Standing in the kitchen again all ready to begin, I almost didn’t want to start, because every step would lead me closer to completion and his arrival. In comparison to this day, how quiet my life had been recently; how peaceful yet faint. Weber once sent a postcard saying, “Live every day as if your hair is on fire.” For a long time, I thought I’d had enough of that fire, with all the years of California burning up my head. But now I knew by the excitement in my heart that the months in Vienna had been too much the other extreme; too quiet, removed, and monklike. The time had made me think too much about life and frankly scared me with the darkness that was there. Leland’s arrival was the best deterrent to biting into myself with my own poisons.
I’d only just begun to cook when the doorbell rang. He stood there, holding a bouquet of flowers.
“I thought you were going to sleep!”
“I did a little, but it’s too nice outside to sleep. May I take Minnie for a walk?”
I suggested he take her up to the vineyards and she’d show him her favorite path. I stood at the door and watched them head out. She ran a way, then turned to see if he was following. He ran after her a few steps and I worried that he might hurt his side. Oh, God, Rose, I was so happy watching them. So happy and excited!
The rest of the day was great too. The meal didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, but he devoured it and complimented every dish. The conversation filled me much more than the meal did. You think you’ve led a zippy life till you meet someone like Leland; after hearing his life story, you feel as if you’ve spent all your days in a mouse hole.
He dropped out of college at nineteen when he realized the only thing he wanted to do was take pictures. Went to New York and worked as an assistant to Ovo, the fashion photographer, but the glitzy scene disgusted him. He quit and went on vacation to what was then Rhodesia. Their revolution began about five minutes after he arrived, so he was stuck in the country with little to do but take photographs of what was going on. That’s how he got started in photo journalism, and since then, it sounds as if he’s been in every ugly and dangerous place on earth. I asked if he was ever scared. He said all the time, but fear made the experiences richer and more satisfying. For fun, I started naming odd places, and he’d either been to most of them, or his plane had touched down in their airport on the way to somewhere even closer to the end of the world. He rode in a camel caravan with Mauretanian slave traders, saw a ghost hovering outside a Buddhist monastery in Nepal, was in Beijing when the Chinese army cracked down on the students. Stories on top of stories. He’s been in remote jungles and seen animals named the bongo and the armor-plated pangolin…
What do you ask someone who’s done all this? I wanted to know if he’d come to any conclusions. He said, “You know those strange spiderwebs you run into when you’re walking down a major street sometimes? What are they doing there? How’d the spiders manage to stretch their strings all the way from there to there without breaking them? How did the webs survive all this time without someone walking through them?”
I asked what he meant by that but he shrugged, got up, and said he had to go to the bathroom. He didn’t come back for a long time and I got worried. I went to the doorway and called to see if he was all right. No answer. I walked to the bathroom and saw that the door was open and the light was off. Where was he? I scooted around the first floor of the house looking for him, sure he was collapsed on a floor or leaning against a wall with his eyes closed, barely able to stand. I scolded myself for not remembering that he was wounded and that talking had probably tired him out terribly. There was a decent hospital in Klosterneuburg and I could have him there in ten minutes if necessary. But where was he?
“Arlen?”
I stopped and realized that I was so worried, I hadn’t noticed the front door was open.
“Leland? Are you out there?”
“Yes, come quick. Look what we found.”
This is what I saw when I rushed out—but there’s no way in the world I can ever do the picture justice with words. He was sitting on the front step with his back to the house. Exactly where I’d been that morning when he drove up. Minnie was against him with that wonderful full-bodied lean she uses when she loves someone and wants to be as close as she can possibly be. Just the two of them sitting out there on that stone step together, looking like drunken sailors, was enough to make me put a hand over my mouth and almost cry. Then I noticed she was craning her head up as far as it would go to see whatever it was Leland held in his cupped hands. The picture reminded me of a parent and child, or a teacher showing a student something interesting. I walked over and came up right behind him. Before I focused on his hands, Minnie looked at me not with her normal crazy excitement, but with calm love in those golden eyes.
There was a small gray-and-brown fur ball in Leland’s hands and I was about to say something when it slowly uncoiled from its protective tuck and stuck a tiny, shiny black nose off the edge of his fingers. Kilroy was here. That time I couldn’t stop an oh! from jumping out of my throat. It was an igel, Austria’s version of a hedgehog. It’s the cutest animal in the world, and sometimes at night, if you’re lucky, you see one tiptoeing slowly across the ground, stopping here and there to look around arid sniff. Minnie isn’t interested; if she does come across one, she’ll nose it and move on. But when you touch one, it normally tucks itself into a tight ball like a porcupine and stays there till the danger has passed. Here was my dog looking at the adorable thing as if it were a friend. And the igel was unafraid enough to come unwound and snoop around in Leland’s hand.
I asked where he found it and he said it’d been on the step when he came out. I was amazed—who was this guy? Robert Capa, Indiana Jones, and Saint Francis of Assisi? He asked what the creature was called, and I told him and said I’d always wanted one for a pet. Did I want that one, he asked, but I said no; I just liked the picture of the three of them together. He turned around with a beautiful smile, then put the igel down on the ground. The little thing just waddled off in no big hurry. Minnie didn’t move, but looked back at me as if to say, “See? Did you see that?” I asked Leland how he felt and he said fine. He put a hand on Minnie’s head and she leaned into him even more. The sound of a plane swept over us, and a few seconds later its flashing lights and dark shape moved across the sky. Leland took his hand off the dog’s head and reached up. He pretended to grab the fist-sized plane and bring it down slowly. Then he opened his hand to me and said, “It’s for you.”
WYATT
My second day in Vienna I raised the dead.
Jet lag set in right after Sophie, Caitlin, and I had dinner at a restaurant near our hotel. One minute I felt fine; the next, I was so exhausted that I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to get up from the table and stagger back to the room. I did, but once there I simply dropped my clothes on the floor and fell into bed.
At six-thirty the next morning I was wide awake and on the phone to Jesse Chapman, telling him to come get me in his car because we had to go someplace right away. He didn’t sound surprised. The only thing he asked was if it had to do with what we’d discussed the day before. Yes, it did. Come get me.
I was standing in front of the hotel when he pulled up half an hour later.
“Hi, Wyatt. What’s up?” There was an eagerness on his face and in his voice that hadn’t been there the day before.
“Do you know where the Friedhof der Namenlosen is?”