“I’m doing something new,” Rabbit said. Then, after a pause: “You and Jabez are friends?”
Ali nodded.
“And Beyer?”
Ali smiled and nodded again. “At the beginning it was the three of us. You know that, right? Tight as thieves, Beyer and Jabez. Thinking the same thoughts and planning the same plans. That’s always how it starts with mortal enemies.”
After Kumi returned from the kids’ room and they’d cleared the dishes, they all went into the living room to get the latest. The television sound on low. Lights shone on the front of Meme Media. The police were asking people to leave the plaza, but nobody seemed to be listening. There were thought to be as many as fifty thousand people in the area, cramming the side streets. You couldn’t see the fountains. You could hardly see the trees. When the crowd moved, it rippled through itself. It had leveled up, become the larger organism. The thing with twitchy movements, limbs, reach, quantum unpredictability.
“I have to ask,” Eve said, staring at the television.
Ali waited for her.
“God,” she said. “Religion.”
Kumi said: “We converted when I came over and we got married.”
“Converted from what to what?”
Ali said: “From epicureans living in the moment to God freaks living in the moment.”
“We’re not God freaks, we’re believers,” Kumi said to Eve. Then to Ali: “And you weren’t epicurean either. The term for what you were is hedonist-nihilist.”
On the television a picture of people in an alley. They were tearing up the pavement and breaking it into pieces. They were loading these pieces into wheeled plastic garbage bins.
“So I’m back here. Tokyo is done. I’m strung out, putting up these line drawings on the roofs of warehouses in the approach path to the airport. These big dioramas, hands and feet and faces and fuck knows what.”
Kumi said: “Language, please.”
Rabbit said: “You might be interested to know that Beyer claims those now.”
Ali shrugged. “Beyer was always like that. You know how Faith Wall happened? We were sitting around drinking beer and decided to put up a piece with a random word from each of us. I said faith. Beyer said wall. Jabez said revolution. Beyer dropped Jabez’s word and there we were.”
Rabbit laughed and shook his head. Eve watched him and knew that the revelation of beginnings did not always satisfy.
Ali went on. Before he’d left for Tokyo, the group of them had done a few of the rooftop Nazca lines together. But when he came back it had stopped. “I decided to start doing them again. Do we still have those pictures?”
Eve could hear rain on the roof, the trees sighing. A musical mobile playing in the room Yuko and Francis shared. These came in over the voices on the television, tuned low. A new condo development. A household cleaner. A line of cosmetics. Someone said:
The simple life full of grace and luxury.
Kumi brought back a handful of photographs, nicked and bent around the edges. Eve took in a breath seeing the first one. Ali, Ali. She felt as if she were meeting him again, this time the one she remembered. Wire thin, white T-shirt. Up on a rooftop. Eve could hear Rabbit breathing next to her, looking at the same image.
Ali was looking over at the television, distracted. Armored cars. Plastic shields. Smoke billowing. “I was working on this big one, a man standing like he’d just been busted. Hands over his head. And I’d almost
finished the thing. I remember I was working on the fingers of his hand. Walking backwards pouring down the powder we used, which is the same from football fields only mixed with this sparkling stuff we got from a kids’ art supply store. I guess I was a little wrapped up in the moment. I was also high. In any case, I walked right off the roof.”
He fell thirty feet into a parking lot. Bent the top of a light pole going down, crushed in the roof of a limousine waiting for an airport fare. He woke up in a hospital bed. “This is the cliché, right? You find God lying in a hospital bed.” They contacted Kumi in Tokyo for him, and she flew over. She showed up with her duffel bag and a change of clothes. She was sitting in the chair next to Ali’s bed. And they were arguing about something.
“About whether you were going to keep making art,” Kumi said. “You decided you weren’t.”
“It was a T5 break. Very bad. I was frozen from the chest down. I’m doing better than I should be. They were telling me people just don’t recover. So we’re arguing. And then we finish arguing and I fall asleep. And then, sometime later, fifteen, twenty minutes, that thing happens when you half wake up.”
