Innocence

53

In order that you may understand times past and how they were, you need to know that my mother admitted that she often considered infanticide. During my first three years of life, on five occasions, she came within a moment of murdering me.

I remember a summer night, weeks before my mother banished me, when whiskey in a squat glass with a yellow rim, white powder inhaled through a silver straw, and two pills of some kind mellowed her into a maternal mood. She insisted that she, with more Scotch over ice, and I, with a glass of orange juice, should sit together in the pair of bentwood rockers on the front porch, for what she called “a little quality time.”

Seldom did she want to talk at any length, and more seldom still did we sit together for the purpose of companionship. I knew that her tenderness was genuine, the truest of her qualities, and although she had flushed it to the surface of her heart with powder, pills, and whiskey, I was no less happy to sit with her than I would have been if this expression of affection had come to her naturally, as now and then it did.

Even before we settled down, we moved the rockers from the porch to the front yard, because we both marveled at the vast twinkling arc above us. A greater quantity of stars pierced the black sky than I had ever seen before, as though the lamplighter of the galaxy had walked the spaceways overnight and rekindled all the suns that had burnt out during the last thousand millennia. As we sat leaning back, faces tipped toward the heavens, I saw many things figured in the stars, all kinds of wonders in addition to the named constellations, and I could recall no happier time on the mountain than that hour bathed in starshine.

For the first and last time, Mother spoke of her childhood. Her parents had been university professors, one of literature, the other of psychology, and I supposed that was where she had gotten her love of books. She said that she had grown up wanting nothing material, but she had grown up nonetheless in desperate need. I asked her what she needed, if maybe it was love, and she said she could have used some love, for sure, but the desperate need was for something else. I asked what that might be, but she didn’t answer me. When my mother chose not to answer, the only safe course was to honor her reticence.

She recalled a few of the happier experiences of her youth, and her little stories were fun to hear, though they would have been more enjoyable if the tone in which she told them had not been melancholy. In spite of the felicitous moments that she remembered, Mother seemed to wish that she’d never had a childhood, perhaps because all delight was fleeting and because the promise of one day was not fulfilled even just until the next.

As we sat there on the mountain, the plenitude of pure-white stars seemed fixed in their positions, although of course all of them — and Earth, as well — were moving ever outward toward a void at terrifying velocities. I realize in hindsight that Mother and I, in the bentwood rockers, likewise seemed to be going nowhere at the moment, though in reality we, too, were speeding forward aboard the train of time, on different journeys, as would become clear within weeks.

When she proceeded from stories of her childhood to recounting the five times when she had nearly murdered me during my first three years, incidents of which I had no memory, a faint note of anguish underlaid her melancholy. Otherwise nothing changed in our posture, demeanor, or attitudes toward each other. The episode was not fraught with strongly expressed feelings, and there were neither apologies nor accusations. In her former life of robbery and other crimes, she had succeeded only at the cost of discarding all morals and also the better emotions that came coupled with them, and she couldn’t be expected easily to regain sentiments that she had discarded with such finality. And I could not justify anger, because I knew I was a burden to her, because she tolerated and even nurtured me as best she could even though I disgusted and frightened her, and because she had saved me from the midwife.

In retrospect I understand that, there under the sea of stars, when she revealed the five times that she had nearly murdered me, she wanted not merely to relieve her guilt by acknowledgment of it. More than that, she wanted me to be her confessor, to bear witness to her contrition, and to give her absolution. I was six months old when she determined to drown me in my bathwater, but though she could push me under and watch the bubbles streaming from my nose, she couldn’t bear to hold me down long enough to kill me. On the ten-month anniversary of my birth, she felt certain she could smother me with the birthing blanket that the midwife would have used, but she threw it in the fireplace and burned it instead. When I was fourteen months, she spent two hours obsessively sharpening a kitchen knife and then put it to my throat — though she couldn’t make the fatal cut. Six months thereafter, an overdose of the drugs that she called her medicines seemed sufficiently merciful so that she might follow through with the plan, and though she mixed the lethal cocktail with apple juice and gave it to me in a nippled bottle, she snatched it away from me when I began to suck. She said that I was nearly three when she led me into the woods, going far enough from our little house to be sure that I would not find my way home, and there she intended to leave me to the mercy of the various predators that prowled those forested mountains and valleys. She told me to sit down in a small clearing and wait for her, though she had no intention of returning, but just then two wolves, lantern-eyed in the green shadows, appeared from among the surrounding ferns. In terror and regret, she snatched me up and ran with me to the house, and after much whiskey and some powder, she reconciled herself to the fact that she was not capable of infanticide.

She didn’t say that she was sorry, but sorrow like a river ran beneath her words. Although she wanted me to grant her absolution, I was not then — nor am I now — ordained with such a power. I could only say to her, “I love you, Momma, and I always will.”

We sat there in the yard, in the rocking chairs, for a while longer. I couldn’t say with certainty if it was ten minutes or an hour. We sat in silence, and the stars that crowned the night seemed to descend around us, until the house and the woods and the lane that connected us to the outer world all disappeared as if behind a veil, and a great host of diamond-white stars sparkled above and to every side of us, an encapsulating dome of stars under which we were safe.

54

Previously, Gwyneth had seemed to turn aimlessly from street to street when in fact she had been guided by a purpose; but now she was indeed making her way by whim and notion.

The city appeared less real than before, fading into falling snow not as though shrouds were being cast upon it, but as if it were retreating. The high-rises immediately around us stood their ground as always, but those that I knew to be a block away looked as though they had moved an additional block. Those buildings at any greater distance were pale shapes, their glowing windows like befogged running lights, as if they were enormous ships long docked but now cast off and setting sail swiftly away.

She said, “Charles Paladine was a much-hailed artist. He painted what he sometimes called abstracted abstracts, and though he said such things and even sillier stuff, no one in the arts community laughed at him. In fact, he was exceedingly well reviewed and, by the age of twenty-eight, he sold out every show, whether here, in New York, or London, and Goddard Galleries represented him exclusively. He went from triumph to triumph. He was said to be the next Jackson Pollock, the next Robert Rauschenberg, the next Andy Warhol, all rolled into one modern master. Then Paladine did something peculiar that endangered his reputation. He stopped painting abstracts and became obsessed with realistic scenes featuring marionettes.”

I said, “Black tuxedo, black shirt, white tie, top hat.”

“Yes, that one, but also others — men, women, and children. The scenes were exotic, moody and disturbing, sometimes featuring several marionettes and sometimes only two. The marionette you mean, the one in the antique-toy store, was often the most prominently featured, but in paintings where other marionettes were the focus, the one in the tuxedo always at least lurked in the background, half shrouded by one thing or another, or in shadow, but always there. The critics who praised Paladine’s abstracts were puzzled by his new direction. They had proclaimed him a genius for so long that they couldn’t at first be harshly critical. But their positive reviews weren’t quite as adoring as before, and some of them openly lamented that he had abandoned abstracts.”

“I’ve never understood abstract art,” I admitted.

“Sometimes I think no one does, but they have to pretend or be considered uncool and unsophisticated. My father liked to quote the critic Paul Johnson, who once referred to Jackson Pollock’s work as ‘inspired linoleum.’ Daddy deeply disliked the marionette period of Paladine’s career, but he said that at least the artist had been putting something recognizable on the canvas instead of the blobs of nothing and nihilistic scratching that had made him rich.”

She drove around a city plow that moved too slow to please her, and coming the opposite direction was a second plow. She maneuvered fast between them in a center lane that was as yet uncleared, and both drivers gave her a blast of their horns in disapproval.

“What happens if a policeman pulls you over?” I asked.

“Won’t happen. Anyway, Paladine sold his marionette paintings, but at a lower price — until he killed his wife and two children, a boy of ten and a girl of twelve. In some of the paintings, he’d used their faces as the faces of the marionettes. When they were dead, he beheaded them—”

“I don’t like these kinds of stories.”

“It doesn’t exactly bring a smile to my face, either. Paladine beheaded and dismembered his wife and children. Then he sewed their heads and limbs back on, though loosely, with coarse black thread. He painted their faces white, added black details, and drew bright spots of rouge on their cheeks.”

With cloaks and robes and cerements of white whirling and billowing and swooning in every quarter, the city looked as if it must be populated by more ghosts than living people, and all those spirits were agitated in their haunting.

I said, “Did he ever explain himself? In court, I mean?”

“No need for either a trial or an asylum. After he finished with his family, Paladine painted his own face like that of the marionette you saw in the shop window. Then he went to the roof of his four-story house, right here in the finest neighborhood in the city, and threw himself into the street.”

I shuddered. “Why?”

“We’ll never know why.”

“Where do the real marionettes come into this?”

“Police found the six of them in Paladine’s studio, which was there in his home. They were identical, like the one you described. He had carved them from cubes of yew wood and crafted their joints and painted them himself. Do you know the yew tree, Addison?”

“No. I’ve not had much experience of trees since I was eight.”

“The yew is the graveyard tree, symbol of sorrow and death.”

“What happened to the six?”

“Oh, they were sold to collectors. His paintings of marionettes soared in price — I won’t say ‘value’—following the murders and the suicide. Many Paladine collectors no longer wanted his work from that period, but certain … enthusiasts purchased multiple paintings. And each of the six hand-carved marionettes brought a serious price when Edmund Goddard put them up at auction.”

I said, “All this happened before you were born.”

“Yes. Before you came to the city.”

“And then, when you turned thirteen, you used the marionette as the inspiration for your Goth look. Why?”

“I happened to see photographs of it in a magazine article.”

“Yes, but why make yourself like it?”

Instead of answering the question, she said, “As you heard me tell Goddard, through surrogates I’ve tracked down and purchased four of the six. I personally oversaw the burning of them.”

“Are you going to buy and destroy the other two?”

“I haven’t known where they are. Which greatly worried me.”

“Worried you — why?”

We arrived at the traffic roundabout in Washington Square, where atop a plinth, the first president and legendary warrior sat on his horse, his stone face solemn, as though he issued a challenge to the city, if not to the world, a call to rise to his vision of truth and liberty and honor. Three Clears in hospital whites stood around the statue, looking for whatever it is they seek, waiting for whatever it is they anticipate.

Gwyneth drove three-quarters of the way around the circle before taking one of the avenues that radiated from it. A first-pass plow had cast the snow from the street onto parked cars, which by morning would be so buried that they would look like a series of igloos along the curb.

Throughout these two nights together, I had feared that if I pressured her too much to reveal her secrets, I would trigger her social phobia, that she would retreat from me or even terminate our friendship. But now I knew that her life and mine shared points of intersection long before we met, beginning in fact on the night she was born. In light of that puzzling discovery, I resolved to press her a bit more insistently.

“Why are you worried about the last two marionettes?”

“I’m not as worried as I was. We have an appointment at one o’clock. We can’t be late.”

“Appointment with whom?”

“You’ll see.”

I returned to the more essential matter: “Why are you worried about the marionettes?”

She hesitated but did not resort again to silence. “Over time, after to some extent I adopted their image, I gradually came to realize … I’d made them aware of me.”

“Aware of you?”

“Yes.”

“The six?”

“I know what I feel, and I know it’s true. But you don’t have to think it makes sense, that’s okay.”

Perhaps right then was the moment to tell her about the Fogs, the Clears, the music box with mismatched dancers, and my conviction that the marionette in the shop window had been aware of me, too. I almost followed that impulse, but then I said instead, “What is there to fear from toys?”

“They were never toys.”

“All right. But what is there to fear from puppets?”

“I don’t know what, and I don’t want to find out.”

The wind found its strength again and hurled the snow at us so furiously that the flakes, smaller now, ticked faintly against the windshield, as if by virtue of their numbers and persistence, they would pit the glass and eventually dissolve it, so that the storm could claim the interior of the Rover and us, as it had claimed the city’s streets.

A thought occurred to me, and I shared it with her. “Earlier, when we were having dinner. The rapping. In the attic.”

“Air in the water pipes.”

“Are there water pipes in an attic?”

“There must be.”

“Have you gone up there to look?”

“No.”

“Is there a way from your apartment into the attic?”

“A trapdoor in a closet. But it’s held shut with two thick bolt latches, and it’s going to stay that way.”

“If you want, I’ll go up there and look.”

She said calmly but firmly, “No. I’m not going up there, you’re not going up there, no one’s going up there tonight, tomorrow night, or ever.”

55

For a block or more, I listened to the metronomic thump-thump of the windshield wipers, which nearly matched the resting pace of my heart, and I listened to the wind, which at times shook the Rover as if to get our attention and compel us to understand what it was striving to communicate with its keening, huffing, and quarrelsome blustering.

Although I counseled myself to let her answer it in her own time, I could not help but ask again the question that she had sidestepped. “When you turned thirteen, why did you use the marionette as inspiration for your Goth transformation?”

“I was timid, and I wanted to look tough. I wanted to look edgy. I was afraid of people, and I thought the best way to keep them at a distance might be to act a little scary.”

Although what she said seemed to be explanation enough, I sensed that she had given me only a partial answer.

She must have known what I was thinking, because she elaborated, though the added words were a continuing evasion. “After I realized that I’d made them aware of me, I could have changed my appearance, gone to some other Goth look. But I knew by then, it wouldn’t matter. They were already aware of me, and they wouldn’t forget me merely because I no longer resembled them. I had opened a door that could never be closed again. I guess now you’re convinced I’m kind of crazy.”

“Not as much as you might think.”

Her cell phone rang. She fished it from a pocket, glanced at the screen, put it on SPEAKER, but said nothing.

For a moment, the line spat out static, but then Telford said, “I know you’re there, little mouse.”

“Let me talk to Simon.”

Telford pretended to be confused. “Simon? Simon who?”

“Put him on the phone.”

“You want me to put someone named Simon on the phone?”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“You may be right about that.”

“I saw Goddard tonight,” she said.

“What a loser.”

“Goddard knows it’s over. There’s no point to what you’re doing. It’s over.”

“His associates don’t think it’s over. They’ve been a great help to me tonight, and still are.”

“Let me talk to Simon.”

“There’s a man here, maybe his name is Simon, maybe it’s not, I can’t say. You want to talk to him?”

“Put him on.”

The line hissed faintly, sputtered, and Gwyneth waited.

At last Telford said, “He doesn’t seem to want to talk. He just lies there on the floor, staring at nothing, his mouth hanging open, a disgusting beard of vomit on his chin, and he doesn’t even try to clean himself up. If this was your Simon, let me tell you, he had no manners, no common sense, no survival instinct. You should hang out with a better class of people.”

She took a moment to blink back tears, biting her lip so hard that I expected real blood to flow around the bright bead of faux blood. In spite of her emotional turmoil, she handled the Land Rover as well as ever. Finally she said, “It’s over, and you better make your peace with that.”

“Oh, are you going to the police?”

She didn’t reply.

“Three things, little mouse. One, I don’t think you can really tolerate being put in a room for questioning, to have all those big burly policemen around you, touching you. Two, the way you look and the way you are won’t give you a lot of credibility. You’re a tasty little bitch, but you’re also a freak.”

“You said three things. That’s two.”

“Three, those associates that Goddard lent to me? Now that he’s turned coward, they work for me. And you know what, little mouse, both of them are former policemen. Isn’t that interesting? They have friends in the department. Lots of friends, little mouse.”

I admired her aplomb as she said, “You can still save yourself. There’s always time to save yourself until there’s no time left.”

“Brilliant, little mouse. In addition to all your other fine qualities, you’re a philosopher. There’s always time until there’s no time left. I will write that down and study it. When I see you, maybe you can elucidate.”

“You won’t be seeing me.”

“I’ve got considerable resources, little mouse. I’m certain that I’ll find you.”

She terminated the call and returned the phone to a pocket of her coat.

She’d lost a friend in Simon. I couldn’t think of anything to say that might be consoling. Perhaps there had been a time when death was not in the world, but it was here now, with a vengeance, and it would come for us as it had come to Simon, if not this very day, then the day following, or a year from now, or in ten years. When we say “I’m sorry for your loss,” we may mean it, but we are also sorrowing for ourselves.

I said, “This one-o’clock meeting that you mentioned — it’s ten minutes to one.”

“We’re almost there.”

Initially the snow had been beautiful, but not so much now. The softness and sparkle still charmed, but the storm occluded the sky, denying us the stars. At the moment, I needed to see a firmament of stars, needed to gaze past the moon and through the constellations, needed to see what can’t be seen — infinity.

56

The 1930s Art Deco Movie Theater — the Egyptian — had been an architectural wonder in its heyday. All these years later, abandoned and in a state of decay, the building still possessed a little magic. A suggestion of glamour remained in spite of its deteriorated facade, even in spite of the defacing graffiti, a Joseph’s coat of luminous paints. The vandalism glowed in neon shades of green and orange and yellow and blue: the initials of the perpetrators; acronyms that meant nothing to me; crudely drawn snakes and fish and zombie faces; symbols that I could not interpret but also a swastika and a crescent moon embracing a five-point star. According to Gwyneth, in the final phase of its commercial life, the Egyptian had run X-rated movies. Its marquee, which once enticed with the titles of films that later became American classics, instead boldly trumpeted titles that were crude double entendres or as blunt as SEX CRAZY. That business model had a short life, viable only until porno films became an in-home entertainment option, and these days the Egyptian was nothing more than a message board for barbarians. Now the only word on the marquee was CLOSED. Those large black letters were ominous to me. I thought a day might come when that one-word declaration would be hung across every entrance to this once-shining city fallen into ruin.

As Gwyneth parked at the curb in front of the theater, she said, “They were going to tear it down and build a hospice. But new health-care regulations — they’re a swamp, and every bureaucrat a gator.”

“Seems a strange place for a meeting.”

“They might be watching his house, so I didn’t dare go there.”

