A few Music Matters to get us started here, so grab a cup of tea and settle in. Lots to think about here, so go slow and enjoy the ride.
(Delius, Upon Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring)
(Pat Metheny Group, Above The Treetops)
Part III: The House With No Windows
Chapter 13.3
Povai Bay, Bora Bora, French Polynesia 24 December 1996
Taggart didn’t know what to think. He’d never run into an orca before, let alone one that seemed so consciously intent on controlling an otherworldly event like what was taking place off the yacht’s stern. The Kid, as everyone had taken to calling William Taylor these days, was standing on the swim platform in open-mouthed wonder, thunderstruck by the sight of Debra surrounded by a pod of swirling orcas.
“What the hell is going on, Hank?” Taylor whispered, his muted words almost unheard over the sound of the thrashing going on down there in the water.
Taggart stood beside the kid and shook his head. “I wish I knew. It doesn’t make sense to me, either.”
“So you’ve never seen anything like this before?”
“Shit, Slick, I ain’t even heard of anything like this before…”
Then almost as quickly as the orcas came, the clustered females simply slipped under the water’s surface and disappeared – and the big male swam to her side and cupped her next to his body and carried her to the swim platform. Taggart jumped into the water and took her from the male yethe could tell she was unconscious simply by the way her head seemed to bob along on the surface of the water.
“Give me a hand, Kid.”
Taylor grabbed Debra’s hands and effortlessly lifted her up onto the platform, then he laid her out and cradled her head on his lap as Taggart came up the shaky little ladder.
“I’ll go get some towels,” Taggart said, darting below and flipping the breaker for the shower on the platform as he passed the chart table. When he got back aft again she was shivering and just coming to, so he tossed aside the towels and turned on the shower and set the temp to a nice amniotic warmth and began hosing her down, warming her slowly.
She sat up and opened her eyes, saw Taggart and flung herself into his completely surprised arms.
“Are you okay?” Taggart whispered into her ear, holding her close – breathing her in.
Taylor grabbed a towel and began drying her and only then did she seem to realize she was in Taggart’s arms, not William’s. She pulled the towel close and wrapped herself up as Taylor handed her another.
And at that point Taggart realized the big male orca was still just off the stern, still looking intently at – Debra – and not knowing what else to do he walked over to the edge and knelt there, waiting. “What is it, boy? Something else you got on your mind?”
But the male didn’t move…he just seemed intent on watching Debra – and William – until, perhaps a few minutes later, it turned and looked at him.
“Now why do I get the impression you know more than you’re letting on?” Taggart said, standing now and still staring into the orca’s eye.
It swam over to him and then it’s head – and a third of it’s body – came out of the water…until they were eye to eye, staring at echoes of the reflections passing between them.
He saw a ball of stars in the orca’s eye, and out of the ball a pulsing light.
“What is it? What are you trying to tell me?” he said to the orca…
But then Debra stepped close to his side, and she was holding her hand out, touching the side of the orca’s face.
“I hear you now,” she sighed. “Tell the others that I understand. I’ll be ready.”
And with that the big male fell away and slipped into the inky blackness and was gone.
Taggart turned to her, his face a mirror of the wonder he felt: “Hear…what, exactly, Debra?”
But she shook her head, her hand still out as if still touching the orca: “He will be back for you, Henry. When you are ready to see.” She turned and looked at William, her skin now beyond pale. “I think I need to go below,” she said – just before she collapsed and began falling again.
Taggart caught her and held her up until Taylor got an arm under her and lifted her up into his arms. “I’ll get your bunk ready,” Henry said as he dashed below.
+++++
“C’mon, everybody!” Ted Sorensen crowed, banging on the companionway hatch. “It’s Christmas…let’s open our presents!”
William turned to face Debra, both still under the sheets after a long night’s sleep: “I thought y’all were Jewish?” he said. “We’re doing Christmas?”
Debra opened her eyes and her hands went to her womb, to the certain knowledge that something was now fundamentally different “down there.” She turned to William and smiled, brought a hand to the side of his face. “Good morning, my love.”
He kissed her hand – just as Ted opened the door to their stateroom and burst inside. “Come on, you two. Into the cockpit, now, or by golly someone is gonna be walking the plank!”
“Dad? Would you mind if we get some clothes on first?” Deb sighed.
“You two are naked? And not even engaged? Okay Taylor, you’re first off the plank!”
“Yessir.”
Sorensen shook his head and started topside. “Dina? How long ’til we have cinnamon rolls?”
“Five minutes!”
“Taggart!” Ted shouted. “You comin’ – or sleeping in?”
“Yeah, soon as I get Dina’s pubes out of my nose,” Henry yelled back.
That was good for a laugh all ‘round the boat, if only because Ted and Dina had kept everyone up all night with at least three repeat performances.
Henry dragged himself out of the forward v-berth and into the head, and after he brushed his teeth he made his way aft to the cockpit, carrying a large pitcher of OJ and some plastic cups up as he went, and he found Sorensen sitting behind the wheel with a huge red velvet Santa sack full of wrapped presents. Dina came up behind Taggart, followed by William Taylor a moment later.
“Where’s Deb?” Sorensen asked. “Isn’t she coming?”
“She was right behind me,” Taylor sighed, turning around and looking down the companionway into the galley. “Deb?” he called out.
Nothing.
He dashed below, calling her name…
Then…nothing but silence. “She’s gone!” he finally cried as he made his way into their stateroom.
Copenhagen, Denmark 13 April 1939
Walter Eisenstadt sat beside the wood stove with his oldest and dearest friend, Aaron Schwarzwald, in the cozy little library off the kitchen in his house. His fingers were stiff with age these days, the knuckles in his fingers now more than a little swollen, but he was still spry enough to make his daily walk along the waterfront, even on days like this one, even in the waning slush of a long winter. He had just come in from his walk, and as was usually the case on Saturday mornings, he’d picked up Aaron along the way. Both made the walk to the main fish market to check prices for fresh salmon, and as was the case on Saturday mornings, to stop and enjoy a coffee. Now they were in his library and he put a couple of pieces of wood on the fire and closed the fireplace door after giving the coals a good poke, and then it was time to sit beside his friend and talk about the world.
“We should have remarried, Walter,” Aaron said. “These spring mornings are too cold for such loneliness.”
“If I could sleep with a woman half my age, I think I might consider the idea.”
“If you could? Why can’t you?”
“I do not want to go to prison, for one thing. And besides, who wants to be seen with a woman so young? Everywhere we might go we’d be told how lovely our daughters looked! Who needs such nonsense, my friend!”
“I do,” Aaron sighed as he rubbed his knees. “My old bed feels so – empty – now. And so cold. And how good would a simple back rub feel…?”
Walter looked at his friend again and sighed. “What’s troubling you, Aaron?”
Schwarzwald took in a deep breath and slowly exhaled as he looked at the fire dancing behind the glass door: “All this talk of war. Perhaps I could bear the thought of it if…if there was not so much hate directed at us this time.”
“So, why not leave? Why not go to America?”
“I told you yesterday…”
“And I heard you yesterday, yet still I must ask. The war will end, Aaron. All wars end, eventually. Come back after the war. Resume your life, and…”
“And what? Turn tail and run away, only to return after all the maniacs have befouled our country? That is a cowards choice, Walter, and you know it.”
“It is a survivors choice, Aaron. You can not see to your patients if you’re dead.”
“I can stay here and treat my patients when they need me most.”
“Alright then. Yet you seem to have answered your own question.”
“No, no I haven’t, Walter. And I have no answer to their hate, nothing to explain such things.”
“Nor do they, Aaron. These Germans hate us without knowing what it is they hate, let alone why. They have been taught to hate, and probably by their parents, or by a friend or maybe even a teacher. It is like a disease that is passed from one generation to the next.”
“Do you really think it is as simple as that?”
“I don’t know, Aaron, but I really don’t if anything like this can ever be simplified. I do know that if you fill a man with hate and then give him a weapon he will use that weapon, and he will use it where he has been taught to use it.”
“That is exactly my point, Walter. Is not such a man evil, is he not a monster…”
“He is a man, Aaron. And all men are open vessels, to be filled with hate or love or a passion for learning or by a desire to kill that which is considered some kind of outsider. He is your fellow man, Aaron. He is the next patient waiting to see you, the man on the tram standing beside you. He is us, Aaron, just another man in all his imperfect glory.”
“Is that so? Evil is just some sort of permutation, something beyond the standard deviation? Or is evil in fact something more grim than that, more singular?”
“You mean…like innate evil?”
“Yes, exactly so! Something tangibly real, something more than a lost soul, something beyond redemption…”
“And, Aaron, what if there is? What would you do?”
“Perhaps…no…I…”
“Is that what you wish to confront, Aaron? Evil itself? Is that how you want your life end…to be remembered for…?”
“I could care less how I am remembered, my friend. I want to look this monster in the eye. I want to see this evil for myself. Perhaps then I might understand…”
“What? Why on earth…”
Aaron Schwarzwald sighed and looked down at the mangled hand resting on his belly. “I think I have prided myself on being a rational man, Walter. A scientist. A surgeon, and now a psychiatrist. I have adapted to circumstance as my life changed,” he said, raising his ruined hand, “and yet this thing called Evil still eludes me.”
“Eludes you? What do you mean by that, Aaron?”
“To believe in Evil, Walter, do you not first have to believe in goodness, in an Absolute Good. To believe in God, would you not also have to believe in His opposite? A destroyer of Goodness?”
“Since when have you believed in God, Aaron?”
Schwarzwald looked up at his friend and smiled. “Since you began speaking to me of this evil. If you are correct, if this evil is indeed something real – and not merely the product of an overactive imagination – then I want to see it for myself. I want to take a measure of this thing, I want to understand it for what it really is.”
Walter scowled, slowly shaking his head. “I’m afraid, Aaron, that the only way to truly know, let alone to understand such a thing, is to become as one with the thing, to embrace it fully. Is that what you want, Aaron? Truly?”
Schwarzwald scoffed, “Hah! So I am to be the anti-Faust, then? Is that how you see me?”
“That’s a fair question, Aaron, assuming this is what you want. Faust wanted to know everything, to possess all knowledge, and he was willing to make a deal with Mephistopheles to get it…”
“I do know the tale, Walter…”
“Oh? I wonder…do you, really? What you seek is almost the antithesis of Faust, Aaron. Can’t you see that?”
“Antithesis? How so?”
“You seek to know and understand Evil, so, in effect you wish to understand Satan, and I would have to assume that the only way you can approach such an understanding would be to petition God himself. To, in effect, strike a bargain, but this time with God…”
Again Schwarzwald chuckled. “Me? The Unbeliever? Petition God?”
“I don’t know how else you might expect to face Evil, Aaron, and walk away unscathed.”
“Unscathed? Walter, you have misunderstood me entirely. Surely you must assume that I would never embark on such a quest without knowing full well there could be no return…?”
Walter Eisenstadt looked at his friend and his hands began to shake, his vision grew dark and narrow: “You would stay here, in Copenhagen, knowing you will perish? Aaron? What is to be gained by such a…?”
Aaron smiled and shook his head slowly. “Ah, my friend, that is the bargain I must make, and the price I will have to pay…”
“To pay? Aaron, what are you talking about?”
“I must see to it that my Imogen survives this darkness, Walter. Nothing else matters.”
“Imogen? What has she to do with this?”
“Everything, Walter. Absolutely everything. And oddly enough, it is your granddaughter that will light the way…”
“My…what? Aaron? What are you talking about? I have no granddaughter!”
Aaron Schwarzwald looked away, looked to the sun rising over the city and he took a deep breath as the sheer majesty of the plan suddenly began to make sense to him, as inside that moment the staggering simplicity of his life grew crystal clear. “Oh, but you will, Walter. Only now…everything depends on her, and on what she does next.”
Povai Bay, Bora Bora, French Polynesia 25 December 1996
“What do you mean ‘She’s not down there!?’” Ted Sorensen screamed. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Where the fuck else could she be!”
Henry Taggart’s head poked up in the companionway. “Unless she’s hiding someplace I don’t know about, she ain’t down here. That’s what I mean by that, Ted.” Taggart added a little extra zing when he spat out Sorensen’s name, and the implied challenge wasn’t lost on anyone in the cockpit.
“William! Get down there and find her! Now!”
“Yessir.”
Taggart came up the companionway and made his way out of the cockpit and up to the bow; with one hand on the jib fuller he stepped up onto the pulpit rail and with his free hand he shaded his eyes and scanned the water around the boat. Shades of turquoise and cobalt, and all the water in the bay as smooth as glass, and that was all he could see…yet suddenly he thought of the orcas last night and once again nothing made any sense at all. He’d just seen her down below, snuggled up next to William and not at all wanting to leave the warmth of her bunk – and now…this had happened? People didn’t just disappear. Did they? Yet – how many people had encounters with Killer Whales like the one Debra had just experienced?
He hopped off the pulpit and went aft to the swim platform and checked the pressure on a SCUBA tank, then went to the edge of the white fiberglass and teak platform and looked into the water. He sighed as he pulled his mask over his forehead and then fins on his feet; he hooked the regulator to the primary and zeroed out the dive computer attached to the rig before he hoisted the BC vest up on his back and secured the velcro band around his waist. He patted the weightson the strap once and stepped off the platform and into the water, his field of view an explosion of bubbles before he sank beneath the surface. He popped the valve on his vest and inflated it a bit and hovered about fifteen feet beneath the keel as he equalized the pressure in his ears – and he saw he was about twenty feet above the white sandy floor below – so he circled the boat slowly, checking the sea floor and, really more than anything else looking for signs of something, anything, out of the ordinary.
But he saw little of interest – and nothing at all of Debra – with just a few small reef sharks a hundred or so feet away – lazily checking him out as he looked them over – and that was it. He popped some air into his buoyancy compensator vest and started to ascend when a flash of light caught his eye, something down deep near the sandy white bottom, so he hovered again and watched the area, looking for something, any movement that might help explain what was happening…
But then…
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the big male orca approaching, only now it was coming his way rapidly, almost urgently.
Then the male circled Taggart once, almost like a bird of prey bleeding off speed before he came in close for the kill – then almost cupping Taggart between his pectoral fin and his body, the orca began pushing Taggart up to the surface. And this did not go unnoticed by Ted Sorensen and the rest of the people standing on the boat.
“What the hell is going on down there, Taggart?” a red-faced Sorensen screamed, as the man was now clearly consumed with fear. “Are there Killer Whales down there, too!?”
But Taggart emptied his BC and sank beneath the surface again and the orca turned and tried to cut him off, to force him back to the surface, so he swam to the anchor rode and grabbed hold of it. Then hand over hand he pushed his way down to the sea floor, and all the while the orca swam in a lazy circle around him, now with Taggart looking at the orca warily.
Then he saw the shimmer again, something like light, or almost the opposite of light drawing his eye in. An area along the bottom seemed to distort and grow dim, then a charged pinkish sphere popped into the space – and Taggart could see Debra inside – curled up like she was lost inside a deep fetal slumber.
And she was not alone.
Then the orca swam up to the surface and took a breath before coming back to Taggart – and in no uncertain terms he extended his pectoral fin, his body language telling Taggart of grab hold and hang on. Taggart took hold of the extended fin and the big male carried him down to the shimmering sphere and dropped him on the sea floor – then it moved a few meters away and seemed to watch the sphere a little expectantly.
The creature Taggart saw inside was immense and covered in pink feathers, and it seemed to be waiting on him to do something. It almost seemed to beckon him, in effect asking him to enter the sphere, so he swam to the edge of the shimmering thing and settled on the sea floor, not sure what to do next. The creature seemed anxious now, using two hands to motion him to step inside, but Taggart really didn’t want to.
“But why?” he heard a feminine voice say – somewhere in the deeper recesses of his mind. “Why are you afraid of me?”
“Who are you?”
“That is unimportant.”
“What is important?”
“There are too many people here and we must get her back to a normal atmosphere now. Does this device you have on provide a means for two people to breathe?”
Taggart picked up the ‘octopus rig’ clipped to his vest and held it up for the creature to see. “Yes, but she needs to be conscious to use it.”
“Come inside, now. We must hurry.”
Taggart heard something in her voice that felt like urgent concern and that was all it took; he stepped inside the sphere and knelt beside Debra. Her body felt warm, almost febrile, as he lifted her to her feet, then he cleared water from the octopus rig and put it into Deb’s mouth.
“Okay,” he said, “she’s breathing on my air supply.”
“We will meet again, soon,” he heard the creature say – just before the sphere vanished…and then suddenly he was standing on the white sandy seafloor with Debra in his arms. Then Debra’s eyes popped open in disoriented panic and he held the regulator in her mouth until she settled down, and soon enough he popped some air into his vest to start his ascent –
But the big male appeared by his side again, offering his pectoral fin once again, and Taggart grabbed ahold and held on tight as the orca slowly made its way to the surface. Debra closed her eyes as the saltwater began stinging, and Taggart felt her holding him tightly – tight enough to provoke a confused rush of emotion.
The orca released them a few feet from the surface and Taggart finished the ascent, carrying Debra the last few feet up to the surface, and they popped into view about a hundred meters aft of the boat.Taggart added air to his vest and held her close – when he felt her quietly sobbing, before she rested her head next to his and caressed his neck…
“Thank you for coming for me,” she whispered, her voice hard to hear over the waves rippling around them.
“Glad to be of service, Ma’am,” Henri said – perhaps a little too obsequiously for the moment, but she laughed and kissed him on the side of his face. “Maybe we better not do this, ya know? While boyfriend and dad are watching?”
“Okay.”
“What happened down there?”
“I’m not really sure, but it felt like I was gone for months…”
“Months? I hate to break it to you, but you’ve been gone for maybe a half hour…”
“I was on one of their ships, Henry. Earth was barely visible…”
“Okay…okay…let’s just get one thing straight right now. If you start talking about stuff like this your father is going to put you in the Funny Farm…know what I mean, Jelly-bean? Stop with the spaceship stuff right now…”
“I know, but I think they wanted me to tell you. And only you. You fit into this somehow.”
“Into what?”
“I’m really, really pregnant now,” she sighed, and she took his hand and put it on her belly…
“Fuck-shit-damn! You aren’t just kiddin’,” Taggart exclaimed. “You feel like you’re about to pop like…any time now…” He was looking at Sorensen and Taylor getting into the Zodiac and starting the outboard – without much luck…so far…
“I told you. I was up there for months.”
“Okay, I believe you, but here comes your dad. We’re going to need some kind of story to…”
“Dad knows about them. He’s met them, in the house…”
“What? Are you sure?” He felt her head nodding gently and he pressed his face into the wet hair on her neck, breathed her in. “God, you smell so good to me.”
“I know. You do too…to me, I mean.”
“We can’t do this, Deb. You and me, I mean.”
“Oh, don’t worry about all that. I already know what’s going to happen…to all of us. I’ve seen it all, everything that’s going to happen…”
“They…showed you?”
“Yup,” she said, sounding almost like a little girl now…
He pushed her away and saw she in fact looked about five years old, yet within the span of a few seconds her appearance changed again, and in the span of a single heartbeat she looked to be a hundred years old…then in the next instant she was the girl her knew, no longer pregnant and her eyes full of infinite love.
“What’s going on, Debra? What’s this all about?”
She shook her head. “They’ll tell you when you’re ready, Henri, but you have to get away from my father. He’ll destroy you, just like he’s going to destroy William…”
They heard her father shouting over the sound of the waves and the outboard motor, and soon they were alongside, then William was pulling Debra up onto the soft inflatable’s tube. William wrapped a towel around her and Sorensen gunned the engine and turned for the boat – leaving Taggart to swim back on his own…
Then the orca appeared again, offered his huge dorsal fin – helping Taggart beat them back to the boat. He was waiting for them by the swim platform as the Zodiac pulled up…
“How’d you get…” Sorensen asked, dumbfounded. “I was going to come back for you…”
“No problem, Pard. Besides being extremely good looking and hot in the sack, it turns out I’m a pretty good swimmer, too.”
Dina Marlowe broke out laughing…but then again she’d just watched an orca circle Taggart and then bring him back to the boat, and by now she knew that some really strange things were happening out here. She jumped down and helped Henry shed his tank and BC before climbing back onboard, and she looked him in the eye as they met on the swim platform…
“Think you could teach me to dive?” she asked. “That looked – interesting…”
“Sure. No problem,” Henry said as he turned and helped Debra out of the unsteady inflatable boat, and she smiled at him as she passed – and Dina didn’t miss the look in her eyes, or in Henry’s either, for that matter. Yet Ted and William seemed clueless.
“What happened to you, Debra?” William asked as she sat in the cockpit, pulling her towel close as she settled into a curved coaming.
“I was hot and needed to go for a swim, so I went out the forward hatch and dove in. Sorry, I didn’t mean to cause such a commotion…”
Sorensen looked at his daughter then at Henry – because the water here in the bay was exceptionally clear and he’d seen the shimmering sphere appear on the bottom, and both he and Dina had watched Taggart as he disappeared inside…
Yet it was William Taylor who had surprised him the most. Sorensen had watched as the Kid looked overboard and seen the sphere, but in his wildest dreams he’d never expected the reaction he’d observed.
Taylor had started shaking, then he’d whispered “Leonidas, Leonidas, oh – what have we done now. Can we never atone for our sins?”
It had taken him a moment to remember the name. Leonidas, the Spartan. What was that all about, Sorensen wondered? And why the hell did it look like the Kid recognized that sphere? And atone for what sins?
He’d turned to look at Dina, to see if she’d seen what he had.
Yet she was staring at him, measuring him and his response to the Kid’s words, then she had started to smile at him.
“What are you smiling at?” Sorensen had snarled, unsure of the things he saw in her eyes.
“Sometimes you are still like a little boy, Ted. And yet there are times when I can only see the fires of Hell in your eyes.”
“And what? This is a surprise to you?”
She’d turned her head away then, before she answered his question: “Maybe they are one and the same, Ted. The little boy might run from the flames, but you’ll grow old, just like the rest of us…and what happens then?”
