy to his feet, sheathed the knife
and commenced vigorously brushing the leaves and bits of gravel off Jeremy’s shoulders and his back. Then he led the way towards the pillbox, a rounded rectangle of thick concrete and steel, rusting, moss covered, clinging to a rock outcropping on the cliff. Inside the heavy steel door Jeremy found himself in a tiny, although neatly organized, room. There were stacks of books, a narrow cot, two benches and a stool for sitting. On the walls there were dozens of maps taped up, overlapping, flickering in the light offered by many candles mounted inside soup cans.
They had tea. Jeremy’s hands shaking, despite himself. The tea cup rattling. It was China Black, he couldn’t help but notice.
Siwash pulled the stool close. He sat and sipped delicately, the Sabatier unsheathed again and balanced across his knees. “You’re wondering about the maps, no doubt,” he said.
Jeremy hadn’t been, but Siwash had decided to talk.
The Mercator projection was familiar to Jeremy. The Miller cylinder might have even come up in highschool geography. The sinusoidal pseudocylindrical projection rang fewer bells, however, and Jeremy admitted defeat with the gnomonic azi-muthal. “Not unlike personal perspectives,” Siwash said, “we rarely understand map projections that are not our own.”
He was on conic projections now: lambert conformal, Albers’ equal area. “One of my favourites,” Siwash was saying. “Bipolar oblique conic conformal.”
Siwash continued to talk while standing and pointing to a map of North America on the far wall. Jeremy could see from where he sat that it was an eccentric projection. If someone had painted a map of the continent on a basketball and (while the paint was still wet) fired this basketball out of a cannon against a canvas, the resultant print might look something like the bipolar oblique conic conformal projection. Compressed and exploded at the same time. It strained to stay on the page.
“The earth usefully rendered in two dimensions,” Siwash sighed, sitting. His face clouded. There were projection
problems, Jeremy learned. Problems inherent in trying to depict the surface of a three dimensional sphere (or a near-sphere, the world being shaped more like a squashed pear) on the impoverished dimensions of a flat piece of paper. “Distortion,” Siwash said, grimacing. “And it gets much worse with scale. You understand?”
Maps of the entire earth were the most distorted, and every projection designed to solve the problem came saddled with its own limitations. Directions weren’t true or the proportions got wonky or—as in the case of the globe cut into petals and flattened on the page—it became impossible to get a sense of how anything was connected. “There’s no straight line here,” Siwash said, stabbing his finger towards a map that illustrated this point. “I know there are straight lines
really
. I can draw one in the soil.” He drew one with the toe of his boot in the dust of the pillbox floor. “Proving,” he said, eyes wide, “that too much map is
problematic.”