“If he’s being watched, maybe they followed him here.”

“When he was young, he had a career in the Marine Corps. He was an intelligence officer. If they tried to tail him, he’d know. He’d have called me to switch the meeting somewhere else.”

We hurried through the snow to the center pair of eight doors, which she knew would have been unlocked for this rendezvous. The lobby smelled of mold and stale urine and rancid popcorn oil so ancient that cockroaches would decline to feed upon it.

In the beam of Gwyneth’s flashlight, the golden-marble floor, inlaid with patterns of Egyptian hieroglyphics in black granite, was cracked and filthy. We might have been archaeologists who’d dug into a tomb long buried under desert sand, where the body of a pharaoh, well-cured in tannin and wrapped in linen, waited for Anubis to send its spirit back from the House of the Dead.

Debris crunched under our feet as we crossed that enormous dark chamber toward an open door in one corner, where milky light spilled across the threshold. Back in the days of newsreels, comedy shorts, and double features, this might have been the manager’s office; but now it lay barren and deserted except for Teague Hanlon.

I entered that chamber with the protection of my gloves, hood, and ski mask. I bowed my head, and I intended to keep it that way, but the girl’s guardian had another idea.

Mr. Hanlon’s voice — gentle yet firm, clear and almost musical but not unserious — reminded me in some ways of Father’s voice, which disposed me to like him. “Addison, I know you have issues, I am not to look at you under any circumstances, and I respect that. I’ve long been accustomed to Gwynie’s rules, and I’m sure she’s told you that I honor them. I won’t look at you, not even sideways. All right?”

“Yes. All right.”

“Gwynie has told me what I may say to you and what she prefers that I not say, and I will abide by her request. But I feel that you should know what I look like, know at least that much of who I am. It’s going to be essential that you trust me in the hours to come. Trust will be easier for you if you look at me and see no deception. From this moment on, I’ll focus my attention only on dear Gwynie.”

Warily, I raised my stare from his zippered boots to his black slacks, to his long overcoat, which was buttoned at his throat, a white scarf partly revealed beneath it. In one gloved hand, he held a navy-blue knitted sailor’s cap.

Gwyneth said, “Telford won’t say it directly on the phone, only imply it, but Simon … they killed him.”

“God be with him,” Mr. Hanlon said. “He didn’t have an easy life, and now a hard death.”

His head was somewhat large at the brow, his chin and jaw a bit small, like a pear standing on its stem. In spite of the slightly odd proportions, his pleasant face served as a recommendation. White thinning hair, disarranged when he pulled off his cap, was tangled and standing up in wispy twists like a fledgling’s feathers. For a man his age, his brow remained remarkably smooth, and a spray of creases at the corner of each eye seemed not to signify a life of much squinting in disapproval, but one of much laughter.

To Gwyneth, her guardian said, “It’s harder every day to hold him off. He wants the larger part of the principal in the primary trust, for his pet projects, and he thinks there has to be a way around the trust provisions. I tell him it’s all yours until you’ve died, but his mind is a riot of schemes, which he keeps pressing on me. He comprehends your legal protections, but he doesn’t respect them. He keeps saying that your father provided for you too lavishly, and even suggests that the fortune wasn’t fairly earned, which is a slander at the very least, as anyone who knew your dad can attest.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gwyneth said. “I’d give it all to him tomorrow if by giving it I could … change things. You know it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Mr. Hanlon’s sweet face hadn’t been made for anger. But his pleasant features conformed to a solemn sadness that frightened me. Based on what the girl had just said and on her guardian’s grave expression, I thought she must be afflicted not just with social phobia, but also with something worse, an incurable illness without visible symptoms.

He said, “Gwynie, are you still sure that now is the time?”

“Aren’t you?” she asked.

After a hesitation, he nodded. “Yes. I’m afraid that I think you’re right.”

“The fact that you called me today with this information, that it has at last come into my hands — it’s confirmation.”

From a coat pocket, Mr. Hanlon withdrew a key on a stretchy green plastic coil. He gave it to Gwyneth. “There are two in his retinue who know precisely what he is. His secretary is one of them. He has a room at the back of the first floor, but he won’t participate.”

“He doesn’t need to. He’s done enough.”

I wondered whom they were talking about, but I didn’t feel that it was my place to ask. If I needed to know, she would tell me.

Mr. Hanlon said, “The security system is armed. The audio function has been disabled, so the alarm won’t sound in the house, and the keypad won’t emit tones when you enter the disarming code.”

Gwyneth accepted from him a piece of paper on which were printed four numbers and a symbol.

“Although no siren will sound in the house, a signal will be sent to the security company’s monitoring station. You have just one minute to enter the numbers and the star key in order to prevent an armed response from them.”

Although I was accustomed to going into locked places where I wasn’t supposed to venture, I never did so with the intention of committing a crime. Listening to Mr. Hanlon, I grew uneasy, though I had to assume that Gwyneth likewise harbored no criminal intent. I loved her with such devotion that I could not do otherwise than trust her. In mere hours, trust had ceased to be a choice and had become, with love, the foundation of all my hopes for the future.

Mr. Hanlon said, “His private apartment occupies the entire third floor. You’ll find what you need in the living room. He usually takes a tablet of Lunesta before bed. He should be sound asleep, down a long hallway, in his bedroom. If you’re reasonably quiet, he won’t know you’re there.”

Sensing that the meeting had reached an end, I looked down at the floor, worried that Mr. Hanlon would forget his promise to me and would turn to say good-bye, quite naturally looking straight into my eyes.

Perhaps I needn’t have been concerned. He said, “Addison, you take care of this girl.”

“I’ll do my best, sir. But I suspect she’ll end up taking care of me.”

I could hear his smile in his words. “You’re probably right. Our Gwynie is a force of nature.” He said to her, “I’ll see you in a little while?”

“That’s the plan.”

“You’re really sure you must do this?”

“Very sure.”

“May God be with you, child.”

“And with you.”

Mr. Hanlon accompanied us across the lobby, where we trod upon the hieroglyphics, which included silhouettes and symbols of some Egyptian gods: Osiris, Horus, Isis, Neph, Amen-Ra, Anubis. He let us out, and as we hurried to the Land Rover, he locked the theater doors.

By the time Gwyneth started the engine and switched on the headlights, her guardian was nearing the end of the block, shoulders hunched and head lowered into the wind.

I said, “Shouldn’t we give him a lift?”

“He doesn’t have far to go. If they’re watching his place, we don’t want to get anywhere near it.”

She drove away from the curb, into the iced city as white as a wedding cake. That image sparked another, and into my mind came the figure of a groom standing on the top layer of such a cake. He was the tuxedoed marionette. Imagination is a wonderful but occasionally disturbing gift. In my mind’s eye, no bride stood with the groom, but he smiled as if he anticipated her arrival at any moment.

I said, “Why did you tell him there were things you preferred he not say to me? What things were they?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

“Do you have some … illness?”

“Illness? Why would you think so?”

“You said you’d give all your money away if it would change things. You said it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You worry too much, Addison. I have no illness. Truly. And you know I never lie.”

“I never lie, either. But sometimes I evade. And so do you.”

After a silence, she said, “You’re an interesting guy.”

“I am?”

“Yes, and you better be.”

“Better be what?”

“Interesting.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Doesn’t matter. I understand. Now, hush. I need to think.”

The streets were at last deserted except for us and the plows. The bright yellow beacons swiveling on the roofs of those vehicles alchemized snow to gold, and on the walls of nearby buildings, waves of sulfurous beacon-cast light chased wolfish beacon-cast shadows.

57

On a warm June night when I was fourteen, there were fireflies in the great park, hundreds of them gliding silently through the dark, familiar to me from my time on the mountain but mysterious in the metropolis. I fancied that they were tiny airships aboard which minute passengers were bound from their world to another peopled by their Lilliputian kind, passing through ours and wondering at the strangeness of this place. That was the first and last night we saw fireflies in the city, as if they had not been borne here by Nature’s intention, but instead had materialized at the will of some other power that meant their throbbing lanterns to warn us away from — or guide us toward — something of importance.

Later on the same night, traversing an alleyway, we heard a man calling out to us, his voice weak and tremulous. “Help me. I’m blind. They blinded me.”

We found him lying beside a Dumpster, and trusting in his claim of blindness, we dared to go to him and examine him by flashlight. He was perhaps fifty, dressed in an expensive but rumpled suit ruined now by bloodstains. He had taken blows to the head. His bruised and swollen face made me afraid for him. Blood oozed from his split lip and from the gums around two broken teeth. His eyes followed not either light or movement, but instead tracked our voices, as he tried to see what he heard. He was strong enough to stand with help, but he was too broken to walk on his own. We were wearing gloves, as usual, and we assisted him, Father to his right and I to his left. A block and a half away, there was a hospital, and in that warm night, our sweat was cold as we risked exposure to get him to those doors.

As he shuffled between us, he said with some bewilderment that this was a safe neighborhood, that he’d had no qualms about walking two blocks even at that late hour. The three men had been waiting in this unlighted alleyway. They stepped out in front of him, thrust a pistol into his abdomen, seized him, and dragged him into the dark. He had twelve hundred in his wallet, credit cards, a watch worth fifteen thousand, a diamond ring worth five thousand, and he thought that if he surrendered all of that without protest, his assailants would not harm him. He knew a man who had, some years earlier, been unfortunate enough to be mugged while carrying little of value, and in frustration, the robbers had beaten him severely. In this case, they were incensed that he had so much, more than they deemed was fair, and they accused him of stealing it from others, one way or another, him in his fancy suit and Gucci shoes, and they beat him in disapproval of his affluence. He lay unconscious, for how long he didn’t know, and when he woke, his skull felt as if it were in pieces, held together by skin and hair, and he was blind.

We assured him that the blindness would be temporary. Although we couldn’t know if that was true, his eyes were without wounds, and clear. We got him within a few feet of the entrance to the hospital and told him that we couldn’t go inside with him, though we didn’t explain why. “The doors are in front of you,” Father said. “They’re automatic. Just two steps, they’ll open, you’re inside where someone can help you.” En route, the victim had asked our names, and we’d avoided giving them. Now he surprised me by reaching out and touching my face, insisting that he must know what his two Samaritans looked like. A ski mask on a June night would have drawn attention to us; we relied on light jackets with deep hoods and, until called to this task, on discretion. No sooner had his fingers begun to trace my features than he snatched his hand away. Because his face was bruised, bloodied, badly distorted by swelling, I couldn’t easily interpret the nuances of his expression, though it was one kind of horror or another. Without a word, he stumbled away, the pneumatic doors hissed open, he staggered inside, and we sprinted into the night as if we were his assailants, not his rescuers.

Several weeks later, reading the newspaper after midnight in the central library, we came upon a story about a mugging victim who was searching for two men who had assisted him. We recognized him only because the story included two pictures — one taken post-recovery that meant nothing to us, the other taken in the hospital by a police officer. He had regained his sight. His name was Robert Pattica, and he hoped to find us and reward us for our kindness. We neither wanted nor needed a reward. Considering that Mr. Pattica had touched my face and therefore knew something of my difference, we couldn’t help but doubt that his motives were as he claimed.

The most interesting thing in the article was what Mr. Pattica said about fireflies. When he touched my face, though blind, he saw fireflies as he remembered them from his youth in farm country, and though they were familiar, they were also strange, because he thought of them in a way he never had before; they seemed to him like tiny airships sailing silently through the dark. The vision had been so entrancing that he couldn’t get it out of his mind, and he was in the process of selling his home in the city, changing careers, and moving back to the town where he had been raised, where there were fireflies and wildlife aplenty, which he hadn’t known he missed until now.

Father and I didn’t know what to make of that.

We were certain that, if Mr. Pattica had seen my face, he would have either fled in terror or, in spite of his injuries, attacked me. We endured too much over the years to believe that, upon revealing ourselves, we would be embraced. The only abovegrounder who had been kind to Father was the friend who’d given him a key to the food bank, and even that individual found it difficult to meet with him more than once every year — and briefly — to confirm that he remained well.

But what about the fireflies? How could Mr. Pattica have seen the fireflies to which I had stood witness earlier that night, and how could he have arrived at the same simile that had occurred to me — tiny airships in the dark? We could conclude only that the blows he had taken to the head had not only temporarily blinded him but had also conferred upon him an equally temporary clairvoyance.

We were fortunate because his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.

Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however, is so abstruse, so deep and complex, most explanations that people embrace to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that can’t be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on Earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.

There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, pinhead eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light.

58

At 1:40 in the morning, Gwyneth parked at the curb on the south side of the cathedral complex, steps from the break in the compound wall that served the residence of the archbishop.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Visiting.”

She turned, reached over the console, groped for something on the floor behind her seat, and snared a laundry bag with a drawstring closure.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Convenience.”

The frozen and crumbling sky, the countless shoals of crystals swimming down the night, the street a quiet sea of white …

We climbed a snowbank compacted by a city plow, forged across a buried sidewalk, and disturbed the pristine white coverlets on the steps leading up to a much broader doorstep under a columned portico.

When she took from a pocket the key on the stretchy coil of green plastic, I said, “Not really?”

“What?”

“This isn’t the place I was expecting.”

“What place were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Just not this.”

“Well, this is the place,” she said.

“Wow. We should take off our boots.”

“We didn’t take them off when we went into Simon’s place.”

“It was just a bungalow, there was an urgency to the moment.”

“There’s an urgency to this moment,” she said, “and who’s to say this place is more sacred than poor Simon’s bungalow?”

Nevertheless, I unzipped my snow-caked boots and shucked them off, and so did she. We were both still wearing athletic shoes, and hers were the silver ones on which she had flown like Mercury through the library stacks.

The key worked, the deadbolt retracted, and we went into the spacious foyer, which was round and paved with marble. Next to the door, the numbers on the keypad of the security panel glowed a soft green. The audio function had been disabled, as promised, and the indicator light above the words PERIMETER ARMED blinked silently to announce a violation of the premises. Having stripped off her gloves and shoved them in a jacket pocket, Gwyneth held in her left hand the paper that her guardian had given her. I shone my flashlight on the code, and with her right hand she entered the four numbers and the star symbol. The indicator light stopped blinking and went dark.

Trust. Our relationship hinged on trust. And I did trust her. But I was nevertheless nervous. My mouth went dry with apprehension.

The stairs were not an architectural feature and did not open into the foyer. We ventured into the large drawing room, probing left and right with our flashlights. This was one of the chambers in which the archbishop entertained, for among his responsibilities was the work of establishing bonds with the leaders of the city’s political, business, arts, and faith communities. Several elegantly furnished seating areas, Persian carpets, and exquisite antiques were balanced by marvelous paintings of scenes from Scripture, marble statuary of Biblical figures, including one of the Holy Mother, and small icons on various tables and consoles. There was also a large portrait of Christ by an artist unusually observant of detail and superbly skilled at creating an illusion of depth, so that the image appeared three-dimensional, and for a moment I could not breathe.

The stairs were behind a corner door in the drawing room, and we climbed to the third floor. At the head of the stairs, another door opened onto an antechamber that offered two chairs. It was lighted only by a flickering electric candle in a glass chimney that stood before a shrine to Mary.

I whispered, “We shouldn’t be here.”

“But we are.”

“Why?”

“We have two things to do before we can go back to my guardian.”

I remembered then that he had asked her if he would see her in a little while, and she said that was the plan.

“What two things?” I asked.

“Trust me,” she said, and turned to the apartment door.

I thought the door would be locked, that we would be foiled by the lack of a second key. But it was not locked.

When we crossed the threshold, I expected darkness, but a couple of lamps glowed. The light made Gwyneth hesitate, but then we stepped into a different world from the ground-floor rooms, which had clearly been part of the residence of a prince of the church.

Here, the living room reminded me of pictures of homes furnished by interior designers who specialized in soft contemporary style. The upholstered furniture, covered in rich golden silk except for two red chairs, featured waterfall edges and round plump arms, and the legs were tucked back out of sight, so that each piece seemed to float an inch off the floor. Tables laminated in exotic lacquered woods in shades varying from silver to gold, scarlet accent pillows, and large canvases of bold abstract art finished a space very like those that, in magazines, belonged to au courant novelists, avant-garde artists, and movie stars who described their taste as “simple glamour.”

I was surprised that the living room contained no smallest representation of things sacred. But the most striking thing about it was the pair of marionettes on the fireplace mantel. They sat with the support of decorative metal stands, facing each other from opposite ends of a painting in which several black arcs made with a wide brush were stark against a white backdrop, spattered across with blue like the blood of some extraterrestrial species.

59

At the end of the living room, on the right, a hallway led to the rest of the apartment. Although the hall was mostly dark, a rectangle of light issued from an open door, catching the tight nap of the pale-gray wool carpet at such an angle as to make it appear pebbled. From that room came two solemn male voices.

Sensing my trepidation, Gwyneth whispered, “Talking heads.”

Baffled, I whispered, “What?”

Because she was more familiar with TV than I would ever be, she said with quiet certainty, “Just TV. News or late-night talk.”

Obviously, the archbishop remained awake, and I thought we should leave at once.

She thought differently, returned to the cold fireplace, and whispered, “Come on. Hurry. Help me.”

As I went to her, she opened the cloth laundry bag and put it on the hearth.

I said, “But this is stealing.”

“No. This is a cleansing.”

Although I believed that she didn’t lie, I assumed that she could be misguided.

“They know I’m here,” she whispered. “They know.”

The marionettes still faced each other from opposite ends of the mantel. Their striated eyes had not turned toward us.

“I don’t think I should touch them, Addison. Will you take them down and put them in the bag?”

“But why is it not stealing?”

“I’ll send him a generous check for them if you insist. But put them in the bag. Please.”

