Bathing the Lion

by Jonathan Carroll

  And what was the significance of the ink bottles on the second sheet? Nothing about them seemed mysterious or ambiguous—just beautifully rendered drawings of many bottles. Did the different color labels have special meaning—or the order in which they were placed in the drawing?

  With her brain sizzling with so many thoughts and her fingers busy with the proper lacing, it took Jane a while to notice someone was sitting on the other end of the bench. And she didn’t realize that until her eyes slid to one side and saw a pair of Rollerblades exactly like her own—make, model, and color—on another’s feet. The same skates, only much smaller, worn on a pair of little feet down there on the corner of her bench.

  Jane’s eyes moved up from the skates to the person wearing them: the girl she’d seen before moving across town roofs at night who had also showed up in the dream. She recognized the child immediately but for some reason wasn’t surprised to see her sitting so close by, wearing exactly the same Italian Rollerblades. Jane had to wait seven weeks for those skates to arrive after ordering them because the brand and model were so hard to find in America.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” The girl spoke in a surprisingly deep voice, which sounded almost adult, a voice both comical and disturbing coming out of such a small child. Jane looked at her again to make sure she wasn’t a midget or dwarf, then went back to lacing her skates. “What if I said no?”

  “I guess I’d join you anyway.”

  “I thought so. Why did you even ask?”

  “I was being polite.”

  Jane finished and stood up. “Polite is for nice people; I already have a feeling you don’t fall into that category. Are you a mechanic? Is that why you’re here?”

  Josephine nodded and stood up too.

  “Can you skate? Because I’m not waiting for you.”

  “It’s not a problem.” The child wiped her hands on her jeans.

  Jane sped off across the parking lot, Josephine right behind her.

  From the first instant it felt magnificent to be skating again, moving fast, flying along, her body deliciously pushing against the slight night breeze instead of standing around talking to people about things in a world and a life completely out of her control. Jane even found herself smiling at this odd time but she didn’t care. Everything was so confused and chaotic now; what difference did it make if she was able to have a brief few minutes of happiness? She was sure the appearance of this girl was only going to add to her confusion one way or another.

  “Do you want to know answers? Because I can tell you if you want.” The girl was nearby but the only trace of her until she spoke was the sound of her skate wheels on the asphalt.

  Jane said angrily, “Could you shut up for a while? Can we just skate and not say anything for now?”

  “Sure—not another word.”

  Past the bakery, past the diner where Bill Edmonds and Kaspar Benn ate breakfast, shoosh shoosh, the thrilling dip and long curve in the road right before you rocketed into the radiantly bright lights of the only gas station in town that stayed open until midnight. Sometimes when night skating, Jane stopped in there to buy a couple of energy bars to eat along the way. The owner of the station, Roberta Zaino, stood in the office door now and waved as Jane swept past. Roberta called out, “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  Jane shouted, “Crazy busy,” waved with both hands, and kept going. The girl stayed right at her heels.

  They skated in and out of the darkness, across crinkly dead leaves, through different shades of shadow, in and out and in and out of the orange glare of overhead streetlights, back into the dark again, more scratchy leaves beneath their feet, more shifting shadows. The air smelled of smoke from burning leaves, wet trees, earth, and a sudden stiff chemical reek of exhaust fumes when cars passed in both directions going fast or slow. The skaters’ moving bodies caught for a moment in the headlights. Jane was breathing heavily by the time they started up Villard Hill.

  As they chugged up the steep hill together, too many nagging questions and worries zoomed around inside Jane’s head, distracting her from enjoying the moment. Would she see the others again? Would her life ever return to any kind of normal?

  Jane stopped and put both hands out to the sides to keep her balance. She looked straight at the girl and said in a voice filled with both wonder and fear, “Your name is Josephine.”

  The girl’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You came here as Bill Edmonds’s child, or the child he was supposed to have.”

  “Yes.”

  An instant ago she knew only the life of Jane Claudius. Now she also knew explicit details of the life of William Edmonds, grieving widower, former tree surgeon, cheapskate who gave his beloved wife lousy presents. Jane knew what Edmonds believed about God, what he dreamed when he was asleep and when he was awake. She knew the words he used when he prayed and what he’d said when he caressed his wife. She even knew some of his most secret fears, the ones he never told Lola when she was alive. In an instant, an infinitesimal fraction of no time at all, Jane knew almost as much about the life of William Edmonds as he did.

  Josephine smiled; she beamed. It was plain by her smile she knew precisely what was happening to Jane and it made the girl very happy.

  “You know what’s happening inside me, don’t you? I can see by the look on your face.”

  Josephine nodded. “Yes, I know.”

  A very loud sports car came roaring down the street. They waited in silence until it had passed.

  Jane saw something a few feet away resting against the curb beneath a street lamp. She rolled over for a closer look. It was a baseball, but completely black and shiny; it looked like it was made of patent leather. As the sound of the car faded, she picked up the ball and turned it over a few times in her hand. The contrast of something as familiar as a baseball but colored so “wrong” made it look like two separate objects existing in the same space.

  “What do you think, Jane—is it still a baseball?”

  “Huh? What?”

