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Volume 26, Number 1, 2002 reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum and Joyce Corrington* NOTHING SUCCEEDS John William Corrington I Mr. Landry came to himself sitting on the terrace of the Forum, a Turkish restaurant. On Telegraph Avenue. In Berkeley, California. In front of him, past a plate of lamb pilaf and a glass of retsina, out beyond the ornamental metal fence which divided the premises from the street, a young man without shirt, shoes, or socks was on his knees in front of a young woman who appeared to be wearing only a poncho. The young man’s hands were under the lower draping of the poncho, and he was caressing the young woman in a manner not to be described. And this in the soft chill twilight, just before dusk, in that city across from the city by the bay. –My God, young Fourier gasped. –This place . . . Sodom by the sea . . . Mr. Landry said nothing. He had already committed his indiscretion for this trip. Flying from New Orleans, he had had three martinis, three glasses of wine, and three Courvoisiers. His head hurt and his sentiments were vague. He could not quite believe in the reality of what was passing before him. He remembered now why men drank. To spare themselves reality. Considering what lay out there, he could not blame them. He had not drunk so much since those days in the Kappa Sigma house. At Tulane. In 1926, in the fall. –I see it, but I don’t believe it, young Fourier was saying. –It’s like a show. Like some crazy sonofabitch putting all his dreams on a stage, one after another. Young Fourier half rose to his feet. He had found another tableau now. A street band of incredibly dirty and hairy men, some young, some not so young, standing on the sidewalk half a block down, playing, singing. They would whip their guitars and pass from hand to hand a single cigarette. The music was not unpleasant. The words were unclear and distant. Something about John’s Band. At one point, the guitar accompaniment fell away, and Mr. Landry was almost shocked by the wonderful purity of the few bars of a capella that followed. He shook his head. The young man and the young woman still stood in front of the Forum, still engaged in their rite. The only difference was that now the young woman had begun to move sinuously in time to the distant music. The young man began to nibble the young woman’s thigh. –Maybe he’s broke, young Fourier snickered. –Maybe he can’t afford anything . . . to eat. Young Fourier coughed, appalled at his own words. He had had six martinis, nine glasses of wine, and Courvoisiers beyond his counting on the way out from New Orleans. The curse and the temptation of first-class air travel. He was LSU School of Law, 1963, well aware that Mr. Landry suspected him of bestial tendencies. Tulane peopled the law offices of New Orleans, as a rule. The country parishes were left to LSU. It was supposed that Tulane produced gentlemen. Still, young Fourier had been at the top of his class. Mr. Landry had taken a chance. Now young Fourier glanced at Mr. Landry, who was squinting down at the band. –I think it’s the Grateful Dead, young Fourier volunteered. –God rest their souls, Mr. Landry said, and sipped his retsina. They had come to California to find Lancelot St. Croix Boudreaux III. He had been gone some five years now, gone, as the Civil Code had it, from his domicile, his ordinary place of habitation. No one in Breauxville had heard from him. No one on the Island had the slightest idea where he might be. The last word from him had been a large dog?eared postcard mailed from Sausalito. It had had a picture of Sather Gate on the front, and on the other side, a line of barely intelligible scrawl in Greek. The Old Man had sent for Mr. Landry, who had trans-lated it for him. Mr. Landry well remembered Colonel Lance Boudreaux, body twisted with age and arthritis, sitting propped in an ancient rattan chair on the sun porch of the Mansion. –Well, the Old Man had asked, –what the hell does it say? –It says, “Rejoice with me, for I have conquered the Kosmos.” The Old Man had stared at him malevolently. –René, I don’t need a goddamned joke. What’s that supposed to mean? Mr. Landry had shaken his head. –It . . . I don’t know. Christ said it . . . somewhere. –If I could get hold of that crazy young sonofabitch . . . But he couldn’t. Mr. Landry knew how much money the Old Man had spent trying. Detectives. Special investigators. A Louisiana state trooper placed on detached service as a favor to the man who dominated agriculture in South Louisiana. One report had come back from the trooper and then silence. It was generally thought that he had defected and might be found somewhere in San Francisco with a flower between his teeth, mind and body rotted by dangerous drugs and controlled substances, more easily obtained there than good licorice down home. Anyhow, no one in Breauxville or on the Island had any idea what Sather Gate was, and no one, including Mr. Landry, who at least had the advantage of having lived in New Orleans since his college days, could say what Lance might mean about conquering the Kosmos. That year, the rice and hot?pepper farmers on the Island and around the town were worried about the weather. There had been a novena for rain at the Immaculate Conception Church. The rain had come, and there was a big thanksgiving festival. Colonel Boudreaux, volatile as the pepper sauce which had made his family fortune almost a century before, had built and dedicated an altar to Mary Queen of Heaven. Even he had no illusions about how to deal with the Kosmos. Mr. Landry shivered. It had turned chilly now, and the lights along Telegraph Avenue had come on. The parade of the peculiar had not ceased. The band was playing something about a dire wolf, and youths in leather jackets and Kit Carson rawhides, girls with Indian feathers and Betty Boop make-up stood about listening, smoking. One boy with a Mohawk haircut, wearing only a loincloth, was stretched out on the sidewalk insensible. He had not moved for quite a spell. But no one paid him any mind, and Mr. Landry supposed people knew whether he was all right or not. He drank more wine, and thought that he should have brought winter clothes. It was summer here, and almost as cold as a New Orleans winter day. Hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp, Mr. Landry thought randomly. My God, that warning from so long ago. Tommy Dorsey and His Clambake Seven. It was not the weather of Louisiana. Nothing about California was like Louisiana. – . . . the list, young Fourier was saying. –We go up to the university tomorrow. A professor in Eastern religion. Some physicist . . . the police . . . They had come to find Lance Boudreaux, to take him home. At least to tell him that he was universal legatee to his grandfather’s estate, that he was heir not only to the Island and to 6,000 acres of prime farm land on the mainland growing peppers and rice and cane, but to the factory and the business itself, which turned a yearly profit of millions sending the Island’s torrid pepper sauce to countries everywhere, most of which had not even existed in 1869 when the first Boudreaux had managed to scrape together enough money to purchase the Island from a carpetbagger who had been shot up on four separate occasions, whose cabin had been burned down with fearsome regularity every time he had left it to go into Breauxville to purchase supplies. Altogether the estate was estimated to be worth some seventeen million for tax purposes. In fact, thirty-five million was more like it. Eight days before, L. St. Croix Boudreaux I had died on the Island. Mr. Landry had been there. As he had been present at every important event in the chronicles of the Boudreaux family since 1927, the year he had taken over from his father a law practice begun in 1880, when the first Breauxville Landry had come home from Rome, Georgia, after fifteen years of wandering beyond that day he had been cast loose from Forrest’s cavalry after his nation died. Mr. Landry had continued to take care of the Boudreaux business even after he had moved to New Orleans and established a staid and careful banking and real estate practice there. He kept a home near the Gulf and a tiny office in Breauxville chiefly for the Old Man, who would trust no one but him. Not because the Colonel had any great opinion of his legal talents, but because the Old Man never changed anything. He could abide sin, but the very idea of change seemed demonic to him; hence Mr. Landry, who was perhaps less rigorous on the point, but felt guilty because of his willingness to meet the times as they came, had never even attempted to suggest that another lawyer, closer to home, would be more immediately available to the Island and its master’s needs. And the years had gone by. Mr. Landry could remember when he was a boy fresh out of law school, and the Old Man was no more than forty. He had seemed immortal, as if the Island would sink and the land turn to granite before he would be stirred, moved to leave this place where his people had been so long. But, Mr. Landry thought, looking out and up at the cold dark green shadows of alien hills, nothing endures. Things change. There is a succession of all things. We rise into light, stare into the sun, and then pay the penalty to time for our existence. Nothing succeeds but succession, he thought wryly. What was that phrase they always used in law school? Le mort saisit le vif. The dead enseize the living. The living have nothing not willed them by the dead. Not even life itself. The Old Man had died hard. It had been a lonely death in the Mansion there on the Island. Covered with gingerbread, the legacy of the first Boudreaux who had come to the Island a hero for no other reason than taking it from some Yankee scum hated for his Anglo name by whites and blacks alike, the house had grown as each new generation had come along, until in the time of the Old Man, the family had begun to shrink. Colonel Boudreaux had come back from the Great War a hero like his ancestor, crossed with sashes and decorations from Belgium and France, each almost mad with pleasure at the notion of decorating an American who spoke French and bore a recognizable surname. But he had had a single son, no more, to raise as carefully as another man might have collected Limoges porcelain–only to see him take to the sky in the 1930s and make an independent living dusting crops through the southwest parishes, hurling his patched biplane over cotton fields from dawn to dusk as if he were determined to destroy the Colonel’s pleasure. But it appeared the Old Man’s will had sustained him, and Lance Boudreaux II had survived three crashes in order to enter the Army Air Corps in 1940 and rise to the rank of colonel himself before, at last, amid a conflagration too vast even to be managed by his father, Lance II had gone down in the winter of 1944 over the oil fields of Romania. Dying, the Old Man had called for Lance. Servants, some of them the children of West African blacks who had been brought to the Island before the turn of the century, speaking nothing but their own brand of French, swore the Old Man was calling for his son. Some, less traditionalist, had claimed he was calling for his grandson. But it made no difference. Neither could be produced. The grandson had vanished amid the turmoil of California as surely and as finally as the son had vanished over Ploesti. So that Mr. Landry had sat there during the final hours, being spoken to as if, at almost seventy, he were son and grandson alike, hearing what had been and what was to be, how the Island would sustain them all until the very ramparts of infinity itself were breached, and the Truth should come to relieve them of their burden. Mr. Landry had drifted into sleep once or twice, only to be awakened by one of the blacks bringing the narcotic required by the Old Man, and a glass of fine Napoleon brandy for this lawyer, this man whose sole duty it was to remain awake, to hold to his duty until the end. The cool stare of the servant reproved him, and he had thrown down the brandy and sat straight in his chair. He had remembered the boy. Not well, for he had been hardly more than a cipher, a presence in a distant room somewhere when the Old Man and Mr. Landry did their business. Lance III had been a curly? headed shadow, the sole remnant of his father’s life, purchased, as it happened, from his mother for a price. His mother, found by Lance Boudreaux somewhere between Orange, Texas, and Lafayette, Louisiana, on one of his airborne careers across the bottom of the state. In a diner, in an auto court, in a dime store, or to put aside euphemism, in a whorehouse. His mother, who had come into Mr. Landry’s New Orleans office one autumn afternoon in 1954 at the invitation of Lance I, whose mansion she had left almost before Lance II had gotten across the sea, and who, for reasons buried in her heart and possibly in the soil of Romania, had, in return for a cashier’s check for $250,000, signed an authentic act by which she gave over permanent custody of her son to his grandfather, agreeing that the Old Man should adopt him and treat him in all particulars as if the boy were his own son, as if, in fact, there had been no generation intervening. She had smoked and read, smoked and signed. It was done, and the young Italianate man with her, most recent in a long succession–her chauffeur, someone had snickered, ’cause he rides her–rose, offered his arm, and guided her back to the dusty Cadillac parked downstairs. –Did you want to see him . . . before . . .? Mr. Landry had asked her. –You see, there are no visiting rights . . . not ever . . . She had paused for a moment, as if she did not understand what he was saying, what he was asking her. –See him? He’s dead . . . isn’t he? –No . . . I mean his . . . your son. –Oh. No. I saw him. Last Christmas. He looks like Lance. Exactly like Lance. He’ll die, too. You watch. You can’t depend on them. They act like gods, nothing can hurt them. Then, when they get you to believing it, they go and die. No, I don’t want to see the sonofabitch. . . . She had gone to Houston then, had lived in a suite at the Shamrock Hotel for four years in what Mr. Landry had been given to understand was a state of sybaritic luxury and perpetual unrelieved drunkenness, hiring and discharging chauffeurs one after another, having, on occasion, more than one at a time, buying extra cars to justify them if not to anyone else, at least to herself, not because morality was at issue, but because of the extravagance so shameful to a girl from a South Louisiana diner, auto court, or even whorehouse. Until one evening, full of Black Jack and Nembutals, she had fallen or leapt ten stories onto a lower roof and bounced, broken and bloody, into the swimming pool to bob there, a shambles of ruined meat, amid hysterical guests of the hotel, who, no soberer than she, could not fathom this thing in the water which had invaded their evening’s pleasure and floated there before them, draining red fluid into the scented water, semblance and prophecy of last things. Her most recent chauffeur had left her, it seemed, and her money had run out. But Mr. Landry, who had a long recall, was never sure it had not been an older and deeper wound that had sent her spiraling down out of the sky into the oil-rich of Houston even as Lance II had gone down into the oil of Romania. Fourier had finished his stuffed grape leaves, downed the last of the wine, and begun on his