In a state of quasi-bewilderment, not quite able to believe that I was in this place and engaged upon such a task, I tried to lift one of the puppets, but it was secured to the metal brace that disappeared under its tuxedo jacket. When I tried to lift the brace, I discovered that it was screwed to the mantel.

“Hurry,” Gwyneth urged.

I worked the tuxedo jacket up the brace until I found the cord that tied the marionette in place. As I fumbled with the knot, the archbishop entered from the hallway.

He carried two suitcases and, upon seeing us, dropped them so abruptly that one of them fell over. He said, “Who’re you, what’re you—” Then Gwyneth turned toward him, and he recognized her.

“You.”

He wasn’t wearing a cassock, rochet, stole, pectoral cross, or Roman collar, nor was he wearing the simple black suit of a priest, nor robe and pajamas. In comfortable suede shoes, khaki slacks, and a dark-brown wool sweater over a beige shirt, he might have been anyone, a schoolteacher or accountant, preparing to catch an early flight and wing away on holiday.

Tall, fit, he had the handsome but pale and sharp-featured face of one of the tort lawyers who ran ads in certain magazines, seeking clients for class-action lawsuits. His hair was thick for his age, quite curly, still more blond than gray.

He didn’t at once approach us. If he began to step closer, I would back away. At this remove, he couldn’t clearly see the eyes in the holes of my ski mask. I remembered well the church by the river and the man with the kindly face, who had come at me with a baseball bat. Among other implements hanging from the rack of fireplace tools on the hearth was a long-handled poker, which would perhaps do more damage than a Louisville Slugger.

“There must be an agent of the devil among my confreres, and perhaps more than one,” he said.

“Your Eminence, Archbishop Wallache,” Gwyneth said and nodded to him, as if we had come calling by invitation.

Father and I never read the entire newspaper, and I did not keep up with ecclesiastical news, but the name resonated with me. I had heard it six years earlier, as I stood by the open drain in the crypt beneath the cathedral. Two men, never seen, met in the farther reaches of that place to share a secret that meant nothing to me at the time but that, I now realized, involved news of whom the Vatican had selected to be the next archbishop.

Please tell me it’s not Wallache.

But it is.

They’ve all gone mad.

Say nothing to anyone or I’m toast. This is übersecret.

But they must know—he must know — Wallache’s history.

They seem to believe Wallache’s version of it.

Now, Archbishop Wallache said, “I assume you haven’t come to me at this hour for a blessing.” His courtroom face produced a smile that I would not have thought it could, one warm enough to charm any jury. “Are you admirers of the marionettes?”

“Why would you have such a foul thing here?” Gwyneth asked.

“I grant you that the subject is macabre and their history is dark, but the workmanship is lovely. For another thing, they were a gift, and it is rude to turn down a sincerely offered gift.”

“A gift from Edmund Goddard,” she said, coloring the name with contempt.

“May I say also that, when one spends every day among people of faith, always bringing the hope of Christ to those who need it, there is a tendency to become too sunny in temperament, to lose track of the truth that Evil walks the Earth and that the battle against it remains always urgent and desperate. Having such a reminder of great wickedness keeps one alert to the possibility of error in one’s own life.”

Gwyneth said, “So you keep them on your mantel to remind you that evil is real and that anyone can be tempted.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“So have they been effective, have you avoided error since you’ve had them?”

He could hold a smile with the apparent effortlessness of a world-class high-wire walker maintaining balance far above a tense crowd of upturned faces. “If I may be allowed a question of my own, I should ask what you want with them.”

“I want to burn them. I’ve bought and burned the other four.”

“You wish to destroy icons of evil, and yet you make yourself up to resemble them.”

She did not respond.

Indicating me with a gesture, the archbishop said, “Who is your masked companion? Is he what would be called your muscle?”

Instead of answering him, Gwyneth said, “I’m taking these last two marionettes to burn them. If you want to call the police and tell them how you kept these things on your mantel as reminders to be on guard against evil and to avoid wickedness yourself, by all means do so. They might believe you. Most of them. So many years have passed, almost twenty-five, since those murders that a lot of people might have forgotten the most gruesome details of what Paladine did to his family. However, that’s the kind of thing cops don’t forget. I’m sure they’ll want to know why Goddard would think to give them to you.”

If he was a man who could take offense, he was too diplomatic to show it. If he had feathers, they would never ruffle. He consulted his wristwatch and said, “I’ve no use for the things anymore. You may burn them — but you may not take them. That’s a gas-log fireplace. The flue is open, and it draws well. You see the remote control lying by the rack of tools? You can switch on the flames with that.”

Gwyneth picked up the remote, clicked it, and blue-orange flames at once licked up around the realistic-looking ceramic logs.

“The wood of the yew tree,” the archbishop said, “is pliable because it retains its natural oils decades after it has been cut and shaped. They should burn well and quickly.”

I returned to the marionette that I had been trying to loosen from its brace.

“Not you,” Archbishop Wallache said.

“Sir?”

“Not you. She must take them down and consign them to the flames. Or I really will pick up the phone.”

“I’ll stop you,” I said.

“Will you really? I suspect not. I’m a good judge of people, masked or not, and you seem to me to be a lamb, not a lion.”

“I’ll do it,” Gwyneth said. “I’m not afraid to do it.”

I said, “He won’t stop me.”

“I don’t know what he might do. I’ll burn them myself.”

I thought I saw the marionette’s eyes turn sideways to regard me. But when I looked directly, it still stared across the mantel at its twin.

60

Gwyneth’s hands trembled, so that she had some difficulty slipping the knot in the cord securing the marionette to the metal stand that braced it upright. When she freed the thing, she held it by its arms and lifted it off the mantel with an obvious dread that infected me.

The archbishop said, “It won’t bite.”

As Gwyneth took a step backward and began to stoop to throw the puppet into the flames, she cried out as if stung, threw it down on the hearth, and backed up another step.

I said, “What’s wrong?”

“It moved.”

“I didn’t see.”

She rubbed the palm of her left hand over the back of her right, the palm of her right over the back of her left, as though she felt the blue lizards of her faux tattoos wriggling on her skin and meant to smooth them into stillness.

“I was holding it by its upper arms. I felt … its muscles tensed.”

“But it’s made of wood,” the archbishop said with a note of amusement. “It doesn’t have muscles.”

The marionette was lying on its back, one arm at its side and the other across its chest, one leg bent. The top hat had fallen off, revealing carved and painted hair. Its hinged mouth sagged open, the square chisel-blade teeth like the jaws of an unsprung trap.

Gwyneth cautiously extended her right leg to kick the hateful thing up and into the firebox.

“No, no. That isn’t permissible,” said the archbishop.

“There aren’t any rules.”

“My rules,” he said, and held up a cell phone, which he had evidently taken from a pocket of his slacks. “I’ve already entered 911. I need only press SEND. Use your hands, girl.”

With no intention other than persuasion, I took a step toward Wallache, but Gwyneth said, “Addison, no. Your eyes.”

As I lowered my head and eased back, the archbishop said, “What about your eyes?”

Gwyneth withdrew her gloves from a jacket pocket.

“Bare hands,” the archbishop instructed.

In response to the look of contempt that she turned upon him, he only brandished the cell phone.

Gwyneth put the gloves away, hesitated, hesitated, hesitated, suddenly bent down and snatched the hateful icon off the hearth. For a moment, she seemed to be struggling to shake it loose of her, and I couldn’t tell if one of the thing’s hands had in fact closed tightly around her thumb or if that was a detail conjured by my imagination, but then she flung it into the firebox, and the gas flames at once ignited the puppet’s costume.

Perhaps the effect was a consequence of the pliancy of the oil-rich yew wood, but the marionette appeared to writhe in agony, flexed and twisted and seemed to seek handholds on the ceramic logs, as if it might clamber out of the fireplace and carry the consuming flames to us, setting the entire room ablaze.

A sound like the wooden heels of wooden shoes drumming hard against marble broke the spell that the sight of the twitching puppet cast over me. I looked at its twin, which still sat upon the mantel. Although I was certain of the source of the sound, the abomination sat motionless, its legs stretched out in front of it, hands upon its knees, as it had been posed previously. Because the mantel was somewhat high, if I hadn’t been tall enough, I wouldn’t have noticed, scattered on the stone, a few chips of the high-gloss black paint with which the puppet’s shoes were made to look like patent leather.

In the firebox, the marionette lay still across the logs, and tendrils of foul-smelling black smoke seethed like spirits from its shrinking form and were either drawn up the chimney by a draft or escaped through it into the night and storm.

When I looked at Gwyneth, she was squeezing her right thumb with her left hand, and when she opened the hand, blood glistened, oozing from a cut on the pad of the thumb.

“She needs a bandage,” I told the archbishop.

“No, Addison. I’m okay. It’s not much of a cut.”

In spite of Wallache and his cell phone, I went to the remaining marionette, snapped the cord that bound it to the metal brace, and lifted it off the mantel.

An ink spot appeared in the center of my vision and spread to the perimeter, but I hadn’t gone blind, because in that darkness floated the music box from which Father had plucked and pocketed the winding key years earlier. As bright as a stage, illuminated by a light that had no source, the lid offered four dancers, as before. The prince and princess were dethroned, and in their place were Gwyneth and I, but dressed as they had been. She danced with the man-goat Pan, I held in my arms the goggle-eyed frog, and the four tiny figures waltzed along the inlaid tracks to cold and brittle music. The goatish god halted in the dance to bury his face in his partner’s cleavage, she threw back her head as if in ecstasy, the frog grinned to reveal teeth as pointed as needles, which no real frog had ever possessed, and flickering from the grin came a snaky black tongue, which the figurine of me bent forward to capture in its mouth.

I don’t believe that I was released from the vision, but instead thrust myself out of it; and if I hadn’t done so, I suspect that next I would not have been merely observing my image on the music box but would have found myself there in its place, the scaly demonic form in my arms, in a hellish kiss with twining tongues.

Although I thought that I had been gone from the archbishop’s private apartment for a minute or longer, the unnerving vision must have occurred and ended in an instant, because neither Gwyneth nor Wallache reacted as if I had seized up. I threw the marionette atop the burning remnants of its twin, and the ribbons of foul black smoke didn’t merely seethe from it but leaped to the flue as if they were raveling up the chimney and onto some cosmic spool that turned at high speed.

The archbishop said, “What do you think you’ve achieved by this pointless ritual?”

We didn’t answer or look at him, but watched until the black smoke faded to gray and the charred marionettes shrank in a tangle of withering limbs, until the fire split their torsos and, through the curtain of blue flames, red coals glowed deep in those cracks.

“Are you done here?” asked Wallache. “Or would you like to burn a sofa cushion, perhaps an entire armchair?”

“We’re done,” Gwyneth said.

“Good. I’m in a hurry, if you don’t mind.”

“Last-minute trip?” she asked, indicating the two suitcases.

“As if it’s any of your business.”

“There’s nowhere for you to go, Your Eminence.”

“I grew up in worse snow country. I can drive through this.”

“Not what I meant. Would you like all the funds in my trust, for your good works? You may have the money now, if you want.”

No longer able to summon a smile, he said, “You are demonic.”

“Outside the storm zone,” she said, “airports will be open. But what about your flock, all left behind?”

A note of defensiveness at last blurred the sharp edges of his self-confidence. “There are many good priests in this diocese to see after them in my absence.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “many good priests,” by her tone implying that she did not include him in that category.

As when she and Goddard had sparred verbally with each other in the alley behind his gallery, this conversation had a subtext that I couldn’t quite grasp. Although I didn’t know where Wallache was going or why, Gwyneth seemed to have — or intuit — that information.

Recovering his poise, the archbishop said, “If you would like to confess your vandalism, Gwyneth, and I assume much else as well, I will prescribe a proper penance.”

“I’ve made other arrangements,” she said, dropped the key to the residence on the floor, and walked out of the apartment with me close behind.

In the antechamber, I said, “We have to bandage your thumb.”

“This will be good enough,” she said, and she pulled a knitted glove onto her right hand.

Following her down the stairs as she worked her left hand into the other glove, I said, “You seem to think he’s not fit to be what he is, where he is.”

“It’s not just what I think. It’s the truth.”

Crossing the drawing room, where in paint and bronze and stone, the many sainted founders of the faith looked sadly down, I said, “But why is he unfit?”

“Others under his authority broke their vows in a most terrible way. He didn’t do what they did, but he engineered a cover-up of what they did, less for the sake of the church than for the sake of his career, with no justice for the victims. And he engineered it in such a way that he left few if any fingerprints in his wake.”

I thought I knew to what she alluded, and if I was right, I did not want any further details.

Outside, the street receded left and right like the white bed of a river, and turbulent currents of snow flooded through the air.

61

Leaving the archbishop’s residence behind, Gwyneth at first pressed the accelerator too hard, so that even with four-wheel drive and tire chains, the Rover fishtailed along the street, whereupon she gave it more gas, which didn’t help matters, before she eased back on the pedal. When the vehicle became stable and we were proceeding at a somewhat safer speed than a bank robber’s getaway car, I relaxed my grip on the seat and lowered my bracing feet from the dashboard to the floor.

I said, “Anger doesn’t solve anything.”

“I wish it did. If it did, I’d anger away all the troubles of the world.”

She hadn’t mentioned a destination. Again, she seemed to be driving a route chosen at random, but by now I knew that whatever map guided her this night, it had not been drawn by a whimsical cartographer.

“Where is he going?” I asked.

“Wallache? I don’t know.”

“Back there, you did seem to know.”

“All I know is that he’s going in a circle, and wherever he goes, he’ll only find the same thing that he’s running from.”

“What is he running from?” When she did not reply, I said, “Sometimes it seems you know something I don’t know but should.”

I could hear the smile in her voice. “Addison Goodheart, you are so well named. I love your innocence.”

For a minute or so, I reran her words several times in my mind, and at last I said, “I don’t think that was a put-down.”

“A put-down? How can it ever be a put-down when a girl says she loves you?”

Let me tell you, I parsed and pondered those words, diagrammed the second sentence in my mind, and worried about what subtext was eluding me this time. Finally, I replied, “You didn’t say that you loved me. You said you loved my innocence.”

“And you are your innocence. It’s as fundamental to you as water is to the sea.”

Although words are the world and were the birthing of the world, there are no words to express what I felt at that moment, no words for the dimensions of my joy, for the great buoyancy that overcame my spirit, for the depth of my gratitude, for the brightness of my hope.

When I could speak, I said, “I love you, too.”

“I know.”

“I’m not just saying it.”

“I know.”

“I mean because you said it.”

“I know. You love me. I know.”

“You really know?”

“I really do.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since we met in the library. You were standing there in shadow by Charles Dickens and you said, ‘We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.’ ”

“I think I also said we were made for each other.”

“Yes, you did. But it was when you said the other thing that my heart seemed almost to fall out of me. When we love someone, we’re held hostage by fate, because if we lose that person, then we, too, are lost. When you said we hold each other hostage, you declared your love as clearly as it could be said.”

How strange it is that one can be rendered unable to speak as much by ecstasy as by terror. Fear never silenced me more effectively than this.

At last I said, “Can there be such a thing as love at first sight?”

“The great poets have always said there is. But do we really need poets to convince us?”

“No. Not me.”

“Not me, either.”

Staring through the windshield, I didn’t see the snow or the veiled city. There was nothing to see, nothing worth seeing except her face.

I wanted to touch her, just my hand to her face, but she could not bear being touched, and I wanted to stare into her eyes, but I dared not let her look into mine. Our eccentricities were more than merely peculiarities of our character; they were cruel conditions of our very existence. Our situation should have seemed hopeless, should have reduced me to despair. But regardless of what we couldn’t have together, we could still have our feelings for each other, and at that moment, knowing my feelings were reciprocated was such a grace that my bliss could not be deflated by any arrow.

She said, “We’ve got to return to Walter’s and get the girl.”

“The girl without a name? Why?”

“Everything’s happening so fast. But before we go to Walter’s, I want to see your rooms, where you live.”

“What, you mean now?”

“Yes, now. I want to see where you’ve hidden from the world for eighteen years.”

62

On an April night when I was twelve, shortly after I finished reading a novel about a lucky coin, Father and I went out into the post-midnight city, where in spite of the faint but lingering odor of automobile exhaust, the sweet smell of spring was in the air, as was the expectation of change, with the trees in the parks leafing out anew.

In the great park, in the pavilion, on the elevated floor of the bandstand, a slant of moonlight polished a penny and brought it to my attention. I snatched it up, neither because we were profoundly poor, which we were, nor because we had much need of money, which we didn’t, but because of the book that I had recently read. I showed it to Father, declared that I had found my own lucky coin, and began to imagine aloud what miraculous benefits it might bestow upon us.

He could always hold his own with me in games of fantasy, but that one did not charm him. In the spring warmth, as we slowly walked the perimeter of the pavilion, gazing out at the meadows pale with lunar frost, at the woodlet guarding its darkness, at the black lake floating the full moon like a raft upon its waters, he told me that there was no such thing as luck. To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity.

He said that because we live in time, we think that the past is baked and served and eaten, that the present is coming out of the oven in continuous courses, and that the future is not yet even in the mixing bowl. Any thoughtful physicist, he said, well schooled in quantum mechanics, would agree that all time exists simultaneously, which I subsequently learned was the case. In truth, Father said, at the first instant of the universe, all of time was present, all our yesterdays and today and all our tomorrows, everyone and everything that was and ever would be existed at that moment. But more amazing still, in the first instant that the universe came into existence, the fabric of it also included all the infinite ways that things might have been, countless of them terrible in the extreme and countless others glorious. Nothing is predetermined for us, and yet all our possible choices are threads in the vast weave of things, so that we have free will even though the consequences of our will are predictable. Father said we were given a sense of time’s progression because our minds are not able to cope with the reality that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously and that all of history existed in the first instant of the universe’s being.

