Galilee

PART ONE. The Time Remaining

A the insistence of my stepmother Cesaria Barbarossa he house in which I presently sit was built so that it faces southeast. The architect-who was no lesser man than the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson-protested her desire repeatedly and eloquently. I have the letters in which he did so here on my desk. But she would not be moved on the subject. The house was to look back towards her homeland, towards Africa, and he, as her employee, was to do as he was instructed.

It's very plain, however, reading between the lines of her missives (I have those too; or at least copies of them) that he is far more than an architect for hire; and she to him more than a headstrong woman with a perverse desire to build a house in a swamp, in North Carolina, facing southeast. They write to one another like people who know a secret.

I know a few myself; and luckily for the thoroughness of what follows I have no intention of keeping them.

The time has come to tell everything I know. Failing that, everything I can detect or surmise. Failing that, everything I can invent. If I do my job properly it won't even matter to you which is which. What will appear on these pages will be, I hope, a seamless history, describing deeds and destinies that will range across the world. Some of them will be, to say the least, strange events, enacted by troubled and unpalatable souls. But as a general rule, you should assume that the more unlikely the action I lay upon this stage for you, the more likely it is that I have evidence of its having happened. The things I will invent will be, I suspect, mundane by comparison with the truth. And as I said, it's my intention that you should not know the difference. I plan to interweave the elements of my story so cunningly that you'll cease to even care whether an event happened out there in the same world where you walk, or in here, in the head of a crippled man who will never again move from his stepmother's house.

This house, this glorious house!

When Jefferson labored on its designs he was still some distance from Pennsylvania Avenue, but he was by no means an unknown. The year was 1790. He had already penned the Declaration of Independence, and served in France as the US Minister to the French government. Great words had flowed from his pen. Yet here he is taking time from his duties in Washington, and from work in his own house, to write long letters to my father's wife, in which the business of constructing this house and the nuances of his heart are exquisitely interlaced.

If that is not extraordinary enough, consider this: Cesaria is a black woman; Jefferson, for all his democratic protestations, was the owner of some two hundred slaves. So how much authority must she have had over him, to be able to persuade him to labor for her as he did? It's a testament to her powers of enchantment-powers which in this case she exercised, as she was fond of saying, "without the juju." In other words: in her dealings with Jefferson she was simply, sweetly, even innocently, human. Whatever capacities she possesses to supematurally beguile a human soul-and she possesses many-she liked his clear-sightedness too well- to blind him that way. If he was devoted to her, it was because she was worthy of his devotion.

They called the house he built for her L'Enfant. Actually, I believe the full name was L'Enfant des Carolinas. I can only speculate as to why they so named it.

That the name of the house is in French is no big surprise: they met in the gilded salons of Paris. But the name itself? I have two theories. The first, and the most obvious, is that the house was in a sense the product of their romance, their child if you will, and they named it accordingly. The second, that it was the infant of an architectural parent, the progenitor being Jefferson's own house at Monticello, into which he poured his genius for most of his life. It's bigger than Monticello by a rough measure of three (Monticello is eleven thousand square feet; I estimate L'Enfant to be a little over thirty-four thousand) and has a number of smaller service buildings in its vicinity, whereas Jefferson's house is a single structure, incorporating the slave and servant quarters, the kitchen and toilet facilities, under one roof. But in other regards the houses are very similar. They're both Jeffersonian reworkings of Palladian models; both have double porticoes, both have octagonal domes, both have capacious high-ceilinged rooms and plenty of windows, both are practical rather than glamorous houses; both, I'd say, are structures that bespeak great confidence and great love.

Of course their settings are radically different. Monti-cello, as its name suggests, is set on a mountain. L'Enfant sits on a plot of low-lying ground forty-seven acres in size, the southeastern end of which is unredeemable swamp, and the northern perimeter wooded, primarily with pine. The house itself is raised up on a modest ridge, which protects it a little from the creeping damps and rots of this region, but not enough to stop the cellar from flooding during heavy rain, and the rooms getting damnably cold in winter and humid as hell in summer. Not that I'm complaining. L'Enfant is an extraordinary house. Sometimes I think it has a soul all of its own. Certainly it seems to know the moods of its occupants, and accommodates them.

There have been times, sitting in my study, when a black thought has crept into my psyche for some reason, and I swear I can feel the room darken in sympathy with me. Nothing changes physically-the drapes don't dose, the stains don't spread-but I nevertheless sense a subtle transformation in the chamber; as if it wishes to fall in rhythm with my mood. The same is true on days when I'm blithe, or haunted by doubts, or merely feeling lazy. Maybe if s Jefferson's genius that creates the illusion of empathy. Or perhaps it's Cesaria's work: her own genius, wedded with his. Whatever the reason, L'Bnfant knows us. Better, I sometimes think, than we know ourselves.

I share this house with three women, two men, and a number of indeterminates.

The women are of course Cesaria and her daughters, my two half-sisters, Marietta and Zabrina. The men? One is my half-brother Luman (who doesn't actually live in the house, but outside, in a shack on the grounds) and Dwight Huddie, who serves as majordomo, as cook and as general handyman: I'll tell you more about him later. Then, as I said, there's the indeterminates, whose number is, not surprisingly, indeterminate.

How shall I best describe these presences to you? Not as spirits; that evokes something altogether too fanciful. They are simply nameless laborers, in Cesaria's exclusive control, who see to the general upkeep of the house. They do their job well. I wonder sometimes if Cesaria didn't first conjure them when Jefferson was still at work here, so that he could give them all a practical education in the strengths and liabilities of his masterpiece. If so, it would have been a scene to cherish: Jefferson the great rationalist, the numbers man, obliged to believe the evidence of his own eyes, though his common sense revolted at the idea that creatures such as these-brought out of the ether at the command of the mistress of L'Enfant-could exist. As I said, I don't know how many of them there are (six, perhaps; perhaps less); nor whether they're in fact projections of Cesaria's will or things once possessed of souls and volition. I only know that they tirelessly perform the task of keeping this vast house and its grounds in a reasonable condition, but-like stagehands in a theater-do so only when our gaze is averted. If this sounds a little eerie, maybe it is: I've simply become used to it. I no longer think about who it is who changes my bed every morning while I'm brushing my teeth, or who sews the buttons back on my shirt when they come loose, or fixes the cracks in the plaster or trims the magnolias. I take it for granted that the work will be done, and that whoever the laborers are, they have no more desire to exchange pleasantries with me than I do with them.

There's one other occupant of the place that I think I should mention, and that's Cesaria's personal servant. How she came to have him as her bosom companion will be the subject of a later passage, so I'll leave the details until then. Let me say only this: he is, in my opinion, the saddest soul in the house. And when you consider the sum of sorrow under this roof, that's no little claim.

Anyway, I don't want to get mired in melancholy. Let's move on.

Having listed the human, or almost human, occupants of L'Enfant, I should make mention perhaps of the animals. An estate of this size is of course home to innumerable wild species. There are foxes, skunks and possums, there are feral cats (escapees from domestic servitude somewhere in Rollins County), and a number of dogs who make their home in the thicket. The trees are busy with birds night and day, and every now and then an alligator wanders up from the swamp and suns itself on the lawn.

All this is predictable enough. But there are two species whose presence here is rather less likely. The first was imported by Marietta, who took it into her head some years back to raise three hyena pups. How she came by them I don't recall (if she ever told me); I only know she wearied of surrogate motherhood quickly enough, and turned them loose. They bred, mcestuously of course, and now there's quite a pack of them out there. The other oddities here are my stepmother's pride and joy: the porcupines. She's kept them as pets since first occupying the house, and they've prospered. They live inside, where they roam unfettered and unchallenged, though they prefer on the whole to stay upstairs, close to their mistress.

We had horses, of course, in my father's day-the stables were palatially appointed-but none of them survived an hour beyond his passing. Even if they'd had choice in the matter (which they didn't), they were too loyal to live once he'd gone; too noble. I doubt the same could be said of any of the other species. They grudgingly coexist with us while we're here, but I doubt there would be much grieving among them if we all departed. Nor do I imagine they'd long respect the sanctity of the house. In a week or two they'd have taken up residence: hyenas in the library, alligators in the cellar, foxes running riot under the great dome. Sometimes I wonder if they're not eyeing it already; planning for the day when it's theirs to shit on from roof to foundations.

My suite of rooms is at the back of the house, four rooms in all, none of which were designed for their present purpose. What is now my bedroom-and the chamber I consider the most charming in the house-was originally a dining room used by my late father, Hursek Nicodemus Barbarossa, who did not once sit at the same table as Cesaria all the time I lived here. Such is marriage.

Adjacent to the study where I am sitting now, Nicodemus put his collection of keepsakes, a goodly portion of which was-at his request-buried with him when he died. There he kept the skull of the first horse he ever owned, along with a comprehensive and outlandish collection of sexual devices fashioned over the ages to increase the pleasure of connoisseurs. (He had a tale for every one of them: invariably hilarious.) This was not all he kept here. There was a gauntlet that had belonged to Saladin, the Moslem lover of Richard the Lionheart. There was a scroll, painted for him in China, which depicted, he once told me, the history of the world (though it seemed to my uneducated eyes simply a landscape with a serpentine river winding through it); there were dozens of representations of the male genitals-the lingam, the jade flute, Aaron's rod (or my father's favorite term: Il Santo Membra, the holy cock)-some of which I believe were carved or sculpted by his own priests, and therefore represent the sex that spurted me into being. Some of those objects are still here on the shelves. You may think that odd; even a little distasteful. I'm not certain I would even argue with that opinion. But he was a sexual man, and these statues, for all their crudity, embody him better than a book of his life, or a thousand photographs.

And it's not as if they're the only things on the shelves.

Over the decades I've assembled here a vast library.

Though I speak only English, French and a halting Italian,

I read Hebrew, Latin and Greek, so my books are often antiquated, their subjects arcane. When you've had as much time on your hands as I've had, your curiosity takes obscure turns. In learned circles I'd probably be counted a world expert in a variety of subjects that no person with a real life to live-children, taxes, love-would give a fig about.

My father, were he here, would not approve of my books. He didn't like me to read. It reminded him, he would tell me, of how he'd lost my mother. A remark, by the way, which I do not understand to this day. The only volume he encouraged me to study was the two-leaved book that opens between a woman's legs. He kept ink, pen and paper from me when I was a child; though of course I wanted them all the more because they were forbidden me. He was determined that my real schooling be in the art and craft of horse breeding, which, after sex, was his great passion.

As a young man I traveled the world on his behalf, buying and selling horses, organizing their transportation to the stables here at L'Enfant, learning how to understand their natures as he understood them. I was good at what I did; and I enjoyed my travels. Indeed I met my late wife, Chiyojo, on one of those trips; and brought her back here to the house, intending to start a family. Those sweet ambitions were unfortunately denied me, however, by a sequence of tragedies that ended with the death of both my wife and that of Nicodemus.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was talking about this room, and what it housed during my father's occupancy: the phalli, the scroll, the horse's skull. What else? Let me think. There was a bell which Nicodemus claimed had been rung by a leper healed at the Crucifixion (he took the bell to his grave), and a device, no bigger than the humidor in which I keep my havanas, which plays a curious, whining music if touched, its sound so close to the human voice that it's possible to believe, as my father insisted, that its sealed interior contains a living mechanism.

Please feel free to make of these claims what you will, by the way. Though my father has been dead almost a hundred and forty years, I'm not about to call him a liar in print. Such men as my father do not take kindly to having their stories questioned, and though he is deceased I do not entirely believe I am beyond his reach.

Anyway, it is a fine room. Obliged as I am to sit here most of the day I have become familiar with every nuance of its form and volume, and were Jefferson standing before me now I would tell him: sir, I can think of no happier prison than this; nor any more likely to inspire my slovenly mind to fly.