“Just like the rest of us? That’s rich.” Ted had looked down into the sea again and he saw Henry and Debra emerge from the sphere. “My guess, dear Dina, is that, in the end, we all burn.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He’d turned and looked up to the heavens and scowled. “We’re flawed, Dina. We shouldn’t even exist, yet we do.”
“And you’re going to change that, aren’t you? You’re going to bring us all down, make all of us burn in the fire you bring?”
He’d turned and looked at her, his eyes black and empty. Then he smiled, at her, at all humanity, and she’d felt her soul wither under the weight of his Hate.
Povai Bay, Bora Bora, French Polynesia 24 December 1996
The French Clorox bottle lay at anchor in the southeast portion of the bay, a few hundred yards north of Bloody Mary’s, a popular watering hole on the main island named after a song of the same name from the musical South Pacific, and Henry Taggart was sitting in the cockpit updating his own personal logbook. He’d maintained this book since in junior high school, primarily to keep track of his sailing adventures but also as a kind of roaming diary, logging his life’s milestones along the routes of his journeys. The first time he’d talked to Doris Day, the first time he’d taken his dad’s Swan out by himself – on a date, for God’s sake – and yes, his first kiss that evening. All these big and not so big events were in this book – or series of books, because he’d filled four logbooks so far – and while he enjoyed keeping them up to date, he also enjoyed thumbing through them from time to time. Sometimes looking back was a good way to make out the road ahead.
He always filled in the usual information, the ship’s longitude and latitude, course and speed and water descriptions such as depth and other features like reefs or sandbars, but he also spent a fair amount of time painting a picture of his surroundings. He enjoyed writing about the people he sailed with, or at least he usually did, but on that score he was a little less sure this time out. Ted Sorensen was, if anything, a little meaner to people than his reputation suggested, yet his daughter was, if anything, the real mystery. She was weird, as in really strange. The first thing he’d noticed was her eyes; huge, dark brown and watery, heavy brows that somehow seemed to remind him of a silent movie stars eyes. They were gorgeous, sensuous eyes, all the more so because they took everything in. He watched her watching her boyfriend and her father’s girlfriend, the nymphomaniacal Dina Marlowe, and Taggart had found himself wondering how long it would take for Marlowe to make a move on William Taylor. The way she stared at the kid’s crotch was almost too much to endure; he’d wanted to laugh the first couple of times he saw that show but really didn’t want to rock that boat.
He’d gone along with Ted and William on Moorea with one of the location scouting crews, looking for just the right house to set the scene for a pivotal moment in the proposed shooting script. The house had to have a prescribed set of features, all clearly established in the original novel, but other more intangible elements had to be factored in, as well. Sun angles for establishing shots, especially sunsets. A needed rain scene had to have good views of the jagged peaks with clouds clearing the peaks. So the house had to have good porches. Ceiling fans a must. Then the fun part. Find the owners and hammer out a working arrangement. And Sorensen berated the kid incessantly, bullied him until it looked like the kid was about to break. Even the scouting crew noticed, and Taggart wondered why no one said anything. Was Ted just trying to run the kid off? William obviously wasn’t Jewish – was that the reason why? Or was Sorensen just a hard taskmaster? Or maybe that was just the movie biz…?
Taggart included all these observations in his log, sometimes drawing little pictures on the margins, almost cartoons that seemed to capture the essence of the moment, in this case little colored pencil pastiches he created on the fly. ‘Gaugin on a Clorox bottle,’ he scribbled under one drawing of the boat; ‘Love will find a way,’ he wrote under a doodle of Debra and William sitting up on the bow, their feet dangling on either side of the anchor rode.
They’d seemed lost up there, sitting side by side yet miles apart. Taggart looked at the kid – all hunched over and miserable because her old man was using him like a punching bag – and it all seemed so unfair. The kid had never been out of the States before and here he was in paradise and so bummed out he couldn’t even look around and see where he was. And yeah, she was an empath – but so what? The kid didn’t need an empath right now. He needed to get laid, get drunk, get a million miles away from Ted Sorensen, but she was smothering the kid with all her clinging empathy and she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see that she was enabling her father’s continuing assaults, that his love and concern for her was keeping him from standing up to her old man.
So Taggart had just convinced Sorensen and the nymph to go ashore for dinner, and after he’d run them to the pier in front of Bloody Mary’s he’d gone back out to the Clorox bottle and given the kid a BIG fuckin’ Viagra and some Tylenol then gone for a swim.
When he swam back to the boat about an hour later, he found them sitting on the bow, talking hand in hand – again. He swam up to the bow and chatted with them, noticed her knees were seriously red and grinned, then asked if they wanted to join him for a swim.
The sun was about half a fist above the horizon but the water was warm, and Taggart held onto the anchor rode while the two went below to put on their swimsuits – and about that time he thought he felt a shadow passing underneath the boat so he slipped his mask back on and ducked his head under the water.
Nothing, just a few little reef fish and a ray skimming along the sandy bottom, then he heard Debra laughing and looked up in time to see her pushing William off the swim platform into the water, then diving in after him, almost landing on top of the kid. He swam aft, back to the stern, and he found them there – face to face with a large male orca.
Taggart got to William first and grabbed his arm, pulled him to the swim platform.
“Just be quiet,” Taggart sighed. “No sudden noise, okay?”
He swam back over to Deb – who seemed almost entranced by the male’s eye – and when he reached out to take her arm she shook herself free.
“Leave me alone,” she whispered.
“I can’t do that,” Taggart said.
“You have to leave now. I’ve been waiting for this.”
“What? What are you talking about…?”
“I’ve seen this happen, in my dreams – the last two nights.”
“I’ve seen a lot of shit in my dreams, Debra, but this ain’t no dream. That’s a killer whale, and they don’t call them that because of their friendly disposition, ya know?”
But then several female orcas appeared a few hundred yards away. Taggart counted five short dorsal fins and they were headed their way, and fast, and as they closed the distance the male moved between Debra and the boat, cutting her off – but when Taggart began to swim around the big male he shifted position to block him. When Taggart tried again the male swam over and nudged him to the stern, in effect pinning him there.
William leaned over and pulled Taggart up onto the platform and they watched in fascinated horror as the females surrounded Debra and began swimming in ever tightening circles around her, the churning water a kaleidoscope of frothy phosphorescence. Debra seemed caught inside a strange pulsing light, her arms overhead and her body slowly spinning in the vortex the females were generating.
The sun slipped beneath the horizon and slowly the sky filled with stars, and it was as if the baby forming inside the womb of this night was destined to make his way among this ever expanding field of stars. And now Debra drifted in open-armed embrace of the sea, dreaming the passing shadows of those who had traveled this way before.
Let’s see if we can climb out of the rabbit hole and find some sunlight…
[Pat Metheny Group + A Place In The World]
Part III: The House With No Windows
Chapter 13.1
Beverly Hills, California 18 December 1996
Deb and William pulled into the garage of her father’s house on Foothill Road and, gently, she turned and smiled at him. “You’re doing better,” she said as he took the key from the ignition and handed it to her.
“I’ve never seen anything like this city. The streets must’ve been laid out by idiots.”
She laughed at that. “Oh, it’s not so bad, really. As long as you can find north, just head that way until you hit Wilshire or Santa Monica then hang a left. You did great!”
He looked at her and nodded, still not really sure of himself. Still, he really liked driving her Porsche…
But he was still really uptight whenever her father was around. Something about the guy, some kind of deep anger always seemed to be hiding in plain sight, welling up to the surface but not quite breaking through. He felt stupid, tongue-tied and almost illiterate when Ted Sorensen asked him something, even mundane questions about the weather! Then, without warning and like always out of the blue Ted would ask some kind of tough question – like about things going on the world – and he could hardly come up with an intelligible reply. Every now and then he’d seen people react to his own father that way, but Mr. Sorensen was in a league of his own. Taylor simply felt out of his depth when Sorensen was around, and the feeling hit him hardest when coming off the football field after practice and going directly over to the house in Beverly Hills. It was like one minute everyone feared and respected him, but as soon as he got to Sorensen’s house he felt the exact opposite reaction…like he was unsure of his place in the world, and very inadequate to the moment.
Sitting there in Deb’s yellow Porsche he realized he was staring at his hands, lost in thought, and that Deb had just asked him something.
“Hm-m? What’d you say?”
“Just relax, William. He’s not going to bite your head off, you know?”
“Deb, we’re going to be locked up on a boat with him, and like a million miles from nowhere…”
“We won’t be the only ones there, you know…? Some location scouts are coming along, and I think he’s bringing someone special.”
“What? You mean…like a date?”
Deb sighed when she heard the mocking tone in Williams question. “No, not really. She’s always been more like a close friend, but they’ve been spending a lot of time together recently. Oh, she designed this house, in case that comes up.”
“She’s an architect?”
“Yeah, a pretty famous one, too. Her name is Dina and she’s really fun to hang out with.”
“Is that special effects guy coming, too?”
She nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t really know all that much about him, other than he’s into sailing.”
“I hope everyone knows I’ve never been on a boat before.”
“You mean besides Dad? Oh, I doubt anyone cares one way or another.”
“They will if I fall overboard.”
She laughed at that. “Don’t worry. I’m a good swimmer.”
“I’m not. With this knee, if I hit the water I’m pretty sure I’ll sink like a rock.”
“How is it today?”
“Good, assuming I don’t run out of Percocet.”
She nodded, tried not to look at the massive bruise on the inside of his right knee then took his hand. “Just lean on me, okay?”
He turned and looked into her eyes and nodded. “Have I told you how much I love you today?”
“Not yet,” she smiled – just before she leaned in for a kiss.
“Well I do, ya know.”
“Ditto,” she sighed as he ran his fingers through her hair. “Ooh, you’re going to drive me mad if you keep that up.”
“Say…maybe we could stay here in the garage and no one would notice…?”
“Or maybe we ought to go on in. I think the limo will be here soon and Dad will get upset if we’re late.”
William Taylor shuddered involuntarily. ‘Perish the thought,’ he sighed…
+++++
He was expecting to drive into the main terminal area at LAX – but the convoy of limos continued south on Sepulveda through the tunnels under the runway; when the cars turned right on Imperial he grew confused. Yet almost immediately the Lincolns made another hard right and turned into a complex of office buildings and hangers that appeared to line the south side of the closest runway. His limo pulled to a stop behind Ted Sorensen’s and soon everyone was getting out and standing around, some stretching and squinting at the sun, others chatting amiably as their noonday departure hit home. Sunglasses went on and baggage handlers dashed out of the main office building and took everyone’s luggage inside, directly to a Customs and Immigration kiosk. Pilots lounged on the far side of the room, looking bored as they thumbed through car magazines.
By now, William knew better than to say a word – lest he appear too vapid – and when he got to customs an agent looked him over then stamped his passport…and that was it. The agent told him he was no longer in the United States – even though he was standing firmly in Los Angeles – and he only grew more confused as he followed Deb through the building and outside to an area dotted with dozens of private jets. He’d never seen anything like these aircraft and he was instantly smitten by the sight of so much obvious wealth…just sitting out there under the sun…waiting for their owners to come and command them.
Then he saw Sorensen walking up the air-stairs and disappearing inside an airliner – a private airliner. It looked like a Boeing 707 but planes weren’t his thing so he just clammed up and walked up the steps. And there was a stewardess waiting for him with a smile, too! ‘What the Hell…!’
Debra led him to a pair of seats just aft of the wing but by that point William was almost in shock. He was looking down, not paying attention at all, and Deb pulled him down into a seat and belted him in.
“You okay?” she asked.
He just shook his head then shrugged.
“What’s wrong?”
“Whose plane is this? Your father’s?”
“God no,” Ted Sorensen said, now standing beside Debra and looking down at William. “It’s the studios. Most of the people on board today are location scouts and pre-production people that will be looking over potential shooting sites around Moorea.”
“Are all these people going to be with us?” Deb asked.
“We have five boats chartered,” Ted answered casually, “so we’ll sail as a caravan over to Moorea then up to Bora-Bora. We’ll spend a couple of days at each island, and William, I want you to spend some time with the location scouts this time, okay?”
“Me, sir?”
“Yes, you,” Sorensen snarled. “You might as well get your feet wet, see what this business is all about.”
“Yessir.”
Sorensen growled and walked aft.
“Stop calling him sir, would you?” Deb sighed. “It’s like you’re trying to piss him off!”
Taylor turned and looked out the window, the shrieking whine of the 707s engines drowning out the feeling of despair that seemed to have latched onto his neck like a snake, then he felt Deb next to him, and she took his hand again.
“I’m sorry, William,” she said over the mounting roar of the four jet engines. “I keep forgetting…”
“I don’t belong here,” he said softly.
“What?” she said. “I can’t hear you.”
“Nothing,” he sighed. “I’ll try to do better.”
Harlowton, Montana 18 December 1990
The Air Force people had completely sealed off the area where the missile silos had been – ever since the entire complex ‘disappeared’ a couple of weeks ago – and ever since that night the area just north of the Taylor’s house had been crawling with strangers in lab coats and hooded orange parkas carry strange looking machines – all pointed down at the earth.
Now that football season was over, William and his kid brother Frank went about their chores every afternoon after school, and after they got off the school bus that afternoon their father had asked them to ride out to the east and check out the gates that secured the Harley pasture.
“Big storm coming on hard now,” their father said, “I don’t know how those idiots did it, but I saw a half dozen head roaming north of the fence. My guess is one of those egg-heads must’ve opened the gate and left it…”
William saddled up Biscuit – who’d been his horse since he was a little colt – while his brother got Tad ready to ride, then they zipped up their heavy parkas and walked their horses out of the barn and into first waves of a raging blizzard. They followed the fence line for a half mile, then William got off Biscuit and opened the gap into the northeast pasture, the one his great grandfather had called the Ghost Pasture. No one had ever bothered to ask why, so the name had stuck.
William closed the gate and they followed the next fence to the gap that separated the Ghost Pasture from the Harley Pasture – and sure enough, it was open. William went over and closed the gate, and then he noticed several hoof prints in the drifting snow – all headed north – and one appeared to be a calf.
He groaned. They’d have to ride out and find the little fella and make sure he hadn’t wandered off by himself, because wolves would pick off a stray in a heartbeat. He pulled his coat’s hood up and cinched the drawstring tight – to keep the wind driven snow from running down his back – then he mounted Biscuit and turned to his brother.
“Frank, you’d better head back. This shouldn’t take more than a half hour.”
Frank shook his head. “No way, Bro. What if you fall on your ass? And you know you can’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground without me…”
William shrugged and snarled: “Whatever, Dude,” before he turned into the wind and set off, following the calf’s prints, his eyes following the track in the snow for several minutes…until…
“There he is,” Frank pointed, “over there!”
But William wasn’t looking for calves anymore. His eyes were locked onto what looked like a welder’s torch in the woods off to his left. There wasn’t anything capable of making that kind of light out here, and especially not in a storm like this. He turned to Frank in time to see him pointing to the calf and rode over to the snow-encrusted creature and jumped down to check him out. He didn’t need to be told what to do next.
The calf was about half-past dead so he roped him up and tossed the end to Frank: “Get him back to the barn,” he yelled out over the roaring snow. “I’m gonna go check out that light!”
“What light?”
“That one,” William said, pointing to the forest a few hundred yards off to the north.
“What the fuck IS that?”
“You got me. Now git goin’, Slick. I’ll be right behind you.”
He got up on Biscuit and rode towards the light, reaching it after about ten minutes. He looked over the situation, more confused than ever – no way should there be a light this bright out here.
‘What if it has something to do with the silo,’ he wondered. ‘But that would mean…’
“Well, one way or the other I’ve got to find out.”
He tied Biscuit off to a sturdy branch and grabbed his 30-30 before he walked into the forest, and the closer he got to the source of the light the warmer the air became, while the sound of the roaring storm grew more and more distant, like a memory fading in the face of new fear.
He pushed his way through drifting snow until he came to a large pine, and here he pushed aside a heavy branch – and gasped.
He saw two creatures, one laying on the ground and obviously injured, the other kneeling beside his injured friend, trying to help.
The one on the ground sat up when it saw William, and the other turned too. William had never felt such fear in his life.
“Ach, Leonída, póso théleis na steíleis móno énan Spartiáto!” the injured creature said, its voice a deep, soothing baritone. (Αχ, Λεωνίδα, πόσο θέλεις να στείλεις μόνο έναν Σπαρτιάτο!)
“I’m sorry,” William said, “I don’t understand.”
The kneeling creature stood and William gasped. It had to be ten feet tall and its body was covered with feathers, his belly feathers robin’s egg blue and his back a deep shimmering cobalt. “He is not Leonidas,” this one said, in English now.
“He looks like Leonidas. Are you certain?”
“I am certain. This one is scared. Leonidas never feared of us.”
William stepped closer to the standing creature and looked at him more closely. “Are you the ones who took the missile silos?” he asked.
The standing creature began to spread its wings, revealing killing talons about a third of the way out the wing…
…and William brought the Winchester up to his shoulder, cocking the hammer in one smooth, practiced motion.
“I do not see fear,” the injured creature said. “Are you sure he is not Leonidas?”
“No, I am not sure. I see something new in his eyes now.”
“Put the weapon down, Leonidas. We are not your enemy,” the injured creature said.
“What’s wrong with you?” William said, his eyes still trained on the razor sharp talons of the standing creature.
“This thing,” the injured creature sighed, pointing to his right leg. “We can not get it loose.”
William looked down and saw the creature had stepped into a heavy spring-loaded trap, and the heavy spring-loaded arms had slammed shut on his leg.
“I tried to cut it off,” the standing creature said, “but the heat transfers from the metal to the flesh to quickly.”
William walked over to the wounded creature and looked at the trap; it belonged to poachers who had been working the area for months, and it was easy enough to remove – assuming your fingers could reach the release mechanism, that is. These creatures had fingers, but they were thick and about a foot long.
He bent down and hit the release and pulled the trap open, then he gently pulled the trap free of the mangled leg – which suddenly started bleeding.
The other creature knelt beside him and hit the wound with another light, a pinkish white floodlight or some sort, and the bleeding stopped almost instantly. “Can you help me get him to his feet, young Leonidas?”
It took a minute but they managed to get the injured creature out to the pasture; William climbed up on Biscuit and the two creatures stood there, watching him as he put his rifle back in its scabbard.
“Is someone coming for you?” Taylor asked.
“Yes. Soon.”
“Okay. Well, nice to meet you,” William said, saluting and turning his horse towards the house.
“It was nice to see you again, my friend,” the injured creature said.
William stopped and turned to face them again. “Yes, it was. Be well.”
“Αυτό πρέπει να μείνει μεταξύ μας.” (Aftó prépei na meínei metaxý mas.)
“I understand,” William said. “Until next time.”
William Taylor rode back to the barn and helped get the stray calf warmed and bedded down for the night, and once he and Frank were inside and helping set the table for dinner, his father came in from the storm and sat by the wood stove to warm up.
“Your brother said you went after some kind of light. What was it, Will?”
“Poachers again, Dad. They had a wolf in a trap.”
“Will?” Frank said. “That sure didn’t look like poachers to me. Not with that light…”
His father looked him over once then nodded. “You got some blood on you. Best go get that washed off before dinner.”
William looked down at his jeans; he hadn’t noticed the blood before and he didn’t remember where it must’ve happened. A minute later he didn’t remember the encounter in the trees or anything else that had happened out there. And neither did he appear to recognize the tiny blue sphere that hovered outside his bedroom window that night, and several more times in the weeks and months that followed.
0230 hours 23 December 1996 approaching Passe Teavanui, Bora-Bora, French Polynesia
Once the sun had set the afternoon trades set, too, and now there wasn’t a breath of air stirring the water’s surface. Henry Taggart had pulled in all the sails hours ago, then spent a half hour tying off halyards to keep them from banging into the mast. Still, sleep had proven elusive. It was just too damn hot down below – even when the air conditioner worked…which wasn’t often. He had finally given up and come back up to the cockpit, only to find the jock from ‘SC already sitting aft by the rail, his feet dangling off the stern.
“Want something to drink?” Taggart said when he saw the kid…
“Huh…what?” William Taylor barked, startled out of his reveries by the unseen voice.
“I said, would you like something to drink?”
“Uh, yeah. Thanks. A Coke if there’s any left.”
“Oh, I have a secret stash,” Taggart said as he disappeared into the galley, and he came back up a few minutes later with two ice cold Cokes – in glass bottles, no less. He handed one to Taylor and sat down on the seat built into the stern rail. “Too hot for you down there?” Taggart asked after he took a long pull from the bottle.
“My knee was bothering me, really throbbing, and I just couldn’t get comfortable.”
“I know the feeling.”
“You play football?”
“Just high school. Middle linebacker.”
“Me too. Did you play any in college?”
“No, not really. I’d pretty much lost interest by then.”
“Where’d you play?”
“Oh, Newport Beach, then I went to a little school in the Bay Area for a couple of years, before I transferred to Claremont. Stanford for grad school, in computer science.”
“What are you doing out here? Mr. Sorensen tag you to come along?”
“Pretty much. He’s interested in sailing, and that’s been my main thing for a while.”
“Sailing? Really?”
“Yeah. It’s a nasty habit. Hard to break, too.”
“Is he going to buy this boat?”
“This piece of crap? Over my dead body. This is a French Clorox bottle, built cheap for the charter market out here.”
“It sure is big.”
“Despite rumors to the contrary, size isn’t everything.”
That was good for a chuckle. “I’m not doing too well in that area, either,” Taylor sighed. “I think it’s the Percocet, but I can’t get it up.”
“You ever heard of Viagra?”
“Sure, who hasn’t…? I just didn’t happen to think I’d need something like that, you know?”
“I have plenty. Let me know if you want one.”
Taylor shook his head. “I couldn’t get on top for all the tea in China right now.”
“So? Let her get on top…”
“What?”
“Excuse me for asking, but how many times have you two made it?”
“A couple.”
“Ah. And before that? You have much experience?”
“Nope.”
“Where you from, kid?”
“Montana.”
