But who’ll take care of her? I wanted to shout. Of course that’s part of the plan. Kick out one and the rest of the family will follow, even if they have work. Efficient.
So we sit at the kitchen table. Pam’s post-doc has seven months to go. She needs to finish—even with it it’ll be hard to find work in the States, with all regulatory agencies under a hiring freeze. She’s thinking about that, I can see. Eight years’ work, and for what. I’ll have to take Liddy, too—Pam can’t work and care for her both. We have a month to get out. Meaning six months apart. The post-docs from China have to do worse than that all the time. But with Liddy so young.
We can protest, I say. Pam shakes her head, mouth bitter. Picks up In’tl Herald Tribune. Southern Club defaulting on all debt. Prediction of twenty-five percent reduction in world population called optimistic by. Civil war in India, in Mexico, in. Deforestation in. World temperature up another degree Centigrade since. Species going extinct—
I’ve already read it.
Pam throws the paper aside, looking beat. Never seen her so grim. Stands to wash dishes. I watch her back and can see she’s crying. Six months.
We are the aristocracy of the world. But this time the revolution will bring down more than the aristocracy. Could be everything. Crumpled newspaper, compartmentalized disaster. Catastrophe by percentage points.
We can avoid it, I swear we can. Must concentrate on that to be able to continue.
When the heart dies, you can’t even grieve.
Tom rolled out of bed feeling old. Antediluvian. Contemporary of the background radiation. Eighty-one years old, actually. Well-propped by geriatric drugs which he abused assiduously, but still. He groaned, limped to the bathroom. Came awake and the great solitude settled on him again.
Standing in the doorway, looking out at the sage sunlight and not seeing a thing. Depression is like that. Sleep disrupted, affect blocked, nothing left but wood under the skin and an urge to cry. The best pills could do was to take the last feeling away and make it all wood. Which was a relief, although depressing in its own way if you considered it.
It was this: when his wife died he had gone crazy. And while he was crazy, he had decided never to become sane again. What was the point? Nothing mattered any more.
Say two strong trees grow together, in a spiraling of trunks. Say one of the trees dies and is cut away. Say the other is left twisted like a corkscrew, an oddity, always turning in an upward reach, stretch, search. Leafy branches bobbing, searching the air for something lost forever.
So the great solitude settled on him. No one to talk to, nothing interesting to do. Even the things he had enjoyed doing alone were not the same, because the solitude in them was not the same as the great solitude. The great solitude had seeped into everything, into the sage sunlight and the rustle of leaves, and it had become the condition of his madness, the definition of it, its heart.
He stood in the doorway, feeling it.
Only now he had been disturbed. A face from the past. Had he really lived that life? Sometimes it was flatly impossible to believe. Surely every morning he woke up an entirely new creature, oppressed by false visions of false pasts. The great solitude provided a continuity of sorts, but perhaps it was just that he had been condemned to wake up every morning in the body of yet another creature under its spell. The Tom Barnard who ran buffeted in the storms of his twenties. Later the canny lawyer chopping away at the law of the land, changing it, replacing it with laws more just, more beautiful. We can escape our memes just as we escaped our genes! they had all cried then. Perhaps they were wrong on both accounts, but the belief of the moment, of that particular incarnation…
A face from a previous incarnation. My name is Bridey Murphy, I can speak Gaelic, I knew a Russian beauty once with raven hair and a wit like the slicer for electron microscopes. Sure you did—Anastasia, right? And he’s your grandson, too, the builder. Sure. A likely story. We can escape our genes, perhaps it was true. If he himself woke a new creature every morning, why expect his daughter’s son to bear any resemblance to any incarnation along the way? We live with strangers. We live with dis-junctures; he had never done any of it; just as likely to have been raising bees in some bombed-out forest, or lying flat on his back in an old folks’ home, choking for breath. Incarnations too, no doubt, following other lines. That he had carved this line to this spot, that the world had spun along to this sage sunlight and the great solitude; impossible to believe. He would never become sane again.
But that face. That tough sharp voice, its undercurrent of scorn. He had liked her, in Singapore, he had thought her… attractive. Exotic. And once he and his young wife had climbed up through the cactus on the back side of Rattlesnake Hill, to watch a sunset and make love in a grove of trees they had helped to plant some incarnations before, in a dream of children. Sylphlike naked woman, standing between trees in the dusk. And jumping across time, a ghost of joy. Like an arrow into wood, thunk. Pale smooth skin, dark rough bark, and in that vision a sudden spark, the ghost of an epiphany.
They shouldn’t be allowed to take that hill.
Bridey Murphy, the canny lawyer, stirring inside. “God damn it,” he cried, “why didn’t you leave me alone!”
He limped back inside and threw on his clothes. He looked at the cascading sheets on the bed and sat on it and cried. Then he laughed, sitting there on his bed. “Shit,” he said, and put on his shoes.
So he came down out of the hills. Through trees, sunbeams breaking in leaves, scuffing the trail, watching for birds. At Black Star Canyon road he got on his little mountain bike and coasted down to Chapman. Coming through the cleft in the hills he looked to the right, up Crawford Canyon to Rattlesnake Hill. Scrub and cactus, a little grove of live oak, black walnut and sycamore on its round peak. The rest of the hills in view were all built up, exotic trees towering over homes, sure. Height equals money equals power. A miracle any hill was left bare. But OC Water District had owned Rattlesnake Hill before El Modena incorporated, and they were tough. Toughest watermasters in California, and that was saying a lot. So they had kept it clear. But a year or two before, they had deeded it over to the town; they hadn’t needed it to fulfill their task, and the task was all that mattered to them. So now El Modena owned it, and they would have to decide what it was for.
Farther down Chapman he passed Pedro Sanchez, Emilia Deutsch, Sylvia Waters and John Smith. “Hey, Tom Barnard! Tom!” They all yelled at him. Old friends all. “Doesn’t anything ever change down here?” he said to them, braking to a halt. Big smiles, awkward chat. No, nothing ever changed. Or so it seemed. Nothing but him. “I’m off to find Kevin.” “They’re playing a game,” Pedro told him. “Down on Esplanade.” Invitations to come over for dinner, cheery good-byes. He biked off, feeling strange. This had been his town, his community. Years and years.
Down on the Esplanade diamonds a softball game was in progress. The sight of it stopped him, and again the wood in him was pierced by ghost arrows. He had to stop.
There on a rise behind the Lobos dugout lolled Nadezhda Katayev and a tall fat man, laughing at something. He gulped, felt his pulse in him. Out of the habit of talking; a great wash of something like grief passed through him, lifted the wood, buoyed it up. Grief, or…