Kitabı oku: «A Beggar’s Kingdom», sayfa 9

Why did he let go of her hand! Or did she let go of his? She let go and fell noiselessly to the cobblestones, and the burning sky fell with her.

She holds her throat. He holds his throat. He reaches out to touch her, opens his mouth to beg her, beg her not to die. I love you, he whispers inaudibly. Please don’t die before you are redeemed.

Mallory almost smiles. Pulling a crumpled piece of parchment out of her apron, she slides it into his palm. Julian tries to stand her up, but she can’t, and he can’t. Why did you fall? Why did you let go of my hand? Why did you run into the fire, why did I hide your gold, why did I take it? Why did you kill him and her, why?

She is gasping.

Timber is being torn to pieces. Julian’s body feels as if it’s being torn to pieces. The ashes of London rise in the black ugly fumes and are carried by the wind into Mallory’s throat, into Julian’s throat, into Mallory’s soul, into Julian’s soul.

He is convulsing. His throat closes. He can’t yell, can’t speak, can’t tell her what he feels.

Reaching up, she touches his face, her eyes clearing and glazing over. Julian …

Still on his knees, he tips over her.

Go, she whispers. Or did she say gold?

Julian, go and come back for me.

10
Six Persuasions

EACH DAY MAN IS PERISHING. YET HE IS RENEWED DAY BY DAY.

Julian didn’t know about the renewed part.

But about perishing? Check.

Still on his knees, covered with grime and soot, he threw up in front of Sweeney. This time he didn’t get up and walk out. They had to call an ambulance and carry him down the mountain on a stretcher. He was taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital and treated with hyperbaric oxygen. The hospital called the police because Julian had no ID, nothing but a coin, out of circulation for four hundred years, and a Bill of Mortality from 1665 clutched in his blackened fist. Julian gave the police Nextel’s number, and Ashton arrived at Queen Elizabeth with Julian’s ID and optimistically with a change of clothes.

But Julian wasn’t going anywhere. His body has been ravaged by prolonged inhalation of carbon monoxide, he was coughing up blood and had swelling in his lungs that was causing continued oxygen deprivation. Julian scribbled his signature on a document making Ashton his health care proxy, and Ashton talked to the doctors.

“What are you talking about, smoke inhalation?” Ashton said. “Like from cigarettes?” He was standing at Julian’s bedside.

Like from a fire, one doctor said. Also he has a number of burst blood vessels in his arms and legs, and Lichtenberg flowers down his back from his neck to his pelvis.

“Is that also from smoke inhalation?”

No, another doctor said. We see Lichtenberg burns after an electrocution.

Ashton refused to believe it. It was obvious they’d mixed up Julian’s chart with someone else’s. They brought out Julian’s chart, showed Ashton there was no mistake. They pointed out that Julian had complained of being electrocuted a year earlier. Then, they had concluded, it was psychosomatic. This year they weren’t so sure. This year, the symptoms were visible.

“What about the tattooed dots on his arm that weren’t there the day before yesterday?” Ashton said. “Is that also from smoke inhalation? Or is it from electrocution? Or are the tattoos psychosomatic?”

The doctors had no opinion about the tattoos. Tattoos weren’t a medical emergency like swollen lungs.

Julian himself was confused and on painkillers and refused to confirm or deny anything. An X-ray showed three fractured bones in each foot.

“Is that also fucking psychosomatic?” Ashton said, fuming at their ignorance, and at his own.

After a week, Julian was sent home with an oxygen tank to help him breathe until his lungs healed. Oxygen for Julian.

While Ashton was at work, Julian, his crutches against the railing, sat motionlessly on the cold rainy balcony and rocked back and forth. When you want to escape from your blinding rage, stop moving, stop speaking. All action feeds the beast. Stop feeding it.

“Dude, I beg you. Explain,” Ashton kept asking in the evenings after work.

Which part?

“Um, the swollen lungs? Electrocution burns? Breeches and tunic? The broken feet, the catatonia, the tattoos? Literally a single thing. What happened to you? Where did you go?”

Smoke inhalation is from a fire.

“What fucking fire?”

The Great Fire of London.