list again. –You know, he quit Tulane, but he seems to have finished med school at UCLA. If he wanted a new life, why do you reckon he went back to medical school all the hell and gone out here? Mr. Landry gestured to the moustached waiter for more wine. It was absurd. He was mildly drunk, but he did so anyhow, and saw a grin of anticipation appear on the face of the Turk or Greek or whatever he was. As the wine flowed, the tip mounted. Mr. Landry smiled back at him. It was the only normal, calculable response he had seen since landing at the San Francisco International Airport. –La vita nuova, Mr. Landry heard himself mutter. –How’s that, sir? young Fourier asked. –Everybody wants a new life, Mr. Landry said. –Only what they really want is the old life. Once more. To do better. Young Fourier’s face was flushed. He was beginning to feel his liquor. –Shit, you know, that’s true. . . . Mr. Landry did not smile. He stared at Fourier. Even a man taken in drink should control his language better. An attorney in New Orleans, at least one connected with a good firm, did not use such speech. Not even in his sleep. Conclusions might be drawn. The wine came, and it was cold and tart, the resin adding a fresh element to the old flavor of decent, not excellent, white wine. That was why they added it to the wine, the ancients. Not to preserve, but to enhance. Mr. Landry remembered Lance’s room–no, rooms, really, in his grandfather’s mansion on the Island. Like a pawnshop, Mr. Landry had thought. Rooms filled with books; records; equipment; laboratory supplies; musical instruments; film projectors; a heap of cameras, including Rolleis, a Speed Graphic, a Leica; rakes; spades; oyster knives; rifles; shotguns of every gauge; a rack of pistols, including black powder weapons, Colt’s Navy, Remington Army; reproductions of paintings from every conceivable period nailed to the wall in and out of frames, including a Rousseau which might well not have been a reproduction; three?dimensional chess sets; television monitors; uniforms of armies current and long disbanded; flags from nations no longer in existence; bundles of periodicals ranging from the Yellow Book to Acta Chemica, journals representing every imaginable profession and interest; tents; and uninflated life rafts; cracked wooden Buddhas; archaeological rubbish from the pre-Columbian period of the Americas and from Sumer and Akkad; canteens; axes; magnifying glasses; retorts; microscopes; and a great chart of the zodiac which almost covered one wall, its corners pinned down by enlarged photos of Proust and Rommel, an Indian swami of uncertain identity, and Artie Shaw–all this and so much more. There was a coin collection, including U.S. gold pattern coins which had never been issued. There were stamp albums and envelopes full of bank notes from failed countries, bottles filled with formalin in which there floated and bobbed the decayed ruins of a two-headed kingsnake, large worms from the Amazon, and an embryo of something like a pig or an ape, which, heedless of gravity, hovered like a tiny dancer, its something like a mouth caught in a permanent leer, its unfinished limbs swaying in the cloudy fluid, filled with a faint golden dust composed, it seemed, of cells from the thing itself. But Mr. Landry could not, for the life of him, place amid this recollected clutter the face of Lance Boudreaux III. He could, in memory, see there sprawled between a large crate of clay pigeons and a lithography stone, the figure of a small boy sitting crosslegged above a board of some kind, a shiny instrument in his hand, and to one side a large leather-bound book obviously older than the Boudreaux holdings themselves, in some strange language, its print large, some passages in red. Mr. Landry remembered looking down, his eyes still sharp in those days, seeing just these words: O Diabolus, Dominus Mundi, ad Servus Tuum, Veniat . . . He had thought little of it. The Latin, after all, was not strange to him. He had served mass from his tenth to his seventeenth year and could recite the ordinary of the mass, his part and the priest’s, without a falter. As it happened, he did not know what all the words meant, and Father Briscoe had suggested that he not bother to learn, as it might confuse him. Still he had known what those words meant. What he could not bring to mind was the board, and whether anything was on it. Nor could he remember the boy’s face. All he could conjure up were a pair of green eyes and a strange distant sound in the background, something over a local radio station with the improbable title “Thermopylae.” –By God, it’s . . . Jerry Garcia, young Fourier said. –Look. The street band had come closer now, and the one Fourier had noticed looked much like all the rest, bearded, a little rotund, long unkempt hair, work clothes, a guitar clutched to his belly. He paused in front of The Forum, smiled a beatific smile. The young people around clapped. –This is for Lance, he grated, –wherever, whenever. The One Who Stands. . . . Then he began to sing, and the others, hirsute, pallid, grasping a variety of instruments, joined in. The Turk brought baklava, and young Fourier whispered that they could use one more bottle of the retsina. The waiter looked at Fourier and then at Mr. Landry. Could they manage yet another? No, Mr. Landry thought, but goddamn the Turks. He nodded soberly. One more. As he walked away, Mr. Landry tried to make out the lyrics of the song. Something about out of the earth, out of the earth, the soul of the earth, the soul of the earth, the soul of forever. The wine came then. They ate the dessert, paid the bill and left tip enough so that the waiter paid no mind when they rose carrying not only the bottle of wine with its cheap paper label, but the two glasses as well. They walked back to the Carleton Hotel then, Mr. Landry taking care, walking slowly, a little unsteady, looking into the windows of the bookshops, headshops, small restaurants specializing in natural food where he could buy a bowl of brown rice for twenty-five cents, complete with a pair of chopsticks which broke in two when you drew them from their cheap paper wrappers. There was Robbie’s Chinese walk-in, and a place that specialized in hot dogs of various kinds. There was a newsstand on the corner near the campus with copies of Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and other papers dedicated to music and nature and how to build a cabin in the Sierras or the Rockies without help and without nails. The hotel was quiet, its lobby dark. Only the desk area was lighted, and as they passed to go to the tiny elevator, Mr. Landry thought he saw figures reclining in the lobby, on sofas, chairs, and even on the floor. There was only the night clerk awake, his eyes wide and fixed on a telephone switchboard without lights, a cigarette caught between his teeth, and the sweet distant stench of smoke, which young Fourier identified as that of extremely fine dope. When he reached his room, Mr. Landry expected that he would fall asleep quickly that night. But it was not so. Instead, as he lay down, he found himself standing in subdued sunlight, under a live oak tree. Before him, in the cool morning glow, between rows of blooming gardenias, were a terrace with a small fountain and open French doors. Mr. Landry could hear music coming from beyond the doors. A Mozart sonata. He stood for a long moment, breathing deeply. By God, Mr. Landry thought, not here. Even dreaming. Even drinking too much for the first time in forty years. I don’t want to be here, because even now, so old that the very memory of love seems an embarrassment, I can’t stand it. I would rather dream of hell, Milton’s flames and Dante’s ice, than remember what I have not thought of in almost thirty years. But nothing changed. He was still there, in the courtyard of the house where they had lived when they were first married. The music stopped, and he heard her voice continuing the melody, low, crystalline, close by. He had wanted to think the sonata came from a phonograph, but he realized that then they had had no phonograph. There had only been the piano brought from Mandeville, from her father’s summer place across the lake. Later there would be a phonograph, and music from it in the morning before the sun broke through the trees. He would put on Albinoni or one of the Marcellos, or perhaps Vivaldi before she woke. He would brew the strong rich coffee and chicory which they ground and mixed themselves, and set two cups on the linen cloth draped fresh each morning on the metal and glass table at the shaded end of the terrace. And when the sun’s first light touched the peak of the fountain, he would go into the bedroom, lean down and kiss her, waking her gently, bringing her back into this pendant world they shared, knowing that nothing in it mattered so much as her presence, her smile, her love. Then they would sit on the terrace and talk until the sun touched the edge of the cloth and he rose to gather up his papers and walk down to St. Charles Avenue where the trolley ran. Only in the depths of winter was that ritual broken, or on those mornings when rain drove them into the breakfast room. He was still standing, it seemed, in the back of the yard near the old brick wall covered with English ivy. He walked toward the terrace then, toward that melody he had not heard in so many years, knowing that he would not get through the open doors because, even dreaming, that was too much to hope for, and that never before in the years intervening, since that last morning they had spent on the terrace, had he found her image again as he slept. He thought, because if I could walk through those doors, there is nothing in the universe, given that I could see her face, which could draw me out again. I would die there, go to hell there, and laugh at the cost, saying how can you scare off a man who has not cared whether he lived or died in thirty years, who has had nothing to wake up for but the bitter law in thirty years? As if, God forbid, death were something other than an end to life, indeed rather the terminus of all things, beyond which nothing lay at all. By then, it seemed, he was on the terrace, that previous voice so close that he knew she must be sitting just within the shadow of the doors, on the piano bench sorting through her music, searching for something to follow the Mozart, most likely one of Bach’s inventions. He remembered then, not the day but the epoch. It was 1938, the spring. He was doing well. Not as well as he would do later, but well. She was not pregnant then, would not be for months yet. But she would be in the fall of 1939, and that pregnancy for which she had hoped and prayed would silence the music for all time, leaving not even a child behind. Nothing but pain. He stepped hopelessly into the dark doorway, turned. And found himself blinking into pale sunlight falling through the blinds of the room. He looked around the faded walls covered with cracking wallpaper. The woodwork, varnished many times, was dark with age and scarred by the transient blows of generations of baggage and bellmen. Strange what the sun does to whatever it touches, searing away the blur of the commonplace, individuating each scar and crease, setting apart that thing as standing forth in itself alone. Mr. Landry rose slowly from his bed and walked over to the wash-bowl beside the windows. The mirror was in shadow so he switched on the weak naked bulb above. He saw his face then, and a spear of shock thrilled him. Awakening from the terrace, from the mild New Orleans spring morning long ago, he had almost forgotten. I am nearly seventy now, he thought, looking at the spare controlled wizened face that had not belonged to him on such a morning long ago, which had only lurked then in the well of possibility, presuming the practice did not kill him, in case he survived the loss, the winter afternoons and interminable evenings alone. In case he was unfortunate enough to extend his life across time, missing each likely chance to die until he came at last to stand behind this ancient alien face that she had never seen, would, by the grace of God, never know. I’m even older than that, he thought, shaving slowly, carefully, with a straight razor she had given him that last anniversary they had been together. It shone in the pallid sunlight, its edge honed deep into the heavy body of the steel. He had used it for over thirty years and more, as if to do other might be to deny the meaning, the magnitude of his loss. I’m so old that I can’t hold it off any more. Only a little while to go, and it’s catching up with me. As if dying were no more than the sum of things you love rushing up from behind, overcoming you, rescuing you from time. He began to dress. He had control of himself now, and he did not think how many times he would be willing to die in order to enter those French doors two thousand miles and thirty years away, to turn and find her there, three, five years into their marriage, leafing through her music, suddenly looking up surprised, saying, –René, do you know the time? Yes. He knew. The summer of 1938. On State Street and sometime past eight in the morning. Almost time for him to be downtown in those oak?lined, book?filled caverns where the minor keys of his life were scored and played out. Down on Telegraph Avenue, he could already hear music and see people moving though the sun had barely risen high enough to touch the street. They looked as if they were dressed in rags. Women wearing loose ugly dresses and shawls over their heads. Men wearing cloth caps and cheap coats and ragged pants. He remembered Prague just after the war, but he could not remember that the sun ever shone. The people there had dressed like these, had moved like ghosts or sleepwalkers amid the tumbled ruins of their city and their lives. But they had had no choice. Something alien had invaded their lives. Das Dritte Reich, a demonic vision separated entirely from reality. It had come upon them, and when finally it had dissipated, there was another vicious dream to take its place. He shook his head, staring downward. But why do these children pretend? Why do they act as if they were the remnant left over, the human particles somehow not claimed by the holocaust? Jesus, he thought, it doesn’t take artillery, does it? It doesn’t take the Nazis. It takes no more than the destruction of the soul. In Prague there had been music, too. Street music. A blind violinist sitting on a box next to the broken wall of the gutted railway station. Before him on the shattered pavement lay his cap with a few coins in it and on his chest, on the lapel of a frayed suit coat which did not match his pants was a beautiful ribbon with a military decoration hanging from it. He played only two or three songs, but Mr. Landry remembered how strange it seemed that one of them was “I’ll See You Again,” as if out of his darkness the violinist chose to mock the visible world and all that it purported to contain by mocking himself. Young Fourier knocked. He was casually dressed, without a tie, his hair fluffed up as if he had not combed it. He noticed Mr. Landry’s long inquisitory look. He smiled what Mr. Landry supposed he considered an ingratiating smile. –When in California, young Fourier laughed. Mr. Landry walked to the elevator. On the way down, he studied the list of faculty members they were scheduled to meet with while Fourier studied a map of the campus. The lobby was empty now, and a new clerk was behind the desk. Just outside, there was