The Crystal Child, page 30
“But you work with him.”
“No. I work for him. He tells me what he wants. We argue, then I do as I am told. His taste is ludicrous, a rich man’s taste. Not my style. In fact, I was ready to break off with him months ago.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wish to come here.”
“But why?”
He drew her closer and brushed a light kiss into her hair. “Seriously, you cannot guess?” He waited, letting several moments pass. “I must ask you. Do you have plans to leave?”
“Leave Tlaloc? No. Where would I go?”
“You should have plan for leaving. I could help.”
“But why? Aaron is safe here.
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think he’s safe? Why not?”
Another, longer pause. “You have seen Peter’s crypt?”
“There’s a crypt?”
“So I call it. He calls it repository.”
“Aaron mentioned that once. What is it?”
“You must see it to believe it. If he shows you, you will know why you must be careful, why you must leave.”
“If I can.”
“Has he told you that you cannot leave?”
“Not in so many words. But he’s made it clear that I’d never be allowed to get past the gate. Not if Aaron was with me. And where would I go?”
“Not to United States?”
“No. I can’t go back there ever.”
“I am sure I could take you to be with me.”
“You’re married.”
“On paper I am married. How shall I put it? The relationship is on life support. For many years.”
“But you haven’t pulled the plug.”
“There seemed to be no need. Until now.”
He leaned his head against hers and stroked her shoulder. “I must leave tomorrow. Paris, then long time in Manilla. Big project. Big foolish project. Luxury hotel in city of hungry people. Then home to Tokyo.”
“How long will you be away?” He could hear the worry in her voice.
“Two months. But this can be changed. If there is problem, I will leave my phone — very powerful, very reliable. You call me, anyplace in the world. Only call.”
“I’ll remember that. Thank you.”
***
She knocked for a third time at the door. There was no answer. She turned the knob and entered. Aaron lay stretched across his sofa, his eyes open and staring fixedly into his upper lids. His color was ashen. She rushed to his side and called his name, then bent to feel his pulse and to listen for his breathing. After several moments of searching at his wrist, chest, and throat, she detected a single faint beat, then a single shallow inhalation. Again and again she spoke his name while she chafed his hand. A sickening fear descended upon her. She realized how helpless she was without medical supplies at hand. She thought of Dr. Horvath’s dispensary. Could she find her way there promptly enough?
She rose and rushed to the intercom to call Eduardo, then stopped. She heard a soft moan. Turning, she saw Aaron’s eyes flutter and refocus. She returned to his side in time to see his face, which had been as placid as the face of a corpse, twist into an expression of agonized bewilderment. Seeing Julia, he reached out to grasp. It was the first time she had seen him so confounded, the first time he had held her close to him. She could feel a deep trembling in him as if he might be on the brink of hysteria. Holding him, she remembered comforting Alex when he awoke from a bad dream. Then, with her cheek against Aaron’s brow, she noticed something. Where the sunlight filtered into the room, his hand, his cheek had a faint shimmer. Looking more closely, she saw a glassiness to his skin tone, as if he were wearing a translucent garment.
“You collapsed,” she said as she hugged him close. “I had no idea what to do.” When he had regained his composure, she said, “You were hardly breathing.”
“Oh that,” he said, waving her concern aside. “I do a few hours of meditation every day. My breath slows to a minimum.”
“Meditation? Hardly. You were in a coma.”
“Not at all. But I was in a place I had to leave.” He pointed to his head. “In here. There are certain … well, I call them zones. It’s not wise to linger.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” The words came out angry, half shouted. She took a breath and decided she had reached her limit. “I’ve been patient, Aaron. How long am I to wait?”
He stood for a moment deep in thought. Finally, “Yes,” he said, “I’ve been inconsiderate. But I haven’t known where to begin.”
“Anywhere,” she said. “Begin anywhere.”
“All right.” He turned to his desk and began shuffling through a stack of papers. “Let’s begin with this, “ he said, retrieving several sheets of paper held together by a staple. “I had a deal of trouble running this down. Read it first. It won’t take long.” Julia glanced at what he had handed her. It was in French, an article photocopied from a medical periodical dated summer 1924. Clipped to the article were several typewritten pages in English. “One of my tutors helped me translate it. Paulette. Mme. Verlain. I wanted to make sure I understood it correctly.” The title was “Report on a Case of Hydrophobia: First Recorded Cure.” Julia sat down to read it at once.
The article was a case history, a report dealing with an eight-year-old boy who had been bitten by a rabid bat. The boy’s family lived in a small village in the mountainous south of France, miles from the nearest hospital and without any means of rapid transportation. The hydrophobia was in an advanced stage by the time a doctor arrived from the nearest town. The doctor — his name was LaSeur — was the author of the paper. He warned the family at once that at this stage the disease was incurable, but the family insisted that he treat the boy. Dr. LaSeur did the only thing he could think of. Intensive nursing. As each symptom appeared, he treated it as best he could, doing everything in his power to keep the boy alert and hopeful. In this way, he kept his patient alive through each new crisis. And at last after twelve days the fever broke, the symptoms vanished. The boy recovered.
