“So you had Nicholas Bonner,” Farrell said gently. “Conceived in hunger, out of loneliness. Does he know he’s your son?”
“He knows I did not have him,” she said. “He knows I made him. Do you understand me?” Her voice was as sad and cruel as wind crawling around the corners of a house. “What he knows is that I made him in myself, by myself, not even really out of loneliness, but out of contempt, such contempt for mysteries, oracles, temples, all those warrens of little half-gods and quarter-gods, that helpless vampire need that illusions have for adoration. I was going to make a child who could exist without fraudulence, who would be a god if nothing in the universe ever worshiped him. Contempt and vanity, you see. Even for a goddess, I have always been vain.”
Farrell wanted to go to her as she stood at the window with her back to him, but, like Briseis, he dared not cross the border of her pain. He said only, “Well, he scares the pure hell out of me, but he’s not a god. Not if you are.”
“He is not anything. You cannot make anything useful out of contempt and vanity, no matter who you are. Nicholas Bonner is not a god, not human, not a spirit of power—he is nothing, nothing but immortal and eternally enraged at me. As he should be. Can you begin to imagine what I did to him?” She turned to look at Farrell, and her face was gray and small. “Can you imagine what it might be like to know certainly that you have no business existing anywhere—that there is no possible place for you from one end of the universe to the other? Can you imagine how that would feel, Joe? Knowing that you can never even die and be free of this terrible not-life, never? That is what I did to my son, Nicholas Bonner.”
Farrell said, “You must have tried to—l don’t know—to unmake him. You were stronger then, you must have tried.”
Sia nodded impatiently. “I could not do it, I was never strong enough. I was exactly like your little witch, just playing with power for every wrong reason and stumbling onto something that would take a miracle to undo. The most I have ever been able to do is to send him very far away, to a place you might call limbo. I don’t want to talk about it. There is nothing to do there but try to sleep and wait for someone to summon you by mistake. Someone always does.” She chuckled suddenly, grimly, and added, “He always looks like that, by the way. My bodies all seem to be older and uglier each time, but Nicholas Bonner is fourteen years old forever.”
“He hates it there,” Farrell said, remembering that first long cry of terror in the redwood grove: Hither then, swiftly, for I’m cold, I’m cold. Sia nodded, looking away. Farrell said, “Something is squeezing this house like a nutcracker. I can’t feel it here, but everywhere else. What’s going on?”
“It has begun.” Her voice was placid, almost indifferent. “In time, maybe a few days, they will try again to come into my house, and he will try to make me go to that place where I have sent him before. I wonder if the girl is strong enough to enter this room. The house, yes, I think so, but perhaps not here.” She took Farrell’s hand between her square, stubby-fingered ones, smiling at him, but not drawing him across the invisible line. She said, “Joe, goodness, don’t look that way. There is nothing Nicholas Bonner can do but destroy me for the sake of some justice. The dreadful thing is that it is all he can do.”
When Farrell continued to stare at her without speaking, she sighed a little and put his hand away from her. “You can go now, Joe. I just needed a little company for a while. I will be fine here, thank you.” But she looked all at once like a very young girl trembling with her first real lie. Farrell wanted to hold her, but she turned away again, and he found himself approaching the door, trying to look back. Someone in the room was making tiny, disconsolate sounds; he assumed it was Briseis, and then realized that the sounds were his own.
He had begun to open the door, already feeling the jaws of air beyond closing slowly on him, when she said, “Stay, Joe. I am not fine. Stay with me until Ben comes home.”
So Farrell stood at the window with her, and they held hands while the house whined and sang and moaned all around the imaginary bubble of her room. He did not want to look out of her window ever again, but she said, “It’s all right, there is only Avicenna out there now, I promise you. Sometimes that is all I see.” And she kept her word; the high windows looked down on remembered roofs and streets, parked cars, the bright haze of the Bay, and people Farrell knew working in their gardens, appearing motionless as waves seen from far away.
“I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another than eat—oh, there is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do to stay here ten minutes longer. Oh, I will leave clawmarks, I will drag mountains and forests away under my fingernails when I am dragged off. Such a stupid way to feel. I will be all dirty from clutching at this stupid planet, and the gods will laugh at me.”
Farrell said, “When we made love, it wasn’t really me, was it?” She did not answer, but held his hand against her breast. “Clutching at the whole stupid planet?” Sia nodded, and Farrell said, “I’m honored,” and they waited silently after that until Ben came home.
Chapter 18
Julie did not call; instead, she came to find him late one afternoon at the restoration shop. Farrell smelled her before he saw her and scrambled out of a rumble seat he was reupholstering, trying hard to look distantly pleased. She stood the car’s length away from him, announcing, “I’m still pissed at you, but I miss you. We have things to talk about, and I think you should come home with me and cook us some scallops Marsala. With new potatoes and those nice green beans in peanut sauce, please. But I’m still pissed.”
Farrell said, “Well, I think you’re overreacting and unreasonable; and I think that’s a dumb way to wear you hair. Give me ten minutes.”
To do her justice, she told him about Micah Willows before he started cooking; to be fair to him, he went ahead with the dinner and threw in a fruit salad with a lemon and yogurt dressing. But it was beyond him to set her plate down in front of her without the scallops bouncing like popcorn, or to forbear from saying, “Just don’t start him calling me up for recipes, that’s all.”
“It’ll only be for a couple of weeks,” she said. “Two weeks at the most. You ought to know I can’t have anyone around all the time for more than two weeks.” Farrell dropped potatoes onto her plate like depth charges. “Joe, the doctor said he needs to be around people he knows, somebody he trusts, until he can trust himself to be whole again. Right now, I am about all he’s got. His family’s back in Columbus, I’ve been on the phone with them almost every day. They’ll pay all his hospital bills, send any money he needs, anything, just so he doesn’t come home. He has nowhere else to go.”
“A genuine remittance man,” Farrell said. “Nicholas Bonner’s got the same problem. Right. I’ll clear my stuff out of the bathroom first thing.”
She caught hold of his arm as he started to turn away and made him face her. “Joe, God damn it, Micah and I have things to settle. We never broke up, he just got possessed.” In spite of himself, Farrell laughed outright at the cozy madness of the statement, and she laughed too, shaking her head and covering her mouth for a moment, as her grandmother had taught her. She said “I don’t know what it was I felt for him and I need to find out, because I can’t stand loose ends. And you and I have a whole lot of business to do yet, because our special relationship happens to be all loose ends, and because we have seen things together that nobody but the other one will ever believe. So we have to be really careful never to lose each other, whatever else happens. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Joe?”