  The girl rolled over and put out her hand, gesturing for the glossy black ball.

  Jane gave it to her. “Sure; it’s a baseball that’s just black.”

  Josephine said, “Maybe not … baseballs have to be white so you can see them. You can’t play with a black ball; it’d be too hard to see. Imagine a high pop fly to deep centerfield with a black ball? Or using one in a night game—it’d be almost invisible.” She gave it back.

  Jane tossed it up and down in her hand. “Did you put this there?”

  The girl ignored the question. “Maybe with a black ball, you have to create a whole different set of rules, or even a new game. Maybe you need a whole different pair of eyes to keep track of it.”

  “Look, Josephine, I’m not a fan of gnomic sayings or double meanings. I flunked metaphor in college. So just tell me what you’re getting at and skip the analogies.” To emphasize her point, Jane let the ball drop onto the street. It bounced and rolled slowly into a small puddle by the curb.

  “That’s not a good idea. You’d better keep it because you might need it later.”

  “Why?”

  “What color is it?”

  “Black.”

  “Not really black, Jane, there’s something more to it, something else just as important.”

  “It’s shiny?”

  “Right. What else has the same kind of shiny blackness?”

  Perplexed, Jane went over and picked the ball up again. It was wet from being in the puddle. She dried it with a small handkerchief she kept in her coat pocket. While drying the ball, she looked at it and felt the texture. The name flashed into her mind: “Obsidian.”

  Josephine said, “One of the ink bottles on your drawing is labeled ‘obsidian.’”

  Jane pushed the ball and handkerchief into a pocket and pulled Kaspar’s drawings from the other. Scanning the bottles under the overhead streetlight, she saw nothing at first glance. Forcing herself to s
low down, she looked again more carefully. In time she noticed it—in the lower left corner of the picture, a bottle labeled OBSIDIAN. Without looking up, she said to the girl, “Okay, I found it, but what does it mean?”

  “Why don’t you ask Bill?”

  Jane shook her head, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Ask Bill. It’s simple.”

  “I can’t—he’s not here.”

  Josephine pointed to Jane’s chest. “He’s there. How do you think you recognized me before? How did you know my name and all those other things about Bill? He’s in there—he’s part of you now, for at least a little while. Take advantage of him, use what he knows.” She pointed again at Jane’s chest. “You’re becoming a mechanic again, so use the powers!”

  Jane nodded. She already knew those things from discussions with the others.

  Josephine continued. “All retirees are being recalled because you have two things now—your past lives as mechanics and this one you’ve lived in a completely different environment. It’s happening to retired mechanics everywhere in the universe; you’ve not been singled out.”

  Jane had questions about this but wanted answers to other things first. “Why do I know so much now about Bill Edmonds?”

  “You were the only one of the group to eat the udesh when you saw it. When you swallowed and it entered your system, naturally the process of you regaining your powers sped up.”

  “The powers of a mechanic?”

  Josephine nodded. “Yes.”

  The girl started to speak again but Jane cut her off. “Wait a minute—Bill killed himself, didn’t he? He got the white key and walked into the Aurora Cobb.”

  Josephine smiled. “See? You’re beginning to remember things too. The transition is happening quicker than I thought with you.”

  “So the only reason why we saw him alive just now is because we were flipped back to the part of our dream where we were standing on the road together?”

  “Correct.”

  Jane expected the girl to say more, to explain why Edmonds was permitted to kill himself if they needed him back as a mechanic.

  As if reading her mind, Josephine said, “They need to know about that human experience too, grim as it is. They need to know precisely what one of you feels and what you’re thinking when you commit suicide. It’s very significant information.

  “Humans treasure life; they cherish it like few other beings do. What happens inside a human psyche for someone to willingly give up the thing they value most?”

  Jane wasn’t having it. “The white key caused his death. It showed him parts of his life that broke his heart. The effect of the key made him give up; if he hadn’t found it in the cloud those memories would never have come back all at once and he would have gone on.”

  She heard a cough behind her and turned. An old woman stood nearby with a big black Newfoundland on a leash. Both of them were staring at Jane. The woman asked, “Who are you talking to, dear? Sounds like you’re having a lively chat with the wind. Don’t let me interrupt.” She finished with a loud self-satisfied “Ha!” and toddled off down the street behind the giant dog.

  Jane turned back and looked for Josephine but the girl was gone. This didn’t bother her. Alone again, she would be able to think clearer about everything.

  She started skating again, one leg in front of the other faster and faster, the sound of the spinning wheels and the gusty wind in the trees her only companions.

  A few minutes later she was rolling down the hill toward Bill Edmonds’s house again. The last time she’d been there was in the dream and the house was on fire. Bill and Kaspar Benn stood outside watching it burn. But the house she saw now had neither burned nor was it in flames. Lights were turned on throughout the small building and gave off a warm yellow light. It looked very cozy inside on this crisp fall night.

  Tiko the bartender had said it was September, but was it this September or last, or even three years ago? It had to be either this year or last because Jane’s bar was three years old and Felice had given her the wooden bench on the first anniversary of the place.

