Mount Terminus (47 page)

Nothing, nothing except for a misting of water kissing his face. The kiss of Death? Or was it the kiss of life? He opened his eyes to find the muddy water receding, falling back into the valley, into a roiling whirlpool of debris churning at the base of the mountain. The road below was slicked with mud, and the twisted earthly remains of cattle and horses, of men?—perhaps they were men?—began to crust over in the sun almost immediately after the retreat. Bloom thought to look, to see, if anything at all was alive, but nothing stirred, nothing groaned. He stepped out of the car to observe the scene, but he could not bear the sight. Before any more of the grotesquerie was revealed across the valley, he turned away from it. He cranked the roadster's engine, and without another thought, Bloom circled about and drove away from this horrible world of his brother's making. He drove up and over his beloved mountain. He slowed for only a brief moment when he approached the estate, and when he thought of looking through its gate to bid Mount Terminus one final farewell, he stopped himself and drove on, past the road leading to the plateau, and he continued down the switchback, taking turns at precarious speeds. When he reached the bottom, he drove past the gates of Mount Terminus Studios without even taking them in, and he continued on down the long stretch of road leading to the edge of the basin. He continued on through the square blocks lined with stucco homes that once stood pinned to his brother's map. He continued on over paved roads lined with pristine curbs and perfectly appointed streetlamps, with high-tension wires cutting across shining billboards holding his brother's image. He continued on past people who had only just become aware of what had happened on the opposite side of the mountain. They emptied out onto the streets, looked out in the direction of the valley. More and more of them congregated on their lawns, in the street, some weeping, more speechless. They sat framed in open windows, unmoving, and on he continued through the throngs, onward to the port, where he parked his car on Eduardo's ferry, and he stood with his friend, his true brother, his fellow lover of birds, and he told this dear man he had missed him, and Eduardo embraced Bloom, and, in an effort to lighten the mood, he said to him, I have made friends with a pelican who perches on my boat in Willow Cove, and upon hearing this, Bloom was overjoyed, and with Eduardo at his side, he continued on to Santa Ynez, and he continued on around the island road in his car, and he drove under the braided ficus trees up the lane, and he parked near the strawberry lupine and amethyst blazing stars, and he greeted Guillaume hello at the foot of his trapeze, and he walked inside the home of La Reina del Fuego, and he was greeted by her, by the beautiful, melancholy Estella, who, as he was about to tell her about what horrors he had seen only hours earlier, took hold of Bloom's hand and walked him upstairs to a room painted with pink and yellow toucans, and there she lifted up from a small bed a little girl with dark skin and dark curls hanging in ringlets over her eyes, and she placed the child in Bloom's arms, and said, She has been waiting for you to return.

 

 

AFTERWORD

 

 

 

Bloom would never again set foot on Mount Terminus. For that matter, he would never again leave the island of Santa Ynez. He would remain with Estella and Eduardo and his daughter, Gisele, who he came to realize the moment he held her in his arms was the one true love he was meant to protect over all others.

He wrote to Isabella some days after he arrived on the island, and in this letter he explained to her the reasons why he couldn't return, and he explained to her why he thought it best she go to Simon with the news of their child. Bloom would always love her, he wrote, but it turned out he wasn't the man he thought he was. He was merely a man. An ordinary man capable of feeling the same ordinary jealousies and anger as any other ordinary man.

After some weeks had passed, Bloom asked Eduardo if he wouldn't mind collecting his belongings. Everything in his studio, his clothes, his father's devices, the books in the library, and his birds. He wished also to have Manuel's journals. Meralda, who chose to remain on the estate with Gus, to see Isabella through her pregnancy, had packed the former, and Roya, who chose to leave her sister for the first time in her life, would travel with Eduardo to carry the latter. Bloom added his books and his father's devices to Estella's library and his birds to Eduardo's aviary. The room whose windows overlooked the oncoming waves of the sea, Estella had kept for Bloom's return, and there he looked out onto the open expanse with no threat of it ever changing. In its mists, in its abstractions, in the infinite wonders of the sea, he would dream up island worlds for Gisele as real as any other.