a newspaper rack, and the headline of the San Francisco Tribune howled BAY HORROR KILLINGS. It seemed that in a nearby suburb south of the peninsula, in a place called Daly City, police had discovered the bodies of a number of people hideously murdered, as if according to some ritual. The body of one young woman had been cut almost in two. There was evidence that she had been in an advanced stage of pregnancy, but no fetus had been found. Mr. Landry almost dropped the paper. He wondered sometimes if these things actually happened, or if there was a stable of demented journalists somewhere paid California-size salaries to conceive of the most incredible degeneracies that diseased and fevered minds could invent. But he knew better. In the firm there was one young attorney whose lot it was to handle such criminal litigation as could not in conscience and good business be avoided. He had casually told Mr. Landry enough of his own experiences to convince. The story in the paper was doubtless true. For a fleeting moment, Mr. Landry wondered which of his sins might be the specific one for which he had been condemned to live into this generation. He threw the paper into a receptacle as they began to walk toward Sather Gate. Along the way, students seemed to be everywhere, handing out leaflets of one kind or another. Some supported, some attacked, but all were written in a dialect only approximating English, and each one howled a Great Outrage, a Crowning Act too Loathsome to be Borne. –They really get steamed up, young Fourier observed, steering Mr. Landry toward the cafeteria. –But it’s all the same, Mr. Landry said, peering through the handful of urgent messages that had been pressed upon him. –Support the Farm Workers’ Union, don’t buy table grapes, free Huey Newton, open admissions and no tests for minorities, abortion at state expense, or we will bring down the social order. What is anyone supposed to make of that? –It’s all non-negotiable, Fourier allowed, his eyes crinkling as the first shafts of sunlight reached the broad cool plaza. –Ummm, Mr. Landry smiled approvingly. –Nothing is nonnegotiable . . . except . . . –They don’t have that out here, Fourier said quickly. –Everyone is too young to . . . Mr. Landry nodded. He looked around as they entered the cafeteria line. Fourier was right. It wasn’t surprising to see so many young people on a campus, but he could not remember seeing anyone much over thirty since the plane had set down across the bay. Toyland. An adolescent fantasy. As they ate their eggs, Mr. Landry mused. –I wonder why young Boudreaux would have come . . . –Here? Didn’t you say he was . . . weird? –Ummm. He wasn’t . . . I never said . . . weird. Out of the ordinary. –Sir, every spook and freak and stranger in the country is tuned in here. It’s the music and the politics and . . . everything. It’s where it’s at. –You mean, where it is. –Whatever. But if Mr. Boudreaux’s grandson was . . . out of the ordinary, he’d . . . This is weirdsville, sir. There’s not a normal person within ten miles of us right now. Skin?freaks, dope?freaks, bomb?freaks . . . these people do anything they want. Fourier looked around. At the next table, two blond girls in shorts and halters were eating and talking rapidly. Mr. Landry had the notion that both were attractive by the standard of the time, allowing for the fact that they were barefoot, hair uncombed, breasts almost exposed in the loose halters, and the shorts so closely cut that one of the girls, when she moved her legs, exposed a portion of pubic hair. Mr. Landry was not shocked. He had visited zoos before. However worthy animals might be, they did not clothe themselves, and some of their personal habits were coarse. As he regarded them, one of the girls was saying to the other, – . . . told me, you want an ace in Math 390, you got to give head. That’s it, honey. You know any chick with an ace in there, you know she’s been down . . . Young Fourier blushed. Mr. Landry turned away, understanding only the syntax and grammar. The words meant nothing at all. –This is the heart of the beast, Fourier was saying, as he threw down the last of his bad coffee quickly and picked up his tray. They walked through Sather Gate into the academic campus, and on toward a low building done in some style only to be described as a California view of Spanish colonial. Inside it was cool and subdued. At a desk a young woman with olive skin, burning dark eyes, and a peculiar accent spoke softly into a phone and told them that Professor Khaldoun would see them. The office door was deep scarlet color, and on it Mr. Landry and Fourier saw the lovely swirls and rises of Arabic script. Underneath, in small roman letters it was declared that here stayed Professor Khaldoun, professor of Middle Eastern thought. Below that was pasted a crudely mimeographed broadsheet which declared the unyielding determination of the Palestinian people to recapture their homeland. And, incidentally, to scourge from the face of the earth those who had usurped it. They knocked and entered, in time to see Professor Khaldoun face down on a small carpet, a shaft of sunlight embracing him. He completed some formula in which he was involved, and rose quickly, smiling, to greet them. –You will pardon me, he said in excellent English. –It must be done. You are the lawyer Landry from New Orleans? Mr. Landry bowed, offered his card, and pumped hands with Professor Khaldoun in that peculiar fashion he had learned from distant French kin, which was the style almost everywhere but in America. –You come about Lancelot, Professor Khaldoun said musingly, as he moved to a small table behind a cluttered desk and began to prepare cups of strong dark coffee. –Yes, Mr. Landry began, staring along with Fourier at the process, almost unable to wait for the thick aromatic brew after the nasty stuff they had had in the cafeteria. –Your letter said his grandfather . . . was no more? –Passed on, Mr. Landry answered in a similar hushed tone. It is of the essence of advocates that they be able to take on at once the color of the place where they must work. It is not a conscious thing, or it would be useless. It is an inherent capacity by which he who would preserve or alter the status of a situation in which he is alien shifts his cognitions into the key dominant among the contenders with whom he deals. –Allah, may His name be praised, is just. So be it. –Amen, Fourier said almost mechanically. Mr. Landry did not look at him. It fitted nicely and was to be expected. Fourier’s family, originally from Breauxville, was Baptist and of a peculiarly demonstrative sect given to baptisms in the bayou and penitential utterances on Wednesday evenings so loud that passing Catholics were chilled at the sound of booming declarations of the most intimate personal failings, as if someone had put their own whispered confessions on an amplified loudspeaker. –And by that passage of his ancestor, Lancelot has become rich? Mr. Landry’s expression did not alter. He was used to greed by proxy. –He has become universal legatee to a considerable estate. The professor placed steaming coffee before each of them and sat down. He smiled indulgently. –A considerable estate. By the standards of your South, I am sure. Mr. Landry’s eyes narrowed. –A considerable estate. By Saudi Arabian standards, I should think. The professor’s eyes widened. –Land? –An island, and perhaps 6,000 acres of the richest farmland in Louisiana. There is also a lagoon, and a number of servitudes on adjacent estates. Professor Khaldoun spread his hands. –What can I tell you? He told them a great deal. He told them of a tall, bearded, green-eyed young man with a silver star emblazoned on his forehead, whether by tattooing or some other means he could not say. He said that this Lancelot, who never used any other name, had appeared before him at the end of a quarter, had demanded, under university regulations, to take the final examination in a graduate seminar on late medieval Islamic thought, and had, before the professor’s eyes, completed the nine?part examination in less than an hour. –When he handed me the papers, he said I was wise, and it was good to contend with me before Allah, may His blessings embrace us. And when I looked at the papers, he had written the examination in Arabic. Moreover, because of this wonder, the professor had followed Lancelot’s doings thereafter, had even gone to hear the opening of his band at the Hungry i, a club in San Francisco reserved for only the most immediately popular rock bands. There he had heard the peculiar rhythms and Eastern melodies of Lance’s group–but most strange, the lyrics. –I cannot remember to quote, he told them. –But names like “I talk to the sword,” “Doom at the bottom of your cup.” That one, it was about poisoning. It said he had come from a violent place, a place where men were connoisseurs of guns and knives, a barbarous place. But that he sought a place without violence, where all contention was settled without the shedding of blood. Where those who could not exist together would vie with poison–poisoned food and drink, poisoned garments, poison in flowers, in rings, poisoned letter–paper, vials of poison gas in autos. And there was this terrible refrain, Belladonna, deadly nightshade, Angel of death, dark as the sea,–Is this what is taught in New Orleans? Professor Khaldoun asked. –No, Mr. Landry said. –No. I think not. –The juju, young Fourier began. –Jews, the professor mused. –It is not surprising. The Kabbalah. They are a venomous people. Their ways . . . but of course you know. . . Mr. Landry rose abruptly, thanked the professor, telling him that there were others that must be seen. They held each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then the professor shrugged. –He last came here after obtaining his doctor of medicine degree. He had already degrees in physics and philosophy. That time he was clean?shaven, indeed, his head was shaven, and the star was gone. He wore a caste mark where it had been. We talked. He said that he embraced the cause of all those who had lost what nothing else could be subsituted for . . . that he would be the physician of the world. –You understood. . . . The professor’s eyes flashed. –Of course, I understood . . . Mr. Landry was astonished to see tears in the professor’s eye. –He will give back to the bereaved their lost homeland . . . Fourier and Mr. Landry exchanged glances as they walked back into the outer office where the sultry secretary fixed them both with her dark eyes. – . . . and so you had better not to seek him, because . . . Mr. Landry was astonished to find himself turning, looking at the professor as if from a great distance. –If I forget thee, O Zion . . . –Selah, Fourier said hoarsely, and the young secretary said some-thing in a harsh vicious whisper in no language either of them understood. –Deny him his inheritance, they heard the professor cry after them, his voice muffled by the partitions and the distance down the dimly lit hallway, –keep it from him, or perish with your kind. He is Lancelot, a true Christian, a hater of those whom all Christians hate . . . a true . . . Professor Hellstrom awaited them in his office. Mr. Landry approved of him at once. The office looked like a monk’s cell. There was no desk, only a table, three chairs, and a blackboard covered with that peculiar arcana of the physicist which had shaken the world more profoundly than all the pother of Hegel, the ranting of Marx. Young Fourier was amazingly subdued as they entered the office. He held Professor Hellstrom’s hand for a long moment. –I . . . never thought . . . to meet you, sir . . . Hellstrorn was a man of middle height, deeply tanned, his eyes almost hidden by thick glasses. He smiled broadly. –You do physics, son? –I did . . . in college. Enough to know that . . . nothing is like it was before you . . . –I ain’t Einstein, son. Just an old East Texas boy who got through Sam Houston State in math . . . – . . . and shared a Nobel prize for tensor analysis of photon vectors. –I should have been a metaphysician, the professor laughed. –You are, Fourier said, and subsided. Mr. Landry felt uncomfortable. He did not grudge Fourier his knowledge, his capacity to evaluate, however crudely, the work of another. He only wished he had done as much. He said nothing. Only watched the two of them as the professor lit a long slim cigar and offered one to Fourier. –You got one hell of a young lawyer here, Mr. Landry, Hellstrorn said. –You know that? –I didn’t know it, Mr. Landry said honestly. –I’m beginning to. –Don’t a lawyer have to be able to see into things? He’s got to take on as many roles as there are, don’t he? –I think he does. All things to all men. –He knows all you need to know about what I do, Hellstrorn said, leaning his ladderback chair against the wall. –I wish my goddamn genius graduate students knew as much. Hell, Lance knew it. That’s how he walked in here, did himself a Ph.D. in S?matrix theory in a year and half and walked away. Shit, he raped the goddamned department, you know? –Sir? –Tunneling theory. He did some equations that would make God cry for the sheer beauty of them. Take a look at this. Professor Hellstrom slammed his chair to the floor, grabbed up a piece of chalk and a rag, and began to scrawl equations across the chalkboard with one hand as he erased with the other. –This is what he did. Described how the proton world-line has to be calculated outside any dimensional structure, how virtual particle exchange is no sort of exchange at all. Look. More equations. Fourier leaned forward. Mr. Landry sat back. Professor Hellstrom wrote faster and faster. –Sonofa-bitch, take a look at this. –No time coordinates, Fourier said. –That’s because exchange doesn’t happen in time. All determinable dimensions are consistent. Do you understand? –Then, there is no pion exchange in I-space . . . –Wrong. There is. The nucleon is defined variously as proton or neutron depending upon the positionality of the pion. But not dimen-sionally. The exchange is not a physical event. It’s a mental event, and that goddamned Louisiana coonass figured how to set it out . . . –That’s . . . Nobody . . . Fourier began. –Right. It’s all a crock, Hellstrom said. –Except for one little old thing. The sonofabitch set out equations that fit the data. Nobody believes they mean anything. Shit, when I back off, neither do I. But now and then, just once in a while . . . –He joined physical and mental events. In a unified mathematical field. –Yeah, that’s what I think he did. But the bastards in this department . . . bunch of goddamned positivists. Proof doesn’t mean a damned thing to them. Logical rigor, beauty, that damned perfection of something that works straight out, upside down, or sideways–they don’t give a damn. Listen, if I hadn’t had that damned piece of gold from Stockholm, they’d of told Lance to go take him a degree in astrology . . . The finest mind since Niels Bohr . . . and these dumb bastards . . . They’re looking for the next transuranic element. As if Glenn Seabourg hasn’t given us enough of those damned phantoms. –Do you know where he is? Mr. Landry put in. –We have to find him. –Ain’t that the damnedest thing? Hellstrom winked at Fourier. –All this and a bundle of money, too. Naw, I don’t know. All I know is this damned school had the best mind in thirty years, and all these cretins in physics wanted to do was burn him at the stake. Listen, there’s people in this department would like to put out a contract on Feinmann . . . You