by Daniel Quinn
Howard nodded. “So the answer wasn’t in Haiti, Aaron, it was in Taos.”
“But you didn’t go there to get my answer, you went there to find David Kennesey. Make sense out of that. Your move.”
“Christ, Aaron, this is like slogging through knee-deep mud.”
“I know. It’s because …”
“It’s because I’m afraid to look at it.”
“It’s because we’re both afraid to look at it. You think that because I hired you to do this thing …”
“Because you hired me to do this thing, Tim was separated from his mother and set down on a bench where I practically tripped over him getting off the bus. Because you hired me to do this thing, I was elected to bring him to Andrea’s house. David was just the bait.”
“What did they want with Tim?”
“I have no idea, Aaron.”
“How did they get David there?”
“Again, I have no idea.”
“I can’t stand it, Howard.”
“I know.”
There was a soft knock on the door that startled both men as if it had been a hammer blow.
It was Ella, who announced that there was a gentleman at the door. “He says you’re expecting him.” She looked at Howard strangely. “Both of you.”
“Who is he?” Aaron asked. “I mean, what’s his name?”
Again she glanced at Howard. “He said, ‘They wouldn’t recognize the name, but it doesn’t matter. They’re expecting me.’ ”
After giving Howard a bewildered look, the old man told her to let him in.
As one, they got to their feet. Howard wasn’t sure whether it was out of simple courtesy or so as to be ready for anything.
“Do you know anything about this?” Aaron asked.
“Not a thing, Aaron. No one knew I was coming here. Who would I tell?”
When the visitor was at last standing before them, an imposing block of a man with black hair, dark complexion, and immaculate black suit, Howard recognized him—not as a person but as the human embodiment of the bull-faced black dog that had haunted his dreams in the early weeks of the investigation.
“May I join you? I believe you’ve been looking for me,” he said to Aaron. And to Howard: “Perhaps Andrea or Tim mentioned my name to you. I’m called Pablo.”
CHAPTER 53
“What makes you think I’ve been looking for you?” Aaron demanded.
“Don’t do that, Aaron,” Howard told him. “This man … this person … has had us under his eye from the beginning.”
“Not at all,” Pablo said with an easy smile. “Your venture was just something in the wind—and we listen to the wind.… But may we not sit down and speak sensibly?”
Howard and Aaron looked at the chairs as if they’d never seen them before, but they sat down, and Pablo joined them.
“We can’t hear people’s thoughts or eavesdrop on every conversation that takes place in the world, like the God of your scriptures,” Pablo went on, “but we’re capable of paying very close attention to things that arouse our curiosity.”
He nodded to Howard. “You busied yourself with certain inquiries, which led you to persons of ongoing interest to us. The tendency of these inquiries was clear enough: you were trying to make your way to us. This opened you to involvement in another enterprise, and so we folded you into our plans, killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.”
“Howard,” Aaron said, then evidently changed his mind and turned to Pablo. “What are you saying? Who are you?”
“I’m one of those you sent Mr. Scheim to find.”
“Howard,” Aaron said again, obviously agitated.
“What is it, Aaron?”
“Are you crazy?”
Pablo interrupted. “Mr. Fischer hasn’t had your experience, Howard. Though he may have heard about it, he didn’t live through it.”
“And so?” Howard asked.
“And so he thinks I’m just one of your kind. In other words, he thinks you’re being fooled. This is why he asks if you’re crazy.”
“Is that it, Aaron?”
Aaron looked from one to the other and said, “Yes, that’s it.”
Pablo smiled. “When Tim Kennesey was a small boy, five years old, I paid him a brief visit, but not in this guise—very far from it, in fact. Despite this, he recognized me when we met at Andrea’s house in Taos a few weeks ago. Would you like to see what Tim saw when I visited him, Mr. Fischer?”
Aaron shrank into his chair and shook his head.
“Or I could tell Howard that, having seen you, I now understand the real motive behind this quest—perhaps unexamined even by you.”
“No.”
Pablo shrugged. “It’s a matter of complete indifference to me what you believe. Having invited myself in, I’ll be happy to invite myself out.”
“No,” Aaron said again.
“What then?”
“Tell me who you are.”
“I’ve told you. I’m Pablo.”
“Then what are you?”
“We’re not you. That’s really the best answer I can give you.”
“But this doesn’t tell me what you are.”
Pablo shrugged. “Metaphysics doesn’t interest us, Mr. Fischer, hard as that may be for one of your kind to believe. Like sharks and snapdragons, we’re perfectly content merely to exist, without examining our nature or the cause of our being. We’re just not curious about it.”
“But how can you live this way if you’re … How can you live this way?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve got money, cars, houses.… I don’t know—maybe bank accounts, stocks.”
“Certainly. All those things. Should we live in cloud-castles, ride in chariots?”
Aaron shot Howard a look of abject helplessness.
