Mount Terminus (9 page)

Yes, said Bloom.

That, he told him, is the sound of the Rosenbloom Drive at work. Bloom listened to it for a moment, and imagined his father listening to the original clicks of the very first machine, and he then placed his hands on the sturdy wooden box to feel its vibration. Go on, said his father, tell me what's inside. Bloom bent over and rested his eyes against the mask of the peephole and felt himself aroused at the sight of a woman balancing on her right foot atop the capital of a Corinthian column. Her left foot she rested flatly against the inner thigh of her extended leg. Her arms she encircled over a Corinthian mound of ivy-twined hair. Very slowly, as if her fingers were rays of light, she broke the halo over her head and reached into the darkness behind her. With an extraordinary display of flexibility, she shifted her hips forward and extended her arms and curled back into the shape of a dewdrop, at which point her hands enfolded her ankle and the column began to rotate. It revolved once and then twice, and at the beginning of the third revolution, a translucent shroud billowed from out of the darkness above and collapsed over her body. When the column finished its rotation, a light flashed and the woman disappeared, leaving only the shroud limply hanging over the capital's leaves.

A woman, said Bloom. Spinning and disappearing.

Yes, said his father with an amused grin, I know it well.

And with that, Jacob reached into his pocket and pulled out the skeleton key he had used for the padlock the other day. The room, he said, is yours. Your mother practiced her art here, and so should you. And then from his other pocket, he removed
Death, Forlorn
, the miniature book he carried with him everywhere, and he said, If you would, I would like you to illustrate this for me.

*   *   *

A young couple, newly wed, travels to the sea. At the end of a mountain pass, they arrive at a parcel of land surrounded by a fortress wall. They ride the entire length of the circular road around it, and as far as they can see, the wall appears to be perfectly enclosed, without entrance or exit. When they descend to the bottom of the mountain, they stop for a meal at an inn where they meet a cloaked figure sitting at the bar. The stranger, they learn, lives behind the enclosed walls. He is about to explain how it is he accesses his home, when the waitress walks by and drops a tray of dishes. The kindhearted husband leaves the table for a moment to offer his help, and when he returns from the kitchen, his wife and the strange man have disappeared. The husband searches the woods and the storefronts of the town, and when he's reached the apothecary at the end of the road, he notices in the front window a terrarium of mandrakes, and at the sight of them, his panic turns to despair. He enters the shop and takes from a shelf a bottle of arsenic, which he gulps down until there is no more. His body begins to wither, but before he has fallen to the floor, he is transported to a bed of nettles lying in the shadows of the enclosure at the top of the mountain, where, before him, a section of stones dematerializes to create a dark opening through which he can enter. The stranger he met at the inn is waiting for him when he has completed his passage. I am Death, he announces, and he asks why he has come to him without being called. The husband says to Death that he's come in search of his wife, and Death says that his wife is beyond hope. He leads the husband into a cathedral whose cupola is lit by candlelight. Each candle, he explains, is a life, and when its flame is extinguished, the life is lost. Death confesses to the husband that he has grown weary. He is tired of being feared and wishes that the inevitable consequences of his actions weren't absolute. He, therefore, offers the man a chance to save his wife. Let us see, he says, if you can alter the boundaries of fate. He makes appear three candles and says to him that if he can keep one of these three candles lit, his wife will be returned to him unharmed. Death first sends the man to save the lover of the Caliph of Baghdad from being buried alive by the Caliph's gardener. He fails, and a candle is extinguished. Death sends him to save the lover of the Chinese emperor from the emperor's archer, and at this task, too, the man fails, and a candle is extinguished. Death sends the man to save the fiancée of a Venetian tyrant, and here too, he fails, and the third candle is extinguished. Because he desires to see the young man succeed, Death offers him a final chance. He tells him that if before noon he can find a life that has yet to meet its fate, he will return his wife in exchange. Death returns the husband to the apothecary just as he is about to swallow the arsenic, and at that moment the clock strikes eleven. He returns to the inn, where he recalls having seen in the window of the second floor a feeble old woman. The old woman, happy for the company, invites him in to sit by the fire. He asks her if she would be willing to give up what remains of her life so that he can live his with his wife. To this, she says, Not one day, not one hour, not one breath. When the old woman is finished speaking, out of the fire pops an ember. The ember falls at the ruffle of a curtain and sets it ablaze. The fire laps at the walls and licks at the ceiling and spreads across the room. The home, it turns out, is the home of the waitress, who, from the street below, is now screaming for her child. As the fire continues to consume the room, the man finds the baby, sitting up in its bassinet near the edge of the flames. Death now appears and reaches out for the child. He says that if he places the babe in his arms, his wife will be returned to him. But the man has already decided what sacrifice he is willing to make for his beloved. He hurries to the window and drops the child into the arms of its mother, then walks into the inferno, from which Death sweeps him up in his arms, and says, This is meant to be. Moments later, the newly wed wife appears on the main road. She searches for her husband as her husband did for her, and once again the story begins.