don’t know what it’s like. Some of these guys come to colloquiums and quote Einstein: “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” –That’s nonsense, Mr. Landry said. –Of course He does. It’s His universe, isn’t it? Professor Hellstrom sat down at his table. From somewhere he pulled forth a bottle of Jack Daniels. –Youall don’t know what a relief it is to sit down with sensible men. You bet your sweet ass He does. Lance said this cosmos, the choirs of heaven and the furniture of earth, is His entertainment. He whiles away eons in loving play, and this pendant universe shall sum zero, ending like a great prelude and fugue, everything coming out. –Right, Mr. Landry said. –Praise be His name. –Right, Professor Hellstrom repeated. –I tell you this: Lance knew. Physics ain’t just experiment and reasoning any more, you know. It’s . . . something else. Lance used to say go listen to Bach. Put on the Second French Suite for harpischord. Number is all. You remember what Paul Dirac did? Pure mind. Pure insight. Let the goddamned experimentalists fool around in the mud. Kids like to make mud pies. But it’s mind. Pure mind. If I can set out the positron in my mind, if it’s rigorously correct, if it’s beautiful . . . then it’s true. Because . . . –What we do in the mind is more than just . . . Fourier began excitedly. –Right, Hellstrom cut him off. –It’s the only truth. The world is a place we have in the mind . . . the only world there is. Lance knew. The last time he came by, he told me. He said, I have put down the darkness. I mean to bring the light. I am the one who stands . . . –Is there somewhere we might look for him? Mr. Landry asked. –Sure, Professor Hellstrom grinned. –Somewhere in the dimensional structure of our world. He hasn’t figured out yet how to be free of it. In his mind he knows . . . but . . . –Yes? –He’s still made of meat. But if anyone can break free, he’s the one. Lance is . . . he understands . . . They walked back the way they had come then. It was close to noon. Students poured out of the classroom buildings, and they saw workmen putting up audio equipment near the stairs of the administration building. Blacks with absurd hairdos, intense young men with thick glasses, women with broad shoulders, all were gathered watching grimly as the loudspeakers were set in place. Down toward the end of the walk, where Telegraph Avenue struck the purlieus of the campus, half a dozen pushcarts had drawn up, and students were buying hot dogs, burritos, or brown rice with sambals from hairy proprietors. Mr. Landry and Fourier chose the brown rice, a health food, according to the placard on the side of the cart. It was nice and strong and they put soy sauce on it and ate it with chopsticks, squatting there at the mouth of Telegraph, looking down its length in the glare of sun from a cloudless sky, able to see almost a mile, utterly unlike the humid Louisiana noontime when clouds were building toward thunderheads and the moisture spread a haze over everything not immediate and close at hand. As they ate, a man came out and placed a box on the pavement close to them. He was the epitome of rednecks. Fourier shook his head and Mr. Landry watched him closely. They wondered if he could be from California with that red hair, that face like a side of aged beef covered with freckles. As they watched, students began to gather around, laughing, speaking to him in good humor. –Hey, Hubert, where you at? What’s the good news, Hubert? The man smiled back at them, drew some of them close and spoke to them earnestly. From under his nylon jacket he drew a tattered book, struck it with his hand, driving home some point he deemed important. –Must have stolen it from the Gideons, young Fourier observed. –See? –He looks like someone from Shreveport, Mr. Landry said. –Or Plain Dealing. Or Oil City. –He’s fixing to preach, Mr. Landry, young Fourier said. Mr. Landry rose to his feet, aware for the first time that he had been sitting on the grass in his business suit. With his Dobbs hat on. Something in the air, he thought. Maybe if we could just get all these poor devils to Texas, they’d be all right. Maybe they ought to declare California unfit for human habitation. He was dusting pollen and grass off his pants when he heard, over Hubert’s breathless, excited nasal drone, another round of applause. He looked up to see another box being placed on the pavement some ten or fifteen feet from where Hubert was preaching. But the young man setting up the box was astonishing. He was tall, hair long and twisted in contorted bundles like the locks of a gorgon. His face bore an unchanging expression somehow both sneer and triumphant smile at once. He wore a set of evening dress clothes, complete with white tie and tails, so old as to have lost its smooth blackness and turned a dark green, the color of patina on an ancient coin. He wore a top hat and a long cloak of a hue not quite matching the suit. His formal shirt was filthy, and in place of cuff links Mr. Landry saw he had twisted paperclips to hold his cuffs together. He worked with feverish speed. When the box was set up, he draped it with a piece of seedy scarlet velvet. Then, down on his hands and knees, he scratched out a pentagram with a piece of charcoal, placing indecipherable initials in the five points of the star. –I don’t believe it, young Fourier was saying. –Do you believe it? –I’m looking at it, Mr. Landry said. –I guess I have to believe it. By then, Hubert had noticed the new arrival. He stopped in mid-sentence and watched the young man jump to the top of the box, lift his arms above his head, and scream out in a voice of amazing volume and power, –Satanas diabolus, here in the blaze of noonday, here at the end of the Western world, come to us, bless us, send us your power and confusion, grant us chaos, and slaughter us all–dead, dead, dead. . . . Cheers from some of the students who had been listening to Hubert, and who now moved to encircle the tall boy. He swirled his cape, twisted his body, and uttered short, piercing squeals like those of a trapped bat –Some prayer, Fourier observed. –How the hell can you get an audience with stuff like that? Who wants to die? –O God of Israel, God of Abraham and David, cast down the infidel, the unbeliever, Hubert intoned as if it was a formula he had used often before. The young man turned on him, laughing exultantly. –That’s him, he howled. –You invoke him, too. The one you call God is Satanas, creator of the world, enemy of the pleroma, hater of the uncreated . . . –O God of Moses. Hubert began. –God of Moses, the young man echoed, –send us the doom reserved for the gentiles. Let us know of you by way of your judgment on us. O God of the festivals and lights, God of the popes and emperors, God whose madness and cruelty is the model for all mankind, God whose whores and pathics are everywhere, God who crucified him who came, the New Anthropos–bless the tongue of this prophet, and let his mouth run with blood. Teach him blasphemy, and show him how to kill. . . . Fourier had been speaking to a long?haired girl standing nearby. –She says it goes on like this almost every day. She says last Good Friday was something else. . . . The nut in the tuxedo was crying out for the death of Anthropos, whoever the hell that is, and Hubert was crying for the blessing of innocence in the blood of the lamb. Said it started to rain, and Hubert called it grace. The other nut called it blood. Hubert paused until his antagonist at last ran out of breath. –I tell you this, he said. –I hope the Lord burns your rotten ass for a thousand years, that’s what I hope . . . you goddamn commanist. . . . The students booed. Fair play for the devil. The Satanist crowed triumphantly. –You see, brothers, he curses his own God. . . . –Jesus and the Holy Spirit, put him down, Hubert howled. –Send him down to suffer with youall’s enemies . . . enemies . . . –Jesus is a joke, the young man shouted back. –Hey, young Fourier said, turning toward Mr. Landry just in time to see him move toward the box the cloaked young man was standing on and, with a single hard kick, upend him, sending him sprawling into the rice cart, overturning it too and causing confusion among the scattered long?haired students. –Go it, Hubert yelled. –See, the Lord answers; the Lord provides; now don’t he? Young Fourier pushed two haltered sunbleached blonds aside, grabbed Mr. Landry, and began walking rapidly across the street, down Telegraph, toward Dwight Way. –I want one of them big hot dogs down the street, he said in a controlled conversational tone. –That miserable bastard, Mr. Landry said, to the astonishment of Fourier, –taking our Lord’s name in vain. –Well, Fourier said, his pace increasing, –I know what you mean, sir. Bunch of perverts . . . whole state full of ’em. The perverts, at last having gathered themselves together, headed out behind the young man. His cloak was befouled with rice, and behind him, looming like an omen, was Hubert singing out praise for him who had brought the godless low and walked in grace before his God. –Listen, we could let that hot dog go. I mean, we got a lot of places to go. . . . –Go with God, Hubert cried after them, eyes and arms aimed heavenward. The young man in the cloak and those who followed had stopped now, as if the love of evil caused short?windedness. –Yes, when he came out of the swamp, when he came here, he was just wanting everything, wanting to get shut of whatever it was back there. He said that in July all over the island when the peppers bloomed you could smell the heat, smell the mud, the rot in the swamps. It was a paradise of heat and moisture, no matter what way you turned. Birds, egrets–what he called water turkeys, gulls. The sky full if you shouted across the water. Listen, I don’t know. All I know is what he told me. What do I know about all that swamp crap? He told me that in the evening he would go down to the water and watch the bugs rising, the fish hitting at them, the moonflowers opening for their single night of blooming, the birds calling out of sleep, as if even having wings was no caution against bad dreams. And the nutria and the muskrats and the snakes. Oh Christ, the whole island was alive. The soil, the water, the trees, the plants in the bayous–there wasn’t anything at rest. And he was alone in the middle of that, his father had gone down, his mother too, and that old man not caring about anything but sending the message on. What message? Oh, God only knows. Some kind of crazy Southern thing. How can I tell you? You ought to know. You’re from it, both of you, aren’t you? Anyhow, we met at Gillie’s the first night. Gillie the head. From Charleston or Atlanta. Working in physics till they caught him standing on line in front of the accelerator. No hair after that. Eyes almost gone. Had gone into the rad lab on an acid trip, looking for the substrate, the Boundless from which all arises and to which all returns. His fingers and toes started to go later. Something was wrong with the blood, so he couldn’t even play lead anymore, only slap out rhythm. Nothing but nubs, see. But Gillie told him it was worth it, that he’d seen the God of Dirac and all his works. Jesus, I should have known right then, you know? But we stayed, listening to Gillie and that funny spade broad who read him I Ching and the Journal of Physical Letters everyday. She was juju. Came from some godforsaken island, Haiti, Martinique. Someplace where they do magic, you know. When the pain started making Gillie scream and even smack didn’t help, she’d whisper to him and he’d laugh and they’d go into some dance. She called it smoke trance. Said she could bring back the dead with it, that they’d be zombies, but that was all right because all the whites she knew were already zombies, though she couldn’t figure out how since nobody but her knew the smoke trance. Said she could keep Gillie alive, even with all those pieces of forever lodged in him. What? Yeah, the radiation. It was tomorrow that came out of the accelerator. Said it was wrong to rush things up like that, make them come before their time, and that’s why they hurt us when we conjured them. Gillie used to argue with her, said we needed to get on. She’d say, all in good time, fool. They know about good time all over this prison, man. So when we left Gillie’s, it was almost dawn. You want to go to my place, I said, till you find a place. Naw, he said. Here’s what I want you to do. Take me to the ocean. I want to see it when the first light comes. It’s not much, I said. The sun comes up on the other side. You can only see sunset on this ocean. He laughed, and we got in his Land Rover, this big thing like a jeep full of every kind of crap you can imagine. Books, microfilms and a reader, clothes, bottles of stuff, tools, cooking gear, a guitar, but mainly books. Gillie said he would be a great physicist, only why bother, there was shorter ways. But we drove across the Golden Gate into Marin County and found this place, so when the sun rose, and the fog started burning off, he could see it spreading out, mile after mile, to the horizon. I never seen a ocean before, he said. Then he kind of looked all around. It ain’t much, he said. I expected . . . something. It’s only the biggest ocean in the world, I said. Yeah, I know, he told me. Ain’t that a goddamn shame. I don’t know; it pissed me off. I come from Sacramento, and this is the best ocean there is. This cracker was putting it down. Why don’t you just go on back where you come from, I asked him. I will later, he said. My end is my beginning. Not now. Want to screw? Yes, I said. Afterward, we got this place and he went to school. You know, he signed up at Cal, and he signed up at the med school. He was taking his M.D. and this Ph.D. in physics and this degree in music theory. He started at five in the morning and kept going till one or two. Maybe four hours sleep. On the weekends he played lead with guys over at the Fillmore unless he was playing viola with the crowd of creeps in the quartet at Grace Church. And there was the poetry he wrote in class, and the music while he was eating lunch. Had this notebook with lined paper and music paper. Carried it to the toilet, kept it beside the water bed, woke up even in that four hours and scrawled things down. Like that for four years. He finished the physics and the music, but they kept giving him trouble in medicine. The residency, when he gave each patient a mantra and told the ones dying that they were and that it was good, that they had been tarrying too long, that it was time to go home. They tried to get rid of him, and he cursed the chief physician, and the next night the big shot smothered in a motel with some nurse, and they found both of them dead and naked with him on top, and they never let Lance forget. Anyhow, you know, we stayed together for four years. Everybody said, Christ, how can you stay with this guy? How can you stay with anyone so long anyhow? Gee, you know, I told them, you never screwed this guy, you never had him. Listen, you know, it was worth it. All we did was drink a lot when he was off, and take the Rover out into the country with Inglenook Cabernet and watch the sun rise and watch it set. I mean, you know, I wanted everything from him. I told him I wanted his baby. You know what? He hit me. He said anybody who wanted a baby was evil, slave of the demiurge, wanting to trap perfection in flesh, to lessen the God, to drive sparks of divinity into the darkness of life. He knocked me down, and he asked me if I