  Having reached Bill’s house, she stopped at the driveway before moving up it as slowly as possible without losing her balance on the skates. She wanted to look in the windows to see who was there and what they were doing.

  A familiar song by the group ABBA came drifting faintly out of the house. Both Jane and Felice liked ABBA and often played their music at home.

  Above the song she heard a great woman’s laugh, which went on and on. It was the kind of happy uninhibited cackle you like to hear because it’s neither fake nor forced. The laugh of someone who isn’t afraid to let loose and ha-ha right up to the rafters.

  Jane moved closer to the house and saw in one of the lit rooms the back of a green couch with a television on a table in front of it. Several seconds passed before she recognized the film Mamma Mia! playing on the screen. Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan were singing a duet together. Jane grinned because she and Felice loved to cuddle up on their couch and watch it, especially whenever either of them was feeling blue and needed cheering up. It was almost a given they would start singing the score about halfway through the movie.

  Sitting on the green couch and facing away from her toward the TV were two men, or what she thought were men until one of them stood up and turned to say something to the other. Jane caught her breath when she saw the face: It was a woman with almost no hair on her head. She was wearing a plaid hunting jacket several sizes too large for her. It was wrapped tightly around her and held in place by her arms across her chest. The film froze on one frame. Obviously it was a videotape or DVD put on pause.

  The woman’s face was appallingly thin. Her skin was stretched tight over her forehead and cheekbones. In grim contrast, there were ugly dark bags beneath her eyes. They broadcast to anyone who saw them, “Yes, I am gravely ill. You don’t want to know the details.” At once Jane thought of photos of starving children in Africa. The difference being those kids’ eyes always appeared to be locked in some kind of otherworldly, thousand-yard stare combining their imminent death with an almost saintly expression that said, I am still here but I am already gone.

  In contrast, this woman’s eyes were powerfully alive, all here and now. She looked at whoever was on the couch with love, laughter, and flirt, but most palpably delight. It was almost unbearable for Jane Claudius to watch those eyes burning like a bright, bright flame on top of the very last bit of melted candle.

  The woman dropped her arms to her sides and the heavy jacket fell open. She was wearing a yellow sweatshirt with SIMMONS COLLEGE across the front. But even though the bright shirt fell like a tent around her, Jane could tell at a glance she was skeletal and frail.

  This was Lola Edmonds, Bill’s late wife. Watching her move out of the room in a sick person’s slow shuffle, Jane knew more and more about her with each step. Lola Dippolito Edmonds was self-absorbed, great company, highly sexual, happily directionless, and adored a husband who had disappointed her for years. As a young woman in Italy Lola had always believed her life would turn out to be prime time but it never did. She’d come to America as a college exchange student and fallen in love with the way the United States supersized everything. She thought, this is where I belong, center ring, and in many ways America was the perfect fit for the exuberant young woman. She did a number of things well but came up short of great in any of her pursuits. She could hold a room’s attention with funny or charming stories and anecdotes but inevitably they went on too long because she never knew when to stop. She was a terrific cook but only knew how to make six dishes. A competent albeit unimaginative painter, her college teachers had given her good grades more for her warmth, grandezza, and three-ring-circus personality rather than for her brains or talent.

  She peaked at twenty-two and like so many good-verging-on-great athletes who never finish higher than fourth place in the big race, eventually slipped back in the pack. By thirty she knew she didn’t stan
d a chance of being a contender anymore for any kind of role in the spotlight. So she married a nice stingy man who loved her every day of their life together but never tried very hard to understand her.

  The most heartbreaking thing Bill ever did for her was, soon after Lola was diagnosed with cancer, he came home one day with a book he’d ordered from the town bookstore entitled Italian for Beginners. In his fear and frustration about what to do, he thought by learning her native language it would strengthen their bond and enhance their ability to fight her new enemy together, which was already well on its way to eating her alive. But Bill had absolutely no talent for language. To watch him sit hour after hour, day after day at their kitchen table with his fat brown Italian book, taking notes and slowly mouthing the beautiful sonorous words from her homeland (per sempre) caused Lola to love her husband more than she ever had. Her impending death opened her already large heart until her love of Bill and her life became both exquisite and almost too much to bear. She had never been happier, ever. She had never been more afraid.

  Lola was unaware of it but this was her one great, genuine talent in life—loving people. The image of her man with the Italian book in his meaty hands looking so damned serious made her smile when they lay in bed at night holding hands, knowing “forever” was no longer a word either of them owned in any language. In Lola’s increasing dependence on him, Bill learned how to be generous, thoughtful, and fully present in the limited days they had left together. Perhaps that was the greatest achievement of her life: without trying, she taught her husband to be a much better person. And then she died.

  Jane didn’t realize how deep a fugue state she’d fallen into as all of this information revealed itself and then the effect it had on her. Minutes might have passed; it easily could have been longer. She was standing at the window with head down and eyes closed, reviewing everything she’d experienced, when she heard the voice behind her.

  “It’s beautiful, no?”

  Turning, she saw Lola Edmonds standing nearby with arms across her chest again, hugging Bill’s heavy mackinaw coat to her body. Up close in this dim light coming from the window, she looked even sicker than from a distance.