From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 49

WEDNESDAY, fully two days after delivering honey-raisin pear pies with Agnes, Edom worked up the nerve to visit Jacob.

Although their apartments were above the garage, back to back, each was served by a separate exterior staircase. As often as either man entered the other's domain, they might as well have lived hundreds of miles apart.

When together in Agnes's company, Edom and Jacob were brothers, comfortable with each other. But together, just the two, no Agnes, they were more awkward than strangers, because strangers had no shared history to overcome.

Edom knocked, Jacob answered.

Jacob backed away from the threshold, Edom stepped inside.

They stood not quite facing each other. The apartment door remained open.

Edom felt uneasy in this kingdom of a strange god. The god that his brother feared was humanity, its dark compulsions, its arrogance. Edom, on the other hand, trembled before Nature, whose wrath was so great that one day she would destroy all things, when the universe collapsed into a super dense nugget of matter the size of a pea.

To Edom, humanity was obviously not the greater of these two destructive forces. Men and women were part of nature, not above it, and their evil was, therefore, just one more example of nature's malignant intent. They had stopped debating this issue years ago, however, neither man conceding any credibility to the other's dogma.

Succinctly, Edom told Jacob about visiting Obadiah, the magician with the mangled hands. Then: “When we left, I followed Agnes, and Obadiah held me back to say, 'Your secret's safe with me.'”

“What secret?” Jacob asked, frowning at Edom's shoes.

I was hoping you might know,” said Edom, studying the collar of Jacob's green flannel shirt.

“How would I know?"

“It occurred to me that he might have thought I was you."

“Why would he think that?” Jacob frowned at Edom's shirt pocket.

“We do look somewhat alike,” Edom said, shifting his attention to Jacob's left ear.

“We're identical twins, but I'm not you, am I?"

“That's obvious to us, but not always to others. Apparently, this would have been some years ago."

” What would have been some years ago?"

“When you met Obadiah."

“Did he say I'd met him?” Jacob asked, squinting past Edom toward the bright sunlight at the open door.

“As I explained, he might have thought I was you,” Edom said, staring at the neatly ordered volumes on the nearby bookshelves.

“Is he addled or something?"

“No, he's got all his wits."

“Supposing he's senile, wouldn't he possibly think you were his long- lost brother or someone?"

“He's not senile."

“If you ranted at him about earthquakes, tornadoes, erupting volcanoes, and all that stuff, how could he mistake you for me?"

“I don't rant. Anyway, Agnes did all the talking."

Returning his attention to his own shoes, Jacob said, “So ... what am I supposed to do about this?"

“Do you know him? “ Edom asked, gazing longingly now at the open door, from which Jacob had turned away. “Obadiah Sepharad? “

“Having spent most of the last twenty years in this apartment, not being the one who has a car, how would I meet a Negro magician?"

“All right then."

As Edom crossed the threshold, moving outside to the landing at the top of the stairs, Jacob followed, proselytizing for his faith: “Christmas Eve, 1940, St. Anselmo's Orphanage, San Francisco. Josef Krepp killed eleven boys, ages six through eleven, murdering them in their sleep and cutting a different trophy from each-an eye here, a tongue there."

“Eleven?” Edom asked, unimpressed.

“From 1604 through 1610, Erzebet Bathory, sister of the Polish king, with the assistance of her servants, tortured and killed six hundred girls. She bit them, drank their blood, tore their faces off with tongs, mutilated their private parts, and mocked their screams."

Descending the stairs, Edom said, “September 18, 1906, a typhoon slammed into Hong Kong. More than ten thousand died. The wind was blowing with such incredible velocity; hundreds of people were killed by sharp pieces of debris-splintered wood, spear-point fence staves, nails, glass-driven into them with the power of bullets. One man was struck by a windblown fragment of a Han Dynasty funerary jar, which cleaved his face, cracked through his skull, and embedded itself in his brain."

As Edom reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard the door close above him.

Jacob was hiding something. Until he had spoken of Josef Krepp, his every response had been formed as a question, which had always been his preferred method of avoidance when conversation involved a subject that made him uncomfortable.

Returning to his apartment, Edom had to pass under the limbs of the majestically crowned oak that dominated the deep yard between the house and the garage.

Head lowered, as if his visit to Jacob were a weight that bowed him, his attention was on the ground. Otherwise, he might not have noticed, might not have been halted by, the intricate and beautiful pattern of sunlight and shadow over which he walked.

This was a California live oak, green even in winter, although its leaves were fewer now than they would be in warmer seasons. The elaborate branch structure, reflected around him, was an exquisite and harmonious maze overlaying a mosaic of sunlight green on grass, and something in its patterns suddenly touched him, moved him, seized his imagination. He felt as if he were balanced on the brink of an astonishing insight.

Then he looked up at the massive limbs overhead, and the mood changed: A sense of impending insight at once gave way to the fear that an unsuspected fissure in a huge limb might crack through at this precise moment, crushing him under a ton of wood, or that the Big One, striking now, would topple the entire oak.

Edom fled back to his apartment.