Chapter Thirty-Four: Chariots

Sitting and laughing by the lake after a long swim he thought, if only I wasn’t alone. The sun was just above the mountains and everything was hot and still. Every now and again a cicada unwound its harsh song or a butterfly wandered in among the nearby bramble of honeysuckle. Felix dozed off and when he awoke the sun was a little lower and the snow on the mountains deepened into blue shadow. He felt it on his face, in his eyes and veins. He stretched, smiled and then she was there, standing over him, blocking the sun, hair haloed with light, mouth half open in a smile.

“Veronica.” He started to his feet and took her in his arms. Her skin was hot and a little sweaty. He kissed her hair, ran his hands over her back from the strong shoulders down the arch of her spine to the muscles of the small, and finally her ass, touching each part of her and naming silently to himself what he could never forget. He held her heavy breasts, felt the bumpy surface of her nipples, kissed her mouth. They fell to the ground. He was growing; they grew together like a fig tree. He kissed her, beyond the loneliness, despair in tatters. The scorched surface of the earth flaked off and blew away. He kissed her feet, her calves, her knees. He ran little biting kisses up the inside of her thigh, ran his lips around her hair up to her navel, inhaling the warm air, then slowly circled in on her cunt, kissing her to life. She swelled between his lips. He kissed her belly and grabbed at her hands, kissed her breasts and sucked her nipples till sweet milk flooded his mouth. He kissed her neck and his head filled with the smell of her thick black hair. He sank his whole life into her mouth and they lay there in perfect poise. He was inside of her but they didn’t move. There was a heat, a beating of the heart, as she pulsed against him and they swelled and swelled. They lay like this till he awoke in the morning, still shuddering, when a yip of pain brought him into full daylight. He checked the sheets with his hands. They were dry.

Promethea and Moises bought a small supply of their own Paregane at Gametria and secretly took it. Peter had not yet noticed the change in them but Felix saw it right away. They grew in stature. Promethea was becoming beautiful to him. It was a strange realignment because after finding Veronica that one time in the garden he lived in a state of constant expectation. Now there were two women, the one who lay near him at night while he slept, whose company he kept through much of the day, who gave him physical intimacy, the exchange of simple words, the sharing of meals, and the other, Veronica, whose scent hung on the air of paradise, whose presence was palpable. She was there, alive, and he had found her. Now he spent his nights restlessly roaming the paths of the garden in pursuit. It brought him to new places, less private, where the others went. People crowded around bonfires in the dark while desultory, spiteful angels looked on.

He was becoming more like the angels. People in paradise were like children, unreflective, happy or afraid or angry but mostly in a state of simpleminded joy. He knew that state, he lived it. But now he found himself perched on the rock of a barren mountainside, above the plains and woods, in a strange darkness, brooding. Down below the idiots were dancing. He turned and looked up the shadowed outline of the crags, black against a sky illuminated by the full moon, which lay, gravidly, on the opposite horizon. Not far off an angel leaned his face against his fist and gazed down at the crowd. He had a huge hooked nose and thick eyebrows. His skin was covered with a grime of dirty gold dust. A pair of heavy wings were at rest against his back. He looked up at Felix, raised his eyebrows and shook his head. Then he nodded and smiled, revealing two rows of pointed teeth. After a while the angel stood up on the outcrop of stone, his feet like talons, flexed his wings and leapt off, circling slowly down from the height. The people did not notice him. They were drinking cider out of stone bowls, laughing and dancing in and out of the dense red light of the fire. Gracefully, the angel dropped in and seized a woman about the waist. With a short, aching cry he carried her off, disappearing into the mountain peaks at the edge of paradise.

Another time, Sammael sidled up beside him as he stalked a section of forest, certain she had just passed by. He could taste her on the air and yet every path he took wound through thickets of tree ferns, in and out of primeval bogs. They walked side by side, on all fours, prowling.

“You’ll never find her like this, you know.”

“How the hell else can I do it?” he asked, turning to look at Sammael, whose face was tawny and whiskered like a lion’s.

He smiled incisors. “Tantalized by glimpses of her?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. It’s a scent. As if she just left the room.”

Sammael groaned suggestively. “Scent of what?”

“You know what. She’s rubbed off on every tree trunk in this place.”