“Ah, Montana. Where men are men…and sheep are scared.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. So, let me just cue you in on something you might not be aware of. Next time the mood strikes just lie on your back and let her assume the position. Just straddle you, ya know? Like riding a horse. She’ll find her groove, and who knows, you might too.”
“Tell you the truth, man, I’m not sure I even want to try out here, ya know? When someone farts it sounds like a cannon going off…”
“You’ll have to wait for her old man to go ashore.”
“I’m just too uptight, man. Her old man really bugs me, ya know?”
“No, I don’t know. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know how to describe it, man, but it’s like I know him, like I’ve always known him – and I mean like forever.”
“Deja vu? Something like that?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Deja vu? Oh, when you find yourself in a situation and it feels like you’ve already been there before, almost like reliving something again.”
“Kinda, but not really. It feels more like I knew him…before.”
“Before? I’m not sure I’m following you, kid.”
“Like I knew him in another life.”
“Another life?”
“Well, more like I’ve lived a bunch of times and he always shows up, like we’re locked in some kind of battle, in a battle we can never win…or even lose…either of us.”
“I’m not sure…” Taggart began saying, then: “Pull your legs in!”
“What?”
But Taggart didn’t hesitate now; he jumped over and pulled Taylor up until he was standing on deck – just as a large shark rolled under the yacht’s stern, thrashing the water in frustration as it passed, then sounding out of sight into the inky blackness below.
“Jesus H Christ!” Taylor cried. “What the fuck was that?”
“White tip.”
“What?”
“An oceanic white-tip shark – pretty big one, too.”
“That was a fucking shark?”
Taggart nodded his head. “This is their home, kid, not yours.”
“Jesus, fuck, shit, I was thinking of going for a swim a half hour ago…”
Taggart looked at the kid, his hands shaking now and his voice a faintly hoarse, crackling-tremorous wisp of a thing, so he grabbed the kid’s Coke and went back to the galley. He topped off the bottle with rum and hurried back to the rail, handing over the bottle again: “Here, try this.”
“What is this?” Taylor said after he took a tentative sip.
“Rum. It’s required after your first close encounter – with a shark, that is. Hell, after any encounter with a shark. And no sipping allowed, kid. Chug it – you won’t regret it.”
Taylor stiffened at the mention of close encounters, then he shrugged it off and took a long pull from the bottle, making a grimaced, squinty-eyed face when he finished swallowing the stuff. “Shit, that tastes just about like the worst fucking cough medicine I’ve ever had.”
“You ought to try gin sometime. Tastes just like your dad’s after-shave lotion smells.”
“Yuk. No thanks.”
“You got that right, kid. Stick with rum. Grows hair on your balls.”
“Really? Can I have some more?”
The breeze filled-in an hour before nautical sunrise and Taylor helped Taggart raise the main, then he took the wheel while Taggart unfurled the big sail up front, which he called the ‘genoa’, and the boat picked up speed after that. Taggart navigated around the north side of the island group, pointing out the highest peak – Mont Otemanu – as an amber sun just lit the summit.
Deb came up from below and stretched as the wind caught her hair, sending it streaming aft and catching her off guard. “Geesh, is that a sight, or what?” she sighed as she looked at the twin peaks glowing in their very own rosy fingered dawn. “And look at the color of that water. Makes you want to dive in and swim for the beach…”
“I wouldn’t,” William replied offhandedly. “See that fella?” he said, pointing at the white-tipped fin cruising about fifty yards aft.
“What is that?”
“A very mean shark,” Taylor sighed. “Take my word for it. You don’t want to fuck around with him.”
Deb looked at William, the obvious question begging to be asked, but she could see his anxiety even now – like an aura of sparkling green and gold traceries, then she smelled the overpowering essence of dark rum. She groaned inwardly then turned and looked at Henry Taggart and he smiled at her in that way of his, but already she hated this smug, sarcastic bastard, and she knew she’d have to limit William’s exposure to him – lest he undo all her work so far.
Taggart headed in close, to within a few hundred meters of the northwest tip of the main group, along the so-called Pointe Paharire and the little airport beyond, and he looked at the alarm on Ted Sorensen’s face when his head popped up the companionway.
“Aren’t you cutting it a little close?” Sorensen barked, the whites of his eyes clearly defined now.
“I guess if we hit something you’ll know for sure,” Taggart replied casually – but with his usual shit-eating grin splitting his face from ear to ear.
“Come on up, Dina,” Ted said. “This ought to be something…”
And then Dina the Architect came up the companionway as naked as the day she was born, and Henry Taggart thought – for a woman her age, anyway – she looked imminently fuckable…so of course his grin only grew bigger.
William Taylor looked away, aft – towards the rounded white-tipped dorsal fin roaming lazily in their wake, though he tried to solve a few quadratic equations in his head…
While Deb seethed in unsettled anger, looking at Dina’s shaved nether regions and her father’s barely contained equipment.
But of course her father looked at Dina with something much more than simple pride of ownership in his eyes. He was in love – again – and he didn’t care who knew.
‘My-oh-my,’ Henry Taggart sighed, if only to himself, ‘but aren’t things looking up now? Ya know, with just a little bit of help, this trip could get real fun, real fast…’
William Taylor was a big kid. An imposing kind of big, and he always had been. Solid muscle, but not the kind that came from too much time in a gym full of preening mirror queens. No, his were home grown, built up over cold, hard winters working on his parent’s ranch between Harlowton and Lavina, in central Montana. He’d grown up riding horses – not because he wanted to ride or because he liked horses, but because riding fence lines on horseback was still a pretty good way to get the job done. Especially when you were just a little kid. Few people understand that riding horses is not a passive activity, and that to ride a horse well you need to be about as strong as the horse you’re riding.
The ranch had been in the family for four generations, dating back to at least the 1890s. Families had arranged marriages out on the prairie for decades, ensuring that large spreads grew larger, that dynasties were maintained and fortunes assured. Now the Taylor Ranch, or the Bar-T, as it was called, was about twenty miles by thirty five miles, so big that Dub Taylor had been flying his fence lines in a Piper Cub for twenty years. They rotated sections on the Bar-T, running cattle on large swathes and growing wheat on adjacent parcels. The land looked flat from up there in the Cub, with squared-off buttes here and there, but once you were down on the ground you soon realized the land was anything but flat. There were several tributaries of the Musselshell River running through the land and more than a few old growth forests just north of the main house, but about the only other remarkable features you’d find out there on the Bar-T those days were little fenced off enclosures that housed Minuteman III ICBMs. A bunch of them, as a matter of fact.
William’s father, William Sr but locally known as Dub, hated those goddam missiles. He hated them because ever since he’d allowed the Air Force put them in the ground life on the ranch had grown uncomfortable. Uncomfortable as in strange, or, as Dub put it: “Pretty fucking weird.”
The ‘Missileers’ – as the airmen in the silos were known – came from Malmstrom Air Force Base over in Great Falls, and they didn’t drive out to the silos in cars or trucks, they came out in dark blue Hueys. And they came out whenever they wanted, but usually in the middle of the night. And if you happened to be anywhere close to them you got out of their way, or else. Large trucks came and went in the middle of the night, too, but they came in heavily armed convoys. If you were dumb enough to ask what was in the trucks you were reminded in no uncertain terms that you really needed to mind your own business and otherwise shut the fuck up. The word over in Harlowton was that 200 megaton hydrogen warheads were in those dark blue trucks. The Air Force guys called them City-busters.
And not long after the blue trucks started coming in the night the red spheres started showing up.
The family was gathered at the dining room table one night when a bunch of Hueys came roaring in low over the house, and that kind of thing was already considered “pretty fuckin’ unusual” – so Dub grabbed his 30-30 and made for the door, not sure what to expect.
“Well, fuck me in the ass,” Dub muttered as he stuttered to a stop in the doorway.
A couple miles away, just to the north of the main house and so not all that far away from Mount Baldy, he saw a red sphere hanging in the sky – and he could tell it was close. Real close. Like right above the local silo close.
“What is it, Dad?” Junior asked as he came up beside his father.
But his father didn’t say a word – he just pointed.
And William Taylor saw his first UFO that night.
It wouldn’t be his last.
Los Angeles, California 14 September 1996
“Anything sound good to you?” William Taylor asked Debra Sorensen when he got to her dorm room.
“You like steak?” she asked.
And he winced, because he’d grown up eating hardly anything other than steak. Although beef stew was a popular option, fish was almost an unknown on the ranch.
“I’m kind of into fish,” he replied, “but so far about all I’ve found is that fish thing at MacDonald’s.”
“The what?”
“I think it’s called the Filet-o-fish.”
“And you like fish?”
“I think so.”
She looked at him, saw he was uncomfortable and in an instant she could feel him, feel his embarrassment, almost overwhelming shame.
“I know a great place,” she said, thinking she knew just how to handle this. “Do you have a car or can we take mine?”
He shook his head. “Nope. No car.”
Again she sensed embarrassment but she didn’t see an easy way around that right now. “Mind if I drive?” she asked – as she reached out and took his hand in hers. She felt him relax as they walked over to the parking garage…at least until they got to her car.
“Is that yours?” he asked as she walked up to her Porsche Carrera 4.
“Yup. Help me with the top, will you?”
“What?”
She smiled as she unlocked the doors. “Just sit down, okay?”
She pointed at a latch and asked him to release it then she flipped a switch and the Cabriolet’s top retracted in a dance of exquisite precision, and she watched Taylor watching the movements, and he seemed totally fascinated. She backed out of her assigned space and made it up to the westbound 10 and took it all the way out to the PCH, turning north on the coast highway and heading up to The Chart House in Malibu.
There was a long wait for a table but when Deb walked up to the hostess’s stand they were seated immediately, and soon enough their waiter greeted Deb like a close friend, even giving her a little hug before he helped her take a seat.
“Trust me?” she asked Taylor, and when he shrugged she turned to Chip, their waiter, and ordered crab bisque, lobster and filet mignons before she took William up to the salad bar. When he saw piles of smoked salmon there he turned and looked at Debra, then he shrugged apologetically.
“I don’t think I can afford this place,” he whispered in her ear.
“You played so well today, maybe you ought to let me get this one, and you can get the next one.”
He nodded but once again she felt something like shame as he picked up an iced salad plate.
“Why is there fish up here?” he asked.
“Ever had a real Caesar Salad?”
“I’ve had caesar dressing before?”
“Henry?” she said to the man behind the station. “Two Caesar’s with anchovies and lox, please.”
“Yes, Miss Sorensen.”
Taylor looked at Debra then looked around the restaurant, and for the first time, really.
The restaurant was not next to the beach but cantilevered on rocks and almost perched out over the breaking surf and there was a huge open fireplace in the center of the dining area roaring away – and about this time a real honest-to-Pete movie star came up to Deb and gave her a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek…and then she introduced William to Robert Redford.
“William plays for USC,” she added.
“Oh?” Redford said. “Were you out there today?”
“Yessir. Middle linebacker.”
“Oh yeah? Number 56, right? Helluva game, and call me Bob, please.”
And that was all it took. Half the people in the restaurant came up after that and wanted to shake his hand, wanted to congratulate him on a game well played, and Debra leaned back and grinned as her plan unfolded. William was an accepted part of the scene now, and she was his date now, and not the other way around.
By the time they got up from their table at the Chart House – about three hours later – he realized this was exactly why he’d come to USC, and he understood that Debra was the key to the future he’d always dreamed of.
But she wasn’t through with him just yet. Not in the least.
Instead of walking out to the valet stand she led him through the rocks and down to the breaking waves beneath the restaurant, and when she took his hands this time he knew exactly what to do.
+++++
It was simply a coincidence that Ted Sorensen was at The Chart House that evening – unless of course it wasn’t.
He was meeting with one of his special effects teams that afternoon anyway, so when the meeting ran over he suggested they continue out in Malibu over dinner. No big deal. But by then the studio’s head of security had briefed him in on Debra’s activities at the Coliseum that day, and that one of the linebackers had asked her out to dinner. It didn’t take too long to learn that the kid didn’t have a pot to piss in and that Deb would be picking up the tab – and besides, where else could she go to impress a jock from East Bumfuck, Montana…on her hundred bucks a week allowance? She still had charging privileges at The Chart House, so that question was conveniently answered. People were so predictable, so easy to manipulate. Even his daughter…
But his FX team had scored a new hire, a real gunslinger who’d been working for Aldus and Adobe and who just might be able to take the studio’s special effects efforts to the next level. His name was Henry Taggart and while he’d played ball down in Newport Beach he was also supposed to be big in the local sailing scene, and that made him of sudden interest to Sorensen. Because Ted wanted to get into sailing right now, tonight. It might prove useful, if only because he’d grown to detest golf and he needed a hobby. Maybe this Taggart kid would know the score, at least well enough to be worth talking to this evening.
He’d made sure to have Taggart sit next to him that evening, though he’d had to ignore him for the first ten or so minutes – the time it took him to read through his security chief’s work-up on the Taylor kid, anyway – then he’d started talking about boats.
“Say,” he began, “you know anything about sailboats?”
“A little,” Taggart sighed. “Why? Got one, or want one?”
“I’m interested in getting one but have no idea where to start.”
“Why?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why do you want a boat? Got a trip in mind, or just looking for another mindless status symbol?”
Ted laughed at that, but the guy’s flippant tone was aggravating. “Mindless. I like that. Is that what boats are for?”
“Around here that’s usually the score,” Taggart said, grinning a little. “Either that or they’re just elaborate compensation mechanisms.”
“Compensation?” Sorensen asked.
“Yup. The smaller the pecker the bigger the boat.”
“Ah.” Sorensen leaned back and smiled. “And you’re a real expert in these matters, I assume?”
“You live and learn, Mr. Sorensen.”
“Ted. Please.”
“Okay, Ted. Look, I’ll tell you what I tell everyone who asks about boats. Go charter one for a week or two and see if the whole thing works for you. That’s usually enough to either catch the bug…or to come to your senses.”
“Charter? Like what? Charter a sailboat? You can do that?”
“Don’t play dumb, Ted. Why don’t you tell me what’s really on your mind?”
Now Sorensen didn’t know what to think of this kid. He was bright, maybe too bright for his own good, but already he was beginning to like him. “See that kid up there with Redford?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s with my daughter, Debra. That’s her, with the brown hair and glasses.”
“Okay?”
“I want to get to know him, maybe over Christmas. She’s been making noises about wanting to learn how to sail, and…”
“Two birds, one stone?”
“Exactly.”
“Over Christmas?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You probably want to head south. I’m thinking Tahiti, Moorea, someplace like that.”
“So, Mr. Taggart,” Sorensen said, grinning as the contours of a plan began taking shape in his mind, “got any plans this Christmas?”
Harlowton, Montana December 1990
Ten Hueys roared past, seemingly inches over the roof of the main house, and Dub grabbed his 30-30 again and ran for the door, really mad now. William Junior pushed himself back from the dinner table and followed his dad out the door, hoping this one wouldn’t be as bad as the last two.
The wind was howling and the snow was already too deep for their Honda trail bikes so they made for the barn, never taking their eyes off the red sphere in the brush beyond the missile silo. The Hueys circled the sphere and door gunners leaned out and opened fire, tracers arcing into the blazing red sphere but with no obvious effect. Just like last time, and the time before that.
“You saddle up Tad; I’ll take Biscuit,” his father said as they jogged into the barn.
A minute later they were riding north towards Mount Baldy, a huge full moon just rising through the trees to the east, and plumes of warm vapor arced out of their horses’ nostrils into the arctic air. A half mile ahead several Hueys settled onto the snow and at least fifty troops jumped out of the helicopters and sprinted for the sphere; even from here their M-16s made a hideously loud roar, and even from here William could see the sphere was completely disinterested in what was now unfolding around the helicopters.
Then in the next instant the sphere disappeared.
Just as several large transport helicopters approached from the northwest.
By the time he and his father approached the scene at least twenty heavily armed airmen had positioned themselves between the Taylors and where, up until a few minutes ago, a huge Minuteman missile silo had been.
Now there was nothing to be seen but a smooth bowl seemingly carved right out of the earth.
And in the blink of an eye four more missiles had simply disappeared. And so had one hundred and twelve 200 megaton nuclear warheads.
And so…down the rabbit hole we go…deeper and deeper…
[And So I Know, Stone Temple Pilots]
Part III: The House With No Windows
Chapter 12.3
Los Angeles, California 14 September 1996
Debra Sorensen was a typical freshman at The University of Southern California; she had been assigned to a four bedroom “apartment” in Webb Tower so she had, in effect, seven roommates and, like almost every other freshman at USC she had not declared a major area of study – at least not yet. She knew she would end up in the film school – because, like duh – yet she really had no special interest in either film or even movie making in general. Her other roommates were, like almost everyone else at ‘SC, planning on going pre-med or pre-law, or both – but that was only because the film school was considered almost impossible to get into – unless you knew “somebody” that was “like really-really big.” So of course as soon as people in Webb found out who Deb’s father was, she became very popular among the more hyper-ambitious sorts – at one of the most hyper-ambitious colleges in one of the most hyper-ambitious cities and yada-yada-yada, well all know how that song sounds, don’t we…?
Which was how she came to be walking over to the Coliseum late that Saturday morning. She’d never expressed any interest in football and had, in fact, never even watched a football game on television, not even the Super Bowl, so she really didn’t know what to expect. One thing had struck her that morning, however: boys were on everyone’s mind. And she finally realized that all the girls names were either Taylor or Jennifer and that all the guys were named Grant. It was, like, really weird – in a bitchin’ kind of way.
The Trojans (could that really be true?) were playing the Ducks…and she, like, really had no idea what the hell any of that meant. “Do ducks really use Trojans?” she asked one of her roommates.
“What are you talking about?” Taylor Krumnow replied.
“Well? Ducks and rubbers, right? Isn’t this a contest to see who can put on rubbers the fastest?”
“It’s the Oregon Ducks, Deb. And we’re the USC Trojans. Those are like football teams, okay?”
Debra laughed at Taylor and flashed her a quick wink. “Got it.”
“Ooh, you! You really like pulling legs, don’t you?”
“Only yours,” Deb fired back. “Any boys going to meet us there?”
“Yeah, Grant – from across the hall.”
“Which one? Grant d’brunette, or Grant d’blonde…?” Deb said, grinning.
“Grant d’one with the cute ass!” Taylor Pickford said as she bounced along beside them.
“What is it with you and asses?” Krumnow snarked. “You got an ass fetish or something?”
“Don’t you?” Pickford barked, sticking out her tongue and swirling it around.
“Ooh, that’s just gross,” Krumnow sighed.
Deb shook her head. She’d read about stuff like this of course, but in truth it was all still a mystery. Boys didn’t stick around her for very long, at least not once they’d spent a little time with her. At least that had been true so far.
Like Brent, the boy at Harvard-Westlake that had asked her up to Mammoth.
He’d wanted sex, of that much she was sure, but he was all “I-Me-Mine” when he wasn’t trying to feel her up, nonstop talk about himself and after a day around him she grew tired of his lame one trick pony. She’d spent the rest of that trip with his father – if only because the old guy seemed somewhat more safe. And besides, he was a pretty good ski instructor.
She’d tried to date after that, had gone to a few dances on campus, but the whole sex type thing was still mystifying. Sex was procreation, right? But did all these boys want to get married and settle down and have a bunch of kids? No, not in the least. Sex was some kind of hedonistic power trip for them, more about weak-egos trying to assert control and dominate because they’d been genetically programmed to be that way. But…the whole thing was…shallow, animalistic, but because that seemed to be just about all these kids had on their mind they were excruciatingly boring to be around.
The had tickets on the home side of the field and almost right behind the players benches and Taylor (Pickford) was all giggles now as she had a front row seat overlooking some of the finest ass on campus. Taylor (Krumnow) was explaining the basics of the game when Grant Cute Ass joined them, and he helped fill in some of the blanks while also explaining that he too had played football in high school but that he had grown bored with the whole thing. And all this while simultaneously trying to grope both Taylors.
The game wasn’t even close. ‘SC wiped the stadium floors with the Ducks but there was a lot of screaming and yelling and beer was flowing in cheerful overabundance and even Debra seemed to get into the spirit of the whole thing – when she noticed this huge lump of muscle on the sidelines. And he was looking at her.
More than once, too.
Number 56. The name Taylor embroidered above the numbers on the back of his jersey.
And when the game was over, before he disappeared with the rest of his teammates, he came over to where she was seated and motioned her to come down to the rail.
“Hi,” he said. “My name is William. William Taylor. You want to go grab a bite?”
“Sure,” Debra said.
“You in Webb?”
“Yes. Seven-A.”
“Would you mind telling me your name?”
“Deb. Debra.”
“Okay, Deb. I’ll be by in about an hour and a half. Is that okay?”
She’d nodded but she wasn’t aware of anything else but his eyes, even as he joined his teammates jogging off the field.
“Nice ass,” both Taylors said as they watched the hulking jock jogging off the field.
“Yeah,” Grant said admiringly.
Beverly Hills, California 11 September 1992
Amanda Patterson came out of it first. Like smoke in her eyes, heavy and full of grit, she rubbed her face with her fingertips then she rubbed her eyes, trying to wipe away the burn. She swallowed hard and shook her eyes open and recoiled in horror when she realized she was hovering in deep space. No spacesuit, nothing to push against and nowhere to turn. She thought she was dead and reached for her wrist and tried to feel a pulse but she felt nothing and that’s when the panic hit.
Then, slowly, reason came back.
‘I’m pretty sure dead people don’t panic,’ she thought, but then she thought again. ‘Maybe when you’re dying you panic,’ she sighed, ‘like maybe when you realize you’ve taken your last breath…’
Then she remembered the orb in Debra’s room. And then Ted saying something about his wife.
‘But his wife is dead,’ she recalled, ‘so how could that be…?’
And within seconds she was back in the bedroom, or at least a bedroom, and the orb was still hanging there, the wide-eyed crystalline figure still entombed within, the figure inside womblike – like a fetal embrace of sustenance. Then Ted was there beside her, and then Tilly too, while the orb seemed to shimmer – then dissolve. And all that was left was the creature within.