Julia skimmed the article again. Was she supposed to see a connection here? She began to put the pieces together. Hydrophobia. Like Aaron’s accelerated aging, it too was thought to be incurable. Two little boys who had been saved from death. But where does the path go beyond that intersection? She was reminded of the videogames she used to play with Aaron. Often the player had to spot unlikely correspondences and connections. A magic bird or a warrior banner. A child’s toy or a witch’s spell. A golden key or a sunken bell. But Julia was drawing a blank. Finally she asked, “What am I missing?”
Aaron settled back deeply in his chair. “When you reported my case to the world, you said you had reversed the disease, that I’d returned to where I started. You described me as a normally healthy ten-year-old child again. We think of disease that way, don’t we? We were better before we got sick, so now we want to get back to that status. We battle with the sickness and fend it off. When it’s beaten, it goes away and we return to something called ‘normal.’ We call that conquering the disease. Isn’t that the way you’ve been thinking about me?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“But pay attention to the metaphors. The metaphors are misleading you. ‘Reversing,’ ‘returning,’ ‘going back’. You see, that’s exactly wrong.”
“How so?”
“There’s another way to see it. We don’t ‘return to health.’ We go forward to health. Not a serious distinction in most instances, but using the wrong image in my case has been a radical mistake. We speak of the patient having a history. But in fact it’s the disease that has a history. Disease uses the patient to reveal its history. It starts, it attacks our organism in some way, severely or mildly, and finally, in most cases, the body finds some way to fight it off. But often what really happens is that we hold on while the disease runs its course and uses up its resources. That’s what Dr. LaSeur was doing, though he seems not to have understood. He was following a sort of Fabian tactic: waiting, holding out, wearing his opponent down. Of course, some diseases are fatal. Fatal diseases never get the chance to complete their history because the patient dies. Every fatal disease is an unfinished story. We die before we get to the last chapter — and so the disease dies with us. I’m like the boy in the article you read. His disease ran its course. After that, it simply departed. Hydrophobia was finished with him. That’s my story as well. The diseases of old age are finished with me, so they’ve departed.” For the first time since she arrived at Tlaloc, he looked at her as if he honestly needed help. “Where does that leave me?”
Julia shook her head. “Aaron, how can I answer that?”
“Someplace nobody has ever been before. I didn’t go back to being ten years old; that should be pretty obvious. That’s what everybody — my parents, the courts, you, Kevin Forrester — has been struggling with. I didn’t go back. I went forward. I went through everything that makes old age lethal — and came out the other side.”
“But the disease was cured, the way we try to cure any disease. I don’t know how we killed it off, but we did.”
Aaron’s eyes were on her, a glowing, penetrating gaze. “But was it a disease? Now that we see its result, do we still think of it as something that needed to be cured or killed? That’s the crucial point here. You know how it is with adolescence. So many wrenching physical changes. The glands go wild, our sexual juices boil over, the entire body gets rebuilt. Raging hormones, we call it. The child becomes overloaded, confused, troubled — as I’ve been for months now. I’ve been behaving like a bratty teenager, taking my confusion out on everybody around me. But is adolescence a disease?”
“Of course not.”
“How do we know it’s not?”
“Because it’s a normal development in every human being. Everybody goes through it, unless they die young.”
“Meaning the child knows what lies ahead. Others have been through this. Children learn that it has to do with sex. We’re born into life sexually immature, and now is the time to grow up. We’ve seen people go through it and come out into the next stage of life. You know the story by H. G. Wells: “The Valley of the Blind?” The man who could see was regarded as diseased, wasn’t he? There were these two bulging orbs — his eyes — that were identified as abnormal growths that had to be removed. Now suppose there were a society of prepubescent children where nobody had ever gone through the teen age years. How would they regard adolescence when it descended on one of their members? Wouldn’t they see it as a sickness? They might try to ‘cure’ adolescence, might they not?”
Julia was growing impatient with what seemed like a far-fetched line of thought. “There couldn’t be a society of prepubescent children. Nobody would be able to reproduce.”
“Obviously. And we take reproduction very seriously. Because when you live in time, with less and less time ahead of you with every passing hour, making babies to live on after us is the only way we can imagine human life surviving. Why? Because we expect everybody to die. So there must be a next generation. Freud almost got that right. Eros is linked to the death instinct. Eros, meaning sex, is how we hope to pass human life along. We get frenzied over sex because it’s our way of escaping annihilation. But in order to have sex, we sink deeper into physical existence and all that comes with it. Think how much more … well, bodily we become when sex takes over our lives. And isn’t that curious? Have you ever thought about it deeply? Why should life have such a jarring discontinuity built into it? As if we got off on the wrong foot at birth. Adolescence is like the beginning of a second life. Suddenly things that were precious to the child become meaningless. At thirteen, we find ourselves living in an entirely new world. But if that can happen at thirteen, why can’t it happen again? Why have doctors never recognized the possibility of a transition into still another stage of life? A transition not of the body, but of something that uses the body, rides the body — a point at which an entirely new range of possibilities opens up, things we never expected and know nothing about because no one has ever reached that point. I say ‘no one,’ but I’ve begun to doubt that I’m alone in experiencing this change. I think there have been others who got close to knowing and passed on, people we call saints or prophets, people who knew there’s something like adolescence at the other end of life, a zone we can also pass through. What if adulthood isn’t the final stage of life? How would we regard someone who went beyond adulthood into another stage?”
