“I like that,” he said, chuckling. “I realize I probably sound a little deranged. As if all I have to do is fill my head with more and more noise, and sooner or later, magically or what have you, some higher level of organization will emerge. It sounds a little crazy to me, too. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe everything will come together in a new way.”
“The sum will become greater than the parts.”
“Exactly. The sum will become greater than the parts.”
“So, how is it looking, so far?”
“So far?” he repeated, with a wry smile. “So far the sum still seems to be a little less than the parts.”
•
I continued my walk home, leaving Steven to his inner orchestrations. Our conversation had been oddly soothing, in a way I didn’t often experience with humans. The feeling surprised me a little, if for no other reason than the fact that Steven seemed to be putting his faith in a pipe dream. He wasn’t ignorant or stupid, but what he’d come up with left him hanging by a very slender thread. So slender, in fact, that blind faith and perverse optimism were the only things keeping it from snapping. At sixty-two, he was holding out for an epiphany that, if it came, would have to emerge out of the sheer complexity of his mental life. How was that for an act of faith?
On the other hand, I had to give him credit. The only way most people seem to be able to console themselves is by sabotaging their own critical faculties. They have to dull themselves down to avoid being eviscerated by their own gullibility. There may have been something inherently paradoxical about Steven’s idea that he could stuff himself with knowledge and thereby arrive at enlightenment. As if by piling up enough debris, he could clear the way to his goal. But maybe it wasn’t impossible. The world was full of surprises. I was a good example of a seemingly miraculous transformation.
In the end, Steven and I weren’t all that different. We both wanted the clarity of a better story. His optimism may have been perverse, but perhaps no more so than my determination to find convincing reasons for who and who not to kill. Maybe we were both clutching at straws. Maybe we were both just giving ourselves something to do while our clocks ran down. The difference was that his clock was going to stop a lot sooner than mine. It would have been nice if becoming a vampire increased my clarity as much as it increased my strength and speed, but it didn’t. It just gave me a lot more time to stumble around in.
•
I was nearing my house when I saw two cats squared off against each other, one on each side of a row of small junipers demarcating the boundary between adjacent front lawns. I slowed my pace as I drew nearer, hearing the tension boiling to a hiss in these two ferocious, supposedly domesticated animals. One of the cats suddenly leapt forward, his adversary meeting him in a screeching ball of fur, claws and teeth. This lasted about half a second before the loser took off at full speed, the victor close on his tail.
The cats had been too preoccupied to notice my presence, and both came across the lawn straight at me. Bits of grass flew into the air as the first cat saw me and clawed its way through a high-speed ninety-degree turn. It was a nice move. The second cat had a bit more time to negotiate and veered in pursuit. I stepped forward and snatched up the little demon by the scruff of its neck. Holding it away from my body, I watched as it tried to free itself, slashing the air with its extended claws. I thought about my conversation with Steven, wondering if complexity might really offer solutions that simplicity lacked. Wasn’t it better to keep things simple? Could you ever get the soup right just by tossing more and more stuff into the pot?
I gave the cat a gentle toss. It landed as cats will, and darted into the night.
Chapter 21
The weather cleared over the weekend. I’d given Karla a call on Sunday and arranged to be picked up the following evening at 11:00 p.m. I suggested that she dress warmly because she might have to wait for me in the car and I wasn’t sure how long I would be. Monday night was clear, cold and windy. It would be colder still at the higher altitude of Pollock Pines. I wore a long sleeved black jersey made of some kind of microfiber under a dark blue nylon windbreaker.
Karla was right on time. She’d dressed warmly, as I’d suggested, wearing a heavy wool sweater under her leather jacket, what looked like logging boots, and some kind of fur-lined, leather head piece reminiscent of an old-fashioned aviator’s helmet, complete with dangling ear flaps.
“I know,” she said, “I look like a beagle. But it keeps my ears warm.” She examined my attire while she was saying this, her expression mildly incredulous. “Is that your idea of dressing for the weather?”
“According to the ads, this shirt is a wonder fabric. Very popular among the mountain-climbing set, as well as with car-campers who want the technical look. Under the windbreaker it’s surprisingly warm.”
Karla looked momentarily dubious, but dropped the subject to focus on her driving. We took Howe Avenue to I-50 and headed east toward the Sierras. Karla seemed quieter than normal, but after a few minutes she broke the silence.
“How’s Mio doing?” she asked.
“She’s fine, I’m sure.”
“She said she was going to Mexico.”
I was still curious about the intimacy they’d so quickly acquired.
“She told me at the club in San Francisco,” Karla explained, as if sensing my curiosity.
“She seems to have taken a liking to you.”
“You think?” she asked, after a long thoughtful pause.
“I’ve known Mio for a long time.