was pregnant, and I said yes, and he said, you stinking whore, you’re not even married. How can you be pregnant, you slut, tell me that? I said, what; he said, no. I said, don’t; he said, yes. And he kicked me in the stomach and hit me with a wine bottle and somewhere along the line I zonked out, and later when I woke up, we were at Gillie’s, and his woman was leaning over me and I wasn’t pregnant anymore. She said, you were sick, but now you’re well. Praise Lancelot, because he knows. Praise the Great Lord who hates all ills and cures us from the sickness of life. You know what? He took me to this real cool apartment, this place near the bay, and he left this envelope and kissed me and said he couldn’t take any more chances, that I had bad ways, and anyhow, he was movin’ on. I said, no, you know. What will I do? You’re weak, he said, you’ll do just fine. Bye?bye. I cried for a long time, and I bled a lot, but later, when I got sober or whatever you get, I looked in the envelope and there was ten thousand dollars and a year’s lease for the apartment in it. So I said, oh shit, it’s all over anyhow, you know, and I called Kip Mendosa, and I said, hey Kippy, listen, you always dug me, you wanted me, huh? Come on to this groovy place and listen, get me a couple of bags huh? No, I know I never did. But now I want to, okay? Yeah, yeah, I can learn anything you know. Living is so bad, really, huh? Really. And I only saw him once. Saw him with some woman at the concert down in the canyon. In Strawberry Canyon. Mechanix Illustrated Celestial Dragon Dong, you know? His hair was real long, tied back. He had all these people with him, and the chick, you know, it made me want to hurt him real bad. Because she was pregnant, real pregnant, and hanging on him, you know, and he liked it. Even across half the canyon, I could tell, really. You know? It was evening again and Fourier was watching a waitress in Japanese costume as she walked quickly and gracefully toward the table, a huge tray balanced on her shoulder. It was dark now, and they sat, the three of them, in a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. – . . . the first time, it was something about drugs. I’ve got it here. Lieutenant Raphael riffled through pages in a file he had brought with him. –We had a snitch lay out a little trip ol’ Lance had in mind. Down to Mexico in the Rover, and back with ten or fifteen kilos of hash. He was going the back way, the snitch said, across the desert, up through the Superstitions till just above the border. –Did you . . . ? Mr. Landry let the rest of his question hang, as if he didn’t want the answer. Fourier’s attention wandered. The Japanese waitress set out raw fish and sauce before him. He began to eat, his eyes holding hers. She was very beautiful, her expression smooth and cheerful, enameled in place like her hair. Fourier wondered what it would be like to make love to a woman so perfect, so complete. Nothing was perfect or complete where he came from. It was wild and half made up, mad with growth, unkempt. As she finished, smiled, and turned away, he wondered if she was what civilization meant. –Oh, we went after him. The whole business. Men everywhere, choppers, close cooperation with the Mexicans. You name it . . . – . . .? –The sonofabitch drove right through us. We never saw the Rover, and the next night they found the snitch next to the fence at the San Diego naval base with his throat cut and a Tarot card tucked into his pocket, the hanged man. The word was, hash dropped nine dollars a cut that day. –The snitch, Mr. Landry began. –Did you ever . . . ? –Very seriously dead; not a clue. The hanged man, Raphael said. –Seemed unnecessary. Editorial comment. Raphael pitched into his fish. –The next time was that business at the Four Square Gospel Tabernacle. I saw him that time. Hell, I heard him. They broke up, you know. –The woman he was with . . . ? –Huh. There wasn’t a woman then. Naw, she turned up later. It was the tabernacle that broke up. It seems he came in one Sunday, and the preacher asked for a witness. So your boy witnessed. Held forth from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon. By seven o’clock, they had a new church. Church of the Living Fire. When the preacher locked up that night, all he had left was the building, and a few old Four Squares who couldn’t hear a different drum if you pounded it with a barge pole. There was some trouble about the building, and that’s how we got involved. –You heard him . . . preach? –I guess that’s what you call it. He talked and they listened. –What’d he preach about? Fourier asked, his attention drifting back. –I mean, I thought he was . . . some kind of hippy. –Not that night. Naw, he had on a suit, and his hair was cut short. Preached on the last things. –Last things, Mr. Landry repeated, thinking for no reason of a terrace cool and pure in the rain. –Last things, Raphael repeated, and fell silent. The waitress brought their main courses, fluffy shrimp tempura, sukiyaki. –He said what had been, and what would be. He told us from whence we were flung and where we’re going, what we were and what we’re going to be. He . . . started to . . . He paused, chopsticks suspended, eyes distant. –He said a lot of crap, Raphael finished shortly. –Impressed the peasants, that was all. At the end of the meal, the waitress brought green tea. They sipped it slowly, as if it were a ceremony of their own. –The last time, it was just an accident. The emergency room of the university hospital. We had a cop with a magnum slug through his lungs. He was spitting blood, and somebody called his wife down in Richmond, and I was holding his hand, and the doctor in the emergency room was working over him, and I heard him say, he’s going to make it. The slug was AP, not a wadcutter. Nobody knows how to do anything anymore. And I looked up and it was Lance, and I damned near passed out, because you get used to seeing certain people in certain places, and this bastard you see everywhere. He looked at me and said, “Not to worry, cher; this one ain’t ready to leave yet.” I started to say something, but they came to take Alec to surgery, and I had to go, and I saw your boy kind of dancing down the corridor with his stethoscope waving, singing something like, Goodbye, Joe, me gotta go, me-o, my-o . . . Outside, they could hear thunder over in the county. The windows of the restaurant began to mist with rain. –Did the cop . . . Fourier began. –Oh yeah, Raphael said. –Fine as wine. Got well, left the force. Works at City Lights Books. Reads poetry. Laid down his sword. Police shrink called it post-traumatic stress neurosis. Wow. Goodbye, Joe . . . Mr. Landry gaped at the check, pushed it toward Fourier, who set his gold American Express card on top of it. The waitress’s smile enlarged, as she moved away. –Is Lance . . . I mean, do they want him . . . now? Mr. Landry asked Raphael. Raphael studied Mr. Landry for a moment. –I don’t know, he said. –I don’t. Even if I did, I don’t know how hard I’d look. Alec and I . . . were tight. But, down in Daly City . . . aw hell, it doesn’t mean anything. There are so many spooks in this town that anything that gets done is gonna get done twice. –What? Fourier asked. –It might be a . . . lead. Raphael shrugged. –Down there, they had a bad killing. Bunch of heads. One girl cut up. They found it in her hand. –What? Fourier asked again. –Tarot, Raphael said. –The hanged man. –If they had a cathedral, like Notre Dame or something like that, I’d look for him there, Fourier was saying. It was the next day, cool and clearing. The radio claimed there would be rain later. They sat on the terrace of the student union, looking out over the campus, wondering where to go next. –Or an opera house, Fourier finished. –I think it’s time we went home, Mr. Landry said. In fact, it was not the failure to find Lance Boudreaux III that depressed him. It was California. In its beauty, its almost theatrical perfection, it made him sad. It is finished, he thought. There isn’t anything to be done here. California is the reward for having trekked across America, across Texas and Arizona, or from Missouri and Kansas, through Colorado. All the anguish, the loneliness, the dry?blazing days and chill nights sprawled out across the continent. Came here, from New England in the 1840s, from Tennessee and Alabama in the late 1860s, from Oklahoma and Nebraska in the 1930s. The weather was never extreme. The people smiled. The vegetation was never wild, not like the kudzu and wisteria in Louisiana that grew everywhere, on houses, fences, weighing down young trees and clogging storm drains. Lance Boudreaux had left the Island and had found his way here, where the sun was pale, and the breeze cold and damp from the Pacific. Let him stay here and freeze, Mr. Landry thought. I should go home. Maybe he belongs here now. Maybe this is his country. –Christ, Fourier said. Mr. Landry looked up to see a long?haired girl, slim and lovely, walking across the terrace, a big German shepherd on a leash behind her. She was naked above the waist except for an unbuttoned leather vest. She paused, looked around, and saw Fourier and Mr. Landry staring at her. She walked over to the table and smiled. –Are you the lawyers looking for Lance? Mr. Landry stood up, almost bowing. –Boudreaux . . . ? –Ummm. Somebody said . . . you’ve got something for him. –We represent the estate of his grandfather who . . . – . . . kicked . . . ? –Ummm. Yes. Gone now. Leaving only . . . –Lance. How much? Fourier grinned at her. –Don’t ask, honey. You wouldn’t believe it. Mr. Landry frowned. –A substantial sum, he said. –Do you know . . .? –Ummm. Might. But I don’t know you. –What’s the difference? Fourier asked. –Narrow-minded people, the girl said. Her smile was lovely. She had a flower over her ear, tucked in her pale hair. –There are people, you know, people who don’t like Lance. Who want to hurt us . . . him. –We have certain papers, Mr. Landry began again. –Authentic acts . . . –Wow, the girl said, leaning forward, shoulders back. Time stopped for Mr. Landry. Her breasts opened that same cool garden in his heart. Twilight came, and he felt a catch in his throat. He had not seen such things in so long. –Wow, authentic . . . that’s what Lance just loves. . . . He says you’ve got to feel it and then do it. . . . –Do what? Fourier asked, his eyes fixed not on hers, but down below. –Anything, she said. –Any old thing at all. I’m Miz Minerva. You can call me Min . . . . –Can you take us . . . ? Mr. Landry asked, coming back from another place. –Ummm. Gimme your name, and I’ll let you know. I got to tell Lance who it is. . . . Does he know you? I mean, really know you? –No, Mr. Landry said. –No, I don’t think so. But I knew his father and his mother. I knew his grandfather. –Gee, Min said. –I never knew my father. I don’t know if I even had a grandfather. –Everybody has a grandfather, Fourier told her. –Not authentically, Min said. –Not so they notice it. I don’t even know where my father came from. I mean, he could have been from Tanzania . . . –I doubt it, Fourier said dryly, moving his chair closer to Min’s, his eyes scuttling about her like small animals. –Christ, I don’t even know anybody who ever knew their grandfather. In California . . . I mean, nobody in California. –Yes, Mr. Landry said gently, –California . . . –Okay, listen, Min said, seeming to lose interest in the talk. –I got to go now. I’ll get back to you, huh? –The Carleton Hotel, Fourier said. –You know? –Oh yeah. See you . . . She rose, one last movement of her shoulders leaving silence in her wake. Mr. Landry and Fourier stared at her as she left, the shepherd padding behind her. Mr. Landry finished his coffee. Fourier forgot his. Min turned as she reached the broad walk that led to Telegraph Avenue. –See you . . . They waited for two days, going no farther from the hotel than it took to eat, and even then leaving word and money with the clerk to pay street people to find them if a call should come from Min. On the third evening, they were eating at Robbie’s. A dollar and a quarter for all the chop suey and fried rice you could eat. Cafeteria style. Mr. Landry used his silverware. Fourier had managed to learn his chopsticks in the time he had been there. Someone on the street was singing “Roll Over, Beethoven” at the top of his lungs. A police car passed, lights blinking, but no siren. Silent running. Fourier looked up. Satan’s messenger was there. He held his top hat in his hand, turning the rim rapidly in his dirt?encrusted hands. He stared down at Mr. Landry, who paid him no mind, eating his chop suey slowly, turning the bean sprouts around the fork, as if it were spaghetti. His eyes were light, a peculiar green, and he paid no mind to Fourier. –You are the one, he said portentously, flicking his cloak about him. –You are the one . . . Mr. Landry looked up from his meal. –I doubt it, he said. –Get thee behind me, beast. And let Him who saved the world send thee down to darkness . . . forever. . . The Satanist backed away. –Forever . . . ? Mr. Landry gave him a wintry smile. –For as long as there is . . . –He sent me for you. He says you’re supposed to come with me. –Shit, Fourier blurted out. –Who sent you? –The One Who Stands. He says for you to come. . . . Fourier looked at Mr. Landry. –I think I ought to whip up on this bastard, he said. Mr. Landry shook his head. –You mean Lance Boudreaux? he asked. –That is one of his manifestations, the Satanist said. –Now is the time. He could pass on at any moment. –Oh, bullshit, Fourier said, pushing his chair back, his brow furrowed. Mr. Landry saw him for the first time as a country man, unhappy in the presence of evil, dejected in the presence of sin. Beyond his education, Fourier hated baseness for its own sake, and for the first time, Mr. Landry was reconciled to him. He reached out and touched Fourier’s arm. –Louis, let it alone. We have to finish this. They started to rise together, Fourier’s eyes wide, having heard for the first time his own Christian name in Mr. Landry’s mouth. –Sure, yes sir. Right. In the street, there was a Volkswagen van parked. It was covered with symbols: pentagrams, peculiar Latin quotations, a dragon with its tail in its mouth, an incredible creature possessing sexual organs both male and female, signs of the zodiac, the names of forgotten gods, Babylonian, Sumerian, Egyptian, and across the front, something with wings, terrible claws, and a great gaping scarlet emptiness where otherwise a face might be. Fourier looked at Mr. Landry as the side door slid open. Mr. Landry was about to nod when a boy dressed in work clothes with a necklace of seashells and a gold stud through his nostril twitched his sleeve. –From the hotel, he said, and Mr. Landry, forgetting he had left money with the clerk, handed him two dollars as he passed the paper over. On it was written in a small neat hand the words, “Raphael has something you need to know.” –The perfect master is waiting, the Satanist said. –Hey, Fourier asked him, –you reckon Minerva is gonna be . . . wherever it is we’re going? –She is Helena, the Satanist whispered, –the great mother. She follows the Lance . . . –She is one great mother, Fourier said. Then he looked at Mr. Landry. –A message from Min? –No, Mr. Landry said, thinking whether to take time for a call or wait until later, until he had seen Lance Boudreaux III and gotten his business done. –The time is now, the Satanist rasped, prodding Mr. Landry in the ribs. –Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you . . . Mr. Landry followed Fourier into the van. As the Satanist reached out to slide the door shut, Mr. Landry stared out into the darkness at him. –I won’t, he said. –And when this business is properly done, I mean to whip your evil ass. As the door slid shut, the last two things Mr. Landry noticed were the leer of the Adversary, and the look of utter astonishment on the face of young Fourier. It was somewhere in the mountains behind the university near Strawberry Canyon as far as they could tell. The inside of the van was even more bizarre than the outside. In there, painted in some luminescent pigment on plastic was a three?panel mural of a Black Mass. The scene was set in the dark center of a forest, like the Schwartzwald or the Ardennes. There was a crescent moon standing high above the trees, luminous clouds bathed in moon rays giving the appearance of motion. Down below, in a clearing and among the gnarled leafless trees, figures of strange shapes moved toward a central place where there stood a circle of stone, and in its midst, an altar upon which lay a beautiful blond woman who looked astonishingly like Minerva, her body nude, full breasts pointed toward the dark skies, her eyes open, fearless, staring upward at a presence poised above, with a body formless as shadow and the lurid bearded face of a man. The thing poised there held in a claw a piece of flint or granite aimed not at her heart, but at her belly, full, as if with child. There was an understanding between them, the demon above, the demon below. Mr. Landry saw Fourier shiver, his mouth twisted in disgust. Fourier had come to California curious. He was be-yond that now. They drove. The van turned this way and that, moved up into the hills past silent houses dark in the night. As they rose higher, the fog began, that same fog that Mr. Landry had seen before, coming in from the Pacific slowly in the late afternoon before the sun faded behind it, inundating the Golden Gate bridge, filling the bay. It seemed to cloak the van now, to swathe it and remove it from the town below or the mountains around. The Satanist sat in the front passenger seat. The driver beside him was hairless, his head and neck thick and bare. As he drove, Mr. Landry heard him breathe. It sounded as if he were snorting, as if he were angry or disgusted. He shifted gears violently, making the van jump as it slewed around the tight curves. The Satanist’s hair was matted, as it lay in long greasy coils on the threadbare, filthy collar of his cloak. Mr. Landry noticed that his own jaw was tight, so tight that he could not swallow. He had never been so close, staring ahead at someone he wanted to kill. It had grown on him slowly. At the campus, watching the dark cloak whirl, at the Chinese cafeteria, staring, claiming. To be a lawyer was to know that evil comes no harder than words or a turning away. The Satanist was a comic figure–no, rather he would be in the South. In Breauxville or New Orleans, his garb, his words would draw a crowd of puzzled yokels, black and white, perhaps a Baptist or a Witness who would frown and listen, and after a few amazed moments, swing, lash out and knock him down in front of the loungers and weekend shoppers while the laughter welled up all around. But here, somehow he had become real. As if the worship of death, sickness, disease of the soul, the Great Refusal, was the other face of a coin that stood on edge across the continent, Janus-like, transposing realities. What was real in the South was fantasy here; what was real in California was a joke down South. To cross a desert is to pass through a door. Mr. Landry closed his eyes. He was there again, and his jaw lost its tension. The music was a fantasy, he thought. How right. He could not tell whether he was thinking or remembering. Something of Telemann. Quick, mercurial, terse. He felt a trace of cool wind across his face. –Time to go in, he said aloud. –What? Fourier said, a little too loudly, his voice piercing in the confines of the van. The Satanist twisted his head around. The driver snorted. –Nothing, Mr. Landry said quickly, realizing that the breeze he had felt was not off the Mississippi or Lake Pontchartrain. The Satanist had opened his window and was lighting a thick cigarette wrapped in brown paper. –You all right? Fourier asked Mr. Landry in a whisper. –Is it getting to you? Mr. Landry smiled. –Fine, he said. One of the results of aging in the law is that you are not easily gotten to. By the time you have been at it thirty or forty years, you have done so many things no one should have to do that something has drained out of you, to be replaced with the law, like a creature trapped in mud which is hard pressed for a long, long time, leaching away the soft parts, making everything over. In stone. He remembered going to Houston to identify that woman who had been Lance Boudreaux III’s mother. She lay nude on a chrome shelf that slid out of a wall. He did not recognize her face. It was distant, cool, wholly at peace. He had never known her that way. It was the wedding ring, bitten deep into the flesh of her finger, that he knew. He wondered why she had not had it cut off, sold it, or thrown it away. What had she loved, what hated? He took her back to be buried on the Island. The Old Man had little ceremony. One evening the coffin arrived, the next morning it was buried next to the gravestone with Lance Boudreaux II carved upon it, underneath which there was nothing. Because nothing had been sent home. Because there had been nothing to send. That had not mattered to the Old Man. Because almost nothing mattered to him. Except that he had a fine sense of symmetry, and there in less than an acre were all those who had gone before, or at least a stone to note their having been. And a stone for a dead son disintegrated over Romania. And the body of a woman who would rather have been dumped in the landfill of East New Orleans than be laid to eternal rest in that soil just offshore, under the eyes of that old man. –Where, Mr. Landry had asked, –is Lance? –In school, the old man had said, drawing his pipe, striking it on a stone named for some anonymous Didier who had died in this place, whose relation to it was not even known to those whose forebears had lived here a hundred years. –Nothing. No need . . . Mr. Landry frowned, trying to remember what his fee had been for bringing her home. It had been high. He charged the Old Man not simply on the difficulty or importance of the matter, but on whether he wanted to do it or not. He had not wanted to. Had not wanted to look upon her dead face, nor see to it that she was brought in death to the place she had fled in life. Not because he honored her unspoken wish, or even felt he should. She was Lance II’s chief mistake, compared to which crashing his fighter was no more than a minor slip. But it seemed cowardly to bring one dead to a place she would not have willingly come to in life. It had not been the first time he had done such a thing–indisputably from cowardice that other time–and so he charged a great deal for his bad conscience. It had not helped at all. The van skidded to a stop, the motor died, and in the silence following, all he could hear was the snorting of the bald driver whose face he had not even seen. No one moved for a long moment. Outside, the fog was so thick that Mr. Landry could see nothing. There was only the weird glow from the black lights which illuminated the murals. Then, almost without motion, the Satanist opened the door and stepped outside. He disappeared into the fog, but they could hear him breaking underbrush, crushing leaves, then his footsteps sounded crisply, as if on brick or flagstone. –Come on, he called from the fog. –Come on. Fourier reached over and opened the sliding door of the van. Tendrils of fog and the chill night air invaded, making the inside like the outside, the outside like the inside. Mr. Landry stepped out gingerly and waited for Fourier whose arm he took. Not because Fourier could see any better than he, but because Fourier could stand a broken leg better. Young legs mend. They should shoot old men with broken legs. They mended no better than horses. –Why won’t you come on? the Satanist’s voice came from the darkness. –He waits. Fourier cursed under his breath. –He can goddamn well wait. Mr. Landry clucked at him. –You sound like you belong here. He could hear Fourier’s breath catch. –No sir, no way. These are not my people. They turned a corner or topped a hill. Even later, trying to reconstruct that moment, they could remember only that one moment they were in darkness, the next in light. There were eucalyptus trees and Pacific cypress all around, a fountain in the center of a Spanish patio illuminated softly by hidden lights. To their left there was a glass table, beyond French doors soft light, and piano music from within. It was Mr. Landry’s turn to gasp. He almost staggered, reached out to steady himself against a tree trunk. He closed his eyes and listened. The Second French Suite. She had played it when she was very happy, very sure of herself. The stone in him began to melt. There were still soft parts. He began to move toward the open French doors. The fog was thicker now, and he felt its moisture condensing on his face. –Whoa, Fourier said, catching his arm. –Wait for me. As they reached the door, the music stopped, and he could hear the rustle of pages turning. He stepped through the door and brought himself to look to the left, where the piano was, where it should be. There was nothing but a large chair, an ottoman, and a low table where a pipe smoked in a marble ashtray. He turned back, confused. Across the room, there was music again. Something from Haydn, a sonata. –Hi, Minerva said, her fingers moving quickly across the keyboard. She wore a long sari of some peculiar shade between blue and green. –Uh, hi, Fourier began, but the volume of the music suddenly rose, and its character changed. It was the “March of the Meistersinger.” Fourier turned, and across the room, he saw Lance Boudreaux III. Mr. Landry shook his head to rid it of the pain of remembering. The man coming into the room had long hair, a beard, and a long sarape. He was tall, broad, his belly beginning to sag. There was a long scar that began on his temple and vanished into the beard. He was smiling, and he swept across the bare wooden floor toward Fourier. –The lawyer, he said. –You’re the lawyer from down there. His voice was low and smooth, and it filled the room, covering the piano’s last notes, the snuffling of the driver who stood now at the French doors with the Satanist. Mr. Landry saw his face for the first time. It was sallow and wrinkled. The driver looked as old as Mr. Landry at first glance. His eyes were round and large and deep. His nose was like a beak. He and the Satanist seemed to be waiting for something. Fourier’s eyes were almost as wide as the driver’s. –That’s him, over there, he managed to get out, pointing at Mr. Landry. Lance turned slowly, and Mr. Landry could see him in profile and three-quarter before they stood face to face. He tried to see in any view some semblance, some resonance from the past that would recall the room in the old house on the Island, and the small hunched figure leaning, chin in hands, over a large shabby book. There was nothing. Not a hint. –Uncle René, Lance Boudreaux said. His smile was a light source. –You came all the way here . . . to see me. All the way out . . . here. –Lance, Mr. Landry answered, automatically extending his hand. Lance Boudreaux took it in both of his. His fleshy face, handsome, deepset dark eyes, was aglow with unfeigned pleasure. –So long, Lance said. –What? Almost fifteen years now. –Nearer twenty. Lance Boudreaux’s smile broadened. He took Mr. Landry’s arm and steered him toward a rough Mexican-style staircase. –No, he said softly, as they began to climb the stairs. –That last time . . . you didn’t see me . . . behind the house, in the graveyard. Mr. Landry found himself breathing heavily as they reached the landing. From down below, he could hear Minerva’s playing. Something dark, dominant. A Rachmaninov prelude, he thought. –That day . . . the cemetery . . . but your grandfather said . . . you were in school. They climbed higher, past the second floor, into a small room with heavily timbered, time?darkened stucco walls, but with large high windows that opened the walls to the night. Down below, the lights of the bay area curved like a necklace from Richmond down to San Jose, with San Francisco a shining pendant obscured and concealed by waves of fog. They paused there, silently watching the festival of lights. Lance Bourdreaux poured brandy into two large snifters. He and Mr. Landry drank. Then he poured again. –No. In the magnolia, the great big one. Not thirty feet away. I could hear . . . Lance Boudreaux fell silent, his eyes clouding. –Nothing. No need. He didn’t even want me to see her then. Mr. Landry threw down his brandy and poured another. The music from below, like the distant lights, was faint, shuddering over the distance from its source. This place, the very state itself, was cold as a tomb when darkness came. Brandy was what was wanted. –But I did . . . –Did what? –I saw her. When youall were gone. When it was dark. Then she was mine. I had my tools, the archaeological tools. The ones he bought me when I said I wanted to go with her and he said, no, you can’t do that, but you can go anywhere else, and I said all right, the Yucatan, thinking that will do it, he’ll let me go with her, and if I do, she’ll come to love me. But he sent me down there. Honest to God. Bought all the stuff, hired guides, a campsite, maps from the Center for Mesoamerican Studies. That was when I realized that you could do anything, or even stop any-thing, if you had the money and laid it on the barrelhead. You remember Hamilton, the big nigger? The one who ran the sheds and killed that little Frenchman Espagnol who tried to burn the place when he was fired? Sure, you remember. You defended him. You got him off. He took me down there, Hamilton did. We went down and dug and dug. For months. Snakes, spiders the size of your hand, tropical storms. Your skin got to mildewing. But we got down . . . Mixtec, Olmec . . . I have pieces in the National Museum. Where the screen of water falls in the courtyard . . . Lance turned away, still talking. In the semi-darkness, lit only by an enormous menorah, tapers almost as large as paschal candles, each of a different height, Mr. Landry could hardly make him out, could see only his outline against the stars and lights. His voice was no longer the splendid captivating bass it had been below. It was soft, reedy, almost pre-adolescent, and the hurt in it was as palpable as the quick sear of the brandy as it speared the throat. There is a kind of speech that passes between men which seeks to tell, and another kind which aims only to evoke, to establish a thing in another mind free of judgment or consideration. Lance’s speech was of that second kind. Mr. Landry was not a listener. He was a hearer now. He was a familiar singularity from the past, a point in the field of Lance Boudreaux’s recollection, something like a milepost long passed, something to fix those old days amid the flux of these. – . . . when it was dark, I dug down with my tools. The dirt was soft. Down to my own beginning, to my denial. I opened the coffin, and she was still there. I didn’t even recognize her. She was a stranger I might once have walked past in the French