To help me understand, Father said that I should think of the universe as a giant painting rendered in more than three dimensions; some scientists say eleven, some say fewer, some say more, but no one knows — or will ever know — for sure. In an art gallery, when you stand too close to a large canvas executed in only two dimensions, you can see the artist’s brushstrokes and certain details clearly, but you can’t understand either the full effect of the piece or the artist’s intentions. You have to step back and step back again, and sometimes yet again, in order to grasp the totality of the work. To understand the universe, our world, and all life in the world, you have to step out of time, which for living humanity is not an option, because we are a part of this painting, characters within it, able to perceive it only as a continuing series of events, episodes. However, because we are conscious creatures with the gift of reason, we can seek and learn and extrapolate from what we learn, and conceive the truth.

In a universe in which past, present, and future came into existence all at once, complete from beginning to end, with all possible outcomes of every life woven through the tapestry, there is no chance, only choice, no luck, but only consequences. A penny polished by moonlight is only a penny, though its existence — minted by thinking creatures for the purpose of commerce in the present and investment in the future — might be a kind of miracle, if you’re imaginative enough to credit miracles. He said that the penny would not bring us luck, that even if it had been a million dollars, it would not of itself bring us luck and change our lives, that what happened to us was of our election — and therefore allowed us more hope than luck could ever provide.

I was only twelve that April night, but already worn to wisdom by the friction between me and the world aboveground. When Father took luck away from me, I was not downcast but exhilarated. The penny didn’t mean anything, but what I did with the penny mattered. I put the coin down on the bandstand floor, where I had found it, in the hope that whoever discovered it next might, by the loving guidance of someone like my father or by his own heart, be led to the revelation to which I had been led.

And so, more than fourteen years later on a snowy night, I knew with conviction that Gwyneth had not been dropped into my lap by Lady Luck. She and her love for me were one of the infinite number of ways that things might have been, but now they were what was, by virtue of countless decisions that she and I had made, moment by moment throughout our lives, which we could never hope to track in retrospect.

I could only lose her if, from this moment forward, I made wrong choices, or if she made them. But I would take those odds rather than the odds that luck offered.

63

In the main room of my subterranean home, Gwyneth moved along the shelves, reading the titles on the spines. “I knew there would be books, and I knew what the character of them would be.”

Her presence here was the most magical turn of events in this night of myriad wonders. Gladness expressed itself in my covered countenance, in my voice, manner, action. The girl was fully aware of my happiness, and she delighted in my delight. I could not take my eyes off her, and in respect of that, she did not turn her eyes toward me.

“Your courage humbles me,” she said.

“Courage? Not really. I’m a coward by necessity. We always had to run from any threat.”

“To live in these cramped spaces, without sun, for eighteen years, the last six without company, and always with the expectation that there would never be more than this, to endure that and not be driven mad … Sanity in such circumstances takes more courage than I possess.”

With that, she gave me a somewhat different perspective on my life, and I didn’t know what to say.

She said then, “What do you want to take with you, Addison?”

“Take with me?”

“What’s most precious to you? Don’t leave it here. After we go, you won’t ever be coming back.”

I couldn’t fully comprehend her meaning, and it seemed that I must have misheard what she said. “Not coming back? But where would I live?”

“With me.”

“You mean in the apartment with the piano?”

“No. We’re not going back there, either. That’s over. All of it is over. We’re moving on to something new.”

Until then, I would not have thought that great happiness could coexist with fear, but the latter came upon me without fading the former. I found myself trembling, not in either dread or rapture, but in a kind of neutral expectation.

“We have a lot to do in the next few hours,” she said. “So hurry and decide what you don’t want to leave behind, and let’s be going.”

Trust, I told myself, and I did trust.

Pressed between two books on one of the shelves, an envelope contained a photograph, a simple snapshot, that I never wanted to be without. From between the front cover and the endpaper of a special book on another shelf, I withdrew an index card on which Father had printed words of special meaning to me. I slipped the card into the envelope and tucked the envelope into an inside pocket of my jacket.

I followed Gwyneth to the passageway that led from the hammock room — which was also my kitchen — and there I paused to look back. I had lived more than two-thirds of my life in those windowless rooms, and for the most part they had been years of contentment and hope. I felt as though ten thousand conversations between Father and me were recorded on those concrete walls and that if I could only sit quietly and attentively enough, with adequate patience, they would replay for me. Nothing in this world, not even the most mundane moments of our lives, is without meaning, nor is any of it lost forever.

In leaving, I had neglected to turn off the lamps. I considered going back through the rooms to extinguish them, but I didn’t. I left them aglow, as the lights in a shrine are never put out. Following Gwyneth, I allowed myself to imagine that the bulbs in those lamps would prove to be blessed with uncanny life and that if, a thousand years from now, some adventurous explorer of storm drains were to come across that haven, he would be welcomed by lamplight, by books perfectly preserved, and would know that in this humblest of places, in ancient times, many treasured hours had been passed in happiness.

64

Snow sheeting through the headlights, the streets vacant except for the laboring plows, the people of the city sequestered in their warm and civilized rooms, the wind keening across the windshield and along the passenger door beside me …

Gwyneth drove a route familiar to me, and only minutes after we set out, her cell rang. She glanced at the screen, put the phone on SPEAKER, and said, “I would pray that Simon haunts you forever, but he deserves his rest.”

“How touching that you should care so much for a useless burnt-out boozer who couldn’t even keep from pissing his pants at the end.”

Ryan Telford’s voice was throatier than before, and in spite of his cocky words, he sounded shaken.

When she said nothing, Telford pressed into her silence: “You were right that he didn’t know where you have a ninth apartment. The only useful thing we got from funky Simon was how he came to know you in the first place.”

Gwyneth stiffened but still did not speak.

“He saved a little girl from death in a Dumpster, probably so drunk at the time, he didn’t know what he was doing. And because he saved her, you saved him. Your weakness, Miss Mouse, is that you’re a sentimental little bitch.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he said, “With the Internet, it’s easy to find an old news story.”

He paused. The sound he made suggested that he was straining at something, a weight that was difficult to lift or the lid of a jar too tight to unscrew. He muttered a curse.

Gwyneth waited.

The curator said, “The newspaper story and follow-ups tell me the hospital where the girl was treated, how she became a ward of the court, how she was in a coma, a vegetative state. Then the stories end. There’s like a press blackout or something, nothing about her fate. Did she die? Is she still alive, with the brain of a carrot?”

When Telford paused again, Gwyneth handed me the phone to hold, so that she could drive with both hands, and she accelerated.

The curator grunted, made that straining-to-lift sound again, and then took a couple of deep, shuddery breaths. “Remember I told you two of Goddard’s guys, they now work for me, they’re ex-cops?”

“I remember.”

“One of them knows these people who are tight with the judge in the news story. In fact, they have a hammerlock on the good judge. They can call him day or night, ask for anything, and he’ll pretend to be delighted to help no matter how much shit they throw at him.”

Gwyneth took a corner so suddenly and so fast that I was thrown against the passenger door and almost dropped the phone.

Telford said, “This time, Judge Gallagher didn’t have to jump through flaming hoops to please them. He just had to tell them what happened to the girl, the one the court records call Jane Doe 329.”

“Don’t touch her,” Gwyneth said. “Don’t.”

The curator seemed to strain at something again, and I imagined that he must be tied to a chair and struggling to be free of his bonds, though that made no sense.

He said, “If you don’t come here, I’ll do to Jane Doe 329 what I promised I’d do to you five years ago. She doesn’t raise my flag as high as you do, little mouse. She’s pale and she won’t even be aware of how good I am when I jam it to her.”

“She’s a child.”

“But she’s pretty enough, and they’ve fed her right, exercised her every day, so she does have nice enough muscle tone.”

“I’m on my way,” Gwyneth said.

“For her sake, I hope so.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“You sure that’s enough time?”

“Twenty minutes,” she insisted.

“Twenty-one will be too late.”

He terminated the call. I pressed END on Gwyneth’s phone.

“You have the Mace,” she said. “I have the Taser.”

“They’ll have guns.”

“We have momentum.”

“I saw my father shot down.”

“Hope for a little luck.”

“There’s no such thing as luck.”

“No,” she said. “There’s not.”

65

That we should meet in the whirl of life that spins more people apart than together, that we should find in each other so much that was compatible, that we should lift each other out of doubt and out of weakness into conviction and strength, that we should fall in love in spite of being unable to consummate it physically, a love that was of mind for mind, heart for heart, soul for soul: This rare gift was priceless. And the elaborate chain of cause and effect from which it arose exceeded in intricacy and in beauty the most exquisitely decorated Fabergé egg, or a hundred of them.

To preserve that love and to have years in which to explore a fraction of its passageways and sanctums, we must now make not one wrong decision, either of us, but do from moment to moment the right thing in the most effective manner.

We passed a plow that must have broken down. Its rooftop beacon shone bright, but the waves of yellow light were pent up and stilled in one glowing ball. Headlights doused, driver’s cab deserted, door hanging open, engine quiet, flakes melting on its still-warm housing, the big vehicle canted on a curbside ridge of compacted snow.

Minutes later, in a residential neighborhood, I wondered at the number of houses with windows aglow. In a few instances, people might have forgotten to switch off their exterior Christmas lighting before going to bed, although of the fraction of houses decorated for the season, light issued from the windows of fully half, their occupants evidently still awake, as were the residents of many other homes. The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the real dark night of the soul was always three o’clock in the morning, and those sixty minutes between three o’clock and four were reliably and literally the darkest in the city. Not this night.

On the street lined with bare-limbed maples, cars at curbside and mounds of plowed snow allowed no place to park. Gwyneth killed the engine, set the brake, and we got out of the Rover in the street directly in front of the yellow-brick house, leaving one lane open for traffic.

The gate in the wrought-iron fence, the porch steps, the door, each salient point on the final approach seemed full of threat, as the cold wind and the snow at our backs pressed us to cross the threshold and enter whatever hell lay beyond. Telford knew we were coming. There could be no hope of stealth.

Before Gwyneth rang the bell, I said, “Maybe this is the time, this once, in spite of who we are, maybe this is the time to call the police.”

“Telford has nothing to lose now. If he sees police, he’ll pull the pin and blow it all up. And what kind of police might come? Can we hope they’ll be the kind who take an oath seriously? And will they come at all? On this night of all nights, will they still answer a call? From here on, Addison, we’re alone, we’re all alone, everyone alone. We’ll be late in two minutes.”

She rang the bell.

When no one responded, she opened the door, and we went inside, where Walter lay dead in the archway between the foyer and the living room. He had been shot more than once.

Lamps lit the living room, the candle at the shrine to the Holy Mother flickered, the voices on TV spoke in soothing tones — Walter and his sister had been watching it at this hour — and Janet lay in a lake of blood, having died a slower death than had her brother.

Her brutal murder long behind her, the lost wife, Claire, smiled eternally in the two photographs framed in chased silver.

Gwyneth’s Goth makeup couldn’t fully conceal her anguish. The thick mascara colored her tears as black as her grief.

The newsreader on the TV said something about a moratorium on all international air traffic in and out of the United States, but we couldn’t consider his breaking news because the stairs commanded our ascent, as the steps to the gallows call forth those condemned.

In the upper hallway, we passed the open door to the children’s bedroom, where the nurse named Cora had been brought to be murdered with them. There were no children there now, no nurse. They had gone and left their bodies behind them.

In the room where the nameless girl received care, Ryan Telford sat on the edge of the bed in which Cora should have been sleeping. He bent forward with his forearms on his thighs, hands between his knees, a pistol gripped in them. He looked up as we entered the room and smiled, but there was no humor in his smile, only the feverish glee of a rabid jackal.

66

Telford’s hair hung as wet and lank as if he had just stepped from the shower, but this was the greasy wetness of sour sweat. In his pale glistening face, the centers of his bloodshot eyes appeared less like black irises than like portals to the lightless realm of his mind. His ham-pink lips were overlaid with gray, as if he had gone for a touch of Goth himself.

“Little mouse, you’re a masturbation fantasy.”

“You’re not,” she said.

“Who’s the masked man, Kemosabe?”

“Don’t you recognize him, the hood and all? He’s Death.”

“I don’t think Death goes skiing.”

His voice was as throaty as on the phone, and perhaps weaker.

“You don’t look well,” Gwyneth said.

“I would agree.”

Soaked with sweat, his shirt clung to him, and his pants were spattered with blood, but the blood wasn’t his.

Moving to the nameless girl’s bed, looking across it at Telford, Gwyneth said, “You were in Japan.”

“The Far East isn’t good for business anymore.”

“So you came back ahead of schedule.”

“Not soon enough.”

Concerned that we were now surrounded, I asked, “Where are your two … associates?”

“Bastards spooked and ran.”

“After slaughtering a family,” I said.

“That doesn’t faze them. But I have one of my moments, and they run away like little girls.”

“Moments?”

That mirthless smile again. “You’ll see.” Gwyneth put her contact Taser on the nightstand.

“I’m not up for it, either,” Telford said, and put his pistol aside on the bed where he sat.

She said, “When did your symptoms start?”

“A little light-headed late morning. Slight queasiness midafternoon. Fever by dinnertime. Then wham.”

“It goes fast.”

“Express train.”

In my recent trips to the library, I had not read newspapers. Fragments of things heard on TV in the past two nights suddenly coalesced in my mind, and I understood why I had seemed to be missing some subtext in Gwyneth’s conversations with Edmund Goddard and the archbishop.

I have always been of the world but little in it. In this case, the price of isolation was ignorance.

Gwyneth began to put down the safety railing on her side of the girl’s hospital bed.

“Better not touch her,” Telford advised.

“I’m taking her out of here.”

“I’ve touched her. Pretty much all over. Sweet thing. Succulent. She’ll die of it now.”

Gwyneth pulled back the sheet and blanket. The sleeping girl’s pajamas had been disarranged.

I looked away.

“Couldn’t manage more than touching,” the curator said. “But it was lovely — the sharing.”

Abruptly he wrapped his arms around himself and doubled over, almost toppling from Cora’s bed. He made that keening noise, as if he were straining to lift a heavy weight, but it was a more tortured sound and went on longer than when he’d been on the phone. He looked as if he were coming apart inside and was trying desperately to hold himself together. Something that didn’t look like vomit and that smelled worse drooled from his mouth.

Having one of his moments.

Gwyneth leaned over the bed, adjusting the girl’s pajamas. “Addison, in the nightstand drawer, you’ll find a bottle of alcohol, a package of cotton pads, and adhesive tape. Please set them out for me.”

I did as she asked, glad to be useful. I worked with my left hand, keeping the little pressurized can of Mace in my right.

When Telford recovered, he sat up straighter and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The tears on his eyelashes and those sliding down his face were tinted with blood. He looked around as if trying to recall the nature of this place and how he had gotten here.

Gwyneth withdrew the plastic cannula from the vein in the girl’s left forearm and let the drip line dangle from the bag of fluid that hung on the IV rack. She said, “I don’t think this is necessary, but just in case,” and with alcohol, she swabbed the point of insertion from which she’d withdrawn the cannula.

Having oriented himself, Telford said, “What’re those stitches in her side?”

“We had the feeding tube taken out two days ago,” Gwyneth said.

“I didn’t like the look of them. Turned me off. Otherwise, she’s a tender little thing. A bit sloppy from lying around all this time, but all in all, prime enough.”

“She’s a child.”

“How prime does it get?”

Gwyneth placed a cotton pad over the puncture in the forearm and taped it down.

Turning quarrelsome, Telford said, “Hell’s bells, the bitch is brain-dead and contaminated. What’re you doing? What’s the use? Why do you care anyway?”

“She’s special,” Gwyneth said.

Picking up the pistol that he had claimed to be too weary to use, he said, “How’s she special?”

Instead of answering him, she pulled the blanket off the bed and threw the top sheet back, so that it draped over the footrail, exposing the girl in her pajamas, head to foot.

“How’s she special?” Telford repeated.

Gwyneth rolled the girl onto her right side, facing away from us, and said, “Addison, help me with this blanket.”

Telford raised the gun, pointing it at the ceiling, as if to get our attention. “I’m talking here.” He must have been even weaker than he appeared, and the weapon must have been too heavy for him, because his wrist kept going limp, the gun wobbling this way and that. “Why is this little slut so special?”

“Because everyone is,” Gwyneth said.

“She’s just a little slut.”

“If that’s so, then I must be wrong.”

“You’re wrong as shit, that’s what you are.”

Together, Gwyneth and I placed the blanket on the bed, so that half of it was draped over the side.

“You’re special, too,” she told Telford.

“What kind of crack is that?”

“It’s not a crack. I’m just hoping.”

She rolled Jane Doe 329 toward us, onto the blanket, and then onto her left side, almost to the edge of the bed.

“Hoping what?” Telford asked.

“Hoping you use what time you have left to save yourself.”

We draped the dangling length of blanket over the girl and sort of tucked it against her back.

“You know I’m dying, bitch. Screw hope.” He struggled up from the second bed, as loose-limbed as a drunk. “I gotta tell you something.”

Gwyneth grabbed the farther hem of the blanket, and pulled it across the insensate child, thereby wrapping her completely.

Telford stumbled two steps forward and grabbed the other bed railing with his left hand to steady himself.

I raised the Mace, and Gwyneth said, “No. That’ll just make him crazy. And then what?”

“Little titmouse, you want crazy, go to North Korea. Maniacs. Lunatic bastards. TV says this thing the lunatics engineered, it’s a twofer.”

Gwyneth said, “Addison, get your arms under her, lift her off the bed. Do it now.”

I didn’t want to pocket the Mace. Maybe it would drive him crazy, the burning in his eyes, but maybe that would be good, even if he had a loaded pistol.

“Do it now, Addison.”

