Mount Terminus (14 page)

And with that said, Mr. Geller vigorously shook Bloom's hand. Your father might not have put it down on paper, he said in parting, but you and I both know what his last wish was for you. More than anything, he wanted to see you and your brother united and made whole. I very much hope this is what comes to pass. Should this dream of his go unfulfilled for any reason, be assured, you always have me, and my family, to turn to.

Thank you, Mr. Geller.

I mean it, said Geller. Every word of it. Mr. Geller now took Bloom by the arm and walked him in the same direction Mr. Stern had gone. Together they meandered through the grove of trees until they reached the head of the drive, where Stern was waiting in his sedan. Bloom wished Mr. Geller safe travels and thanked him for having come all this way, and he asked him to thank his daughters for their wonderful gift. The birds, said Bloom, have lifted my spirits, as has your visit.

Mr. Geller was pleased to hear it.

I will be seeing you, said Mr. Stern from behind the wheel. I'm available to you anytime.

Goodbye, Joseph, Geller called as they drove off. And good luck!

*   *   *

That afternoon, Bloom did as he had done before so many times in the past. Filled with the warmth and kindness he felt from Saul Geller's visit, he returned to the courtyard and sat with Roya on the wall of the reflecting pool, sank his feet into its water. He reclined in the library for some time and read
The Fall of the House of Usher
.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

He took the book with him for a walk up the trail to Mount Terminus's peak and remained there to read it three times over. Three times, he saw the mighty walls rush asunder. He returned in time for dinner, and when he walked into the dining room with his book in hand, he was pleased to find the walls freshened with a coat of whitewash. The table and the rugs, the sideboards and the drapery had all been substituted for furniture and material of a similarly baroque shape and pattern, yet dissimilar enough that the room appeared to Bloom sufficiently altered. Meralda placed a plate of enchiladas before him, bent over him, and pressed her cheek to his. I'm so happy to see you at your place again, she said. As she swung through the kitchen door, Bloom turned his attention to where his father would have been seated, and he was reminded of his shattered body lying atop the table, and with that image in mind, the buoyant mood he had fostered that morning and throughout the day was undone. He stared at the bands of color that had begun to streak the sky outside the window, and in this storm of particles, he felt nothing of its beauty, only the oncoming death of the day. Through the duration of the twilight, he waited for the fall of night, and sat with an emptiness within him, which wouldn't be filled with food. When Meralda returned and saw he hadn't eaten, and was entranced by the sight of the empty chair, she sat beside him and said, Tomorrow, let's try the parlor, shall we? To this, Bloom nodded his consent. The aches, she acknowledged, they rise and fall with a mind all their own. In time, she said. In time.

*   *   *

Each morning now, he returned to the tower to commune with the birds given to him by Mr. Geller's daughters, hoping he might recapture the exultation he'd experienced upon discovering them. He named the male cockatiel Elijah and taught him to say the meaning of his name.

My God is Yahweh, he repeated over and over until the bird squawked back, My God is Yahweh, My God is Yahweh.

To Bloom's greeting, Hello, my dear Elijah, he taught Elijah to respond: Hello, my dear Bloom. Where have you been?

I've been here and there, Bloom would say.

To which Elijah responded, My God is Yahweh.

When Bloom asked Elijah, Do you want to be free?

Elijah responded, Open the door and we shall see.

No, Bloom would say. I need you here with me.

To which Elijah would say, My God is Yahweh.

Such amusements held Bloom's interest for only so long before he found himself revisiting again and again the House of Usher. It began to inhabit him so thoroughly, when he wandered in and around the estate there grew in his mind a strange fancy. About him emerged an atmosphere, which had no affinity with the air of heaven. Around the villa's exterior, within the walls of its rooms, hung a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, leaden-hued. He sat at the opening of the gate for hours at a time and in pencil and ink laid over the façade minute fungi … hanging in a fine tangled webwork from the eaves. Throughout the stucco walls, he inlaid a zigzag of fissures. He turned the roof's clay tiles an ebon black, the white gravel of the drive, of the gardens, a dusty gray. He withered leaves, flowers, and fruit. He blew into the sky clouds of ash, lit the cadaverous landscape with feeble gleams of encrimsoned light, laid waste to livestock throughout the depression of the valley, turned the sea into an inky stain, scattered from the top of the tower into the wind the exotic feathers of his birds.