If I am so very happy here, sitting with a book in my hands, why, you may ask, have I decided to put pen to paper and write what will be inevitably a tragic history? Why torment myself this way, when I could wheel myself out onto the balcony and sit with a copy of St. Thomas Aquinas in my lap and watch life in the mimosas?

There are two reasons. The first is my half-sister Marietta.

It happened like this. About two weeks ago she came into my room (without knocking, as usual), partook of a glass of gin, without asking, as usual, and sitting down without invitation in what used to be my father's chair said: "Eddie…"

She knows I hate to be called Eddie. My full name's Edmund Maddox Barbarossa. Edmund is fine; Maddox is fine; I was even called The Ox in my younger day, and didn't find it offensive. But Eddie? An Eddie can walk. An Eddie can make love. I'm no Eddie.

"Why do you always do that?" I asked her.

She sat back in the creaking chair and smiled mischievously, "Because it annoys you," she replied. A typically Mariettaesque response, I may say. She can be the very soul of perversity, though to look at her you'd never think it. I won't dote on her here (she gets far too much of that from her girlfriends), but she is a beautiful woman, by any measure. When she smiles, it's my father's smile; the sheer appetite in it, that's an echo of him. In repose, she's Cesaria's daughter; lazy-lidded and full of quiet certitude, her gaze, if it rests on you for more than a moment, like a physical thing. She's not a tall creature, my Marietta-a little over five feet without her boots-and now the immensity of chair she was sitting in, and the silly-sweet smile on her face, diminished her almost to a child. It wasn't hard to imagine my father behind her, his huge arms wrapped around her, rocking her. Perhaps she imagined it too, sitting there. Perhaps it was that memory that made her say:

"Do you feel sad these days? I mean, especially sad?"

"What do you mean: especially sad?"

"Well I know how you brood in here-"

"I don't brood."

"You shut yourself away."

"It's by choice. I'm not unhappy."

"Honestly?"

"I've got all I need here. My books. My music. Even if I'm desperate, I've got a television. I even know how to switch it on."

"So you don't feel sad? Ever?"

As she was pressing me so hard on the subject, I gave it a few more moments of thought. "Actually, I suppose I have had one or two bouts of melancholy recently," I conceded. "Nothing I couldn't shake off, but-"

"I hate this gin."

"It's English."

"It's bitter. Why do you have to have English gin? The sun went down on the Empire a long time ago."

"I like the bitterness."

She pulled a face. "Next time I'm in Charleston I'm going to bring you some really nice brandy," she said.

"Brandy's overrated," I remarked.

"It's good if you dissolve a little cocaine in it. Have you ever tried that? That gives it a nice kick."

"Cocaine dissolved in brandy?"

"It goes down so smoothly, and you don't get a nose filled with grey boogers the next morning."

"I don't have any need for cocaine. Marietta. I get along quite well with my gin."

"But liquor makes you sleepy."

"So?"

"So you won't be able to afford so much sleepiness, once you get to work."

"Am I missing something here?" I asked her.

She got up, and despite her contempt for my English gin, refilled her glass and came to stand behind my chair. "May I wheel you out onto the balcony?"

"I wish you'd get to the point."

"I thought you Englishmen liked prevarication?" she said, easing me out from in front of my desk and taking me around it to the french windows. They were already wide open-I'd been sitting enjoying the fragrance of the evening air when Marietta entered. She took me out onto the balcony.

"Do you miss England?" she asked me.

"This is the most peculiar conversation…" I said.

"It's a simple question. You must miss it sometimes."

(My mother, I should explain, was English; one of my father's many mistresses.)

"It's a very long time since I was in England. I only really remember it in my dreams."

"Do you write the dreams down?"

"Oh…" I said. "Now I get it. We're back to the book."

"It's time, Maddox," she said, with a greater gravity than

I could recall her displaying in a long while. "We don't have very much time left."

"According to whom?"

"Oh for God's sake, use your eyes. Something's changing, Eddie. It's subtle, but it's everywhere. It's in the bricks. It's in the flowers. It's in the ground. I went walking near the stables, where we put Poppa, and I swear I felt the earth shaking."

"You're not supposed to go there."

"Don't change the subject. You are so good at that, especially when you're trying to avoid your responsibility."

"Since when was it-"

"You're the only one in the family who can write all this down, Eddie. You've got all the journals here, all the diaries. You still get letters from you-know-who."

"Three in the last forty years. It's scarcely a thriving correspondence. And for God's sake. Marietta, use his name."

"Why should I? I hate the little bastard."

"That's the one thing he certainly isn't, Marietta. Now why don't you just drink your gin and leave me alone?"

"Are you telling me no, Eddie?"

"You don't hear that very often, do you?"

"Eddie…" she simpered.

"Marietta. Darling. I'm not going to throw my life into turmoil because you want me to write a family history."

She gave me a sharp little look and downed her gin in one throatful, setting the glass on the balcony railing. I could tell by the precision of this motion, and her pause before she spoke, that she had an exit line in readiness. She has a fine theatrical flair, my Marietta.

"You don't want to throw your life into turmoil? Don't be so perfectly pathetic. You don't have a life, Eddie. That's why you've got to write this book. If you don't, you're going to die without having done a damn thing."

She knew better of course. I've lived, damn her! Before my injury I had almost as great an appetite for experience as Nicodemus. I take that back. I was never as interested in the sexual opportunities afforded by my travel as he was. He knew all the great bordellos of Europe intimately; I preferred to wander the cathedrals or drink myself into a stupor in a bar. Drink is a weakness of mine, no question, and it's got me into trouble more than once. It's made me fat too. It's hard, of course, to stay thin when you're in a wheelchair. Your backside gets big, your waistline spreads; and Lord, my face, which used to be so well made I could walk into any gathering and take my pick of the female company, is now pasty and round. Only in my eyes might you glimpse the magnetism I once exercised. They are a peculiar color: mingled flecks of blue and gray. The rest of me's just gone to hell.

I suppose that happens to everybody sooner or later. Even Marietta, who is a pure-blooded Barbarossa, has said that over the years she's noticed some subtle signs of aging; it's just much, much slower than it would be for a human being. One gray hair every decade or so isn't anything to bitch about, I remind her, especially when nature had given her so much else: she has Cesaria's flawless skin (though neither she nor Zabrina are quite as black as their mother) and Nicodemus's physical ease. She also shares my delight in getting drunk, but as yet it's taken no toll on her waist or her buttocks. I digress; again. How did I get onto the subject of Marietta's backside? Oh yes, I was talking about how I traveled as my father's envoy. It was wonderful. I stood in the shit in a lot of stables over the years, of course, but I also visited some of this planet's glories: the wilds of Mongolia, the deserts of North Africa, the plains of Andalusia. So please understand that though I'm now reduced to being a voyeur, this wasn't always the case. I don't write as a theorist, pontificating on the state of a world that I only knew from my newspapers and my television screen.

As I get deeper into the story I'll no doubt season it with talk of the sights I saw and the people I knew on my journeys. For now, let me just talk of England, the country where I was conceived. My birth mother was a woman by the name of Moira Feeney, and, though she died a short time after my birth, of a sickness I've never quite comprehended, I passed the first seven years of my life in her native country, looked after by her sister, Gisela. It was not by any means a cosseted existence; Gisela was enraged when she discovered the father of her sister's child did not intend to bring us into his charmed circle, and rather than accept the substantial sums he offered her to help raise me, she proudly, and foolishly, refused all subsidy. She also refused to see him. It wasn't until Gisela also died (she was struck, somewhat suspiciously, by lightning) that my father appeared in my life, and took me with him on his travels. In the next five years we lived in a number of extraordinary houses, the guests of great men who wanted my father's advice as a horse breeder (and Lord knows what else besides; I think he was probably shaping the destinies of nations behind the scenes). But for all the glamour of those years-two summers in Granada, a spring in Venice; so much more that I can't recall-it is my years in Blackheath with Gisela that I still return to most fondly. Gentle seasons these; and my gentle human aunt, and milk and rain and the plum tree at the back of the cottage, from the topmost branches of which I could see the dome of St. Paul's.

I have a pristine memory of what it was like to perch in those gnarled branches, where I would linger for hour upon hour, lulled into a happy trance by rhymes and songs. One of those rhymes I remember to this day.

It seems I am. It seems I was. It seems I will Be born, because It seems I am. It seems I was. It seems I will Be bom because-

And so on, round and round.

Marietta's right, I do miss England, and I do what I can to keep remembrance of it. English gin, English syntax, English melancholy. But the England I yearn for, the England I dream of when I doze in my chair, no longer exists. It was just a view from a plum tree, and a happy child. Both went into history a long time ago. It is, however, the second reason why I am writing this book. In opening the floodgates of memory, I hope to be carried, at least for a little while, back into the bliss of my childhood.

I should tell you, just briefly, about what happened the day I told Marietta I'd begun this book, because you'll understand better what it's like to live in this house. I had been sitting on my balcony with the birds (there are eleven individuals-cardinals, buntings, soldier-wing blackbirds-who come to feed from my hand and then stay to make music for me), and while I was feeding them I heard her down below having a furious argument with my other half-sister, Zabrina. As far as I could gather Marietta was being her usual imperious self, and Zabrina-who keeps out of everybody's way most of the time, and when she does encounter one of the family doesn't say much-was for once standing up for her own opinions. The gist of the exchange was this: Marietta had apparently brought one of her lovers into the house the previous night, and the visitor had proved to be quite the detective. Apparently she'd got up while Marietta was asleep, had gone wandering around the house and seen something she should not have seen.

Now she was apparently in a state of panic, and Marietta was quite out of patience with her, so she was trying to cajole Zabrina into cooking up some spiked candy that would wipe the woman's memory clean. Then Marietta could take her back home, and the whole untidy business could be forgotten.

"I told you last time I don't approve-" Zabrina's voice is normally reedy and thin; now it was positively shrill.

"Oh Lord," said Marietta wearily. "Don't be so highhanded."

"You know you should keep ordinary folks away from the house," Zabrina went on. "It's asking for trouble, bringing somebody here."

"This one's special," Marietta said.

"So why do you want me to wipe her memory?"

"Because I'm afraid she's going to lose her mind if you don't."

"What did she see?"

There was a pause. "I don't know," Marietta finally admitted. "She's too incoherent to tell me."

"Well where did you find her?"

"On the stairs."

"She didn't see Mama?"

"No, Zabrina. She didn't see Mama. If she'd seen Mama-"

"She'd be dead."

"-she'd be dead."

There was a pause. Finally Zabrina said: "If I do this-"

"Yes?"

"Quidpro quo."

"That's not very sisterly," Marietta groused. "But all right. Quid pro quo. What do you want?"

"I don't know yet," Zabrina said. "But I'll think of something, don't worry. And you won't like it. I'll make sure of that."

"How very petty of you," Marietta observed.

"Look. Do you want me to do it or don't you?"

Again there was a pause. "She's in my bedroom," Marietta said. "I had to tie her to the bed."

Zabrina giggled.

"It's not funny."

"They're all funny," Zabrina replied. "Weak heads, weak hearts. You're never going to find anyone who can really be with you. You know that don't you? It's impossible. We're on our own, to the very end."

About an hour later Marietta appeared in my room. She looked ashen; her gray eyes full of sadness.

"You heard the conversation," she said. I didn't bother to reply. "Sometimes that bitch makes me want to hit her. Hard. Not that she'd feel it. Fat cow."

"You just can't bear to be in anybody's debt."

"I wouldn't mind with you," she said.

"I don't count."