Quarter, a face I might have seen in a car passing along Highway 61. Sleeping in Christ, the priest had said just a few hours before. But empirical observation proved that false. She was dead in there. She’d never sleep again. The undertaker’s paste was shrinking, and I could see where . . . the fall. She had fallen a very long way . . . Mr. Landry stared at Lance’s back as he reached for the bottle. He was beginning to listen now. –My God, why . . . ? Lance turned back, but he was paying Mr. Landry no mind even as he took the bottle from Mr. Landry’s hand and poured the large snifter full again. He was not telling Mr. Landry anything. He was living it again. Mr. Landry happened to be present. That was good, because it would not do for just anyone to be present. No, not quite that. More than present: a cause, a reason for the reliving, though not an efficient cause, not a sufficient reason. –Looking very prim. Like she’d never taken a drink, never hired her a dago lover, never done a wrong thing. Like being dead was a cure and answer to everything, like it made everything all right . . . Mr. Landry poured the last of the brandy into his glass. Even before he could raise it to his lips, Lance Boudreaux drew out another from some hidden trove, breached it, and filled his own glass again, then topped up Mr. Landry’s. On the Island, in the Mansion, Mr. Landry suddenly remembered, brandy had been all the hard liquor there was. No bourbon, no scotch, no gin. Courvoisier V.S.O.P., or one had to dip into a bewildering array of vintage wines from France, some dating back to the 1880s. I think I’m getting to be an alcoholic, Mr. Landry thought. I forgot how much I could handle . . . even after she . . . I held together. But this one trip. In the long run, he tried to remember what Keynes had said. In the long run, we succeed . . . at nothing. – . . . said goodbye. Not to her. The hell with her. I just had to see the actual physical source for what I was saying good?bye to. It was the loneliness, the waiting for her at least to come see me between studs, even if she couldn’t do her plain duty, what even a lousy white?trash family like hers must have raised her to do, or there wouldn’t have been any children from them. . . . The brandy had reached Mr. Landry by then. He was distanced from what he saw and heard. The room took on the character of a stage turning slowly above the distant city lights, the faded music below, the wheeling stars. – . . . then I poured in the kerosene and set it off . . . Mr. Landry heard him, but it didn’t matter. He was noticing how the stars looked like reflections of the lights of San Francisco in a profound and darkened pool. – . . . nothing but carbon. How could carbon, a little calcium, and some trace elements have hurt me so much? That’s when I decided to do physics, to do religions, too. Medicine wasn’t going to be enough. Later, years later, each time I practiced medicine, I thought, this is only carbon, some mess of elements you’re patching or adjusting. It will fall again. There’s no truth here. Not at this magnitude . . . Mr. Landry heard, but he was not listening. He lifted his full glass in a silent toast to the half circle of lights down there, to the strains of a muffled Scarlatti sonata which shivered on the crisp California air. The brandy, the music, and the stars were real. The rest was a delusion. Old men suffer those when they have been alone a very long time. – . . . then I put her back. I was done with her. Like those three dago chauffeurs who walked away when they had got whatever it was they wanted from her. More than that. I pushed the archaeological tools in, too. Because I was done with digging, rooting in the earth, the past. Once, when I was small, I had thought to go to Romania, to pay whatever they’d charge to let me dig until I found him . . . So I could look, even if at nothing more than broken bones and bits of khaki cloth. If only that, then that at least. She cured me that night, translated me to physics, to magic. . . . Squinting, Mr. Landry had noticed movement in the grove of trees below, out behind the main house. A man, tiny as an ant, with long hair, came to the side of a large swimming pool. He led a child by the hand. He began to bathe the child in the water. A thin cloud of vapor rose from the pool. Beyond the pool, Mr. Landry saw others. A fire or two outside small tents or shacks apparently thrown together out of plywood and tar paper. The more closely he focused his eyes, the more he could see. Mr. Landry pointed down there. –What . . . ? –Niggers, Lance Boudreaux said quickly. –They’re my niggers. Mr. Landry shook his head. The man and child at the pool were, even at this distance, obviously not black. –But . . . –No, they’re niggers. I scooped ’em up and brought ’em here. Off the roads, out of the alleys. Got some of ’em at the hospital while I worked there. Fair number from jail. Listen, I got a Louisiana state trooper down there youall sent out to find me. But it don’t matter. What you got is just pieces of people. Hands, hearts, brains, guts, all the other things. But not a goddamned one with all of it together. They see me saving ‘em. If I say, work, and bring it all back home to me, they do it. He smiled crookedly. –Now, if I was to say, go kill, ’cause that’s what has to be . . . why, they would. Look at ’em down there. They live like niggers, they think like niggers. They’re my people. They need me . . . and they go out and dance and shuffle and beg in the streets and bring me whatever they get. Nothing held back. I make a nice crop . . . Mr. Landry sat down. Lance Boudreaux opened one of the large windows and stepped out onto a balcony beyond. –See, Uncle René, these people are fellahin. Racked up, burned out. They were clerks or waitresses. They managed filling stations or ran a mini-golf. One of ’em was a computer programmer. Some of ’em were at the university. There’s a few come back from Vietnam with their heads on upside down. Lots of musicians and artists. Writers. I think there’s even a lawyer out there. Couple of doctors. One did five big ones for controlled substances. The other one got ruined with a malpractice suit. Wouldn’t let him operate on a dead goat. But they’re all laid back now. They hang around and take groceries from me and smoke grass I pick up across the bay. Nobody asks ’em anything. Nobody breaks their hearts. They do what I say, and the rest is okay . . . –The one downstairs . . . they’re insane. The one in the dirty cloak thinks you’re God . . . or . . . –Satanas. Yeah, well, they’re probably right. What the hell . . . they never came across anything like me before. Lance Boudreaux turned around unsteadily. He had put aside the snifter and was drinking from the bottle now. His grin was visible through the mass of beard. –Hell, you’ve seen ’em in the streets. Any sonofabitch who can drink a quart of whiskey and still walk, anybody who can make a decision and stick to it. Anybody who can handle that little madonna downstairs–that’s a god. Or a devil. They’re wreckage, Uncle René, zombies. To a zombie, a living man’s a god. To a woman surrounded by freaks, a man who stands is a god. Don’t you take it too serious. People always construct what they need. It don’t have anything to do with you or the people back home. Anyhow, everything is full of gods, remember? Mr. Landry shook his head. He did not remember. Everything is full of pain. Whatever you love is certain to die. Nothing gets better with age. What does it mean for a man to claim he is a god? Is it a way of saying he can’t be hurt any more? –It’s just the Island again, Lance Boudreaux said abstractedly. –Only bigger. The Old Man would love it. He could have taken over California. Nobody leaves me. I’m . . . their life. That’s what he had, isn’t it? He didn’t just live his own life. He lived the Island and every sonofabitch on it. Now he’s dead, and you come for me. He had everything but droit du seigneur, and if he’d wanted those hairy-legged slatterns, he’d of had that too. Mr. Landry found that he had carried his thin briefcase up the stairs with him. He put it down on a dark slate table covered with cunningly wrought symbols, and fanned out a large bundle of legal-sized sheets. –I have the papers, he said, as if he had heard nothing that had gone before. –You must accept the succession. No need for benefit of inventory . . . there were no debts to speak of . . . Lance Boudreaux paid no mind. He went on drinking, talking, staring alternately up at the stars and down at the lights. He paid no mind to the man and child beside the pool who had somehow heard his distant voice and now knelt side by side, arms extended upward toward him. Others around the fires and in the tents and shacks had heard, too, and slowly came through the fog to gather around the pool. –It bothers you, Uncle René, those . . . things I got down there . . . Mr. Landry paused. In court or out, he always paused when what he would say had not been long considered. Words have consequences. –Lancelot, he said at last, and softly, –I am very old and tired, too. This trip, this place–I mean the state–these people cause me great discomfort. I only want to do my duty and go home. . . . –Ah, Lance Boudreaux said as softly. He came back into the room and squatted beside Mr. Landry. –Duty . . . the most sublime word in the English language . . . Mr. Landry looked at him in astonishment, but Lance Boudreaux’s expression behind the dense beard bore no sign, not the slightest, of irony or sardonic intention. –Look out there, Uncle René . . . see ’em coming? They want a look at me. See? It’s my duty . . . they want to see their god . . . Lance stood up, swayed a moment, belched, and stepped back onto the balcony, falling against the rail, recovering. A chill shard of breeze carried back to Mr. Landry the smell of brandy and a strange carnal odor, that which one comes upon in a zoo. By the wolves, by the great cats. He threw up his arms as if to bless them, and the nearly empty bottle of brandy looped upward from his hand and then spiraled down to fall into the pool, troubling the motionless waters. Immediately those below began jumping into the pool to recover the mystery vouchsafed them. –See, Lance Boudreaux said, his voice beginning to blur. –Even if they’re wrong, they won’t be the first . . . Baal, Astarte, Mazda . . . we bring the poor bastards comfort. Just by standing. Look at ’em . . . Mr. Landry arose only a little steadier than Lance. He stepped carefully to the opening where he could see. Down there, the tiny people, garbed in rags and outrageous costumes, were drinking from the bottle, passing it from hand to hand, touching their naked children with the liquor. From behind and below, he could hear the unutterably distant sound of the piano: “Pavane pour une infante defunte,” slow, solemn, each note a threnody. Lance Boudreaux turned, leaned precariously against the rail now, outlined by stars above, lights below. –He . . . left it all . . . to me . . . ? Mr. Landry was still looking down at the pool. It made him sad. Nothing changes. Only appearances. The beast remains what he always was. –What? Yes. There was no one else . . . yes. All of it. Some was always yours under Louisiana law. By representation . . . – . . . ? – . . . your father’s legitim . . . his forced portion . . . –My father? But he . . . –It doesn’t matter. Our law chains the generations together. Through property if nothing else . . . if you should have a child . . . –Ah, Lance Boudreaux muttered, coming inside, almost slamming the door. –You see, they worship wholeness . . . the deaf sob for music, the blind for color and form, the soulless for a movement within that tells them they’re alive, tells them what to do. The Island hurt me. But it took nothing away. . . You’re a god, too . . . Mr. Landry almost smiled. This time he paused only for an instant. –No. Not me . . . –You’re from down there, from home. You’re still whole. You could . . . Mr. Landry did smile, a wretched smile not fit to see. –Become vice-regent of California? No, only the young are gods. And they get cured. One way or the other. He quickly folded up the papers as Lance Boudreaux found still another bottle of brandy. No one would be signing anything tonight. He could not imagine why he had even taken the papers out. It was his opinion that Lancelot Boudreaux III was not of sound mind. If he was to succeed to his grandfather’s estate without a curator, there would be a hearing first. And in Louisiana, not here. God knows not here. No place west of Texas. Perhaps no place west of the Sabine River. Lance Boudreaux did not notice Mr. Landry putting the papers away. He was drinking, talking. Not to Mr. Landry. Not even to himself. – . . . take the sonsofbitches to the Island. Solitude. Isolation. Carbon and a little calcium . . . traces . . . It doesn’t matter so long as you don’t let ’em hurt . . . don’t let ‘em hope. No, hurt . . . Mr. Landry began the long treacherous descent down the unlighted stairs, tottering now and again, hearing the heavy tread of Lance Boudreaux close behind him. It crossed his mind to wonder if Lance was homicidal or simply dotty, taken with the kind of mania, the mild will to one thing so common along St. Charles Avenue and in the quiet old uptown streets where families had lived well over a century, ruminating on the whirlwind which had enwrapped them when Mr. Jefferson bought them from the bourgeois emperor of the French. Quietists who had never heard of Port Royale; Jansenists who supposed they had invented self?denial and punishment; exorcists who used Jack Daniels to put away the business that stalks at noon; ancient feckless magicians living on dividends, who had been taking moderate doses of cocaine since the time it was legally used as an ingredient of Coca Cola. They reached the bottom floor. Mr. Landry saw Fourier seated next to Minerva on the narrow piano bench. The top of her sari was loose and when she leaned forward over the keyboard, Fourier would lean with her. At the French doors, the Satanist and the driver had not moved. Their eyes caught Lance Boudreaux as if they expected instruction or revelation. Minerva was playing one of the Brahms piano sonatas now–no, it was the theme from the Second Piano Quartet. Lance Boudreaux stumbled behind the long ornate bar. Back there, it was dark mirrored panels. The bar top was of black marble with chrome accents. Art deco, they had called it, Mr. Landry remembered. It had gotten nowhere in New Orleans. Only the WPA had made use of it here and there in parks and public buildings. It belonged in California. – . . . forced portion, Lance muttered to himself. –I get that. No matter what. From my father. Listen, he said louder, so that the Satanist and the driver could hear. So that Minerva, Fourier, and Mr. Landry could hear him. –Listen, down South, where the old gods were, where the new gods will arise, they have these laws. Families are big. This is my Uncle René, because when I was too small even to know what an uncle was, that’s what they told me to say. And it’s real, because he never went away. He is an old bastard who brings the law down, who hasn’t got the smoke of life left in him, but he was always there. Like the goddamned statue of the Confederate dead. He never bought a trailer and moved away or had a divorce . . . and now he’s brought me . . . Lance fell forward against the polished black marble bar. –He’s brought me to my . . . kingdom . . . Mr. Landry felt his face turn red. But why should it? This was