After James (30 page)

“They'll break their necks,” said her father.

“They're there almost every day this time of year. Now they seem to like jumping in the dark.”

She knew the desire, or had once known it when she was their age. By the local standard in Vancouver she'd been wild for a couple of years after her mother died. Drinking, having sex with boys whose last names she didn't know from other parts of
the city, once with an older man who'd offered her a ride in his Jaguar. He asked her not to leave footprints on the wooden dashboard. She'd almost ruined her grades, everything, her chance at life, as her father had put it. Of course, looking back, she could see she'd just been angry at Fate. Furious, actually.

“I walked down there,” Koss continued. “This was in the spring. I would have thought the water was too cold for swimming. We talked for a while, me and two of the girls. They're local kids. They assumed I'd come to complain about the noise but I just wanted to invite them up to the chateau. They were interested but too shy, I think. They were sober. There's no law against diving as far as I know. I suppose their parents are just happy they're not fucking. Though of course they're doing that, too.”

In her father's expression was a sudden fascination. The near-naked humans, jumping and howling, made for a primitive scene. He would be thinking about the cave he'd found, calculating whether to mention tomorrow's expedition to Koss, which she hoped he wouldn't, and how much he'd had to drink and whether he could trust his calculation. Or was he just remembering a swimming hole from his youth?

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him. He looked at her urgently, as if he didn't know where he was. It was a woman's question, she supposed, though not of the kind she would normally ask. He wouldn't have heard it for years.

“I was thinking that video games, the entertainments, they separate fear from awe. Last week Armin pointed out that the word
reverence
is from French and Latin—”

“Cognate of
reveri
,” said Koss.

“Yes, reverie, which is what you caught me in, dear. To be in awe of, or in fear of. And the worship of the thing that strikes awe or fear. This can't be good for us. But then, seeing the kids out there, risking their necks and whooping and laughing, I wonder if maybe fear does belong with delight.”

“I suppose we have to factor in boredom and stupidity and mating displays,” she said. “These are part of the species, too.”

Koss caught her eye and held it, trying to load a sexual charge into the moment. Through her blank stare she saw the charge die on his face.

By now the kids had all jumped into the pool. One of the boys climbed onto the rocks, scrambled to the top, and waded out to the lip of the falls. He was about to jump again. He paused for a moment with the rushing water folded against his calves, and stood tall and seemed to look their way, aware of his audience at the distant candlelit table. Celia counted five heads below in the water, two of them bigger, male. She realized she'd been hearing only two male voices. One of the boys must have been soft-spoken or silent. She wondered which one, and who he was inside.

And then the boy on the top was gone. She had expected a shout before he jumped but he simply stepped out, surely too close to the rockface, and fell inside the falls themselves. Or he must have. His descent wasn't visible. One of the boys in the pool below began swimming toward the falls with his head up, looking, ducking into the water and surfacing again, swinging his head this way and that with the long, wet hair whipping around, and only when he was before the crashing falls did the other head emerge, back with the others, who
yelped with delight. A brilliant trick, to have fallen secretly and swum undetected below his friend. One of the girls, Celia guessed she was the jumper's girlfriend, was less delighted. She held a hand to her face and then drew it back and hit him on the shoulder. By now the friend had swum back to the group. He raised locked hands above his head and kicked up and brought them down around the jumper's neck to pull him under—this was playful, Celia thought—but the jumper ducked and pushed him away and turned to his girlfriend and embraced her.

Koss and her father had been watching all this, talking, she hadn't really listened. The jumper was the silent boy. He knew something, she was sure of it, that none of the rest of them in the water understood. It was a suffered knowledge no one would want.

The father of her lost child was the first man she'd had sex with in three years. She'd described him to Indrani as the only man in Vancouver who in his off-hours wasn't wearing shorts, fleece, or spandex. He co-owned a restaurant near the lab where Celia often had the appetizer salad by herself. One day he was characterizing the balsamic reduction as “sugared blood” and the next he was someone she'd spent a night with. There were no actual dates. The dates were retrospective, the plates he'd set before her, the weather talk, testing together the tang of fruits through the growing season. He didn't call her afterward. She returned to the restaurant once, a week later, and the waitress told her he'd gone to Paris “to
study what they do with ducks or something.” The way Celia told it to Indrani, absent the pregnancy, the way Indrani laughed at the beginning and end, it was a rounded story, one of slight and comic disappointment. Indrani understood this was how people came and went in a life, or at least in Celia's life. One day in the future Celia might tell a story of the same shape about Indrani, assuming she had someone to tell it to.

Koss stood to light the candles on the table—left-handed, she noticed—sat back down and looked at her, then stood again and pushed two of them slightly closer to her until he was satisfied with the effect.

Spiritual matters put aside, her father held forth on the role of ancient pathogens in the great extinctions. This led them to de-extinction and cloning, the thought of which prompted Koss to exclaim about “the possibilities.”

“It's coming fast, extinct species, even humans,” said her father. “We shouldn't let
that
genie out of
that
bottle. And whatever they say, profit is the evil here.”

Koss checked Celia for a reaction. Apparently she looked as she felt, plucked from one world and set down a few hours later into another where she was expected to know the local customs and rules of sport.

They cleared the table together. The kitchen was huge. It must have once served the whole chateau but now sat mostly unused and unlit, full of pointless space. In the dim reaches were black cast-iron pans and table legs. The long room had the feel of a broken steam engine. She was a little drunk, a little free-associative. A dozen copper pots hung from a metal cylinder like huge saxophone keys. A wall of
cookbooks, a rolling ladder to reach the top ones. Except for the island where he'd prepared the dinner, it was all clean. She wondered if someone other than Koss was tending it.