“If I’m going to spend time with a human being you might at least allow me to be small minded. The taste of cat. We couple with people you know. When Adam leftus, and the devil took our hindmost, gegifting her with his painapple.” He chuckled dourly. “You can’t look for her, my little Felix Culpa, I told you that before. You have to find each other. The harder you search, the more of a game it becomes. You two are still attached but her substance has changed. Yearning for you is a yearning for embodiment. This is a rather delicate desire among us, or should I say delicacy. Or better, delecstasy. But for you it’s a yearning upward, beyond matter or the gross material of your existence. You’re growing Felix. So few do. You’ve become angelic in your melancholy. Maybe this path to Veronica’s cunt is your true calling after all.” He stood upright and smiled as a man does, his face once again covered in a rough beard of red hair. They were at a pool of water surrounded by palm trees and ferns. Felix was going to say something but Sammael was gone and so was the scent on the air. He sat by the pool and wept. There was no reflection in the water.

One afternoon he came in from a long walk. He had stopped at Gametria for pills. They were expensive but he didn’t really care. Days and weeks ran together now. He lived for the nights. Every trip to the garden brought him closer. Gametria was transformed. He went up the narrow stair, past the guards who knew him, in their bubble suits. The main room had been taken to pieces. The windows were open and fans and filters circulated air throughout the floors. Huge natural plants, ficus trees, ferns and palms, spider plants and geraniums were everywhere, hanging from the ceilings, along the walls, in pots beneath the windows. The foliage scented the air. Pipes rained periodically and then the air smelled of waterfalls and earth. There were tables and comfortable chairs and couches set up, built of raw wood, wicker and rattan. The floors were unvarnished, split bamboo. Upstairs the dance spaces and galleries had been similarly stripped of ornament and illusion and replaced with plants, real rocks and water. The only sound was of wind and falling water. They had created grottoes out of stone, just large enough to shelter a single person. In these grottoes was a futon and nothing else. A person could enter, buy a tablet of Paregane and lie on the futon, resting or sleeping as they pleased. When they awoke they went downstairs to the room with tables where naked waiters served them herb tea and fresh fruit. When someone died, which happened all the time, joy rocked the inmates, and though envy was inimical to the state of paradise, it was but one of many serpents slithering silently through Gametria. The corpse, wrapped in a muslin winding sheet, was carried out by staff dressed in black pj’s and carted off. By the time people came to live there they had left family and friends. This was terminal stage paradise; no one living at Gametria had any intention of leaving.

The thought of lying for days on one of those futons frightened Felix. He was sure that each and every trip to the garden would be with all the others, that the mobs dancing around bonfires, that the paradise parties whose edges he skirted while searching for Veronica, were made up of all the people in various Lucky Day parlours around the world. They were polluting the garden and feeding the angels. And every loner like him who took an animal was taking a careless soul. And he knew that his day would come. He only hoped it would be Veronica who took him.

He paid the naked man with a distant manner and left. He walked up to the park and sat on the benches, then walked down the west side. When he walked now he walked very fast. His muscles were strong. Sometimes he ran. His heart beat hard and his breath came and went in deep gusts. He enjoyed his days. South of the park, on Sixth Avenue, he was caught in a sudden thunderstorm, a cold, thick rain with winds of a hundred and twenty k an hour and hail the size of ping pong balls. These bounced and scattered over the streets and thwocked the canal water. People ran for shelter but Felix kept walking. He didn’t care. He came in soaked through and sore from the hailstones, expecting to be alone for a few hours, but Promethea was there, sitting on the cushion, reading a script and drinking a cup of peppermint tea. The sun had just come out through a break in the heavy black clouds and shined in through the window and the rays lit her hair up like an electric filament.

At first she didn’t notice him and he saw her as he had never seen her before. Her expression was different, not affected by his presence, not wary as on the street. It was relaxed and strong, requited. Her skin was lustrous, her lips and eyes full of life. She had beautiful hands; her long slender fingers held open the electraweave script and lifted the cup of tea. Her arms were muscular, smooth and her breasts had grown fuller and firm. He could see her nipples erect against the white cotton t-shirt. Even her feet were beautiful. The nails were not painted and cracked and the deformations of a lifetime of service were gone. The gnarled and curled toes were open. They looked plump, almost like baby feet. He remembered vaguely that he had found them attractive before. Hands and feet were so expressive of existence. The lines in faces, crow’s feet around the eyes, dry lips, were beautiful to him. Age was beautiful. The beatings the body took were real and artificial youth was repellant. But they had really regressed. She was a mature woman with the skin of a ten year old.