Still hovering above the bed.
Ted fell to his knees, Tilly dropped to console her son.
The creature seemed to unfurl and drift to the floor, her eyes never once leaving Patterson’s as she settled on the floor.
Patterson looked up at the creature and endless fear filled her mind, blocking everything else from consciousness. She – it? – had to be ten feet tall, maybe more, and she was covered in feathers. White feathers. With a pinkish amber tinge, and the creature’s eyes were bright amber flecked with deep cobalt islands, the whites of the eyes a pale Robin’s egg blue. She continued staring at it, cataloguing everything she could: no external genitalia, no mammaries, long boney phalanges, eyes and mouth almost human in form…
“Dear God!” she screamed – as the creature’s wings extended the breadth of the room.
And for some reason the creature seemed to enjoy watching this reaction.
“Do you have a name?” Patterson asked, still unable to take her eyes off the unfolding wings.
“Yes, of course.”
“My name is…” Patterson began to say…
“I know your name, Amanda Patterson,” the creature said. “You may call me…Katharine…if you like.”
Ted stood when he heard that, he stood and then he faced the creature. “Kat?” he whispered.
And the creature nodded her head slowly. “Yes, Ted.”
“It’s you?”
Again the creature’s head nodded gently. “I think so, yes.”
“But…what happened?” he asked, his eyes filling with tears.
“I can’t stay here now, but I need to tell you something, and you need to listen. All of you. Don’t interfere, Ted. With Debra. Do not interfere with what happens.”
“What?” Ted cried. “Interfere – with what?”
But the creature just shook her head – before the orb reappeared. Before she furled herself away and disappeared, leaving Ted feeling even more bereft than he ever had before.
“She’s not gone,” he whispered over and over – until they heard Deb in the bathroom, moaning.
Patterson made it to the shower first and she opened the shower door then jumped back in horror. The girl was covered with thick, hot blood – yet none of it was her own – but Ted pushed his way in and picked up his little girl and turned on the water. He rinsed her off and shampooed her hair and rinsed and rinsed her until the water ran clear again, then the physicians helped dry her and got her to bed.
And the most peculiar thing, Patterson thought, was that Deb never once appeared to wake up. Not once.
Yet their clothes were covered in the blood, so there was no doubt in Patterson’s mind that something had happened up there in that room. It wasn’t some kind of bizarre hallucination, or even something like a shared dream. No, something had happened up there, and the blood on her blouse was proof enough of that. She’d get it to the lab and then they’d know for sure…
Yet it was Tilly who spoke first. Once they were back in the living room and once they had gathered their wits about them.
“Ted?” she asked. “Do you have any idea what she meant?”
“No, Mom. Nothing.”
“Well,’ Patterson sighed, “she said don’t interfere. She could have meant right then, tonight, or she could have meant to tell us not to interfere with something in the future.”
“Or both,” Tilly said, slumping over in her chair, head in hand. “Exasperating. That was – this is – exasperating.”
Patterson shook her head. “I was thinking for a moment that I was terrified but then I felt something like peace, like I was supposed to be there watching this happen.”
“No me,” Ted said. “I think I just about crapped my pants when I saw it was Kat up there.”
“How long ago did she pass?” Patterson asked.
“Almost seven years ago. Cancer.”
Patterson shook her head. “This is almost like one of those bad movies. You know, oh what was it called…?”
“The Exorcist?” Tilly said.
Patterson nodded. “Yup, but that…”
“But that wasn’t some kind of demon up there, Doctor. That was my wife.”
“I wonder…” Patterson whispered. “Why your wife, Mr. Sorensen. Why not a grandparent, or even…”
“Because Kat was Deb’s mother. That has to be the link.”
“But what’s so special about your daughter?”
Ted leaned back and sighed. “She always has been. Since the day she was born.”
Tilly leaned over and shook her head. “Of course,” she sighed. “Since the day she was born. Could it be that she, our Debra, is part of some kind of experiment?”
Ted recoiled from the idea. “What?” he cried. “What do you mean?”
“Ted, think about it. ‘Don’t interfere?’ What else could she have meant?”
Patterson nodded. “Yes, that makes sense. Don’t interfere or you might screw up the results.”
Ted leaned back in his chair as icy fingers grabbed his chest. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? The implications…”
“The implications are troubling,” Patterson said, nodding at Tilly, “no matter what. As long as we assume what we experienced wasn’t some kind of shared hallucination…”
“How could that be?” Ted replied. “I mean…really…how?”
Patterson closed her eyes for a moment and that triggered a reaction: “When I reacted to the orb I almost remember passing out…”
“I do too,” Tilly added.
“I thought I was in space,” Ted whispered as he recalled the feeling of being suspended, almost like a fly in amber. “I thought I saw stars, at least for a moment.”
Patterson shook her head, suddenly on the verge of tears. “Do you know what this means?” she sighed.
Ted nodded. “Paradigm shift. Bad day to be an evangelical, I guess.”
“Ted?” he mother asked. “Did you say that Debra has no memory of these events?”
He nodded again. “That’s right. None.”
“Regressive hypnosis?” Patterson said, looking at Tilly.
“And that would surely qualify as interference, right?” she replied.
“Our hands are tied,” Ted said.
“So maybe that’s why this Katharine-avatar appeared,” Tilly added, looking at her son. “They knew you’d be more likely to respect this sort of restriction if it came from her.”
“That makes sense,” he agreed. “So, the question is…do we accept this restriction? Or do we…?”
Patterson burst out laughing: “Are you serious? We could not simply screw up someone’s science project, Ted. We might seriously fuck up your daughter in the process. You really want to risk that?”
“So…we’re back to square one?” he summarized. “Hands tied, we don’t interfere? Is that about where we stand?”
“And we don’t mention this to anyone,” Tilly added. “Ever.”
Patterson shook her head. “No one would believe us, so really, why bother?”
Time for a little excursion down the rabbit hole. Ready or not, here it comes…
Part III: The House With No Windows
Chapter 12.2
Copenhagen, Denmark 12 April 1939
Niels Bohr, Walter Eisenstadt, and Saul Rosenthal sat with Aaron Schwarzwald listening to Imogen as she played a few disjointed passages from her latest work, her Second Piano Concerto, a work still incomplete, yet Bohr nodded appreciatively as she played. “That is marvelous, a truly interesting passage,” he said at one point. “I felt transported, Aaron. She still has the gift…”
Saul smiled. He loved Imogen so much it hurt, yet on days like this he felt transported by his love for her, transported to a place beyond space and time. ‘But,’ he thought, ‘isn’t that what Niels is responding to…? To some place beyond…?’
Once she finished Imogen left her mother’s cherished Bösendorfer piano and went to the kitchen to help Krista, the family’s longtime housekeeper, prepare tea and toast to go with the fresh blackberry jam she’d found at the market earlier that day.
Yet it was Saul who was the first to speak once Imogen left the room. “Chamberlain is out. The vote will come any day now.”
“Thank God,” Bohr sighed. “This can’t come a day too soon. Any idea who will replace him?”
Saul looked down and shook his head apologetically. “Churchill,” was all he managed to say.
“Then it is war,” Aaron Schwarzwald said, his voice a faltering whisper.
“This war was never avoidable,” Eisenstadt said, and Bohr nodded in emphatic agreement. “Now we are all dancing to the madman’s tune, so perhaps it lies with old Winston now. He just might be the only man left who can put this djinn back in his bottle.”
“You can’t be serious,” Aaron sighed. “With Churchill in power all out war is all but guaranteed. This is a catastrophe!”
Bohr laughed at that. “The Sudetenland was a catastrophe, Aaron. Chamberlain was the catastrophe, so now it is up to Churchill to clean up Chamberlain’s mess. We can only pray that he is up to the task.”
Saul cleared his throat. “Professor Eisenstadt? You said you had urgent news?”
Eisenstadt nodded. “I have talked with Werner. He is certain the Germans will move on Norway. The heavy water project. That is the real objective.”
“So, it is true?” Saul sighed – looking first at Eisenstadt then to Bohr. “Herr Hitler wants to build this bomb you two have spoken of?”
“Yes,” Bohr replied, “but even so, Heisenberg is certain he can stall the program, keep it from achieving its aim.”
“I am not so certain,” Eisenstadt said, his voice flat now, “that I would be so willing to bet the future of the human race on Heisenberg’s certainty he can forestall the development of such a weapon.”
“Oh, der Führer puts much more stock in the occult,” Bohr said, his voice tinged with derisive sarcasm. “He may not even understand what such a weapon means.”
“I am unwilling to underestimate,” Saul said, taking in a deep breath as he spoke, “anything this Hitler concocts. He might be a madman, yet he has discovered the uncertain strength that resides within the dark underbelly of humanity. Professor? How certain of these facts are you?”
“I spoke with Werner last week. Why?”
“Face to face?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I assumed you wanted me to convey this information to His Majesty’s government. Or am I incorrect?”
“Can you get to Churchill? Directly?” Niels asked.
Saul nodded. “It will take some doing, but yes.”
“What about Roosevelt?” Eisenstadt said.
Saul shrugged. “Do you trust anyone else with this information, Professor? Hopkins, perhaps?”
“So, can you get this information to Washington?” Eisenstadt asked again – as he shrugged.
“I’d do better to go to Princeton. Talk to Albert and the others. You were just there, weren’t you?” Saul asked Eisenstadt.
“Last year, yes. Should I cable him?”
“If you think it’s safe to do so. But yes, I will go to London tomorrow and I can arrange to go on to New York from there.”
“You must be back by June,” Bohr sighed.
“Oh? Why?”
“The Wehrmacht will begin moving troops towards east in early summer.”
“Is this from Heisenberg, as well?”
“No. I overheard this on a train in Berlin,” Bohr sighed. “Two colonels talking – under the influence, I might add.”
“The east, you say?”
“Yes. I’d say Poland, from what they were saying. One of them mentioned that the secondary objective would be rounding up Jews.”
Saul and Aaron looked at one another.
“This will not end well, Aaron,” Saul whispered to Imogen’s father. “I beg you, please, leave now…while there is still time.”
But Aaron shook his head. “After all that I have said to you about this you still fail to hear me. I will never leave Denmark. Not ever. This is my home, but more than that, this home is the place where my heart and soul reside. These are my people, Saul, lives I have sworn to care for. You know this, Saul, so speak of it no more.”
Niels leaned forward and nodded to Aaron: “If anything happens, Aaron, please know that I will care for Imogen no matter what happens, and Werner knows how I feel about this. He will look after her should we be overtaken by events.”
Saul looked away when he heard that last bit of bravado. ‘If anyone gets overtaken by Herr Hitler,’ he thought, ‘there will be no safe haven…there will be only a last lingering twilight before a night without end.’
So many plans to make, so many contingencies. So much love waiting to die on the vine.
He watched Imogen as she walked into the room carrying a plate of toast and jam and he felt the last rays of the sun dance in this old room once again, even as a late winter’s snow started to fall in the twilight.
Beverly Hills, California 7 January 1992
These days Ted Sorensen went to the office only a few days a week and at most he’d spend a half day there. At the level he was playing, life was all about finding the right people to do the heavy lifting, and he’d set up the office in his new house to be at least as productive as his office at the studio. One of his secretaries had been permanently assigned to the house for a while, but he’d found her presence annoying and had sent her back to work for someone else. Now he kept in touch by fax and went to the office only when the most important duties called.
Sorensen really didn’t like getting out and mixing it up with people anymore, and for the last few years he’d led an ascetic’s life. His only indulgence was Debra, and he lavished her with all the attention and love he felt she deserved, and there was literally nothing she wanted that he didn’t immediately secure for her. The problem with all this was, however, quite easy for anyone to see, if anyone had ever bothered to look: Debra had patterned off her father and never really wanted anything beyond the simplest food and drink, so when her classmates wagged their tails about wearing the latest jeans or sneakers she simply couldn’t relate. Her clothes were classically stylish yet durable, and she always appeared neat and presentable – and what else mattered? What was status when you didn’t care about such things?
She’d had a few friends in elementary school but nothing lasting developed until she reached high school. Her mother had attended the Westlake School for Girls and that school had now merged with her father’s alma mater, The Harvard School for Boys, so it was only natural she attend – and this despite all her intellectual gifts. She could have attended college when she was eleven years old but Ted didn’t want to deprive her of all the experiences growing up and going to high school might provide.
Then he realized he’d never taken Debra skiing before. Or sailing. Or riding the trails around Sequoia on horseback. All the things he’d done as a kid growing up here or up north.
‘What the hell have I been doing?’ he wondered…
‘…but she never complains, does she?’
In fact, she seemed to live inside a world of her own, and maybe she did, he thought, because the world really wasn’t ready for someone like her. At least that’s what his own mother kept telling him.
“There’s nothing wrong with her, Ted. And I don’t think that she’s different, either. But there’s nothing I can point to that makes me think she’s imagining all this…”
He’d told his mother about the things she’d said, about the tall feathered visitors and journeys to oceans and stars, but now as she listened to Ted her heart filled with dread. So many varieties of schizophrenia were genetic transcription disorders easily passed along from generation to generation, and the thought that Anders’ own peculiar guilt-paranoia might be passed along to Debra was something that had kept her up at night.
So Ted’s call, when it finally came, wasn’t completely unexpected.
But what happened next was.
Ted had techs from the studio come in and wire Debra’s room with all kinds of state-of-the-art video recording equipment, with passive night vision and even infra-red cameras installed in the ceiling. He sat up one night and watched her sleeping – only one moment she was there in the bed and in the next instant she was gone. Simply gone. He’d run from his office and up the stairs to her bedroom and – yes – she was indeed no longer there.
She was, instead, in the shower. Drenched in sea water. Kelp wrapped around an ankle. And she was shivering.
He’d turned on warm water and picked her up, held her close until the coldness passed, but he noticed that everything about her now smelled of the sea. Her night clothes, her hair and even her skin, and he was terrified. Terrified enough to call his mother the next morning.
She listened, startled, as Ted spoke on the phone. And now terrified that her son was slipping into his father’s own peculiar psychosis. And so she came to the House With No Windows that afternoon.
She despised Ted’s house, everything about it. From the brooding menace of the exterior to the cloistered feel of the too-dark interior. The gallery circulation was indeed impressive, the various atriums botanically interesting but almost frightening in a deliberately fashioned way, as if those spaces had been drawn up to awaken dormant instincts – and in the most primeval way imaginable. The first time she’d stepped out to peer down into one of the swimming pools she’d felt the hooded eyes of silent predators lurking behind each and every frond; soon she’d felt naked and exposed and – hunted – and couldn’t wait to get back inside, back into the relative comfort of Ted’s insidiously dark living room.
“I don’t know how you can stand to live in a place like this,” she said as she stepped inside to the relative safety of the living room again.
‘Because I love how it makes you feel,’ he’d wanted to say, but of course he never could say such a simple truth to her.“Oh, you get used to the eccentricities,” he sighed at last – though somewhat remorsefully.
“I couldn’t do it. Never. Not in a million years.”
She thought Ted’s smile was a little odd just then. Or…more than odd.
Debra’s bedroom was located in one of the two-story towers, and there was a small study-sitting room on the ground level and a library marching up beside the stairway to her second floor sleeping room. Her studio now had hidden cameras installed everywhere – except for the bathroom, and a bank of Beta-Max VCRs kept a running log of any and all movement in her spaces. Tilly sat with Ted and watched the recording from the night before, still not sure what to expect, but when Debra disappeared from her bed Tilly felt her world lurch sideways.
“What on earth just happened?” she sighed, startled.
“She told me – this time – that she was in an ocean and there were icebergs everywhere. Apparently when she goes there she’s with a killer whale. I gather it’s the same one each time.”
“The same one? What do you mean?”
“Every time, well, you know, she’s with the same orca.”
“Are you saying this has happened more than once?”
“She told me it started in the other house and has been going on ever since.”
“Theodore! This is preposterous! Du begynder at opføre dig ligesom din far! ”
“Og hvad hvis jeg er det? Ville det være så slemt? ” he screamed in return, his face turning an angry sort of red.
She pulled herself inward, protecting herself from this unexpected reaction, then she turned to her son: “How long have you felt this way?” she asked softly, walls of professional distance sliding into place.
“Don’t you dare pull that goddamn psychotherapist bullshit on me, Mother!”
“You resent me for the divorce even now, don’t you?” she cried, wilting under the furnace of his cold gray eyes.
“Even now? Mom, there’s not a day since we left San Francisco that I haven’t blamed you! And that I haven’t hated you for what…”
“That is so unfair!”
“Unfair? And you – a shrink…think it’s fair that walking away from your husband, because he had a, a mental illness, was, was somehow the right thing to do? And you call that unfair…?”
“We were ruining each other, Ted.”
“In sickness and in health, Mother. Those are the words, remember?”
“He released me, Ted. He knew what was coming next.”
“And yet, look at him now? You call that…”
“We have better medications now, better care…”
“Care he should have gotten from you, his wife!”
She turned away, knew he was right, yet she knew she was right too. A classic double bind, no way out. She turned to face her son again and sighed. “What would you have me do, Ted?”
“There’s nothing that can undo the past, Mother. Nothing we can do. We can only finish what you set out to do with father…to tear him down – until nothing of us remains.”
“Is that what you think? Ted? Really?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think anymore, Mother. I asked you to come over and look at these tapes because I want to know what you think I should do.”
Tilly pulled back from the brink and nodded as his words took hold and registered. “You said she has encounters with people of some kind?”
“Very tall, covered in feathers. Pink feathers.”
Tilly laughed at that. “Ted, this all sounds like a little girl’s fantasy. Surely you don’t think…”
“Of everything I know about Debra, Mother, the one thing she has never done is lie to me, about anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. People lie when they fear something – isn’t that what you always told me? That lies are a kind of response to something we’ve done, or even not done. So…I’ve simply removed anger from our lives, and so in a way I think I’ve removed fear. With no fear truth can flourish, right? I seem to recall hearing you say that once or twice,” he said, his voice full of bitter irony.
“Oh, Ted, if only our lives could be so simple…”
Ted shrugged. “I’m an expert in anger and fear, Mother. I grew up watching Father’s fear. And the anger you showered on him as a result.”
She shook her head, trying to keep her focus. “The best thing we can do, Ted, is to monitor these images and see if these creatures present themselves. I cannot, however, imagine that anything like this is even possible.”
“And if this is all some kind of elaborate fantasy? Then what?”
“Then we will take her to the clinic and let a pediatric specialist talk to her.”
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“I do,” Tilly said. “Amanda Patterson. She is most gifted, especially with girls.”
“Call her. Now. Have her join us for dinner tonight.”
+++++
Amanda Patterson was a psychiatrist, Dublin trained – and a kind of wild Irish beauty permeated everything about her. She knew Tilly Sorensen professionally, of course, but had never interacted socially with her so she was more than a little curious about this sudden invitation. Then…she heard words about Tilly’s granddaughter and possible hallucinatory episodes and everything slipped into place. This wasn’t a social call. This was work, she sighed. And she smiled, because that made sense.
She’d heard of Ted Sorensen, of course. He was one of the most feared personalities in Hollywood, a man who seemed to relish destroying the careers of anyone who stood in his way. And like everyone else on the West Side, she’d heard of this house. The House With No Windows.
Which of course told her everything she needed to know about the situation. Here was a man who had walled himself off from the world, from having to witness the consequences of his reign of terror. She imagined a little girl raised in such a house, a frail creature full of fear and lying to save her skin time after time, day after day. And night after night? Might she also not be a victim of sexual abuse, too?
But then wouldn’t her grandmother be complicit, too?
Oh, what an interesting evening this was going to be!
+++++
They met at house, while Debra was still at school. Something about a lacrosse game.
Ted told Patterson about his recent conversations with Debra, about the pink feathered visitors coming in the night, then he told her about the disappearance that had been captured on the video feed and about what he’d discovered in the shower…
…and Patterson seemed a little confused by that…
“You mean you actually found kelp around her leg?”
“I did, yes.”
“And you said you smelled seawater? In her shower?”
“Yes.”
“So, is it not possible that she has discovered how to cut-off the video feed, and that she planted these items beforehand so that she could pull off this little ruse?”
“But…why?” Ted asked.
“For attention, Mr. Sorensen. Perhaps because she feels neglected in some way?”
His mind reached out to thoughts he’d only recently had, thoughts of ignoring her needs, and while Patterson’s words hit him, and hard, he couldn’t imagine Debra doing something like that. Not just for some attention.
+++++
During her freshman year at Harvard-Westlake Debra asked her father for permission to go on the school’s annual ski trip up to Mammoth Mountain, and Ted smiled when he remembered his first such trip. Good memories from those worst of times, not long after his parents split, and yet somehow it was those memories that carried him through the worst of it all.
“Of course you can,” he told her. “Funny, but I had no idea you were interested in skiing…?”
“Oh, yes, ever since Dina mentioned it once I’ve wanted to learn.”
“Dina? You mean my architect?”
“Yes, of course.”
“She mentioned skiing?”
“Yes. She asked if we wanted to go with her up to Lake Tahoe.”
“We? You mean she asked us?”
“Yes. You didn’t seem interested.”
“You know,” he sighed, “I only went a couple of times. I was never any good at sports, I never had the patience to learn, I guess.”
“I think the mountains must be wonderful.”
“We haven’t been? Up to Tahoe, I mean?”
And right away, when she shook her head, Ted knew that on so many basic levels he’d failed as a parent. He wanted to turn and feel Kat next to him, wanted to feel her steady hand on his, and he missed her most at times like this.
But Debra went on her ski trip and when she came back she seemed a different person.
There were the superficial things, of course – the sunburned cheeks and the healthy glow first among the things he spotted – but there were other, deeper changes, as well.
“You look like you had a good time,” he said when she bounced back into the House With No Windows.
“You look pale, Father. Like you need to get out in the sun.”
He had shrugged indifferently. “How’d you like skiing?” he asked.
“It was hard at first but on the third day, I don’t know, it almost felt like flying. Like I was a bird and I was drifting on air currents.”
He leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands over his chest. “I remember that. Fun, isn’t it?”
“Fun? It was more than fun, Father. There are people up there who live like that. They ski every day, they’re out there in the sun and the air and the sky is a part of their lives…”
“And our life isn’t, Debra. We have a different destiny.”
Her eyes narrowed a bit when she heard him speak those words, and perhaps because she had just come in from the sun and the wind was still in her hair his words seemed contrived, almost hollow. Yet in the next instant she understood her father was missing something, like his life was devoid – of life. She had lived her life completely walled off from this other world, yet she’d also been surrounded by music, and musicians, all her life. Musicians who, by and large, worked for her father. Well, for one of the recording studios her father owned.
Folk singers, rock ’n rollers, new wave and punk. She’d seen most of the heavy hitters at one time or another, sometimes in the studio but also at concerts – when her father felt compelled to attend, anyway. And she remembered something one of the hard-line ayatollahs in Iran had said once, when he banned rock ’n roll from Iranian radio stations.
In such music could be found the devil’s lair.
And at first she’d laughed, but soon enough she understood and she stopped laughing.
There was truth inside the rebellious spirit music conveyed, truth found in the same kind of Romanticism that had popularized Byron’s poetry and probably Jesus’s sermon on the mount. The truth they spoke was a universal truth and the truth had to come out, had to be set free – only in the way best suited to the moment. Of course the ayatollahs were terrified of The Beatles. There was truth in such music, the truth of the human condition, and those scared old men knew what could bring down their whole house of cards.
And standing there in her father’s house she suddenly realized that her father was scared, the same kind of scared. Scared of what was “out there” – which meant he was scared of things he could not control. Which led her to the single most terrifying thought she’d ever had: her father was scared because he could not control her, not even the music she listened to.
Her life?
Her…life? Is that it?
Because ever since his parents had come undone he’d lost control of his life and he’d been trying to get everything all neat and tidy ever since.
But…does that really make since?
Mom died, they didn’t get divorced, so…
Mom died? So in a way she left…him. Is that when he lost control?
But that wasn’t his fault. And if it wasn’t his fault what was the point of trying to control the uncontrollable? Because…that’s what death is, isn’t it? But no, trying to keep someone you love safe and out of harm’s way isn’t unreasonable. But, oh, what was that song? Question? A question of balance? Was that it? Had he simply lost his way?
“Dad?” she said.
“Yes darlin’…what is it?”
“Something happened.”
He looked up at her, looked at the rosy glow on her cheeks once again. “Oh?”
“I met a boy.”
He smiled, but his hands started to shake a little. “And does he have a name?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing like that, Dad. He was sitting beside me in the van and he fell asleep on my shoulder. I wasn’t expecting to feel what I felt.”
He relaxed – a little – and he pointed to the chair across from his desk. “Tell me about him,” he said, gently.
“He’s a senior, he got an early admission letter from Yale.”
“And he’s cute?”
She nodded sheepishly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“And let me guess. He’s a good skier and he wanted to know if you could go back up to Mammoth with him next weekend?”
She nodded. “His parents will be there too.”
“Uh-huh. I’m just curious, but do I fit into this equation somewhere?”
“I was wondering if, well, if you wanted to come too.”
He grinned. “Is that what you were wondering?”
“Yes.”
“Deb…I do not remember how to ski, nor do I have the slightest interest in relearning.”
“Okay.”
“But why don’t you have this boy’s parents give me a call and we can see about you going with them.”
“Really! That’d be the boss, Dad!”
“The boss?”
But he did go skiing with her that weekend, and several more weekends that winter. Though of course she never knew.
+++++
Amanda Patterson quietly watched the bank of monitors as Debra fell asleep, Tilly sitting beside her in the little control room. Ted remained in his office, not wanting to watch anything that might possibly unfold – again – because he was afraid what it might mean for his daughter. One way or another.
An hour passed, then another – before all the monitors went out. Then all the lights in the house…
“Ted! Come!” his mother cried as she stood and groped for the stairway. “Something’s happening!”
But it was almost pitch-black inside the house and everyone found it difficult to move through the darkness. Ted made it to the stairs first and started up but soon the way ahead was apparent. Deb’s room was suffused with pulsing shades of pink and blue and a faint crackling sound helped him find his way, until all three were standing in her room.
And a small, translucent sphere hovered in the air just above the girl’s bed. One moment the sphere glowed pink and in the next a pale lime green aura filled the room…
And Debra was gone. Not in the bedroom and not in the bathroom. Gone.
“Sweet Jesus,” Patterson whispered as she stepped back from the hovering sphere, “what is that?”
Ted leaned close to the sphere, his eyes at first lost in wonder – then filling with tears. “That’s my wife,” he said, just before their eyes closed. Just before they disappeared.
Here begins Part the Third. Dividing up Ch. 12 into several interlinking sub-chapters. Sorry. Think of it as more opportunities for cardamom tea.
Here’s the latest from Tears for Fears, pre-released last week from their new album The Tipping Point (to be released late February 2022). Is this as good as I think it is?
Another emergency eye surgery yesterday. I know this is getting old but it’s really beginning to slow me down. Anyway, enjoy the music and I hope this part of the arc answers a few lingering questions. Or makes you ask a few new ones…!
Part III: The House With No Windows
Chapter 12.1
Beverly Hills, California 12 August 1983
She was a strange girl, all brown-eyed empathy with a soul as big and ever-expanding as the universe. You could not sit with her for any length of time and not feel the peace she exuded. After her mother passed everyone gathered protectively around her, yet it was the little girl who reached out and most protected those around her. Her father most of all.
Because Ted Sorensen came undone for a while. Simply and completely.
And in the aftermath he turned inside himself. He drove up the slot canyon to the house on Collingwood and all that glass mocked him. His anger and his sorrow. Only now more than ever he did not want anyone or anything to see him like this. To see his mortality. This inhuman weakness.
But the little girl understood.
He purchased an old house on Foothill just a block from Sam’s house. A huge old house hidden within a series of rambling gardens, the place had been perfect for the silent film matinee idol who had built it fifty years before, but Ted hated the house and even before he found an architect he tore it down.
But then he found an architect – The Architect. Dina Marlowe was her name.
She was a wild, powerful creature, a clear-eyed disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright that scores of local architects had long ago taken to calling Frank Lloyd Wrong. She loved that. She loved their loathing, their self-righteous protestations to everything she drew. She walked over the old lot with Ted and listened to him as he talked about Katharine and her cancer and the total helplessness he’d felt for almost two years. She was a good listener, too.
She drove him around LA and looked at several of Wright’s houses, as well as several she’d designed, and soon she began to picture in her mind exactly what Ted Sorensen wanted. Not what he needed, but what he wanted. Then she tried to get him to see the difference between the two.
She lived down on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, a little prominence of land that juts out into the Pacific and that’s located just a few miles south of Los Angeles International. Close – but not touching – as living in PV was living a life apart, especially in those days. She rode a horse to her studio. She lived not far from where the writer Thomas Mann had lived when he came to California – before he came to his senses. She lived in a rambling house of her own design, a sprawling series of soaring copper-roofed hexagons crafted of redwood and glass, and where a series of flagstoned terraces floated like lily pads down to the rocks where the earth and the sea came together.
Dina Marlowe was almost twice Ted’s age yet she’d never married, never had children of her own. She invited Ted and the little brown eyed girl out to her house – so that together father and daughter could feel what expansive architecture was all about. Such was the power of her house that prospective clients lucky enough to earn an invitation to her house invariably came away impressed enough to sign with her on the spot. Yet oddly enough she rarely invited prospective clients to her house. She rarely deemed them worthy of her work and she didn’t care what other people thought about that.
But Ted Sorensen was different.
Because Ted Sorensen was the face of the new Hollywood. Daring to break with the past, Sorensen had broken free of all the old paradigms, the light comedies and the formulaic westerns. He was already behind several groundbreaking sci-fi epics and he had quickly begun bringing in new talent – both behind the camera as well as scores fresh faces in front. For years Paramount had fallen behind the other studios in LA – but in just a few short years all that was in the past.
And if she could get Sorensen as a client then new doors would open for her work, not just in LA but around the world. So…a new conundrum emerged.
She knew if she created what Sorensen wanted her career would be in tatters, that she would truly become a laughingstock, and that she might as well retire after her work was done for him.
And when they’d driven around LA looking at Wright’s houses he had expressed interest in only one. The Ennis House. A house that at its best looked like a Mayan temple, and that typically aroused feelings of outright dread, like something lifted right out of a dystopian Babylonian nightmare. But at least the Ennis House had windows.
And Ted Sorensen wanted no visible windows, no way for anyone to see inside his new home. The house would, Sorensen demanded, literally turn in on itself. Yet while all the exterior would present an impenetrable wall to the world, the interior would be pure, unobstructed glass. And every room in the house, every single space, would look inward. Inward onto a series of lush garden pools, like some impossible landscape dug up from a primeval rainforest and transported intact to Beverly Hills California – and literally just a few hundred feet from Sunset Boulevard.
Sorensen seemed drawn to the monolithic power of Wright’s Ennis House, the impossibility of finding something so incongruously out of place where the exact opposite was not simply expected, but demanded. And even Dina Marlowe knew that when the authorities in Beverly Hills took one look at her final drawings they would shit all over themselves. Horrified. Furious. How dare anyone even contemplate building something like this – in Beverly Hills!
Which was why she had invited Ted and his daughter to spend an afternoon at her home on the cliffs.
+++++
She had a small house attached to the main house and an old French couple lived there; they looked after the house and cooked when guests came and when her draftsmen came around after hours the old couple cooked for them, too – and important impromptu gatherings that often sprang-up there on the cliffs.
When the Sorensens came the old couple prepared a simple dinner of salads and artichokes and fresh seafood caught that morning, and Debra walked around the various swimming pools – and the waterfalls that joined them into a whole – amazed that anyone could live so close to the sea. She stood, entranced, as dolphins and whales swam by just beyond the rocks, entranced as swirling clouds of gulls cried over the rocks below. In a life already full of treasured memories that afternoon on the cliffs was the one she would claim as her first.
Dina Marlowe’s draftsmen had created two sets of drawings based on her preliminary sketches; the first set was for a more traditional “prairie house” that in some ways resembled Wright’s Taliesin East, his second home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin – where Wright had started his first architecture school. She created this set of plans because she’d been a student of Wright’s and knew this would more than likely be the last time that she’d be able to create such an homage.
The second set of plans she’d spent more time on. She was already beginning to understand the role this commission would have on her career and, perhaps, she wanted to make a statement. This second set looked like the Ennis House – but on steroids, and without one single window visible from the street. Her blocks would use the same “Usonian” concrete block construction and her version incorporated similar geometric design motifs both in the blocks and in the overall design. One of her draftsmen made a quarter inch scale model of this plan out of heavy foam-board and from the street the house looked more like an ancient Babylonian ziggurat than Mayan temple, yet even in cardboard the form possessed a heavy, almost brooding presence that defied easy acquiescence. Ted Sorensen looked at the model and at once felt revolted and curious – just as Dina knew it would.
“Dear God,” he whispered as he looked at the thing, “what will people think when they see this?”
“Terror would be my guess, Ted,” Dina Marlowe sighed. “My first impression, once I saw the model, was that it looks like a place where human sacrifices once took place.”
Ted looked at her, expecting to see a smile or hear a laugh, but no – her face was a blank mask.
“Where did this come from?” he asked her.
“I listened to you, Ted. This is what you asked for. It’s a home where a person who seeks to deny their own humanity goes to lick their wounds.”
In an instant Sorensen grew furious with the audacity of her insight…
…then he fell back into her words…
“I listened to you.”
And this from an artist who made her living by listening to her clients.
He gathered his sense of himself and walked around the model again and again, then she leaned over and pulled the roofs off, revealing the series of interior courtyards and pools. “There’s no way to model the landscaping but I tried to render those here,” she said as she turned and almost theatrically uncovered three renderings of the house done in colored pencil – Wright’s favorite media for presenting renderings to clients.
“From the street about all a passersby might see was is forest, actually three layers of forest – to be more precise – with each inner layer taller than the one before. Various towers and sub-towers will be visible both above or through the forest, but never the house in its entirety, not from any angle…”
Sorensen stepped close and looked at the renderings and only then did he nod his head in dawning appreciation. “It’s majestic,” he sighed, “and utterly ominous.”
“It’s what you asked for, Ted.”
“It’s perfect,” he said as he turned to her, smiling.
“I know,” she said, sure this would amount to nothing more or less than her ruin.
And in that she could not have been more wrong.
+++++
Construction began almost as soon as a contractor willing to take on the commission could be found, while the city’s planning commission proved to be less an issue than Marlowe had feared – but only because she had no idea how much money – in the form of pure, unadulterated bribes – Sorensen had been willing to pay for a construction permit.
Literally thousands of the various intricately layered concrete blocks had to be formed and poured, and this proceeded as the first layer of the forest was transplanted. There would be almost no lawn adjacent to the sidewalk, at least not in any traditional meaning of the word. Though within the first few few in from the sidewalk there would indeed be some grass, almost immediately low, dense broad-leafed palm-like trees would define the first outer wall of the forest. While this planting got under underway the primary contractor moved-in and excavated the basements and subfloor footings, and within a few weeks the first walls started to appear.
And then the first wave of complaints started to trickle in to the city planning office. “What is this thing?” seemed to be the gist of these first missives, and the city replied with a form letter explicitly stating that the plans had passed the city’s usual review process with flying colors. Most people were satisfied with this and let the matter drop.
Then the second layer of the forest was planted, and the front elevation of the house began to take shape. People began driving out of their way to see the new Babylonian ziggurat taking shape on Foothill. Traffic at times backed up as people stopped their cars and gawked. Until someone noticed this appeared to be a house with no windows…and wasn’t that a code violation? More letters were sent to the planning office, then matters escalated when members of the planning commission were summoned to a meeting in the City Manager’s office.
Of course the city manager had been bought off as well, so what followed was more a strategy session to reassure the public that the house did in fact have the required number of windows and that everything was in fact okay with the design review process. But then even more people complained, because most people appeared quite uncomfortable with the idea that an ancient temple of some kind was being constructed right in the middle of a prime residential neighborhood, and it looked exactly like the sort of place where human sacrifices might take place.
Evangelical Christian leaders got involved next, alerted by parishioners that a temple dedicated to reviving the practice of ritual human sacrifice was being constructed in the heart of Los Angeles, and then these same evangelicals appeared in Palos Verdes, in the form of marching protesters outside of Dina Marlowe’s studio. She met with the gathered religious leaders and told them the story of the original Ennis House, as well as the handful of other houses around LA that Wright had designed that were also called Neo-Mayan by critics of art and architecture.
But when one of the evangelical pastors asked Marlowe if her new design was in fact intended to be a religious temple of some sort she scoffed at the idea, then she asked the pastor to drive around LA and look at Wright’s other Usonian houses. When pressed further by this pastor – he repeated his original question and added something particularly stupid about Wright having been an advocate of human sacrifice – and she laughed in the man’s face and called him a “congenital idiot…”
“Which is, I believe, on the front page of this morning’s Times,” Henry Carmichael said as Ted settled into the back of his limo.
Ted picked up the newspaper and skimmed the article, at one point laughing so hard his eyes watered – even as Henry drove the Lincoln out Melrose to the studio. “This couldn’t be going better,” Ted sighed as he looked at his reflection in the car’s window – as he turned inward and thought about all the hideous monsters out there in the world who had no idea what he had in store for them. He smiled at his father’s reflection in his mind’s eye, then leaned back and laughed when his father laughed at them too.
+++++
Teachers reacted to Debra the way everyone else had: they were drawn to her, to her eyes, and when they made contact and stared into her eyes they almost always reported feeling something like waves of complete peace-of-mind breaking over them. Even students in her classes had no idea what to think when they interacted with her on the playground. She was just…different. Bullies tried to pick on her, to intimidate her and she would smile gently and look at them – and her teachers watched as her bullies wilted like flowers under a fierce noonday sun.
One morning at early recess she was sitting on a bench talking to a friend when a small rabbit hopped over and sat beneath her dangling feet. Then another rabbit, and another and another came out of the bushes and sat there on the ground beneath the bench, looking up at her as if expecting something from her…so she went down to them and sat with them; within moments rabbits were crawling all over her legs then cuddling on her lap, and everyone on theplayground – students and staff – stared in awestruck wonder at the sight of her. More rabbits came to her until dozens surrounded her, yet by then most faced outward as if they were taking a defensive stance – as if they were gathering there to protect her.
And day after day the rabbits came to her. Until one day, after a teacher called, her father came to see these strange goings-on.
And the rabbits came and sat beside Debra after she sat on the ground, and they remained there until her father came. They ran away then, and they did not come back.
+++++
She loved him, of course. She could see the goodness in him. She could see past the monster everyone else saw.
The first time she saw the House With No Windows she did not know what to think. In a way the imposing hulk of the small towers peeking out of the little forest reminded her of one of her father’s movies, and she expected stunted little creatures to come crawling out to greet her. Two streams ran through the forest in the front of the house and two glass bridges crossed over the running water, and she didn’t realize this was to be her new home because she felt like she was on one of her father’s film sets.
The front walk wound slowly through the forest to a small opening, and then, after a short turn not visible until then, a door appeared…and that first time there her father and Dina Marlowe took her inside to show her around.
The same blocks on the outside made up the inner walls, and the floors appeared to be highly polished concrete stained a deep mahogany brown. A fireplace as big as a kitchen drew her eye inward, until she saw the forest atrium just outside the living room and she couldn’t help but run to the glass wall and look out there.
“Can we swim in that?” she asked Dina. “The water looks very dark, Dina, almost like a pool in a river, only at night.”
“Yes you can, Debra. This is just like any other swimming pool, only the inside of this pool is dark so it will look more like a pool within a stream. Do you like it?”
She nodded but remained unconvinced. “It feels very strange, Dina. Like some kind of power is hidden inside.”
“Inside? The water?” her father asked. “Really? What do you mean by that, Debra?”
But the girl simply shook her head, and slowly – as she turned and looked at Dina. “I don’t know, father,” she said as she looked around the house and the garden pools again. “I’m really not sure.”
But she did know, and she was sure. She had seen a place just like this once upon a time, though by the time she stood there inside the house the ‘here and now’ felt like it must have been a very long time ago. She looked into the dark water again, and then into Dina’s eyes all while trying to understand what she was feeling – again. Echoes? Something like echoes of another time and place, feeling the gut punch of knowing absolutely that she had been here before.
But she understood it was a long time ago, and very far from this place.
+++++
She read all the time. And she remembered everything she read. Word for word. Page by page.
When her classmates were reading Dick and Jane books aloud in her first grade class she was finishing up Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, because that was one of her father’s favorite movies. The next book she read was Mann’s Death in Venice and she struggled with the idea that an old man could be attracted to someone so young, but Dina had given her the book. She asked her father about the von Aschenbach character and he told her that many men in their 40s and 50s became confused about their place in the world when their bodies began changing…
“What about women? Do they become confused too?”
Her father nodded. “I think so, yes, but maybe you should ask your grandmother.”
“What is a psychiatrist, father?”
“Well, do you know how some people become ill? Like when they catch a cold?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Well, sometimes peoples’ brains become ill. Sometimes it is a kind of sickness, while there are other times when a person’s brain develops that way.”
“You mean genetics, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Chromosomes, DNA, genetic codes and markers? Those things?”
Ted looked at her, now only seven years old but already so conversant in so many subjects. “Yes, those things. Where did you hear about those? At school?”
“No, the other teachers.”
He looked up from his dinner, looked her in the eye: “What other teachers?”
“The ones who come to me in the night.”
He felt cold dread. A piercing heaviness gripped his chest. He began to sweat a little, too. “People come to you? In the night?”
“Yes, father, but I am unsure if they are people.”
“What does that mean, Debra? What do they look like?”
“They are usually very tall, too tall to stand in my room, and most of them are covered in feathers. Pink feathers.”
“You’ve seen more than one?”
“Not usually, but sometimes.”
He was watching her closely then, looking into her eyes, looking for evasiveness or any other signs she was making this up – but when he saw only frank honesty he decided he’d call his mother after he put her to bed. “Do they stay in the room with you at night?”
“Usually, but we have been to the ocean, and once they took me to see a star.”
“A star?”
“Yes, only it wasn’t a star. It was some kind of machine.”
Another brief chapter, the last in this second part of the story. Cardamom tea, anyone?
Part II: The Broken Road
Chapter 11
Hollywood, California 7 July 1977
“Take Beverly, it’ll be faster this time of day,” Ted said to his driver. Kat’s OB’s office had just called; her contractions were getting closer so it was time for him to dash to the hospital. Cedars-Sinai wasn’t even four miles away but in noonday traffic on a Thursday it could easily take a half hour – or more – and Ted was already nervous, even before he made it to the Paramount limo. His palms were sweating and his stomach was twisted up in hard little knots, every one of them on fire. “Could you turn up the air, Henry?”
Henry Carmichael smiled and nodded as he turned the Lincoln onto Melrose. He could do this drive in his sleep, and probably had more than once over the last twenty-seven years, but even so he had to take care – if only because Ted Sorensen already had a brutal reputation around the studio. You didn’t cross him, you didn’t make him angry, and you sure didn’t contradict anything he said – not if you wanted to keep your job. Funny, too, because the kid was still just that: a kid. He’d just graduated from the film school at ‘SC but already the word around the back lots was that this kid was some kind of wunderkind, brilliant – but ruthless – and let’s not mention he’d married the boss’s daughter last month. And now here he was, in a city full of power players the kid was already swimming at the top of the food chain. Better still, the kid was shaking up the old, established pecking order; firing people left and right, pissing-off has-been actors who’d been at Paramount for decades, getting rid of the deadwood while clearing the way ahead for fresh talent.
