This was not the condition that he'd expected to be in when he went to confront Sethlynn, but as long as she didn't misinterpret the smile he could not remove from his face, perhaps it wasn't an inappropriate state. If she was indeed the sensitive Patrick had claimed her to be, then she'd know his euphoria was genuine. Focusing attention on the simple business of walking two blocks to her door was problematical, however. Everywhere he looked, sights distracted him. A wall, a roof, a reflection in a window: all demanded he take the time to stand and gawp. How many days, weeks, months of his life had he waited in a mud-hole or a tree on another continent for a glimpse of something he wanted to put on film - and how often left the field unsatisfied? - while here, all along, on this street ten miles from where he lived were profligate glories, eager to be seen? And if he'd spent that time teaching his camera to see with the eyes he was using right now - taught it even a tiny part of that sight - would he not have converted every soul who saw his pictures to the greater good? Would they not have looked astonished, and said is this the world? and realizing that it was, become its protector?
Oh God, why had the fox not opened his head fifteen years ago, and saved him all that wasted time?
It took him the better part of an hour to walk the two blocks to reach the porch of Bethlynn's unostentatious bungalow, but by the time he did, he had his wits about him again, and was ready to take the smile off his face and play the reformed reprobate. She took a little time to respond to his rapping however, during which time the intricacy of the cracks on the step drew his admiration, and when she finally opened the door, he looked up at her with an asinine smirk on his face.
'What do you want?' she said.
He mumbled the barest minimum: 'I came to apologize.'
'Did you really?' she said, her appraisal of him less than promising.
'I was ... looking at the cracks on your step ...' he said, trying to explain his smile away. She scrutinized him a little harder. 'Are you all right?' she said.
'Yes ... and ... no,' he replied.
She kept staring at him, with a look on her face he couldn't quite interpret. Plainly she was sensing something about him other than how well he'd cleaned his teeth this morning. And whatever it was - his aura, his vibrations - she seemed to trust what she felt, because she said: 'We can talk inside,' and stepping back from the door, ushered him into the house.
CHAPTER XI
The interior was not what he expected at all. There were no astrological charts, no incense burners, no healing crystals on the table. The large room she brought him into was sparsely but comfortably furnished, the paintwork a calming beige, the walls bare but for a family photograph. The only other decoration was a vase of camellias set on the sill. The window was open a little way, and the breeze sweetened the room with the scent of their petals.
'Please sit down,' she said. 'Do you want something to drink?'
'Some water would be just great. Thank you.'
She went to get it, leaving him to settle into the comfort of the sofa. He'd no sooner done so than an enormous tabby cat leapt up onto the armrest - his nimbleness belying his bulk - and, purring in anticipation of Will's touch, vamped towards him. 'My God, you're quite a piece of work,' Will said.
The cat put his head beneath his hand, and pressed itself against his palm.
'Genghis, stop being pushy,' Bethlynn said, returning with the water.
'Genghis? As in Khan?'
Bethlynn nodded. 'The terrorizer of Christendom.' She set Will's water on the table, and sipped from her own glass. 'A pagan to his care.'
'The cat or the Khan?'
'Both,' Bethlynn said. 'Don't be too flattered. He likes everyone.'
'Good for him,' Will said. 'Look, about Pat's party: it was my fault; I was in one of my contrary moods, and I'm sorry.'
'One apology's quite sufficient,' Bethlynn said, her tone wanner than her vocabulary. 'We all make assumptions about people. I made some about you, I'll admit, and they were no more flattering than those you made about me.'
'Because of my pictures?'
'And some articles I'd read. Maybe you were misrepresented, but I must say you seemed very much the professional pessimist.'
'I wasn't misrepresented. It was just ... a consequence of what I'd seen ...' Despite his best efforts, he felt the same idiot smile she'd met on the doorstep creeping back onto his face as he talked. Even in this almost ascetically plain room, his eyes were bringing him revelations.
The sunlight on the wall, the flowers on the sill, the cat on his lap; all sheen and shift and flutes of colour. It was all he could do not to let the threads of his sober exchange with Beihlynn go, and babble like a child about what he was seeing and seeing.
'I know you probably think a lot of what I share with Patrick is sentimental nonsense,' Bethlynn was telling him, 'but healing isn't a business for me, it's a vocation. I do what I do because I want to help people.'
'You think you can heal him?'
'Not in the medical sense, no. He has a virus. I can't make it curl up and die. But I can put him in touch with the Patrick that isn't sick. The Patrick that can never be sick, because he's part of something that's beyond sickness.'
'Part of God?'
'If that's the word you want to use,' Bethlynn said. 'It's a little Old Testament for me.'
'But God's what you mean?'
'Yes, God's what I mean.'
'Does Patrick know that's what's going on? Or does he think he's going to get better?'
'You don't need to ask me that,' Bethlynn said. 'You know him at a far deeper level than I do. He's a very intelligent man. Just because he's ill doesn't mean he's lying to himself.'
'With respect,' Will said, 'that's not what I'm asking.'
'If you're asking have I been lying to him, the answer's no. I've never promised him he'd get out of this alive. But he can and will get out whole.'
'What do you mean by that?'
'I mean once he finds himself in the eternal, then he won't be afraid of death. He'll see it for what it is. Part of the process. No more nor less.'
'If it's part of the process, why did it matter if he looked at my pictures or not?'
`I wondered when we'd get to that,' Bethlynn said, easing back in her chair. 'I just ... didn't feel they were a positive influence on him, that's all. He's very raw at the moment; very responsive to influences good and bad. Your pictures are extremely powerful, Will, there's no question about that. They exercised an almost mesmeric hold on me when I first saw them. I'd go as far as to say they're a form of magic.'
'They're just pictures of animals,' Will said.
'They're a lot more than that. And ... if you'll forgive my saying so, which you may not . , . a lot less.' On another day, in another state of mind, Will would have been rising to the defence of his work by now. Instead he listened with an easy detachment. 'You disagree?' Bethlynn said.
'About the magic part, yes.'
'When I say magic I'm not talking about something from a faery tale. I'm talking about working change in the world. That's what your art's intended to do, isn't it? It's an attempt, a misdirected one, I think, but perfectly sincere attempt to work change. Now you could say all art's trying to do that, and maybe it is, but you know the forces your work plays with. It's trying for something more potent than a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. In other words, I think you have the instincts of a shaman. You want to be a go-between, a channel by which some vision that's larger than the human perspective - perhaps it's a divine vision, perhaps it's demoniacal, I'm not sure you'd know the difference - is communicated to the tribe. Does any of that sound plausible to you, or are you just sitting there thinking I talk too much?'