How the Stars did Fall (19 page)

Olivia shuddered as the cold water soaked her clothes, the steady pounding of the rain forcing her out of the dark dream she had fallen into. Yet before her eyes were even open, the rain ceased and the sea fell silent again.

They traveled the rest of the way under a clear sky, stopping only when they had reached their destination. At that point, Adler turned towards the coast, swimming as far as he safely could. Once the water became too shallow, he lifted his mouth above the water and spoke.

“Hold on,” he said. And with Olivia still hanging on to his back, Adler’s form changed. To Olivia it sounded like the breaking of one hundred bones and it looked like it, too, as Adler’s body contracted and took on the form of a tall hoofed beast with thick brown fur and an equine face. Like a Minotaur out of ancient Crete, Adler strode out of the water triumphant and helped Olivia down from her perch. The orcas deposited the other girls onto the beach similarly. Once their labor was done, all of them in unison let out a song, their whale voices high-pitched and magical like the language of angels. Adler responded in a similar tone and the orcas dispersed, swimming away.

On the beach the girls realized they were all famished and thirsty but none of them found the strength to start a fire. Instead, they stood around staring at the beastly figure of Adler, his fur not enough to conceal his hard muscles, taut like iron, or the terrible fierceness of his face. Realizing the effect he created in the women, Adler changed forms into that of a leafy man, the same he had shown before to Olivia.

Adler led them off the beach and onto a grass patch, where together the girls gathered kindling for a fire and, lighting it, they sat around it, all eyes glued to Adler.

While they sat, a foal approached the group and stopped a few meters from the fire, afraid. But Adler stretched out his hand and called it to him and it came. He whispered something in the foal’s ear and it responded by bending its short legs and falling to the ground. Adler in turn put his hands on the foal and incanted some sacred prayer and all life exited the foal, leaving only the body, which he gave up to Ah Toy. She thanked him and set out immediately to cut the baby horse open, removing the viscera and prepping it for cooking.

“Are you a wendigo?” one of the girls asked Adler.

Adler laughed heartily until the very trees seemed to sway in response and a strong gust nearly blew out their fire like a passing spirit suddenly unhinged.

“There are no wendigos, little one.”

Molly stood and left the circle, taking hold of Adler’s hand and studying it, the green veins and skin tough as bark.

By the time the foal had finished cooking, the girls had peppered Adler with questions. He answered them as best he could, and then they slept. In the morning they moved on, walking, stopping only to eat and drink and fill their jars with fresh water from streams. At night more animals came to Adler and he repeated the same ritual he had conducted with the foal, and the girls ate until all were satisfied. Two more days and nights they traveled. Over time the awe the girls felt for Olivia and Adler changed to veneration and among themselves they set out to codify the tenets of their new religion. And if Olivia was their savior, then Adler was their holy anchorite come out of obscurity to show them the truth of the world.

They practiced their rites early in the morning. In the woods they found stones and with them made a circle and in the circle each girl took her turn standing and reciting a new catechism. The words of this catechism had been volunteered by a Polish girl. No one else knew what it meant and neither did they ask the Polish girl the meaning. Once the words had been said, each girl took one of the stones from the circle and, polishing it, dug out a pocket in the soil and slipped the stone in. They buried the stones not like corpses but seeds of whatever future the girls awaited.

Throughout their journey, Adler looked on at the cult building around him and paid it no mind. Even those who participated made no effort to include him physically, as if the mere idea of him was enough. Neither did they include Olivia.

But on one occasion when the girls had convened, Adler appeared to them not as a man but as an overgrowth, a stretched-out plane of foliage and bark and root with two large eyes. His arms wrapped around the trees and his feet burrowed in the deep underground. Unseen.

And in that solemn moment of quiet anticipation he spoke with the voice of a thousand forests. A gentle, swaying voice, slow and deliberate.