At first Ashton had nothing to say. Then: “Why do you refuse to be straight with me? Why can’t you reply to a serious question with a serious answer? What fucking fire?”

I just told you, the Great Fire of London.

Ahhhh!

You wanted me to be straight. I’m straight.

Julian stuffed the ends of the plastic tubing into his nostrils, inhaled deeply, and closed his eyes. I can’t explain any better than that, Ash. We’ll try again if I’m renewed.

A week went by, the lungs got better, the tank had gone. Ashton and Julian still hadn’t talked. Julian still hadn’t returned to work.

After another week, Ashton walked into Julian’s bedroom on a Saturday afternoon and surveyed the abnormal disorder inside. Julian knew his room did not look rational to a man who was used to Julian being meticulous with his belongings and who was suddenly greeted with a scene as after a ransacking or an earthquake. Hundreds of books were strewn on the bed and the floor: history, how-to, biography, travel, plays, and philosophies. Everywhere newspapers, broken pencils, open notebooks, pencil shavings, a sharpener on its side, half-empty plastic cups of water, an unmade bed, and on it, a half-naked Julian with a magnifying glass and a superbright LED lamp trained on a coffee-table tome of London paintings from the 1600s. He was trying to find a glimpse of something true somewhere, anywhere, to prove to himself she had been real. He’d been sleeping poorly, attacked by bewildering nightmares, callbacks to old visions and memories once so vivid, now half-forgotten. This time, there was no Josephine shining on the street. Instead there was terror and fire followed by a dismal icy darkness.

A pallid, unshaven Julian raised his head from the book to face Ashton grimly homing in on the chaos. Julian tried to smile. He could tell his friend wanted to make a joke, lighten the mood, but comedy was beyond even him.

“What the fuck,” Ashton said. That was as funny as he could make it.

“Don’t ask.”

“I feel I must, dude. I must ask. What the fuck.”

“Everything’s okay.”

“It’s two in the afternoon,” Ashton said, as if that was the only thing that was wrong.

“Then what are you still doing home? Did you go to Valentina’s, get us food like you said?”

“Don’t answer my questions with questions,” Ashton said. “What are you doing? What are you writing, reading, looking for? Why the magnifying glass, why the mania? What’s happening? What the fuck is happening?”

Dressed in nothing but boxer briefs, Julian swung his aching feet onto the floor. He was uncontained. He was a dead leaf in the yellow river, an ailing creature, a rotting marmoset. How could he have not seen it coming? How could he have allowed it to happen. Allowed it to happen again.

“Why are you examining this nonsense with a microscope? Old London? What are you looking for?” Ashton picked up A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. “Edmund Burke? If you’re going to self-destruct, why can’t you self-destruct with porn, with ribald novels from de Sade: Erotica, Justine?”

Julian could not explain to Ashton the inner howl of his helplessness.

“Burke wrote that all things are good that obey reason,” Ashton said. “Does anything you’re doing fit that category?”

“Did you come in just to harass me?”

“I need another reason? Put some clothes on, will you. You have a visitor.”

“You’re full of shit. Who?”

“I don’t know who, but there’s a man on the landing who says, and I quote, that he lost the piece of paper with my number but knew where I lived and you had told him to come tell me you weren’t coming back. I understood not a single fucking thing of that. The individual words maybe.”

“Devi?”

“I don’t know, Jules. I’m guessing he’s a fellow inmate, let out for an afternoon. Hurry up. It doesn’t look as if he’s got long before they come to take him back to the asylum. Kind of like you.”

A pale Devi stood at the door when Julian limped out into the living room in sweats and a pullover.

“Hello, Julian. I see you’ve returned—again.” Devi sounded so disappointed.

“You’re minimally observant.”

“Returned from where?” Ashton said.

“How are you feeling?” said Devi.

“How do I look?” said Julian.

“Like a man who’s been in a hundred and one fights. And lost them all.”

From the kitchen, Ashton smirked. “So he knows about the boxing? Wow.”

“Devi, you’ve met Ashton?”

“Not formally.”

“Ashton, Devi. Devi, Ashton.”

With wary reserve, Ashton stepped forward, and the two men shook hands, Ashton silent and blond towering over the little man silent and dark.