Gradually Promethea became aware of his presence. When she looked up at him he didn’t look away, didn’t blush or hide. She put down the copper electraweave and said, “They gave me Desdemona, Felix! Can you believe it? I thought they’d forgotten about me. I try out for Emilia and they don’t call for weeks. Then a fortnight ago I waited on the producer. Well, he couldn’t get his eyes off of me and he asks me what do I do. Blech, the smell of his cologne! But everything there turns my stomach. So I told him, thinking, if he plans on me screwing him for the part, ha. That was that, another part lost to virtue. But this morning his assistant called and I go in, thinking it’s for Emilia, but the director has me read for Desdemona. I know the part of course, but oh god, was I ever petrified.” She stopped speaking and bit her lower lip. “What?” she asked.

Felix shook his head. He could not stop looking at her nipples, at her feet, at her mouth. “Congratulations.”

“Come,” she said, patting the cushion beside her. “Sit down.”

He had intended to sit across from her but autonomically sank down next to her. “Do you know who’ll play Othello?”

“MacKenzie Knight.” She hid her face in her hands and groaned. “Oh Felix, how on earth will I ever do this?”

He put his arm around her and said, “I don’t know. Tell me, when you’re on the stage, when the words are in your mouth, do you question it?”

She shook her head.

“You just know?”

“Somehow.”

“Do you ever suck?”

“Sometimes.”

“But it’s part of the job?”

“It’s worse than death.”

“But when you connect, do you always know?”

“Not always.”

“And Shakespeare?”

“It’s like breathing.”

They faced each other and their voices seemed hollow and remote. The space between them shrank. They were both so afraid there was not a breath left in the room. Air moved between them. It was the common element. Finally the touch came, a hand to a hand, a cheek, hair touched in the light, and then they touched lips, testing the others’ intention, still withholding and then, slowly, kept nothing back, there were no barriers. They didn’t speak or negotiate or hesitate, they didn’t interrupt themselves. It was better than any two people in their situation could expect. There was no love, no history, no practice, no need. Nothing ordinary. Two bodies coming together in complete accord on a rainy afternoon. By the time they were done their lips, fingers and groins were wet and a little sore. They had kicked over the peppermint tea. Sleepily, naked, they sat up against the cushion, dozing, talking, touching. They had not even the energy to move when Peter and Moises walked in.

Felix had not slept with anyone besides Veronica in twenty years. Before that, he remembered in a distant and wistful way, he had had girlfriends and lovers. Yolanda Schultz was his first. She was a pretty, smart girl. He was destroyed by his crush for her through most of tenth grade. What was she really like? he wondered. At the time she was so aloof and perfect, a dancer, an actress, a straight A student. From afar he’d watch her and dream of fucking her outrageous, nubile body. Pornographic fantasies obsessed him and he fell prey to the customary dishevelment and moped about, unkempt, hungry, shivery. He contrived elaborate plans for meeting her, which he never carried out, and then, one Sunday, found himself quite by accident swimming next to her at the pool. They started talking. To his surprise she was easy for him to talk to. He watched the water bead up on her chest and roll down between her breasts, a view she allowed him. At school she was so self-conscious, so put together but in the water that was all gone, she was almost childish. She blew water out of her mouth and nose. She slouched and kicked and dove about with abandon. They talked and talked, hanging on the poolside, till they both became cold and a little nervous. They got out and dressed and had a bag of coke together, then rode their bikes to the park. Soon they spent every Sunday together and began to talk at school. It was as if he had conjured her up out of his imagination and she was his without a struggle. Well, there was the sexual struggle. For two years they engaged in a long, fruitless sexual play until finally, early in their senior year she allowed him to screw her. At least one of them was satisfied. The relationship didn’t survive long after this. Exhausted by the long battle, they had both lost interest. Yolanda, ever the realist, ditched him for a man, as she put it, a twenty year old college student. It rattled Felix badly. His indifference effloresced into a raging, jealous love which slowly abated, finally dying into a simmering resentment against women and a canniness about relationships.

But nothing survives long in youth and shortly after this, during the summer before college he met a woman in his building. He helped her with some moving on a brutally hot June day and she invited him into her apartment to pay him and have a cold drink. She was a dermatologist, 38 years old, with cornsilk hair. Carmen something or other. He stood in her kitchen drinking down the cold water, staring at her face. He smelled bad, and he knew it. The florid kiss she bestowed upon him then was like none other he had known. The contents of the room swam in front of his eyes. Soon he was in her bed, sworn to silence, learning the less than delicate art of bringing her to orgasm, to every one of which he delivered two ejaculations. He had never known a woman’s body. His ideal was of plump breasts with tiny nipples and dark aureoles, easily excited, of flat muscular bellies and firm bottoms and slender, delicate vaginas just barely concealed beneath a soft, mosslike covering of pubic hair. Having finger fucked his way through long dark evenings in the park, and at last gaining entrance into Yolanda’s paradise, he felt he knew a thing or two about the odor of sex and the inundation of tissue, but nothing in his experience could prepare him for the strong, lusty lips of Carmen’s cunt, buried under a mound of black hair, with its wild smell, or the giant, flaccid breasts coming to life under his hands and lips, and the buttocks, which she threw back into his hands and demanded silently that he grip, or when she stuck her finger up his ass and he was like a fish wiggling on a hook.

