The Crystal Child (20 page)

It was late afternoon.  She could think of a dozen things she ought to do to re-order her life, but nothing she had the energy or inclination to do.  She left the curtains drawn, found a comfortable corner of the living room sofa, switched on a lamp, and tried reading from one of her books of fairy tales, an Andrew Lang collection with the kind of antique illustrations she liked to loiter over.  Her mind drifted away from the page as she looked up to survey the familiar but strange room she was in.  And then, for the first time since she had gone on trial, the tears came.  They flooded from her and would not stop.  She wept until the muscles in her face cramped.   She gasped so deeply that at times she felt faint, as if she might not catch her breath.  At last her eyes glazed over and she fell into a fitful sleep, her lungs still shuddering.  When she woke, the world outside her windows was turning dark.  It was past eight o’clock.  Her chest still ached from the crying that had fatigued her.

She made her way upstairs and got ready for bed.  She brought her purse with her and left it on the bed, then turned to the bathroom.  She stripped away her prison clothes and stood naked in front of a full-length mirror, studying herself, something she could not remember doing in prison.  Her body looked leaner, more angular than she recalled, shrunken here and there to the bone on a diet of institutional cooking.  She came closer and sat to look at her face.  The eyes were still puffy and red from crying; her skin pale and worn, a face that had aged a hundred years. Slowly, she drew her fingers over the contours of her cheeks, down her neck.  Then as if she were shaking herself awake, she realized she had been there at the mirror staring at herself for a very long while. How long?  She glanced at her watch on the sink top.  Could it have been almost half an hour?  Or was she simply losing all track of time now that she was not being paced along by the jailhouse routine?

She ran water for a bath.  The tap, unused for months, spat out a brown stream for several seconds, then ran clear.  After a long, hot soak, she pulled on her robe, filled a glass with water, and returned to the bedroom.  She took up the purse she had left on the bed, turned it upside down, and gave it a shake.  Several items fell out across the bed, a few cards of identity, her parole papers, some cosmetics she had not used since entering prison.  There was also a rubber-banded bundle of letters that had been handed to her as she left Stockton, her last mail delivery.  And finally the plastic container of Oramorph.  It was the container she was after.

She had several times reflected on how medically oriented the world of mythology was, how often the stories had to do with wounds, diseases, poison, healing potions, medicinal plants.  For all she knew, there was a wealth of antique pharmaceutical lore worked into the fabric of the world’s folklore.  The quaint and colorful names of folk remedies lent themselves to literature.  St. John’s wort, goldenrod, angelica, chasteberry.  She, on the other hand, had never found a graceful way to weave genes or antibiotics into the story of Aaron and Julia. But here was a small sample of myth surviving into modern medicine.  Somebody had named the drug she held in her hand after the mythic god of dreams.  Morpheus, son of Somnus and brother of Death, was a god of the sky, but his great dark wings made no sound.  He came silently in the night, able to assume the shape of any human being he wished to impersonate as he entered the dreaming mind.  He was associated with the valley of Cimmeria, the distant black country where sleep-inducing poppies grow in abundance and the sun never shines.  It is a land of perpetual twilight and unbroken silence where the only sound that can be heard is the gently rustling waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.  The poets had never lent him the attribution, but Julia now thought of Morpheus as the god of mercy, he who puts an end to all suffering.  Her palm filled with tiny white pellets, she tried to think of a brief prayer of thanks to offer him.

By chance her glance fell upon the bundled letters that had fallen from her purse.  The top letter caught her eye.  It bore brightly colored, foreign postage.  She looked again and saw that the letter had not been forwarded; it was addressed to her at the prison.   The postmark she saw was more than two weeks old.  That was not unusual.  Prison authorities often held letters that long or longer until they got round to inspecting them.  She glanced across to the return address.  “The DeLeon Immortalist Institute,” and then, looking more closely, felt her breath catch.  Under the address there was a mark that might have been mistaken for a smudge.  Julia recognized it at once.  It was a tiny drawing.  A cartoon ape sitting atop a skyscraper.  She stared at the envelope as if she had to guess what it contained.  But she need not even open it to find out.  Like all her mail, this letter had already been opened and read by someone at the prison, the flap left unsealed.  She quickly pored the tablets she held back into their container, in her haste dropping several on the bed.  She let them lie as she read what the envelope held.  “Dear Dr. Stein,” the letter inside began.