"No, I guess you don't," she replied. Then, seeing the expression on my face. "Now what have I said? I'm just agreeing with you, for God's sake! Why is everybody so damn sensitive around here?" She went to my desk and examined the contents of the gin bottle. There was barely a shot remaining. "Got any more?"

"There's half a case in the closet in the bedroom."

"Mind if I-?"

"Help yourself."

"You know we should talk more often, Eddie," she called back to me while she dug for the gin. "Get to know one another. I don't have anything in common with Dwight and Zabrina's been in the foulest mood for the last couple of months. She's so obese these days, Eddie, Have you seen her? I mean, she's grossly fat."

Though both Zabrina and Marietta insist that they're completely unlike-and in many regards this is true-they have some essential qualities in common. At their cores they're both willful, stubborn, obsessive women. But whereas Marietta, who's eleven years Zabrina's junior, has always prided herself on her athleticism, and is as lean as a woman can get and still have a lushness about her body, Zabrina gave into her cravings for praline brittle and pecan pie years ago. Occasionally I'll see her from my window, wandering rotundly across the lawn. At the last sighting she was probably three hundred and fifty pounds. (We are, you've doubtless begun to grasp, a profoundly wounded group of people. But trust me, when you better know the circumstances of our lives, you'll be astonished we're as functional as we are.)

Marietta had emerged with a fresh bottle of gin, and, unscrewing the top, poured herself an ample measure.

"Why do you keep all those clothes in the closet?" she said, knocking back a mouthful. "You're never going to wear most of them."

"I presume that means you have your eye on something."

"The smoking jacket."

"Take it."

She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. "I've underrated you all these years," she said, and went back into the bedroom to fetch the jacket in case I changed my mind.

"I've decided to write the book," I told her when she emerged.

She tossed the jacket at Nicodemus's chair and fairly danced with excitement. "That's so wonderful," she said. "Oh my God, Eddie, we're going to have such fun."

"We?"

"Yes, we. I mean, you'll be writing it most of the time, but I'll be helping. There's a lot you don't know. Dirt about Cesaria that she told me when I was little."

"Maybe you should keep your voice down."

"She can't hear me. She's always in her chambers these days."

"We don't know what she can hear," I said. There was a story that she'd had Jefferson design the house so that it funneled sounds to her chambers (which I've never entered, by the way; nor has Marietta). The story may be apocryphal, but I wonder. Though it's many, many months since I caught sight of the woman I don't have difficulty believing she sits there in her boudoir listening to her children, and her husband's children, conniving and weeping and slowly losing their minds. She probably enjoys it.

"Well if she can hear me, so what? She should be happy we're going to all this trouble. I mean, it's going to be a history of the Barbarossas. It'll make her immortal."

"If she isn't already."

"Oh no… she's getting old. Zabrina sees her all the time and she says the old bitch is failing."

"I find that hard to imagine."

"It was her saying that which started me thinking about our book."

"It's not our book," I insisted. "If I'm going to do it, it's going to be done my way. Which means it's not going to simply be a history of the Barbarossas."

She emptied her glass. "I see," she said, with a little chill in her voice. "So what's it going to be?"

"Oh, it'll be about the family. But it'll be about the Gearys too."

Now she fell silent and stared out of the window at the place where I sit with the birds. It took her fully a minute to bring herself to speak again. "If you write about the Gearys, then I'm having nothing to do with the fucking thing."

"How can I write-"

"Or indeed you."

"Let me finish, will you? How can I write about this family-particularly the recent history of this family-and not write about the Gearys?"

"They're scum, Eddie. Human scum. And vicious. Every one of them."

"That's not true. Marietta. And even if it were, I say again: what kind of bowdlerized account would this damn book be if I didn't include them?"

"All right. So just mention them in passing."

"They're part of our lives."

"They're not part of mine," she said fiercely. Her gaze came back in my direction and I saw that she wasn't so much enraged as sorrowful. I was revealing myself as a traitor with my desire to tell the story this way. She measured her next words with great care, like a lawyer making a pivotal argument.

"You realize, don't you, that this may be the only way people out there get to know about our family?" she snapped, showing me a glimpse of her temper.

"All the more-"

"Now you let me finish. When I came in here suggesting you write this fucking book, it was because I had this feeling-I have this feeling-that we haven't got very long. And my instincts are rarely wrong."

"I realize that," I said quietly. Marietta has prophetic talents, no question. She gets them from her mother.

"Maybe that's why she's looking so haggard these days," Marietta said.

"She's feeling what you're feeling?"

She nodded. "Poor bitch," she said softly. "And that's another thing to consider. Cesaria. She hates the Gearys even more than I do. They took her beloved Galilee."

I snorted at this nonsense. "That's one sentimental myth I intend to lay to rest, for a start," I said.

"So you don't believe he was taken?"

"Absolutely not. I know what happened the night he left better than anyone living. And I intend to tell what I know."

"Of course, nobody may give a damn," Marietta observed.

"At least I'll have set the record straight. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"I don't know what the hell I was thinking," Marietta replied, her distaste at what I had proposed now resurfacing. "I'm beginning to wish I'd never suggested a fucking book."

"Well, it's too late now. It's begun."

"You began already?"

This was not entirely true. I hadn't yet laid pen to paper. But I knew where I was going to begin: with the house, and Cesaria and Thomas Jefferson. The work was as good as started.

"Well don't let me delay you," Marietta said, going to the door. "But I'm not guaranteeing you my help."

"That's fine. I'm not asking for it."

"Not now you're not. But you will. You'll have to. There's a lot of pieces of information I've got that you'll need. Then we'll see what your integrity's worth."

So saying, she left me to my gin. I didn't doubt the significance of this last remark: she intended to make some kind of bargain. A section of my book she didn't approve of excised in return for a piece of information I needed. I was absolutely determined she wasn't going to get a single word removed however. What I'd told her was true. There was no way to tell the story of the Barbarossas without telling that of the Gearys, and thus also the story of Rachel Pallenberg, the one name I do not ever expect to hear crossing Marietta's lips. I had deliberately, not mentioned the Pallenberg woman myself, because I was certain as soon as I did so Marietta would be screaming inventive obscenities at me. Needless to say, I intend to devote a substantial portion of this story to the vices and virtues of Rachel Pallenberg.

That said, this narrative will be somewhat impoverished if I don't get Marietta's help; so I intend to be selective in the way I talk about what I'm doing. She'll come round; if only because she's an egotist, and the idea of not having her ideas in the book is going to be far more painful to her than my talking about the Gearys. Besides, she knows very well there are so many matters that I'm going to trust to my instinct on, matters that cannot be strictly verified. Matters of the spirit, matters of the bedroom, matters of the grave. These are the truly important elements. The rest is just geography and dates.

Later that day, I saw Marietta escorting from the house the woman I'd heard her talking to Zabrina about. She was, like almost all of Marietta's lovers, blonde, petite and probably no more than twenty years old. By the look of the clothes, I'd guess she was a tourist, perhaps a hitchhiker, rather than a local woman.

Zabrina had plainly done as Marietta had requested, and relieved the poor woman of her panic (along with any memory of the experience that had induced that panic). I watched them from my balcony through my binoculars. The blank expression on the girl's face disturbed me. Was this really the only way human beings could deal with the appearance of the miraculous: panic rising to insanity; or, if they were lucky, a healing excision of the memory, which left them like this woman, calm but impoverished? What pitiful options they were. (Which thought brought me back to the book. Was it too grand an ambition to hope that in these pages I might somehow prepare the way for such revelations, so that when they came the human mind didn't simply crack like a mirror too frail to reflect the wonders before it?) I felt a kind of sadness for the visitor, who had been washed, for her own good, of the very experience that might have made her life worth the living. What would she be after this, I wondered. Had Zabrina left deep inside her a seed of the memory, which, like the irritant mote in an oyster's flesh might with time become something rare and wonderful? I would have to ask.

Meanwhile, under the cover of the trees, Marietta had halted with her companion, and was saying a more than fond goodbye. Having promised to tell the truth, however unpalatable, I can scarcely remain silent on what I saw: she bared the woman's breasts while I watched; she teased the woman's nipples and kissed her lips, while I watched, and then, while I watched, she whispered something, and the woman went down on to her knees, unbuckled and unbuttoned Marietta's pants, and put her tongue into Marietta, flicking it so cunningly I heard Marietta's yelps from my balcony. Lord knows I'm grateful for whatever pleasures come my way, and I'm not about to pretend that I'm deeply ashamed of watching them make love. It was perfectly wonderful to watch, and when they were finished, and Marietta escorted the woman to the path that winds away from L'Enfant and back into the real world, I felt-though this may seem absurd-.a pang of loneliness.

Though Marietta had mocked my belief that the house is a kind of listening device, which brings news from all its rooms to the ears of one soul in particular, that very night I had that belief confirmed.

I do not sleep well; never have, never will. It doesn't matter how weary I am, as soon as I put my head on my pillow all manner of thoughts, most of them utterly without merit circle in my skull. So it was last night; fragments of my conversation with Marietta, all rearranged so as to be nonsensical, and punctuated with her libidinous yelps, constituted the soundtrack. But the images were from some other store entirely. Neither Marietta's face nor form appeared in my mind's eye; rather the faces and forms of men and women I did not even recognize. No, I take that back. I recognized them; I simply couldn't name them. Some seemed grotesquely happy with their lot; going naked, some of them, on the streets of what I think was Charleston, darting along the sidewalks and defecating from the chestnut trees. But there were others I dreamed of who were far less happy: one moment blank-faced brothers and sisters to Marietta's concubine, the next moment shrieking like tortured animals-as though their forgetfulness had been snatched away, and what they were remembering was unbearable. I know there are some psychoanalysts who theorize that every creature which appears in a dream or waking dream is an aspect of the dreamer. If so, then I suppose the naked beasts in the streets of Charleston are the part of me that's my father, and the other, the terrified souls sobbing incoherently, are that human part which my mother made. But I suspect the scheme's too simple. In search of a pattern, the theorist ignores all that's ragged and contradictory, and ends with a pretty lie. I'm not two in one; I'm many. This self has my mother's compassion and my father's taste for raw mutton. That one has my mother's love of murder stories and my father's passion for sunflowers. Who knows how many there are? Too many for any dogma to contain, I'm certain of that.

The point is, these dreams had me in a terrible state. I was close to tears, which is rare for me.

And then, in the darkness, I heard the sound of shuffling, and of clicking on the wooden floor and, looking down toward the noise, saw in a lozenge of moonlight a prickly silhouette waddling toward my bed. It was a porcupine. I didn't move. I simply let the creature come to me (my arm was hanging off the bed, my hand dose to the floor) and put its wet nose in my palm.

"Did you come down here on your own?" I said softly to the creature. Sometimes they did just that, particularly the younger, more adventurous ones; came shuffling down the stairs in the hope of finding a snack. But I'd no sooner asked the question than I had my answer, as my body responded to the entrance of the quill-pig's mistress, Cesaria. You see, this pitiful anatomy of mine, wounded beyond all hope of repair, was quickening. It was uncanny. I was in the presence of this woman, my father's wife, very rarely, but I knew from past experience the effect of this visit would last for days. Even if she were to leave the room now I would feel spasms in my lower limbs for a week or more, though the muscles of my legs were atrophied. And my cock, which had been just a piss-pipe for far too long, would stand up like an adolescent's and demand milking twice an hour. Lord, I thought, was it any wonder she'd been worshiped? She could probably raise the dead if it pleased her to do so.

"Come away. Tansy," she said to the porcupine.

Tansy ignored the instruction, which I will admit pleased me. Even she might be disobeyed.

"I don't mind it," I said.

