Penult (2 page)

I’m not even legal yet, but I’m no
teenager any more. I turned twenty just the other day, celebrating
my birthday alone in that cabin in Vermont, just me and a book and
a fifth of Jack Daniels. I’ve been drinking like a fish ever since
I got out of jail, not because I need it, just because I
can.

Six miles over Newfoundland I bid
farewell and good riddance to North America. For every sweet memory
on this continent, I had three tainted with bitterness and blood.
Not that the UK had been any better to me, not that I would ever be
going back there again, at least not legally.

Italy was another story entirely. I
truly enjoyed my first time there even if it did turn out to be a
wild goose chase. I could see myself living, if not in Rome, then
someplace in all that crazy beautiful countryside I saw from the
train. Of course, knowing Karla is there waiting for me is no small
bias.

I have to say that my most happy and
thrilling days all happened in the Liminality. Nowhere else but
this foyer to the afterlife have I felt more alive.

There were plenty of dark days, the
darkest of them being Karla getting killed by that Fellstraw. For
the most part, though, good memories prevailed. Hanging with Karla
in her cozy little dome deep in the caverns of Root. Cruising the
mesas and valleys of the surface world on the backs of giant
mantids.

No chance of me going back any time
soon. I was way too excited about my prospects in this world. I
mean, I just got out of jail and now I’m jetting off to see Karla.
In fact, I’ve felt this way for some time now. The roots haven’t
come calling in months.

Early in my sentence, bored out of my
skull with the days creeping along, the roots would visit me
regularly. I welcomed them like friends come to take me out on a
joy ride.

Karla would meet me in my favorite
hollow with the pond and the waterfall and the willow tree. She had
a knack for crossing over at will, a skill she called
‘surfing.’

We would have tea with Lille and Bern
at their cabin on the pitted plains and go on long hikes up to the
mesas where the new Dusters were settling into a ‘life’ out of the
Deeps. We even visited with Luther in his new palace, roaming the
alleys and avenues of the sprawling city that the Burg had
become.

But once I got past the halfway point
of my sentence, the visitations abruptly ceased. When I could see
the light at the end of the tunnel, the roots were no longer
interested in me. It has been three months since I stepped foot in
the Liminality.

Optimism and excitement were toxic to
the forces that recruit souls to places like the Liminality. They
avoided me like I was strychnine.

I still had my bad days, but none ever
bad enough to drive my soul to the depths it needed to reach to
execute a crossing. Even when I started missing Karla again, it
could not outweigh the expectation that I would soon be seeing her
again for real in the living world.

I’m thinking it might be nice to have
a little out of body excursion to shorten this plane ride. No
chance of that happening. I am way too buzzed and tingly at the
prospect of seeing Karla. My life forces have shifted into a rarely
engaged gear, a special kind of overdrive. I think it’s called
love.

The flight attendant comes by to offer
me another drink. The oak leaf that had been a napkin startles her
momentarily, but she whisks it off the tray with the other
trash.

Small-scale weaving comes to me easy as
breathing these days. Prison time only honed my skills. Any mass of
carbon or water less than a kilo or so is no match for my mind.
That frost on the window that marred my view of the Newfoundland
coast? Gone. Vaporized.

My napkin? I had cycled it through an
entire herbarium’s worth of leaves—big-toothed aspen to serrated
elm, sugar maple and every oak I knew from red to black to
white.

I have yet to master larger scale
transformations. I can do it now and then, but it takes way more
effort and concentration to make it happen. I almost have to be on
the verge of a panic attack to get something as large as a tree or
a house to shift. It’s a rare skill, they tell me.

Yet, there are Weavers in this world
and some of the others that can execute such transformations with
ease. I’m talking about souls like Victoria and Luther and Wendell.
I’m not quite on their level yet.

Prison gave me tons of time to
practice. I would animate dust bunnies, make them sprout legs and
eyes and send them running down the corridor, to give me a head’s
up on what was for dinner or to eavesdrop in the warden’s
office.

I could even give my creation wings and
send them flying off into the suburbs on vicarious jaunts that did
wonders for my mood. They would swoop through yards past little
kids playing soccer, old men trimming shrubberies, coyotes circling
the carcass of a deer that had been hit by a truck.

Don’t believe all the hype you hear
about the American prison system. The food isn’t nearly as bad as
they say. The violence? The sexual deviancy? All over-rated.
Boredom was the biggest threat to my mental health.

Maybe things weren’t so bad because I
was in Coleman Medium, a place devoid of hard-core criminals. Maybe
Florida State Prison would have been much worse. Though, I think I
could have handled it. It was hard to imagine anything worse than
Edmund Raeth’s church basement dungeon.

Six months in the slammer healed my
brain and made me stronger both emotionally and physically. I took
advantage of the gym, the books, the classes in Biology and History
and Trigonometry. I worked in the wood shop for a while, but had to
quit, because I couldn’t restrain myself from weaving the wood
instead of cutting and carving it like my shop mates.

Weaving was not a skill I was ready to
go public with. It had been awkward enough during the court
proceedings trying to explain how a hundred year old beech had been
made to appear in the middle of a Dartmouth soccer field and how
its wood had come to encase a dapper gentleman named Wendell Frank
who had a taste for cigars and fine handguns.

The case against Wendell didn’t even
make it to trial. The happenings on that Dartmouth field could not
be distilled into in words. The weirder stuff was downplayed and an
alternative rationalization was fabricated involving bombs and
bulldozers. Just like me, Wendell was treated more like a victim
than a perpetrator.

Wendell had great lawyers according to
Ramon. That didn’t surprise me. A guy like Wendell had access to
the best of everything.