She read the letter through twice more, pausing each time at the phrase “Kong Effect.”  Did the words mean what she suspected?  She felt her pulse accelerate at the possibility.  The letter was accompanied by a brochure that offered the usual collection of obscure but extravagant claims for the DeLeon Method.  The brochure opened out to offer an aerial photograph of the Institute.  It had grown in size since Julia last saw it.  It now had the look of a small village: paved streets, pools and patios, several hacienda-like buildings.  Below the complex was the same sunny beach, palm trees, and gently breaking surf she remembered.  San Lazaro, the Earthly Paradise of Baja California.

You fool,
she said to herself. 
You of all people should have known better than to mistake him for a child.

She had spent months in prison worrying about Aaron after she learned he had run away.  Why had she ever doubted that he could look after himself?  If there was a great deal of the god Eros in him, there was also a bit of Hermes the trickster.  Of course he had found a way out.  He had used his wits and worked out a plan, an escape he was offering to share with her.  Why did that surprise her?

Now she had to be just as cunning as he had been.  Suddenly her mind was brimming with possibilities.  She lay awake half the night thinking through choices she had never expected to have.  Finally, needing no pills at all, she fell into a deep sleep.  At once she was in the dark grove she remembered so well.  The cool night wind tugged at her as she followed a winding path through the trees. She accepted the dream gratefully; it was where she wished to be.  She was pursuing the faun-like figure that was once again coaxing her into the wood, knowing this time he would wait for her to catch up.  She was beside him now, close enough to feel his breath on her cheek.  “Julia,” she heard him say.  And again, more urgently, “Julia.”

***

At the bank the next morning she presented the legal papers Martha had assembled so neatly for her along with her cards of identity.  “Dr. Julia Stein,” the cards repeated over and over.  She was no longer a doctor, but there was no need to bring that up.  Today, she would pretend to be a doctor; who she might be tomorrow, she had no idea.  She remembered the bank manager; he looked no different than he had a year before.  A neat, young Asian man with a head of shiny jet-black hair and long sideburns.  “Mr. Kwan” read the name plate on his desk.  No doubt supremely polite Mr. Kwan had been sitting at this desk every day all the while Julia was in prison, working conscientiously, hoping for a promotion.  If he knew anything about where she had been for the last year, he gave no indication.  He began by updating her passbook.  The book showed periodic withdrawals by John Briggs to cover various costs, hundreds, sometimes thousands for taxes and insurance.  With all the subtractions entered, she finished with a balance of only $2,500 in her checking account.  If she had spent another month in prison, she would have been bankrupt.  Or was she bankrupt already?  She must, by now, owe more in legal fees than she could afford. But she would not have to face the consequences of that.  She would leave her loyal John Briggs to tie up the loose ends.  She assumed he had the legal authority to sell her house.  Let him.  Let him keep the money.

“I’d like to withdraw the balance of this account in cash,” she told the bank manager.  He asked if she was sure she wanted to close it out completely.  She said she was sure. “But you’re leaving the retirement account?” he asked.

“I have a retirement account?”  She assumed Jake had taken everything else.  Had he overlooked something?

Mr. Kwan checked his computer screen.  “A small one.  About $4,000.”

“I’d like to withdraw that too.”

That produced a look of surprise.  “You are not fifty-nine.”

“No, I’m not.”

He pursed his lips. “There will be a penalty for early withdrawal,” he warned.

“How much?”

“Ten percent.”

“That’s all right. I’d like the rest in cash.”

Mr. Kwan knitted his brows, but went about gathering the money she wanted.  “Sorry to lose your account,” he said.  “Please think of us again.”

She rose to leave, then remembered something.  “You sell telephone calling cards,” she said pointing to a sign across the lobby.

“Yes.  Would you like to buy one?  They come in ten, twenty, and fifty-dollar denominations.”

Julia gave him a fifty-dollar bill.  A few minutes later he returned with a plastic card and asked her again to remember the bank if she had any future business.  Outside the door of the bank she stopped to breathe deeply, bracing herself against the wall of the building.  Her breath was trapped in her throat.  “Do you need help?” a woman asked as she passed her to enter the bank.

