Here was a picture of Stephen, in a military uniform, bending over a long piece of something in the desert. So he had been a soldier after all. The thing looked similar to the cryptic balsa beam she'd just handled. Another photo showed the I-beam up close, with markings, much like glyphs, embossed along its center.
She picked a sheet of paper out of the folder at random and read:
She stared at the sheet as though it were a skiving of human skin in her hands. Behind her the door clicked open.
'From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah,' came his flowing voice. 'From Galilee to Agincourt to the blood-fields of Carthage where Hannibal lost his dream.'
The room seemed to hush beneath her stare.
He was wearing the mask again but she could still see his eyes, the eyes so blue, with veins of milk. He stepped forward once, twice. A third time. Measured, even steps. His hands opened out like a preceptor on an ancient mount standing before smoking crevices and plinths of obsidian and granite dolmens encrusted with the blood of the innocent.
'And from Kingman to San Angelo to Roswell,' he said. And now his voice resembled a sound akin to crumbling rocks. 'There is such truth in little things Christine, be they from here or from places we can't conceive. The little things, in a sense, are ghosts that haven't quite given up all their flesh.'
His eyes moved toward the highboy and something in her nearly understood.
She snatched up her own mask from its top. Her fingers pressed against it. The wooden lamb mask stared up inert. But beneath it… The insert. The satin-covered lining.
She untied the insert from the mask's carved holes. The mask clunked to the floor — dead wood and nothing more.
The covered insert lay in her hands now like something stillborn. She untied its velvet strings, slipped the insert from its delicate lining. And withdrew…a second mask.
It shone silver, like metal, in the candlelight.
It had no weight at all.
'So much power in truth, and so much truth in culture, Christine.' His milky-blue eyes stared hard at her through the face of the carven wolf. 'All cultures, all relics. It's a symbology of life, isn't it? Mythology needn't belong exclusively to us. We'd be stupid to believe that.'
Only then did she fix her own eyes on the insert, on the mask within the mask.
What looked up at her was this:
A curved plate in the shape of an inverted pear. The tiniest slit for a mouth. Only a rudimentary bump for a nose.
And two spacious holes for eyes.
'In nearly all cultures, though,' he said, 'three is the charm.' Her own eyes rose, then, back to him.
The wolf leapt.
And as the lamb was finally run to ground, the black muttering rose again from the deep, deep well of her soul.
Much louder this time.
It was nearly celebratory.
Eyes Left
Happy Hour at the World Cafe. 69th and Columbus.
At 4:30 after work, that was where we came. Neal from his studio and John from behind his camera over at ABC and yours truly from She Who Must Be Fed — otherwise known as Microsoft Word. Pretty much every day. There were other regulars who'd come and go but we three formed the core of it. We'd stand there talking at the bar, drinking and munching trail mix with Neal feeding the juke a couple dollars now and then to keep the blues and country flowing and so that John wouldn't start in with his goddamn Frank Sinatra.
You had to be careful with John and Sinatra. He'd play a whole CD and sooner or later he'd be singing along.
And we watched the ladies, of course.
Today was Neal's day On Point.
'Eyes left,' he'd say.
That was what we did. Stake our claim on the liquor industry, tell jokes and bitch about life in general and listen to sweet blues and watch the women walk by along the hot summer sidewalk. We'd been doing it for years.
The only difference now was that some of the women were dead.
The women. They're the first best reason to love summer in New York City. The sidewalk outside the big plate glass window on Columbus brought along an endless procession of them — almost as though they were walking by just for us, just for the appreciation radiating out from inside. Sure, I know what you're thinking. A bunch of horny sexist pigs. Reducing women to the sum of their sexual parts. But it's not like that at all. At least not for me. For me there's a kind of reverence to it. All that beauty and diversity. All those blessings to our little lonesome planet walking around in shorts and tanks and halters. I'm serious.
You ask me, the best that fifty-one percent of the human species has to offer can be found right here in the City. L.A. just can't hold a candle to it. Neither can Boston or San Francisco. You don't believe me? Come over to the World Cafe some time and sip your Bud and keep your eyes on that window.
Of course it's a little different now.
You can mostly tell the dead by the grayish look to the skin or of course if they've been mutilated in some way but from the distance of bar to sidewalk not by much else. You might notice that the hair had little sheen maybe. That the sun didn't catch it right. But you had to get up close to see the clouded eyes or the blue fingernails and you didn't usually want to get that close. If you did, that was what your sidearm was for. And none of us had shot one in a long time, male or female, old or young, and didn't care to.
The dead walk briskly in Manhattan, just like everybody else. Thing is, they have no place to go. The law protects them now, at least to some extent, but they're not allowed to work jobs or have careers. They get food stamps, welfare, public housing. I pretty much always felt sorry for them. Sure, a small percentage get out of line now and then, would rape somebody, mug somebody, rob a liquor store. But no more than the living.
Most of the bum rap they got came from the cannibalism thing. That's what the crazy ones would do, kill regular folks and eat them. There was a lot of hysteria over that at first. That's when the mayor revoked the Sullivan Law and passed the concealed-carry ordinance. But once the Army retrieval squads rounded up the crazy ones you didn't hear much about cannibalism anymore. Hardly ever.
Fact is, the dead don't seem to fuck up any more than the living. It's a simple, primitive prejudice against a minority, nothing more. Sure, you wanted to be careful, just like you wanted to be careful of a lot of things and people in New York. But I'd stopped carrying my own gun a long time ago. A lot of us did.
Still, it was kind of like a game with us, a bar contest.
Seeing who could pick out the dead ones.
'Eyes left.'
This one sure wasn't dead. Chestnut hair tied back long and gleaming, tan shoulders glowing in the sun.