“Hey, Lone Ranger, you hear it’s a twofer?”

“I heard,” I assured him as Gwyneth took the Mace from me.

“Ebola virus, Lone Ranger, and flesh-eating bacteria, and way pumped up, the shit’s totally enhanced, airborne, they say worse than atom bombs. It eats you up from the inside out. How’s that for bad?”

I got my arms under the girl and lifted her from the bed. Strong with terror, I was amazed that she felt so light.

The pistol tumbled from Telford’s hand onto the bed. Dripping sweat, weeping bloodier tears than before, he leaned hard across the railing, not to retrieve the weapon, but instead to spit in Gwyneth’s face. The thick, disgusting wad of spittle contained more than mere saliva.

67

In this fallen world, there are things you hope for but never expect to receive because there is no luck and never was, but also because they are things of such great value that not all the good you could do in an entire lifetime would be enough to make you worthy of them. If one of your hopes is fulfilled, if that precious thing ever comes to you, it comes to you as a grace, and every day of your life thereafter, you need to give thanks for the gift. The girl I met in lamplight near Charles Dickens — she was my grace, all I wanted or would ever want.

I stood there helpless, with Jane Doe in my arms, and Telford spat in Gwyneth’s face, a foul phlegm that he worked up for a final outrage. He laughed shakily, and there was amusement in it, a giddy delight, almost rapture. “A gun’s too easy, titmouse. You die like me, just like me.”

She snatched a corner of the top sheet and blotted her face, but I knew that couldn’t be good enough to spare her.

“Die like me, like me.” The curator drew out each me like squeezed air escaping from the pinched neck of a balloon. He was a man and a monster, too, a monster and a clown amusing himself, and if he had possessed the strength, he would have capered in his delight.

God help me, I almost dropped the comatose girl to seize the gun and kill him. A rushing noise swelled in my head, like cataracts of water falling from a hundred feet, flecks of static in my vision, ice in my marrow, for I was overtaken by wrath and almost consumed by it, but I didn’t drop the girl.

Gwyneth said, “Let’s get her out of here,” and I said, “The bathroom, hot water, soap, wash yourself,” and she said, “Move, move, now, let’s go.”

A seizure took Telford. His entire body spasmed. He bent over the bed and poured out from his mouth a steaming mass that was not anything he had eaten, that was part of the essential substance of himself. With the sound of bowels liquifying and the knocking of bones, he collapsed onto the floor and out of sight.

“Come on,” she said, “Come on,” and led the way out of the room, past the bathroom where there would be hot water and soap, along the hallway, to the stairs, and I could do nothing, nothing but follow her, my legs weak with the weight of the girl in my arms and with the burden of my terror.

As I descended the stairs, the malodor from the archbishop’s fireplace rose around me, the foul stink of Paladine’s marionettes in flames.

I halted, and Gwyneth must have known, for as she continued down the stairs in front of me, she said, “It’s nothing, they’re not here, it’s arrant deception. Like the rapping in the attic. Come on.”

Across the foyer, past dead Walter. The door, the porch, the gate in the spearpoint fence, every salient point along the way was no less ominous than it had been when we’d passed it earlier.

Gwyneth raised the tailgate, and I gently slid the blanket-wrapped girl into the cargo space of the Rover.

Along the street, two or three people were digging their parked vehicles out of the snow. Their labor had a frantic quality, and not one of them looked up from the job to see what we were about.

Closing the tailgate, I said, “Do you have sanitizing gel in the glove box, anything, do you have anything? I’ll drive.”

“You don’t know how to drive. I’ll be all right, Addison.”

She settled behind the steering wheel, and I had no choice but the passenger seat, and then we were rolling. Rolling, but where and to what?

68

Who we of the hidden were, what we were, why we ever existed, explained the mystery of music issuing out of the ether.

Days after that grim night in the city, when I had quiet time to reflect, I realized that Father had never heard the beautiful but sad melody that sometimes found its way into my deep three-room safehold. He had been laid to rest in the river a year or more before the first piano notes came from the air around me as I sat reading.

Sometimes the nocturne played only once, those clear notes flowing in crystalline passages, and my mind was engaged by the brilliance of the melodic structure, my heart roused by the purity of emotion embodied in the music. I recognized the acute grief that had been the composer’s motivation, and knew it must have been the consequence of losing someone, but I also admired the talent and the wise intention that had subdued the bitter emotion and had drawn from it the strains of sorrow that were a better testament to the beauty of whoever was lost. On other occasions, the piece repeated two and three times, as often as five, and repetition carried me past all wondering about the identity and motivation of the composer, until the music spoke for me alone and expressed my feelings about my losses.

If Father had been alive when the phenomenon began, if he had heard that nocturne and, in seeking its source, had been as mystified as I was, he would have raised a question for exploration: By what agency could a piece of piano music be conveyed halfway across a city and deep beneath its streets, making use of neither wire nor wireless technology, playing sweetly without benefit of receiver, amplifier, or speakers? Fascinating conversations would have led to all manner of speculations, from speculation to conjecture, from conjecture to supposition, and finally to a working hypothesis, which might in time be discarded and the process begun again.

Father could never have gone from a hypothesis to the conviction of a theory, because while he lived, he never knew the true nature of the hidden. What we are and why we exist explains the agency by which Gwyneth’s music was conveyed to me by extraordinary means, there at the end of an age. If I had not met Gwyneth, if her biological father had not been the man of insight and true grace that he was, if her father’s closest friend hadn’t been Teague Hanlon, perhaps I never would have learned what we are, and would have died in an ultimate riot of nihilistic violence.

On that night of Telford’s death, I discovered what I was and who I am. What might have been but never was … Well, it all became possible again.

69

This snow falling, snow on snow, seemed like none before it, not because it fell as dense as tropical rain, but because of what I now knew of the implacable plague. That knowledge served as a corrective to my vision, so that I saw in this descending whiteness not merely the suggestion of peace inherent in all snow, but peace eternal.

A great city is the hope of mankind. This isn’t to say that the future lies in cities. A whistle-stop is also the hope of mankind. A humble village, a county seat, a state capitol, a great metropolis: Each is the hope of mankind on Earth. As is any neighborhood. A life in isolation might be a life in preparation, as mine seemed now to be, but it is not a life complete until it is lived with others who complete it. Although I had been an outsider, welcome nowhere in its boroughs, the city was home to me, its people my people even if they did not wish to be, and this fast-falling snow might as well have been ashes from a crematorium in a death camp, its descent a piercing sadness.

The nameless girl lay blanketed and comatose in the back of the Land Rover. Gwyneth drove. I worried. Worried and accused myself for not using Telford’s gun on him, and prayed to hold off despair.

Gwyneth said, “How often do you get a cold?”

In our current circumstances, the question seemed curious. “What do you mean?”

“Only one of those words had more than a single syllable.”

“How often do I get a cold?”

“Is there any word in that you need defined?”

“I don’t get colds,” I said.

“How often have you had the flu?”

“Never. How would I possibly catch a cold or the flu? I’ve had virtually no contact with people, sick people or otherwise. I’ve lived almost in isolation.”

“What about the man you called Father? Colds, the flu?”

“Not in the time I knew him. He had no more contact with people than I did.”

“Toothache?”

“No. We floss and brush. We’re very diligent about it.”

“That must be miracle floss, a magic brush. Not one cavity?”

“What is this about?”

“Ever cut yourself?”

“Of course.”

“Ever had an infected cut?”

The Clears distracted me from answering her. We were still in a residential neighborhood, where they could be seen from time to time, as they could be seen anywhere, but suddenly they appeared in numbers. One in hospital blues crossed a lawn where, in the early hours of the storm, children had rolled together a snowman, using discs of reflective orange plastic for its eyes, a tennis ball for its nose, and what appeared to be the keys from a toy piano for its teeth. Another in whites passed through the wall of a house and came toward the street, leaving no rubble and bearing no wounds from his passage, and two in greens glided down from a roof to drift across a yard, all of them moving atop the mantle of snow rather than through it. On a branch high in a bare-limbed tree, a glowing woman in blues stood as if sentinel, and as the Land Rover approached, she turned her head to stare down at us, and in spite of the distance, though being in no danger of coming eye-to-eye, I looked away, as Father had told me always to do.

Gwyneth said, “How long do you need to ponder it?”

“Ponder what?”

“Ever had an infected cut?” she repeated.

“Not with Bactine and iodine and bandages.”

“You’re very careful about your health.”

“I have to be. I can never go to a doctor.”

“What do you fear, Addison?”

“Losing you,” I said at once.

“What did you fear most before you ever met me?”

“Losing Father.”

“And what else?”

“Father being beaten and badly hurt. Being beaten myself.”

“There must be more you feared.”

“Seeing other people hurt. A man shot in the back gave me this Rolex. It was the worst thing to watch him die. Sometimes I’m afraid to read the newspapers in the library because they contain so many stories of suffering.”

“Do you fear the policemen who killed your father?”

“No. I don’t fear anyone until I see murder in his face.”

We still hadn’t talked much about Father. I hadn’t told her that the men who killed him were police officers.

Accustomed to the prevalence of mysteries in the world and still reluctant to ask questions that, though she had professed her love, might cause her to withdraw, I didn’t inquire how she had come upon that information.

“What do you hate?” she asked.

I thought a moment. “Only what I fear.”

“What you fear. That’s a most unusual answer in this world of hatred.”

Before I could consider what she said, we turned a corner onto a major avenue, drove through three Clears, and came upon a gathering of their kind that reminded me of that night five years earlier, a year after Father died, when I encountered the grand spectacle that I called the Convocation. Now, the city lay dimmed by the seething veils of winter, and the high-rises tiered away into the obscuring weather until those beyond a block might have been only shapes in a murky mirror, mere reflections of nearer buildings. Through the white gloom, standing in air and descending slowly like glowing ornaments being hung upon the night by invisible hands, came Clears of both sexes and all races, in their white shoes and white or blue or green uniforms, from whatever other dimension and into ours. Upon touching down, each of them at once walked away, with the brisk purpose that perhaps hospital personnel displayed on a busy night in the emergency room.

Until the past few minutes, the sight of Clears always lifted my spirits. Although I believed that in their eyes could be glimpsed some power or knowledge that, though it might not turn me to stone, would shake me to my core, I felt happier in their presence than I was when they weren’t around. But they did not gladden my heart now. Ordinarily, if anything can be said to be ordinary in this world, some of them were solemn while others smiled. This time, not one smile could be seen, and their demeanor seemed to be one of deep, inconsolable sorrow. The great beauty of their incandescent descent chilled my heart, and finally I understood something of what Father had meant when he said that the Clears, although not evil like the Fogs, were in their own way terrible, for their power was supremely grand and formidable.

I closed my eyes, unable to bear that beauty anymore, and after a moment, Gwyneth said, “Have you ever had a sore throat, headache, indigestion, ulcers in the mouth, hay fever?”

“What does any of that matter?”

She said, “You will not die of the plague.”

“I’m in the world more now. I’m at risk of contagion, just like you. I wish you had washed your face.”

“Trust,” she insisted.

70

Before i ever came to the city, father’s benefactor had given him the key to the food bank. I was never told the man’s position, and the only name that I had for him was Our Friend. Although this stranger cared about us and our welfare, although he could once or twice a year meet with my father for a few minutes and not strike out at him, Our Friend did not trust himself to restrain a violent impulse through a longer encounter. And because Our Friend suffered a bout of depression bordering on despair after each meeting, Father felt that he should impose upon the man as seldom as possible and that I should impose upon him not at all until Father had died.

When that day of misery arrived, and after Father lay at rest on the river bottom, I composed a note as he had instructed me and, that night, I took it to the food bank. The note said: Father has died. I have done with his body what he instructed. He wished me to tell you how very much he loved you for your tolerance and how much he appreciated your generosity. I know that you told him the key would be mine when he passed away, but he wanted me to ask you just the same if I might keep it. I will never take more than I need from either the food bank or the thrift shop, and I will try never to be found on the premises, never frighten anyone there by revealing what I am, for I would be most aggrieved to ever bring pain or dishonor to the food bank or anyone who staffs it. I miss Father terribly, and I don’t think that will ever change, but I will be all right. He wanted me to assure you that I will be all right.

Because Father had told me that Our Friend had a sense of humor and because I knew he would understand the meaning of my last three words, I signed the note Son of It.

Father had instructed me to seal the message in an envelope and to leave it in the center drawer of the desk in the smaller of the food bank’s two offices. The arrangement with our benefactor was that any missive would be answered overnight if possible. When I returned, I found a different sealed envelope from the one that I had left, and in it a reply. Dear boy, I was profoundly saddened to receive your news. I have always kept your father in my prayers, and I will keep him — and you — in them as long as I live. You may of course have the key. I wish that I could do more for you and be more of a comfort, but I am weak and so afraid. I accuse myself daily of cowardice and insufficient charity. As your father might have told you, for much longer than I knew him, I have suffered periodic depression, though I do always bounce back. Each encounter with your father precipitated a bout of the most severe despair, blackest depression, in spite of his great heart and gentle nature, and his face appears in dreams from which I wake as terrified as a child. This is my shortcoming and of course no fault of his. Do not hesitate to ask me for whatever you may need. Each time that I can be of help, I have a chance to mend my soul. God bless.

Because I knew that Father would be most proud of me if I were to respect Our Friend’s unfortunate vulnerability to depression and if I were as self-sufficient as possible, I asked for nothing more during the following six years. Every few months, I left him a note so that he would know I was alive and well.

On the night when Gwyneth faced down Ryan Telford to save the nameless girl, I met Our Friend, who was not, after all, a stranger to me. These years later, I still think of him with great affection, and I wish that I could send him a note to let him know that I am well, but he has been dead for a long time.

71

Against the sight of solemn clears descending, I kept my eyes closed until Gwyneth pulled to a stop and switched off the engine. When I looked, I found that we were in an alleyway, parked on a garage apron, athwart its two roll-up doors.

“Where’s this, what now?” I asked.

“You’ll see. We won’t be here that long, but we can’t leave the girl. Anyway, she’s coming around.”

“She is?”

“She will.”

We got out of the Rover, and she put up the tailgate, and I took the bundled child into my arms again.

Following Gwyneth along the side of the garage, snow almost to the tops of my boots, I kept my head down, because the cold sharp wind stung tears from my eyes. I had been humbled, too, and filled with dread by the presence of so many Clears in the avenue, and I was afraid to look into the sky.

We came into a snow-choked area between the garage and the back of a two-story brick house, where all the windows were as black as if they had been painted over. Walls marked the property line, and the space felt like a miniature prison yard. The back porch didn’t extend the width of the residence, and to the left of it, a pair of narrow rain doors sloped away from the house, covering a short flight of exterior stairs that led to a basement. Evidently in anticipation of us, someone had swept the snow off the doors. Gwyneth opened them.

I followed her down, through the door at the bottom, into a warm basement that smelled of hot coffee, where bare bulbs in old ceramic sockets were recessed between exposed beams, striping the room with soft-edged bands of light and shadow. The space was used for storage, but it wasn’t packed full or cluttered. There were neatly labeled cartons, several pieces of old furniture, including a tattered armchair, and along one wall a folding table on which a coffeemaker warmed a Pyrex pot.

Gwyneth directed me to put the nameless girl in the armchair, and after I had done so, she gently extracted the child from the blanket, which she folded and put aside on a stack of cardboard boxes.

In slippers, flannel pants, a pale-blue cardigan, and a blue-and-white-checkered shirt, Teague Hanlon shuffled out of shadows and put two mugs of coffee on one of three metal barrels of different sizes that stood like an array of primitive kettle drums. “Gwynie takes hers black and said you would as well.”

“I do,” I assured him.

“How’s the child?” he asked.

“She’s coming around,” Gwyneth said.

Just then a series of small kittenish sounds issued from the girl, as if she were waking from ordinary sleep and regretted leaving a sweet dream not quite finished.

“This is hard for me,” Mr. Hanlon said. “I hope you understand, Gwynie.”

“Of course I understand.”

Mr. Hanlon crossed the room to the door through which we had entered the basement, where he engaged two deadbolts.

Gwyneth picked up her mug of coffee and sipped it, watching the girl intently. “You can take off your mask to drink the coffee, Addison. Neither of us will look at you.”

To remove the ski mask, I would have to untie my hood and slide it back, thereupon being entirely exposed, which I never was outside of my rooms deep beneath the city. The thought of such vulnerability distressed me so much that I almost declined the coffee.

But I was cold, not from the short time that I had spent in the open, but from thoughts of plague and death. I needed the fragrant brew. If she said there was no risk, I could only believe her.

As soon as I stripped off the mask, I pulled the hood over my head again and tied it loosely under my chin.

The coffee tasted strong and good, and even through my gloves, the mug warmed my hands.

With his head bowed severely like a penitent monk sans habit, Mr. Hanlon returned to the coffeemaker to fill a mug for himself.

The child raised one hand to her face and traced her features with her fingertips, as if she were not merely confused but also blind and trying to identify herself by touch. She shifted in the armchair, lowered her hand from her face, opened her mouth, and let out a long sigh. Nearly three years of coma seemed to fall away from her as easily as a single night of sleep. Her eyes opened, huge and gray and limpid, and focused at once on Gwyneth. Her voice was hoarse when she said, “Mama?”

Gwyneth put down her mug, went to the girl, and knelt before her. “No, honey. Your mother’s gone. She’s never coming back. You’re safe now. No one will hurt you anymore. You’re safe with me.”

Head still lowered, Mr. Hanlon returned with another mug. “Her mouth will be dry. I made sweet tea for her. It’s cooled enough.” As soon as Gwyneth took the tea from him, he returned to the coffeemaker and stood with his back to us.

I sensed that his discretion might be no less for his benefit than for ours, and I wondered why he was so different now from the way he had been in the Egyptian Theater.