“No, I’m fine,” Julia said and forced out a reassuring smile.  It was a cool day, but she was sweating profusely.  Her blouse was sticking to her ribs. An air of high risk had closed around her.  She was treading on illegal ground without sure footing.  She had no experience at the kind of deception she was about to undertake.  She needed clear judgment and confidence, but her time in prison had taken that away. The walls that had once cut her off from the world of practical realities, the dull routine that had delimited every decision she could make, were gone.  Their safety was gone.  She was on her own, capable once again of transgressing.  The realization made her vertiginous.

***

She left the bank with nearly seven thousand dollars in her purse, more cash than she had ever carried.  Was it enough?  Enough for what?  She had no idea what to expect of the adventure she was about to begin.  Either she needed much more money or, just possibly, none at all.  Back at home she packed a few more things into her prison suitcase. A change of  clothing, another pair of shoes, toiletries, books.  She chose practical things to wear, nothing dressy.  As far as she could look into her future, she could see no social occasions that required a stylish dress.  No cocktail parties, no openings, no theater evenings or formal dinners.  The last item to be added was the container of Oramorph she had brought from Stockton.  Her ultimate safety net; if all else failed, the kind god Morpheus would offer her a way out of all the misery that might befall her.

She loaded the suitcase into the back of Alex’s car, made her way to the freeway, and headed south on 101.  At SFO she headed into the dark maw of the long-term parking garage and there cruised down and down through level after level, looking for some forgotten corner of the labyrinthine structure where a car might never be found.  But of course it would eventually be identified as abandoned and traced to Jake.  That might take months and what would anybody assume but that she had fled the country?  That was the best she could do in covering her tracks.  How else does one get rid of a car?  Drive it into deep water perhaps — nothing she could manage.  She was an amateur at stratagems like this.  At last she pulled into a slot on one of the lower, tomb-like levels where she did not see a single person moving among the silent ranks of cars.  The air here was stale and dusty.  She locked the car and hurried away through the poorly-lit and seemingly deserted garage, feeling more furtive by the moment.  As she waited for an elevator, a thought struck her.  Fingerprints.  Would anybody check the car for fingerprints and discover Julia Stein had left it there?  Should she go back and wipe thee car down?  The more she tried to be clever, the more foolishly inadequate she felt.

Back at street level, she stationed herself on the traffic island outside the arrivals lobby, waving at taxis as they passed.  While she waited, she tucked her hair out of sight under a snug cap and searched for sunglasses in her purse.  Not much of a disguise, she decided.  At last a taxi stopped.

“Where to?” the driver asked as she stepped into the cab.

“Take me to a motel, please,” she said.

“Which one?” he asked, as if she her instruction was unusual.

“Anything close by,” she answered, trying to sound casual.  “Just for overnight,” she added as if to justify her request, then wondered why she had said that.

The driver drove her back to 101 and cruised past a number of airport motels.  “Tell me when,” he said.  She spotted a motel whose garish neon sign read “Vacancy.”

“That one,” she said.

She paid the driver, adding a generous tip as if that might win his complicity.  Or would a big tip only make her more memorable to him if he were ever questioned?  Improvising as she was, working more by impulse than design, she felt she was making one mistake after another.  Perhaps she should not stay in the motel where he had left her.  She waited until the cab was out of sight, then quickly crossed the street and walked two blocks to a motel farther along.  The sign out front said “Airport Econo-Lodge, Lowest Rates, Shuttle Service to SFO.”  She signed in at the desk under a made-up name — her mother’s name Clara Shapiro — then realized that might not be a smart choice.  Asked for a credit card, she volunteered cash and made the mistake of asking if that was all right.  “Why not?” the clerk asked, suspiciously she thought.

Once the door of unit twelve was locked behind her, she wilted with fatigue.  Deception wearied her as much as carrying a heavy load.  The more furtive she became, the more she feared that she was already being watched. Was she?  She had lived for a year under round-the-clock surveillance, long enough to be haunted by a sense that eyes were always on her, suspecting her of deceit.  With good reason. She had lied to the prison authorities already.  Asked where she was headed, she had given her sister’s address, though she had no intention of going to Texas.  Would somebody phone to see if she had arrived?  She had a full month before she needed to report to a probation officer. By then she hoped to be beyond their reach, a permanent fugitive.  She had not consciously thought through the plan she was now following.  As if somebody might be reading her mind, she did not permit herself to focus on what she intended to do.  She held each step she took in a kind of peripheral vision, just out of direct sight, waiting until the last possible moment, then acting spontaneously as if she had suddenly hit upon her next move.