*   *   *

After his father had placed the frail pages of Death's allegory in his hand, Bloom began to spend his mornings in the studio. Every day after breakfast, he sat at a drawing table set before a pane of glass framing the courtyard, the walls of the villa, the cottages, the reflecting pool. And with each successive morning after breakfast he felt a keener and keener appetency to better understand the deeper meaning of his mother's visions. While weighing in his mind the story handed to him by his father, he wondered if the fate of his sanity was in some way tethered to his mother's. He wrote of what transpired between him and his father and left his summaries for Roya to find, and when the sheets of paper disappeared, he wrote such questions as
Was it a natural deterioration she experienced? Or was there a precipitating cause? Am I destined to confuse the visions I see in my mind for what I perceived in my perceptions of world?
But she never answered him. She did, however, sit beside him in his studio as he worked, sometimes for many hours. These were worrying thoughts, he told her on several occasions, ones from which he didn't know how to dissociate himself. If he were, perhaps, a more typical young man, one who didn't empathize with his father's sensitivities, one who hadn't been conditioned to tolerate his secrets and his silence, he might have pressed Jacob to explain his mother's condition in more detail, but he couldn't in good conscience—not for the time being, at any rate—ask him to confide in him any more than he had already. He had observed the great strength it took for his father to reveal what little he had. He had heard the hesitation in his voice, witnessed the way his nerves had been shaken. To ask more of him now, Bloom said to Roya, would be cruel, would it not? And so Bloom decided to wait, to exercise, as he had done for so long, patience.

*   *   *

Before long the sound of picks and shovels reached the top of the mountain, and not long afterward they heard, through the open windows and all about the grounds, the call and response of song keeping rhythm with the thwack and scrape of the men's toil.

It's a lo-o-o-ng John!

A lo-o-ng John!

He's a lo-o-o-ng gone!

A l-o-o-ng gone!

Like a turkey through the corn!

A turkey through the corn!

Through the lo-o-o-ng corn!

The l-o-o-ng corn!

… Well, my John say-ed!

My John say-ed!

In the ten chap ten!

Ten chap ten!

If a man die!

A man die!

He will live again!

He will live again!

And from their camps each night just before the noise waned, Bloom heard:

Wait and let me tell you what your brother will do:

Fo' your face, have a love for you.

'Hind your back, scandalize your name.

Jest the same you have to bear the blame.

O Lord, trouble so hard. O Lord, trouble so hard.

Don't nobody know my troubles but God.

Yes, indeed, my troubles so hard.

