Starting to graduate down to finer details, we converged on a section of the encircling wall that was free of ivy, and, aside from the statues, the only aspect of these gardens-run-amok that alluded to the touch of human hands. Vanessa traced their long-ago labours with her own, fingertips caressing one of several malformed faces that leered from the wall, bulging from the stone in bas-relief.
‘God, they look like they could take your hand off in half a second,’ Heather said. ‘They’re worse than snapping turtles.’
‘Meaner, maybe,’ I said. ‘But not a whole lot brighter.’
‘Hush, both of you.’ Vanessa, doing some snapping of her own. ‘You’ll hurt their feelings.’
‘Oh, go hug a tree,’ I said, just to be contentious, only half in play, my elder self swimming up from the depths. In truth, it was still closer to the surface than I would’ve liked, but I really was trying to be a born-again lackadaisical transient.
The carvings on the wall were the sort of thing I generally associated with churches, and old churches at that — cathedrals, really — mediaeval leftovers from Catholicism’s gaudier heritage, when popes and priests still condoned a discreet nod towards all things heathen that they’d borrowed, burned, or buried beneath a layer of revisionism. Then again, some people just think they look bitchin’. Hard to say how old these particular fellows were, but they certainly didn’t appear to have put up with centuries of weathering. If they’d been carved much before 1900, I would’ve been very surprised to hear it.
They were almost all head, and their heads almost all mouth. Fierce of eye, they gaped or seemed to bellow. Their arms and legs and compact barrel-bodies looked stumpy by comparison. Some of them reached around to grab their mouths at the corner and stretch them wider still, exposing the depths of their gullets. Giants, I guessed they were, because others grappled with smaller figures of normal human proportion and stuffed these poor unfortunates into their vast maws.
‘Fe fi fo fum,’ I whispered into Vanessa’s ear, quietly, so they wouldn’t hear me. ‘I smell the blood of an American.’ Nuzzling her there and nipping at her lobe until she laughed and pushed me away.
‘What do they mean?’ Heather asked, defaulting to Vanessa on this one. ‘They’ve got to mean something, don’t they?’
‘Oh sure. It’s like pictures in stained-glass, they have a story to tell, a little lesson in them.’ Vanessa shot a playfully bitchy glance at me. ‘For illiterates.’
‘So what is it these fatheads have to say to us?’ Heather said.
‘If I’m remembering correctly, they’re to remind us that there are always forces out there much greater than we are.’
‘Wow, they’re absolutely right,’ I said. ‘For me, it was Microsoft.’
I expected recriminations from Vanessa, but no — something clearly more important had crossed her mind. She glanced about the gardens, then broke loose with a slow, broad smile as she looked at Heather and me.
‘We’ll do it here, right here, tomorrow,’ she told us. ‘Haven’t I been saying all along we’d know the right spot when we found it?’
And it was fine with me, because the place really was beautiful, and we surely wouldn’t be lucky enough to blunder across another like it anytime soon. Heather looked startled for a moment, as if our intentions had never been genuinely real until this moment, and the truth of it was only now sinking in.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said.
‘Besides,’ and Vanessa swept her hand toward the devouring heads peering from their wall, ‘if we’re getting married, we really should have witnesses.’
The money. Oh, right — that.
There are no better mousetraps any more. These days, if you want the world to beat a path to your door, you’d best come up with something new and improved going on at the other end of the mouse plugged into your computer. While still in college, I founded a little start-up software company called Cerulean Data that grew in surges over the next ten years. Our greatest achievement was developing an applications programming interface that brought the giants calling. Next big leap forward in better-faster-wilder 3D graphics. Simply put, the giants had to have it.
There arose a mighty tug-of-war over how I should handle this, with my accountants and lawyers on one side, my doctor on the other. The former clamoured in favour of licensing the API, since through me, they’d make far more money that way in the long run. But let it be understood they weren’t the ones with blood on their toilet paper, the trickle-down effect of my ravaging ulcer. My doctor, who had told me more than once that I was killing myself, voted to sell the company.
In a college business course I had learned that during the development of the original Macintosh, one of Apple Computer’s founders gave out T-shirts to his employees that said 90 HRS/WK AND LOVING IT. That’ll never be me, I vowed. Never wear a shirt like that. No. I’m going to have a life.
Ten, eleven years later, anyone who might’ve heard me back then would have been fully entitled to laugh themselves silly.
Human beings aren’t meant to live this way, Vanessa told me, because by this time she had moved into our condo and come to realise that Heather wasn’t exaggerating about how little time I actually spent there. Visitor in my own home. Human beings weren’t meant to shit blood either, but it happens.
Cerulean Data had gone public two years before Microsoft came knocking, with me as the major shareholder, and the last thing the other shareholders’ board of directors was going to do was stand in the way of something like this. All they did was rub their pudgy hands in anticipation, because they knew exactly what would happen with their stock.
So did I. So did Heather. She brokered the deals for herself and Vanessa, the two of them pulling every penny they had out of the bank and borrowing money from whoever would lend it to them to buy up as much stock as they could, then sit back and wait for the windfall. Insider trading, it’s called, and plenty of people have gone to prison for it. Worth the risk, though, and I don’t know but that only half of it was the money, and the rest of it the thrill of committing a smash-and-grab on a world that each of us wanted less and less to do with…
Maybe because of everybody we’d found out we had to share the place with.
Since Heather and Vanessa had their hearts set on a noon ceremony, in which we would each profess our vows to the other two with the sun at its zenith overhead, we planned to spend the night in the manor house. We found a ratty old broom and swept clean an area in front of the fireplace in what might once have been the drawing room. A quick test with dry leaves and scavenged kindling proved that the flue still drew smoke, and so we built a fire and spread out our sleeping bags, and it was as fine a lodging as any hotel or B&B where we’d spent a night, as long as you could overlook the lack of running water and a proper bathroom.
Food we had, bread and cheese and apples and wine, and as night fell past the windows, the chill deepened beyond the circle cast by our fire. It was all the light in the world right now, and all we needed. We sat cross-legged or sprawled along our spread sleeping bags and it seemed befitting to tell stories about this place we had found. How it had come to be; how it had got this way.