She stretched out across the wide, spongy bed and kicked off her shoes.  Staring up at the heavily stippled ceiling of the motel, she studied the cracks and discolorations she found there.  There was a large dark splotch in one corner of the room where there had apparently been a leak.  After several minutes, she rose and took ten deliberate steps across the floor, one step further than she could have paced off in any direction in her cell at Stockton.  Freedom — and yet the space she stood in imposed a greater sense of isolation upon her than imprisonment ever had.  Beyond these four walls there was a buzzing world of everyday activity, cars on the freeway, planes overhead, people doing business, coming and going.  But she was no part of that.  At that moment she was as close to non-entity as she could imagine being.  No one knew where she was, no one was expecting her.  She had only a few cards of identity to connect her to the world.  If she burned those papers and died in this room, it would take days to find somebody to notify.

The room was dismal: poorly lit and cheaply furnished.  The few feeble efforts at decoration — cheap reproductions of western scenes hanging crookedly on the walls — only made the place seem sleazier.  The bathroom facilities were in worse disrepair than those at Stockton.  In prison, the toilets were inspected twice a day for concealed weapons or drugs and cleaned in the process.  Here she washed in a stained sink and combed her hair in a mottled mirror.  There was a constant drip in the flush tank of the toilet.  Even with the air-conditioner fan turned up to maximum she could hear the rush and roar of traffic outside.   This lonely, characterless place was what her life had become and, for all she knew, might remain.  Perhaps that was all that lay ahead of her, a succession of drab hideaways like this.  Well, at least there was a window without bars, though all it looked out upon was the freeway.  Later that night, she was besieged by barely muffled voices and television sets on both sides of her room.   Once she would have been annoyed, but she had learned to think of herself as one who had no right to privacy.

Lying awake in her darkened room, she remembered that the last time she had stayed in a hotel she had been the keynote speaker at a professional conference in Washington D.C.  The American Gerontological Society.  She had been introduced by a dean from Johns Hopkins as one of the school’s most esteemed graduates.  She had been treated to four-star luxury, all expenses paid. She had spoken about Aaron’s case and had been warmly applauded afterwards.

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away.

***

Toward two in the morning, she was aroused from a light sleep by noise on the other side of the wall.  Two voices — a man and a woman arguing. A stream of angry obscenities.  Both sounded drunk.   Finally a door slammed and she heard a woman’s high heels clacking across the passageway and down the stairs, muttering threats all the way.  Then once again the white noise of the freeway closed in, the ever-flowing river of traffic.

Though it was reasonably quiet now, she could not sleep.  She switched on the bedside light and turned to her books, choosing a story she had almost memorized by now.  Cupid and Psyche, among the most bewildering of the ancient tales, the one tale of Eros that includes actual sexual relations.  Again Eros was drawn as a boy, though now old enough to court a girl and to marry.  Psyche, the object of his desire, was so beautiful that even Venus was jealous of her and sought to punish her.  By now Julia had learned the basic symbolism of the myths.  The girl, Psyche, represents the soul.  The boy, Eros, represents divine love.  Here, their relationship is mysteriously troubled.  Eros, concealing his identity, agrees to take Psyche for his wife and invites her to come live with him in a mansion of gold and silver.  But their marriage seems to go without consummation.  Instead, Eros plays hide and seek with his bride.  He does not show himself during the day and comes to Psyche’s bed only in the dark of night when she cannot see him.  Psyche begs him to make himself visible, but he refuses.  She wonders if he is perhaps some kind of monster — a hideous serpent.  Finally, Psyche defies his orders and comes to him in the night with a candle.  She sees at once that this is the magnificent god of love.  But she accidentally drops candle wax on his shoulder.  He wakes and flees from her.  The rest of the tale is a succession of ordeals Psyche must endure to win back her husband.  And in time she does. At which point Eros grants her the immortality of the gods.