When it was finished, the road ended well before Mount Terminus's gate; it turned inward onto the long plateau downhill from the stand of eucalyptus. Early the next morning, not a full day after the completion of the work, Bloom heard, for the first time, the fiery combustion of motorcars. When the sound of the engines quieted, he looked out of his bedroom window to see, at the end of the cobbled path, his father, standing on a boulder under the long, spindling limbs at the edge of the estate. Bloom dressed and walked down into the courtyard and on through the pergola to the path's end, and when he arrived, his father handed him a pair of binoculars. Bloom watched through the lenses the dozen or so men who had convened at the center of the clearing. Three carried scrolls of blueprints, three carried theodolites, the others held mallets and stakes and cones of twine.

But that's our land, Bloom said to his father.

No, said his father. Not since the day we traveled to the sea.

For all these years, said Bloom, this is what they wanted?

This, said his father, and a great deal more.

And what have you given them?

Everything they've asked for.

I don't understand.

I know, my dear. But you will soon enough.

The men carrying the tools gathered around a young man, tall and slim, dressed in a white suit whose cut was sharp in the shoulders and along the lapel. His hair had been tussled from the wind, and falling over his eyes was a rakish curl. He had a natural ease about him when he spoke, yet he held himself upright in such a way he appeared superior to those around him. He formed the men into groups and sent them on their way to different areas of the plateau, and when these men had set about their tasks, the young man turned his head to where Bloom and his father stood, and with a cold, hard gaze acknowledged he knew he was being observed. He made no attempt to wave or nod; he only tucked his hands into his trouser pockets and glared at them. And with his face now unobstructed by the others, Bloom was overcome by the uncanny feeling that he knew this young man. He was somehow familiar to him. Strangely so. He eased the binoculars away from his face and looked at his father, who said, They will be coming for a share of our water next.

And we will give it to them?

Yes, said Jacob.

The man below continued to look up to Bloom and his father, and Bloom could see when he raised the binoculars again, a dark emotion had entered the young man's eyes. He began to tilt in their direction, and an instant later he was walking toward them. I want you to leave me now, said the elder Rosenbloom. I'd like to have a few words alone with this man.

Do you know him?

Please, my dear, be on your way.

Bloom did as he was told. He stepped back and walked the way he had come, and when he reached the courtyard, he climbed up to the studio landing, where he looked down to the stand of eucalyptus and saw through the binoculars the man emerge from the steep hike up the hill. The elder Rosenbloom extended his hand, but the young man didn't take it. His father said a few words now, to which came no response. The elder Rosenbloom tried once more, but the young man stood his ground, and this time when his father failed to elicit a reaction, he made a polite gesture and walked away in the direction of his gardens. The young man watched the elder Rosenbloom walk off, and then, with his fists clenched at his sides, he followed.

This disturbing behavior concerned Bloom, so he, too, followed. He ran down the steps, into the villa, through the kitchen, and leaped up the stairwell of the tower, taking steps two by two, to the pavilion landing. Once there, he saw Jacob's head wending through the maze of hedgerows, and saw his pursuer wasn't very far behind. When they reached the corner of the garden for which his father was bound, the young man in the white suit looked up to see the topiary, and at the sight of it, he allowed his eyes to wander from the elder Rosenbloom to the leafy figure. He circled around it once, and then again, this time shaking his head. Bloom watched him through the eyepiece of the telescope now, and could see an expression of disbelief in the openness of his mouth and eyes. He now said something. What, Bloom, of course, couldn't hear, but he believed he saw form on his lips No or How. And then You as he pointed a finger at the elder Rosenbloom. And another No or How. The sensation Bloom felt earlier returned. There was something familiar about this young man's face, something familial, perhaps. And now his father's pursuer circled the topiary one last time, and when he said his last words, he spat at Jacob's feet and threw up a hand in disgust. When he reached the drive, Bloom could clearly see the shadows of his arms casting rude gestures onto the gravel below.

*   *   *

Over dinner that evening, Bloom asked his father why the man from the plateau had been so angry with him. He wanted to know if they had met each other before today. The elder Rosenbloom would only say, I would like for you to go out and make his acquaintance. The questions you have for me, pose them to him. And then we will talk. On the subject of the angry young man, he would say no more.