“Can you feel the despair of my brothers and sisters? Through the mist, the trees speak in unison. They fear orange fire and black smoke and the sharp axes of hairless apes. Under the sun they have long labored and the weight of every second, every century, bears down on them, impressing always the need to go on, to reach out further towards the sky above. At what cost? At every cost. To exist is both free and the greatest expense.”

Adler shifted in his perch as a strong wind gusted through him, brushing his many leaves. A gentle caress.

The girls struggled with the mystery of Adler’s words. They sat in silence, hoping for further elaboration, transfixed by the swaying vegetable corpus. It stretched over the trees and little flowers bloomed, then withered continuously across the span, sped up, as if not a part of the current timeline, the cycle repeating over and over, flowers of every color, like the momentary flashes of shooting stars. Birth, death and rebirth. The wonder of it fixed the girls’ attention for several minutes. Then without a word passing between any of them, they got up and plucked each a flower from Adler’s body and left. Each girl went a different direction as if the mystery had been revealed by Adler without the need of words and with it came a commission to travel to all of the corners of the continent and speak of what they had seen to anyone who would listen.

Those who remained walked on until they came within sight of Los Angeles. Seeing it, Adler grimaced and stamped his walking stick into the soft dirt. Then he motioned with his head and the girls followed him. They walked away from the city, making their camp that night in the high wilderness, where the grass grew thick and the stars shone above the canopy of trees like some extraordinary blanket encrusted with sparkling diamonds. Once again Adler procured them meat for roasting, but before the food had finished cooking he summoned Olivia to him away from the other girls, something clearly troubling him.

“There is something else I must attend to.”

“You are leaving us?”

“I must find your brother.”

“But where will we go? What will we do? We’re not hunters, nor do we possess the means to purchase food.”

“I don’t know, but I will return to you. Perhaps you ought go into the city. You may find an answer there.”

With his walking stick, Adler disappeared into the darkened forest, leaving Olivia alone and afraid. She found the other girls eating and laughing. They, in turn, noticed Olivia’s changed disposition and questioned her.

“Adler has left us,” Olivia said.

“Why?” Molly asked.

“He would not say.”

“Then what are we to do?”

“We must go on without him.”

“How do we do that with no horses, no food?” Molly asked.

Olivia had no answer. They bivouacked in the wilderness that night, sleeping little.

The next day, after a brief journey, they entered Los Angeles. The dirt main street cut through the middle of the city like some thick and elastic artery. There were a few stragglers commuting up and down with haste as if they were late for something. And everywhere windows and doors were shuttered and locked, whether to keep things out or keep things in Olivia could not say. From the other side of the city, the powerful dong of church bells could be heard. It was Sunday.

Down the streets they went, stopping at every store they passed and knocking on the door and trying to look through the windows for signs of people working on a Sunday. They were disappointed until they found a general store down one of the smaller streets. This one’s door stood slightly ajar and its dusty floor could be seen from the street. Olivia approached the door and saw through the slit the movement of a man. He wore a Kossuth hat upon his head and he paced in front of a shelf, stopping now and again to reach out and grab a product— a bag of flour, a tin of beans— moving it from one spot to another. His concentration was such that he did not even notice Olivia and Molly when they came in until they were right behind him.

“Goddamn. You startled me half to death,” the storekeeper said. Then he leaned in and took a full measure of the people in front of him. “You girls look like you just came up out of hell. Shouldn’t you be at chapel?”

“We aren’t religious,” Molly said.

“Aye, me neither. Anyway, what can I do for you?”

“We need food and water.”

“I have plenty of both.”

“But we don’t have any coin.”

“You don’t have any gold? No bank notes?” The storekeeper scratched his head. “Well, you can’t purchase anything without money.”

“We could work for it.”

“Doing what?”

Olivia looked around the store, searching for liquids hidden in containers, enablers of her awesome power with which to intimidate the storekeeper, but while she scanned the room she thought she saw the items on the shelves shift ever so slightly by themselves. As if they were somehow alive. She dismissed that as impossible, but the notion gave her an idea.

“I want to show you something,” she said.

“Show me what?”