Ali came up into the room, up under his own eyelids. He felt the room, heard the low hum of hospital machines and hallway traffic, the dry heat of the place, the cover smells, cleaning products, all just barely keeping the stench of sickness and fear at bay. And Kumi was sitting there just where she’d been when he fell asleep, but now her eyes were closed and he realized she was praying. He knew, watching her, that she was addressing her thoughts to some entity beyond. Some being they couldn’t know to exist. She was saying words that required belief.
“And here comes the big epiphany,” Ali said.
Rabbit moved in his chair, sharply. Eve wondered for a moment if he might leave the room. But the movement was followed by stillness.
“It just burned right through me, this thought,” Ali said. “We’d been
arguing about whether to keep going or to stop. A dispute over free choice, free will. We assumed freedom enough to even argue the choices. And yet where did it come from, that confidence that we could really choose? Everything that had happened to me could be explained by rational science. Inability to move legs because of nerve damage. Nerve damage because of T5 break. T5 break because of falling off a roof. This all happens because of this, which happens because of this, which stretches back through time, past me, past generations and history back to whenever it began, with whatever big explosion. Thermodynamics, quantum physics, whatever it is, it’s a rational unfolding. But if that were true, if my lying there really was fully explained in those terms, molecules jostling outwards in some inviolable quantum legal framework that started at the big bang, the irreducible particles in us just doing what they do in accordance with the fantastic numbers encoded within them, then what decisions were left for me to make? Do billiard balls make decisions after the break? Do they suspend geometric laws on occasion to find the pocket of their choosing? How would a billiard ball understand choice or desire, or the notion that by choice or desire something good or bad, or beautiful or ugly, might come about? What sense could a billiard ball make of hope and regret? And yet I suddenly understood how intensely I needed just those things. Choice, desire, hope, regret. I needed these not just to feel good, but to live. Kumi praying over there. I could see her lips move. I was thinking: I need choice, I need desire, I need hope and regret not to be proteins etched on the inner lining of my cells. I need to want art or not want it. I need to want Kumi or not want her. I need to want recovery or death, or happy spirits or sad ones, or to clean up or return to junk. Why junk without choice? Why smile? Why was I smiling, lying there in my hospital bed with a broken T5 vertebra? Well sure, because my cheek muscles contracted in response to endorphin flows. But in my experience of the
moment, in my memory of its texture, it was because I was falling in love with Kumi. My love for her entered the universe coming from the same place that the art came from, a big eye on the top of a warehouse, my endless, useless work. It didn’t come from the network, from the phenomenal soup. It came from somewhere outside, some source beyond or before. And watching her lips move, I knew she was addressing that same source. Wherever and whatever it was. Whomever. I didn’t care about religion as an institution or a set of coded practices. I still don’t care about that. I care about choice. I need it. And without belief, without faith in something beyond sense, there can be no meaningful choice.”
The wind was up. The trees were whipping back and forth in the yard. Rabbit, who had risen from his chair during Ali’s long speech, now slipped out of the room and into the hall. Conversation flagged, it softened and lost its shape. Eve’s eyes kept drifting to the window, to the trees moving there. Ali lived in a forest. The man of the rooftops having come down just far enough to nest among the branches. And even when Ali keyed up the television volume, Eve’s attention remained outside the news. She thought of what Ali had said. Without belief there was no choice.
They were showing a steady shot of the plaza now, seething crowds. The camera seemed bewildered in its long, unwavering shot. No fast cuts, no slick production values. The camera stared open mouthed just as they all did. It took Eve several minutes to realize what she was watching, coasting between the images and her thoughts of Ali’s new conviction. The people in the shot had started a fire in a planter, the flames and sparks now rising up. A beautiful and terrifying sight. Eve and Ali and Kumi sat as if they were in front of a fire in a hearth.
Rabbit came back into the room. He was holding a copy of
1984.
Ali caught his glance. “It’s killing you, so ask.”
Rabbit said: “The Poets.”