"Just be careful. The spines-"

"I know." I still had the scars where one of her quill-pigs, as she preferred to call them, had taken against me. And I think it had distressed Cesaria to see me bleed. I remember the look on her face quite dearly: her eyes like liquid night in that obsidian head of hers; her sympathy terrifying to me, because I suppose I feared her touch, her healing. Feared it would transform me, make me her devotee forever. So we'd stood, neither one of us moving, both distressed by something essential to the other (her power, my blood) while the quill-pig had sat on the floor between us and scratched its fleas.

"This book…" she said.

"Marietta told you about it?" I said.

"I don't need telling, Maddox."

"No. Of course not."

What she said next astonished me. But then of course she would never be who she is-she could not trail the legends she trails-if she were not a constant astonishment.

"You must write it fearlessly," she said. "Write out of your head and out of your heart and never care about the consequences."

She spoke more softly than I'd ever heard her speak before. Not weakly, you understand, but with a kind of tenderness I'd always assumed she would never feel toward me. In truth, I hadn't believed she felt it toward anybody.

"So the business about the Gearys-?"

"Must go in. All of it. Every last detail. Don't spare any of them. Or any of us, come to that. We've all made our compromises over the years. Treated with the enemy instead of stopping their hearts."

"Do you hate the Gearys?"

"I should say no. They're only human. They know no better. But yes, I hate them. If they didn't exist I'd still have a husband and a son."

"It's not as though Galilee's dead."

"He's dead to me," she said. "He died the moment he sided with them against your father." She snapped her fingers lightly, and her quill-pig turned round and waddled back to her. Throughout this entire conversation I'd seen only glimpses of her, but now, as the porcupine approached her, she bent down to gather it up into her arms, and the moonlight, washing up off the boards, momentarily showed me her entirely. She was not, as Marietta had reported, frail or sickly; far from it. She looked like a young woman to my eye; a woman prodigiously gifted by nature: her beauty both refined and raw at the same time, the planes of her face so strong she seemed almost the idol of herself, carved out of the silver light in which she stood. Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman's face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you'd been before.

With the quill-pig in her arms, she was moving toward the door. But as she reached it she halted (all this I only heard; she was again invisible to me).

"The beginning is always the hardest," she said.

"Well actually I've already begun…" I said, a little tentatively. Despite the fact that she'd neither said nor done anything to intimidate me, I was still-perhaps unfairly-anxious that she'd blindside me with some attack or other.

"How?" she said.

"How did I begin?"

"Yes." f

"With the house, of course."

"Ah…" I heard the smile in her voice. "With Mr. Jefferson?"

"With Mr. Jefferson."

"That was a good idea. To begin in the middle that way. And with my glorious Thomas. He was, you know, the love of my life."

"Jefferson?"

"You think it should have been your father?"

"Well-"

"It was nothing like love with your father. It became love, but that's not how it began. When such as I, and such as he, mate, we do not mate for the sake of sentiment. We mate to make children. To preserve our genius, as your father would have said."

"Perhaps I should have begun there."

She laughed. "With our mating?"

"No I didn't mean that." I was glad of the darkness, to cover my blushes-though with her eyes she probably saw them anyway. "I… I… meant with the firstborn. With Galilee."

I heard her sigh. Then I heard nothing; for such a time I thought perhaps shefd decided to leave me. But no. She was still there in the room.

"We didn't baptize him Galilee," she said. "He took that name for himself, when he was six."

"I didn't know that."

"There's a great deal you don't know, Maddox. A great deal you can't even guess. That's why I came to invite you… when you're ready… to see some of the past…"

"You have more books?"

"Not books. Nothing so tangible…"

"I'm sorry, I don't really understand."

Again, she sighed, and I was afraid this offer, whatever it was, would be snatched away again because I was making her impatient. But she sighed not out of irritation, rather out of a heaviness of the heart.

"Galilee was everything to us," she said. "And he became nothing. I want you to understand how that came about."

"I'll do my best, I swear."

"I know you will," she said gently. "But it may take more courage than you have. You're so human, Maddox. I've always found that hard to like."

"I can't do much about it."

"Your father loved you for that very reason, you know…" Her voice trailed away. "What a mess it all is," she said. "What a terrible, tragic mess. To have had so much, and let it go through our ringers…"

"I want to understand how that happened," I replied, "more than anything, I want to understand."

"Yes," she said, somewhat distractedly. Her thoughts were already elsewhere.

"What do I need to do?" I asked her.

'"I'll explain everything to Luman," Mama replied. "He'll watch over you. And of course if it's too much for your human sensibilities-"

"Zabrina can take it away."

"That's right. Zabrina can take it away."

I had a different vision of the house thereafter. Everything was expectation. I was looking for a sign, a due, a glimpse of this mysterious source of knowledge that Cesaria had invited me to share. What form would it take, if it wasn't books? Was there somewhere in the house a collection of family heirlooms for me to sift through? Or was I being entirely too literal? Had I been invited into a place of spirit rather than substance? If so, would I have the words to express what I felt in that place?

For the first time in perhaps three months I decided to leave my room and go outside. For this, I need somebody's help. Jefferson didn't design the house anticipating the presence of a crippled occupant (and I doubt that Cesaria ever thought she'd entertain such frailty) so there are fpur steps in the passageway that leads out to the front hall; steps which are too deep for me to negotiate in a wheelchair even with help. Dwight has to carry me down, like a babe in arms, and then I wait, laid prone on the sofa in the hallway, until he brings down the chair and sets me in it.

Dwight is quite simply the most amiable fellow I have ever known; though he has every reason to hate the God who made him and probably every human being in the state of North Carolina. He was born with some kind of mental defect that made self-expression difficult, and was therefore thought to be an idiot. His childhood and early adolescence were a living hell: denied any real education, he languished, abused by both his parents.

Then, one day in his fourteenth year, he wandered into the swamp, perhaps to kill himself; he says he doesn't exactly recall the reason. Nor does he know how long he wandered-though it was many days and nights-until Zabrina found him at the perimeters of L'Enfant. He was in a state of complete exhaustion. She brought him back to the house, and for reasons of her own nursed him to health in her rooms without telling anyone. I've never pressed Dwight as to the exact nature of his relationship with Zabrina, but I don't doubt that when he was younger she used him sexually; nor do I doubt that he was quite happy with the arrangement. She wasn't then quite the scale she is now, but she was still substantial; for Dwight this was no hardship. He has several times mentioned to me in passing his enthusiasm for plenitude in a woman. Whether that taste predated his time with Zabrina, or was formed by it, I don't know. I can only report that she kept him a secret for almost three years, during which she apparently made it her business to educate him; and well. By the time she introduced him to Marietta and myself, all but the faintest trace of his speech impediment had disappeared, and he had become the fledgling form of the man he was to become. Now, thirty-two years later, he is as much a part of this house as the boards beneath my feet. Though his relationship with Zabrina soured for reasons I've never been able to pry out of him, he still speaks of her with a kind of reverence. She is, and will always be, the woman who taught him Herodotus and saved his soul (which services, by the way, are in my opinion intimately connected).

Of course, he's aging far faster than any of the rest of us. He's forty-nine now, and crops his thinning hair to a gray stubble (which gives him a rather scholarly look) and his body, which used to be lean, is getting pudgy around the middle. The business of carrying me around has become much more of a chore for him, and I've told him several times that he's soon going to have to go looking for another lost soul out there; someone he can train to take over the heavy duties in the house.

But perhaps now that's academic. If Marietta's right, and our days here are indeed numbered, he won't need to train anyone to follow in his footsteps. They, and he, and we all, will have disappeared from sight forever.

We ate together that day, not in the dining room, which is far too large for just two (I wonder sometimes what kind of guests Mama had intended to invite), but in the kitchen. Jellied chicken loaf, and chives and sesame seed biscuits, followed by Dwight's dessert specialty, a Hampton polonaise: a cake made with layers of almond and chocolate, which he serves with a sweet whipped cream. (His skills as a cook he got from Zabrina, I'm certain. His repertoire of candies is remarkable: all manner of crystallized fruit, nougat, pralines, and a tooth-rotting wonder he calls divinity fudge.)

"I saw Zabrina yesterday," he said, serving me another slice of the polonaise.

"Did you speak to her?"

"No. She had that don't come near me look on her face. You know how she gets."

"Are you just going to watch me make a hog of myself?"

"I'm so filled up I'll not stay awake this afternoon as it is."

"Nothing wrong with a little siesta. Good ol' Southern tradition. It gets hot, you go snooze till it cools down." I looked up from my plate to see that Dwight had a glum expression on his face. "What's wrong?"

"I don't like sleep as much as I used to," he said softly.

"Why not?" I asked him.

"Bad dreams…" he said. "No, not bad. Sorrowful. Sorrowful dreams."

"About what?"

Dwight shrugged. "I don't rightly know. This and that. People I knew when I was little." He drew a deep breath. "I've been thinkin' maybe I should go out… you know… back where I come from."

"Permanently?"

"Oh Lord, no. I belong here an' I always will. No, just go out one more time to see if my folks are still alive, an' if they are, say my goodbyes."

"They must be getting old."

"It's not them that's goin', Mr. Maddox, an' we both know it. It's us." He ran his finger through the remaining cream on his plate and put his finger on his tongue. "That's what I'm dreamin' about. Us goin'. Everythin' goin'."

"Have you been talking to Marietta?"

"Now and again."

"No, I mean about this."

He shook his head. "This is the first I've told anybody."

There was an uneasy silence. Then he said: "What do you think?"

"About the dreams?"

"About going to see my folks an' all."

"I think you should go." ii

Though I attempted to take my own advice and have a siesta that afternoon, my head, despite the melancholy exchange with Dwight-or perhaps because of it-was buzzing like a stirred-up hive. I found myself thinking about certain parallels that existed between families that were in every other way unlike. The family of Dwight Huddie, for instance, living in a trailer park somewhere in Sampson County: did they ever wonder about their child, whom they lost to a place they would never see, never even know existed? Did they think of seeking him out all those years ago, when he was first lost, or was he as good as dead to them, as Galilee was to Cesaria? And then there was the Gearys. That family, for all its fabled dannishness had also in its time cut off some of its children as though they were gangrenous limbs. Again: as good as dead. I was sure that as I went on, I was going to find connections like these throughout this history: ways in which the sorrows and the cruelties of one bloodline were echoed in another.

The question that still lay before me, and I had so far failed to answer, was the way these connections might best be expressed. My mind was filled with possibilities but I had no real sense of how all that I knew was arrayed and dispersed; no sense of the pattern.

To distract myself from anxiety I made a slow exploration of the house. It was many years since I'd gone from room to room as I did now, and everywhere I looked this newly curious gaze of mine was rewarded. Jefferson's extraordinary taste and passion for detail was in evidence all around me, but married to a wildness of conception that is, I'm certain, my mother's gift. It's an extraordinary combination: Jeffersonian restraint and Barbarossian bravura; a constant struggle of wills that creates forms and volumes utterly unlike any I have seen before. The great study, for instance, now fallen into neglect, which seemed the perfect model of an austere place of intellectual inquiry, until the eye drifted to the ceiling, where the Hellenic columns grew sinewy and put forth a harvest of unearthly fruit. The dining room, where the floor was set with such a cunning design of marble tiles that it seemed like a pool of blue-green water. A long gallery of arched alcoves, each of which contained a bas-relief so cunningly lit that the scenes seemed to shed their own luminescence, which spilled out as from a series of windows. There was nothing, it seemed to me, that had been left to chance; every tiny subtlety of form had been planned so as to flatter the greater scheme, just as the great scheme brought the eye back to these subtleties. It was all, it seemed to me, one glorious invitation: to pleasure in the seeing, yes; but also to a calm certainty of one's own place in all of this, not overpowered, simply enjoined to be here in the moment, feeling the way the air flowed through the rooms and brushed your face, or the way the light came to meet you from a wall. More than once I found my eyes filling with tears at the sheer beauty of a chamber, then soothed from my tears by that same beauty, which wanted only my happiness.