“A trick. Something my pa taught me. Bet you’ll like it. Can you fill a glass with water and place it on that desk?”

The storekeeper did just that and he sat in front of the desk as Olivia stood opposite him. She closed her eyes and let her hands hang in the air as if she were summoning some power from beyond. The acting seemed to work, for the curiosity evident on the storekeeper’s face was replaced by a kind of subdued dread, as if, whatever were to happen next, the storekeeper already knew he would not like it. Then the glass with the water rose up from the table and floated in the air, bobbing up and down dramatically.

The storekeeper stood at the sight, his mouth agape. He waved his hands over and under the glass, trying to discover some hidden means by which the thing did float. But he found nothing. While the storekeeper struggled with the scene, the glass slowly returned to its place and Olivia opened her eyes. She waited a while, not knowing what kind of reaction to expect. He stood.

“It’s you,” he said. “You’ve come. He said you’d come.”

Then he picked the glass up and drank every last drop of the water as if those morsels held some lingering secret energy and he wanted it all for himself.

Chapter Fourteen

Early in the morning Faraday’s mother came up the stairs bearing a bucket filled with water, the floorboards creaking with each step. She carried it into Faraday’s room, where her son lay unconscious, and placed it next to the bed as she had done for the past couple days. Then she took a rolled-up towel and, dipping it into the water, proceeded to dab and wipe Faraday, cleaning his face and his neck and his arms. From the outside it looked as though Faraday were dead. But the doctor had come and measured Faraday’s vitals and guaranteed that Faraday still lived in some way or other but gave a low probability that he would ever regain the fullness of his faculties. The father had resigned himself to his son’s death but the mother hadn’t. She stood vigilant at his side like a stubborn elephant matriarch, willing to forfeit everything else if only her son could live.

All of these acts of hers went by without Faraday noticing, for even though he lived his eyes were shut and his mind roamed unbridled upon the planes of his consciousness. Over and over the scene inside the brothel repeated in Faraday’s mind, but sped up as if he had been condemned to live inside someone else’s head, forever reliving the same hours in the same night. But each night he inhabited a different person, a different perspective. He caught glimpses of his sister serving drinks, speaking to a tall Chinese woman. Sometimes even while stuck in that manor he would look out a window and see a giant’s hand holding a cold, moist cloth and he felt that hand was familiar but he could not place it. Then the changing perspectives stopped. No longer did he move within the manor but he froze in front of the painting. It was his sister, he was sure, but he looked at the painting so long that the doubts came anyway. At times he believed it was actually his mother there underneath that vast column of seawater. At other times he believed he saw himself or another woman. An Indian woman with dark skin in a light brown leather dress. While he stood there time went on around him, the days coming and going in the blink of an eye, the heavenly bodies swirling above him in perpetual orbit, the sun and the moon each ceding its place to the other. Wind and rain eroded the building around him, the whores long since gone until only the wall upon which the painting hung still stood. The ground gave way to water, the height of the flooding growing higher with each passing day until he could no longer stand and he found himself battling to stay afloat, his arms and legs aching out of fatigue, his tongue dry as paper and the painting halfway covered up, the splashing of the water smearing the paint, leaving it ruined.

At one point Faraday faltered. His head fell into the water and then bobbed back up and then fell again and this time he did not return. He tried to scream and failed, choking and coughing instead. His hands came up and encircled his neck and he waited for death to embrace him and carry him away. But death did not come. So Faraday opened his eyes and first he saw the painting still held before him and intact. Then he realized he was breathing and the impossibility of that fact jolted him awake.

Sitting upright on the bed, Faraday took in his surroundings. His forehead was slick with sweat and his legs felt weak and numb. An empty bucket sat by his side, a lantern lit and failing against the predawn dark, the flame hidden behind the folds of glass, dim and wilting. Then Faraday felt a hollowness in his gut. Hunger. The kind of hunger he could not ignore, the kind that got worse the more he thought about it until the hollowness spread upward from his gut into his lungs and his heart and the base of his skull.