Sacrament

CHAPTER X

i

Will didn't stir until a little after nine, but when he did he felt remarkably clearheaded. He got up, contemplated the shower for a few moments, wondering if he wasn't inviting trouble by stepping in. He defiantly ran the water cold and stepped under its barrage. There were no visions forthcoming, and after a minute of this masochism, he turned the heat up a little and scrubbed himself clean.

Dried, dressed and on his second cup of coffee, he called up Adrianna. Glenn picked up, sounding adenoidal. 'I got some kind of allergy,' he said. 'My nose won't stop running. You want to speak to Adrianna?'

'May I?'

'No, 'cause she's not here. She's gone to see about getting a job.'

'Where?'

'At the city-planning department. I met this woman at Patrick's party who was looking for someone, so she's gone to check it out.'

'I'll call back later then,' Will said. 'You take care of your allergies.'

His next call went to Patrick, whose first question was: 'How are you feeling this morning?'

'Pretty good, thank you.'

'No regrets, huh? Shit. I was afraid of this. The whole thing was a fiasco.'

It took a minute or two for Will to convince him that just because nobody had fallen in love or out of a window didn't mean the party hadn't been memorable. Patrick reluctantly conceded that maybe he was just feeling nostalgic this morning, sitting in the litter, but in the old days a party wasn't even considered to have occurred unless somebody ended up being screwed in the bath while the guests offered a rousing chorus from Aida. 'I must have missed that particular night,' Will said, to which Patrick replied that no, they'd both been there, but poor Will's memory had been fried standing in the sun taking family portraits of waterbuffalo.

'Moving on ...' Will said.

'You want Bethlynn's whereabouts,' Patrick said.

'Yes, please.'

'She lives in Berkeley, on Spruce Street.' Will jotted down directions, warned once again not to try calling her first, because she'd almost certainly slam the phone down on him. 'She doesn't like any air of negativity around her,' Patrick explained.

'And I'm Mr Negativity?'

'Well, face it, honey, nobody looks at your books and thinks, gee, what a lovely planet we live on. In fact - now, Will, I don't want you to get steamed about this - Bethlynn took a glance at one of your books and told me to get it out of the apartment.'

'She did what?'

'I told you, don't get mad. It's the way she thinks. She sees things in terms of good vibrations and bad vibrations.'

'So you had a book-burning on Castro.'

'No, Will-'

'What else went? Naked Lunch? King Lear? Bad vibes in Lear, man, better toss it out!'

'Shut up, Will,' Patrick replied mildly. 'I didn't say I agreed with her, I'm just telling you where her head's at. And if you really and truly want to make peace with her, then you're going to have to work with that.'

'Okay,' Will said, calming down a little. 'I'll make as nice as I can make. Maybe I'll offer to do her a book of sunflowers to make up for all those bad vibes. Big yellow sunflowers on every page, with a quote from the Bhagavadgita underneath.'

'You could do worse, man o' mine,' Patrick pointed out. 'People need some light in their lives right now.'

Oh, there's light in my pictures, Will thought, remembering how they'd flickered at the fox's feet, the eyes of the hunted and the bones they'd become shining out at him. There was light aplenty. It just wasn't the kind of illumination Bethlynn would want to meditate upon.

ii

Later, as the cab carried him over the bridge, he looked back at the fog and sundraped hills and thought for the first time in many years how fine a city it was to live in; one of the few places left on earth where the human experiment was still conducted in an atmosphere of passionate civility.

'You a visitor?' the driver wanted to know.

'No. Why?'

'You keep looking back like you never saw the place before.'

'It feels like that today,' Will said, which so confounded the man it efficiently silenced him for the rest of the trip.

However it sounded, it was true. He felt as though his eyes were clearer today than they'd been in years, both literally and figuratively. Not only did the sights around him seem crystalline, but he was taking pleasure where his gaze would never have lingered before. Everywhere he looked there were nuances of tone and colour to delight him. In the cedars, in the storefronts, in the cracked leather of the seat in front of him. And on the sidewalk, faces glimpsed that he would never see again, every one of them a burgeoning glory of its own. He didn't know where this new-found clarity was coming from, but it was as if he had been looking through a dirty lens for most of his life and become so familiar with the grime that now, when the glass was miraculously cleansed, it was a revelation. Was this what the fox had meant by the simple bliss of things?

He elected to get out of the cab two blocks shy of Sethlynn's house, in part so as to luxuriate a little in this feeling before he met with her, and in part to prepare a speech of reconciliation. The latter purpose, however, was abandoned the moment he started to walk. The confines of the cab had been a limitation on his hungry sight. Now, alone on the sidewalk, the world rushed away from him in every direction; and in the same moment came careening back to show him its wonders. There were clouds above his head that the wind had teased into frills and fripperies; the decaying boards of a home across the street paraded glorious patterns of peeling paint. A flock of pigeons, dining on the crumbs of a discarded doughnut, performed an exquisite dance as they fluttered and settled, then rose in a glorious flight and swooped away.

This was not the condition that he'd expected to be in when he went to confront Sethlynn, but as long as she didn't misinterpret the smile he could not remove from his face, perhaps it wasn't an inappropriate state. If she was indeed the sensitive Patrick had claimed her to be, then she'd know his euphoria was genuine. Focusing attention on the simple business of walking two blocks to her door was problematical, however. Everywhere he looked, sights distracted him. A wall, a roof, a reflection in a window: all demanded he take the time to stand and gawp. How many days, weeks, months of his life had he waited in a mud-hole or a tree on another continent for a glimpse of something he wanted to put on film - and how often left the field unsatisfied? - while here, all along, on this street ten miles from where he lived were profligate glories, eager to be seen? And if he'd spent that time teaching his camera to see with the eyes he was using right now - taught it even a tiny part of that sight - would he not have converted every soul who saw his pictures to the greater good? Would they not have looked astonished, and said is this the world? and realizing that it was, become its protector?

Oh God, why had the fox not opened his head fifteen years ago, and saved him all that wasted time?

It took him the better part of an hour to walk the two blocks to reach the porch of Bethlynn's unostentatious bungalow, but by the time he did, he had his wits about him again, and was ready to take the smile off his face and play the reformed reprobate. She took a little time to respond to his rapping however, during which time the intricacy of the cracks on the step drew his admiration, and when she finally opened the door, he looked up at her with an asinine smirk on his face.

'What do you want?' she said.

He mumbled the barest minimum: 'I came to apologize.'

'Did you really?' she said, her appraisal of him less than promising.

'I was ... looking at the cracks on your step ...' he said, trying to explain his smile away. She scrutinized him a little harder. 'Are you all right?' she said.

'Yes ... and ... no,' he replied.

She kept staring at him, with a look on her face he couldn't quite interpret. Plainly she was sensing something about him other than how well he'd cleaned his teeth this morning. And whatever it was - his aura, his vibrations - she seemed to trust what she felt, because she said: 'We can talk inside,' and stepping back from the door, ushered him into the house.