All this said, the house was not by any means unspoiled. The years, and the humidity, have taken a terrible toll; scarcely a single room has escaped some measure of decay, and a few-particularly those which lay closest to the swamp-are in such a poor state of disrepair that I was obliged to have Dwight carry me into them, the floors were too rotted for my wheelchair. Even these chambers, I should say, had an undeniable grandeur to them. The creeping rot on the walls resembles the charts of some as yet unnamed world; the small forests of fungi that grow in the sodden boards have a fascination all of their own. Dwight was unpersuaded. "These are bad places," he said, determined that their deterioration was due to some spiritual malaise that hung about them. "Bad things happened here."

This didn't make a lot of sense to me, and I told him so. If one room had rot in the walls and another didn't, it was because of some vagary in the water table; it wasn't evidence of bad karma.

"In this house," Dwight said, "everything's connected."

That was all I could get him to say on the subject, but it was plain enough, I suppose. Just as I had come to appreciate the way the house played back and forth between spirit and sight, so Dwight seemed to be telling me the physical and moral states of the house were connected.

He was right, of course, though I couldn't see it at the time. The house wasn't simply a reflection of Jefferson's genius and Cesaria's vision: it was a repository for all that it had ever contained. The past was still present here, in Ways my limited senses had yet to grasp.

I encountered Marietta once or twice during these days of reacquaintance with the house (I even glimpsed Zabrina on a few occasions, though she shared no interest in conversing with me; only hurried away). But of Luman, of the man Cesaria had promised could help educate me, I saw not a hair. Had my stepmother decided not to allow me access to her secrets after all? Or perhaps simply forgotten to tell Luman that he was to be my guide? I decided after a couple of days that I'd seek him out for myself, and tell him how badly I wanted to get on with my work, but that I couldn't do so; not until I knew the stories Cesaria had told me I could not even guess at.

Luman, as I've said, does not live in the main house, though Lord knows it has enough rooms, empty rooms, to accommodate several families. He chooses instead to live in what was once the Smoke House; a modest building, which he claims suits him better. I had not until this visit ever come within fifty yards of the building, much less entered it; he has always been fiercely protective of his isolation.

My mounting irritation made me bold, however. So I had Dwight take me to the place, wheeling me down what had once been a pleasant path, but which was now thickly overgrown. The air became steadily danker; in places it swarmed with mosquitoes. I lit up a cigar to keep them at bay, which I doubt worked, but a good cigar always gets me a little high, so I cared rather less that they were making a meal of me.

As we approached the door I saw that it was open a little way, and that somebody was moving around inside. Luman knew I was here; which probably meant he also knew why I called out to him.

"Luman? It's Maddox! Is it all right if Dwight brings me in? I'd like to have a little talk!"

"We got nothing to talk about," came the reply out of the murky interior.

"I beg to differ."

Now Luman's face appeared at the partially opened door. He looked thoroughly rattled, like a man who'd just stepped away from not one but several excesses. His wide, tawny face was shiny with sweat, his pupils pinpricks, his cornea yellowed. His beard looked as though it hadn't been trimmed, or indeed even washed, in several weeks.

"Jesus, man," he growled, "can't you just let it be?"

"Did you speak to Cesaria?" I asked him.

He ran his hand through his mane and tugged it back from his head so violently it looked like an act of masochism. Those pinprick eyes of his suddenly grew to the size of quarters. This was a parlor trick I'd never seen him perform before; I was so startled I all but cried out. I stifled the yelp, however. I didn't want him thinking he had the upper hand here. There was too much of the mad dog about him. If he sensed fear in me, I was certain he'd at very least drive me from his door. And at worst? Who knew what a creature like this could do if he set his perverse mind to it? Just about anything, probably.

"Yes," he said finally, "she spoke to me. But I don't think you need to be seeing the stuff she wants you to see. It ain't your business."

"She thinks it is."

"Huh."

"Look, can we at least have this conversation out of the way of the mosquitoes?"

"You don't like bein' bit?" he said, with a nasty little grin. "Oh I like to get naked an' have 'em at me. Gets me goin'."

Perhaps he hoped he'd repulse me with this, and I'd leave, but I was not about to be so easily removed. I simply stared at him.

"Do you have any more of them cigars?"

I had indeed come prepared. Not only did I have cigars, I had gin, and, by way of more intellectual seduction, a small pamphlet on madhouses from my collection. Many years before Luman had spent some months incarcerated in Utica, an institution in upstate New York. A century later (so Marietta told me) he was still obsessed with the business of how a sane man might be thought mad, and a madman put in charge of Congress. I dug first for the cigar, as he'd requested it.

"Here," I said.

"Is it Cuban?"

"Of course."

"Toss it to me."

"Dwight can bring it."

"No. Toss it."

I gently lobbed the cigar in his direction. It fell a foot shy of the threshold. He bent down and picked it up, rolling it between his fingers and sniffing it.

"This is nice," he said appreciatively. "You keep a humidor?"

"Yes. In this humidity-"

"Got to, got to," he said, his tone distinctly warming. "Well then," he said, "you'd better get your sorry ass in here."

"It's all right if Dwight carries me in?"

"As long as he leaves," Luman said. Then to Dwight: "No offense. But this is between my half-brother and me."

"I understand," said Dwight, and picking me up out of my wheelchair carried me to the door, which Luman now hauled open. A wave of stinking heat hit me; like the stench of a pigpen in high summer.

"I like it rank," Luman said by way of explanation. "It reminds me of the old country."

I didn't reply to him; I was too-I don't know quite what the word is-astonished, perhaps appalled by the state of the interior.

"Sit him down on the ol' crib there," Luman said, pointing to a peculiar bed-cum-coffin set dose to the hearth. Worse than the crib itself-which looked more like an instrument of torture than a place of repose-was the fact that the hearth was far from cold: a large, smoky fire was burning there. It was little wonder Luman was sweating so profusely.

"Will this be all right?" Dwight said to me, plainly concerned for my well-being.

"I'll be fine," I said. "I could do with losing the weight."

"That you could," Luman said. "You need to get fightin' fit. We all do."

He had lit a match, and with the care of a true connoisseur, was slowly coaxing his cigar to life. "My," he said, "this is nice. I surely do appreciate a good bribe, brother. It's a sign o' good breedin', when a man knows how to offer a good bribe."

"Speaking of which…" I said. "Dwight. The gin."

Dwight set the bottle of gin on the table, which was as thickly strewn with detritus as every other inch of Luman's hellhole.

"Well that's mighty kind of you," Luman said.

"And this-"

"My, my, the presents jus' keep comin', don't they?" I gave him the book. "What's this now?" He looked at the cover. "Oh, this is interesting brother." He flipped through the book, which was amply illustrated. "I wonder if there's a picture of my li'l ol' crib."

"This came from an asylum?" I said, looking down at the bed on which Dwight had set me.

"It sure did. I was chained up in that for two hundred and fifty-five nights."

"Inside it?"

"Inside it."

He came over to where I sat and tugged the filthy blanket out from under me, so I could better see the cruel narrow box in which he had been put. The restraints were still in place.

"Why do you keep it?" I asked him.

"As a reminder," he said, meeting my gaze head-on for the first time since I'd entered. "I can't ever let myself forget, 'cause the moment I forget then I've as good as forgiven them that did it to me, and I ain't never going to do that."

"But-"

"I know what you're going to say: they're all dead. And so they are. But that don't mean I can't still get my day with 'em, when the Lord calls us all to judgment. I'm going to be sniffin' after 'em like the mad dog they said I was. I'm going to have their souls, and there ain't no saint in Heaven's goin' to stop me." His volume and vehemence had steadily escalated through this speech; when it was done I said nothing for a moment or two, so as to let him calm down. Then I said:

"Seems to me you've got reason to keep the crib."

He grunted by way of reply. Then he went over to the table and sat on the chair beside it. "Don't you wonder sometimes…?" he began.

"Wonder what?"

"Why one of us gets put in a madhouse an' another gets to be a cripple an' another gets to go 'round the world fuckin' every beautiful woman he sets his eyes on."

This last, of course, was Galilee; or at least the Galilee of family myth: the wanderer, pursuing his unattainable dreams from ocean to ocean.

"Well don't you wonder?" Luman said again.

"Now and again."

"See, things ain't fair. That's why people go crazy. That's why they get guns and kill their kids. Or end up in chains.

Things ain't fair!" He was beginning to shout again.

"If I may say…"

"Say what the fuck you like!" he replied, "I want to hear, brother."

"… we're luckier than most."

"How'd you reckon that?"

"We're a special family. We've got… you've got talents most people would kill to have…"

"Sure I can fuck a woman then make her forget I ever laid a finger on her. Sure I can listen in on one snake's sayin' to another. Sure I got a Momma who used to be one of the all time great ladies and a Poppa who knew Jesus. So what? They still put me in chains. And I still thought I deserved it, 'cause in my heart I thought I was a worthless sonofabitch." His voice dropped to a whisper. "An' that ain't really changed."

This silenced me utterly. Not just the flow of images (Luman listening to snakes? My father as a confidante of Christ?) but the sheer desperation in Luman's voice.

"We ain't none of us what we should've been, brother," he said. "We ain't none of us done a thing worth callin' important, an' now it's all over, and we ain't never goin' to have that chance."

"So let me write about why."

"Oh… I knew we'd get back to that sooner or later," Luman replied. "There ain't no use in writin' no book, brother. It's just goin' to make us look like losers. 'Cept Galilee, of course. He'll look fine an' fancy an' I'll look like a fuckwit."

"I'm not here to beg," I said. "If you don't want to help me then I'll just go back to Mama-"

"If you can find her."

"-I'D find her. And I'll just ask her to have Marietta show me the sights instead of you."

"She doesn't trust Marietta," Luman said, getting up and crossing to crouch in front of the fire. "She trusts me because I've stayed here. I've been loyal." His lip curled.

"Loyal like a dog," he said. "Stayed in my kennel and guarded her little empire."

"Why do you stay out here?" I asked him. "There's so much room in the house."

"I hate the house. It's entirely too civilized. I find I can't catch my breath in there."

"Is that why you don't want to help me? You don't want to go in the house?"

"Oh, shit," he said, apparently resigned to this torment, "if I have to I have to. I'll take you up, if you want to go that badly."

"Up where?"

"To the dome, of course. But once I've done that, buddy, you're on your own. I ain't staying with you. Not in that place."

I began to see that one of the curses of the Barbarossa family is self-pity. There's Luman in his Smoke House, plotting his revenge against dead men; me in my library, determined that life had done me a terrible disservice; Zabrina in her own loneliness, fat with candy. Even Galilee-out there under a limitless sky-writing me melancholy letters about the aimlessness of his life. It was pathetic. We, who were the blessed fruit of such an extraordinary tree. How did we all end up bemoaning the fact of living, instead of finding purpose in that fact? We didn't deserve what we'd been given: our glamours, our skills, our visions. We'd frittered them all away while we bemoaned our lot.

Was it too late to change all of that, I wondered? Was there still a chance for four ungrateful children to rediscover why we'd been created?

Only Marietta, it seemed to me, had escaped the curse, and she'd done so by reinventing herself. I saw her often, coming back from her visits to the world, dressed like a trucker sometimes in low-slung jeans and a dirty shut, sometimes like a torch-song singer in a slinky dress; sometimes barely dressed at all, running across the lawn as the sun came up, her skin as dewy as the grass.

Oh Lord, what am I admitting to? Well, it's said; for better or worse. To my list of sins (which isn't as long as I'd like it to be) I must now append incestuous desires.