“Returned from where?” Ashton repeated. Neither Julian nor Devi answered. Ashton swore under his breath, grabbed his jacket and said he was going on a food run. Devi said Julian needed some plain chicken and white rice. Julian said no. Ashton said he was getting it anyway and split.

“You need food,” Devi said, coming closer.

Julian sank into the sofa.

“How’s your friend handling you?”

“Fine.”

“You haven’t told him?”

“Told him what.”

Devi perched stiffly in the corner of the opposite sofa. “Tell me.”

“You really need to be told? You know what happened.”

“I don’t.”

“Is that why you didn’t want me to go? Did you know all along?”

Devi stared into his crippled hands. “I’m waiting.”

Julian told him.

London burned. It burned to the ground. And she along with it. All the glory was laid to dust.

Then they were mute.

“Come back to Quatrang with me, Julian,” Devi said. “You need healing.” He added, “Please.”

“I’ve had just about enough of your healing, don’t you think?”

“Very often,” Devi said, “what God first helps us with is not virtue itself, but the power of trying again. And you did that. You tried again. What a noble thing that is. What a gallant effort. Don’t minimize it.”

“Hard to minimize it, Devi.” Julian rolled up his sleeve, thrusting the inside of his forearm across the coffee table into the cook’s face. “You see the ink? Forty-five minimized tattoos.”

“Is that how many days you had?”

“No. I got sick of marking them, so I missed some. A week, maybe more.”

Devi bowed his head.

“Let’s not minimize it,” Julian said. “Let’s maximize it, shall we? Here on my arm is the answer to the question I asked you before the first time I went. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“I asked you if I was going to find her young or old. And you said young. But you were wrong. Or lying. Which is it?”

Devi didn’t speak.

“I asked you at what point I was going to be inserted into her life, and you told me you didn’t know. Were you lying?”

“No.”

“Well, now you know,” Julian said. “And I know. Aren’t you glad we’re both so full of knowledge. When I find her, she’s not young.” Julian fell back against the cushions. “She is old. Each time she is at the end of her life.” Barely able to breathe, as if his lungs were still filled with smoke, he stared at the columns of black dots on his arm. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

“Is that too much time, Julian, or not enough?” Devi said. “I’m not clear. Because most of us don’t get even a picosecond extra.”

“Oh, fuck that.”

“I told you not to go,” the shaman whispered.

“You didn’t tell me she would die again!” Julian yelled.

“Control your temper. I told you, you couldn’t change things. I told you this over and over.”

“Okay, fine,” Julian said through his teeth. “You told me. I hear you—finally. Loud and clear. I’m done with this bullshit. With all of it.” He glared at Devi.

“Yes,” Devi said. “By all means live out your days in bitter pity for yourself while your life passes you by.” He stood up, gathering his hat into his hands and left.

After Ashton came back from Valentina’s with some precooked chicken and rice and found Devi gone and Julian back in his room, he banged on the bedroom door. “Food’s here.”

Julian sat on the sofa, Ashton across from him.

“So the man left?”

“The man left.”

“They took him back?” When Julian said nothing, Ashton said, “Who was he?”

“A cook from Great Eastern Road.”

“Cook. Great Eastern Road. Really. Well. Thanks for clearing that up.” When Julian offered nothing else, Ashton pressed further. “Is he the shaman you were asking me about a year ago? Some Hmong man who summoned the dead?”

Julian half-nodded.

“Does he have anything to do with what happened to you?”

Julian half-nodded.

“Jules, I can’t play twenty questions. I’m not Socrates. I’m going to start throwing shit by the next question. Talk to me. What happened to you?”

“Forget it, Ash. Honestly. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s in the past.” Julian clenched and unclenched his hands. “And you don’t want to know.”

“Like hell I don’t. And it’s not in the past. It’s the fucking here and now. Julian, you left home in the morning and by the afternoon you were in an ICU with smoke inhalation and electrocution burns. Does that sound like the past to you?”

“If I tell you, you won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

For interminable minutes, Julian stared at Ashton. “Short or long?”

“Short. Elevator pitch. Two sentences.”

“Devi showed me a way to go back in time to find Josephine. And I’ve gone twice.”

