“How long have you had this one?”
“I don’t know. They’re all written down.”
“In order of descending merit?”
“In the order they came to me.”
“And each one,” I said to him, “seemed equally true to you at the time.”
Nicholas said, “One of them has to be true. Finally I’ll find it. I have to.”
“You could go to your grave not knowing,” Rachel said.
“I’ll understand it eventually,” Nicholas said doggedly.
Maybe not, I thought; maybe she is right. Nicholas could flounder around forever, his stack of typed papers constantly growing with theory after theory, each one more lurid than the last, more comprehensive, more daring. Finally the man slumbering within him whom they were attempting to arouse back into wakeful life could appear, take charge, and finish Nicholas’s thesis for him. Nicholas could write, I wonder if it’s . . . it may be that . . . I’m sure that . . . it has to be; and then the ancient man could rise into life and write down, He was correct; it is. I am.
“The thing that has worried me,” Rachel said, “whenever you talked like this, is, What will he be like to me and Johnny if they’re able to waken him, and I guess tonight shows that he’ll take care of Johnny.”
“With more than I can,” Nicholas said.
“You’re not going to fight?” I said. “You’re just going to let it take you over?”
Nicholas said, “I’m looking forward to it.”
To Rachel, I said, “Are there any vacant apartments in your building?” I was thinking to myself that as a free-lance writer I could live anywhere. I didn’t have to remain in the Bay Area.
Smiling a little, Rachel said, “You think you should be down here to help take care of him?”
“Something like that,” I said.
8
They had both evidently accepted the invasion of Nicholas by this entity; they seemed resigned and not afraid. That was more than I could manage; the whole thing seemed unnatural and terrifying to me, something to be fought with all one had at one’s disposal. The supplanting of a human personality by—whatever it was. Assuming Nicholas’s theories were correct. In point of fact he could be totally wrong. Even so, perhaps because of this, I wanted to be down here. Over the many years Nicholas had been my best friend; he still was, even though six hundred miles separated us. And, like him, I had begun to like the Placentia area. I liked the barrio. There was nothing like it in Berkeley.
“It’s a nice gesture,” Rachel said, “to be with your friend at a time like this.”
“It’s more than a gesture,” I said.
“Before you move to Placentia,” Rachel said, “there is something I found out the other day by accident, that I don’t think either of you realize. I was driving along one of those little palm-lined streets, just driving at random, trying to get Johnny to calm down and go to sleep before we got back to the apartment, and I saw a green clapboard house with a sign on it. ‘Birthplace of Ferris F. Fremont,’ it said. I asked the manager of our building, and he said, Yes, Ferris Fremont was born in Placentia.”
“Well, he’s not here now,” Nicholas said. “He’s in Washington D.C., three thousand miles away.”
“But how grotesque,” Rachel said. “To be living in the town where the tyrant was born. Like him, it’s an ugly little house, a dreadful color. I didn’t get out of the car; I didn’t want to go near it, even though it seemed to be open, and people were walking around inside it. Like it was a little museum, probably with exhibits of his schoolbooks and the bed he slept in, like one of those California historical sites you see near the highway.”
Nicholas turned to gaze at his wife enigmatically.
“And nobody mentioned this to you?” I said.
“I don’t think they like to talk about it much,” Rachel said, “the people around here. I think they’d rather keep it secret. Fremont probably paid for it to be made into a historical site himself; I didn’t see any official state marker.”
“I’d like to go there,” I said.
“Fremont,” Nicholas ruminated. “The greatest liar in the history of the world. He probably wasn’t actually born there; he probably had a PR firm pick it out as the kind of place he ought to have been born in. I’d like to see it. Drive by there now, Rachel; let’s take a look at it.”
She made a left turn; presently we were moving along very narrow tree-lined streets, some of which weren’t paved. This was Oldtown; I had been driven through it before.
“It’s on Santa Fe,” Rachel said. “I remember noticing that and thinking I’d like to ride Fremont out of town on a rail.” She pulled up to the curb and parked. “There it is, over there to the right.” She pointed. We could see only dim outlines of houses. Somewhere a TV set played a Spanish program. A dog barked. The air, as usual, was warm. There were no special lights put up around the house where, allegedly, Ferris F. Fremont had been born. Nicholas and I got out of the car and walked over, while Rachel remained in the car, holding the sleeping baby.
“Well, there’s not much to see, and we can’t get inside tonight,” I said to Nicholas.
“I want to determine if it’s a place I foresaw in my vision,” Nicholas said.
“You’re going to have to do that tomorrow.”
Together he and I walked slowly along the sidewalk; grass grew in the cracks, and once Nicholas stubbed his toe and swore. We arrived at last at the corner, where we halted.
Bending down, Nicholas examined a word incised in the cement of the sidewalk, a very old word put there some time ago, when the sidewalk had been wet. It was professionally printed.
“Look!” Nicholas said.
I bent down and read the word.
ARAMCHEK
“That was the original name of this street,” Nicholas said, “evidently. Before they changed it. So that’s where Fremont got the name of that conspiratorial group:
