“Did you see the inscription?” he asked. She had not. He opened to the third page and held it out for her to read.
Beloved Felix,
For You!
We have survived this;
we can survive anything.
In Celebration,
Margon
Rome ’04
“What do you think it means, ‘We have survived this; we can survive anything’?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“What the book means to me at any rate is that Felix is a theological thinker, a person interested in the destiny of souls.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not.” She hesitated, then. “You do realize …”
“What?” he asked.
“I hesitate to say it, but it’s true, really. Catholics, sometimes, seem to be all a little insane.”
He laughed. “I suppose that is true,” he said.
“Well, Felix Nideck might not be Catholic,” she said soberly, “and he might not be a theological thinker. The destiny of souls might not mean a thing to him at all.”
He nodded. He smiled. But he didn’t believe it. He knew Felix. He knew something of Felix. Enough to love him, and that was quite a lot.
She put her arms around him and gently urged him towards the bed.
They fell into each other’s arms.
Then they climbed under the covers of the big bed and went to sleep.
23
JIM ARRIVED in the late afternoon.
Reuben had been out walking in the woods with Laura. They’d found no vehicle or backpack or anything to connect with Marrok. And they still did not know how he’d gained access to the house.
Jim had managed to get the evening off at St. Francis, which was quite a rare thing, and he had prevented Grace and Phil and Celeste from coming on the promise that he would go and see why Reuben wasn’t answering his cell, or e-mail, and if everything was all right. He had time for an early dinner, yes, but then he’d have to be on the road for home.
Reuben had to confess he was glad to see him. Jim was in his full clerics, and Reuben couldn’t prevent himself from hugging Jim as if he hadn’t seen him in a year. It felt that long. It felt wretched. The whole separation from his family felt wretched.
After a fairly perfunctory tour of the house, they took a pot of coffee with them to the eastern breakfast room that opened off the long kitchen and sat down to talk.
Laura understood this was “Confession” as Reuben had explained, and she’d gone upstairs to answer e-mails on her laptop. She’d chosen the first western bedroom behind the master as her office, and they would have this cleared out for her as soon as possible. In the meantime, she’d set up her books and papers in there, and was more than comfortable, with a partial view of the sea, and a splendid view of the wooded cliffs.
Reuben watched as Jim took out the small purple stole and put it around his neck to hear Confession.
“Is it sacrilege for me to allow you to do that?” Reuben asked.
Jim said nothing for a moment and then in the softest voice suggested, “Come to God with your best intentions.”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” said Reuben. “I’m trying to find my way to contrition.” He looked out the eastern window as he spoke, into the dense but airy grove of gray live oaks that ran on out to the redwood forest. These trees were thick and gnarled, and the ground beneath them soft and speckled with yellow and green and brown leaves, and the ivy grew rampant over many a massive trunk and up into the winding, reaching branches.
The rain had stopped before dawn. The blue sky shone through the mass of enclosing foliage that was the treetops. And warm sunlight came from the west, slanting down on the pathways through the trees. Reuben was lost in thought for a moment looking at it.
Then he turned and, resting his elbows on the table, and his face in his hands, he started talking, telling Jim absolutely everything that had happened. He told him of the strange coincidence of the names Nideck and Sperver. He explained everything in minute and obviously horrifying detail.
“I can’t tell you that I want to give up this power,” he confided. “I can’t tell you what it’s like to be moving through the forest as this thing, this beast, this creature that can run for miles on all fours and then go up, up there into the canopy and climb for hundreds of feet, this thing that can so easily satisfy its needs.…”
Jim’s eyes were moist, and his face sort of broken with sadness, with worry. But he only nodded, waiting patiently, every time Reuben paused, for him to go on.
“Every other form of experience is paling in the face of it,” Reuben said. “Oh, I miss you and Mom and Phil so much, so much! But everything is paling.”
He described feasting on the mountain lion, and what it had been like up there in that haven of branches when the lethal cubs had been circling beneath, how he had wanted to take Laura up there in that sanctuary. How could he convey this to Jim, the seduction of this new existence? How could he break through the tragic expression on Jim’s face with some flash of how dazzling and even sublime this was?
“Is this impossible for you to grasp?”
“I don’t know that I need to grasp it,” said Jim. “Let’s go back now to this Marrok and what you’ve learned.”
“But you can’t forgive me if you don’t grasp it,” said Reuben.
“I’m not the one who has to forgive, am I?” asked Jim.
Reuben looked off again, beyond the gravel driveway, at the oak forest, so close, so dense, so filled with shadow and light.
“So what you know now is this,” said Jim. “There are ‘others’ and these others may include Felix Nideck, though you can’t be sure. This man, Margon Sperver, he too may be a Morphenkind, with the names being deliberate clues, that’s what you suspect. These creatures have a terminology—Chrism, Morphenkinder—and that indicates tradition, that they’ve been around for a long time. The creature hinted they’d been around for a long time. You know that the Chrism that made you into this can sicken and can kill, yet you survived. You know that your cells have been altered so that once severed from the life force in you they disintegrate. And once that life force is extinguished, the corpse disintegrates. And that’s why the authorities have no indication of who you are.”