As I sipped coffee and, from the shadow of my hood, watched Gwyneth and the girl, I realized that whatever might be happening in this basement was as beyond ordinary human experience as were the Fogs and Clears. The child returned to full consciousness not as any doctor might have expected, not as any other victim of coma would have returned, not gradually and with weakness, but rapidly and with her physical strength intact. She had sufficient coordination to hold the mug of tea and drink from it. Gwyneth spoke so softly that often I couldn’t hear what she said, and though the girl did not respond, she listened intently and focused her luminous gray eyes on Gwyneth, who smoothed her hair and touched her face, her arms, so tenderly, reassuringly.

Sooner than seemed possible, the girl put aside her tea and got to her feet. She leaned against Gwyneth, though perhaps she did not need that support.

To Mr. Hanlon, Gwyneth said, “Did you get the clothes for her that I requested?”

He turned toward us but didn’t approach. “They’re on a chair at the kitchen table. I left it dark upstairs in case something … someone comes around looking for you. The only light in the kitchen is the range hood, but it’s enough. There aren’t any windows in the half bath, so you can turn the lights on in there.”

Holding Gwyneth’s hand, the child walked on coltish legs that she had not used in nearly three years and that shouldn’t have easily supported her. I watched the pair until they moved out of sight on the stairs, and then I watched their shadows accordion after them across treads and risers.

In a world rich with wonders and mysteries, there are also miracles.

To keep his distance from me, Mr. Hanlon began to travel the room, stopping at each piece of furniture or stack of cardboard boxes, pondering it as if he were browsing in a shop where he had never been before, evaluating the merchandise.

“Addison, I assume you know what has come into the world.”

“A plague, you mean.”

“The plague, I think, after which the long war between mankind and microbes will have ended.”

Remembering Telford, I said, “It’s going to be bad.”

“It’ll be worse than bad. Latest word is that they engineered the weapon, the bug, for a 98-percent mortality rate. It exceeded their expectations. Then they lost control of it.”

“I’m scared for Gwyneth. Telford was dying and he spit on her.”

Mr. Hanlon looked up, surprised, but then turned away at once. “Where did Telford find her?”

“He got to the child before we did. She’s contaminated, too.”

He was silent, not because he had nothing to say but because he had too much. Then: “Though I always hoped for better circumstances, I’m honored to have you in my home at last. Addison Goodheart is a more appropriate name for you than Son of It.”

72

Teague Hanlon, both guardian to Gwyneth and the benefactor who had given Father a key to the food bank and the associated thrift shop, was not the high-priced attorney that I might initially have imagined. Once a fighting marine who’d gone to war, he was now a priest and the rector of St. Sebastian’s, the man to whom Gwyneth’s father and mine had turned when in need, the man who worked through Judge Gallagher’s mother, his parishioner, to ensure the transfer of the nameless girl into Gwyneth’s custody. He was the nexus of our intersecting lives.

We were in the basement of the rectory behind St. Sebastian’s on this terrible night, and Father Hanlon didn’t wear the Roman collar here that identified his office when he was in public.

Prior to his revelation, the chalice of my heart had been filled to the brim with emotion, and now it overflowed. I sat on the edge of the armchair, searching for an adequate response and at first finding none. The intense tide of feelings did not wash me away. I had taken a master’s degree in stoicism before I learned to walk. I needed only to sit quietly for a moment, seining those deep waters for the right words.

I said, “You fed us all these years.”

“The food wasn’t mine. It was all donated.”

“You clothed us.”

“With secondhand garments also donated.”

“You kept our secret.”

“The least expected of a priest who hears confessions.”

“You never raised a hand against Father.”

“I saw his face only a few times.”

“But never harmed him.”

“I was able to meet his eyes only once.”

“And didn’t harm him.”

“I should have made myself meet them again and again.”

“But after each encounter with him, you fell into despair.”

“I suffered periodic depression before I ever knew about you and the man you called Father.”

“Yes, but the very thought of us made those depressions blacker. You said so yourself in your note to me, and we gave you nightmares, yet still you sustained us.”

Standing with his face in his hands, he spoke in Latin, not to me, but perhaps in prayer. I listened, and though I didn’t understand the words, his great distress was evident.

I rose from the armchair, took a couple of steps toward Father Hanlon, but halted, for it was not given to me, in my difference, to be able to comfort people. In fact, quite the opposite. As on the night when Father had been brutally murdered while I lay watching from under an SUV, I felt inadequate, useless, and I was ashamed of my helplessness.

The Latin words crumbled in his mouth, falling from his lips in broken syllables, and he faltered in the prayer, taking deep shuddery breaths and expelling them with tortured sounds that might have been half sobs of grief and half expressions of disgust.

Given my twenty-six years of experience, I could only imagine that my presence was the cause of such powerful, unchecked emotions. I said, “I’ll go. I never should have come here. Foolish. I’ve been foolish. And reckless.”

“No. Wait. Let me pull myself together. Give me a chance.”

He had given us so much that I owed him anything he asked.

When he regained control of himself, he went to the door through which we had arrived and seemed to check the locks to be certain that he had secured them. He stood listening to the storm, his back to me, and at last he said, “It’s an east wind, like the one that parted the sea.” That thought led him to another, and he quoted: “ ‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ ”

Although there was much I wanted to say, I knew that I should not. His mind and heart were out of alignment, and only he could bring them into harmony.

He said, “The North Koreans, what’s left of them, announced a short while ago that birds don’t contract the disease, but they do carry it. There’s no quarantine that can prevent birds from flying.”

They made movies and wrote books about planet-killing asteroids, stories that evoked a frisson of horror in audiences and readers. But in the end, no million-ton mass from outer space was necessary to put an end to civilization. The murder of one man could be committed with something as small as a few drops of nectar from the oleander plant instilled in honey, and all of humankind could be murdered most efficiently by something even smaller, a mere microbe of malevolent invention.

Still turned to the door, the priest said, “Your father didn’t know what he was, but there was no reason that he should. Do you know what you are, Addison?”

“A monstrosity,” I said. “A miscreation, freak, abomination.”

73

The wind rattled the basement door that Father Hanlon faced, and as if he knew my thoughts, he said, “It may seem to be the wind that tests the door, but on this night of all nights, it’s more likely to be something far worse than wind. These aren’t the times of which Saint John the Evangelist wrote in Revelations. Armageddon would be an hour of horror and of glory, but there is no glory in what’s coming, no final judgment, no new Earth, only bitter tragedy on an unthinkable scale. This is the work of men and women in all their perversity and transgression, the love of power in the service of mass death. On such a night, the darkest spirits are likely to be drawn from their usual pursuits, taking to the streets in gleeful celebration.”

The delicious aroma of coffee gave way to the stench of burning marionettes. Remembering Gwyneth’s words to me as we left the yellow-brick house with the girl, I said, “That’s how the marionettes smelled in the archbishop’s fireplace. But the stink is deception. Nothing’s out there.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he cautioned, and pointed to the doorknob, which worked violently back and forth, not as the wind could ever have moved it. “Whatever wants in, it will bring with it doubt. Did you know that the artist Paladine’s last will and testament required that a marionette be included in his casket?”

“There were only six, and Gwyneth found them all.”

“This one wasn’t like the six. Paladine carved and painted this one in his own image, and they say it looked uncannily like him. His mother was his sole living relative and heir. A woman with unhealthy interests and strange beliefs that perhaps she had inculcated in her son. She had him buried precisely as his will directed, in a little-known cemetery that attracts people who wish to be laid to rest in ground that isn’t hallowed, that has never been blessed by anyone of any faith.”

The foul odor had grown stronger, and although the door stopped rattling and the knob stopped turning, I said, “Deception.”

“You must learn what you are, Addison, so that you won’t doubt anymore and won’t any longer be vulnerable.” He turned his back to the door but still didn’t look at me. He stared down at his hands, which he turned palms up. “Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that’s good and true.”

The storm wind struck great blows at the house, and although the rectory was a sturdy structure of long-standing brick, it creaked overhead.

Father Hanlon lowered his hands and took two steps toward me, but he didn’t attempt to make eye contact. “You’re not a monster, miscreation, freak, or abomination. You’ve seen yourself in mirrors, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you see?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. I’m blind to it, I guess.”

He pressed me: “What is the deformity that makes you an object of such instant hatred and rage?”

“Father and I spent many hours in speculation and conjecture, but in the end there’s no way for us to know. It’s something in our faces, especially in our eyes, even in our hands, that others see in the first instant they look at us, but it’s something we can’t ever see. Lots of people recoil from spiders, don’t they? But if spiders had the capacity for complex thought, they wouldn’t have a clue why they were so often loathed, because to one another, spiders look appealing.”

“You’ve come close to the truth,” the priest said. “But you are not to be compared to spiders.” He came to me, stood before me, but didn’t look up. He took one of my gloved hands in both of his hands. “The man you called Father told me about your arrival in the world. Your biological father was shiftless, irresponsible, perhaps even a criminal, and he was never known to you. Your mother was a damaged woman but not entirely lost. You were born of man and woman, as are we all, but with one crucial difference. You were born with that difference perhaps because the world was moving toward a time when such as you would be needed.”

“What difference?” I asked, breathless in expectation of the answer. I knew that a difference shaped my life and made of me an outcast, though I didn’t know the nature of it. In this mysterious world, I was the central mystery of my life.

“Though born of man and woman, you aren’t an heir to Adam or to Eve, and neither was your second and better father. By some grace beyond my understanding, beyond anyone’s, you don’t carry the stain of original sin. You have a purity, an innocence that the rest of us can sense in an instant, as surely as a wolf can smell the spoor of a rabbit.”

I began to deny that I possessed such innocence, but he silenced me with a squeeze of my hand and a shake of his head.

“Addison, I dread looking at you worse than I have dreaded anything else in life, because I see not only you, but also what you are and what I am not. When I look at you, I see into myself as I never do otherwise, every sin of my life in a vivid kaleidoscopic collection of past toxic moments, more than I could recall in a lifetime of examining my conscience. When I look at you, I see what should be, and I know that I am not as I should be, and I recognize in totality every time in my life that I have gone wrong, every small unkindness, every meanness, every lie and unworthy thought relived simultaneously and in an instant.”

“No,” I protested. “You’re a good man.”

“Better than some, perhaps, but far from perfect. In my youth, in that unconventional war, when the enemy was never easily identified, sometimes I shot in fear, when I couldn’t be sure that shooting was entirely justified—”

“But, sir, self-defense—”

“Is never a sin, but sometimes I knew shooting wasn’t justified, a delay was necessary, further consideration, further inquiry, but I didn’t inquire or delay. Surrender to fear is an invitation to doubt. There is lust and greed in every heart, son, and bitter envy. Perhaps there’s envy more than anything, and it’s worse than most passions. Even as a young priest, I had unworthy ambitions, a desire for praise and position that outweighed the desire to counsel, save, and serve.”

I didn’t want to hear his confession. I asked him please to stop at once, be quiet, and he fell silent. He still held my hand. He was trembling. So was I. Quaking.

If my difference was as he identified it, I would rather have been an abomination, a freak so hideous that my twisted face drove men to sudden insane violence. How much worse to be a mirror to their souls, to know that when they looked at me, they experienced in an instant all the errors of their lives, both petty and profound, that they felt the pain they had caused others and knew themselves to an extent that they were not meant to know themselves while still in the flesh, to a degree that no one could bear to know himself until he was but a spirit, in the docket, and free from the possibility of further error.

The priest raised his head, and though I still wore the hood, there was sufficient light for him to see my shadowed features and to stare into my eyes. Across his face came such a look of mental agony and profound sorrow that, even though no rage accompanied it, no antipathy, I was distressed for him, anguished that I should have such an effect on anyone, and afraid for both of us.

Shaken, I looked away from him. “You’re the first I’ve ever known who isn’t driven to violence by me, by Father, by just the sight of us.”

“It’s despair and hatred of their own errors that makes them want to kill you, to put an end to that painful self-awareness. I feel the same urge and resist it, though I doubt that I could ever resist it with the courage of your mother. Eight years.”

With that statement he put my childhood and my mother in a new light, and I stood astonished to think of her as a woman who remained moral enough — who loved me enough — to endure the intense mental and emotional anguish that Father Hanlon had just described.

“And if your mother had something of a saint in her character, well then a case might be made that Gwyneth’s father ought to be canonized. He not only endured thirteen years, but he loved her with all his heart and would have endured much longer if he hadn’t been murdered.”

The house creaked in the buffeting wind, the basement door shook in its frame as though it might break loose of its hinges, the knob rattled back and forth, back and forth, but at that revelatory moment I didn’t care what might be loose in the night or what might burst in upon us.

74

Mine is the kind of story in which names should not much matter, certainly not full names, first and middle and last, not for every person stepping onto the stage. Had a story of this kind been told in the third person instead of the first, by some writer just two centuries earlier than my time, he or she would have used even fewer names than I have employed, and some characters would have been identified only by their occupation, such as Archbishop or Priest. Back in that time, had the story involved royalty, the king would have been known as nothing more than the King, and the queen’s name would have been the Queen, and the valiant little tailor would have been known as only the Little Tailor. Even in that long-past age but certainly centuries prior, the story might have been told with animals in all the roles, and their names would have been only what they were, such as Tortoise and Hare, Cat and Mouse, Lambkin and Little Fish, Hen and Mr. Fox. That would have been the way because, in those times, life was simpler, and people had a clearer sense of right and wrong than they possessed later. I will call that long-ago period the Age of Clarity. No writer or reader would have imagined that an analysis of a villain’s childhood traumas was needed to explain his wickedness, for it was well understood that a life of wickedness was a choice that anyone could make if he loved wickedness more than truth. For twenty-six years, I lived in the Modern Age, when it was said that human psychology was so complex, the chain of motivations so recondite and abstruse, that only experts could tell us why anyone did anything, and in the end even the experts were loath to render a definitive judgment of any particular person’s specific actions. But although this story is of the Modern Age, I have not written it for that age. Nevertheless, though we know Gwyneth’s father by his deeds and by his selfless love for her, and though I have gotten this far without saddling him with a name, it seems to me that because he was not representative of his times, not emblematic, that I should use his name, if for no other reason, to signify that he was a light in a darkening world. Surnames do not matter much anymore, so I will use only his first, which was Bailey. The name derives from the Middle English word baile, which means “the outer wall of a castle.”

Bailey was present in the delivery room when his daughter came into the world and when his wife died in childbirth. The reactions of the attending physician and the nurses were not as radical as those of the midwife and her daughter who delivered me, but Bailey was aware of a curious tension and some antipathy toward the baby, not anything as strong as detestation but an uncongeniality, a want of tender touch and sympathy, almost a quiet shunning.

His beloved wife had died. A confusing mix of emotions stirred through him, grief and rejoicing, neither entirely suitable to the moment; but having always been an excellent judge of people and their states of mind, he felt that even in his current condition, he could trust his intuition. What he read in the faces and the actions of the medical team first puzzled him and then concerned him. He suspected that if the death of his wife and the failed effort to resuscitate her had not distracted the doctor and the nurses, if their attention had been entirely on the baby, their reactions to tiny Gwyneth might have been even less tender. He counseled himself that they had no reason to bear an animus against the infant, who was beautiful and helpless and unusually serene, that his fear for the safety of the child was nothing more than a reaction to the unexpected, devastating loss of his wife. But he could not persuade himself.

The swaddled baby had been set aside in a bassinet that was in fact a lozenge-shaped white-enameled basin, pending the official weighing and transfer to the neonatal-care unit. No sooner had the effort to resuscitate his wife failed than Bailey let go of her hand and went directly to his daughter. When he picked her up and looked into her as-yet-unfocused eyes, he knew himself to a degree that he had never known himself before, and a flood of remorse for certain past actions nearly brought him to his knees.

He withstood the wave of emotion, and his mind, always quick, had never been quicker as he tried to make sense of the effect that Gwyneth had on him. According to Father Hanlon, Bailey had been not merely a good man, but also scrupulously honest and honorable; successful, but humble in his success. If he had been corrupt, or if he had been ruthlessly ambitious in his rise from poverty to wealth, perhaps his reasons for remorse would have been so numerous and serious that he would have dropped the infant on her head, right there, right then, and blamed his weak grip on the grief that racked him. Instead, he held fast to her, overcome by a conviction that she was precious not only in all the ways that a daughter was precious to her father, but also for reasons he could not explain.

He thought the effect she had on him might be proof of some psychic ability that she was too young to be able to control. She might be a telepath or an empath, if that was a word, a clairvoyant or a mind reader. He didn’t know which of those she might be or if she was any of them, but he knew that she was something. He suspected that the explosive examination of conscience she had triggered in him could not have been what the physician and the nurses experienced. If they had endured anything that invasive and intense, their reactions would have been more dramatic; their quiet shunning would no doubt have been more hostile. Perhaps when still linked to her mother by an umbilical cord and in the few minutes after it was cut, Gwyneth had a lesser effect than after she’d been breathing on her own for a few minutes, her heart no longer in sync with her mother’s heart, the electrical activity in her brain more vital by the minute.

Some on the hospital staff thought Bailey eccentric and others judged him imperious when he insisted that his daughter not be taken to the neonatal-care unit but that instead she be given a private room where he could stay with her and tend to her himself, according to the instructions of a nurse. Eccentric or imperious, or even if mentally unbalanced by grief, he was treated respectfully and his demands were granted because he was a well-liked man but, in truth, because his foundation had given the hospital millions in grants. No one on its staff or in its administration wanted to put at risk any future millions that might come to the institution.