He went off to college where he discovered other types of relationship, equally loveless and primarily oral, which produced spectacular orgasms that for some reason evanesced in a day. Then there was Jewell who, for a year or so, until he met Veronica, gave him the feeling of an adult affair, mutually satisfying, sad, necessary.

But Veronica was the first woman he made love with whom he loved and cared about, who loved and cared about him. It was like Yeats said in Solomon and the Witch: Chance being at one with Choice at last. For twenty years he knew nothing else. And now he had slept with Promethea. What would he tell Veronica? Veronica was dead, it didn’t matter about Veronica. But what of the Veronica in the garden? The Veronica in the garden was just a hint, a spirit, a wind, a wordless creature. Or was she now a creatrix? A fantasy, that was all.

Peter looked at them with the face of a cobra and slithered out the door.

“You two,” Moises said with a snicker. “How dare you leave me out of things?”

Felix stood, pulled his clothes on and ran after Peter. On the street he strained his eyes. Bikes floated and rattled by, putt-putts plotzed along. A couple of junkies, evidently in love, walked arm in arm. A crazy old man stood in the street screaming. Two stoops down a couple of guys were making out. There was no Peter.

Peter didn’t return till late that night and when he did he spoke to no one. He descended into darkness and silence, stared at his feet and wouldn’t engage them. Attempts at conversation failed. Promethea could not call him out and Moises refused to. He was like an ink well in their midst.

The garden drew them in now. The drama was there. Felix carefully avoided meeting them. They went their way and he went his, always after Veronica. Now instead of hints, shadows and sighs and a fugitive scent found in the interstices of branches, between the breezes, a single leaf turning against the others, he caught glimpses of her on the paths. He heard footsteps crunching the twigs and leaves. He followed his longing through the night. It was like those hot summer weeks of build up, clouds piling on the horizon but no rain.

Sometimes he would give up and sit beneath the shimmering plane tress by the river, watching the colorful procession of the prahus with their single, pastel sails. Then he would look up and find her by his side, silent and imperial. If he said nothing she would sit down next to him and they would hold hands and then he was fused to the warmth of her body and the life of her eyes, whole again. The only thing she ever said to him was as he was fading out, and he would awake with a single word still in his ears, Stay.

Sometimes he felt like he was stalking her against her will, that by not letting her be he was somehow imprisoning her in his garden, that he was in pursuit of a fleeing animal. He didn’t want to bug her, but he would do what he had to do to get her. That was the only reality.

The day was starting to form a continuum with the night. There were no calculations between Moises, Promethea and Felix now. They didn’t speak about the garden or Peter. They were in some weird single world, a bubble of desire, separate pieces of a single drive, three flowers on one stalk.

The first time it happened Felix awoke late to see Promethea crawling on her hands and knees over to Moises, who lay back with a vague, mischievous smile on his face, his perfect body glistening with sweat like oil, his chest swelling and hairless. She kissed his three nipples and his navel and he gripped her hair as she began sucking him off, her ass high and full and her back arched. Felix watched her tits sway heavily beneath her, watched her cunt from behind. He crawled up to her and kissed her ass and her lips till they were wet and she started to snort through her nose. She dripped over his lips, swayed with the motion, spit welling out of her mouth down the sides of the cock, Moises’s legs spread. She rolled his balls around with her fingers and pressed into his asshole. Felix rubbed the head of his cock against her clit and dragged it up the crack of her ass, pushing back and forth till the rhythm came and he got up inside of her, teasing her clit with one hand and her nipples with the other. They moved then as one, neither to the one side or the other, slapping and squelching and grunting till together they reached a long, high climax that somehow sustained till none could stand it anymore and they collapsed, trembling. Then they got their coffee and sat together silently till Edsel came.

Whenever they were alone now it happened. No one had to say a word. Felix spent his days in a field of continuous orgasm, distracted, unaware, apathetic, joyful against his will. His thoughts were only of the garden. What happened by day was unreal. It was pure pleasure and yet he was indifferent to it, awaking at night in the garden, as if from a dream.