After I stopped being able to visit
Root, Karla compensated by starting to send me letters by snail
mail. She was a Luddite when it came to the internet and social
networking. I didn’t hear from her nearly as often as I would have
liked, but it was at least once a month. Her letters were less than
satisfying. She was cryptic in both expressing her affections and
in describing her activities.

She seemed to be moving around a lot.
She hinted that she was being followed. I wasn’t sure how much was
paranoia and how much was real. In every letter, she begged for me
to come see her as soon as I got out. That went without
saying.

Time slowed down. Days crept. Hours
became interminable. But if nothing else, prison taught me
patience, as if my thwarted life had not already been one long
lesson in perseverance and delayed gratification. The day I left
Coleman Medium, my heart took flight and I practically floated
through world. I was brimming with energy. Leaves rustled as I
passed and it had nothing to do with the wind.

***

When the plane touched down, I turned
on my phone and was surprised to find a text from Karla, sent from
her cousin’s iPhone.

“
Cannot come to Fiumicino.
Meet me at the special place. Make sure nobody follow
you.”

Fiumicino was the name of the airport.
But what did she mean by special place? Karla loved living in Rome
so she had a lot of special places she had gushed to me about. Did
she mean the pews under the alabaster dove in the Basilica? The
Trevi fountain? The benches below the columns on the edge of St.
Peter’s Square?

I grabbed my only luggage, a day pack,
out of the overhead bin and hurried off the plane. The queue for
immigration was short. I got through in a flash and made a bee line
for a coffee stand and ordered a double espresso.

Despite my cushy digs aboard the
plane, I hadn’t slept much. The video unit listed tons of movies I
hadn’t seen. A year spent living homeless, wandering the lands of
the dead, being held hostage and doing time will do
that.

As I sat there taking tiny sugary,
bitter sips, a wicked pain punched through my back and into my
sternum. I grunted and lurched, spilling the espresso all over
myself. Another jab, not as deep, went straight into my belly. It
felt like I had been shot, but there was no blood, no puncture
wounds.

I knew this pain. The places that hurt
were exactly the spots where Junger had got me with his arrows. I
had felt aches in those places from time to time, nothing compared
to this. These felt as bad as the original injuries.

As I sat there, clutching myself, some
blonde lady ambled past and tossed me a glance. She leaned against
a support column, alternately staring at me and gazing down at her
phone.

The pain subsided, and so I daubed
myself dry with a stack of napkins and wiped the spilled coffee off
the metal table. I debated whether to replace the precious caffeine
I had just abused when I noticed that woman staring at me
outright.

I knew she wasn’t checking out my good
looks. I was an unshaven, bedraggled mess, my hair a collection of
cowlicks, having gone straight to JFK from Rutland, without
bothering to check into a hotel. I had tried my best to wash up in
the rest room, but there’s only so much you can do with an airport
sink.

Even at my best, I’m not exactly
handsome. So what was she looking at? Did she mistake me for some
celebrity?

My wits were slow, dulled by lack of
sleep, but it occurred to me that she might be a threat. I downed
the last dribble of coffee and tossed the cup in a bin, darting
away, weaving through the crowd, making for the exit.

Who was she? I don’t know, maybe one
of Sergei’s people continuing a posthumous vendetta for the
deceased drug lord. Or maybe she was one of Wendell’s folks, come
either to recruit or assassinate me.

Before I could reach the door, the
lady was already there, blocking my way. How did she get there so
fast?

She was nicely dressed, wearing a
short jacket that complemented her dress. Hazel eyes. Brown with
shards of blue and gold. Her makeup was perfect. I prefer a natural
look, because so many women apply makeup like they learned it in
clown school. But her eyes were nestled in velvet, carefully
feathered out to faceted cheekbones and an expanse of pristine,
unwrinkled skin. She had strawberry blond hair, so silky it didn’t
look real, tied back in a neat ponytail.

I checked for a gun, but her hands
were empty and clasped in front of her. She smiled, baring an
elegant array of pure white teeth, lined up almost too
perfectly.

“
Hello James. Please. Come
with me. We need have a little talk.”

“
Who are you?”

“
I am Belinda. Come. Just
little talk. We give you ride. It will not take long. We have a
nice, cool drink. We chat. Afterwards, we can take you wherever you
want to go.”

“
Who are you with? You one
of Sergei’s people?”

“
I know not any
Sergei.”

“
Wendell’s?”

The mention of his name snagged her
attention like a baseball bat to the temple. Her hazel eyes burned
back at me and studied every pore on my face.

“
No. But this is about …
his people. Don’t worry. You are safe with us. We mean you no harm.
We’re not like them. We’re not … executioners,” she whispered and
slowly regained her smile.

I’ve never been good at sensing
people’s motivations, but her ease and grace reassured me. I
perceived no threat. Maybe like a cow at a slaughterhouse, I
followed her out the glass doors to a silver Land Rover waiting in
the drop off lane.

The driver wore bulgy mirror shades
that made him look like some giant insect. I got into the back next
to Belinda. Another man who seemed to materialize out of nowhere
hopped in front. We drove for half an hour, deeper into Rome, but
not quite to the city core. We pulled down an alley that led into a
huge courtyard with gnarled olive trees, manicured gardens and
marble fountains.

The driver hopped out and opened my
door. Belinda opened her own door and made her way around the back
and took my hand. She led me down a cobbled walk that led through
the gardens into an open portico. A huge room, like a stripped down
hotel lobby, devoid of any wall decoration, not even a painting or
a clock, yawned before us. The ceilings had to be twenty feet
high.

We sat beside a glass table on some
weird looking chairs—asymmetric leather strapping on a metal frame.
They were easy on the bones, supporting me in all the right
places.