Ali sighed. “All Jabez. All his. I have nothing to do with them anymore.”
“The Grove.”
“What about it?”
“You own the building.”
“Me and a group of people. Strictly business.”
“Wow,” Rabbit said. “I’m finding this very bizarre. You seem to be at the root of a lot of things in my life.”
Ali shrugged. “Don’t start thinking anything. I’m out. Millions of people have copies of
1984.
”
But Rabbit was on to a new idea, and this was now coursing uncomfortably through him. “You ran the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel.”
Ali looked at him in surprise. “We all ran the tunnel. Jabez wanted to
live
in the freaking tunnel. He found those rooms down there.”
“Who’s Alto?”
Ali’s expression changed. He was amused.
“The name of an artist who failed,” Ali said. “Ali Latour. Alla never quite sat right. God complex and all that.”
Rabbit took a step backwards and bumped the frame of the door. On the TV, the fire grew, front and center. The on-scene reporter was saying “ . . . several slightly injured . . .”
Alto.
And Rabbit was gone. Disappeared up and into the front hall. Eve could hear the front door clicking shut.
SHE WAS GOING TO FOLLOW HIM. She didn’t need Ali to tell her to, although he did. He wheeled with her into the front hall and pulled her down to him again. No more tears from Eve even though he said he was sorry again, and she knew he was and that moved her. But she just held him. She inhaled his different smell, different soaps and routines, different pains and defenses. She wondered if they would now
see each other occasionally or if they’d return to their separate lives. But either way, she was at peace with it. He was safe. He was still himself, still walking the path he chose. And by connecting, they had restored at least a part of what had existed between them.
Then it was open, the door in front of her. Open by her hand. Her feet taking one step after another down the flagstone walk and onto the pavement of the drive, her eyes casting around, looking for Rabbit. Choice in every instant for her too. Maybe that was something Ali had returned to her. Something like a belief in her own ability to choose. Irrational, but vital.
Rabbit was sitting in the truck, waiting. Eve climbed in herself. They sat in silence for a moment, Rabbit staring straight ahead, seemingly lost in thought. She started the truck. And when they were five or six blocks down the hill towards the river, she cracked a glance over at him. His strong profile against a blur of streetscape. Rabbit flying across the brick and glass, the mailboxes and utility poles.
He shook his head, a sharp movement, as if to startle himself awake. “Ahh,” he said. “That was strange.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. Honest, I am.”
“I’m not sure I understand what happened back there. You want to tell me?”
He did, actually. He wanted to tell her a lot of things. But for now he told her about the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel and his running routine, about a mysterious hidden painting and the inspiration it had provided.
“I always knew there was a person out there somewhere who had done that piece,” Rabbit said. “I just didn’t necessarily want to meet them.”
“Why not?” Eve asked.
It was a harder question to answer, to even think about. Because he
didn’t want to meet his inspiration. He didn’t want to risk having someone in his life he might then look to for approval. “Or worse,” Rabbit said. “Someone I’d end up resenting. Beyer and Jabez, they’re ruined. They used to have ideas. Now they have nothing but their rivalry.”
They’d made the bridge and were stopped in a long line of cars leading up to a checkpoint. An officer with a flashlight was coming down the row of cars, shining the light into each. No traffic moving.
“You think you might feel rivalry towards Ali?” Eve asked.
He turned to look at her when she said that. Mineral-green eyes, dark lashes. And having asked the question, she suddenly knew what she wanted him to feel. She wanted Rabbit to feel that he could be better than Ali, truer than Ali. She wanted Rabbit to feel that he could replace Ali.
Rabbit was still looking at her steadily. “I think we’re past rivalry,” he said.
And Eve again felt the surge, like a river current, like the tug of acceleration. Forward rushing. Anticipation and excitement. These delicious feelings, so recently renewed.
The officer had arrived at the truck. And when Eve buzzed down the window, he recognized her and said: “Evey, what’s up? Can’t let you across in the vehicle.”
“Can we go on foot?” she asked him.