Bathing the Lion

by Jonathan Carroll

  “Apparently not anymore. Wanna go sit down someplace for five minutes so I can eat this? I know you’ve got to get back to work. I’ll eat fast.”

  They walked to a wooden bench near a fountain and sat with their four knees touching. They had been together a year but were still jubilant to have found each other. Neither woman had ever been successful at love. Certainly over the years it had flirted with both of them; sometimes it had even given them short intense embraces. But each time love pulled away much too soon and fled or turned into a lumpy pumpkin at some unexpected or undeserved midnight. So as both women grew older, Jane and Felice became more resigned and self-sufficient. They welcomed romance whenever it appeared at their doors, but in the long stretches without it they worked hard to fill their days with engaging people and activities that made them feel pretty good most of the time.

  In the beginning of their relationship, both women proceeded as if they had entered a very dark room and were sliding their hands hesitantly up and down all the walls, feeling for a light switch while at the same time afraid they might touch something sharp or dangerous. But from the minute they met there was absolutely no game playing between them. Both had had more than enough of it in their lives. They were eager to get to the heart of this matter. They wanted to reach the point as soon as possible where sharing silence was just as good as sharing their life stories.

  They were both neat. They both wanted to laugh often. One of them liked sex more than the other but they worked it out. All in all, the ease with which they fit into each other’s lives made them both skeptical. It doesn’t happen this way; it’s never this easy. Where were the difficulties? One night soon after they had moved in together while eating large bowls of ramen soup Jane had microwaved for them, she put down her spoon and said out of the blue, “Maybe it just is and I’m not going to worry about it anymore, you know? Maybe we’re just lucky this time. Maybe there really is such a thing as luck. I never believed it before, but maybe there is.”

  “What are you talking about, dear?”

  “Us. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Felice grinned and whizzed her spoon around in her soup.

  Months later sitting together in the shopping mall, Jane said incomprehensibly through a mouthful of blueberry muffin, “Maybe it was the secret and the monster.”

  Felice reached over and breaking off a piece of the muffin popped it into her mouth. “What did you say?”

  Jane felt like a kid stuffing her mouth and then trying to talk through it. She swallowed, sipped some coffee, and repeated, “Maybe it was the secret and the monster that broke them up.”

  “It’s possible; or else just one or the other. Usually one of them is ugly enough to do it for most couples.” Felice believed you could never really know a person until you’d learned at least one of their deepest secrets, and seen the monster we keep hidden within and only allow to surface when we’re truly out of control, or trust someone enough to feel we can let our guard down around them and allow our honest emotion to show.

  “You’ve never told me any of your secrets, do you realize that?”

  Jane stopped chewing.… Looking at Felice, she pointed to her mouth as if to say, let me finish this first and then I’ll respond.

  Felice continued. “It’s true though, Jane. I told you about me and the guy at the gas station when I was fourteen, but you’ve never told me even one of your secrets.”

  Jane swallowed and brushed crumbs off her hands. “I know who we were.”

  Felice waited for her to say more, then shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I know who we both were in our last lives.”

  Whatever Felice had been expecting to hear, it certainly wasn’t this. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you have to get back to work? We can talk about it later.”

  Felice shook her head. “Harry Potter can wait five more minutes. Explain please.”

  Jane turned the cardboard coffee cup around and around in her hands. “I told you; I know who we were in our last lives. Whenever I meet somebody, I can see it immediately. It’s always been like that, ever since I was a little girl.”

  “All right then, who were you? Who was I?” Despite being skeptical about the subject, Felice couldn’t resist asking.

  Jane answered matter-of-factly, “Your name was Stina Salmi. You lived in Helsinki, Finland, where you were an industrial designer and worked for an associate of Alvar Aalto. You died of a cerebral hemorrhage during little vappu in 1971.”

  Felice looked at her lover’s black hands holding the blue coffee cup on her lap now. When she looked at Jane’s face again, she was smiling. “You’re joking, right?”

  Jane shook her head. “I’m totally serious.”

  “Helsinki?”

  “Helsinki.”

  “What’s ‘little vappu’?”

  “A Finnish summer festival. Everyone drinks a lot.”

  “This is mega-bizarre. How do you know these things?”

  Jane shrugged. “You asked for one of my secrets so I told you.”

  “Who were you?”

  “My name was Milton Rice. I was born in Barbados in 1946, lived three days, and then died in the hospital—bad heart and lungs.”

  “A boy? You were a boy?”

  Jane stood up. “Not for long. Only three days.”

  Felice pushed her hair back behind one ear. “And what were you before that? Do you remember?”

  “No. I can only see one life ago for anyone, including me. Come on, I’ll walk you back to the store.”

  Felice stood up and shook all over, like a dog shaking water off its body. “What an interesting way to start the morning”—she looked at her partner and raised one eyebrow—“Milton.”

  THREE

  A child was running across rooftops. No one saw her this time because no one happened to look up at just the right moment to see a little girl in a yellow dress and green sneakers running in such a crazy, dangerous place. Why on earth was she up there? If she were someone’s daughter her parents would be screaming, “Get down! Get down from there this instant! What are you doing? Come down right now before you fall and break your neck.” But the little girl wouldn’t. She would not come down. She had been doing this for months, day and night.