Daffodils were coming up. The days were warmer. Forsythia came and went, then lilac and magnolia. As the days got longer people sat out on the stoops into the evening. He loved his walks still, they were peaceful, and he loved errands, getting bread, buying coffee out of barrels, the smell of the beans grinding into a paper sack. Some days he awoke early and went out into the cool dawn air, the sun weak and low. Even the canals could be beautiful in the early morning when the sun danced on the black water. People coming home from clubs had a look of satisfaction, like they had reached some place they had set out for uncertainly. And the old folks of course, poor and hard, sweeping the filth off the sidewalks, hosing shit into the canal.

One morning he stood on line at the bakery thinking that he had to do more, that he was reaching an end of things and that it was time to move on. It was something he had sometimes thought; it was a square in the checkerboard of obsessive thoughts and plans he played on all day. He was approaching some sort of resolution. He had violated his promise to Peter, at first in spirit and now in fact. When they fucked each other they did so as one. Felix felt like he was on fire from the waist down when he fucked Promethea. Light and flame erupted from him. Then he was going down on her and Moises was fucking him in the ass and the fire shot up his spine and exploded in his head, pouring like lava into her cunt, bringing her to life. And when Promethea sucked him off he felt like inert matter being brought to life by her tongue and mouth, that the fire spewed out of Moises, through Promethea and into him. They jerked each other off, they fucked each other in the mouth and cunt and ass, cum flowed from mouth to mouth, cunt juice ran out of their lips, purple bubbles winking at the brim. They were indistinct now, a fountain of water with three jets, pots broken by liquid fire pouring up and out.

He surveyed the bread and tried to decide what he wanted. The man behind the counter had white hair falling straight to his shoulder, pale lips and pink eyes. In each ear was a golden hoop. Tattoos of vintage cars drove up one arm and down the other. Felix decided on the raisin pumpernickel and a whole grain loaf dusted with flour, the top dark brown and cracked. He paused on a bridge across the canal and watched the water go sluggishly around a metal cart and a garbage heap. Bikes and trucks went by.

Upstairs, Promethea stirred and felt for Felix. When she felt the empty bed she awoke, vaguely disappointed. She looked at Moises and wondered how it was she was fucking so passionately her old friend, a man who never used to fuck women at all. She didn’t understand, but somehow it seemed natural. They both wanted Felix and maybe that was the only way Moises could have him. Anyway, they had each other now, she was three again, like in the old days when Moises first came and Peter tried to share her with him. Then Peter and Moises ended up together and she was alone. But this was different. A charge surged through them, one to the other. It moved back and forth, in an out, like lightening, going out and coming in.

Moises was out cold. Peter too. She went into the kitchen and poured boiling water onto coffee grounds. There was just enough to make eight cups. She made a mental note to buy more. Peter called to her, “Bring me a cup?” It was the first nice thing he’d said to her since walking in on them that first time. She had no idea what he knew but assumed if he found out about them, about Felix and Moises, he would become violent, maybe suicidal. Yet she felt no guilt or shame. They just didn’t exist in the garden. Sensing an opening she handed him a cup of coffee and said, “How was work?” Just like they used to do.

“Slow.”

“Me too. They’ve hired another chef.”

“What! Is that four?”

“Since I’ve been there.”

“What is it about that place?”

“It drives them nuts. They ought to give ‘em Paregane.” She said it and regretted it immediately but he laughed. “Reb Akiva. He seems even keeled enough. There was a hood vent fire and he managed to put it out without even breaking a sweat, or closing down the restaurant. And he’s better than that old goat we had before, Barbi Aher was his name, the one who got sucked off by the bus boys while he cooked and said it was his call to prayer.”

Peter nodded and rubbed his eyes. “I was hoping that now that it’s getting to be spring things would pick up.”

“I know, but it’s like, they’re just not spending.”

Peter poked Moises. “Hey,” he said. “Get up.”

“Let him sleep,” she said.

“I never see him anymore,” he said sadly. “What’s happened to us? I’m lonely now.” They drank their coffee.

“Peter,” she said, eyes pricked with tears.

“Look, Moises,” Peter said. “It’s time to get up.” He kissed his ear and whispered something. “It’s just not fair,” he mumbled.

“What?” she asked, worried that the good mood was evaporating.

“You fucking Felix and me and Moises not getting any.”