“Maybe I can cut to the heart of this,” Howard said. “The Israelites were constantly attracted to the gods their neighbors worshiped—Baal, Ashtaroth, Moloch—I don’t remember all their names. The Bible doesn’t say these weren’t gods. What the Bible says is that they were false gods. What Aaron asked me to find out is what happened to these false gods, and, now that he’s got you here, what he wants to know is, to put it bluntly, are you one of them? Are you Baal?”
Pablo shook his head gently. “I’m not Baal. There was never one of us who was Baal. But this is the wrong place to begin the story—if you want to hear it.”
Both men nodded.
“We’ve been your friends from the beginning—from the time before you were humans, before you were primates, before you were mammals, even before you were land animals. This is to say that, rather like dolphins at play in the ocean, we were creatures at play in the fire of life that has coursed through this planet for billions of years. We are certainly born of that fire in some way, the way that heat or light is, but we’re not of that substance, as you are. This is simply to say that we’re not biological entities. We have no function here, no destiny—at least none that we’re aware of.”
“Are you spirits?” Aaron asked abruptly.
“What is a spirit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
Oddly, Howard remembered having an almost identical exchange with Richard Holloway.
“When I say we were your friends from the beginning, I don’t mean that this represented something new to us. We didn’t say to ourselves, ‘Aha! At last someone truly worthy of our attention and friendship!’ The gradual emergence of human intelligence was no more a cause for special rejoicing among us than the gradual emergence of amphibians or reptiles. We regarded you with the same affection as beetles or bats. But at a certain point in your development, something entirely new happened: you began to look back at us.
“An awareness grew up among you that you were not alone here, that there were others not of your kind who shared the world with you. We don’t keep track of millennia any more than you keep track of seconds, but the period I
’m talking about was perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. The curious and venturesome in every generation sought us out to participate in our own lives, and we welcomed them. These you would call shamans, and from that time to the present they haven’t gone away. We extended invitations to them, and we still do, though of course not all accept the invitations. Andrea extended an invitation to David Kennesey when he was a few years older than Tim is now. He never forgot it, but it took him some twenty years finally to accept it, to throw over his settled life and come looking for us. I extended an invitation to Tim when he was five.”
Pablo smiled. “But you want to know about Baal and those other ‘false gods.’ With the emergence of your civilization, the shamanistic tradition died out among the people of your culture. Or you might say that it became formalized in state religions. Shamans were displaced by priests, and we were promoted to the status of deities—in the minds of the faithful. They put us on Mount Olympus and gave us names like Zeus, Apollo, and Hermes. They erected altars to us and called us Baal and Ashtaroth and Moloch. It meant nothing more to us than a new game that we were happy to play. We didn’t know what a god is any more than we know what a spirit is.”
“You didn’t care?” Aaron asked. “You allowed them to worship you?”
Pablo frowned. “We’re not your monitors, not your custodians, dedicated to leading you to some ultimate truth. We didn’t invite these people to worship us, and it was no more flattering to us than the worship of rabbits would have been … I see that this shocks you. To say such a thing isn’t nice. But we’ve never been nice, Mr. Fischer. We’ve never pretended to be holy or just or even moral, much less worthy of anyone’s adoration.”
He waited a moment to see if Aaron had anything more to say, then went on.
“I hardly need tell you what the Hebrews did. They wrapped us up into a unitary abstraction and banished us to the sky. But of course that was just something happening in one small corner of the Old World. Elsewhere in the Old World we continued quite happily to play the roles it pleased you to assign us.”
“Are you saying that these people saw you?”
Pablo laughed. “What they wanted to see and expected to see, we gave them to see. We’re nothing if not adaptable—and obliging. Did you imagine that these people were complete fools just because they lived long ago?”
Aaron gave Howard a guilty look, remembering that he’d once said much the same thing to him.
“Under Christianity, things changed again, of course. Under the Hebraic dispensation we were false gods, but under the Christian dispensation we were demons. To us, it matters not at all what people say we are. We remained what we’d always been, and those who sought us out found us. And elsewhere in the world—in Africa, Australia, the Americas—we continued to interact with people the same way we’d been doing from the beginning, for tens of thousands years.”
“And now?” Aaron asked.
“And now,” Pablo said with a grim smile, “for the first time in our long history, we have an enemy. This enemy is the vast machine the people of your culture have constructed to destroy the life of this planet. Every day hundreds of species we’ve known and loved from their birth are crushed out of existence by this machine. You built it unwittingly—we realize that—but now you seem unable or unwilling to disassemble it, even though in the end (not far off now, I’m afraid) it will crush you out of existence as well.”
The two men were silent.
“Mr. Fischer, why not tell your friend the truth? It can’t matter now.”
“What truth?”
“Tell him what prompted you to embark on this quest.”
“It wasn’t that way. It wasn’t ‘this, so that.’ I didn’t see the connection at the time.”
“Don’t temporize. You see it now.”
Aaron gave Howard a guilty glance, and his face twisted with pain. “It’s cancer.”
“Not treatable?”