“Go back, like astral projection?”

“Go back, like body and soul.”

At first, Ashton was without words. “It’s a terrible pitch,” he said finally. “Based on that, I won’t be able to produce your script, I’m afraid. It’s not even remotely believable and you’ve left too many hanging questions. Have you got anything else? I’m serious now. Anything else.”

“The first time I went, she died,” Julian said. “And I was blasted back into my present life. It was just before you moved here. I went again a month ago. I thought I was leaving London for good. If she hadn’t died, I’d still be there with her. But … here I am, so.” He took a breath. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what, Julian,” Ashton said slowly. “How am I looking at you?”

“Like I’m nuts.”

“No.”

“I leap into a wormhole,” Julian said, “and float for a long time down an underground river, and when I come out on the other side, she lives.”

Ashton draped himself over the couch. “Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s time for the long version.” He shot up. “Wait!” From the kitchen he brought a bottle of Grey Goose, two glasses, some ice, and some soda water. He made the drinks, gave one to Julian, didn’t clink, and gulped down half of his. “Go.”

Julian spoke for a long time. Meridian, crystal, the Transit Circle, tear in the fabric of the universe, future tense, moongate, river, dead queen, Wales, Mary, Lord Falk, the Silver Cross, Mallory, Fabian, Margrave, murder, gold, the Fire. Body immolating and reforming at the speed of light. Correction: at the speed of light, squared.

Ashton reached over and swallowed Julian’s untouched vodka.

“I know how it sounds,” Julian said.

“Oh no, my friend. I don’t think you do.”

“Do you remember the dream I used to have of her? Where she is walking toward me, happy and smiling? Devi says it could be a vision of her and me in the future.”

“Well, if Devi says … You mean in the future that Devi just finished telling you doesn’t exist, or some other future?”

“Everything you’re thinking of, Ash, I’ve thought of,” said Julian. “Yet here it is. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m not lying. There is a difference.”

“Oh, a huge one. If you were lying, it would mean you were sane.”

In silence the two men sat in their open sunny flat. Julian was oddly comforted by the shellshocked look on Ashton’s normally placid face, as if his friend didn’t know how to begin to begin to figure out how to help him. You can’t help me, Ash, Julian wanted to say. You can’t help a husk whose fruits have fallen and rotted on the ground.

“Explain my injuries,” Julian said.

“I can’t explain them,” Ashton said, “but you entered a triathlon event without my knowledge. You spent a year growing a sick beard without explanation and shaved it off without explanation.”

“I shaved it off because in 1666 men didn’t have beards.”

“Oh, that’s why. You’re boxing, caving, fencing. I can’t explain any of those things. 1666. Is that when you became a landlord in a brothel?”

“Yes.”

“You, Julian Cruz, son of a professor and a principal, were a caretaker in a house of women who got naked and had sex for money?”

“Yes.”

“I’m supposed to believe this?”

“That’s the part you find unbelievable? Not wormholes and—”

“Frankly, yes. Okay, from the top. You fell in love with a girl, but then she died.”

“Yes.”

“And you found a charlatan who showed you how to travel back in time to find her.”

“A shaman, but yes.”

“Potato, potahtoe. You traveled into this past.”

“Yes.”

“Not once but twice.”

“Yes.”

“And you found her, and fell in love with her again, and she with you, and both times, she died.”

“Yes.”

“And you were a landlord in a brothel?”

Persuasion #1: Julian showed Ashton the list of casualties from Mallory’s yellowing but intact Bill of Mortality. “Look at the paper. It’s from 1665. Why is it still in such good condition?”

“That’s your proof? How the hell should I know?”

“Because,” Julian said, “the paper is only a year old, not four hundred years old.”

Apoplexie 1

Burned in his bed by a candle 1

Canker 1

Cough 2

Fright 3

Grief 3

Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1

Lethargy 1

Suddenly 1

Timpany 1

Plague 7165

“What’s timpany?” Ashton said.

“That’s your question?”

“How does one die suddenly?”

“That’s your question?”

“How does one die of grief, I wonder.”

“To paraphrase John Green,” Julian said, uncle of nieces besotted with Hazel and Augustus, “slowly, and all at once.”