Luman had arranged to come and fetch me at ten. He was late, of course. When he finally turned up, he had the last inch of his havana between his teeth, and the last inch of gin left in the bottle. I suspect he didn't indulge himself with hard liquor very often, because he was much the worse for wear.

"Are you ready?" he slurred.

"More than ready."

"Did you bring something to eat and drink?"

"What do I need food for?"

"You're going to be in there a long time. That's why."

"You make it sound like I'm being locked up."

Luman leered at me, as though he was making up his mind whether to be cruel or not. "Don't be shittin' yourself," he said finally. "The door'll be open all the time, you just won't feel like leaving. It's very addictive once you get going." With that he started off down the passageway, leaving me to trundle behind him.

"Don't go too fast," I told him.

"Afraid of gettin' lost in the dark?" he said, "Brother, you are one nervous son of a bitch."

I wasn't afraid of the dark, but there was good reason to be concerned about getting lost. We turned a couple of corners and I was in a passageway I was pretty certain I'd never visited before, though I'd thought myself familiar with the entire house, barring Cesaria's chambers. Another corner, and another, and a passageway, and a small empty room, and another, and another, and now I knew this was unknown terrain. If Luman decided to play the mischief maker and leave me here, I doubted I could find my way back to anywhere familiar.

"You smell the air here?"

"Stale."

"Dead. Nobody comes here, you see. Not even her."

"Why not?"

"Because it fucks with your head," he said, casting a glance back in my direction. I could barely see his expression in the murk, but I'm certain he had that yellow-toothed leer back on his face. "Of course, you're a saner man than I ever was, so maybe it won't bother you so much 'cause you got better control of your wits. On the other hand… maybe you'll crack, and I'll have to put you in my li'l crib for the night, so's you don't do yourself harm."

I brought the chair to a halt. "You know what?" I said. "I've changed my mind."

"You can't do that," Luman said.

"I'm telling you I don't want to go in there."

"Well ain't this a flip-flop, huh? First I don't want to take you, and now I brought you here, you don't want to go. Make up your fuckin' mind."

"I'm not going to risk my sanity," I said.

Luman drained the gin bottle. "I can see that," he said. "I mean, a man in your condition ain't got but his mind, right? You lose that you ain't got nothin'." He came a step or two toward me. "On the other hand," he said, "if you don't go in, you ain't got no book, so it's a kind of toss-up." He lobbed the gin bottle from hand to hand, and back again, to illustrate his point. "Book. Mind. Book. Mind. It's up to you."

I hated him at that moment; simply because what he said was true. If he left me under the dome and I lost my sanity, I wouldn't be capable of putting words in any sensible order. On the other hand, if I didn't risk the lunacy, and I simply wrote from what I already knew, wouldn't I always wonder how much richer, how much truer, my work would have been if I'd had the courage to see what the room had to show me?

"It's your choice," he said.

"What would you do?"

"You're asking me?" Luman said, sounding genuinely surprised at my interest in his opinion. "Well it ain't pretty being mad," he said. "It ain't pretty at all. But the way I see it, we don't have a lot of time left. This house ain't goin' to stand forever, an' when it comes down, whatever you might see in there…" he pointed along the passageway ahead of me, towards the stairs that led up to the dome "… is going to be lost. You won't be seeing no more visions when this house falls. None of us will."

I stared at the passageway.

"I guess that's my answer then," I said.

"So you're goin' to go in?"

"I'm goin' to go in."

Luman smiled. "Hold on," he said. Then he did a remarkable thing. He picked up the wheelchair, with me in it, and carried us both up the stairs. I held my breath, afraid he was either going to drop me, or topple back down the flight. But we readied the top without incident. There was a narrow landing, and a single door.

"I'm goin' to leave you here," Luman said.

"This is as far as you go?"

"You know how to open a door," he said.

"What happens when I get inside?"

"You'll find you know that too." He laid his hand on my shoulder. "If you need anything, just call."

"You'll be here?"

'It depends how the mood takes me," he said, and sauntered off down the stairs. I wanted to call him back; but I was out of delaying tactics. Time to do this, if I was going to do it.

I wheeled my way to the door, glancing back once to see if Luman was still in sight. He'd gone. I was on my own. I took a deep breath, and grasped the door handle. There was still a corner of me that hoped the door was locked and I'd be denied entry. But the handle turned, and the door opened-almost too readily, I thought, as though some overeager host stood on the other side, ready to usher me in.

I had some idea of what I thought lay on the other side, at least architecturally speaking. The dome room-or "sky room" as Jefferson had dubbed his version at Monticello-was, I'd been told by Marietta (who'd crept up there once to do the deed with a girlfriend) a somewhat strange but beautiful room. At Monticello it had apparently been used as a child's playroom, because it was hard to access (a design deficiency which also applied to L'Enfant) but here, Marietta had told me, there was a whisper of unease in the room; no child would have been happy playing there. Though there were eight windows, after the Monticellian model, and a skylight, the place seemed to her "a little on the twitchy side," whatever that meant.

I was about to find out. I pushed the door wide with my foot, half-expecting birds or bats to fly in my face. But the room was deserted. There was not so much as a single piece of furniture to spoil its absolute simplicity. Just the starlight, coming in from nine apertures.

"Luman," I murmured to myself, "you sonofabitch…"

He'd prepared me for something fearful; a delirium, an assault of visions so violent it might put me out of my wits. But there was nothing here but murk and more murk.

I ventured in a couple of yards, looking everywhere for a reason to be afraid. But there was nothing. I pressed on, with a mingling of disappointment and relief. There was nothing to fear in here. My sanity was perfectly secure.

Unless, of course, I was being lulled into a false sense of security. I glanced back toward the door. It was still open; still solid. And beyond it the landing where I'd stood with Luman, and debated the wisdom of coming in here. What an easy mark I'd made; he must have been thoroughly entertained at the sight of my discomfort! Cursing him again, I took my eyes from the door and returned them to the murk. This time, however, much to my astonishment, I discovered that the sky room was not quite as empty as I'd thought. A few yards from me-at the place where the lights of the nine windows intersected-there was a skittering pattern in the gloom, so subtle I was not certain at first it was even real. I kept staring at it, resisting the urge to blink for fear that it would vanish. But it remained before me, intensifying a little. I wheeled my way toward it; slowly, slowly, like a hunter dosing on his quarry, fearful of alarming it into flight. But it didn't retreat. Nor did it become any the less mystifying. My approach had become less tentative now; I was very soon at the center of the room, directly under the skylight. The patterns were in the air all around me; so subtle I was still not absolutely certain I was ever seeing them. I looked up to my zenith: I could see stars through the skylight, but nothing that would be likely to create these shifting shadows. Returning my gaze to the walls, I went from one window to the next, looking for some explanation there. But I found none. There was a little wash of light through each of them, but no sign of motion-a wind-stirred branch, a bird fluttering on a sill. Whatever was creating this shifting shadow was here in the room with me. As I finished my study of the windows, muttering to myself in confusion, I had the uncomfortable sense my bef uddlement was being watched. Again, I looked toward the door, thinking maybe Luman had crept back to spy on me. But no; the landing was deserted.

Well, I thought, there's no use my sitting here, getting dizzy and paranoid. I may as well spit out my reasons for coming, and see if that elicited some response.

I drew an anxious breath, and spoke.

"I came… I came to see the past," I said. My voice sounded tiny, like a child's voice. "Cesaria sent me," I added, thinking that might help whatever forces occupied the room understand that I was a legitimate presence, and that if they had something to show me, they should damned well do it.

Something that I'd said-whether it was talking about the past or about Cesaria I can't say-brought a response. The shadows seemed to darken around me, and their motion grew more complex. Some portion of the pattern twitched like a living thing, and rose up in front of me-up, up toward the skylight. Another flew off toward the wall at my left, trailing more fragments of dark air, whip ping like the tail of a kite. A third dropped to the polished boards and spread across the floor.

I believe I breathed some words of astonishment. "Oh my Lord," or some such. I had reason. The spectacle was growing by the moment, the writhing motions of these shadows, and their scale, expanding as if by some logarithmic progression. Motion was inspiring motion; forms were inspiring forms. In the space of perhaps forty-five seconds the walls of the dome room had been all but eclipsed by these roiling abstractions; gray on gray, yet filled with subtle intimations of visions to come. My eyes were darting everywhere, of course, astonished by all this, but even as my gaze went on from one cloudy duster of shapes to the next, it moved with the impression that something was almost visible here. That I was moments away from understanding how these abstractions worked.

And yet, even in their protean condition they moved me. Watching these rollings and cavortings I began to understand why Luman had been so reluctant to enter this room. He was a man of great vulnerability, despite his manner: there was simply too much feeling here for a soul so tender. Watching the unfolding spectade, I felt as though I were listening to a piece of music; or rather several at the same time.

Those grand shapes moving overhead, like columns of smoke passing across the sun had all the gravity of a requiem; while the forms that moved dose to me reeled and swaggered as though to a drunken polka. And in between, circling me as they climbed, were sinuous ropes of ether that seemed to express lovely, rising music, like the bright line of a rhapsody.

To say I was enchanted does not begin to express my beguilement. It was all so perfectly mysterious: a seduction of eye and heart that left me dose to tears. But I was not so enthralled that I didn't wonder what powers lay so far undisclosed. I had invited this vision with my own readiness to accept it. Now it was time to do the same thing again; to open my spirit, as it were, a little wider, and see what the shadows would show me.

"I'm ready," I said softly, "whenever you are…"

The forms before me continued to profligate, but made no visible response to my invitation. There was still a sense of evolution in their motion, but I sensed that it had slowed. I was no longer seeing the heart-quickening changes that had astonished me a minute or two before.

Again, I spoke. "I'm not afraid," I said.

Did I ever say anything so foolish in my life as to boast fearlessness in such a place as this?

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than the shadows before me convulsed, as though some seismic shock had shaken the dome. Two or three seconds later, like thunder coming a heartbeat after lightning, the shock wave struck the only nonethereal form in the room, which is to say, myself.-My chair was propelled backward, tipping over as it went. I vainly tried to regain some measure of control, but the chair sped over the boards, its wheels shrieking, and struck the wall close to the door with such violence that I was pitched out of it.

I felt something crack as I landed face down, and the breath was completely knocked out of my body. Had I possessed the wherewithal I might have attempted a plea for clemency at that moment; might have attempted to withdraw my too-brave words. But I doubt it would have availed me much.

Gasping, I tried to haul myself up into a semirecumbent position so that I could find out where my chair had landed. But there was a sharp pain in my side. I'd plainly snapped a rib. I gave up trying to move, for fear of doing myself still greater damage.

All I could do was lie where I'd been so unceremoniously dropped, and wait for the room to do its work. I had invited the powers here to show me their splendors, and I was quite certain they weren't about to deny themselves the pleasure.

Nothing happened. I lay there, my breaths quick and shallow, my stomach ready to revolt, my body sticky with sweat, and the room just waited. The unfixable forms all around me-which had by now entirely blotted out every detail of windows and walls, even carpeted the floor-were almost still, their evolutionary endeavors at an end, at least for the moment.

Had the fact that I'd been injured shocked the presence, or presences, here into reticence, I wondered? Perhaps they felt they'd overstepped the bounds of enthusiasm, and now wanted nothing more than for me to crawl away and tend my wounds? Were they waiting for me to call down to Luman, perhaps? I thought about doing so^ but decided against it. This was not a room in which to speak a simple word unless it was strictly necessary. I would be better lying still and quiet, I decided, and let my panicked body calm itself. Then, once I had governed myself, I would try to crawl back to the door. Sooner or later, Luman would come up and fetch me; I felt certain of that. Even if I had to wait all night.