Henry already liked Ted, even felt loyal to him. He liked driving him around the city, just like he’d enjoyed driving the Old Man around. Still, the fact of the matter was simple enough: Henry was still working for Sam Gold. He was still filing written reports on everything the kid said and did while being driven around town. Henry’s ultimate loyalty was, after all, reserved for The Boss. And it’d been earned, too. Sam Gold was a Mensch…with a capital M, the best of the best.
Henry took Melrose to Fairfax to Beverly and made it to the hospital in less than ten minutes, impressing even Ted, but even before he could get around and open the kid’s door, Ted was out and sprinting for the entry.
The Old Man had done pretty much the same thing when Katharine came into the world, but that’s what Henry liked about working for the studio. LA was constantly reinventing itself, spreading out into the valleys that branched out like vines from Hollywood, the real beating heart of the city, yet the studios were already bastions of tradition. Whole ecosystems had grown up and flourished around each of the major studios, but Paramount was the grandfather of them all – and in a way Hollywood was Hollywood because of Paramount. And not just Hollywood…Beverly Hills, too. Then BelAir and Brentwood, and even the far-flung Palisades, everything because of Paramount. Andalong with the other studios, out of the orange groves and lemon trees – out of all that nothingness – new traditions sprang up – almost overnight. Traditions that developed into networks as intricately powerful as anything ever seen in ancient Rome, all in the span of a single lifetime. The world had never seen anything quite like it, and everyone everywhere was still trying to comes to terms with what exactly Hollywood really meant.
Yet one thing was certain. Hollywood was power. Sheer, unadulterated power.
And it looked like a ruthless kid was moving in to take over.
+++++
Debra Sorensen came into the world at seven minutes past seven in the evening, and from that moment on she became the center of Theodore Sorensen’s waking existence. In a way, she became his salvation.
And from the beginning of her time here, there was something strange about the little girl.
She never cried. When people came to see her in the hospital the baby would look at her visitors and an unexpected calm would come for them. When Katharine first held her daughter she felt a peace fall over her that she had never experienced before.
Ted held her and at once grew terrified, almost rigid with fear, yet the longer he held her the more irresistible her gaze became – and the more at ease he became.
When Sam Gold held her close the little girl reached up and touched the side of his face and he cried for hours after, while Debra’s nurses all said they’d never seen anything like these actions and reactions before. Strangers heard stories about the new little baby girl and would go to the window in the maternity ward and seek out her eyes, and everyone reported feeling the same kind of never-before-experienced calm, and after one psychiatrist heard about the phenomenon she went to see for herself; perhaps this physician described Debra’s effect on people best when she related that something like an existential peace came to her when she looked at the little girl, and into her eyes.
Debra had brown hair and gentle brown eyes, and her skin was a little more olive than white – though the bridge of her nose was intensely freckled – something no one could account for. Her birth weight was seven pounds – seven ounces, a simple fact no one seemed to find in the least extraordinary.
Father, mother, and daughter went home to their new house at the end of Collingwood Place, a boxy monstrosity designed by an architect with a thing for huge glass rectangles and dull black steel. There were three swimming pools in the back yard, and not a single blade of grass in sight. The house was clinging to the side of a canyon and appeared ready to fly away at a moments notice. The view from the tiered back patios was stupendous, and on smog-free days the little girl could see from Catalina Island to the Malibu Hills from her bedroom. She lived the first seven years of her life in this little glass and steel airey, perched up there on the side of the canyon – ready to fly away at a moments notice.
+++++
In a way, Ted Sorensen came of age up there, too.
He disposed of his little green BMW after his return from Berlin, in pointed discussions vowing to never again purchase anything with even the slightest hint of German origin. He began to study the Holocaust, he made charitable donations to homes in Israel that cared for orphaned children, Jewish children recovered from Soviet Russia, helpless children with their own harrowing tales to tell. If down and out actors found their way to him looking for work he listened to their stories, but some actors received more attention than others.
He went to first one country club then another – only to be told that Jews need not apply – for membership or for a job, not even as a janitor. The same was true all around Southern California, from yacht clubs to hunting preserves. When he learned that there were only a few politicians who listened to the concerns of their Jewish constituents he began to wonder where the difference between German Hate and American Hate resided. He soon decided that the only way to take care of the problem was to beat the Haters at their own game.
He saw in Sam Gold echoes of his father’s paranoia; both had spent their lives looking over their shoulders, looking for Hate in all their passing shadows. They never looked ahead, they never confronted their fears head-on. They ran, they avoided. More than anything else they lived in fear of drawing attention to their jewishness – and Ted Sorensen was done with that. He wasn’t buying into that way of life. Not for him. Not for Katharine. And most especially not for his daughter.
So he joined a country club that was derisively known as ‘that place that takes Jews,’ and he bought his way onto the board of directors. He got investors, some with really big money, to come in and within a few years the dowdy old place became the jewel of Southern California country clubs and everyone was welcome to join. Everyone. With the money to make the cut. The other country clubs began to languish as their anti-semitism hit the full light of day in newspapers that Sorensen invested in. Other anti-semitic organizations on the West Side met a similar fate until, one by one, these groups either disappeared – or moved to Orange County with all the other John Birchers.
He began to put the studio’s money behind space operas, then more big budget revivals of sixties television series and that put him over the top. By the early eighties and with Sam’s endorsement he took over as president and chairman of the board and now there was nothing in the world that could stop what came next.
+++++
Katharine never went to medical school. That life was never meant to be.
Sam moved to Israel, to one of his so-called compounds, though he kept the house on Alpine, for a while, anyway.
Then one night, when Debra was just six years old, Katharine found a lump in her left breast.
A short chapter here, so pour yourself a stiff one (Dr Pepper on the rocks, anyone?) and settle in for a quickie.
Odd little juxtaposition. About an hour after I posted chapter nine word came out regarding the hostage situation at the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. Hate never sleeps.
Part II: The Broken Road
Chapter 10
Tel Aviv, Israel 22 November 1976
Most guests invited to Anders Sorensen’s marriage to Anya Eisenstadt arrived on commercial flights from California. Theodore Sorensen, as well as Sam and Katharine Gold, arrived by private jet, in this case by Sam’s Gulfstream II, and in a curious way this conspicuous arrival set the tone surrounding Ted’s introduction to Israel. He was accorded a different level of deference by state bureaucracies that the others did not experience, and none of these little things escaped Ted’s notice. Power was power, he was learning, yet passive displays of the symbols and accoutrements of power often meant that more obvious exercises of gross power were often unnecessary.
And somehow, within a day of his arrival in Tel Aviv, all of the invited guests knew that Ted had arrived by private jet. Unknown to these guests, however, was Katharine Gold’s ‘condition’ – for she was now quite pregnant – though still barely ‘showing’. Also, though Tilly Sorensen had been invited to the wedding she chose not to come, for – oddly enough – she was still rather angry about the whole second marriage thing. The Callahans chose not to attend, as well – for Imogen had never felt comfortable with the Sorensen’s divorce and she did not want to be seen taking sides. Tilly therefore spent her Thanksgiving at the Callahan house in Potrero Hills.
Anders had asked Saul Rosenthal to stand with Ted under the chuppah, while Anya, a recent emigre from Soviet Armenia and without parents, had no onto stand with. For Anya was indeed alone, and it was becoming clear to all concerned that Anya had been characterized by the authorities as some sort of ‘mail-order bride’… She was certainly much younger than Anders, and quite good looking too, but little else was known of her background by Anders’ friends and associates.
Ted was not amused when he learned of this, yet had he known more about the precarious history of Armenian Jews he might have at the very least been more understanding. As it was, once Ted heard the first faint rumblings surrounding Anya’s presumed role in these proceedings he grew more skeptical by the hour. More skeptical and, in both word and deed, less understanding.
Yet for some reason his father seemed quite happy when he was standing beside Anya, and with Sam’s steady counsel never far away Ted took a cautious ‘wait and see’ approach. Kat, for her part, was as gracious as could be to Anya – which of course meant that Anya was soon never far away from either Anders or Katharine. For her part, Katharine would soon become the tiny, empathetic voice whispering in Ted’s ear, her counsel a mirror image of her father’s: watch; listen; say nothing you might regret; smile – even when you don’t feel like smiling.
Ted spent almost every moment standing beside Sam Gold; Katharine listened to Anya Tarkov, who happened to speak flawless English – as well as French, German, and the Germanic Yiddish of Ashkenazi Jews – for it turned out that parts of her family had once prospered in cities such as Heidelberg and Copenhagen, before being forced into exile – first to the Soviet Union and thence to Armenia. She came from a family of academics and physicians; Anya was, at 35 years of age, already a trained cardio-thoracic surgeon. Katharine soon began to feel that of all the people she’d met so far in Israel, Anya Eisenstadt was by far the most cultured she’d talked to. It wasn’t long before Kat began to understand just how delightful Anya truly was, and how truly blessed Anders must have felt when he first met her.
Yet Ted rarely listened to Kat when she spoke of all this, at least when Anya’s background was the chosen topic of conversation. Worse still, Ted was cool, almost distant and preoccupied around her, and it wasn’t long before Anders began to notice.
Katharine, ever the empath, took this deterioration seriously, enough to talk to her own father about Ted. Sam began to watch the boy, trying to understand all the varieties of his antipathy, and the more he watched the more he began to see a complex deterioration of the relationship between father and son – and this he simply did not understand.
Was it a basic failing within the boy? Could Ted simply not understand the emotional complexities of survivor’s guilt? Did the boy, at root, simply have no frame of reference to understand the Jewish experience of the camps? Of the continuing diaspora? Were America’s schools doing such a poor job of conveying the tortured landscape of Hate?
The ceremony was never meant to be a lavish affair but as Kat – and Sam – learned more about Anya the scale of the post-nuptial celebration increased in both scale and social importance. Sam talked to people. Government ministers took note. Various important people’s names were added to the guest list – and all this happened over the span of a few days – so that by the time of the actual ceremony the list had grown from less than thirty names to more than a hundred, and as his father’s wedding seemed to grow in stature Ted’s acceptance of Anya seemed to grow. The event was remembered by all concerned as a happy, even a joyous affair.
Ted observed that Sam seemed to operate in Israel just as he did in Los Angeles. He was comfortable, and perhaps because Sam was well connected in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as he was LA? Ted soon learned that Sam was well connected because he gave, and quite generously, to a number of important Israeli charities – and to many Israeli politicians connected to those charities. Sam did so because he owned quite a lot of property in and around Tel Aviv, and he had purchased these properties with an eye to building residential projects. Yet he never talked about these investments. He never let on that it was his intent to immigrate to Israel as soon as he had cultivated an heir to handle his affairs in the States.
Yet what Sam Gold observed in Ted Sorensen filled his heart with foreboding. The boy had displayed all the killer instincts necessary to flourish in Hollywood; he had proven to be, in fact, a more than competent producer while Falling Water was in development. Yet there was something missing in the boy, something important, something…vital.
Ted lacked both humility and humanity. He didn’t just want power, he appeared to crave it, and not just the power to create or to build, but power for power’s sake. The boy was, in a word, dangerous.
Yet his daughter loved the boy, and she had apparently loved him enough to ‘forget’ to take her birth control pills. She loved him enough to want to have a baby with him, to put-off her studies for at least a year to have this baby with him – so at some point he had to recognize that he’d raised Katharine inside a home that valued humility and compassion, so surely her choice would reflect those values.
+++++
The Gulfstream made an unscheduled stop on the way back to California.
The jet landed in West Berlin, itself an audacious act that required serious political muscle, and which meant that the jet was met by a sizable contingent of US Army troops. Sam led Ted and his daughter to the car indicated by a light colonel, and after leaving the airport their small convoy drove into the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, and then to the Plötzensee Prison complex. The colonel escorted the group to a small brick building not far from the main administrative center and led them inside. Almost instantly someone turned on floodlights and the white painted walls seemed to come alive, as if they had a tale to tell and only lacked iron-willed souls ready to stand and listen. And to remember.
The colonel led them to the far wall and pointed to pockmarks in the brick – with a brown leather riding-crop he wielded with precision. “Bullet holes,” he said, the words a steely statement of fact. “In the early forties new prison guards were trained here, in this room.” Next he pointed to five hooks suspended from a heavy timber beam that spanned the width of the room. “Routine political executions took place in the courtyard, usually by guillotine. Jews, on the other hand, came in for special treatment. The prisoner’s hands were tied overhead and then they were suspended from these hooks. Guards used them for target practice, I understand to get new recruits used to killing unarmed human beings.”
Katharine turned and ran into her father’s arms; he sheltered her and took her back to their waiting car.
Ted stood there, entranced.
“They’ve bricked-over all the other parts of the apparatus,” the colonel continued. “They had meathooks suspended from the tracks you see up there, and the track – we assume – was chain-driven and ran in a large oval. Children were impaled on the hooks and their squirming bodies then sent along the track. They were more challenging to hit, or so I understand.”
“You’re not serious…” Ted whispered.
“Oh, similar set-ups were found in Poland. We think this facility was a ‘proof-of-concept’ operation; the walls had already been bricked over when the Russians got here, but the very same arrangement, right down to the same hardware, was found in operational condition at both Auschwitz and Treblinka. Survivor’s accounts, mainly of those carting the bodies off to crematories, fill in the blanks.”
“This is monstrous. Simply monstrous.”
“Is this your first camp?” the colonel asked, gently, knowingly.
“Yes.”
“I hate to say it, but this is nothing.”
“Nothing? How can you say that?”
“Do your research, Mr. Sorensen.”
“How can you stand it? To live here, surrounded by these monsters…?”
The colonel nodded, then he turned and looked Sorensen in the eye. “I’ve lived here for six years and I haven’t met one monster here. Not one, Mr. Sorensen. Hitler and his pals sold the German people real a bill of goods…he promised to ‘Make Germany Great Again’ and part of the mechanism of Hate they built to do that was focused on scapegoating the Jewish population here. They were a prosperous people but more importantly there were a few prominent Jewish politicians during the Republic. Those Jews were accused…”
“The stab in the back. Yeah, I’ve heard that one – and that still doesn’t explain why you think these people aren’t monsters.”
“They’re just people, Mr. Sorensen. People like you and me. Many were broke and starving and Hitler came along and told them exactly what they wanted to hear. ‘It’s not your fault! It’s the Jews! Follow me and together we will restore Germany.’ It’s the same formula would-be dictators trot out and use all the time. It goes back to Caligula and the Germanic tribes and, hell, I don’t know, it probably goes back to cold men huddled in caves, to when we first learned to kill each other. To Hate.”
“You’ve seen more things like this? These things, I mean?” Ted asked, pointing at the track mounted on the ceiling.
“Me? Yessir, I have. Funny thing, though. The first time I saw stuff like this was over in Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia, too.” The colonel chuckled a little, then shook his head. Truth is, it’s everywhere, Mr. Sorensen. Every place you find desperate people my guess is you’ll find Hate waiting in the wings, and when you find people blindly willing to follow Hate you’ll find the same kind of thing.”
Ted nodded his head slowly, then he held out his right hand. “Thank you, Colonel.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Now…we really need to get you back out to the airport…before the Russians throw a real first-class hissy-fit…”
If you’ve been reading along here for more than a few years you know that every now and then a little hiccup comes along and a new story just pops up. Well, this is a hiccup. A new story that has absolutely nothing to do with the 88th Key or Come Alive or…anything else. It just is.
And it’s about 25 pages so not real long and not too brief. Maybe time for tea? Probably.
Enjoy.
Tangent
Life is really kind of funny, ya know? Like how many unexpected things come up and slap us on the face – almost like right out of the blue – except maybe we’ve been setting out little breadcrumbs all along the way? When you look at it that way, well, that little slap on the face almost seems inevitable, kind of like we planned it that way. That would almost make a weird kind of sense if we were actually smart enough to pull something like that off. Yet it’s funnier still how many of these consequential slaps remain just out of sight – and then at just the wrong moment they strike. We go through life and never hear anything from them, but then – like meteors that narrowly miss the earth – sometimes our little breadcrumbs cruise on by and we remain blissfully unaware of how utterly close we’ve come to annihilation. Or…we come full circle and trip over our trail of breadcrumbs and despite all our so-called smarts we remain in no position to effect any sort of positive outcome. That’s just life I suppose, yet I’ve always been a little more proactive about the things I am aware of to let even the littlest things slip by. But there’s a catch here, and it’s a biggie: you have to be, at the very least, aware of the world unfurling around you. If you aren’t…well then…you have no one to blame but yourself – even if you aren’t a total control freak.
Which, of course, we all are. Yet in a way being a control freak has contributed to the nature of our success, as well as more than a few of our personal failures along the way – but that, too, is just life. After all, everyone has to be something, so why not be a control freak?
Yet through it all I keep coming back to the idea of circles.
Yeah, circles.
But cut me some slack here, because while I’m not exactly sure where I’m going I have a feeling it’s someplace interesting. Circles are like that, I guess.
+++++
Didn’t Elton John write something about taking me to the pilot for control. Yeah, that one. Take me to the pilot of your soul. You get the drift – of the song, I mean? Well, I look back on all that time in college and think I wanted to get a handle on the whole soul thing, and I did right up to the exact point in time when my brother was killed in Southeast Asia, on a dark and stormy night all his own. I know that’s when I first started thinking about circles, anyway.
See…my brother was a full-fledged member of the war corp, yet I was well on my way to becoming some kind of rock ’n roller when I got news that his life had reached an unexpected end. He’d been flying off carriers in A-4 Skyhawks; he’d been flying one of the very first missions in early ’66 to go after shipping in Haiphong Harbor – when a Russian SAM removed him from the ledger.
There was a place I used to go up north of the Golden Gate, and I drove out to that cold little beach after my dad called to let me know I didn’t have a brother anymore. Lost out there in a fog, I tried to picture him alone in the middle of the night in one of those jets, here one second and gone the next – literally just gone – and then all these other memories of him came back in a dull roar that maybe sounded a little like surf out there in the mist. Throwing the football in the backyard with him, my fingers so cold they hurt and smoke from a million wood stoves hangingin the air. Learning to drive with him by my side, all patience and so full of confidence because he was such a good teacher. Such a good friend. Maybe that’s what big brothers are supposed to be, in the world as it’s supposed to be, anyway. Friends. Role models. And sure, yeah, teachers. And Doug was all those things. I was lucky, and even then I knew it.
Because when I was a spud I had friends whose big brothers were bullies, who we avoided like the plague. You know the type, I’m sure, maybe even if you were one. But sitting out in the fog on a cold rock with Pacific tides rolling-in all I could see in my mind’s eye was some kind of missile warning light blinking red and then a few last seconds of dawning awareness – that my brother knew his life was about to end, that the light he had carried through his life was about to go out, and I wondered what he thought and felt in those last few seconds of his life. Work the problem? Fight the inevitable until the very end? I’d never know, of course.
Because a couple hundred pounds of high explosive had turned him into purple rain, little bits of death slipping into the ooze and out of my life. One more point of light switched off in a sea of flickering stars disappearing in one black hole after another.
+++++
I was playing keyboards a lot back then, kind of a college side gig to earn money for pizza. But the group I was with had cut a second album and we were getting a reputation. And that’s when I showed up for a gig with my long hair long gone. I was, I told them that afternoon, joining the Navy, headed up to Washington State for OCS and then, hopefully, on to flight school. I was following in my brother’s footsteps, you see. Walking along the remains of his circle.
I remember the looks of stupefied disbelief on faces of people I’d called friends for more than a few years, then the sense of betrayal in their downcast, red as stoned eyes. I wasn’t war corp, they cried. I was one of them. How could you do such a thing…?
I had a girlfriend, of course. Joyce. Joyce of the long red hair and deep green eyes, her batik skirts that always swept the floor. Patchouli. I remember clouds of patchouli most of all when I thought about her. I loved her, of course. As a matter of fact she taught me how to love. Not the mechanics but the soul searching embrace of love. Probably the best song on our last album together was all about her, about the way she moved, about the way she made me feel inside when she smiled at me just so. She was a light acoustic number, all gentle chords wrapped up in little love-knots, and I always felt closest to her when her music came to me.
I had a little green Porsche back then, a new 911E I’d picked up a few week before all this went down. I bought the car with the money from the album, and Joyce picked it out. In a way I guess I always thought it would be our car – because I couldn’t imagine life without her. She was my circle, if that makes sense.
I can still remember throwing a few bags in the front boot and getting behind the wheel of our car, looking around at the life I’d had, at the life I was turning away from. Driving away from familiar streets I turned on more time and got on the I-5 Northbound, bound for Someplace I’d Never Been Before.
Two days followed, tow days of thinking about how much I wanted to kill the people who’d killed my brother. Two days to come to terms with the fact that I’d already started to hate the person I was becoming.
+++++
NAS Whidbey Island became my home after Berkeley, especially after doing hard time in OCS and then Pri-Fly in Pensacola. Like my brother I went into attack aircraft, in my case the A-6E Intruder, and after my initial squadron orientation and readiness training ay Whidbey I was assigned to VA-165 and sent to Southeast Asia. I won’t dwell on this part of the circle but in my mind I avenged my brother by plastering targets all around Hanoi and Haiphong, but even if such a thing was truly possible I have to admit now that I found no pleasure or satisfaction in anything about the experience. If anything I felt more empty than I ever had, but Death is like that. Maybe I was just bitter now, probably because the whole vengeance thing proved nothing at all. Then, as the war wound down I couldn’t wait to…do what? To do what…exactly…with the burned-out husk of my life?
Stay in the Navy? I used to go up to the hangar deck then aft to the fantail and I’d stand at the rail and watch the churning water down there in the dark. My brother was down there now, a part of the sea again. What would he have wanted me to do, I wondered?
No. The Navy wasn’t going to happen. Not to me. The Navy had taken his life and was chewing mine up slowing. Each cat shot in the night, every bombing run, the night traps and the endless endless endless stress of living up to everyone’s endless endless endless expectations. About the best thing I could say about flying is I didn’t have to look into the eyes of the people I killed, but that didn’t mean all those broken circles would leave me be; no, they came calling in my nightmares, where I least expected them. Where there was no place to hide.