Persuasion #2: Julian took Ashton to the Silver Cross, off Craig’s Court on lit-up Whitehall. It was a Friday night. They ate. They drank. They read the plaque on the wall. “THE SILVER CROSS HAS BEEN THE SITE OF A PUBLIC HOUSE SINCE THE 17^TH CENTURY AND WAS EVEN THE SITE OF A LICENSED BROTHEL.”

Persuasion #3: Julian tried to hand Ashton his breeches and tunic.

“You got them in a costume store,” Ashton said, pulling his arms behind his back.

Persuasion #4: The Elizabethan gold coin.

“It’s fake,” Ashton said.

“Do you want to know how much one of these fake coins is worth today?”

“Fine, but it’ll prove nothing.”

Julian showed him the online collector’s currency markets. An Elizabeth I gold sovereign in fairly good condition, not mint condition, was selling for £50,000. “And there were 48 more.”

“So you say.” Ashton fake-shrugged. “Yours isn’t real. And even if it is real, so what? You found it on the street.”

“I found fifty thousand quid on the street. That sounds normal to you.”

“Jules, we left normal back at Tequila Cantina’s when you showed me a ring for a chick whose mother you’d never met.”

Persuasion #5: The pièce de résistance. Julian took Ashton to St. Giles at Cripplegate. He would unveil for his friend the ultimate proof—the gold in the wall. They went to a hardware store, purchased a hammer, a chisel, a bucket, a trowel, and some mortar.

“You know,” Ashton said, pointing to the supplies in Julian’s hands, “when someone is sick and you entertain him in his sickness, you become an accomplice in his disorder.”

“Let’s see what you say after I show you a leather purse full of ancient gold coins hidden in the London Wall.”

“After, I’ll be visiting you in jail,” said Ashton, “because it’s against the law to deface a historical monument. Douchebaggery most foul. Vandalism in the first degree. In Singapore you’d get fifty lashes.”

Ashton kept watch on a bench by the church, while across the narrow canal, over a hanging bridge, Julian spent the afternoon walking up and down the same fifty feet, feeling the remains of the crumbling Roman wall with his hands. When he reached the end near the circular turret, he’d turn around and creep back, inch by inch searching for the Kentish ragstone spackled by an amateur mason. Sometimes Ashton was on his phone, but mostly, he sat and watched Julian.

Hours passed. Julian, exhausted and sore from walking bent at the waist, collapsed next to Ashton. “I don’t understand why I can’t find it. It was so easy. Down the hill, in a straight line from the nave’s last window, three feet off the ground. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense.” Ashton shook his head. “Just for a second, step out of your skin and think about how you appear to me. Hunched over for the last two hours, pacing up and down the same stretch of wall, mumbling to yourself.”

“You think I’m nuts.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, Julian. Mentally ill.” Ashton wasn’t smiling.

“You think I’m obsessing over a girl and you’re afraid that eventually that obsession is going to drive me insane.”

“Eventually? And not a girl. A coin.”

Persuasion #6: One Sunday Julian took Ashton to Greenwich. To show him the telescope, to introduce him to the guard.

“Hello, Sweeney. This is my friend, Ashton.”

“Hello, Ashton,” Sweeney said, turning to Julian. “And who are you?”

“The guy who threw up a few months ago,” Julian said. “You had to call me an ambulance, remember?”

“I don’t remember the ambulance, but so many people pass this way, mate, and I’m terrible with faces, sorry. Me memory’s really the pits. One time, there was a bloke who appeared in my Transit Room nekkid! I have no idea how he got through security with his junk hanging out.”

“Maybe it was so small they didn’t notice,” Ashton said to Sweeney, and to Julian he said, “Naked?!”

“Don’t know what that guy is on about,” said Julian.

He and Ashton stood for a few minutes in front of the well, the stairs, the railing, the glossy Transit Circle. They looked up at the gray sky through the retracted roof. Julian told Ashton about noon and infinite meridians and the blue halo opening to another dimension. They visited the gift shop, walked around the soaked gardens, stood on the stone plaza with the panorama of London laid out before them, today glum and obscured, the oaks heavy with rain, the river in a mist.

Ashton didn’t speak on the train back home.