In time, said Meralda each evening, in time.

*   *   *

Weeks passed in this gloom, until one morning, while under the archways of the pavilion, the combustion and grind of a car shifting gears turned his attention outward. The birds noticed it before he did. The noise quieted their song and movement, and their silence disrupted his contemplation. On the final switchback at the top of the mountain, a white roadster motored into view, and in only a few minutes' time, it entered the gates. When it had traveled the length of the drive and had come to a stop, it took Bloom a moment to apprehend who was there. For the better part of a year, he had been reminded of his brother each time the strike of a hammer resounded from the construction site. He knew he would return before long, but the circumstances of the past months had pushed the thought of him a vast distance away. That Simon now sat in the sunlight below, staring off through a pair of goggles in the direction of the promontory, took Bloom aback. He thought to call out to him, but his brother had yet to disengage the motor and likely wouldn't hear him, so he started down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he walked out the service entrance to discover the car absent its driver, its engine no longer idling, his brother's goggles hanging from the rearview mirror. He looked in the direction to which Simon had focused his attention when he arrived, and there Bloom saw his white suit reflecting the sun's morning light onto the tall grass of the field. Bloom trailed after him, on toward the estate's end, where the yellow meadow met brush and rock, and as he neared the headland, he recalled most vividly the first time he and his father stood together at the bluff's edge to watch the twilight reflect off the surface of the sea, and for the first time in many years, he recalled the vow he had taken. Like a hypnotic melody he couldn't detach himself from, he heard the words over and over again within his mind; and in a quiet voice, in the voice of the child who once fit snugly under his father's arm, he repeated it in the form of a prayer.
Blessed art thou, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the Universe, when I am a man and I fall in love, I will protect my love better than he protected his. Blessed art thou, O Lord Our God
 … When Bloom reached his brother at the edge of the bluff, the prayer turned into a whisper and was ended upon hearing Simon say, in a tone that held little recognition of Bloom's presence beside him, How strange it is to know I'll never have a complete picture of him. Not even a trace of his death remains.

As his elder brother continued to hang his head, Bloom stepped forward and inched his brow over the promontory's border. It was true. The mound of earth in which his father had been buried was no more. The mud, the rock, the bramble had in the months since the accident been reclaimed by the mountain; it had hardened in the heat, crumbled, and, with the aid of gravity's invisible hand, spread over the scree at the base of the ravine.

Tell me, Joseph. Do you think a man can fully assemble himself without having knowledge of his father?

I don't know, said Bloom.

No, said Simon, nor do I.

Simon said after a thoughtful pause, I've lived out so much of my life on a stage. I've acted so many roles, appeared as figments dreamed up in the minds of others, I'm not convinced I'd recognize the original inhabitant of my body if it introduced itself to me on the street one day; it's often the case I open a door to an unfamiliar room filled with unfamiliar faces, and find I haven't a clue who will arrive on the other side of the threshold.

Actors, said Simon. Hydras all.

He now stepped back and took in the sight of Bloom, and Bloom stepped back and took in the sight of Simon, and each, unaccustomed to seeing himself reflected so precisely on the surface of another, looked off in opposite directions.

Perhaps it was Bloom's new habit of dampening the light of the day into the darkest of shades, but when they turned back to each other a moment later, Simon appeared to him a duller version of himself. Paler in the cheek, more gray in complexion, more skeletal in stature. His eyes, too, appeared a dimmer version of what Bloom recalled. No longer were they burning with the same intensity he had encountered on the trail that day of their first meeting. He asked Bloom if he'd mind showing him where their father had been buried. To this, Bloom said, Not at all.