“You two need some time alone.” “Oh, even then he’s not interested. Ever since Felix came. It’s not his fault. I don’t blame him.”

Promethea couldn’t lie. She said, “I’m in love with Felix.”

He darkened and then gave Moises a good kick. Moises didn’t move. “Moises? Moises!” Bile surged into Promethea’s throat and she couldn’t breathe. Peter shook Moises vigorously. “My god, something’s wrong.”

“Give him mouth to mouth.”

Peter looked around abruptly, as if there were an expert in the room who could do it, and then nodded and ripped the blankets off the bed. He straddled his waist and started to pound his chest, covered his mouth and tried to breath life into it. Promethea began to pace.

“I can’t wake him up,” Peter cried. He shook him, pulled at his feet and pounded his sternum. The body thumped. “He’s all limp! I can’t make him breathe. Promethea–”

“I don’t know what to do.”

Peter stood up and faced her. He stared, tried to figure out what was happening. Then his face developed slowly into murderous rage.

“You did this. You and Felix.”

“What do you mean?”

“I knew it all along. Stupid me. You’re on that fucking drug. He gave it to you, Paregane. All three of you. It wasn’t just him.”

“No! He didn’t, Peter, I swear. We stole it at first because he wouldn’t give it to us, even though we begged him. He didn’t want us to take it. We bought our own. He wouldn’t even talk about it. And we made him promise not to tell.”

They faced off and then Peter turned away and made for the cabinets. Promethea knew what was coming, and knew what to do.

She grabbed her purse and took out her gun. Peter, his back to her, said, “I’m going to kill him. When he walks in that door,” he turned back towards her, a pistol in his hand. “I’m gonna kill him!”

“No you’re not,” she said coldly, pointing the gun at him. Peter backed against the wall and held the gun straight out with both hands. Neither took their eyes off the other.

“You’ll have to shoot me,” he said.

“Don’t think I won’t. Felix did nothing wrong. It’s an accident.”

“He brought that shit into our home. He killed Moises.”

Felix was lost in the water. The horn of a delivery truck startled him out of his reverie and he crossed the street and headed over to Eighth Avenue. Halfway down the block he bumped into Edsel smoking on a stoop.

“Felix,” he said, sun warping on his sunglasses.

“Good morning, Edsel.”

“I was just heading over. Thought you might be asleep.”

“It’s one of those days when I get up with the sun.”

“Me too. I love this time of year. The city smells nice for about an hour.”

“Everything’s in bloom in the park.”

“Those lazy ass housemates of yours up yet?”

“Not when I left.”

“Why don’t we go to Bereshit for coffee then?”

Felix thought, I don’t know.

“C’mon.” He followed Edsel, like a leaf adrift on a stream. That was how it was, going where things took him. Even his own will appeared to be an alien order. He bought the burnt coffee from Mrs. Giordano and took their cups to a sticky, rickety table in the back. Bereshit had its usual morning odor of poorly mopped beer stains, vomit, ScatAway toilet flush, and ashtrays wiped out with a wet rag.

“What are you working on?” Felix asked.

“A new play, Acedia.”

“Sloth,” Felix said. “The vice of monks.”

“Indeed. It takes place in a monastery. The monks are so bored they play a game called Secret Murderer. A box is filled with white marbles and one green one. Each monk draws a marble without showing it to the others. Who ever draws the green marble must plot to kill one of the others and the others must try and discern who the murderer is and prevent the crime. One by one they kill each other off.”

“Sounds dramatic.” “I guess. I’ve directed worse.” They drank their coffee for a while. It was awful. He wanted

Promethea’s coffee. He began to feel a pain of separation. Without Moises and Promethea he felt unstabilized.

Edsel said, “So Felix, have you thought any more about what you’re going to do?”

“About?”

Edsel shrugged and smiled, looked at Felix over the silver rims of his glasses. “Alaska, work, whatever.”

“No. I’ve got to work through this business. It’s only been a few months and I’m really getting somewhere now.” He searched for the right words. “I see Veronica all the time now. As long as I don’t look for her. Which is a trick, because I can’t not look for her. Sometimes I just show up and then she’s there. Actually, I’m more there than here, you know?”

“I stopped taking it.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t do anything for me. Felix, I’m worried about Peter.”

“Me too.”

“You can do something about it.”

Felix stared at the floor. “I know.”

“There’s an apartment. A corner of a loft actually, upstairs from me. It’s a theater space but they said you could stay there for almost nothing.”

“How much is that?”

“Not more than you pay now. Whatever you can afford. They aren’t interested in money as such.”