no court. It was not even Louisiana, and as for whatever it might be that Lance Boudreaux called the smoke of life, he was most surely right. It had drifted away one morning light?years ago on a silent patio in a town across the universe. When the music stopped. –You can’t keep things . . . from the kids, Lance Boudreaux gasped, laughing into his water tumbler of brandy. The Satanist and the driver stared at Lance Boudreaux. Then they stared at Mr. Landry. Then they began to snicker. Quietly at first, then more loudly. The eyes of the driver were wide, insane. He had come close to Mr. Landry now, and there was a rank, sickening stench about him. He was not an old man as he appeared from a distance. He was quite young. But his skin was incredibly wrinkled, his features pinched as if his face had been squeezed in a vise. As they laughed, Lance Boudreaux rose up from his elbows behind the bar. He paused there as if posed against the back bar for photographs to be taken, a wide smile spreading across his bearded face. He nodded his head toward the mirrored shelves behind, raised his eyebrows. The Satanist pointed gleefully, the driver slapped him on the back. Mr. Landry followed their eyes, past the bar, past Lance Boudreaux III, to a shelf of the back bar where, amid bottles of gin and creme de menthe, was a jar containing a thing something like a pig, curled members inward, and which, heedless of gravity, hovered like a tiny dancer, its something like a mouth caught in a permanent leer, unfinished limbs swaying in the cloudy fluid, filled with a faint golden dust composed it seemed of cells of the thing itself. And at the base of the jar there was an irregularly trimmed paper tab posted upon which was written in a neat hand, LANCE ST. C. BOUDREAUX IV. It was then, just as Mr. Landry’s eyes registered the jar, its contents, and its label, that the flat distant emotionless voice seemed to sound within the room itself. –This is the police. You in the house. Throw down your arms. Come out with your hands on your heads. This is the police. You in the house . . . Throw down your arms, Mr. Landry frowned. What is that supposed to mean? Then he saw the guns . . . The driver and the Satanist had M?16s. They had gotten them from behind the bar and were moving toward the French doors. Lance Boudreaux came up from behind the bar with something that looked like a sten gun, except that it had a large round barrel, and an enormous clip below. –This is the appointed time, dogs, Lance Boudreaux shouted. –The beast is here . . . Mr. Landry looked across the room. Minerva was standing beside the piano with a Kalasnikov assault rifle. Fourier was moving back from the piano as Minerva turned to a window, broke it with the barrel of her gun, and fired a burst out across the patio, into the fog. But before the echoes of her fire had died away, the room was annihilated. Mr. Landry dropped from his barstool to the floor. Falling, he heard and saw the striated mirrors behind the bar shatter, the shards of glass flying like shot across the room, as the lamp near the piano exploded into pieces. He could not see Fourier, but even in the darkness he could hear him. –Sonofabitch, gimme a goddamned gun . . . –No, Mr. Landry called out. –Let it be, Fourier . . . let it be. Everything was fine down there for Mr. Landry. The clatter of gunfire did not disturb him. He had closed his eyes, thinking this was God’s will, he would go on here in California. Why not? Why shouldn’t a man die in a foreign place? He was surely justified, being in this artificial hell by way of doing his duty, wasn’t he? Afterward, someone would surely send him home. Above, he heard that rich deep voice so alien that he felt even now he should recognize it. –I am the one who stands. They cannot end this thing we have begun . . . But by then the fire from outside had become incredible. It was as if someone out there were throwing masses of metal into the room. Bullets hit the piano, and Mr. Landry could hear the strange harmony of strings plucked randomly. Another burst raked the bar just above his head, and he heard bottles and glasses breaking. It crossed his mind to wonder if, among the bottles of bourbon, scotch, and gin, that jar had been shattered, its contents poured out on the shelves of the back bar. At the French doors, he could see the driver and the Satanist. The Satanist was standing, firing at random into the fog. The driver knelt, firing too. Suddenly, there was light, and following it, another shattering blast of fire. Mr. Landry saw the Satanist fall, a mist of blood and flesh spraying from him. The cloak flew up, and Mr. Landry could see the dirty starched shirt shatter, pieces of it flying away as the Satanist stumbled backward, his voice suddenly louder than the gunshots. –Diabolus . . . Dominus . . . Then it was quiet again, and the Satanist lay sprawled backward, part of his head gone, his body riddled. Thank God, Mr. Landry thought. So far, so good. –Fourier, Mr. Landry called out. –Sir, Mr. Landry heard from across the room. –Stay down, you hear? –Yes sir, I do. But Minerva . . . –Hit her one up side her head, Fourier. That’s best. –Yes sir. . . Then there was another burst of fire, and in the midst of it, Mr. Landry saw shadows out on the patio. The driver rose up from the floor, and as he did, there was a brilliant interlock of lights from outside. They fell across the driver, and at that moment there was a stab of flame from outside which quenched itself in the body of the driver who, in the very instant of dying, shouted, –O Unknown Lord . . . As some of the shadows from the patio entered the room, materializing into men in black uniforms with what looked to Mr. Landry like baseball caps and dark short guns, there was suddenly a strange whispering sound from just above, from behind the bar. The figures coming through the French doors spun backward, one falling into the piano, another into an end table, spilling a lamp and ashtrays across the floor. Mr. Landry craned his neck and saw Lance Boudreaux III leaning forward over the bar, a long thick?barreled gun pointing out toward the darkness. –Who’s next? he roared in a harsh country accent. –Come on, boys. My ass is a cabbage patch. There’s enough here for all you sons of bitches . . . Later Mr. Landry would remember his own astonishment, thinking of that language, those words, welling up amid death and disorder, in the wake of death befuddled by mystery. He never left home, Mr. Landry remembered thinking. Never even left. Then he looked up, and once more the shadows were invading, only this time their guns were firing. As they moved across the room, Mr. Landry saw a blur behind the piano. For a fraction of a second, he thought it was Fourier, and he almost rose himself to shout him down, out of the path of what he knew would be coming even before he could shout. But it wasn’t Fourier, and as he focused on the girl, Minerva rose from behind the piano, her sari pulled down, her long blond hair hanging down, veiling her golden breasts. –Hey, she cried at the shadows, –hey . . . For the smallest of instants, the shadows turned, they and their weapons tranced, as if they were substantial, of flesh instead of mist. Then, as Mr. Landry watched in horror, Minerva raised from the shattered keyboard of the piano the assault rifle, aiming it at the shadows. But there were others coming from behind who had seen nothing but the motion itself, as if it were disembodied. The bullets stitched across her breasts, planting ghastly scarlet flowers there, slapping her backward like the blow of a callous lover. –O wow, she whispered from the darkness down there. The shadows turned then, and Mr. Landry thought they were about to fire at him. They strode into the light and he could see that they were men, young men, whose faces were darkened with burnt cork. Their guns were not pointing at him, though, and he saw their eyes shining out above their smudged cheeks, aimed behind the bar . . . –Praise the Lord, Mr. Landry heard Lance Boudreaux yell. –You godless scumbags . . . He heard that peculiar whispering sound again, and then the deafening clatter of the guns before him. One of the shadows fell, his baseball cap coming off, showing his light hair, his white forehead, clearly dead. Behind the bar, something was struggling, thrashing in the broken glass back there, snuffling, sounding like some kind of animal. –Ah, ah, ah, it croaked. I am ready, Mr. Landry thought. Lord God, I am surely ready now. But the sounds went on, and after another moment, there were arms lifting Mr. Landry from the floor, assisting him across the rubble scattered over the floor, past the bleeding bodies of the Satanist and the driver. The last thing he could remember later concerning that night was Fourier, dirty, confused, covered with blood not his own, half stumbling, half supported by a pair of shadows like those who were carrying Mr. Landry. Somehow, they were brought close together, the two of them. –Aw shit, René, aw Jesus, you know what’s happened . . . young Fourier blurted. For a small moment Mr. Landry didn’t answer him. He was trying to gather himself back together. Fourier was an associate. It was important to give good example. Always. Even then. –Yes, Mr. Landry managed to cough out. –I know. Everything. It . . . it’s all right . . . He lost consciousness then. He had never lied to an associate before. Mr. Landry came to himself aboard Flight 671. He had recollections of what had passed in between. He remembered being carried out on an ambulance stretcher. He remembered Lieutenant Raphael poised there above him, his face red, suffused with anger. –You crazy old bastard, Raphael was saying, –why didn’t you . . . The boy said you got my note . . . The people in Daly City . . . It was Lance . . . –Because, Mr. Landry remembered saying, –because it wasn’t right . . . –Right? –Never mind, Mr. Landry remembered telling him. –You couldn’t understand. It’s . . . –Couldn’t understand . . . what was . . . right . . . ? Mr. Landry remembered feeling a certain triumph then, a certain fulfillment. –Right . . . not what was . . . right. They were in the sky now, above Las Vegas according to the pilot. Heading back to New Orleans. At least that is what the pilot said, taking into account his accent, translating what the pilot was telling the passengers. Back to New Orleans. Mr. Landry looked to his left. He was seated on the aisle. At the window was Fourier, his head bandaged, his eyes downcast. Mr. Landry studied him, considering what he had been to begin with, what he was now. He was pleased, Mr. Landry was. Not simply with this boy, this Louis Fourier, but with himself as well. The very essence of life, he considered, was to have something set before you, something that had to be done. And to achieve it, to do what needed to be done. He shook his head slowly, trying to clear it of the shadows, the uncertainties. He was not quite right just yet. There were still blank spots in his memory–as there had been when he had been called upon to appear before the Superior Court in and for Marin County, the State of California. He looked up, and the stewardess was before him. She was tall and tanned, her body luxurious, her smile certain and assured. She bent down over him. –I’m Kim, she said. –Is there anything I can get you? Mr. Landry smiled up at her, his eyes meeting hers and holding them. –I would like a . . . double martini and some writing paper, he said softly. Kim’s eyes swept past him, holding for a moment on the unmoving figure between him and Fourier. Then her eyes moved onward. –Excuse me, sir, she said to Fourier. –What would you like to drink? Fourier made no response at first. He was staring out of the window, down into the Grand Canyon. Kim spoke again, and his eyes moved from the depths 35,000 feet below. –Honey, he said, –lemme have a double martini right now, and keep ’em coming every ten minutes till we get home . . . I mean New Orleans, you dig? Kim stared at him, then at the bandaged burden between him and Mr. Landry. –Yes, of course, sir, she said, moving away a little faster than she might have, had it not been for the certain tension she felt there. No one spoke for a long moment after she moved down the aisle. Mr. Landry heard the smooth insistent roar of the jet engines behind them. –Lord God, Fourier breathed, –you know, I . . . I think I really . . . loved her . . . For a long moment Mr. Landry said nothing. His eyes were pressed shut. Yes, he knew that. Yes, he knew. That for the rest of his life, Fourier would remember that. –Louis, he said, –you got to get used to . . . losing. You know what I mean. –Yessir, young Fourier said. –I mean, I really do understand . . . Mr. Landry saw Fourier’s eyes fixed on the seat between them. The seat where Lance Boudreaux III sat, his head bandaged, his eyes fixed on the front of the first-class compartment, unmoving, steady as the rock and sand below over which the plane was passing. The bandage on his head was not as large as the one Fourier wore, and his close-shaven face was free of emotion. He looked like a slightly pudgy boy of twenty or so. Depending on how you looked, and from what angle, there appeared to be a slight smile on his lips. The stewardess returned with the drinks and some paper. –Thank you, Kim, Mr. Landry said, smiling up at her. He took the paper she handed him, and as he sipped his drink, took out a pen, and began to sketch out the terms of an order of interdiction he would file with the court when they reached home. Fourier watched him glumly. –They should of killed the sonofabitch, he said softly, –instead of giving him to you. I’d never of given him to you . . . He’d never of gotten out of my jurisdiction alive . . . Mr. Landry went on writing. –He’s a dead man to the law, he said slowly. –You heard the doctors. The bullets blasted away everything. Everything. We’re taking home a carcass. There’s nothing there . . . It eats and sleeps . . . Fourier was silent for a moment. – . . . killed all them people, he said. – . . . ought to push him out of this plane. –Louis, Louis, Mr. Landry said, shaking his head, sipping his drink. It was then, as Fourier turned away and leaned his head against the window, eyes closed, that Mr. Landry felt his sleeve being twitched. He felt cold for a moment, but when he turned, it was only the clawed hand of Lance Boudreaux III aimlessly scratching. As Mr. Landry looked, Lance’s face remained what it had been since that night when the police ambulance had come to take him away from the shambles of the house in the canyon, a sea of tranquility, depthless, imperturbable, purposeless. But as he reached over to free his sleeve, the hand plucked his pen away. Before he could even attempt to retrieve it, the hand, moving as if it had a life of its own, settled on the paper on Mr. Landry’s tray. In large childish letters the hand quickly traced out something almost unintelligible, yet obviously more than random scrawl. Then the hand was done, the pen lying beside his martini glass. Mr. Landry squinted to read. Yet . . . still. I am the . . . One Who. Stands. Mr. Landry picked up the paper, stared at it, then crumpled it into a ball before he could bring himself to look at Lance Boudreaux. When at last he did, nothing had changed. Except that the impression of a smile on Lance Boudreaux’s lips was much stronger. A virtual certainty. Mr. Landry threw down his martini and lay back in his seat. They were hardly half an hour into their trip, and they had still a long way to go. |