As the men prepared espressos she drifted into the living room. On one wall were light boxes of images overlaid into senselessness, and artworks of neon lines suggesting horses' necks and women's backs, and small black photo frames without photos. She looked at these in some defiant mood, so as not to look first at the centrepiece. On the floor midroom was a device about three feet high, in motion, a brass frame and fulcrum with a malleiform lever, duller, mismatched, tinted red. A ring spun on an axis as the head of the lever bobbed up and down as if hammering the stone floor or drawing oil. The machine or whatever it was possessed a throwback, deco beauty. She sensed its weight.

Koss came in behind her and loomed at her shoulder. She turned to find he was slightly too close and storming pheromones. She turned back to the penitent machine.

“Don't tell me. I'll figure it out,” she said.

“I've never been able to. It doesn't even have a name as far as I know.”

“You bought it?”

“I made it from my grandfather's design. He was a soldier in the second war.” She resisted doing what he wanted, asking for the full story, but then asked. “As the Russians took Berlin he was shot through the cheek. The bullet broke his jaw and many teeth and disfigured him. He missed dying by only inches, but he never felt lucky or unlucky during that time, or for the rest of his life. He
didn't believe in luck.” She drifted to the right as if to get a different angle on the piece and Koss stepped along with her. “He was a prisoner of war during the occupation. And his wife, my grandmother, she was left to deal with the Russians on her own. He said he used to stay sane by designing these objects in his head. Then after he was a free man, he drew them but was afraid to make them in three dimensions. He told me he thought they were connected to a madness but the madness wasn't his.”

The story was not burnished. He wanted the telling to sound uncomplicated and fresh, but its ease was practised.

“It seems to run on its own,” said Celia. “In perpetual motion.”

“There's a trick to it,” said her father, entering the room.

“Not a trick but a secret, yes. This object is my closest connection to my grandfather.” Celia and her father watched the machine but Koss didn't so much as glance at it. He was looking at them. Of the machine he must have been well past looking.

“You inherited his design talent,” said her father.

“Not in this case. My blood grandfather was a Russian soldier. Brutal and anonymous. I only learned this at the end of my grandfather's life. He told me himself. Even my father didn't know.”

“Good god.” Her father's head slotted back a few inches as if the machine had made a threatening remark.

Koss said, “It's not such an unusual story to come out of a war, of course.”

In the days ahead, what would come to her most often from the chateau was the penitent machine and the moment she and her father took their coffees outside to the table with Koss still in the house.

“I'm undergoing a conversion, dear. From a man of science to a man of god. Or at least of something much larger than I've been willing to imagine.”

He could say nothing of the god, except that it was ancient, and Koss had been given to glimpse it in earthly forms. Koss had urged him to make of his remaining years the practice of a devotion to seeing the world differently. He would look for god or the evidence of god. He would study the raiments, the praisings, the showings forth, not only in the great and obscure religions but also, as Koss had advised, in nature and art. He knew how to read the natural world but had never tried not to read it, had never actually seen anything he had studied for having imprisoned it all in names and taxonomies. And it was art—painting and poetry, “that bobbing thing in there”—that would help free nature back into its innate strangeness and wonder. Of course art had its own terms but he didn't know most of them so they weren't in the way. He would sample and read, and if he ended up covered in mud and dancing around a fire, then so be it. He would find the shards of the first things.

He asked her not to look so shocked. Koss joined them at the table and began speaking. She worked at not registering meaning in his voice. The kids were gone now, night had fallen, the moon rising. She watched a bat fly overhead and disappear onto a dark shutter on the upper floor of the chateau and then realized the shutter wasn't dark but matted in
bats. The night was full of textured shades of misperception. At least the bats could echolocate. She was jet-lagged in a foreign country. Apparently she couldn't even guess at what counted locally as unexpected. She'd just heard what she'd heard and now they were all drinking coffee and talking about the great extinctions.

“In your lifetime, Lia, or certainly that of the next generation, at least half the species on earth will have gone extinct.”

“Parents shouldn't scare their children,” she said. He missed her subtext.

“I've tried to learn these extinctions,” said Koss. “The last was called…” He'd lost the English name.

“The end-Cretaceous event,” said Celia. “I wonder what ours will be called. Just ‘The End,' I guess.”

“It won't be called anything, not by us. Not even by our clones.” The false authority of the booze had further elevated her father's voice.

“You believe our species is ending soon?” Koss asked.

“Well. The harbingers are there. Biological, climatic, historical—”

“Conversational,” she added. “Men love talk of doom. Though not so much plummeting sperm counts.”

“It's time for some other organism to take over the world.” Her father outlined the so-called no-analog future currently rounding the corner upon carbon emissions and acidification. “Nothing like this has ever existed before. There's nothing to compare it to. We've made something new and deadly and can't stop repeating the mistake.”

“What do you think, Celia?”

She thought about dyings-off. Not the deaths of lone things but of kinds. It was perplexing that only one species should know about the past. To what purpose does one animal evolve to study the great swaths of time? Was such study driven by some shared awareness not yet identified? We can't always find words and numbers for what we know. She couldn't find words at all.

She excused herself and left the table and walked across the pea gravel to the low stone wall. Behind the chateau, ground lights had come on to reveal a garden with ragged hedges and two rows of plane trees that ended at a square fountain. On the four corners stone lions stood astride tipped stone barrels. Only two of the barrels still fed the small, dirty pool. A stunted column of water stood in the centre. Then another rose up inside it, reaching higher, falling on itself. After a few seconds the columns disappeared. Presumably they kept the bugs down.

She turned and watched the river. Her day had been sustained past its breaking point. The men talked, their voices drew down the sky. She was not safe.