I’d kept in touch with some of the guys in the band and one of the guys wrote back and told me the group still wanted me. But Joyce, he wrote, my red headed green eyed girlfriend and the love of my life was long gone, married to a realtor and I realized she was well beyond my reach now, but yet somehow that loss felt like a reward I all too richly deserved.
Staring down into the churning sea behind an aircraft carrier is a strange thing, especially so at two in the morning. Your mind dances in phosphorescent chaos and there are no stars reflecting off the echoes of fleet-footed memories. You are alone with the cold truth of the sea, her eternal nothingness an all beckoning gravity singing her siren’s songs you could swear you’d heard before – maybe in another time, or another life…
There was a piano in one of the squadron ready room on the Connie, a beat up old upright tied off to a bulkhead, and I went to her on my last night aboard and played Take Me To The Pilot. I mean I really banged it out, five years of hate pouring through my fingers into the poor old thing and when I looked up there were a couple dozen pilots standing there in awe, maybe because I’d stopped playing when I left Berkeley so no one knew I played. I finally told my shipmates about the group I’d been in before all this flying shit and no one could believe it. “What the fuck are you doing out here,” they asked.
“I hate the world and I want to set it on fire,” I replied – and everyone laughed.
I mean, really, who wouldn’t? Who knows, maybe we all wanted something as insane as that – each in our way, but whatever, it was good for a laugh.
But not me; I wasn’t laughing. In fact, I’d never been more serious in my life.
+++++
After signing some papers that part of my life closed like a bad book. I found my Porsche and got her ready to roll and then threw my bags in the front boot again and after a little soul searching on a beach turned onto the I-5 once again and this time headed South, only when I got to Berkeley I looked at the offramp and shook my head then just drove right on by. It was time to go home so home I went. Back to Newport Beach. Back to standing in line at The Crab Cooker on Friday afternoons with mom and dad, back to catching up with old friends from high school. I went up to SNA, that’s Orange County Airport to the uninitiated, to one of the flight schools there and I talked about maybe teaching or something like that but one of the owners asked me why I hadn’t considered the airlines.
Because I hadn’t. No reason, really. Maybe I just didn’t want to be a bus driver, I think I said and that made everyone laugh. Everyone there wanted to be a bus driver…
So anyway, me being me that’s exactly what I did.
+++++
I ended up at TWA because I thought maybe flying internationally would be more interesting, and who knows, maybe it was. I started off in 707s, well, actually the 707-320c, and like all the new hires back in the day I drew the really glamorous routes during my first few years. In my case it was JFK to LAX – which is, believe me, about the most boring route a commercial pilot can get saddled with. Two years of boring and I was about ready for a career change. Maybe something exotic. You know, maybe something along the lines of dental hygiene or plumbing.
Then I drew JFK to Stockholm.
Lots of blonds in Stockholm, right? That had to be a good thing, right?
I was happy again and all thought of going to dental hygiene school vanished. But within a year the word was we were going to drop 707s and transition to L-1011s for most of our trans-Atlantic European routes, so it was back to school – then a year after getting my type I went back to school to work on my transition to captain. To four stripes. The promised land of commercial aviation.
And I ended flying out of Boston Logan for the rest of my career, flying the TriStar to either Heathrow or Charles De Gaulle, though occasionally to Frankfurt or Munich. It was fun work, satisfying in its way, yet all this flying stuff has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Well, almost nothing, but circles are like that. You gotta follow the breadcrumbs, ya know? You gotta go where they take you.
A lot of people think that cockpit crews work as teams, like two or three pilots working together all the time, and there was a time when this was true. The problem with such groupings is simple enough to understand, though. When people work together all the time relationships develop. Some relationships are good, some are not so good, while others may grow toxic and mean-spirited – but none of these relationships end up creating a competent cockpit environment. The end result of all this is you really never know who’ll be working with you until you show up at the airport and get your manifest and load-out from the dispatch office.
Getting to know the people you fly with is not exactly discouraged, but neither is it encouraged. Call it a gray area. Inviting some of the guys over to watch a football game is sort of okay, while screwing one of the flight attendants you fly with is kind of a no-no. Assuming male-female gender combinations in the cockpit happen more frequently these days – as opposed to when I was flying – screwing your co-pilot is about the worst thing cockpit crews can do today. Period. I have to assume that the same principle applies to male-male or female-female hookups as well, if you know what I mean…but I’d rather not go there.
Still, you get to know the people you do fly with. If, for instance, you fly with John Doe three times a month you kind of pick up where you left off, talking about his farm in Indiana or his son’s interest in wearing stockings and high heels. And you might fly from Boston to Paris with one First Officer and Flight Engineer and then have an entirely new crew for the return. Again, you just never really knew who you’d work with, but even so – over time, anyway – you began to know quite a bit about the people you were flying with.
Everything is inevitable, ya know? Like points on a curve. More breadcrumbs along the way.
+++++
Mike Elliot was one such character. He was a couple of years older than I yet he’d never expressed any interest in moving up to captain. None. He didn’t want the added responsibility, he told me once, or all the extra pressure that went along with the position. And, as it happened, Mike’s attitude wasn’t really all that unusual. I met a number of First Officers over the years who were comfortable where they were, the same with a whole bunch of Flight Engineers. Mike was usually down in the dumps about something his wife had done to him and he was, generally speaking, a very unhappy fella.
On one trip to Paris, Mike’s wife, a petite fire breathing dragon named Isabel, joined us on the flight across from Boston; they were going to spend a few weeks in France on vacation – together – and yet Mike was despondent about the whole thing.
Because, as it turned out, Isabel was a total control freak. Not a casual misanthrope but a real balls-to-the wall man-eating hell-bitch sort of control freak. She’d been a dancer of some sort, ballet, not exotic, and even I could see she was cute. Or, well, maybe once upon a time her looks had covered up certain character traits. When I met her the first time, and it was on that trip, all I noticed was an uncertain meanness in her eyes, and a tendency to mock everyone and everything around her – her husband Mike most of all. After being around her for about five minutes I realized she was a toxic compound, really mean to the core, and I couldn’t wait to make my excuses and get away from her. Which was exactly what I did, too.
Then again, I was flying back to Boston the next morning and had to hit the sack fairly early; Mike had no such luck and he was stuck with the bitch, and it didn’t take a lot of imagination to understand where all his existential despair came from. Anyway, after we cleared customs I found the crew shuttle to the hotel and left Mike and the hell-bitch to enjoy their vacation together.
We typically got into CDG, or Charles De Gaulle International, a little after six in the morning, and I usually didn’t go back out to the airport until nine the next morning, so my routine in Paris was fairly casual. Check in at the hotel then head down to a favorite bistro for a quick breakfast before a long walk to nowhere in particular followed by a late lunch and then heading off to bed, and that’s exactly what I did that December night.
Except in the middle of that night I jumped out of bed, startled by the pounding drumbeat of someone banging on my door; and there was Mike in a bath-robe, all bleary-eyed and blitzed out of his mind, crying and halfway out of his mind. I was, on the other hand, shaking from yet another nightmare, and that was before Mike’s fists started hammering on my door. Anyway, he said he couldn’t take it anymore. At least that’s what he said between ragged sobs full of pointless accusations and pointed recriminations. He couldn’t, he said, spend a dime without her approval. He couldn’t eat a thing she didn’t approve of first; at dinner that night she’d ordered his meal, told him what he was allowed to drink and even the people sitting around them had noticed her overbearing crudeness and it had gone downhill ever since.
Yet there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, and certainly nothing I was willing to say about matters. In truth, I didn’t know Mike all that well and I sure didn’t know his wife, which, if nothing else, meant I really didn’t know both side of the story. By the way, getting pulled into this kind of drama without knowing the true dynamics of the relationship is, in my experience, a toxically stupid thing to do and besides, it was two in the morning. I helped Mike get a room then trudged back up to my own and promptly passed out.
Sleep was, however, not to be. Probably less than a half hour later I sat up in bed, my ears ringing like church bells as even more furious pounding on my door woke me – again. Yes indeedy, I was a really happy camper. Only when I went to the door this time I found a vampire bat named Isabel frothing at the mouth in rabid fury on the other side of peephole.
And even as I opened the door to my room she tried to push her way in – not with much success, I might add – and then she demanded to know where her husband was. I pointed to the open doors that led to my balcony and said as politely as I could that when her husband had heard her banging on the door he had decided to jump, then I slammed the door in her face.
I listened to the stream of four-letter invectives as she made for her broomstick and yes, I smiled, not really caring what the witch was thinking but nevertheless somehow quite pleased with myself. And, if I was lucky, or so I thought, I might even get two more hours of sleep.
So…and this in no way accounts for what happened next, I went and packed my overnighter and caught the next crew shuttle back out to De Gaulle. I’d had enough of their drama and I’d had just enough sleep to get me through the day. Yet I halfway expected to read about Mike in the morning edition of the International Herald-Tribune. You know, something like ‘American Murders Vampire Wife, Throws Decapitated Body From Eiffel Tower.’ That sort of thing. But no, nothing happened. Matter of fact, I didn’t fly with Mike again for a week or so.
Something told their vacation just didn’t work out, ya know…?
+++++
So…after signing off on the manifest and load-out in the dispatch office at CDG, I made my way out to the airplane on the early side because I wanted to stop off for breakfast at Maxims. I always loved their ham and cheese omelet and made it a point to drop by for breakfast whenever I made the CDG-Logan run, and with a decent breakfast under my belt I went on out to the gate to get the day going.
And that’s when my life turned upside down.
Red hair. Batik dress. Sitting in a cloud of patchouli. Joyce. Joyce of the green eyes.
Sitting with a young girl. Sitting there expectantly – just like she was waiting, for me.
Because, as it happened, that’s exactly what she was doing.
+++++
Maybe the first clue that something was wrong came when she ran into the pilot’s arms.
She wasn’t the skinny little thing he remembered, either. As a matter of fact, he thought she was rather plump. The bags under her eyes came as a surprise, too. Still, the pilot seemed to take hold of the moment and he helped her back into her seat and gave her a tissue to wipe away the tears that had come as a surprise.
+++++
“Joyce? I can’t believe it’s you!”
“I know, I know,” she said between sniffles. “I just really need to see you, to talk to you.”
And about this time I notice the teenaged girl sitting next to Joyce. Then I noticed her eyes. Which for some reason reminded me of my own mother’s blue-green eyes.
Fuck.
What was that sound? Cosmic tumblers slipping into place?
“Joyce? What is it?” I think I managed to say – as I looked at the teenager.
“We need to talk,” she repeated, now gasping for air.
“I can see that,” I sighed, wondering where I’d packed my heartburn medications. “Are you on this flight?”
“Yes, your dad helped me.”
Okay, like that was a big help. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Can we talk – once we get to Boston?”
She nodded before she hauled a wad of soggy tissue up to her nose and began playing something that sounded an awful lot like The Ride of the Valkyries.
Not exactly knowing what else to do I looked at the teenager and held out my hand. “Hi. My name’s Jim. And you are?”
“Tracy,” the girl said – and rather sullenly, too – as she took my hand in her’s.
Then Joyce looked at me and shrugged – as if the gravity taking hold of us had grown too strong to ignore. “Jim…she’s your daughter.”
I think there’s something about those cosmic tumblers – like they make an unmistakable, almost imperceptible little clicking noise as they slip into place. You can feel them, too, right in the middle of your heart.
+++++
They were flying coach but I took care of that and moved them up to the front of the plane before I disappeared into the cockpit. I was so early I had the space all to myself – until one of the flight attendants, a sweet thing I’d known for years came in to go over the cabin manifest.
“Anything I need to know about?” she asked.
Really. No kidding. Like what would you say then, ya know? “Well,” I began, “it turns out a girl I was nailing back in college has a kid, and guess what? I’m the daddy. And…I just found out.”
“Uh, okay.”
“And they’re on this flight. I just put them in 2A & B. Would you take care of them for me, please.”
“Take care of them? What did you have in mind?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have a clue, Jill. As a matter of fact I’m feeling a little speechless right now.”
“You? Speechless? Wow, I am impressed.”
“Jill? Not now, please.”
“Okay, champagne and caviar it is. Anything else I need to know?”
I think I just shook my head, but not much else remains in my mind about the rest of that day. Once we got in to Logan and parked on the ramp at T5, I helped Joyce and Tracy off the plane and through customs, then Joyce told me to pick a place where we could talk for a while.
“Where are you staying?” I asked her in reply.
“Nowhere right now.”
“Nowhere? What does that mean?”
“I was in Copenhagen,” she said, “but I needed a way home so I called your dad.”
“Uh, Joyce, you’re losing me. Do you guys have a place to stay or not?”
“No.”
“I don’t mean to split hairs, but are you telling me you don’t have anyplace to live?”
“Mom!” Tracy cried-out in exasperation. “Just tell him!”
“Tracy, just back off, okay?” Joyce whispered, her voice a coarse, jagged thing that seemed to have come from someplace way beyond tired. “Jim? Just get us out of here, please.”
Tired, yes, but I heard a rising tide of panic in her voice and now all of a sudden I realized I was looking at some kind of breakdown in the making. And, if I was reading the tea leaves just right my father had given his blessing to this meeting so I really needed to get my act together, and quick. I picked up Joyce’s bag and headed for the crew shuttle – with these two strangers in tow. We got to my car, an ancient Land Rover that I used to drive to the airport in winter, and I did the only thing that came to mind…I drove them up to my place.
I’d bought a little place in Manchester-by-the-Sea after I settled on Logan as my home base; it was new construction and bigger than I needed but it was almost right in the center of town and I could walk to almost everything I needed. I’d furnished the place as if a family might – had one lived there, though I knew not why at the time; maybe because it felt like the right thing to do? So, are you thinking breadcrumbs and circles yet?
And as I think I mentioned, it was early December and the mid-afternoon sky was lead gray, but the sky around Boston in wintertime is always lead gray – and cold. There’d been a couple of snowy days a few weeks prior but only the gritty remains were left on the margins of the highway leading out from Boston; it was, I guess, a typical New England winter’s day – which is to say it was depressing as hell. When I pulled into my driveway and hit the garage door opener the first words out of Joyce’s mouth concerned our little green Porsche.
“You still have it?” she cried, and for some reason seeing the old thing made her cry – again.
I got their bags to the rooms I thought they’d like, then went downstairs to wait for them, and Tracy came down first, and she found me in the kitchen popping the top on a Coke.
“Is there anything to drink?” she asked.
“All kinds of stuff in the ‘fridge. Help yourself.”
She found my last Coke and stood behind the sink and slugged it down, then she took a deep breath before cutting loose with a timber-rattling belch.
Nice first impression, ya know?
“So. You’re my dad.” Not a question, just a statement of fact. And she didn’t seem too excited by the idea, either.
“Uh, look, this is all news to me, Tracy. Have you and your mother talked much about all this?”
“Oh…only for the past ten years or so.”
“How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Fourteen. I’ll be fifteen on the twenty-fifth.”
“A Christmas baby,” I said, doing themath as I watched her. And yes, the numbers worked out perfectly. I could in fact remember the night I’d nailed Joyce that would have led to a December birth. I was, in fact, in Pensacola, Florida at the time she came into the world, and by then Joyce was supposedly hooked up with some realtor or something like that. “That always sounded like…” I started to say…
“Like getting short-changed? Christmas and your birthday on the same day so you only get half as many presents…?” She shrugged, then she walked off – into the living room, and there she plopped down onto the sofa and finished off a root beer. And then Joyce came down the stairs and straight away asked for a mineral water, just as Tracy fired off another wall rattling burp.
“Sparkling?” I asked, trying to ignore the eruption in the living room.
“If you have it. Please.”
“What about dinner?” I asked. “We’ve got a couple of good seafood places within walking distance, if anyone’s interested.”
“I’ve always wanted to try lobster,” Tracy chirped brightly. “Is there anyplace for that?”
“Sure,” I replied. “Joyce? What about you? Are you hungry yet?”
“Give me a half hour,” she sighed, trying to smile a little.
I handed her a Perrier after she sat beside Tracy, and it wasn’t hard to see my contribution to her features as they sat side by side. And it wasn’t too big a stretch to see my mother – as well as bits of me and my brother – in her profile.
And yes, this was all a little unsettling – yet I was still waiting to hear what this was really all about.
“So?” I began cheerfully. “I think you said there’s something you wanted to tell me?”
Joyce sipped her water, then put the little green bottle down on the table in front of her legs.
“Yeah, Jim. I’m sorry, I should’ve let you know about Tracy years ago but after I got married…”
“Did your husband know?” I asked…
…and she shook her head. “We hooked up right after you left, but I knew. And I never told him. Then during some kind of medical exam he learned he was sterile and that was the end of that. He filed for divorce about three years ago. I tried to keep up with the house payments but, well, that didn’t work out. That’s when I contacted your dad. He’s been helping us out a little…”
I think my hands were shaking by that point. I know I was upset, but just then I saw that Tracy was curling up inside, already extremely afraid something bad was about to happen, so I tried to let go, let Joyce get this out in her own way.
“…but we ended up losing the house. We tried staying with my mom for a while but that didn’t work out, either.”
“I can only imagine,” I sighed. I remembered Joyce’s mother. She’d been an alcoholic for as long as I’d known Joyce and I couldn’t imagine a worse place to raise a kid.
“You remember her?”
“She’s kind of hard to forget, Joyce.”
“Yeah, well, she’s worse now.”
“So…where were you living, when you were married?”
“Up on the coast,” she said – a little too evasively.
“I see,” I said, because I did see. ‘Up on the coast’ meant Humboldt County, the pot growing capitol of the known universe, which meant her realtor hubby had probably been knee deep in the trade. And she probably had been, too. And she was being evasive because, despite my time in Berkeley, I had always been considered uncool when and where pot was concerned. Then again, I was probably considered uncool where booze was concerned, or any other drugs, for that matter. Call me a prude or call me an asshole – it doesn’t matter to me what your excuses are – because I am the anti-drug. Always have been, always will be, and you’d be surprised how many pilots are exactly like me. Or…maybe you wouldn’t be…
“I always hated that judgmental tone,” Joyce sighed. “I can still hear the derision in your voice when you say ‘I see.’ We all could, ya know…?”
“I wasn’t cut out for that life, Joyce.”
“But you were such a good musician. I really never understood where all your anger came from?”
“I don’t either, but here’s the kicker. I really don’t care where it came from, and guess what? I’m not going to change anytime soon. I hope that’s not going to be a problem for you.”
And Tracy was getting smaller and smaller, turning in on herself the more I spoke, the more worked up I got, but it didn’t take a real rocket scientist to figure out that all the horror stories she’d heard about me were coming true. More than true. She was getting a front row seat to her nightmare-come-true…her asshole father in all his self-righteous glory about to explode and throw them back out on the street. Again.
But then…the circle started to close.
“Jim, I’m sick,” Joyce said. The green eyed love of my life. The girl I turned away from when I decided to destroy the world…
“Sick?” I said.
“It’s called a glioblastoma. It’s a…”
“I know what a glioblastoma is, Joyce. How long have you known?”
“About a month.”
“What’s the treatment plan?”
“Jim, I don’t have insurance. That’s why we were in Copenhagen.”
“What? Not even Medicaid?”
She shook her head and my eyes started blinking like a semaphore flashing out an SOS. I looked at my watch and went to the telephone and called a friend – who also just happened to be a lawyer. After a brief hold I explained the situation to him, right down to the Tracy thing, and he recommended we meet up for dinner and go over some options.
Joyce and Tracy were staring at me during this exchange, looking at me like I was some kind of lunatic-idiot-savior, and after I rang off I turned to them and was really quite taken aback by the sight of the two of them. Diaphanous little Joyce, well, not so petite anymore but still cute as hell, and our little girl. Two peas from the same pod. And just then it hit me. And hard.
They were the life I’d had within my grasp, and yet they were the life I never knew was within my grasp. I was angry as hell and totally unprepared for the sudden overwhelming love I felt for them both.
+++++
Marco Petrocelli was one of those all purpose lawyers everyone runs across sooner or later. He’d handled the closing on my house and beat a speeding ticket in municipal court for me. Well, more than one, actually. He played golf and liked to sail, which was how we became friends. Sailing. Not golf. A real fringe benefit of being Marco’s friend was his mom’s lasagna. His parents owned a fantastic little Italian cafe down on the waterfront and his mom’s lasagna was the stuff legends are made of.
So we met Marco at the cafe and sat in a quiet little corner booth, and Joyce finally felt free enough to let it all hang out. Tracy did too, and I assume because she probably thought I couldn’t possibly hurt either of them in front of witnesses!
Sheesh. Teenagers.
Anyway, I’ll spare you the details, but as time was of the essence Marco thought the best way to get insurance for Joyce – and Tracy – was to marry her and get her on my group policy as soon as humanly fucking possible, because Massachusetts had the best laws in the country as far as pre-existing coverage issues were concerned. He volunteered to make it happen, too.
So, here’s the scoop.
The day before I was this happy-go-lucky single guy with a nice job and no responsibilities.
Tomorrow I was going to be married to my college sweetheart. I was going to be the father of a fifteen year old girl who was, quite literally, terrified of me. And, assuming the clouds of patchouli that seemed to ooze from their pores meant they were both potheads, I was going to be up to my neck in one hell of an ethical dilemma.
Make them quit? Yup. That wasn’t an issue, at least not as far as I was concerned, yet…now I had to consider the probable results of coming down hard while having a rebellious teenager on my hands. Stupid I am not. Uncompromising? Yeah, probably, but not stupid.
I knew exactly what I needed. In fact, it was the only possible solution.
I needed a mother.
No. Let me be clear. I needed my mother.
When I called home I realized I needn’t have worried. Their bags were already packed.
+++++
Yes. I know. Maybe I could have handled this on my own. Hell, who knows, maybe I should have…but that’s not how these circle things work.
But here’s the thing. My parents were good at the whole mom and dad thing, and maybe because the first thing they ever taught me to do was to listen. Listen to them. Listen to my teachers. Listen to my friends. So…I listened. And I because I knew how to listen I found it easy to learn. And I found that by listening to people I found it easy to learn all about them, and that as a result I hardly ever got into arguments or disagreements with anyone.