“Yes, that’s it, so far.”
“Well, not quite. This Marrok gave you the impression that you’d been brash, destructive, courting publicity that threatens the species, right?”
“Yes.”
“And so you think the ‘other’ or ‘others’ may come to harm you, even kill you, and kill Laura as well. You’ve killed one of them, and they may want to kill you for that as well as everything else.”
“I know what you’re going to say,” said Reuben. “I know what you’re going to tell me. But there is no one who can help us with this. No one. And don’t tell me to call this or that authority! Or to confide in this or that doctor. Because any such move would spell the complete end of my freedom and Laura’s freedom, and the complete end of our lives!”
“But what is your alternative, Reuben? Live here and fight this power? Fight the lure of the voices? Fight the urge to go into the woods and kill? And when will you be tempted to bring Laura into this, and what if the Chrism or the serum or whatever it is kills her exactly as this Marrok indicated it could?”
“I’ve thought of that, of course,” he said, “I’ve thought of that.” And he had.
He’d always thought it a stupid cliché of horror films that “the monster” wants a mate, or spends eternity chasing a lost love. Now he understood that completely. He understood the isolation and the alienation and the fear. “I will bring no harm to Laura,” he said. “Laura isn’t asking for the gift.”
“The gift, you call this a gift? Look, I’m a man of imagination. I always have been. I can imagine the freedom, the power—.”
“No, you can’t. You won’t. You refuse.”
“Okay, then I know I can’t imagine the freedom and
the power and they must be seductive beyond my most feverish dreams.”
“Now you’re getting it. Feverish dreams. Have you ever wanted to bring agony to someone who hurt you, ever wanted them to feel pain for what they did? I brought that agony to those kidnappers, to others.”
“You killed them, Reuben. You killed them in their sins! You terminated their destiny on this earth. You snatched from them any chance for repentance, for redemption. You took that from them. You took it all, Reuben. You snuffed out forever the years of reparation they might have lived! You took life itself from them and you took it from their descendants, and yes, even from their victims, you took what their amends might have been.”
He stopped. Reuben had closed his eyes, and was holding his forehead in his hands. He was angry. Took from their victims? They had been slaughtering their victims! There would have been no “amends” for their victims. There would have been death if Reuben had not intervened. Even all the children of the kidnap had been in mortal peril. But that was not the point, was it? He was guilty of killing. He could not deny it and he could not feel remorse.
“Look, I want to help you!” Jim pleaded. “I don’t want to condemn you, or drive you away from me.”
“You won’t do that, Jimmy.” It is I who am moving inexorably away from you.
“You can’t keep going with this alone. And this woman, Laura, she’s beautiful and she’s devoted to you. And she’s no child or fool, I can see that. But she doesn’t know any more about this than you do.”
“She knows what I know. And she knows that I love her. If she hadn’t struck Marrok with the ax when she did, I might not have been able to defeat him.…”
Jim clearly didn’t know how to answer.
“So what are you saying?” Reuben asked. “What then do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Let me think. Let me try to figure who could be trusted, who could study this, analyze, figure some way perhaps to reverse it—.”
“Reverse it? Jim, Marrok evaporated! Ashes to ashes. He disappeared. You think something this powerful can be reversed?”
“You don’t know how long this creature had had the power.”
“That’s another thing, Jim. A knife or a gun can’t hurt me. If that creature had had a few more seconds, he could have removed that ax from the back of his skull, and his skull, even his skull, and his brain might have healed. I decapitated him. Nothing can survive that. Remember, I healed from a bullet wound, Jim.”
“Yes, I know that, Reuben, I remember. I didn’t believe you when you told me this before, about being shot. I have to say, I didn’t believe you.” He shook his head. “But they found the bullet in the wall of that Buena Vista house. Celeste told me. They found the bullet and the trajectory indicated the bullet had been deflected somehow. The bullet had passed through something before it lodged in the plaster of the wall. And there was no tissue on that bullet, not even the tiniest particle of any tissue.”
“And what does that mean, Jim? What does that mean about … my body and about time?”
“Don’t go thinking you’re immortal, Little Boy,” he said under his breath. He reached out and pinched the loose flesh right above Reuben’s left wrist. “Please don’t go thinking that.”
“But what if we have great longevity, Jim? I mean, I don’t know, but that Marrok creature. I got the distinct impression that the thing had been around for a long time.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Something he said about remembering, remembering his early curiosity when he couldn’t remember anything else. I don’t know. I confess, I’m guessing, going by my gut.”
“It could be the opposite,” Jim said. “You just don’t know. You’re right about the forensics. There’s no other explanation as to why they have nothing, and Celeste says they have nothing.… And Mom says they can’t explain it but the materials they gather simply self-destruct.”
“I knew it. And Mom knows that’s what happened to the specimens they took from me.”
“She hasn’t said so. But Mom knows something. And Mom is afraid. Also Mom’s obsessed. This Russian doctor, he’s supposed to arrive here tomorrow, and take her to see this little hospital in Sausalito—.”
“That is a dead end!”
