I started to walk away but he uncoiled out of himself and grabbed my hand with both of his – not hard, not snared – and said, ‘I’m Clyde. My name is Clyde Hibbard. Hi. Hi, how are you?’ He smiled uncertainly.
I let him hold my hand a moment, then gently slipped it free. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I said, ‘My name is Jennifer Raine, Goldie Hart, Serena del Rio, Belle Tinker, Annie Oakley, Lola Montez. Mia and I are new here. Just checked in. Glad to meet you, Clyde.’
He was nodding excitedly. ‘You-you-you are beautiful. You are. Just like the other men said. Beautiful.’
I tried to tell him as clearly as I could: ‘I’m not what anyone says, Clyde. Either are you. It’s complicated enough being who we are.’
It only bewildered him. He fastened his gaze back on the clock.
‘Nice talking to you, Clyde,’ I said. ‘I have to find my daughter now.’
He swung his eyes to mine, pleading a case I didn’t understand. ‘I’m thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three years old.’
‘Don’t watch the clock, Clyde,’ I said. ‘Clocks lie. Watch the sun and moon.’ I squeezed his shoulder quickly, and left him there.
And I didn’t see him again till he was on top of me tonight like some nightmare lover pecking my face with slobbery kisses. I think that’s all he really wanted to do, kiss me, because he had his clothes on and wasn’t choking me or anything, but just his weight had me pinned, my arms under the covers. But I didn’t know what he wanted, and I was terrified, so I yelled for Mia to crawl under the bed so she wouldn’t have to watch and then I tried to fight out from under him, twisting my face away from his mouth, finally squirming an arm loose, and when I turned to roll free my elbow caught him in the nose. The pain seemed to startle him, then scare him. He grabbed my bare shoulders hard, shaking his head as he looked at my face. ‘Please, please, please,’ he blubbered, each ragged breath spraying blood from his nose on my face, shoulders, breasts. He shut his eyes and lowered his head, moaning ‘Please, please, love, I love you, please.’
When he started sobbing he let go of my shoulders and I slapped him as hard as I could. He flinched and ducked as I swung again, and I know if I had a gun it would have meant nothing to me, nothing, to blow his stupid fucking brains out.
‘Love you,’ he cried, eyes closed, shaking his head.
‘No. You have to ask, Clyde. You need permission. This is rape, Clyde; you’re scaring me, hurting me.’
He opened his eyes then, looking at me, and his eyes just kept getting wider, as if he was trying to open them far enough to hold what he was seeing in my face. He worked his mouth, a gummy white string of spittle at the corner, a wet, strangled whimper rising from his throat.
I realized he was looking at his blood on my face. ‘You hurt me, Clyde,’ I hissed. ‘You did.’
He lifted his hands helplessly, beseechingly, his mouth trembling to speak what he found impossible to believe.
I helped him believe. ‘It hurts, goddamn you, Clyde, you motherfucker, it hurts!’
‘No,’ he begged me. ‘Love you. I do. I do. I do.’
It was too much pain and hopelessness and fear. I started crying.
‘I hurt you,’ Clyde said, amazed, destroyed, lost. He slid off me onto the floor and curled up in a ball, sobbing. I jumped naked from the bed, looking for something to club him with, or to scream for help, or run, but instead I knelt down beside him, stroked his shoulder, whispered it was all right, it was over.
I promised him I wouldn’t tell.
He promised he’d help me escape.
Daniel reappeared with the Diamond. He was sitting cross-legged, the Diamond before him, on a high desert somewhere in Arizona on a windless, starless night, with the moon close to the horizon. He was crying, but he couldn’t remember why. Not because he couldn’t see inside the Diamond-center flame. He would eventually. The Diamond needed to be seen as much as he needed to see it. He could feel the permission there, but not the way. He would just have to keep sitting at the gate, keep mapping the axis of light until it illuminated the way. He smiled at the memory of Wild Bill trying to hammer into him that the map was not the journey.
‘Okay, Wild Bill,’ he said aloud, ‘until it illuminates the territory.’
He looked at the Diamond in front of him and told Volta, ‘It’s not a metaphor. It’s not the seed of the next universe. It is not a beacon. I think the Diamond is an entrance, a door, a portal – into what, I don’t know, but I will find out. When I do, and if I can, I will bring it to you.’
Since the telephone call nearly a day ago, Daniel talked aloud to Volta to discover and rehearse what he wanted to say the next time he called. He’d been too rattled from the theft the first time, less certain. One part of Daniel’s new certainty was the understanding that the Diamond wouldn’t permit him full passage until he honored his agreement with Volta or could explain, to his satisfaction and Volta’s, why he couldn’t bring him the Diamond. Daniel’s failure to fulfill his part of the agreement upset him deeply. He wondered if that was why he was crying when he reappeared, or if it was because he’d had to return. He checked his watch: They’d been gone five hours.
He’d discovered that when the Diamond vanished with him in daylight, he couldn’t see the spiral flame inside. The flame either dissolved in the sunlight or fused with it. The spiral-flame center was only visible when he vanished at night, and Daniel was convinced the flame was the threshold he needed to cross to enter the sphere.
He wiped his tears. As he got to his feet, he was seized by a vision of two moons on the horizon, one setting, one rising to meet it in mirror image. For a spinning moment he thought the moon was setting over the ocean or a lake, but unless the desert had turned liquid this was physically impossible. But so, supposedly, was vanishing. He thought his tears might be refracting the light and wiped his eyes again, this time with his sleeve. When he looked up, the moons were almost touching, as if a ghost twin were rising to join the real moon. He watched them melt into one. The moon seemed to brighten as it set.