  Jane Claudius saw her one morning at three o’clock. Rollerblading home after work, she looked up and saw something, someone small move surefooted across the roof of the town bakery. But Jane was tired and distracted. She’d just had another upsetting confrontation with Vanessa Corbin and wasn’t interested in what she was seeing. Her eyes said look—something’s up there! It’s a child, did you see? Yes I saw, but I don’t care. Right now I can only think about that horrible woman.

  Vanessa Corbin saw the girl a week later. The kid stood unmoving on top of the flat roof of the high school, looking down at the world below. Driving by the building, Vanessa caught a glimpse of her but only thought the girl was up there for school or something related. Maybe her whole class was on the roof working together on a science project. Vanessa didn’t think twice about it and drove on.

  Dean Corbin and Kaspar Benn saw the child one afternoon standing on the roof of the railroad station being photographed by a man with a very professional-looking camera. They thought the picture was for a magazine advertisement or an article about their beautiful town. Of course they didn’t know the photographer was a hedge fund manager whose hobby was photography and who just happened to look up at the right moment and saw this little girl standing on the roof of the lovingly restored 1920s station.

  This man was set in his ways. A traditionalist, he didn’t like digital cameras, no matter how many millions of pixels they were capable of producing today. To him, half the pleasure of taking pictures was working in a darkroom bringing photos manually to life. He disliked the immediacy of digital cameras—how you could see a picture seconds after taking it. He thought photography should have mystery i
n it, something indefinable and elusive. This was why he liked working in a darkroom developing pictures. It was a hands-on process you could never measure or replicate exactly. A photographic image slowly emerging in a chemical bath was like a woman undressing in front of you—slowly, slowly, you got to see everything.

  Except for this little girl. As soon as he saw her up on that roof, the man snapped off seven pictures of her in quick succession. On the last one she looked down at him and smiled. Then she turned around and walked back toward the middle of the building and disappeared. He assumed a door was there for her to use to get back into the station again.

  He spent the rest of the morning taking pictures of the town. It was his first visit there. He was delighted with the combination of hip but at the same time pastoral feel of the place. He shot three rolls of film over the weekend. When he got home to Hartford Sunday afternoon, he went straight to his darkroom and developed half of them. In that batch were the seven pictures he’d taken of the girl on the roof. But he could not find them. In their place were photographs of seven different vegetables: beautiful, stunning pictures—of vegetables. Butternut squash, lima beans, bell peppers … none of a little girl standing on a roof. He had never in his life taken a single photograph of a vegetable, but there they were in his developing tray—spectacular images that looked like the still lifes of Georgia O’Keeffe or Robert Mapplethorpe. They were the best photographs he had ever taken. Only he hadn’t taken them. All seven were in black-and-white. The striking combination of dramatic shadows and tones made those banal objects transcendently beautiful.

  But he never used black-and-white film in any of his cameras.

  * * *

  This morning the child looked down from a roof and saw Kaspar Benn standing and smoking a cigarette in the doorway of his store across the street. His mind was still galloping in panicked circles around the news of the Corbins’ breakup. Staring straight ahead, he wondered what to do next. He was worried at any minute impulsive Vanessa would show up in tears or even hysterics demanding his help, his advice, his home to hide in, or something else to cause his comfortable status quo to drop dead on the spot. How would he handle her if she asked him for something really extreme?

  And how would he handle his business partner and friend when Dean inevitably learned Kaspar had been diddling his wife? He knew Dean and Vanessa had been having problems recently, but all married couples did at one point or another. You could not live intimately with someone day in and day out for years without knocking heads occasionally. But his affair with Vanessa had nothing to do with the Corbins’ problems. It had to do with the fact that when both Kaspar and Vanessa wanted something, they took it.

  “My name is Josephine.”

  Kaspar was so caught up in his concerns he did not hear the child’s voice until she repeated the sentence a second time.

  “My name is Josephine.”

  He looked down. The girl from the roof was standing by his side and staring up at him. He flicked his cigarette away and gave her a thin false smile. “Hello, Josephine. You have a lovely name.” Kaspar didn’t like children but was always civil to them. He spoke to them as little as possible but always in the voice of an equal; if a kid didn’t like it, too bad.

  Josephine said, “Today is my last day.”

  “Your last day for what?”

  “After today I go away forever. I don’t know how or when, but today for sure. It’s the last day I can help you.”

  Kaspar scratched his cheek and looked at a silver Porsche Cayman driving slowly down the street. “How do you know? You’re pretty young to go away forever.”

  The girl cupped her hands and blew on them. “And you, Muba? How do you feel today?”

  He reran the ridiculous name in his mind and closed one eye. “Muba? Or did you say ‘mover’? What do you mean?” Kaspar now had a sinking feeling this was about to turn into one of those loony conversations you have with children after they’ve eaten too much sugar.

  The girl touched her stomach. “Do you have owls in your bowels? I do. I know I’m not supposed to, but I do.” She smiled and shrugged.