“Acedia.”

“Will you think about it?” His voice was quiet and kind. It didn’t come as a rejection.

“Sure, of course. I just…. I’ve always done what I was supposed to do. This is the first time in my life where I’ve really had a choice, where there isn’t ‘a thing to do’, you know?”

Edsel covered his mouth with his hand and nodded. “Peter’s going out of his mind. I think he blames you but he’s afraid of losing Promethea. Why he hasn’t figured out the Paregane–”

“That’s my fault. I should never have left it where they could find it.”

Edsel waved him off. “They would have gotten it anyway. You aren’t to blame. But they’re a tight family. A fourth is just too much. Do you love Promethea?”

“I don’t know what to call it. I love Veronica. But Promethea is there. We’re like, I don’t know, some kind of thing. Entangled. But in love? I don’t know. No.”

Edsel looked at him sadly. “Peter’s younger than we are Felix. All three of them are. They don’t understand about that. With Peter it’s absolute. And I sincerely believe he knows on some level about the Paregane. And when he finds out you’re fucking Moises too…. I don’t have the heart to tell him. But he will know, eventually, about all of it.”

“Let’s go back. Give me a few more weeks, o.k.?”

“I think a week will do,” he said definitely.

“Are you telling me that?” Felix’s eyes dilated.

“Don’t get your back up with me. I know what you can do.”

“What does that mean?”

They stood. “Don’t take this wrong Felix. I like you, a lot. But you’re some kind of a freak. Everyone wants to fuck you. You’re the most passive person I’ve ever met and yet everyone doubles over to help you. The gangs let you pass wherever you want. You beat that man in Central Park to death. You scare the shit out of me and yet here I am, having coffee with you thinking you’re the most ordinary, middle-of-the-road weenie I could hope to meet. Then your eyes start to flash like that and you get this smell like an animal, like a predator, and my skin starts to crawl. Or you smile and what wouldn’t I do then to have five minutes in your bed. My god Felix, you could fuck me ten different ways and it wouldn’t be enough. It’s too much.” He laughed and slapped Felix on the back. “You’re gonna make every one of us nuts.”

They headed out the door and towards the apartment. Felix carried the bag of bread in his arms almost like a baby. The loaves chafed together. “I know how you feel,” he said. “That’s how Veronica made me feel before I started taking Paregane. It’s an insidious business. The way it spreads from one person to another. And the medium is love. Who can resist that?”

“That’s why I don’t go for that crazy garden. Those angels give me the creeps.”

Felix stopped walking. “You saw angels?”

“Yeah, there’s that one with the red hair you always talk about. I saw him. And others. It’s like, out of the corner of your eye, this bear comes lumbering along. Hello, bear. I should be afraid, but I’m not.

And then you notice, it’s like the way light filters in through the slats of venetian blinds, that he’s a man in a coat of golden mail. There were men of marble come to life with winged sandals. And lizard men with long slithering tongues, feeding on people like bugs.”

“Promethea and Moises don’t see the angels.”

“Yeah, well I did. Whatever they put in that pill is evil if you ask me. Everyone has the same delusion. Isn’t one reality bad enough? Who needs two?”

Felix sighed. The sun was warm on his shoulders. He wondered about that. It ought to be enough to be alive, to exist in this partial disclosure which in and of itself is beyond final explanation. “I guess I must need it.” They walked into the trashed, dark lobby and waited for the elevator. “Are you really afraid of me?”

“Yes. But don’t think I wouldn’t kill you if I had to, or die trying.”

Felix laughed. “Thomas More used to say of Henry the Eighth that he knew his lord loved him but that he would cut his head off if it would get him a castle.”

They rode up to the twelfth floor and got out. At the door Felix searched his right pocket for the key. It wasn’t there. He shifted the bag of bread to his other arm and dug around in his left pocket. “I got it,” Edsel said.

“No, no,” Felix said, pushing the key into the door and turning the knob. As it swung open Promethea screamed, very loudly, NO. How strange, Felix thought. She must be naked. But that was absurd. She didn’t care if Edsel or he saw her naked. Then she must be fucking Moises and think it’s Peter. He was going to say Don’t worry, when he saw that Peter was facing the door, at the far end of the room, and that Promethea was facing Peter. Edsel stood behind Felix, with his usual smile, hand raised up to take off his sunglasses. “It’s only us,” Felix said.

“Don’t Peter,” Promethea warned. “Let’s just talk about it.”

“Fuck you,” Peter snarled.