As soon as he could, Bailey phoned Father Hanlon, his parish priest. Without explanation, he inquired as to the availability of a particularly devout nun, someone who had taken her vows young and whose experience of the world was largely limited to her convent and to prayer. Preferably she would be in the contemplative rather than the active life, if such a one could be given a dispensation to leave her cloistered circumstances for this assignment. Bailey needed such a relative innocent to come to the hospital that night, to assist him with the care of his newborn and motherless daughter, for he didn’t trust a nurse, any nurse, in the room alone with her.

Even in those days, the city was home to fewer religious orders than in the past. The number of moniales residing in convents was lower than in yesteryear, when the church was stronger. Nevertheless, as a consequence of Bailey’s former generosity and Father Hanlon’s persuasiveness, Sister Gabriel, of the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine, though in the active life rather than the contemplative, proved to be an ideal choice, for she was an untroubled soul, yet wise to the ways of the world and effective in dealing with the most secular of individuals in a manner that made them pleased to do as she felt best.

In addition, as a result of her meditation and contemplation, Sister Gabriel was a mystic with an awareness beyond the five senses. The very sight of Gwyneth troubled her but also filled her heart with gladness, so that she could endure the searing introspection caused by the very sight of the child and be uplifted by it. On only the third day of the infant’s journey in the world, the nun told Bailey that his daughter had been born in a condition of absolute purity, that somehow she was not burdened with the sad inheritance of the first-made in Eden. How this could be, Sister Gabriel could not say, given that Gwyneth was born of man and woman, but her certainty was such that, were she to be told by a superior that her perception was in error and that to insist upon it might be an occasion of mortal pride, she would have insisted just the same, because this was a truth that pierced her. Bailey knew it to be true, as well, the moment that he heard it.

Gwyneth was taken home from the hospital, and for the next four years, Sister Gabriel visited daily, to assist with the child’s care. At the end of this period, she believed that Bailey could manage the situation himself, because Gwyneth was by then intellectually and emotionally mature beyond her years, aware of the great gift of her innocence, of the necessity and difficulty of preserving it, and of the danger of a world hostile to one such as she. Sister Gabriel elected thereafter a contemplative and cloistered life and never ventured again beyond the walls of her convent.

During those same four years, Bailey had so often experienced the involuntary examination of his conscience, which occurred when he but looked at the girl, that he came to fully understand himself and his past errors. He arrived at a state of perfect contrition, so that he could enjoy her company and she his, in as normal a fashion as any father and daughter.

He had by then divested himself of his real-estate empire and reordered his investments so that management of them could be left largely to others. He devoted himself to Gwyneth and embarked upon a most unlikely second career as a novelist, under a pen name, which proved amazingly successful in spite of the fact that he never toured or engaged in much publicity.

To explain Gwyneth’s reclusive, almost monastic, existence, Bailey told the household staff and others in his life that his daughter was afflicted with fragile health, a compromised immune system, though in fact she never had as much as a cold or a headache. Later it was said that she suffered from social phobia, which in fact she did not. The girl’s nature was such that she thrived on seclusion and devoted herself to literature and music and study. She and her father believed that hers was to be a life in waiting, that the day would come when her purpose would be clear and that in the meantime she needed only to be patient.

When she hit upon the scheme to disguise her nature and thereby be able to go out into the world, her father was at first reluctant to grant permission. But Gwyneth was nothing if not persistent, and she proved that her plan was workable. In the magazine photographs of the Paladine marionettes, she recognized a portrait of evil that would be the perfect mask to hide her true nature and to dissuade people from looking closely at her, so that if she could avoid being touched, and thereby known, she could dare to venture tentatively and cautiously out of the house in which she had, until then, passed her entire life.

When I had asked why she imitated the look of the marionettes, she had said that it was to overcome her social phobia, that she felt she needed to look edgy. She was afraid of people, and she thought the best way to keep them at a distance might be to act a little scary. I had known at the time that her answer was incomplete, that she was keeping something from me. The full truth was that she and I were two of a kind, that whereas I lived by day underground and aboveground only by night, she moved safely in the city by spackling over her true nature with Goth makeup. Her strange, disturbing eyes, black with red striations like those of the vile marionettes, were contact lenses, nonprescription because she had perfect vision, custom-made for her by a company that produced all manner of prosthetics for actors of stage and screen, as well as for the growing number of people who chose to escape unsatisfying, mundane lives by donning costumes not just for fantasy and gaming conventions but also for more and more of their lives outside of their office jobs.

Much of that I learned from Father Hanlon as we sat together in the rectory basement, with the house creaking around us and the storm rattling the door, if indeed it was the storm and not a bestial hand, though Gwyneth shared some of her story with me later.

I still had questions, not the least of which was, What next?

This might not be the last winter of the world, but by all the evidence, it was likely to be the last winter to which the people of this city or any other would stand witness. The contagion out of Asia, spread by man and bird, might have a hundred-percent mortality rate among the infected. However, if we were what we now believed ourselves to be, we were not heir to the ills of this fallen world.

I said, “If Gwyneth and I — and the child — aren’t destined to die from what those madmen have unleashed, what’s our future and how do we ensure it?”

If Father Hanlon knew the answer, he had no time to tell me, for just then Gwyneth returned with the girl.

75

Dressed now in sweater and jeans and sneakers, with a coat draped over one arm, the nameless six-year-old girl came down the basement stairs, fully alert and smiling. No evidence remained that she had been comatose for years. Her sweet smile seemed to shame the storm, or whatever wanted to be let into the house, because the door stopped rattling and the rectory ceased its creaking.

Following the child, Gwyneth appeared, dressed as before but with all the Goth makeup washed off. She did not glow as the Clears glowed, but I will tell you that she glowed anyway, for no other word quite conveys the wattage of her beauty, skin as clear as rainwater, eyes reflecting summer heavens here in the winter of the world, not luminous, no, this girl of flesh and blood, but radiant nonetheless. The serpent ring was gone from her nose, the red bead missing from the corner of her mouth, and her lips were no longer black, but the red-pink of certain roses.

Of the child, Gwyneth said, “Her name is Moriah,” and I asked, “How do you know?” and the child said, “I told her.” Of Moriah, I inquired, “Do you remember what happened to you?” and she responded, “No, I don’t remember anything of the past,” and I said, “Then I wonder how you remember your name.” She said, “I didn’t remember. It was spoken to me just when I woke, a whisper in my mind, Moriah.”

Father Hanlon closed his eyes, as if the sight of three such as us would undo him, although his voice didn’t tremble when he said, “Addison, Gwyneth, and Moriah.”

Gwyneth came to me, stood before me, and considered my shadowed face within my hood.

“Social phobia,” I said.

“Not a lie. People did terrify me, their potential. My social phobia wasn’t a mental affliction, but a choice.”

Throughout much of her eighteen years and much of my twenty-six, we had known the world more through our books than through direct contact. We should not have been surprised that of those many hundreds of volumes, we had for the most part read the same books, which we began to discover there in the rectory basement.

When she untied the drawstrings under my chin, she touched my face, and a new light entered my heart. Her voice soft and loving, she began to recite a poem by Poe, one of the last he had written. “ ‘Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow—’ ”

I continued: “ ‘Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado.’ ”

When the drawstrings were untied, I put a hand to the hood, to keep it in place, suddenly fearful of letting her see me in full light. I found it difficult to believe that I was what Father Hanlon said that I was, easier by far to believe that I was a hideous thing that a stabbed man, dying by the roadside, hated and feared more than he hated and feared dying.

She skipped from the first stanza of “Eldorado” to the fourth and last. “ ‘ “Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied, — “If you seek for Eldorado!” ’ ”

I lowered my hand from the hood, and she pushed it back from my head. “In every way,” she said, “you are so beautiful, and you will be beautiful forever.”

Overcome by wonder, I kissed the corner of her mouth, where the bead had been, and the nose from which the serpent ring had hung, and her eyes that no longer needed to be concealed from a hostile world, and her brow, behind which she lived and hoped and dreamed and knew God, and loved me.

76

As always seemed to be the case, by the time I began to imagine the shape of the immediate future, Gwyneth already knew what came next, what came after what came next, and what came after that, as well. Regarding foresight and wise planning, she was her father’s daughter. Before picking me up in the Land Rover, by the pond in Riverside Commons, more than eight hours earlier, she had by phone set the appointment in the Egyptian Theater, had arranged for her guardian to expect us, with the child, in the darkest hour of the night, and had suggested that he might be required, perhaps with unseemly haste, to perform a duty of his office before daybreak.

I was honored that she should want my proposal, joyous when it was accepted, and somewhat dizzied when Gwyneth took from around her neck a delicate gold chain on which hung a ring fashioned from a nail. Either the nail must have been very old and worn or the point had been rounded with a file. The shank was bent into a smooth and perfect circle, and the head, which resembled in shape the setting for a diamond, was engraved with a tiny lazy eight, the symbol for infinity. The artist, Simon, made it for her because he believed she had freed him from the self-crucifixion of his addiction. In an accompanying note, he wrote that one day she would meet a man who would so love her that, if his sacrifice would spare her from death, he would straighten the nail and drive it through his own heart.

“Simon was as melodramatic as he was talented,” she said, “but he was also right.”

Father Hanlon had only begun to explain the necessary simplicity with which we must proceed when from the house above us came the hard crash and then the brittle ringing fall of shattered glass, as if not one window but three or four had exploded simultaneously.

Not even Gwyneth, with all her foresight, had anticipated such a frontal assault in the penultimate moment.

Regarding the basement ceiling with apprehension, Father Hanlon said, “The stairhead door locks from the kitchen, but not from this side.”

I snatched up a chrome-and-red-vinyl chair, which might once have been part of a dinette set, and hurried to the stairs. On the landing at the top, I was relieved to discover that the door opened toward me rather than into the kitchen. I tipped the chair onto its back legs and jammed the header under the knob, bracing the door shut.

By the time I returned to the basement, heavy footsteps sounded in the rooms above. They blundered first in one direction and then in another, as though the intruder must be drunk or confused.

“Who is it?” Moriah asked. “What does he want?”

I didn’t know, couldn’t guess, but judging by Gwyneth’s grim expression, she had at least a firm suspicion.

Among the old furniture stored in the basement was a prie-dieu that had previously been in the sacristy of St. Sebastian’s but had been moved when it was replaced with a new one. The padded kneeling bench was wide enough for two. Father Hanlon stood on the other side of it, his face averted but his voice steady and full.

In the house overhead, something crashed over with thunderous impact, perhaps a breakfront or a tall chest of drawers, and dust sifted down upon us from the basement ceiling.

I didn’t want to delay our vows for even a minute. But if these were the last hours of the world as we had known it, nothing was less important than it had been, and in fact everything was more important than it had ever been before. And so I said to the priest, “Are you sure this is right? I’m not of your church.”

“By your nature,” he said, evading my eyes, “you are of all churches and in need of none. Never have I conducted a marriage service with fewer doubts than I have now.”

If a house could be eviscerated, the sound that now came from the ground floor must be guts of wire torn through cartilage that was lath and through flesh that was plaster. I imagined that someone leaped to a chandelier, his full weight depended from it, swinging like a crazed ape, the dangling crystals clinking against one another and plummeting to the floor like glass grenades amidst the cracking-knuckle sounds of chain links torquing and the hard stutter of mounting screws stripping out of the junction box in the ceiling. Again the building shook as something heavy fell from a height. The lights dimmed, fluttered, and chased flurries of moth-wing shadows across the basement, but we were not cast into darkness.

“Addison, wilt thou take Gwyneth, here present, for thy lawful wife, according to the rite of our Holy Mother the Church?”

“I will.”

As the marriage service continued, the tumult overhead seemed surely to be the work of an entire wrecking crew of psychopaths, of many eager hands wielding sledgehammers and prybars, smashing glass, splitting wood, ripping up flooring, tossing furniture in a frenzy of destructive glee. A series of explosions sounded not like bomb blasts but like the whumps of aircraft breaking the sound barrier, as if numerous visitors were being imported from a distant kingdom, coming into the house at tremendous speed, great hands of air clapping to announce each arrival. But though they raised a racket, they didn’t call out to one another or curse, or rage, as if they were creatures who never spoke except to deceive and who, in this late hour of the world, no longer had any reason to lie, no purpose for their tongues.

Yet our voices were clear through the roar, and before long Gwyneth said, “… to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

At last, whatever beast or horde of beasts might be laying waste to the rectory, a destroyer arrived at the braced door at the top of the basement stairs and shook it more violently than the exterior door had been shaken earlier. The chrome header of the chair shrieked against the twisting doorknob. With the bone-in-socket sound of an animated skeleton, the pivot pins rattled in the knuckles of the hinge barrels, the latch bolt squealed in the plate fixed to the door frame.

Speaking sacred names that sealed our vows, the priest joined Gwyneth and me in matrimony, that we should face together whatever might lie ahead of us, the two of us now one, always one throughout our days on Earth and ever after.

We sprang to our feet. Pulling on her coat, small and quick and perhaps afraid, Moriah headed toward the exterior door, and Father Hanlon shepherded us after her, through bands of light and shadow, with dust descending from the cracked ceiling as if in reminder of our origins. There we paused, and Gwyneth put her arms around him and said that she loved him. If the contact tortured the priest, it exalted him as well, and if his face was wrenched with anguish and sorrow, it was also informed by hope. I said that he should come with us, and he said that he couldn’t, that he needed to remain behind to comfort the dying.

He gave me a sealed envelope and said that it held a treasure, and I tucked it into an inner jacket pocket with the envelope that contained the only things I had taken from my three windowless rooms.

The basement door opened onto nothing worse than icy wind and hurled snow. Climbing the stairs and sprinting across the yard, we didn’t dare look back to see by what bleak light the previously dark windows of the rectory might now be brightened and what grotesque forms and ghastly shadows might loom behind them.

When the three of us were safely in the Land Rover, Gwyneth reversed into the alley, and for a moment I could see past the side of the garage, into the lamplit passage between that building and the property wall, along which we had made our way moments earlier. Snow falling in thick torrents, shuddered by capricious wind into strange writhing forms, playing tricks with light and shadow, might conjure legions of demons in the imagination, but I believe that what I saw in pursuit of us was as real as the snow through which it forged.

If it was a man, it was a dead man with moon-pale eyes, clothed in rags and here and there strigose with splintered bones like sticks and straw bristling from rips in a scarecrow’s costume. If it was a dead man, it was the artist Paladine, for it carried in the cradle of its right arm what, seen through the veils of churning snow, might have been a marionette. If it was a marionette, and not an illusion, there were no strings for its wooden hands to pull, yet the man-sized puppet conveyed it through the storm.

Gwyneth shifted into drive. The tires spun out wet ravelings of clotted snow, but then found traction, and we were away into a city enchanted and haunted, its towers shining high into the night, but under it a black abyss.

77

Gwyneth turned the corner onto a broad avenue where skyscrapers sought a sky beyond their reach and blurred into the upper depths of a sea of snow. Before us lay a display of pageantry beyond all of our experience, a tableau vivant with a shining cast of thousands, tens of thousands, wondrous and exhilarating but also a scene of drama so dire that I was chilled.

She had always been able to see them, of course; and she could see them now, which is why she let our speed fall. On the older towers crafted by masons, the Clears stood side by side on every ledge, aglow in their hospital greens and blues and whites, like candles in endless tiers of votive cups, and in the buildings of steel and glass, they stood at every window, in the snow on every setback. Where the roofs of the lower buildings were visible through the white veils, the Clears stood there, too, and atop the marquees of theaters, on hotel porticoes, and upon the stone pediments that surmounted grand entryways. They gazed down into the street, solemn multitudes, standing witness now and until there was nothing left to which they might attest. I knew without needing confirmation that they were arrayed like this on other avenues and cross streets, on the roofs and in the trees of residential neighborhoods, in other towns and cities and nations, wherever there were people who would fall sick and into death.

From the rear seat, Moriah said, “I’m scared.”

Nothing I could say to her would gentle away her fright. During whatever hours might remain for this world, fear was unavoidable, fear and remorse and grief and fierce, desperate love. In the thrall of such emotions, Gwyneth let the Rover drift to a stop in the middle of the street, and I opened the door and got out and stood in awe and terror, turning, looking up at the thousands who stared down.

Disobedience brought time into the world, so that lives could thereafter be measured to an end. Then Cain murdered Abel, and there was yet another new thing in the world, the power to control others by threat and menace, the power to cut short their stories and rule by fear, whereupon death that was a grace and a welcoming into a life without tears became no longer sacred in itself, but became the blunt weapon of crude men. And though the blood of Abel had once cried out from the Earth, we had come now to a time when so much blood had been spilled over the millennia that the throat of the Earth was clotted and choked, and fresh blood could not raise a voice from it.

Gazing up at the shining multitudes, turning, turning, I spoke to them from my heart, because I knew they could hear that even more clearly than they could hear my voice. I reminded them of the many millions of children, of the fathers who loved and the mothers who cherished, of the simple-minded who in their simplicity were without blame, of the humble and the would-be chaste and the would-be honest and those who loved truth even if they didn’t always speak it, who struggled daily toward an ideal that they might never reach, but for which they yearned. There was hatred among people, but there was also love, bitter envy but also gladness for the fortune of others, greed but also charity, rage but also compassion. No matter how ardently or eloquently I might plead the case of humanity, however, I knew that this radiant audience would not, could not, prevent what was coming, that after we had brought ourselves to this pass, they could not be guardians but only witnesses. The world was run by our free will, and if they were to step down from their ledges and rooftops to undo what had been done, they would take from humanity our free will, after which we would be nothing more than robots, golems with hearts of mud and regimented minds. If some people chose to seek the power to strip the Earth of human life and if others of good intention did not take all necessary steps to defend against such madness, the consequences were as certain as that thunder will follow lightning. These shining multitudes did not stare down with cruel indifference, but with love and pity and grief that perhaps exceeded all of the grief that would wash through the dying nations in the days to come.