“Oh, treatable, sure, Howard. There’s always some quack who’ll sell you a treatment. The point is, it’s incurable. It’s invaded the bone.”
“I know what that means,” Howard said. “I’m sorry.”
“They say I have to be prepared to … It’s the most agonizing end possible.”
“I know. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want your pity.”
“But what’s it got to do with the wild goose chase you set me on?”
“I don’t know, Howard. At the time I was thinking, what a great enterprise! And … something to be involved in, something other than just … waiting.”
“I understand.”
Howard gave Pablo a long look. “Why are you here, really?”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
“If I’d known in advance that you were coming, I might have thought it was to punish us.”
Pablo shook his head. “We have nothing you would call morals, Howard, and are capable of behavior that would seem to you completely ruthless, but we’re not monsters, not vindictive fiends. I’m here because I’m curious—and I have all the time in the world in which to indulge my curiosity.”
“Do you know a man named Joel Bailey?”
“I know of him.”
“Many of the things he says sound like echoes of what you’ve been saying here tonight.”
Pablo made a face. “Bailey’s of the same stripe as those who turned us into gods. He names us Satan and calls us Lord. All the same, not everything he says is nonsense. If those of our kind indulged in metaphysical musings—which we don’t—they might sound very much like his, which is remarkable, considering that he came to them entirely on his own.”
The door to the study opened, and Ella stepped in, blinking.
“Someone … called,” she stammered. “I thought I heard someone call.”
“You’re right,” Pablo said. “I called. Your master is dead.”
Wide-eyed, Howard looked to where Aaron was sitting and saw that the man he knew was indeed gone, his chin resting on his chest, his face—formerly shaped by intelligence and wry wit—now sagging, blank clay.
“He suffered a massive heart attack, and death was instantaneous,” Pablo was telling the stunned Ella. “I suppose you must call an ambulance, but tell them he’s completely beyond recall.”
When she was gone, Pablo turned to Howard and said, “I merely did for him what his God would not.”
CHAPTER 54
It’s over, Howard told himself guiltily fifty times over the next two days—guiltily, because he thought he should be grieving over Aaron instead of thinking about himself and his own loss—of momentum and purpose. It was as if he’d become an addict for the action.
It’s over. Howard Scheim’s greatest case was over. He wondered if the depression he felt was anything like postpartum blues.
The worst of it was that it was a weekend. Pointless to go to the office. Nothing he could do with the money Andrea had given him for Tim. Nothing he could do with the letter she’d written, which he intended to give to his lawyer to hang on to.
He wanted badly to call Denise but knew she didn’t want to talk about it any more than Tim did. Of course he thought of going to the club, but everyone there would be memorializing Aaron. So desperately did he want to talk to someone that he even considered calling Joel Bailey. He would have invited Délices to dinner at the Pump Room if he’d known how to reach her. And of course Hayes Peterson, legendary leg man, was always good for a few laughs over drinks and dinner, but Hayes would want to know what had come of Howard’s meeting with Denise. He’d want the whole story—but would scoff if he heard it. And that would be intolerable.
Sunday afternoon he went to his office. There was nothing for him there—no message on his machine or note slipped under the door—nothing but one last, dreary chore. He had to rake through, annotate, and file all the trash he’d accumulated while running around the country for Aaron and Tim: receipts, ticket stubs, tape cassettes, maps, notes to himself, and …
one item he’d have to return to Tim: the elegant, battered piece of stationery that had traveled hundreds of miles on the wind, carrying a message from David to his son.
Without giving himself a moment to think about it (because if he thought about it, he wouldn’t do it), he picked up the phone and dialed the number on the letterhead, hoping someone would answer on the first ring.
No one did.
After the second ring, he told himself he’d give it one more and then hang up. After the sixth he started to relax, because obviously the house at the end of Morningstar Path was empty, perhaps even abandoned. He’d give it one more ring, exactly one, and then it would be over.
The phone at the other end was picked up: just picked up.
Howard’s mouth was as dry as sandpaper.
“I’m still here, Howard,” Andrea said at last.
He was sure he hadn’t intended to speak at all, had only wanted … what? To hear a voice? Was that it?
He managed to squeeze out five words: “Don’t know why I called.”
She said, “Of course you do.”
Tim caught the phone in the middle of the second ring and hoped it hadn’t woken Ellen. It was eight o’clock, Sunday morning.
“Well, well, well. The wanderer returns.” The voice on the phone was familiar: Frank Hawkins, a classmate. “And may one ask where the hell you’ve been? The truant officers are out in force, frothing at the mouth.”
“It’s a long story,” Tim said, thinking he’d have to concoct one pretty soon.
“You better have something better than that, dude.”
“I will.”
“Huh. I didn’t expect to find you there. I’ve been calling off and on for two weeks.”
“Yeah, well …”
“Listen, some of the guys are gonna knock a ball around at the school yard. You want to come?”
“Uh … yeah, sure. When?”
“Any time. I’m leaving now.”