“I understand, but I don’t like it. I mean, I want you to tell Mom, but I don’t like it, this Paris doctor, what he’s got in mind. Dad doesn’t like it either. He’s already had it out with Mom that she better not be suggesting committing you against your will.”
“What?”
“Look, I’m telling you what I’ve been hearing. Mom and Dad can’t find any mention of this hospital on the Internet or any doctor that’s ever heard of such a place.”
“Well, what the hell is Mom thinking?”
“I do not see how much more harm you could do to Mom by telling her the whole truth. But I’d get her alone to do that, away from this Paris doctor, whoever he is. Reuben, you can’t let yourself fall into private hands. That’s worse than any scenario you’ve imagined.”
“Private hands!”
Jim nodded. “I don’t like it. I don’t know that Mom actually likes it. But Mom’s desperate.”
“Jim, I can’t tell her. Private hospital, government hospital, it doesn’t matter. Fearing your son has become a monster is one thing; hearing him confess it in detail would be too much. Besides, it’s not going to happen. That is not the path for me. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have told you.”
“Don’t say that, Little Boy.”
“Listen to me. I fear what you fear—that this thing will consume me, that I will lose my inhibitions one by one, that I will lose all perspective finally and obey its physical imperatives without question—.”
“Dear God.”
“—but Jim, I will not go into this without a fight. I am not bad, Jim. I am good. I know it. I feel it. My soul is me. And I am not a creature without conscience, without empathy, without the capacity for good.”
Reuben opened his right hand on his chest.
“In here, I know this,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something else.”
“Please.”
“I am not progressing with this, Jim. I’ve reached a kind of plateau. I battle it, I seek to come to terms with it, I learn new things from it every time it happens, but I am not devolving, Jim.”
“Reuben, you said yourself everything else was paling in comparison to what you think and feel when this change comes! Now you’re saying that’s not so?”
“My soul is not decaying,” said Reuben. “I swear it. Look at me and tell me that I’m not your brother.”
“You’re my brother, Reuben,” he said. “But those men you killed, they were your brothers, too. Damn, what can I say to make it any clearer? The woman you killed was your sister! We are not beasts of the wild, for the love of heaven, we are human beings. We are all kin! Look, you don’t have to believe in God to believe that. You don’t have to believe doctrine or dogma to know what I’m saying is true.”
“Okay, Jimmy, take it easy, take it easy.” Reuben reached for the carafe of coffee and refilled Jim’s cup.
Jim sat back, trying to get control, but the tears were in his eyes. Reuben had never seen Jim cry. Jim was almost ten years older than him. Jim had been a tall, clever, and self-possessed adolescent by the time Reuben crawled out of toddlerhood. He’d never known Jim as a child.
Jim was looking out into the woods. The afternoon sun was traveling west and the house cast a big shadow now over the nearest grove of trees, but it broke through gloriously in the distance where the woods ran uphill towards the southern end of the redwood forest.
“And you don’t even know what brings on the change, or how to control it,” Jim murmured almost absently, his eyes distant, and his voice dispirited. “Will you change into this thing every night of your life from now on?”
“That’s impossible,” Reuben said. “This species, Morphenkinder, it couldn’t survive if it changed
every night, if it lived like this. I have to believe that’s not how it works. And I’m learning how to control it. I’ll learn how to bring it on and how to make it stop. That thing, that guardian, Marrok, he changed at will, just like that, when he was ready. I’ll learn.”
Jim sighed. He shook his head.
A quiet fell between them. Jim kept looking at the forest. The winter afternoon was dying fast. Reuben wondered what Jim could hear, what scents he could detect. The forest was living, breathing, gasping, whispering. The forest was redolent with the smell of life and death. Was that a form of prayer? Was that a striving towards the spiritual? Was that spiritual in itself? He wanted so to talk about these thoughts with Jim, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t expect that of Jim now. He stared off beyond the oak forest at the ghostly haze of the redwoods that lay far beyond. The world went to dusk in shades of blue. He felt himself drifting, drifting away from this table, this conversation, this confession.
Suddenly, softly, Jim’s voice brought him back.
“This is an exceptional place, this,” Jim said. “Ah, but what a price you’ve paid for it.”
“Don’t I know?” Reuben pressed his lips together in a bitter smile.
He put his hands together in an attitude of prayer and began the Act of Contrition: “ ‘O my God I am heartily sorry’ … heartily sorry, I am; with all my heart, I swear it, I am heartily sorry; please show me the way. God, please show me what I am, what manner of thing I am. Please give me the strength, against all temptation, to do no harm to anyone, somehow to do no harm, but to be a force for love in Your Name.”
He meant these prayers, but he did not deeply feel them. He had a sense of the world around him, insofar as he could grasp it, and of the tiny speck that was the planet Earth, spinning in the galaxy of the Milky Way, and of how tiny was that galaxy in the vast far-flung universe beyond human grasp. He had the sinking feeling that he was speaking not to God but to Jim, and for Jim. But hadn’t he spoken to God in another way last night? Wasn’t he speaking to God in his own way when he looked out there at the living, striving forest and he felt in all his parts that that striving of all living things was a form of prayer?