Meanwhile I dosed my eyes so as to put the images around me out of the way. Though the pain in my side was by now only a dull throb, my head and eyes were throbbing too; indeed it was not hard to imagine my body had become one fat heart, lying discarded on the floor, pumping its last.

I'm not afraid I'd boasted, moments before the bolt had struck me. But now? Oh, I was very much afraid now.

Afraid that I would die here, before I'd worked my way through the catalog of unfinished business that sat at the back of my skull, awaiting my attention and of course never getting it, while all the time growing and growing. Well, it was most likely too late; there would not be time for me to flagellate myself for every dishonorable deed in that list, nor any chance to make good the harms I'd done. Minor harms, to be sure, in the scheme of things; but large enough to regret.

And then, on the back of my neck, a touch; or what I believed to be a touch.

"Luman?" I murmured, and opened my eyes.

It wasn't Luman; it wasn't even a human touch, or anything resembling a human touch. It was some presence in the shadows; or the shadows themselves. They had swarmed upon me while my eyes were closed, and were now pressing close, their intimacy in no way threatening, but curiously tender. It was as though these roiling, senseless forms were concerned for my well-being, the way they brushed my nape, my brow, my lips. I stayed absolutely still, holding my breath, half expecting their mood to change and their consolations to turn into something cruder. But no; they simply waited, dose upon me.

Relieved, I drew breath. And in the instant of drawing, knew I had again unwittingly done something of consequence.

On the intake I felt the marked air about my head rush toward my open lips, and down my throat. I had no choice but to let it in. By the time I knew what was happening it was too late to resist. I was a vessel being filled. I could feel the marks on my tongue, against my tonsils, in my windpipe-

Nor did I want to choke them off, once I felt them inside me. At their entrance the pain in my side seemed instantly to recede, as did the throbbing in my head and eyes. The fear of a lonely demise here went out of my head and I

was removed-in one breath-from despair to pleasurable ease.

What a maze of manipulations this chamber contained! First banality, then a blow, then this opiated bliss. I would be foolish, I knew, to believe that it did not have more tricks in its repertoire. But while it was content to give me some relief from my pains I was happy to take what was offered. Greedy for it, indeed. I gulped at the air, drawing in great draughts of it. And with every breath I felt further removed from my pain. Nor was it just the hurt in my flank and the throb in my head that was becoming remote; there was a much older ache-a dull, wretched pain that haunted the dead terrain of my lower limbs-that was now, for the first time in almost two human spans, relieved. It wasn't, I think, that the pain was taken away; only that I no longer knew it as pain. Need I say I gladly banished it from my mind, sobbing gratitude to be relieved Of an agony that had attended me so closely I'd forgotten how profound a hurt it was?

And with its passing my eyes-which were more acute than I could ever remember their being, even in my youth-found a new sight to astonish them. The air that I was expelling from my lungs had a bright solidity of its own; it came from me filled with flecks of delicate brilliance, as though a fire was stoked in me, and I was breathing out shards of flame. Was this some representation of my pain, I wondered? The room-or my own delirium's-way of demonstrating the expulsion? That theory floated for ten seconds, then it was gone. The motes were about to show me their true nature, and it had nothing to do with pain.

They were still flowing from my mouth with every breath, but I wasn't watching those I'd just exhaled. It was those that had flown from me first which drew my startled sight. They were seeding their luminescence in the shadows-disappeared into the cloudy bed around me. I watched with what I'd like to think was almost scientific detachment. There was a certain logic to all that happened to me here; or so I now supposed. The shadows were only half the equation: they were a site of possibilities, no more than that; the fertile mud of this chamber, waiting for some galvanizing spark to bring forth-to bring forth what?

That was the question. What did the marriage of fire and shadow want to show me?

I didn't have to wait more than twenty seconds to discover the answer. No sooner had the first of the motes embedded themselves than the shadows surrendered thek uncertainty, and blossomed.

The limits of the dome room had been banished. When the visions came-and oh, how they came!-they were vast.

Fkst, out of the shadows, a landscape. The most primal of landscapes, in fact: rock and fire, and a flowing mass of magma. It was like the beginning of the world; red and black. It took me only a moment to make sense of this scene. The next, I was besieged with images, the scene before me transforming with every beat of my heart. Something flowered from the fire, gold and green, rising into a smoky sky. As it rose the blossoms it bore became fruit, and fell back onto the laval ground. I didn't have time to watch them be consumed. A motion in the smoke off to my right drew my gaze. An animal of some kind;-with pale, scarred flanks-galloped through my field of vision. I felt the violence of its hooves in my bowels. And before it had passed from sight came another, and another, then a herd of these beasts-not horses, but something close to them. Had I made these creatures? I wondered. Had I exhaled them with my pain; and the fire too, and the rock and tree that rose from the rock? Was all this my invention, or perhaps some remote memory, which the enchantments of the room had somehow made visible?

Even as I shaped that thought the pale herd changed direction and came pounding at me. I instinctively covered my head, to keep my brains from being beaten out. But for all the fury of thek hooves, the passage of the herd did me no more harm than a light breeze; they passed over me, and away.

I looked up. In the few seconds I'd had my eyes averted the ground had given prodigious birth. There were now sights to be seen on every side. Close by me, sliding through the very air from which it was being carved, a snake came, bright as a flower. Before it was even finished with its own creation another creature snatched it up, and my eyes rose to find before me a form that was vaguely human, but winged and sleek. The snake was gone in an instant, swallowed down the throat of this thing, which then settled its fiery eyes on me as though wondering if I too were edible. Tlainly I looked like poor fare. Pumping its massive wings the creature rose like a curtain to reveal another drama, stranger still, behind it.

The tree I'd seen born had spread its seeds in every direction. In a few seconds a forest had sprung up, its churning canopy as dark as a thunderhead. And flitting between the trees were all manner of creatures, rising to nest, falling to rot. Close by me, an antelope stood in the dapple, shitting itself in terror. I looked for the cause. There; a few yards from the creature, something moved between the trees. I glimpsed only the glint off its eye, or tooth, until it suddenly broke cover, and came at its prey in one vast bound. A tiger, the size of four or five men. The antelope made to dart away, but its hunter was too fast. The tiger's claws sank into the antelope's silken flank and finished its leap with its prey beneath it. The death wasn't quick or pretty. The antelope thrashed wildly, though its body was torn wide open, and the tiger was tearing out its stringy throat. I didn't look away. I watched until the antelope was steaming meat, and the tiger sank down to dine. Only then did my eyes wander in search of new distractions.

There was something bright between the trees, I saw; brighter by the moment. Like a fire in its appetite, it climbed through the canopy as it approached, its advance above outpacing its steadier progress below. There was chaos in the thicket, as every speciesT-hunter and hunted alike-fled before the blaze. But above me there was no escape. The fire came too fast, consuming birds in their flight the chicks in their nests, monkeys and squirrels on the bough. Countless corpses fell around me, blackened and smoking. White hot ash came with them, powdering the ground.

I wasn't in fear for my life. By now I knew enough about this place to be confident of my immunity. But the scene appalled me nevertheless. What was I witnessing? Some primal cataclysm that had scoured this world? Undone it from sky to ground? If so, what was its source? This was no natural disaster, I was certain of that. The blaze above me had made itself into a kind of roof, creating in the moment of destruction a fretted vault, in which the dying were immortalized in fire. Tears started into my eyes, the sight moved me so. I reached to brush them out, so as not to miss whatever new glories or horrors were imminent, arid as I did so I heard in my heart the first human utterance-other than my own noise-to come my way since I'd entered this chamber.

It was not a word; or if it was it was no word I knew. But it had meaning; at least that was my belief. To my ear it sounded like an open-throated shout raised by some newborn soul in the midst of the blaze; a yell of celebration and defiance. Here I am! it seemed to say. Now we begin!

I raised myself up on my hands to see if I could find the shouter (whether tt was man or woman I couldn't yet decide) but the rain of ash and detritus was like a veil before me: I could see almost nothing through it.

My arms could not support me for more than a few moments. But as I sank back down to the ground, frustrated, the fire overhead-having perhaps exhausted its fuel-went out. The ash ceased falling. And there, standing no more than twenty yards from where I lay, the blaze surrounding her like a vast, fiery flower, was Cesaria. There was nothing about her attitude or her expression that suggested the fire threatened her. Far from it. She seemed rather to be luxuriating in its touch; her hands moving over her body as the conflagration bathed it, as though to be certain its balm penetrated every pore. Her hair, which was even blacker than her skin, flickered and twitched; her breasts seeped milk, her eyes ran silvery tears, her sex, which now and then she fingered, issued streams of blood.

I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. She was too exquisite, too ripe. It seemed to me that all I had seen before me in the last little while-the laval ground, the tree and its fruit, the pale herd, the hunted antelope and the tiger that took it; even the strange, winged creature that had briefly appeared in my vision-all of these were in and of the woman before me. She was their maker and their slaughterer; the sea into which they flowed and the rock from which they'd sprung.

I'd seen enough, I decided. I'd drunk down all I could bear to drink, and still keep my sanity. It was time I turned my back on these visions, and retreated to the safety of the mundane. I needed time to assimilate what I'd seen-and the thoughts that the sights had engendered.

But retreat was no easy business. Ungluing my eyes from the sight of my father's wife was hard enough; but when I did so, and looked back toward the door, I could not find it. The illusion surrounded me on every side; there was no hint of the real remaining. For the first time since the visions had begun I remembered Luman's talk of madness, and I was seized with panic. Had I carelessly let my hold on sanity slip, without even noticing that I'd done so? Was I now adrift in this illusion with no solid ground left for my senses?

I remembered with a shudder the crib in which Luman had been bound; and the look of unappeasable rage in his eyes. Was that all that lay before me now? A life without certainty, without solidity; this forest a prison I'd breathed into being, and that other world, where I'd been real and in my wounded fashion content, now a dream of freedom to which I could not return?

I closed my eyes to shut out the illusion. Like a child in terror, I prayed.

"Oh Lord God in Heaven, look down on your servant at this moment; I beg of you… I need you with me.

"Help me. Please. Take these things out of my head. I don't want them, Lord. I don't want them."

Even as I whispered my prayer I felt a rush of energies against me. The blaze between the trees, which had come to a halt a little distance from me, was on the move again. I hastened my prayer, certain that if the fire was coming for me, then so was Cesaria.

''Save me. Lord-"

She was coming to silence me. That was my sudden conviction. She was a part of my insanity and she was coming to hush the words I'd uttered to defend myself against it.

"Lord, please hear me-"

The energies intensified, as though they intended to snatch the words away from my lips.

"Quickly, Lord, quickly! Show me the way out of here! Please! God in Heaven, help me!"

"Hush…" I heard Cesaria say. She was right behind me. It seemed to me I could feel the small hairs at the nape of my neck fizzle and fry. I opened my eyes and looked over my shoulder. There she was, still cocooned in fire, her dark flesh shining. My mouth was suddenly parched; I could barely speak.

"I want…"

"I know," she said softly. "I know. I know. Poor child. Poor lost child. You want your mind back."

"Yes…" I said. I was close to sobbing.

"But here it is," she said. "All around you. The trees. The fire. Me. All of it's yours."

"No," I protested. "I've never been in this place before."

"But it's been in you. This is where your father came looking for me, an age ago. He dreamed it into you when you were born."

"Dreamed it into me…" I said.

"Every sight, every feeling. All he was and all he knew and all he knew was to come… it's in your blood and in your bowels."

"Then why am I so afraid of it?"

"Because you've held on to a simpler self for so long, you think you're the sum of what you can hold in your hands. But there are other hands holding you, child. Filled with you, these hands. Brimming with you…"

Did I dare believe any of this?