“We’d probably see him as abnormal.”
“Right. We’d say he had a disease.”
She rubbed at her temples. “This is all too fanciful. Medical science is based on what we know of the human life span: three score years and ten — give or take. What could we know of the stage you’re speaking of?”
“ ‘We?’ If you mean you and everybody else, the answer is nothing. You’re the population of the blind. But then there’s me.” He was growing more agitated, as if he had been waiting to tell her what he had to say and now could not hold back. “Remember that game I used to play? Kong? The idea was for Kong to leap across great spaces. That’s what happened to me. I worked up enough speed to make the leap. You saw that as accelerated aging. Well, it was. It was speed, the speed I needed to carry me across. I was building up a kind of physiological momentum. Only my leap was into the dark. I had no idea where I was headed. I had no idea I’d land safely, but I did. I found someplace on the other side of old age. I recall being fascinated by games that involved getting across to some distant point — like the last row in a checkers game. If you could simply keep moving forward, you got there — all the way there. That’s the sense in which you cured me. You kept me alive long enough to get up that much speed. You boosted my morale; you kept my mind alert and working. You gave me hope, Julia. And the hope turned into momentum.”
“But what does it mean to say you found someplace on the other side of old age?”
He paused over the question. “That’s harder to explain. You’ve heard of the sound barrier. It’s as if aging is that kind of barrier. As we approach it, we encounter increasing resistance like the air that builds up in front of an airplane as it flies faster. The resistance wears us down. That’s called ‘getting old.’ The barrier has a name. We call it ‘time.’ Time is what resists us, resists life. Time is the enemy. And when we’re up against time and can’t get any older, we die. But suppose there was a way to break through that barrier and continue.”
“Continue?”
“That’s where we are now, Julia. We … or rather I’m continuing. I can feel that — a sense of incompletion. I’m moving toward something greater.”
“Moving? For how long?”
“I can’t tell you. But I know I’m near a point of climax, like a supersaturated solution that suddenly transforms.”
“Into what?”
He offered her a troubled smile. “I’m as curious as you.”
***
“How long?” she wants to know. And that I can’t tell her. When I try to see ahead, everything flakes away into confusion — as if I were trying to make out the shapes in a house of mirrors. I see panels of glass shifting and sliding, catching the light — the brightness behind them that’s too fierce to see. Blinded by the light. I’m feeling my way forward, working from intuition.
At first I thought the brightness was of the mind, changes of perception, judgement, understanding. But no. Mind is too slow. Mind must find words, must make sense. It is an asker and answerer of questions. Mind is a hair-splitter and a logic-chopper. No use when you are riding the whirlwind. I am beyond what mind can grasp.
But body! This body, this gem-like structure — it is taking light into itself, becoming the brightness. It holds me like a loving presence that knows its purpose better than I could frame in words, guides me, draws me. Body has become a hive of restless bees, every cell alert and impatient to take wing. Time to gather together and leave, as the bees do when they sense the need of a new home. Maybe this is what migratory animals experience as they rush toward their destination, drawn forward, obeying. The joy of it! The joy of surrendering to something older, wiser, relentless. And orgiastic. Yes, that’s what I feel. In every inch of my body, an excitement like the approach of sexual climax. It’s what I felt with Julia, with Jason, with Paulette — my brief catalogue of lovers, all of them bringing me so much less than this, mere samples and glimpses.
“I was an Inward Sphere of Light.” That line from Julia’s book. The poet knew. I’m in the sphere. And the sphere is growing. The sphere is my world, an expanding world. A city of light, expanding because it is drawn by a force outside of it. Don’t they all know this city? Don’t they all want to enter and live here? But for others, there is only so much time — not enough time, and at last the sphere collapses, the city is buried. The end of life. But I am passing beyond the domain of time. The sphere is growing, infusing my body with light, turning me into a creature of light. Or rather returning me. To what? What I once was. The original splendor. And then? What happens then? How will it end?
No! It won’t end. Always something greater. The sphere will empty itself. It will pour its light into something else, into a kind of death. Like death, still and mute and mindless — and yet exactly the opposite.
That’s what I fear. Forrester, DeLeon, even Julia. They want to extend life. They want more time. Another year and another and another. Forrester believes life is just not dying. They don’t understand. Time is the enemy. Time is the devil.
Twenty
After the police visited, Forrester wondered if he had — technically speaking — broken the law. He had not given false answers to any direct question asked by the police, but he had left things unsaid. Whatever he had first peripherally perceived in the phrase “Kong Effect,” he had kept to himself. What he knew about Julia’s first visit to San Lazaro several years in the past, he had also left unmentioned. Why? He was not ready to say why, not even in his private thoughts.