In this room, Roya would sit by his side, and together they would reflect on the ocean in the same manner they reflected on the reflecting pool, and here in this room he would watch her grow old, and together they would draw panels for hundreds of pictures that would never be produced. In this room, among the growing collection of unmade movies, Gisele would visit him, and together they would draw and paint, and like Bloom, like her grandmother, she had a unique eye and a fine hand, but like her mother, she possessed a stately calm that allowed her to control her internal flame. Estella no longer mourned the death of Guillaume. She no longer dwelled in the darkness of her past. The moment she felt her child growing inside her, she knew there was no longer room for her grief. She removed all the artifacts of her former life from the walls, closed the house to visitors, and said her final goodbyes to her long-dead husband, to her nightly rituals.

As for Simon, like ancient rulers of old, like pharaohs and emperors, his legend would grow, for both his remarkable achievements and his monumental miscalculation. Not unlike Don Fernando Miguel Estrella's, his city and his fortunes would continue to rise, despite Bloom's brother being nearly destroyed by this moment of infamy. Bloom wouldn't hear of its aftermath until Gus and Meralda, newly wed, delivered the story. No structure throughout the valley remained standing. Not one. Everything had been swept away or buried. Thousands of head of cattle, all varieties of livestock, mingled with human bodies and fence posts and shards of buildings and heavy equipment. Human limbs, feet, arms, and heads were buried in mud, not among them, to Bloom's great relief, Gottlieb's, nor Hannah Edelstein's, nor Hershel Verbinsky's, nor anyone else who nurtured Bloom for those years he spent on the plateau, as Gottlieb, God bless him, on the day Bloom was to meet them, forced his colleagues to hike up the side of the mountain and join him in the canopy of an ancient oak whose elevation was just high enough on the mountainside to miss the oncoming rush of water when it was released from the dam. And this is how they were spared. Gottlieb, who would complete Bloom's final picture without him, the man who would be remembered best for this picture,
The Death of Paradise—
because the timing of its release and because its true creator had disappeared and was rumored to have been lost to the onrush of the great flood—would die much later, in a comfortable bed, in his sleep, on a Mount Terminus estate whose doorways, ceilings, windows, and furniture were built to accommodate Gottlieb's small stature, so that when men and women of normal height visited him, they were made to stoop and crouch and look most awkward and uncomfortable in his presence, which, of course, Gottlieb took great pleasure in.

Five hundred thirty-five souls passed that day. The anarchists of the Mojave were hunted down and held in custody for months while the county conducted an investigation. Several of the men died mysterious deaths while awaiting the outcome of the report, which showed, in the end, no one had tampered with the dam. A geologist determined the structural integrity of the great project had failed, as it had been built on unstable ground. It didn't matter that Simon had nothing to do with the actual construction of the reservoir. He and several members of the water authority were the faces of the project, but, as the once-heroic bust of progress and renewal, Simon took the brunt of the public's outrage, and he had no other choice but to accept the blame. Gus told Bloom he returned to Simon's side. He couldn't bear to watch him suffer the consequences of this moment alone. The big man encouraged Bloom's brother to set up a charity for the surviving family members and influenced him to make a pledge to rebuild the destroyed property. In time, Gus hoped, Simon would redeem himself in the eyes of those who had placed their trust in him.

Not long after the inquiries had concluded, not long after Gus and Meralda's visit, Simon traveled to Santa Ynez on Eduardo's ferry, and Bloom saw in his brother's face the toll these events had taken on him, and he saw to what extent he had been humbled. He had been stripped of his pride and his arrogance, and perhaps for the first time, Bloom believed, his brother truly needed him, as a brother, and nothing more, his unconditional love, his time, his ear. They walked down the stairs of the bluff together and sat on the rocks and looked off to the sea's horizon, and Simon said how sorry he was for having betrayed Bloom's trust. He had fallen in love with Isabella. There was no other motivation. He loved her, simple as that, and as hard as he tried, he couldn't resist what he felt for her. For what he did to Stern, and for the unintended consequences, he promised to help find Bloom's former trustee, and if he couldn't be found, he would contact Mr. Geller and make a financial arrangement. Bloom learned from Simon that Isabella was now living in Simon's house, and that the estate on Mount Terminus had been shut. Gus and Meralda were now living with them, helping with the baby.