My face was stiff with frozen tears when, from the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the street. One Clear had come down among us for the purpose of leading three children to me. They were all under the age of five. I knew them by their bruises and their scars, by the emaciation of forced starvation that hollowed the faces of the twin boys, by the bleeding abrasion that encircled the girl’s neck, which was evidence of the coarse ligature with which she had nearly been strangled. They were like me and Gwyneth and Moriah, outcasts once hated and reviled, now heirs to all the world.

The Clear was the same woman who had visited the ninth apartment while Gwyneth played the piano piece that she had composed in memory of her father. I remembered what she had told me the first night that we met, when she had prepared for us scrambled eggs and brioche with raisin butter. I had asked if she lived alone, and she’d said, There is one who comes and goes infrequently, but I won’t speak of that. This Clear was the one who came and went.

The great host of Clears gathered above me were too far away for me to look into their eyes. In spite of Father’s warning, I met the eyes of this woman, and he was right when he’d told me that I would find them terrible. They were terrible in the sense that they were august and imposing and exalted, blue and yet as clear as glass, containing depths that no eyes I’d ever seen before could contain, as if I were looking through them to the end of time. By her stare, this woman settled a solemn awe upon my heart, and I was frightened by the degree to which I felt humbled and by the intensity with which I felt loved, and I had to look away.

The three children were small, and there was room for them in the backseat with Moriah.

We drove a block in silence, and we knew that however far we might go, we would find the multitudes shining and observant and sorrowing, sentinels to the end.

Suddenly more traffic appeared on the streets, far less than you would expect on a night of good weather, more than I had ever seen in a snowstorm. The drivers were heedless of risk, as if all of them were being pursued.

In Ford Square, the Jumbotron loomed like a giant window that offered a somber view of our future as it was already playing out in Asia, where the dead were lying in the streets and desperate mobs struggled to board ships already overcrowded. The news crawl listed American cities where deaths from the swift-moving plague were being reported, and the geographic spread was so wide that already it should have been clear even to the most confirmed optimists that there would be no refuge.

When three snow plows crossed an intersection in front of us, one after the other in a train, moving fast with emergency beacons flashing, Gwyneth said, “They aren’t serving the city now. They’re fleeing it.”

We fell in behind them, and they cleared the way for us, though that was not their intention.

Soon we reached the outskirts of the last borough, where we first saw looters. Bent-backed and frenzied, like figures from a nightmare of lupine predators, they poured out of shattered store windows, pushed grocery-store carts, pulled laden slat-sided wagons as if they were dray animals, loaded SUVs and cars with the latest electronic gear and all manner of luxury goods, some of them as wild-eyed as spooked horses and others as giddy as little children on a birthday-party treasure hunt.

The Clears stood witness to this, as well.

By the time that we were passing through the suburbs, the city plows no longer leading us, many of the sacked businesses were on fire, and the looters were stealing from one another now, defending their swag with guns and tire irons and pickaxes. A man in burning clothes ran across the street in front of us, still clutching a box bearing the Apple logo as the flames leaped from his coat to his hair and broiled him, screaming, to the pavement.

78

By dawn, the snow stopped, and we were driving through territory that had been less heavily blanketed, the roads clear except for some vehicles driven by desperate or panicked people, most of whom didn’t seem certain of where they were going, recklessly bound nowhere in particular.

We were at first puzzled that the roads were not choked with traffic, that thousands weren’t fleeing to remote places, even though they knew escape was impossible. Then we heard on the radio that the president had ordered Homeland Security to close off major arteries out of cities that offered international air traffic and shipping, because the first wave of plague reports were coming from those metropolitan areas. The hope was to contain the disease. We had gotten out just in time.

The pointlessness of the government’s action was made clear when a squall of cedar waxwings burst into flight from a berried hedge, fluttering across the road, up and away, reminding us that birds were a vector. For its spread, the plague didn’t depend on travelers from Asia debarking from planes and cruise ships.

Although tired, we were loath to stop short of our destination. The previous night, when Gwyneth had driven to the pond in Riverside Commons and given me my first ride in a motor vehicle, she mentioned a place in the country that her father had prepared for her, in the event that, for whatever reason, she ever needed to leave the city. We hoped to make it to that haven before nightfall.

In the backseat, Moriah slept. The three exhausted young ones were bunked down in the cargo space behind her.

At a Mobil station and convenience store in a quaint country town, a man dressed in khaki pants and shirt lay dead and befouled outside the raised doors of the repair garage. The establishment was otherwise deserted, but the pumps were working. We didn’t have a credit card. Steeling myself for the horror, I chased the pecking crows from the corpse, found the right plastic in his wallet, and filled the tank of the Land Rover.

In the convenience store, I loaded a handbasket with snack crackers, granola bars, and bottles of apple juice, provisions for the last leg of our journey.

Gwyneth’s father, Bailey, had given her both detailed directions and a map, but once she’d entered the destination in the Land Rover’s navigation system, we no longer needed to consult them.

Whether Bailey had intuited why the likes of his daughter were being born into the world or whether he simply thought that in a crisis she would be safe only far from the nearest people, we will never know. The cabin was remote, on considerable acreage owned by her trust; and within a year of its completion, Bailey ordered trees to be felled across the one-lane dirt track and weeds to be seeded along its route to encourage Nature to take back the trail as quickly as possible.

A caretaker named Waylon, something of a modern mountain man, hiked into the property once a month and stayed for three days at a time, ensuring that it was maintained. He wasn’t likely to be staying there now, and when Gwyneth could not raise him by phone, we thought he must be already ill with the plague or dead.

By noon, the wintry landscapes were behind us. We had removed the tire chains. Among the golden meadows, backdropped by green pine forests, here and there a lone house stood, or a house and a barn, behind pasture encompassed by split-rail or ranch-style fencing. Although they might once have appeared picturesque and welcoming, they were now held in a stillness like miniatures inside snow-globe paperweights but without the snow, the sunlight falling so plumb that no building cast a shadow, all of them standing silent, stark, and lonely.

Shortly before three o’clock in the afternoon, the navigator warned us that the paved county road would lead to a dead end within a mile. From there we would have to proceed on foot.

We had traveled two-thirds of that mile when the dogs began to appear. Labradors, German shepherds, golden retrievers, and various mixed breeds came from the fields and woods, angling ahead of us, bounding onto the shoulder of the road and then running alongside the car, grinning up at us, tails lashing the air. We counted twenty of them, and we couldn’t imagine whose dogs they were or where they had come from, but their joyful behavior assured us that they were no threat.

The pavement ended at a line of metal posts spaced close enough to one another to prevent the Rover from passing between them. Beyond lay a dirt road rutted, rocky, and unpromising.

When we got out among the dogs, they were without exception eager and affectionate, panting but neither growling nor barking. They milled around us, pleading with their soulful eyes for a touch, a scratch. The four children were enchanted by the animals, and for the first time I saw the three younger ones smiling.

We had nothing to carry other than granola bars and cellophane-wrapped packets of peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, with which we stuffed our pockets.

The map promised to guide us through the wilds by a series of nature’s landmarks. The dogs seemed to think they had been hired as scouts, for they gathered in a pack and set out ahead of us, glancing back to be sure we were following.

The dirt road began in a curve, and when we rounded it, we came upon the gunmen.

79

Forty feet ahead, a Jeep Wagon had been parked crosswise to the dirt road. Four men outfitted in hunter’s camouflage and carrying fully automatic rifles were gathered near the tailgate, but when they saw us, they separated and took up defensive positions, three of them using the vehicle for cover.

The one still exposed shouted at us to halt. He said we could come no farther, that there was no disease in their land and that they meant to keep it that way. But though they might have been too distant to be turned violent by our difference, I thought that the speaker was pale and gray-lipped as Telford had been, and in this cool air there seemed to be a thin sheen of sweat on his face, so that I could only conclude that they were in denial of their peril.

I told them that the six of us were not infected, that we only wanted to pass through to a place of our own a couple of miles to the west, but they were not disposed to believe me or even to care whether I told the truth. The leader squeezed off a burst of four or five rounds, over the heads of the dogs and wide of us, and demanded that we retreat.

As if the gunfire must have been a summons, more dogs began to appear out of the tall grass in the meadow to both sides of the road, startling the four men. They seemed not to emerge from hiding, but instead almost to effervesce out of common wild grass. Twenty or thirty of them came forth to join those already leading us, until there were perhaps fifty in the pack.

The mysteries and wonders of the city were the mysteries and wonders of the world, as prevalent here as anywhere, as we would learn in the days to come. The dogs gathered around us, to all sides, as if they were our praetorian guard, the extraordinary nature of the pack evident in the animals’ perfect silence and in the way in which every one of them turned its gaze on the Jeep and the gunmen gathered around it, not in threat but as if challenging them to set aside their fear and behave humanely.

I wasn’t sure what we should do, but when the dogs began to move, Gwyneth said that we must move with them. They led us into the meadow, where rabbits bounded away but did not distract our guardians, and in a wide arc around the Jeep wagon before returning to the track.

The gunmen watched in silence, and if one of them thought the safest course was to cut us down with a spray of bullets, he didn’t act upon that opinion. Whatever happened to those men, we never saw them again.

Into primal woods where afternoon sunlight laddered down through branches, the dogs led us along winding deer trails. Feathery ferns, like an aviary of immense green wings that might catch a draft and soar, arced away into the piney gloom. Ahead of me, the children followed Gwyneth, all of them repeatedly melting into shadows and reconstituted in sunlight, as if the forest wished to remind me that what had been given could be lost.

The cabin wasn’t as simple as it sounds, a sprawling structure of tightly fitted logs caulked with what might have been elasticized stucco, under a slate roof hung with copper gutters that had acquired a green patina. A veranda encircled four sides of it.

While we stood in the large clearing that the house occupied, before going inside, Gwyneth said that of the many provisions stored therein, included were three years’ worth of food. But she wondered how we could possibly feed fifty dogs as well.

As if in answer to her question, the dogs retreated to all arms of the surrounding woods and, within a minute, were gone as if they had never existed. In the days to come, they would keep us company, but they would never eat anything that we offered, sniffing what we had to give them but rejecting it as though it offended their keen sense of smell. From time to time, the dogs wandered away among the trees, not all at once but each to its own schedule, and when they returned, they seemed to be well fed and content. Eventually, we would learn their secret.

80

The twins’ names were Joshua and Justin, and the girl who had come with them, Consuela, was not related to them. The boys, starved thin in punishment for the distress they caused their mother, soon fleshed out, and the bleeding evidence of near strangulation in time faded from the girl’s neck without leaving a scar. The depression in Moriah’s skull did not fill out, but her hair concealed it, and she did not suffer any ill effects from it, for she was smart and quick and full of laughter.

They wanted Christmas that year. We cut down a suitable tree and decorated it with holly gathered from the woods and with shiny metal ornaments made from tin cans and painted by hand.

In the main room stood a Steinway, on which Gwyneth played for us songs of the season. She sometimes said she didn’t know a tune that we mentioned, but whenever she tried to play it, she found the right keys and the music flowed without a wrong note through the cabin.

Because his daughter was musically talented, Bailey had stocked this forest home with other instruments: two clarinets, a saxophone, two violins, a cello, and more. We agreed that, by next Christmas, at least I and perhaps Moriah would have learned to play an instrument with which we could accompany Gwyneth’s piano.

81

On the morning of January 6, when I came into the kitchen to help make breakfast, the back door was open, and Gwyneth stood at the porch railing, staring across the clearing to the woods, where the trees were skirted with lingering shadows and crowned with early sunlight.

Outside, the day was mild for that time of year, and Gwyneth was in the grip of sadness, which from time to time troubled both of us, though none of the children.

When I stepped beside her and put an arm around her, she said, “Do you feel it?”

“What?”

She didn’t reply, and after a minute or two, I knew the cause of her melancholy. Neither silence nor sound, neither scent nor the absence of it, neither the quality of the sunlight nor the color of the sky offered any evidence that an age had fully ended and a new era had begun. Yet I had no doubt that they were gone to the last, all their vast wealth without an owner, all their amusement parks and taverns and dance halls without celebrants, every city and hamlet without a single voice, every ship upon the sea a ghost ship, and the sky traveled now only by birds.

“So soon,” she said.

It didn’t bear thinking about, but it was our gift, as it was the gift of those who had come before us, to be able to think, to reason and reflect, and with the gift came the compulsion to use it.

If there were other thinkers out there in the quiet vastness of the Earth, they were like Gwyneth and me, small groups in far-flung locations, alert to the wonder and mystery that were woven throughout the fabric of the day.

The following morning, the animals came out of the woods into the clearing and some even ascended the steps onto our veranda. There were several deer and a family of brown bears, raccoons and squirrels and wolves and rabbits. And dogs sat observant or frolicked among the other species. Former predators basked in the early sun beside former prey, watched the lingering veils of mist wither up into the morning light, wrestled playfully or chased one another without fear or menace, and so it has been ever since.

During my first eight years, when I had spent much time in the woods, no animals had feared me or stalked me. If my mother had abandoned me deep in the forest, as she once meant to do, she would have been surprised to discover that even wolves would have been my good companions. At the time, that community of the winged and the four-footed had seemed natural to me, which it had been at the start of time, which it now is again.

82

The forest deep and primal harbors nothing that kills, and in it now grow trees of which there are no photographs or descriptions in the books in our extensive library. The new trees and new vines produce scores of fruits never known before or at least not in the age recently passed. Some of the fruits are sweet, some savory, and it is with these that we are nourished and on these that the dogs and all other creatures, from bears to mice, now feed. If ever we grow a little tired of the flavors and textures of what the trees and vines produce, we at once think of new ways to prepare and serve them or else new fruits appear, different but no less delicious.

Sometimes, when I glance out of a window and see a laughing child riding bareback on a brown bear, an old fear twists through me, but it does not last.

83

On a day late that January, I read again “East Coker” by the poet T. S. Eliot, and saw something that I had forgotten: the stark but beautiful metaphor by which he described God as a wounded surgeon whose bleeding hands apply a scalpel to his patients so that “Beneath the bleeding hands we feel / The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.” I wondered then if it was that forgotten metaphor that worked on my subconscious to see the Clears in hospital garb or if instead Eliot was a greater visionary even than his admirers claimed.

84

In our new home, the windowsills and the thresholds of doors do not bear any of the words that Gwyneth printed on the entry points of her other residences, as there is no need for them anymore. The alphabet she had used was early Roman derived from the Greek through Etruscan. Expressed in Latin, it would have read Exi, impie, exi, scelerate, exi cum omnia fallacia tua, which translates into English as “Depart, impious one, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits.” If she was protected from Fogs and whatever else might take up tenancy in marionettes and music boxes and people, Ryan Telford was not stopped by words composed with Magic Markers, perhaps because nothing curled within him except his own evil.

85

In all the many books that I have read, there exists much truth and wisdom, but in not a single volume has the truth of lovemaking been revealed. When I lie in the arms of Gwyneth, in ecstasy, it is essentially not about sensation but about passion, and passion is not of the flesh but of the mind and heart. No writer ever told me that there is no self in the act, that the desire to give drives out all thought of receiving, that lovers become one, transported, that I am her and she is me, that we find ourselves not engaged in seduction and surrender but in the throes of creation, not consumed by desire but by astonishment, given for a moment the very power that brought into existence the universe, so that we, too, can create life. She carries now a child.

86

On the Steinway are photographs in handmade frames. Among them is the one I retrieved from my windowless rooms on the night when Gwyneth told me that I would never be returning there. It is a snapshot of my mother on a day when she didn’t drink too much and smiled more readily than usual. She is lovely, and you can see in her eyes and in her graceful pose the promise that was never fulfilled. I found it in a zippered compartment of the backpack that she gave to me when she turned me out.

There is, too, a photo of Gwyneth’s father, who is the very picture of kindness, whose eyes are deep with intelligence. Now and then I find myself staring at him for long periods, and sometimes when I sit alone on the porch or am hiking in the woods, I talk to him and tell him what we have been doing and reading and thinking lately, and I thank him not just then but every day, for I would have no life if he had not lived his.

Father and I never took photographs of each other. We had no camera and we felt no need to preserve memories when we were always together and were certain to keep them fresh by recalling them in conversation. But the envelope given to me by Father Hanlon in the basement of his rectory contained a photograph of Father. The priest had taken it as Father sat in an armchair, lamplit and shadowed like those artful portraits of famous individuals taken by the great photographer Steichen. He greatly resembled an actor who was once very famous, Denzel Washington: milk-chocolate skin, a crisp tight cap of hair, a broad and pleasant face, a smile that angels might envy, and dark eyes that seem to be the still points around which the universe turns eternally.

I have also framed the index card on both sides of which Father had written for me what he said was the one thing I must never forget after he was no longer there to remind me. He willed me these words: But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in a world beyond this world of time and dust and forgetting.

I have written this account for the benefit of my children and their children and their children’s children, so that they might know how the world once was and how it came to be as it is. Not only is there no killing now of man by man or even beast by beast, but there seems to be no death except of grasses and flowers and other plants with the changing of the seasons, until spring revitalizes. If death should be forgotten, that might not be as good a thing as it at first seems to be. We must remember death and the temptation of power that it represents. We must remember that by claiming the power of death and using it to control others, we lost a world and in fact more than a world.

Since the day that we arrived here, we have not seen either Fogs or Clears. We believe the former no longer have visitation privileges to the Earth, and perhaps the latter are not needed here anymore. If ever I should glimpse a serpentine form of congealed smoke weaving through the forest or see a shining form wearing hospital scrubs, in snow descending, I will know that somewhere the compact has been broken and onto the stage of the world has come again the tragedy. Until then, there is joy, which by the way does not, as was once thought, require contrast with fear and pain to keep its zing.