Cesaria replied as though she'd heard the doubt spoken aloud.

"I can't reassure you," she said. "Either you trust that these visions are a greater wisdom than you've ever known, or you try to rid yourself of them, and fall again."

"Fall where?"

"Why back into your own hands, of course," she said. Was she amused by me? By my tears and my trembling? I believe she was. But then I couldn't blame her; there was a part of me that also thought I was ridiculous, praying to a God I'd never seen, in order to escape the sight of glories a man of faith would have wept to witness. But I was afraid. Over and over I came back to that: I was afraid.

"Ask your question," Cesaria said. "You have a question. Ask it."

"It sounds so childish."

"Then have your answer and move on. But first you have to ask it."

"Am I… safe?"

"Safe?"

"Yes. Safe."

"In your flesh? No. I can't guarantee your safety in the flesh. But in your immortal form? Nothing and nobody can unbeget you. If you fall through your own fingers, there's other hands to hold you. I've told you that already."

"And… I think I believe you," I said.

"So then," Cesaria said, "you have no reason not to let the memories come."

She reached out toward me. Her hand was covered with countless snakes: as fine as hairs but brilliantly colored, yellow and red and blue, weaving their way between her fingers like living jewelry.

"Touch me," she said.

I looked up at her face, which wore an expression of sweet calm, and then back at the hand she wanted me to take.

"Don't be afraid," she said to me. "They don't bite."

I reached up and took her hand. She was right, the snakes didn't bite. But they swarmed; over her fingers and onto mine, squirming across the back of my hand and up onto my arm. I was so distracted by the sight of them that I didn't realize that she was pulling me up off the ground until I was almost standing up. I say standing though I can't imagine how that's possible; my legs were, until that moment, incapable of supporting me. Even so I found myself on my feet, gripping her hand, my face inches from her own.

I don't believe I had ever stood so close to my father's wife before. Even when I was a child, brought from England and accepted as her stepson, she always kept a certain distance from me. But now I stood (or seemed to stand) with my face inches from her own, feeling the snakes still writhing up my arm, but no longer caring to look down at them: not when I had the sight of her face before me. She was flawless. Her skin, for all its darkness, was possessed of an uncanny luminescence, her gaze, like her mouth, both lush and forbidding. Strands of her hair were lifted by gusts off the blaze around us (to the heat of which I seemed invulnerable) and brushed against my cheek. Their touch, though it was light, was nevertheless profoundly sensual. Feeling it, and seeing her exquisite features, I could not help but imagine what it would be like to be received into her arms. To kiss her, to lie with her, to put a child into her. It was little wonder my father had obsessed on her to his dying day, though all manner of argument and disappointment had soured the love between them.

"So now…" she said.

"Yes?" I swear I would have done anything for her at that moment. I was like a lover standing before his beloved; I could deny her nothing.

"Take it back…" she said.

I didn't comprehend what she was telling me. "Take what back?" I said.

"The breath. The pain. Me. Take it all back. It belongs to you Maddox. Take it back."

I understood. It was time to repossess all that I'd attempted to put away from myself: the visions that were a part of my blood, though I'd hidden them from myself; the pain that was also, for better or worse, mine. And of course the very air from my lungs, whose expulsion had begun this journey.

"Take it back."

I wanted to beg a few moments' grace, to talk with her, perhaps; at least to gaze at her, before my body was returned into its agony. But she was already easing her fingers from my grip.

"Take it back," she said a third time, and to be certain I obeyed her edict she put her face close to mine and drew a breath of her own, a breath so swift and strong it emptied my mouth, throat and lungs in an instant.

My head reeled; white blotches burnt at the corners of my vision, threatening to occlude the sight before me. But my body acted with a vigor of its own, and without instruction from my will, did as Cesaria had demanded: it took the breath back.

The effect was immediate, and to my enchanted eyes distressing. The fabled face in front of me dissolved as though it had been conjured out of mist and my needy lungs had unmade it. I looked up-hoping to snatch a glimpse of the ancient sky before it too dissolved, but I was too late.

What had seemed unquestionably real moments before came to nothing in a heartbeat. No; not to nothing. It unknitted into marks such as had haunted the air when I'd first entered the room. Some of them still carried traces of color. There were smudges of blue and white above, and around me, where the thicket had not been consumed by fire, a hundred kinds of green; and ahead of me glints of gold from the flame and scarlet-flecked darkness where my father's wife had stood. But even these remains evaporated in the next heartbeat, and I was back in the arena of gray on gray which I had mistaken for a maze of stained walls.

All of the events that had just unfolded might have seemed a fiction but for one simple fact: I was still standing. Whatever force my mind had unleashed here, it had come with power enough to raise me up off the ground and set me on my feet. And there I stood, amazed; and of course certain I would fall down again at any moment. That moment passed, however; so did the next and the next and the next, and still I stood.

Tentatively I glanced back over my shoulder. There, not six yards from me, was the door through which I'd stepped all these visions ago. Beside it, overturned, lay my wheelchair. I fixed my gaze upon it. Dared I believe it was now redundant?

"Look at you…" said a slurred voice.

I glanced back from the wheelchair to the door, where Luman was now leaning. He'd found another source of liquor while I'd been occupied in the room. Not a bottle but a decanter. He had the glazed look of a well-soused man. "You're standing," he said. "When did you learn to do that?"

"I didn't…" I said. "I mean, I don't understand why I'm not falling down."

"Can you walk?"

"I don't know. I haven't tried."

"Well, Lordie, man. Try."

I looked down at my feet, which had not taken any instruction from me in a hundred and thirty years. "Go on then," I murmured.

And they moved. Not easily at first, but they moved. First the left, then the right, turning me around to face Luman and the door.

I didn't stop there. I kept moving, my breath quick and fast, my arms stretched before me to break my fall should my legs suddenly give out. But they didn't. Some miracle had occurred when Cesaria had raised me up. Her will, or mine, or both combined, had healed me. I could walk; stride. In time, I would run. I would go all the places I'd not seen in my years in the chair. Out into the swamp, and the roads beyond,- to the gardens beyond Luman's Smoke House; to my father's tomb in the empty stables.

But for now, I was happy to reach the door. So happy indeed that I embraced Luman. Tears were coming, and I could not have held them back if I'd cared to.

"Thank you," I said to him.

He was quite happy to accept my embrace. Indeed he returned it with equal fervor, burying his face in my neck. He too was sobbing, though I didn't quite know why. "I don't see what you have to thank me for," he said.

"For making me brave," I said. "For persuading me to go in."

"You don't regret it then?"

I laughed, and took his bleary face in my hands. "No, brother, I do not regret it. Not a moment."

"Were you nearly driven mad?"

"Nearly."

"And you cursed me?"

"Ripely."

"But it was worth the suffering?"

"Absolutely."

He paused, and considered his next question. "Does that mean we can sit down and drink till we puke, like brothers should?"

"It would be my pleasure."

What must I do, in the time remaining? Only everything. I don't yet know how much I know; but it's a great deal. There are vast tracts of my nature I never knew existed until now. I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn't want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion. I daresay most of us live in such pitiful realms. It takes something profound to transform us; to open our eyes to our own glorious diversity.

Now my eyes were open, and I had no doubt that with my sight came great responsibility. I had to write about what I saw; I had to put it into the words that appear on the very pages you are reading.

But I could bear the weight of that responsibility. Gladly. For now I had the answer to the question: what lay at the center of all the threads of my story? It was myself. I wasn't an abstracted recanter of these lives and loves. I was-I am-the story itself; its source, its voice, its music. Perhaps to you that doesn't seem like much of a revelation. But for me, it changes everything. It makes me see, with brutal clarity, the person I once was. It makes me understand for the first time who I am now. And it makes me shake with anticipation of what I must become.

I must tell you not only how the living human world fared, but also how it went among the animals, and among those who had passed from life, yet still wandered the earth. I must tell you about those creatures God made, but also of those who made themselves by force of will or appetite. In other words, there must inevitably be unholy business here, just as there will be sacred, but I cannot guarantee to tell you-or even sometimes to know-which is which.

And in my heart I realize I want most to romance you; to share with you a vision of the world that puts order where there has been discordance and chaos. Nothing happens carelessly. We're not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand that reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty. And it is my duty to sweat until I convince you of the same. Sometimes the stories will recount epic events-wars and insurrection; the fall of dynasties. Sometimes they'll seem, by contrast, inconsequential, and you'll wonder what business they have in these pages. Bear with me. Think of these fragments as the shavings off a carpenter's floor, swept together after some great work has been made. The masterpiece has been taken from the workshop, but what might we learn from a study of some particular curl of wood about the moment of creation? How here the carpenter hesitated, or there moved to complete a form with unerring certainty? Are these shavings then, that seem at first glance redundant, not also part of the great work, being that which has been removed to reveal it?

I won't be staying here at L'Enfant, searching for these shavings. We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk Road. Weary of cities? Then we'll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where the Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.

Only everything: prophets, poets, soldiers, dogs, birds, fishes, lovers, potentates, beggars, ghosts. Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities, and show you the loveliness of filth.

Wait! What am I saying? There's a kind of madness in my pen; promising all this. It's suicidal. I'm bound to fail. But it's what I want to do. Even if I make a wretched fool of myself in the process, it's what I want to do.

I want to show you bliss; my own, amongst others. And I will most certainly show you despair. That I promise you without the least hesitation. Despair so deep it will lighten your heart to discover that others suffer so much more than you do.

And how will it all end? This showing, this failing. Honestly? I don't have the slightest idea.

Sitting here, looking out across the lawn, I wonder how far from the borders of our strange little domain the invading world is. Weeks away? Months away? A year? I don't believe any of us here know the answer to that question. Even Cesaria, with all her powers of prophecy, couldn't tell me how fast the enemy will be upon us. All I know is that they will come. Must come, indeed, for everybody's sake. I no longer cling to the idea of this house as a blessed refuge for enchantment. Perhaps it was once that. But it has fallen into decadence; its fine ambitions rotted. Better it be taken apart, hopefully with some measure of dignity; but if not, not.

All I want now is the time to enchant you. After that, I suppose I'm history, just as this house is history. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't both end up at the bottom of the swamp together. And truth to tell, that prospect doesn't entirely distress me, as long as I've done all I need to do before I go. Which is only everything.

And so at last I come to the beginning.

What place is that? Should I start, perhaps, with Rachel Pallenberg, who was lately married to one of the most handsome and powerful men in America, Mitchell Monroe Geary? Shall I describe her in her sudden desolation, driving around a little town in Ohio, utterly lost, even though this is the place where she was born and raised? Poor Rachel. She has not only left her husband, but several houses and apartments, along with a life that would be considered enviable by all but perhaps one percent of the populace (which percentage already lives that life, and knows it to be largely joyless). Now she has come home only to discover that she doesn't belong here either, which leaves her asking herself: where do I belong?

It's a tempting place to begin. Rachel's so human; her confusions and contradictions are easy to comprehend. But if I begin with her I'm afraid I'm going to get distracted by modernity. I need first to strike a mythic note; to show you something from the distant past, when the world was a living fable.

So, it can't be Rachel I begin with. She'll come into these pages soon enough, but not yet.

It must be Galilee. Of course, it must be Galilee. My Galilee, who has been, and is, so many things: adored boy-child, lover of innumerable women (and a goodly number of men), shipwright, sailor, cowboy, stevedore, pool player and pimp; coward, deceiver and innocent. My Galilee.

I won't begin with one of his great voyages, or one of his notorious romances. I will begin with what happened the day of his baptism. I would not have known any of this before I entered the room beneath the dome. But I know it now, as dearly as my own life. More dearly perhaps, because it's only a day since I walked out of that chamber, and these memories seem to me but a few hours old.