The afternoon was drawing on, and the house was even gloomier inside than out, its walls bare, its air damp.
"Where is she?" Harry asked Raul, struggling out of his jacket.
"Let me give you a hand."
"I can do it," Harry said, impatient now. "Just take me to Tesla, will you?"
Raul nodded, his mouth tight, and ushered Har7y through to the back of the house. "We have to be careful," he said, as they came to a closed door. "Whatever's going on in here, I think it's volatile."
With that, he opened the door. The room was packed to capacity with all the paraphernalia of Grillo's beloved Reef, the sight of which put Harry in mind of Nonna's little sanctum, with its thirty screens busily keeping lost souls at bay. Here, he knew, the reverse process was at work. Here the lost and the crazy found refuge; a place to unburden themselves of all that obsessed them. Their reports were on the screens now, scrolling furiously. And sitting in front of them, her eyes closed, Testa.
"nis is how she was when I got here," Raul said. "In case you're wondering, she's breathing, but it's very slow." Harry took a step towards her, but Raul checked him. "Be careful," he said.
.'Why?"
"When I tried to get close to her I felt some kind of energy field."
"I don't feel anything," Harry said, advancing another step. As he did so something grazed his face, oh so lightly, like the tremulous wall of a bubble. He made to retreat, but he was too slow. In one paradoxical moment the bubble seemed to suck him in and burst. The room vanished, and he flew like a bullet fired into the blaze of a scarlet sun, its color pure beyond expression. A moment there, and he was gone, out the other side and into another, this one blue; and on, into a yellow, then green, then purple. And as he traveled, sun succeeding sun, vistas began to open to left and right of him, above and below, receding from him to the limit of his sight. Forms erupted on every side, stealing their incandescence from the suns he was piercing, the blaze of which was retreating now, as the forms claimed his devotion. they came at him from every direction, bombarding him with images in such numbers his mind failed to grasp a single one. He started to panic as the assault intensified, fearing his sanity would abandon him if he didn't find a rock in this maelstrom.
And then, Tesla's voice: "Harry?"
The sound fixed a vision for an instant. He saw a scene of vivid particulars. A patch of scarred ocher ground. A hole and a bitch mutt sitting beside it, chewing at her rump. A
hand with bitten fingernails emerging from the hole, tossing a shard of pottery out onto the cloth laid beside it. And Tesla-or a fragment of her-somewhere beyond the hole and the hand and the mutt.
"Thank God," Harry said, but he'd spoken too soon. The picture slid away, and he was off again, yelling for Testa as he flew. "it Is okay," she said, "hold on."
Again her voice pulled him up short. Another scene. More particulars. Dusk, this time, and distant hills. A wooden shack in a field of swaying grass, and a woman running towards him with a bawling baby in her arms. Behind her, three dark, diminutive creatures in eager pursuit, their heads huge, their eyes golden. The woman was sobbing in terror as she fled, but the child was weeping for very different reasons, its skinny arms reaching back towards the pursuers. And now, as the babe turned to beat at its mother's head, Harry saw why. Though it appeared to be a human child, its eyes were also golden.
"What's happening here?" Harry said.
"Anybody's guess," Testa replied. As she spoke he saw another piece of her in the vicinity of the shack. "It's all part of the Reef."
And now, as the child started to slip from its mother's arms, the scene slid away like the first, and on he flew, his mind starting to snatch hold of some of the dramas he was piercing. Never more than a piece-a flock of birds in ice, a coin bleeding on the ground, somebody laughing in a burning chair-but enough to know that every one of these innumerable images was part of some greater scheme.
"Amazing-" he breathed.
"Isn't it?" Testa said, and again her voice brought him to a halt. A city, this time. A lowery sky, and from it flecks of silvery light dropping lightly, like mirrored feathers. On the sidewalks below, people went about their business blind to the sight, except for one upturned face: an old man, pointing and hollering.
"What am I seeing?" Harry said.
"Stories... " Testa replied, and hearing her, Harry glimpsed another piece of her mosaic, in the crowd. "That's what Grillo gathered here. Hundreds of thousands of stories.
The street was slipping. "I'm losing you@' Harry warned.
"Just let go," Tesla replied. "I'll catch up with you somewhere else."
He did as she instructed. The street fled, and he moved on at breath-snatching speed while the stories continued to fly at him from all directions. Again, he caught only glimpses. But now he had some way to interpret the sights, however brief. There were epics and chamber pieces here; domestic dramas and quests to the end of the world; Old Testament splendors and nursery-tale terrors.
"I'm not sure I can take much more," Harry said. "I feel like I'm going to lose my mind."
"You'll find another," Tesla quipped, and again he stopped dead in the midst of a tale.
This time, however, there was something different about it. This was a story he knew. "Recognize it?" Tesla said.
Of course. It was Everville. The crossroads, Saturday afternoon, with the sun pouring down on a scene of farce and lunacy. The band on their butts; Buddenbaum digging for glory; the air laced with visions of whores. It was not the way Harry remembered it exactly, but what the hell? It held its own with anything he'd witnessed so far.
"Am I here?" he asked.
"You are now," Tesla replied.
"What?"
"Grillo was wrong, calling it a reef " Tesla went on. "A reefs dead This is still growing. Stories don't die, Harry-"
"they change?"
"Exactly. Your seeing all this enriches it,' evolves it. Nothing's ever lost. That's what I'm learning. "
"Are you going to stay?" Harry said, watching the drama at the crossroads continue to elaborate.
"For a while," she said. "There are answers here, if I can get down to the root. "
She reached out towards Harry as she spoke, and he saw that the fragments he'd glimpsed on the way here were before him still. Part of her was carved from a patch of ocher ground, and part from the hole dug there. Part resembled the shack in the field, and part the golden-eyed child. Part was made of mirror-flakes, part was the old man, pointing skyward.
And part, of course, was made from that sunlit afternoon, and from Owen Buddenbaum, who would be at the crossroads raging for as long as stories were told.
Finally, though he could not see this sliver, he knew she was also made from him, who was in this story somewhere.
I am you... the Nomad murmured in his head.
"Do you understand any of this?" Tesla asked him.
"I'm beginning to."
"It's like love, Harry. No; that's not right. I think maybe. it is love. "
She smiled at her own comprehension. And as she smiled the contact between them was broken. He flew from her, back through the blazing colors, and was returned in the bursting of a bubble to the stale room he'd departed. Raul was there, waiting for him, trembling.
"God, D'Amour," he said, "I thought I'd lost you."
Harry shook his head. "It was touch and go for a moment there," he said. "I was visiting with Tesla. She was showing me around."
He looked at the body sitting in the chair in front of the monitors. It seemed suddenly redundant: the flesh, the bone. The true Tesla-perhaps the true Harry, perhaps the true world-was back where he'd come from, telling itself in the infinite branches of the story tree. "Will she be coming back?" Raul wanted to know.