“Rachel, thank God you’re all right.”
I turned and I saw him and he saw me, and he looked hard and determined, and cold. “Let my wife go,” he said. Liar.
He was blazing with anger, and anger made him evil; anger took away his charm. I suppose it had done that to mine before. And I realized slowly as I stood there that I loved again, and didn’t hate. I loved Esther and I loved Rachel. I didn’t hate even him.
“Go to the door and stand between us,” Rachel said. “Do that for me, please.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Do that, my angel.”
I obeyed. I put my hand up on the steel frame. “You can’t pass,” I said.
Gregory roared. He let out a terrible roar, a roar from the soul, and the whole company of men rushed towards me. I turned around as they buffeted my shoulders, passing me. But I knew already what had made them cry out.
She had jumped.
I went to the railing, pushing them aside, and I looked down into the garden and I saw her tiny empty shell of a body. The light hovered around her.
“Oh, God, take her, please,” I prayed in my ancient tongue.
Then the light blazed and went straight up and for a moment it seemed that lightning lashed the southern sky, exploded behind the clouds, but it was only her passing. She’d gone up, and for one second perhaps I’d seen the Door of Heaven.
The garden held nothing but its bed of Egyptian flowers and her empty flesh, her face unhurt, intact, staring blindly upward.
Gregory cried in agony. Men took hold of me by the arms. Gregory screamed and cried and sobbed and there was no artifice to it. The man stared down at her and roared in pain and hit the railing with his fists.
“Rachel, Rachel, Rachel!”
I shook off the hands of the men. They fell backwards, stunned by the strength of it, and not knowing what to do, seemingly embarrassed by the figure of Gregory roaring in grief.
Suddenly there was havoc all around me. More men had come, poor Ritchie had come, and Gregory wailed and wailed and leaned over the railing. He was davening, bowing like a Hebrew and crying out in Yiddish.
I shoved off the men again, hurling some of them to the end of the terrace, I pushed and I pushed at them till they simply backed off.
I said to Gregory:
“You really loved her, didn’t you?”
He turned and looked at me, and tried to speak but he was choked with grief. “She was…my queen of Sheba,” he said. “She was my queen…” And then he wailed again, and said the same prayers.
“I’m leaving you now,” I said, “with all your armed men.”
A crowd was climbing up the slope of the garden below. Men with flashlights shone them on her dead face.
Then I went up and up.
Where would I go? What would I do?
It was time to walk on my own.
I looked back once at the tiny men down on the terrace, confounded now by my disappearance. Gregory had actually collapsed and sat down rocking, holding his head.
Then I went high, so high that the joyous spirits were there, and it seemed as I flew north that they stared at me with great interest.
I knew what I had to do first of all. Find Nathan.
22
By the time I reached New York the need for sleep was weighing me down. I would have to give in to it before further explorations. But I was fiercely worried about Nathan. Before taking on a body, I prowled invisibly all through the Temple of the Mind.
Just as I expected, there was much chemical research being done there, and there were numerous restricted areas, and there were people working in the night in the strange rubbery orange plastic suits I had seen, and these suits seemed to be filled with air. These suited beings peered through their helmets as they worked with chemicals which they obviously did not mean to breathe or touch. They were loading these into what seemed very lightweight plastic cartridges. I studied everything else that was going on. In an antiseptic laboratory, my bones lay on a hard table, being studied by the evil Mastermind doctor, the thin one with the bottle-black hair. He had no hint of my invisible presence as I circled him. I could not make out his notes. I felt nothing for the Bones, except the desire to destroy them so that I could never be driven back into them again. But I might die if that happened. It was much too soon for such a risk.
Other parts of the building were obviously communication centers. There were people watching monitors, speaking on phones and working with maps. There were great electrified maps of the world on the wall, filled with pinpoints of light.
There was a great air of urgency and commotion among these night workers.
All spoke in a completely guarded way, as if they thought they were being monitored by enemies, and their statements were maddeningly vague. “We have to hurry.” “This is going to be glorious.” “This has to be loaded by four a.m.” “Everything at Point 17 is perfectly in line.”
I could not make something sensible or sophisticated out of what they said. I managed to discover from one slip of the tongue that the project they all shared was called Last Days.
Last Days.
All I saw alarmed me and repelled me. I suspected the chemicals in the canisters were filoviruses, or some other lethal agent only recently discovered through technology, and the entire Temple stank of murder.
I passed many empty floors, many sleeping dormitories filled with young Minders, and a huge chapel where Minders prayed silently like contemplative monks, on their knees with their hands pressed to their foreheads. The image over the altar was a great Brain. The Mind of God, I presume. It was a mere outline in gold. It was strangely uninspiring. It looked anatomical and bizarre.
I passed rooms where men slept alone, in dimness. In one room was a man covered up and bandaged, with a nurse in attendance. In other chambers, there were other sick people, swathed in sheeting, hooked to gleaming tubes connected to tiny computers. Many solitary rooms contained sleeping members of the church. Some were so luxurious as to rival Gregory’s rooms. They had floors of marble tile and gilded furniture; they had sumptuous bathrooms with great square tubs.
I had many unanswered questions about what I saw in the building, and could have spent much more time.
But now I had to go on to Brooklyn. I felt I could see what was happening. Surely, Nathan was in danger.
It was two a.m. Invisible I passed into the Rebbe’s house and found him sound asleep in his bed, but he woke the minute I entered the room. He knew I was there. He was at once alarmed and climbed out of the bed. I simply went very far away from the house. There was no time to search for Nathan or to look for more sympathetic members of the family.
Besides, I was growing more tired by the minute. I couldn’t dare retreat to the Bones; in fact, I had no intention of ever retreating to them again, not the way that I felt now, and I feared my weakness in sleep, that I might be called back or dissolved by Gregory or even somehow by the Rebbe.
I went back into Manhattan, found a lake in the middle of Central Park not very far at all from the huge Temple of the Mind. Indeed, I could see all its lighted windows. I took form as a man, dressed myself in the finest garb I could conceive of—red velvet suit, fine linen shirt, all manner of exotic gold embellishments—and then I drank huge amounts of water from the lake. I knelt and drank it in handfuls. I was filled with water, and felt very powerful.