  “Owls? Listen, Josephine, I have to go now. It’s been nice talking to you.” Kaspar Benn walked back into his store. At the counter he turned around and the little girl was standing right behind him. It was very strange because he had no sense of her following him in, but there she was, inches away.

  The phone in his pocket rang. He let it ring once more before taking it out because he was trying to process what the girl had said. Between “Muba” and “owls in the bowels,” he was so distracted it never crossed his mind not to answer the phone because it might be—“Hello?”

  “Kaspar! Finally! Thank God. It’s Vanessa. Look, we’ve got to talk. I think Dean left me this morning.”

  The little girl next to him began shaking her head. “Don’t listen to her.”

  Frowning, Kaspar lowered the phone and asked exasperatedly, “Why not?”

  “You’ve got other things to do.”

  He made a sour face while lifting the phone back up to his ear. “Why don’t you come to the store, Vanessa? Dean’s sledding up on the hill all morning and I’m here alone. I talked to him before and he told me about you two.”

  Vanessa gave a surprised oh! and then asked, “You talked to him? What did he say?”

  “He said you two fought and things were dicey.”

  “Anything more? Did he say anything else?”

  “No, not really. Just he was sledding and wanted to think things over up there before he made any decisions. He always says sledding is his therapy.”

  Josephine stared at Kaspar while he spoke. Her expression was disconcerting. He averted his eyes.

  “I didn’t see this coming, Kaspar, not at all. We’ve been having some arguments, sure, but I had no idea he felt like this. Really, it’s the truth.”

  Before he could stop himself, the normally tactful Kaspar blurted out, “You can be a handful at times, Vanessa.”

  “I know, but still, he wants to leave?” She paused to breathe a few times. “Out of the blue he throws this bomb at me? We’re supposed to talk about it first. You’re supposed to talk things like this out before you make such big decisions. Right?”

  “I don’t know, Vanessa. I’ve never been married. It obviously depends on the people involved. Dean’s a quiet guy. You never know what’s going on with some quiet people…”

  She expected him to continue but he didn’t. She waited for him to say something more but he didn’t. His silence held. “Kaspar?”

  Nothing.

  “Kaspar, are you still there? Did you get cut off?” Hearing nothing, she grimaced, ended the call, and tried his number again. But it just rang and rang unanswered on the other end.

  Sitting in her car in the mall parking lot, Vanessa put the useless phone on the seat next to her and closed her eyes. “Now what?” she asked the empty space around her. She decided to do as he had suggested—go to the store and meet him there. Even a short conversation with her lover might help her regain some perspective, some balance now that all the gravity had suddenly evaporated from her life.

  * * *

  At his feet, Kaspar’s cell phone burned brightly on a green throw rug under him. Speechless, he watched it crackle and hiss as the molten plastic bubbled and melted into a blob. Its parts twisted and fused together in the intense heat. One moment he’d been talking on that phone to Vanessa. The next, he was yelping against the fiery pain across his palm where he was holding it.

  The little girl stood with a hand extended over the small blaze on the floor. He didn’t realize until later that it did not burn the rug. When he eventually lifted the charred melted mess off the floor to throw it away, there was no mark—no blackened spot, no heat-scorched carpet pile.

  “You can’t be stupid today, Muba, not today. If you’re not going to be smart on your own, then I have to help you because you’ve got to be very clever and think straight. You can’t ma
ke any mistakes today.”

  Kaspar put his hand on top of his head as if to keep it from blowing off. “What the hell are you talking about? Who is ‘Muba’? What do you want from me?” He was angry and beginning to be afraid.

  He was forty-eight years old, thirty-one pounds overweight. Seven cashmere sports jackets hung in his closet at home. There were five different kinds of mustard in his refrigerator. He’d had two serious relationships in his life. Both women (smart and accomplished—real catches) had grown terminally frustrated with him and left in similar heartbroken huffs. He succeeded in small matters with almost no effort at all because of his great natural charm and the not-so-common ability to give something his full attention when it interested him.

  But the few times in his life when the stakes had been high and he was put to the test, he’d always either chickened out or failed. It didn’t bother him though because more often than not, Kaspar Benn was genuinely satisfied with things easy for him to obtain—good food, women who said yes more than they said no, elegant clothes that made him look and feel both more prosperous and attractive than he was.

  Somewhere in our life’s cast of characters most of us know a person like Kaspar. These people are fun to be around but not essential. If we don’t encounter them for months or even years it doesn’t matter. When they show up at a party, we think, oh good, I haven’t seen them for ages. Often it’s difficult to pinpoint when you last did see them or what you talked about. They are effusive in their greetings, entertaining; their many stories make you laugh and gasp—lots of flash and good fun. They’re sort of like Italian variety shows on TV. But just like those shows, you forget about them quickly. Accused by one of his girlfriends of being facile, Kaspar said, “I make no pretense.” She shot back, “No, you make no effort.”

  The little girl Josephine now said to him, “You have to go see Edmonds. You have to find him right now.”

  Kaspar didn’t know what she was talking about. “Edmonds? Who’s Edmonds?”