Increasingly impatient, Tesla scrolled page after page after page, still hoping for come clue to the mystery in her cells. And while she dug, the reports kept pouring in from all directions.
From Kentucky a woman who claimed she had been twice raped by "the Higher Ones," whoever they were, checked in to report that her violators were now moving south-southeast towards the state, and would be visible tomorrow dusk in the form of a yellow cloud "that will look like two angels tied back to back." From New Orleans a certain Dr. Toumier wanted to share his discovery that disease was caused by an inability to speak "with a true tongue," and that he had cured over six hundred patients thought terminal by teaching them the basic vocabulary of a language he dubbed Nazque. From her home town of Philadelphia came a piece of psychotic prose from one who signed himself (it was surely a man) the Cockatrice, warning the world that from Wednesday next he would be in glory, and only the blind would be safe For three days she remained hostage to the Reef, like an atheist locked in the Vatican library, contemptuous, repulsed even, but going back and back to the shelves, morbidly fascinated by the dogmas she found there. Even in her most frustrated moods she could not quite shake the suspicion that somewhere amid this wilderness of insanities were gems she could profit by-knowledge of the Art, knowledge of the lad-if only she could find them. But it became increasingly clear that she might very well have passed over them already, their form so garbled or their code so dense she'd failed to recognize them for what they were. At last, in the middle of the afternoon of the fifth day, she told herself: If you do this much longer you'll be as crazy as they are. Turn it off, woman. Just turn the dwnn thing off.
She flicked back to the file list, and was about to kill the machines when one of the names caught her eye.
The Ride Is Over, it read.
Perhaps she'd passed over these four words before, and not recognized them, but now they rang bells. The Ride Is Over had been the headline Grillo had wanted for his last report from Palomo Grove; he'd told her later she could use it for a screenplay if she wanted, as long as the movie was cheap and opportunistic. It was probably just a coincidence but she called up the file anyway, determined it would be the last. Her heart jumped at the words that appeared on the screen.
Tesla, Grillo had written, I hope it's you out there. But whether it is or it isn, t, I guess it doesn't matter much now, because if you're reading this-whoever you are-I'm dead.
It was the last thing she'd expected to find, but now that it was there in front of her, she wasn't so surprised. He'd known he was dying, after all, and though he'd always hated farewells, even of the casual variety, he was still a journalist to the bone. Here was his final report then: intended for a readership of one.
It's the middle of June right now, he'd written, and the last couple of weeks I've been feeling like shit. The doc says things are movingfaster than he's seen before. He wants me to go in for tests, but I told him I'd prefer to use the time working. He asked me on what, and of course I couldn't tell him about the Reef so I lied and said I was writing a book.
(It's strange. While I'm typing this I'm imagining you sitting there, Tes, reading it, hearing my voice in your head.) She could; she could hear it loud and clear.
I tried to write once, when Ifirst got the bad news. I'm not sure it was ever going to be a book, but I did try and put down a few memories, to see how they looked on the page. And you know what? they were clich@s, all of them. What I remembered was real enough-the feel of my mother's cheek, the smell of my dad's cigars; summers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; a couple of Christmases in Maine with my grandmother-but there was nothing that you couldn't find in a million autobiographies.
It didn't make the memories any less meaningful to me, but it did make the idea of writing them down redundant.
So I thought.- Okay, maybe I'll write about the things that happened in the Grove. Not just what went on at Coney Eye, but about Ellen (I think of her a lot these days) and her kid, Philip (I don't remember if you met him or not), and Fletcher in the mall But that plan went to shit just as quickly. I'd be writing away and some report would come in from Buttfuck, Ohio, about angels or UFOs or skunks speaking in tongues, and when I got back to what I'd been writing the words were like week-old cold cuts. they just lay there, stale and tasteless and gray.
I was so pissed with myself. Here was me, the wordsmith, writing about something that had actually happened in the real world, and I couldn't make it sing; not the way these crazies who were putting down whatever wild shit came into their heads could do it.
Then I began to see why Tesla leaned forward at this juncture, as if she and Grillo were debating over a couple of glasses of vodka, and now he was getting to the crux of his argument.
"Tell me, Grillo," she murmured to the screen, "tell me why."
I wouldn't let the truth go. I wanted to describe things just the way they'd happened (no, that's not right,- the way I remembered them happening), so I killed what I was doing trying to be precise, instead of letting itfly, letting it sing. Letting it be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.
What really happened in Palomo Grove doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the stories people tell about it.
I'm thinking while I'm writing this: None of it makes much sense, it's justfragments. Maybe you can connect it up for me, Tes.
That's part of it, isn't it? Connecting everything.
I know if I couldjust let my mother's skin and Christmas in Maine and Ellen and Fletcher and the talking skunks and every damn thing I everfelt or saw be part of the same story and called that story me, instead of always looking for something separate from the things I've fel@ or seen, it wouldn't matter that I was going to die soon, because I'd be part of what was going on and on. Connecting and connecting.
The way I see it now, the story doesn't give a ihit if you're real or not, alive or not. All the story wants is to be told. And I guess in the end, that's what I want too.
Will you do thatfor me, Tes?
Will you make me part of what you tell? Always?
She wiped the tears from her eyes, smiling at the screen, as though Grillo was leaning back in his chair, sipping his vodka, waiting for her to reply.
"You've got it, Grillo," she said, reaching out to touch the glass. "So she added, "what happens next?" The age-old question.
There was a breathless moment while the glass trembled beneath her fingers. Then she knew.
September had been a month of recuperation for Harry. He'd made a project of tidying his tiny office on Forty-fifth Street; touched base with friends he hadn't seen all summer; even attempted to reignite a few amorous fuses around town. In this last he was completely unsuccessfuclass="underline" Only one of the women for whom he left messages returned his call, and only to remind him that he'd borrowed fifty bucks.
He was not unhappy then, to find a girl in her late teens at his apartment door that Tuesday night in early October. She had a ring through her left nostril, a black dress too short for her health, and a package.
"Are you Harry?" she said.
I 11
'Yep.
"I'm Sabina. I got something for you." The parcel was cylindrical, four feet long, and wrapped in brown paper. "You want to take it from me?" she said.
"What is it?"
"I'm going to drop it-2' the girl said, and let the thing go. Harry caught it before it hit the floor. "It's a present."
"Who from?"