Maybe it was too late to get Tracy over that hump, or maybe no one had ever tried to get her to listen, but all that fear coiled like a spring in her gut sure looked to me just like someone who didn’t know how to listen. She’s heard a lot of stuff about me but when it came right down to it, when she finally met me she had no clue how to listen to me. What she’d heard about me in the past kept her from hearing me when I spoke – and it was going to hurt us. She and me. And my mom was the best remedy to the problem I had, so why not at least give it a try…?
Why not, indeed?
Because as it happened they’d been on the sidelines for a few years. My dad had been involved for at least the last three years, and though he’d never told me about Tracy he’d done so only because Joyce had insisted he not do so. Now it looked like they were going to get to play the whole grandparent thing – and that by marrying Joyce I was going to make the game legit. How perfect! Instant family!
But wait a minute there, young whippersnapper. Your betrothed, your wife, has a glioblastoma, and in case no one has clued you in yet, this wife of yours, the one with the glioblastoma, is going to die. And probably within a year, if not a whole lot sooner.
In other words, this part of the story does not come with a happy ending.
+++++
I think it was a few days before Christmas.
Yeah. Mike and I were scheduled to do the CDG thing again.
And I know right about now you’re scratching your head and wondering where this is going. I got that. Yeah. But, well, you see…the whole Mike thing is wrapped up in this story in all kind of interesting ways. Like I said…circles are like that.
So, yeah, dispatch office, pick up manifest and load out and Mike’s there too, going over the METARs – the meteorological reports for the North Atlantic overnight – then we walked out to the gate and stowed our flight bags, woke up the aircraft then went down onto the slush covered ramp to do our walk-around. Yeah. Cold as shit and snowing like a son of a bitch. That about sums it up. Nasty outside, and getting nastier by the minute.
Back to the ‘pit and get the heat cranked up, program the INS and sign-off for the load-out, call the stews and tell them it’s time to close and arm the doors. Call Ground for a pushback and activate the flight-plan. Push back and start three then taxi to the active. Take off and climb out of the muck and work the SID to the airway. Routine. Pilots like routine. Routine is good.
The time from pushback to takeoff to getting established on your airway is no nonsense time. There’s no extraneous chit-chat allowed. No ‘how’s the new pup doing?’ or ‘how’d that wisdom tooth thing go?’ during that phase of flight. You ‘aviate’ – period. You fly the plane and listen to ATC when they call out traffic. You fly the plane and look for traffic. Maybe a half hour later, when you hit cruise and the autopilot takes over, you start the whole idle chit-chat thing – assuming you want to.
As far as Mike was concerned I was pretty sure I didn’t want to.
Mike, on the other hand, wanted to. Hell, he needed to.
“I left Isabel,” he said like right out of the blue.
“Oh?” I think I said, not really wanting to go there.
“Yeah. The thing is, I got a problem.”
I turned and looked at the flight engineer, a crusty old dude who looked and acted like a civil war veteran, and he knowingly pulled the breaker on the CVR, the cockpit voice recorder. And voila, with Big Brother turned off you can vent to your heart’s content knowing the goons back on the ground won’t be listening as you talk about corn-holing your mother-in-law at Thanksgiving. Or…whatever…
“Oh?” I replied. “What’s up?”
“Well, see, the thing is…I’ve been seeing a dominatrix up in Beverly…”
I think I closed my eyes and looked heavenward, saying the only prayer that comes to mind in such situations: “Oh, God no…Why me?”
Then I looked at Mike. “No kidding? A dominatrix? What’s that like?” This, of course, I said in a remarkably non-judgmental voice. As in, “Oh, you like bananas on your Cheerios? Me too. Well, how about that! What a coincidence!”
“Yeah,” Mike continued, “I’m moving in with her next week.”
“Really? Doesn’t that seem kind of sudden to you?”
“No, no, not at all. She’s getting out of the scene, not going to be doing it professionally anymore…”
“She’s a…professional?” I think I asked.
“Yeah man.”
“Is that how you met?”
He nodded maniacally. “She’s great. I can’t wait for you guys to meet her.”
I turned and looked at the crusty old civil war veteran flight engineer – who was literally laughing so hard he was crying, only he had his fist in his mouth so he could laugh silently, and I don’t know why but I envied the old guy right about then.
“Yeah, you know, a few weeks ago she did me with a strap on and…”
And that was it. Crusty old dude burst out laughing so hard he started cutting cheese right there in the cockpit. In case no one ever cued you in on this, you can’t just roll down the windows on an airplane, not even up front, and cockpits are already nasty, confined spaces that smell of coffee, sweat, and spilled chicken-a-la-king – so adding old man fart to the mix just ain’t cool. And anyway, now I was laughing my ass off as I tried not to picture Mike on all fours with some leather-clad whack-job set to give him a colonoscopy on a No-Tell Motel bed. And it weren’t working. Not at all.
Then the head flight attendant called and wanted to know what was going on up here and that people in First could hear us laughing.
That put an end to the party and I told Mike we’d have to finish this conversation once we were on the ground.
C’est la vie, right?
So after we got to Gay Paree Mike told us all about this chick. All the whips and chains shit you’d ever want to hear, and then some. It was kind of funny, but then again it wasn’t.Having my ass paddled is not my idea of fun. Paying someone to paddle my ass seems like the height of insanity, yet Mike was full of so much love for this girl even I could see it.
Still, I had no clue, not really. I didn’t know the guy, not well, anyway, so about all I could do was laugh it off. Which is exactly what I did.
+++++
The next time I flew with Mike he had indeed filed for divorce and he had moved in with the dominatrix. I also learned that, surprise, Mike and Isabel had a…wait for it…a fifteen year old daughter, and now that kid was mixed up in this affair, too. I was, in a word, speechless. Did she realize what her father was into? Really…speechless.
Mike’s situation smacked – to my puritanical way of looking at the world, anyway – of a full blown middle aged crazy outburst of somewhat more or less epic proportions. Mike was in his forties and had a fifteen year old daughter and he’d been married to an absolute hell-bitch control freak and so what does he do? He hooks up with a professional dominatrix, and excuse the fuck out of me but isn’t a professional dominatrix a professional control freak? A paid mercenary control freak?
Man, I was confused.
Yet, well, my own life on the home front was already confusing enough.
Joyce was indeed sick, sicker than even I imagined in my most pessimistic imaginings. She’d be lucky to see June, at least that was the word her oncologists laid on me. My parents were doing their best to keep Tracy from falling apart – because, let’s face it, I was away on average four days a week, sometimes five or six, and Joyce wasn’t strong enough to handle treatments and raising a daughter.
Oh yes. Treatments. Surgery. Chemo. Radiation. All with the hope of giving Joyce an additional six months to a year. Tough call. After seeing what she went through I’m not sure I could do it, not sure I’d make the same decision, but when the sand is running through your hourglass at that speed time becomes a seriously interesting issue. As in: what would you do if you were almost forty and someone told you that six months was it. The party is going to be over and the lights are going out. Wouldn’t an extra six months to a year seem like the most important thing in the universe right about then?
And here’s one more piece of this little ever-expanding puzzle.
I’d begun falling in love with Joyce all over again. Whatever had brought us together back at Berkeley was still there. It was a palpable thing. My mom saw it first, then Tracy did. I felt it, or at least the beginnings of that resurgence, when I saw her sitting next to the window by the gate at CDG. Maybe because I’d only been with a few women since leaving the Navy, and nothing really serious had ever come along. Sorry, Jill, but I tried to be upfront, ya know?
And, oh yeah, I can talk all about her now so let’s get it out in the open right now. Let’s talk about that which we’ve ignored so far. Destiny. As in: Joyce was my destiny, right? And some mysterious force brought us back together, right? La forza del destino, nes pa? I’m still not sure I buy into all that stuff but there it is, hanging out there in the air apparent, just waiting for your casual refutation. Or mine, for that matter.
The thing is…I can’t.
I held her in the shower before her surgery, and that was the night she asked me to shave her head. I always loved her hair so the idea of cutting that away from her really hurt us both. But there it was, reality. And sure, yeah, reality is a close cousin to destiny. I get that. And at times reality is inescapable, a weight on your chest you can’t shove aside, so with scissors in hand I cut her hair and placed the strands in a big zip-lock baggie to we could drop them off at a place that made wigs for chemo patients to use later on in their treatment. Later on, when those lucky souls were well on their way to a remarkable recovery. Only Joyce wasn’t on that road, and that was about all I could fathom as I put a fresh blade in my razor and began lathering her skin, then shaving her smooth.
After I finished I just held her. No words came. No words could possibly suffice. Standing there under the hot water all I knew is I wanted to hold on to her for something like forever. I hated myself for ever leaving her. I loved her for finding me again, for trusting in me enough to pass her future on to me.
I thought about destiny a lot those days. Mine and, oddly enough, Mike’s.
I know. Circles are funny. Yada-yada-yada…
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Because about a month later I learned that Mike had, quite literally, bought the farm. Well, he and the (ex-)professional dominatrix – and I wish I was making this up – along with her ten year old daughter (!) moved into an ancient farm house in the hills not all that far from my place. Isabel, his now ex-wife, and their fifteen year old daughter moved into an apartment in Boston and that was, I reckoned, that.
Oh, yeah. That. What a word.
But there’s that whole destiny thing lurking around out there, ya know…? That old saw about not counting your chickens before they’ve hatched? Yeah. As in: don’t fuck around with destiny, because she’ll kick your ass every time.
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I guess it was April. Joyce was not doing well and Tracy was acting out at home and in school – and even my parents were struggling to keep up with Tracy’s constantly shifting moods. Joyce helped when she could, which was more than I managed on my two days a week at home, but Tracy was foundering and we all knew it.
Then late one night the phone rang and of course I picked it up…
…and I heard screaming in the background and a girl trying frantically to talk to me…
“Hello!” I said.
“Hi, it’s Angela. Is this Jim?”
“I’m Jim,” I said between the gales of screaming insanity I heard in the background.
“I’m Mike’s daughter, he told me to call you.”
“Oh?” Why is it that whenever destiny calls your first reaction is to say something clever like ‘Oh?’
“He’s in London and he said I should call you when I need help!”
“What’s wrong, Angela?” I think I said, molten steam seeping from my ears.
“Something’s going on with my mom. She’s not acting right…”
“Is that her screaming?” I asked.
“Yes, she’s acting really weird…” and then she stopped talking – and I’d assume she did so when the sound a smashing glass cut off her train of thought.
“What’s your address?” I asked, pen in hand.
When I hung up my dad was standing there looking at me with that “What Now?” look in his eyes.
So I told him and off we went, the Lone Ranger and Tonto off to save another damsel in distress one more time and I think the entire time I was driving into Boston Little Miss Destiny was laughing her fucking ass off.
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The apartment was in tatters. So was Angela. As in bruised and battered.
Isabel was a whirling dervish and somewhere completely off this planet. One look around and dad grabbed Angela and took her down to the Land Rover; I talked Isabel down from wherever the hell she was and got her to Mass General.
One of the ER interns, probably fresh from a psych rotation, wanted to put her in a straight jacket and into a rubber room – but calmer heads prevailed. Angela helped provide a decent history, some of which I could verify, and it turned out that Isabel had started acting weird about six months ago. So as fast as you can say magnetic resonance imaging Isabel was off for some pictures of her brain and just wouldn’t you know it…?
“That’s a glioblastoma…” the attending neurologist said – about two hours later. “They’re really quite rare.”
“Oh, really?” I sighed as my gut pulled another barrel roll. “Imagine that…” Actually that was about all I could manage at the time. Maybe because I was too busy getting Destiny’s foot out of my ass.
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This whole Circle of Life thing sometimes leaves me a little flummoxed.
You’re born, you live, then you die. I get that. Your life is just one small part of a larger circle, like an arc…or a segment, if you will. If you don’t have kids the circle ends with you. If you have a bunch of kids then a whole bunch of new circles spin-off of the original, yet somehow all these new circles are a part of the original, like fused atomic nuclei. Like planets orbiting their home star over eons of time.
Only Isabel and Joyce were fusing now. United by cancer, united in fighting the good fight.
And Tracy? Wild, unmanageable Tracy?
She became Angela’s new best friend, her coach and savior. It all came together naturally enough after that night. Those two teenaged girls decided they’d get through this whole cancer thing together, and just like that – problem solved. Cosmic tumblers?
Don’t get me started.
When Mike got back he surveyed the carnage he’d let slip under the door and I think he took stock of his life and found himself wonting. So…Mike being Mike and all – he moved Isabel and Angela into the farmhouse with the (ex-)professional dominatrix and her ten year old daughter. But as mentioned Isabel and Joyce were now on the same trajectory and Mike, overwhelmed – or overrun– with feelings of guilt could hardly keep up with his own feelings. So we – Mike and I – took turns taking the girls to the oncology clinic for their chemo, then their radiation, and Mike and I – now picking our way carefully through the same jagged, heart-stopping terrain – grew closer and closer as death itself came closer and closer to our respective circles.
And that’s when Destiny decided to come in for one more kick, this one aimed squarely at the heart of the matter.
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The (ex-)professional dominatrix – Sybel was, I believe, her nom de guerre – called me at the house one morning, but Dad took the call.
“Jim,” he called out a minute later, “I think you’d better take this one.”
Mike was flying that day and Sybel woke up with a bad pain in her pelvic area and would I mind taking her to her doctor in the city? And, oh yes, her daughter Sadie would need someone to look after her.
“Mom?” I called out in desperation.
I mean, really, wouldn’t you?
So…I picked up the (ex-)professional dominatrix and drove her to her clinic in the city and she asked that I stay with her in the room when her doc did an ultrasound. Then her doc asked that I wait outside while they did a quick colposcopy to get a tissue sample. An emergency procedure was scheduled for five the next morning, and I learned then that Sybel had a high-grade small-cell neuroendocrine cancer. Stage 4, by the way, we soon found out. The surgeon told me that this was a very rare cancer and I’m sure by now you know exactly what I said next.
“Oh really? You don’t say?”
When I picked up Mike at Logan later that afternoon I got to explain the known and unknown intricacies of high-grade small-cell neuroendocrine cancer to him – while he broke down and apart and crumbled into a million shards of thin glass – as I drove him through the city to Mass Gen and to the crumbling remains of his passion play. Little was known about this cancer at the time, I think her doctor mentioned to him in passing, only that it was invariably fatal. No, he didn’t say that. Doctors really are not that obtuse. Anyway, Sybel soon started on some sort of generic chemotherapy but again, little was known at the time about this type of cancer and it was just a shot in the dark. She starting sinking fast by early summer, and so too did Mike.
For the life of me I can’t really remember why I bought that little house on Saw Mill Circle. I was single at the time and if you’d asked if I planned on getting married I’d have shrugged off the question as the deranged musings of a lunatic. Maybe, I told myself, five bedrooms and four baths was great for resale value. The house had three main floors, too, with a big master on the ground level, four on the next, while the third floor was finished out as a great room, but which, thankfully, as it turned out included a full bath.
The third floor turned into the hospice floor by that summer as one by one our gathered arcs drew to a close. Marco busily went over contingencies, with Sadie’s real father the first real unknown we had to confront. Also, as it happened, Mike’s divorce wouldn’t be finalized while Isabel was still alive so Angela would remain with him regardless. Yet by early summer Sadie and the other two girls were doing well together – and this is where all that talk about circles and atoms and planets comes into play.
Who knows what pulls us together, what tugs at our orbits or what comes along and tears us loose, pulls us into new orbits, new ways of being, new lives out of the old. My father could see all this at the time but maybe that was because his own arc was closing. We didn’t know it at the time, of course, and even though death didn’t come to him for a few years, he still knew. He was always wise about those kinds of things, and maybe that’s why Joyce reached out to him in the first place. Of all the people in the universe, she reached out for his warm, steady hand and he pulled her back into our orbit, kept her stable until she could find her way back to me, to her real place in the world.
Mike? Who the hell knows. I sure don’t know how to reconcile what went down with him. Sometimes middle-aged crazy sounds about right, but not others. Still, if he’d never left Isabel and if he’d never found his new orbit around Sybel’s little star we’d have never had Sadie join our own circle. So…see what I mean? This whole circle of life thing is pretty daunting and none of it makes the slightest sense – until it happens.
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Joyce was a wisp of herself the last time we drifted into the shower – together. Standing there as one under the water it finally hit me: I couldn’t let her go. No way. She was confused all the time by then, and some days she hardly knew where she was, or even who I was for that matter. Still, there’s something about warm water, something almost amniotic, womblike and comfortable. I loved to hold her there, smell her hair, even as short as it was. Her skin on mine, an attraction stronger than gravity, the pull of what was meant to be. How could I let go? How could I ever? Even when I did so many years ago.
Some mistakes you can never make right, no matter how nice the water feels.
Tracy couldn’t do it. She’d come up to the third floor and the smell would hit her and she’d start to cry as he turned and fled to her room. The last few times days it was sheer will that pulled her up there to her mother’s side. Her fear was palpable. So was mine.
Joyce stayed those last days in a blue recliner with an IV hooked up to a port in her chest, and she was receiving fluids and nourishment through that line. The hospice nurse came by one day and dropped off some morphine and instructions on how to do it – and when, but there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I could pull that trigger. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Tracy or even Mike to do it, so when the time came, when Joyce was slipping into that place you might charitably call agony, we called the hospice agency and waited – no longer knowing how or what to feel. I sat with Joyce as she passed, but Tracy couldn’t do it. My mom stayed with her. My father stayed with me. We held her hands and it was all so easy. So gentle. So final.
As human beings we really have no words to say goodbye in moments like these. You do the best you can knowing words will never be enough.
But Joyce had figured that one out a long time before she grew ill. The song I wrote for her, the music we made together? All of it now on a scratchy old vinyl record hastily transcribed to binary bits on a shiny silver disc, and she asked that I slipped headphones on her head when the time came and so I played that music, our music, while she slipped away. It was music we’d made together so many years ago – yet I could see those moments unfold in her eyes as the crystalline notes made their way to the place where memories hang on the longest, and I could feel all the stories of our life come together again, all right there on one last sigh.
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I’d gotten used to sleeping with her, to sleeping with someone in my bed, and the loneliness I felt after she left us was unbearable. The cold sheets, the utter quiet of night without her breathing next to me. Tracy, of course, felt pretty much the same way and so she decided she just had to have a dog.
So…why not get two dogs? One for her bed – and one for mine?
Only someone should have talked us into something more practical than Bernese Mountain Dogs. I mean, really…
Anything other than Bernese Mountain Dogs. Bernese Mountain Dogs know how to do one thing really well: they know how to drool. Drool by the bucket load. They eat a lot, too – which means they shit small Volkswagens all over your yard. They are, however, terrific cuddlers…and frankly that was all that mattered.
Because Death still had a grip on our little house.
Sybel and Isabel went next, and they passed on the same day. Don’t ask me the how or the why of such things because I do not know. Never have and never will.
Mike went up to the farm the day after his love died and cleared-out all his belongings and put the property on the market. Then he didn’t even ask, he just moved in with the rest of us. I called the guy who built the house and we converted the third floor into an apartment for him. And that, as they say, was that.
Marco had a little sailboat and we carried all our ashes out into Mass Bay. A few minutes after the deed was done a whale and her calf scooted by so close we could her them breathing and there it was again, that whole circle of life thing. It was everywhere that day. In the air, in the sea, in the eye of a passing whale. Like there was more to live than mere survival. I could feel the love in that whale’s eye, the love for her calf, her love of life. Who knows, maybe she felt what was in our beating hearts, and maybe I was looking into the beating heart of that truth when I stood looking down into an aircraft carrier’s churning wake.
Mike dated once or twice but nothing ever came of it. I think he was afraid any woman he touched would turn to cancer and that her ashes would blow away on the next sea breeze. He kept flying for a while, at least until Sadie graduated from high school, then he retired and started teaching kids to fly. By that time Sadie and Mario Petrocelli were a permanent fixture down on the waterfront, and once she started working at the restaurant as a waitress that was it. Within a few years she alone possessed the secret to Mama Petrocelli’s lasagna and there she would remain, spinning off to form new circles of her own.
Angela went to NYU and then to med school. She’s an oncologist now, and lives up in Portland, Maine, yet the funniest thing about us, the really odd part of our story, is that I love Angela and Sadie as much as I love Tracy. We came together inside a shifting moment in time, a moment when old circles completed their arcs and new circles seemed ready to start, but we, all of us, we fused under the pressure of the moment. We came together, just like families have come together throughout all our time on this planet.
I watched my father’s circle close, then my mother’s. And I watched their circles close with three girls and a slightly insane pilot there by my side because, hey, that’s what families do. When we’re together now everything feel whole and good and right with our world, and I don’t know how else to describe things. We just are.
Tracy thought she wanted to be a pilot for a while, until she heard me play the piano anyway, and then, after she really listened to the two records I was a part of she decided she wanted to be a musician. And despite all my best efforts to change her mind she turned out to be a decent keyboardist, even if she still burps too loudly.
All these spinning circles come together at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and everyone comes and spends a month or so here when the leaves are green and the breezes are soft and warm. Even Mike comes by every now and then, usually to pick up a grandkid and bounce him on a knee, but sometimes just to pick up his mail. It’s home, after all is said and done.
I married Jill, the flight attendant I’d futzed around with before Joyce came back to me. It took me a while to get there but we weren’t meant to live alone. We go down to Petrocelli’s at least once a week and eat Sadie’s lasagna, and on Sundays Marco joins us for brunch.
Jill and I like to walk out to a nearby beach – it’s called Singing Beach for some reason – and even in winter we like to walk through the snow and watch the sun come up over the water. Sunrise and sunset, points on an arc describing and defining circles of her own design, yet even so a part of who and what we are, what it means to be alive, even if we are but little tangents to her steady arc. Jill and I walk down to the sand and the sea with an old Bernese Mountain Dog by our side, and she barks at passing whales.
Adrian Leverkühn Writes 