The brothers turned their backs on the ravine and wended a path through the grove. They circled into the center of the rose garden, where, at the foot of the grave, they stood in silence until Simon reached into the neck of his shirt and pulled out a silver chain; attached to it was the other half of the pendant Bloom had received the day he and his father traveled to the sanitarium by the sea.

As long as I can remember, Simon said, this has been such a weight around my neck. It's a wonder I can hold my head upright. He gripped the pendant in his fist and, with his jaw braced tight, he yanked the chain hard enough to break one of the fastenings. Bloom eyed the shimmering links that had fallen over his brother's knuckles. When Simon saw Bloom observing his closed hand, he said, I understand you have one just like it.

I do, said Bloom, but I know nothing about it.

Simon pointed to the grave. Didn't he say?

No.

No, said Simon, why would he? There was a note of scorn in Simon's voice, sharp enough it troubled Bloom. His brother seemed to have heard it as well, because when he spoke next, he was more measured. He didn't tell you because the gift of the pendant, it was a morbid gesture. To have told you would have been perverse.

I don't understand.

I was told the story when I was a child. Sam, the man who placed the other half of this in your hand the day you visited him on the beach, he related it to me. Mother told him. Simon opened his fist to reveal the charm. It was a gift from our father. This coin was his only true possession when he arrived at the orphanage. It had been sewn into his swaddling, presumably by his parents. As a loving gesture to your mother and mine, he went to the orphanage's tool shop to divide it in two and presented it to them on their eighth birthday. Simon's eyes studied the object in his hand for a moment as if he hadn't looked at it for a long time. Sam, he removed this half of the coin from my mother's neck the day she died, and he clasped it here around mine the night he retrieved me from your home in Woodhaven.

Simon glanced over at Bloom. You know the night?

Yes.

He told you, then.

Yes. He told me everything.

Well, what he didn't tell you was the half of the pendant Sam placed in your hand the day you visited him at the sanitarium was the half my mother pulled from your mother's neck as my mother fell to her death.

No, said Bloom, no he didn't.

No, said Simon with a thin smile. A thoughtful man wouldn't burden a child with such an ugly account. A calm now came over his face and for a few moments he lost himself to his thoughts. When he returned, he breathed out a tremor of laughter that made Bloom wonder if he was taking some pleasure at his expense. But his brother then shook his head and said, as if dumbfounded by an idea he couldn't fully grasp, Sam, on the other hand …

What about him?

He was the type of man who was mostly unaware he was an affront to all things decent. Simon laughed. A different sort of man altogether. One who took great pleasure in delivering the cruelest aspects of the world with an avuncular smile. As I'm sure he did when he handed the other half of this to you.

Why are you speaking of him in the past?

Simon turned to observe Bloom. His eyes narrowed as if he were trying to puzzle out a riddle. He now gripped the pendant between thumb and forefinger and rubbed at its surface. He walked around their father's grave to the base of the statue and ran his finger over the contours of Psyche's arm. Observing the languid features of her face, he said over his shoulder, I truly was hoping to know him. I hoped in time I would come to forgive him. To better understand him … He's always been present in my life, you know. Sam never allowed me to forget. He always reminded me there was a father, my father, a Jacob Rosenbloom, who played a part in my mother's ruin, a Jacob Rosenbloom who owed me more than he could ever repay me. I would have preferred the knowledge of his existence to fade, but Sam wouldn't allow it. Simon turned back to Bloom and said with some seriousness, I would have preferred to live as you have. Quietly. In peace. Without a thought about what I was owed, in what ways I had been wronged. He set the pendant and its chain into Psyche's lifeless hand. But you had him, and I, I had Sam. The petty. The unprincipled. The very hungry Sam. Simon laughed again at the thought of his protector and benefactor one last time, and then meandered off through the garden's rings. Bloom thought to walk after him, but he could sense, from his brother's shift in tone and the way he turned away from him, this was his exit.