Bloom asked Simon if he and Isabella were happy together, and Simon said they were. But, he said, she still loves you. You must know that. Is it so wrong, he asked, that she loves us both in different ways?

No, said Bloom, I suppose not.

You're happy here, said Simon.

Very. And it would make me even happier if you and Isabella would visit from time to time, so our children can grow up together. After all, we're all that's left, you and I, and them.

They parted company that day on good terms, and they would, indeed, see each other every now and then, and Bloom would find it in himself to forgive Simon, and he would grow accustomed to seeing him and Isabella as a couple, happy in their own way, with their daughter, Anna, who Bloom, too, would come to love. Anna and Gisele would meet on Santa Ynez and swing on Guillaume's trapeze, and lie on their backs for hours in the aviary, thinking up pictures in their minds, and when the desert gales blew across the channel, sweeping away all the mist and dust, they and Bloom would climb to the top of the turret and look through his telescope to Mount Terminus, and Gisele would say, Please, Father, and Anna would say, Please, Uncle Joseph, tell us a fairy tale. And Bloom would tell them stories about the time he spent on Mount Terminus as a child. He hid nothing from them. He told them the sad tale of their grandfather and how he had spent the better part of his life mourning the loss of their grandmothers. And he told them how it was he and his brother were reunited and driven apart, and reunited again. He told them about how he and Eduardo discovered their mutual love of birds. He told them about how he fell in love with Anna's mother, and how his love had been poisoned and transformed. He told Gisele about how he and her mother had come to be joined in love by a grief that in time turned to joy. And he told them stories of imagined worlds he dreamed about in the silence of his days and dreamed about in the darkness of the night.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I started work on
Mount Terminus
, I had every intention of completing it in three, perhaps four years. For reasons I'm not entirely sure I can adequately explain, the writing came, but it came slowly. My process, it seemed, was more in sync with geologic time than with publishing time. And while I'm sure he was none too pleased when we entered the fifth year of this endeavor, and then the seventh, and then the ninth, my longtime editor, Sean McDonald, never cast doubt into my mind that I would one day finish, that one day there would be a book we could both feel proud of. For Sean's patience, devotion, loyalty, friendship, and sage direction, for his illuminating notes and great instincts, I am deeply grateful. Without him, I could have very easily wandered off into the wilderness and never returned.

I extend similar gratitude and thanks to Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency, who never ceases to go above and beyond. She read multiple drafts, provided valuable insights along the way, and accomplished the impossible task of rescuing my spirits when they needed rescuing. Thank you to Zoe Pagnamenta, formerly of the Wylie Agency, for selling the book to Sean when my children were just out of diapers (they're now in high school), for being a dear friend in the intervening years, and for providing good company and a country retreat, where many of these pages were written. Thank you also to Tracy Bohan at Wylie, who has seen to it that
Mount Terminus
will have a life abroad.

In addition to these very fine people, thank you to Wesley Stace for his unmatched friendship and careful reading, and for sharing his encyclopedic knowledge on all the subjects I most value; to the talented writers and dear friends that comprise the Masonville Collective—Rene Steinke and Beka Chace, who read closely, edited meticulously, and fed me and sang to me; to Errollyn Wallen, for fortifying me with beautiful music; to Minna Proctor, for editorial notes, copyedits, and all-around brilliance; to Gary Shteyngart, for a place to write in Rome and Germantown, New York; to Emily Chamberlain and Ryan Elwood, my research assistants, who hunted everywhere for obscure books and added depth where depth was needed; and to Joel Stutz, for his lifelong support.

Thanks also to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for opening their archives to me.

Christine, my wife, who is the embodiment of the world's most moving lyrical poetry, and my sons, Sasha and Nathanael, the most excellent young men I know—you are the reason I do everything I do.