“What the hell?” Edsel asked. He craned his head to look around Felix and saw the guns. “Shit. Now you just calm down there,” he said.

“You don’t understand what he did,” Peter said, his face squeezed tight and trembling, tears pouring out of his eyes.

Felix didn’t know whether to enter the room or run into the hall. He wondered where Moises was and then saw that he was asleep on the floor.

“It doesn’t matter about that now,” Edsel said, but his voice was not so calm now, it trembled. “Both of you put the guns down. Where’s Moises?” Felix saw that Moises wasn’t asleep, that his eyes were staring vacantly at the ceiling. “Oh my god,” Edsel said, looking at Moises. “What happened to him?”

“Ask Felix,” Peter said between his teeth. As he did so he fired off a shot that hit the door lintel. Felix flinched down and then the second shot came, hitting Edsel in the face and throwing him back into the hallway. Felix turned to see if Edsel was o.k. and saw blood splattered all over the wall. He dropped to his knees and Peter shot again.

“Peter please don’t!” Promethea screamed and she fired five times into Peter’s chest and stomach, smashing him all to pieces. Felix stood up, panting, his ears ringing, the smell of cordite in his nose. Promethea’s hands shook. They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time, not even a time but a vacuum in time in which neither entity was real to the other. She looked through the drifting smoke at Moises’s inert body, stretched out on the mattress, at the splintered bloody body of Peter, at Edsel lying in the hall bleeding out across the tiled floor, and then at Felix, a man she didn’t even know. She uttered a strange cry then, more like a bird than a woman.

“Promethea,” Felix said. The name filled his mouth like blood. He couldn’t really even hear his own voice, all he heard was the ringing in his ears, but he felt like he was falling and he knew that that was what Promethea was feeling, like she was falling into nothingness, racing down and out.

“Felix,” she sobbed. “My beautiful friends, where are my beautiful friends?” She crouched over Peter’s body, her long dark hair spread out over his naked corpse. She looked up at Felix, blood smeared across her face, mixing with the tears pouring out of her eyes and said, “It was for you,” she said. “Tell me you love me. Please.”

Felix could barely understand what she was saying. She wanted something from him, he knew that, but he couldn’t think, couldn’t feel. Was she asking him if he loved her? “For me? Why?”

“Is it true what Peter said, that you don’t love anyone, that I’m crazy, that he was all I had?”

“No! I don’t know anything Promethea. I don’t know what’s true.”

She took the gun and pointed it vaguely around the room and started to caress Peter’s face, running her fingers through his long black hair. “Don’t go baby, don’t go.” She looked up at Felix. “You love her, don’t you? All along it was Veronica. I fell in love with a man who cares more for a box of ashes than the flesh and blood of human beings. Say it’s not true!”

“It’s not, none of it. Promethea–” He moved towards her tentatively. “Give me the gun now. It’s over. We’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

“What the fuck have I done?” she asked, looking up at him. “My friends, they were all I had.” She stroked Peter’s face, looked into his black empty eyes. “Oh baby, don’t go, don’t leave me here.” She put the barrel in her mouth and looked into Felix’s eyes, afraid, her lips and teeth opening and closing around the metal tube.

“Promethea!”

She swallowed hard. Her eyes became fixed, as if she saw something and then she pulled the trigger. The back of her head exploded and she thumped into the wall.

Felix stepped into the room between the bodies and found his bag. He checked for Veronica, for his clothes and books and Paregane and walked mechanically out the door and down the fire stairs. Gunshots followed him down. The echoes would not stop. Promethea’s eyes were on him.

On the street he ran. He ran like a fool. His feet hurt, his chest hurt but he ran and ran and still could not outrun the images, of Promethea shooting Peter. NO! If he had not opened the door. Then she turned it on herself. Why didn’t he say he loved her? He ran in an agony of grief and guilt. He had killed Moises. He had killed them all. He did nothing to stop them. There was only one thing to do, one place to go. He slowed down to a walk and went to Gametria. They had remodeled the entrance. They had painted the building white and the entrance and hallway were a light seashell pink, shaped like the lips of a conch. He walked up the stairs and into the main chamber. The people seated around the tables didn’t turn to look at him. He was sweating, panting; his face was crusty from crying.

He hadn’t enough money to live there. He didn’t even want to. He had to go far from people. He had to end things. He bought enough Paregane for a week and walked back out again. As he stepped out of the Gametria entrance and turned to head off he felt a tiny bite on the back of his neck. He slapped whatever it was and thought that the biting flies were early this year. Then he walked up to the far north end of Central park.