‘It’s out of range,’ says Max, but he fires and the eagle falls dead at his feet.
‘That was a charmed bullet in his gun,’ says Kaspar. ‘If Max wants such bullets he must meet him in the Wolf’s Glen at midnight.’
3. Despite Agathe’s fears Max goes to that haunted place where even the ghost of his mother tries to warn him away. Evil apparitions surround him but he goes down to where Kaspar, invoking Samiel, is casting seven bullets. Six will fly true but the seventh is meant to kill Agathe and give Kaspar three more years before Samiel collects his soul.
4. Agathe dreams that she is a white dove and Max is aiming at her. In the morning she hurries to where Ottokar is saying, ‘The white dove in that tree is your mark, Max.’
‘Don’t shoot!’ cries Agathe. ‘I am the white dove!’ But Max has fired. Agathe falls, but only in a swoon. Kaspar falls from the same tree, killed by Samiel’s charmed bullet.
5. Ottokar says that Max must be punished for consorting with Samiel but he asks the local holy man, a pious hermit, to decide on the sentence. Max and Agathe must stay apart for a year, says the hermit. After that they may marry. Everybody cheers and thanks God, and that’s a wrap.
‘The white dove’, my father had written, and I knew that for him the dove was more than Agathe but I was content to let it be his private bird.
I wondered what Michael would think of Der Freischütz and the white dove so I invited him over for pizza and a viewing. He arrived with a big smile on his face and an airline ticket which he waved in front of me.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘A weekend at the Grand Mayan in Acapulco,’ he chortled, ‘and two business-class seats on Aviacsa’s Friday-afternoon flight. One of the nurses has Mexican connections and she got me a big discount.’
Michael and I had never slept together and I’d made him keep his tongue in his mouth when he kissed me goodnight after a date. He was better at operating on other people’s brains than at using his own which was mostly in his pants.
‘I’m busy this weekend,’ I said.
‘Busy doing what?’
‘Busy not going to Acapulco.’
‘Come on, Angie, don’t mess with me like that.’
‘I’m not messing with you. There’s the doorbell, the pizza’s here.’
‘Pizza!’ he snorted.
‘Don’t snort,’ I said. ‘That’s what you were invited for: pizza and Der Freischütz.’
‘Der Frei-fucking-schütz,’ he resnorted, scorning italics.
‘This is Marco’s pizza classica,’ I said. ‘Don’t let it get cold. And there’s Chianti Classico.’
‘Pepperoni,’ he said when I opened the box. ‘But I like it with Hawaiian topping.’
‘If I’d known you were into that kind of perversion I wouldn’t have invited you. Shall I remove the pepperoni and put jam on your half?’
‘That does it,’ he snapped. ‘I’m outta here. And I won’t have any trouble getting somebody else for Acapulco.’
‘I hope you’ll be very happy together. Don’t slam the door on your way out. Vaya con Dios.’
That was how we parted. And that evening a hippo-griff appeared at my window. I’ll never forget my first sight of that strange beaked face and those eyes staring at me. Volatore! An imaginary creature but there he was, and in a matter of minutes I was naked on all fours under him and he covered me as the griffin had covered his mother. I screamed as his seed spurted into me, and all the while the music that had lifted him to my window was on the Bose, Olimpia lamenting her lost Bireno in the voice of Emma Kirkby.
Why and how had it happened? Had I ever since my limited reading of Ariosto nursed a subconscious passion for the hippogriff? And even if that were so, how had he broken through the membrane of his reality into mine?
Now Volatore and Jim were circling in my head like the figures in a little weather house. Who was fair weather and who was foul? I didn’t know, I was burdened well over my confusion loadline and my judgement was not to be trusted.
Eventually I fell asleep and the eyes that stared at me in the darkness of my dream were those of Volatore. In utter silence he brought his face close to mine and there were tears in his eyes.
‘Oh,’ I said, and woke up.
Chapter 56. Where from Here?
I didn’t see Jim or talk to him until our next session, two days later. Dos Arbolitos looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.
‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. ‘We go way back.’
But I was wondering what Jim was to me now; could a lover still be your shrink? Was he now my lover? Or had it just been a one-boat stand?
When I went inside Jim was wearing a cardboard smile.
‘Hi,’ he said, syncing his lips with his voice.
‘Relax,’ I said. ‘You look as if you’re expecting my dad to turn up with a shotgun.’
‘Nothing as simple as that.’
‘What, then?’
‘What did you dream last night?’
‘Ah! I see where this is going. Let’s do it like the song — you tell me your dream and I’ll tell you mine.’
‘I dreamed of your hippogriff, the same as you, right?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it felt as if it was coming from you.’
‘What was he doing in your dream?’
‘Looking at me with tears in his eyes. Was that your dream?’
‘Yes, exactly the same. Does that surprise you?’
‘Not really. When people are tuned to each other, that kind of thing can happen. It’s a sort of telepathy.’
‘Has it ever happened to you before?’
‘No.’
‘So then we’re tuned to each other, right?’
‘As I’ve said.’
‘Are you comfortable with that?’
‘I think there are things we need to sort out.’
‘Like what?’
Jim had his notebook in his hand and was leafing through it.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘The session where you said you had a reality problem and I said, “That’s called life.” Which seems to me now a little flippant. The fact is that I’d never had a client with your looks before and I was showing off. Trying to be cool.’
‘Go on.’
‘You said you were living in two realities, maybe more, and you were trying to understand them so you’d know how to deal with them. And I said that was a waste of energy, that it didn’t matter how many realities there were, you just had to handle them one at a time and do whatever had to be done.’
‘Perfectly sound advice, I thought. Still do.’
‘Wait, now we’re coming to the heart of the matter: I said that everything that happens to you — even a hallucination — is real; it’s part of your reality.’
‘So?’
‘The thing is, Angelica, sometimes you have to let go of part of your reality. Life is, after all, a succession of losses.’
‘How can you say that! Was it a loss that you and I found each other?’
‘I’m talking about the loss of such things as youthful illusions; and adult delusions.’
‘Get to the point, Jim.’
‘Your Volatore thing, for example.’
‘My Volatore thing? I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Are you jealous, is that it?’
‘I don’t want your Volatore reality to interfere with the reality you and I share.’
‘Are you afraid that Volatore is stronger than you are?’ All sorts of thoughts were running through my mind when I said that. I remembered Vassily Baby and the ease with which he had expelled Volatore. ‘Jim, are you afraid of Volatore?’