"They read your mind," Kirsten said. "That's where they get it. She knew my health was bad. She knows I'm worried about the spot on my lung."
"What spot?" I said. This was the first I had heard about it. "Have you been in for more tests?"
When Kirsten did not answer, Tim said, "She showed a spot. Several weeks ago. It was a routine X-ray. They don't think it means anything."
"It means I'm going to die," Kirsten said bitingly, with palpable venom. "You heard her, the old bitch."
"Kill the Spartan runners," I said.
Furiously, Kirsten lashed at me, "Is that one of your Berkeley educated remarks?"
"Please," Tim said in a faint voice. I said, "It's not her fault."
"We pay a hundred dollars to be told we're both going to die," Kirsten said, "and then on top of that, according to you, we should be grateful?" She scrutinized me with what struck me as psychotic malice, exceeding anything I had ever seen in her or in anyone else. "You're okay; she didn't say anything was going to happen to you, you cunt. You little Berkeley cunt- you're doing fine. I'm going to die and you get to have Tim all to yourself, with Jeff dead and now me. I think you set it up; you're involved; goddamn you!" Reaching, she took a swing at me; there in the back of the Yellow Cab she tried to hit me. I drew back, horrified.
Grabbing her with both hands, Tim pinned her against the side of the cab, against the door. "If I ever hear you use that word again," he said, "you are out of my life forever."
"You prick," Kirsten said.
After that, we drove in silence. The only sound was the occasional racket of the cab company's dispatcher, from the driver's two-way radio.
"Let's stop somewhere for a drink," Kirsten said, as we approached the house. "I don't want to have to deal with those awful mousy people; I just can't. I want to shop." To Tim she said, "We'll let you off. Angel and I'll go shopping. I really can't take any more today."
I said, "I don't feel like shopping right now."
"Please," Kirsten said tightly.
Tim said to me in a gentle voice, "Do it as a favor to both of us." He opened the cab door.
"Okay," I said.
After giving Kirsten money-all the money he had with him, apparently-Tim got out of the cab; we shut the door after him, and, presently, arrived at the downtown shopping district of Santa Barbara, with all the many lovely little shops and their various handcrafted artifacts. Soon Kirsten and I sat together in a bar, a nice bar, subdued, with low music playing. Through the open doors we could see people strolling around in the bright midday sunlight.
"Shit," Kirsten said as she sipped her vodka collins. "What a thing to find out. That you're going to die."
"Dr. Garret worked backward from Jeff's return," I said.
"How do you mean?" She stirred her drink.
"Jeff had come back to you. That's the given. So Garret summoned up a reason to explain it, the most dramatic reason she could find. 'He returned for a reason. That's why they return.' It's a commonplace. It's like-" I gestured. "Like the
ghost in Hamlet."
Gazing at me quizzically, Kirsten said, "In Berkeley there is an intellectual reason for everything."
"The ghost warns Hamlet that Claudius is a murderer, that he murdered him, Hamlet's father."
"What's Hamlet's father's name?"
"He's just called 'Hamlet's father, the late king.' "
Kirsten, an owlish expression on her face, said, "No, his father is named Hamlet, too."
"Ten bucks says otherwise."
She extended her hand; we shook. "The play," Kirsten said, "instead of being called Hamlet should properly be called Hamlet, Junior." We both laughed. "I mean," Kirsten said, "this is just sick. We're sick going to that medium. Coming all this way-of course, Tim is meeting with those double-domed eggheads from the think tank. You know where he really wants to work? Don't ever say this to anyone, but he'd like to work for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. This whole business about Jeff coming back-" She sipped her drink. "It's cost Tim a lot."
"He doesn't have to bring out the book. He could drop the project."
As if thinking aloud, Kirsten said, "How do those mediums do it? It's ESP; they can pick up your anxieties. Somehow the old biddy knew I have medical problems. It goes back to that damn peritonitis ... that's public knowledge that I had that. There's a central file they keep, mediums of the world. Media, I guess, is the plural. And my cancer. They know I'm plagued with a second-rate body, sort of a used car. A lemon. God sold me a lemon for a body."
"You should have told me about the spot."
"It's none of your business."
"I care about you."
"Dike," Kirsten said. "Homo. That's why Jeff killed himself, because you and I are in love with each other." Both of us had begun laughing, now; we bumped heads, and I put my arm around her. "I have this joke for you. We're not supposed to call Mexicans 'greasers' any more; right?" She lowered her voice. "We're supposed to call them-"
"Lubricanos," I said.
She glanced at me. "Well, fuck you."
"Let's pick up somebody," I said.
"I want to shop. You pick up somebody." In a more somber tone she said, "This is a beautiful city. We may be living down here, you realize. Would you stay up in Berkeley if Tim and I moved down here?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You and your Berkeley friends. The Greater East Bay Co-Sexual Communal Free Love Exchange-Partners Enterprise, Unlimited. What is it about Berkeley, Angel? Why do you stay there?"
"The house," I said. And I thought: Memories of Jeff. In connection with the house. The Co-op on University Avenue where we used to shop. "I like the coffee houses on the Avenue," I said. "Especially Larry Blake's. One time, Larry Blake came over to Jeff and me; downstairs in the Ratskeller-he was so nice to us. And I like Tilden Park." And the campus, I said to myself. I can never free myself of that. The eucalyptus grove, down by Oxford. The library. "It's my home," I said.
"You'd get accustomed to Santa Barbara."
I said, "You shouldn't call me a cunt in front of Tim. He might get ideas."
"If I die," Kirsten said, "would you sleep with him? I mean, seriously?"
"You're not going to die."
"Dr. Spooky says I am."
"Dr. Spooky," I said, "is full of it."
"Do you think so? God, it was weird." Kirsten shivered. "I felt she could read my mind, that she was tapping it, like you tap a maple tree. Reading my own fears back to me. Would you sleep with Tim? Answer me seriously; I need to know."
"It would be incest."
"Why? Oh; okay. Well-it's already a sin, a sin for him; why not add incest? If Jeff is in heaven and they're preparing a place for me, apparently I'm going to go to heaven. That's a relief. I just don't know how seriously to take what Dr. Garret said."
"Take it with the entire output of salt from the Polish salt mines for one full calendar year."
"But," Kirsten said, "it is Jeff coming back to us. Now we have it confirmed. But if I'm going to believe that, don't I have to believe the other, the prophecy?"
As I listened to her, a line from Dido and Aeneas entered my head, both the music and the words:
"The Trojan Prince, you know, is bound By Fate to seek Italian ground;
The Queen and he are now in chase. "
Why had that come to mind? The sorceress ... Jeff had quoted her or I had; the music had been a part of our lives, and I was thinking about Jeff, now, and the things that had bound us together. Fate, I thought. Predestination; doctrine of the church, based on Augustine and Paul. Tim had once told me that Christianity as a Mystery Religion had come into existence as a means of abolishing the tyranny of fate, only to reintroduce it as predestination-in fact, double predestination: some predestined to hell, some to heaven. Calvin's doctrine.
"We don't have fate any more," I said. "That went out with astrology, with the ancient world. Tim explained it to me."