Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  And he lifted his right hand now and stared at the gray ivy-leaf mark on the back of his knuckles … and reluctantly he called up his impossible childhood memory of what had happened on the day his hand was cut.

  “I think he’s right,” Cochran said hollowly. “I think it is Dionysus.” He looked at Plumtree, and had no idea who might be behind her eyes at the moment. “When they were talking about shooting you, just now,” he said to her, “did you … do your stay-calm trick, did you throw your anger over onto me?”

  “No,” Plumtree said. “They weren’t insulting me, I wasn’t mad. That was all you—but hey, I gotta say I liked your style.”

  “Well, good for me. But a person can throw other things, anybody can. What I mean is, you can throw away grief for dead people you loved, if you’re willing to disown along with it all you have of them, all your memories and all your—all the feelings you had about them … which are arguably of no use to you anymore anyway, they’re just stuff in your head that there’s nothing to be done with anymore, like a collection, a very damn costly collection, of eight-track tapes after all the stereos are gone that ever played ’em.”

  “Yeah,” said Plumtree quietly, “they just make you unhappy. All you could do would be dust off the big old cassettes; whistle the tunes from memory and try to remember the instruments, and the vocals.”

  Pete closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “This is all just—deep and moving as hell, you know, but it’s near midnight and—”

  “Let the guy talk,” said Mavranos.

  “You can disown the dead person,” Cochran went on, “but not just into a void; I suppose that’d … like, violate the law of conservation of grief, right? The god wants you to give it all to him.” He smiled, but didn’t dare look at anyone but the dead body of Spider Joe. “And it’s a gift, that the god takes it—in exchange he gives you ‘surcease from sorrow.’ ”

  “Euripides?” said Mavranos.

  “That’s what the tailor says,” put in Plumtree with hectic cheer, “when you bring in a torn pair of pants; and then you say, ‘Eumenides!’ ”

  “That’s mighty funny,” said Mavranos patiently. “But Euripides wrote a play that deals with what Mr. Cochran is talking about.” He glanced at Angelica. “It’s another play with a secret hidden in it, like your Troilus and Cressida.”

  Cochran sighed, with a shiver at the bottom of his lungs. “This would be Les Bacchants, wouldn’t it,” he said. This soaked ceiling may as well fall in on me, he thought; everything else is.

  “I guess so,” said Mavranos. “That’s French? I mean what in English they call The Bacchae, this ancient play about a guy named Pentheus, who was king of Thebes, and his mom, Agave, who cut his head off and brought it to town.”

  “Agave is the cactus they make tequila from,” noted Plumtree. “Often enough I’ve felt like it cut my head off.”

  “I never read the play,” Cochran told Mavranos. He yawned, creaking his jaw and tipping tears from the corners of his eyes. “But as a matter of fact my in-laws were reading bits of it to me just last week, in France.”

  Cochran wished for another cold American beer, to chase away the palate-memory of the flinty claret with which Monsieur Leon had kept topping up his glass—the family’s most prized vin de bouche, the old 1945 vintage, picked from vines that had gone unpruned during the Nazi occupation—while Madame Leon had droningly read page after leisurely, age-yellowed page of the old play; and he remembered how his weary brain had eventually stopped struggling to translate the French sentences, and had begun simply letting the syllables come through as random near-miss English, and how it had all seemed then to be phrases of idiot obscenity, both childish and shocking at the same time. There had been some moral the elderly couple had wanted him to derive from the play, and though he had come to their fifteenth-century farmhouse in Queyrac to turn over to them the urn that contained the ashes of their daughter and unborn grandchild, it had soon become clear that they were trying to get him into bed with their other, younger daughter, the slow-witted Marie-Claire. The thought that had sent him running from the house to his rented car and speeding away down the D-l across the low country of the Bas Médoc toward distant Paris was It’s only January—they want a second try at a grandchild crop out of me in this thirteen-moon year.

  “At the start of the play,” said Mavranos, “Dionysus comes to Thebes disguised as a stranger from Phrygia, but he gets all the local women to go dancing off into the hills in his honor, wearing animal skins and waving these staffs that are wrapped in ivy and topped with pinecones—”

  “Easy on the vino there, Kootie,” interrupted Angelica.

  But the boy didn’t put the bottle down until he had refilled his gold cup; and when he spoke, it was to Mavranos: “Was there blood on these staffs too?”

  “After a while, there was,” Mavranos told him. “The old retired king, Cadmus, he puts ivy vines in his hair and goes out to honor Dionysus too; but the present king, Pentheus, disapproves of all this crazy behavior and has the stranger arrested and thrown in jail. But since the stranger is really the god Dionysus, it’s no problem for him to conjure up an earthquake and blow the jail to bits and get out. Pentheus asks him who set him free, and the stranger says, ‘Him who provides mortal man with the grapevine.’ And Pentheus says something argumentative back, which makes the stranger laugh and say, ‘That’s hardly an insult to Dionysus!’ ”

  Dutifully, Cochran asked him, “What did Pentheus say?”

  “Well, officially that line has been lost. In all the modern editions the editors have put in something like, ‘The god who makes men and women act like lunatics.’ But Scott Crane’s dad had a real old copy, in Latin, and in this old version the original line’s still there—and it translates to ‘An unjust gift—that lets men forsake their wronged dead.’ Then the stranger talks Pentheus into putting on a dress so he can go spy on the women, disguised as one of them. Pentheus is like somebody with a concussion at this point—he’s seeing double, and he asks the stranger, ‘Were you an animal a minute ago? You’ve got a bull’s head now.’ ”

  Cochran could feel Plumtree’s gaze on him, but he didn’t glance at her; instead he strode into the kitchen and managed to fumble three cans of Coors out of the refrigerator without looking squarely at the dead man on the table. Perceived only in his peripheral vision, the body seemed huge.

  “Sorry,” he said when he had stepped back into the office and popped open one of the cans. He took a deep sip of the stinging cold beer and gasped, “Do go on.”

  “Well,” Mavranos said, “the women aren’t fooled by Pentheus’s disguise, and they chase him down and just tear him apart. His own mom, Agave, is the worst—she’s, like, delirious, and doesn’t recognize him, she thinks they’ve caught a mountain lion or something, and she cuts off his head and carries it back to town, real pleased with herself. Old Cadmus, who’s her dad, he sees that this is his grandson’s head, and he talks her out of her delirium so that she sees it too; they’re both horrified at what she’s done—and then there’s another missing section, a whole couple of pages. Modern editors have put in made-up speeches from Cadmus and Agave saying what a terrible thing this is and how bad they feel. And then when the old, real text picks up again, Dionysus is condemning Cadmus and his wife to be turned into snakes, and sending Agave off into destitute exile.”

  “Is that how it ends?” asked Plumtree. “Downer play, if you ask me.” Angelica closed her eyes and sighed, obviously weary of Plumtree’s remarks but reluctant to snap at her.

  “Well, yeah,” Mavranos agreed. “You do wonder why the god treats ’em so rough, when they were apparently just doing what he wanted ’em to do. It doesn’t make sense—the way it’s published these days. But in the original version, after Cadmus and Agave realize what she’s done, the god offers them a sacramental wine, called the debt-payer; he tells them that if they drink it, they will lose all memory of Pentheus, and therefore all guilt and unhappiness and gr
ief over his bloody murder. They’ll be turning over Pentheus’s ghost to the god, and in return he’ll give them forgetfulness and peace. And the reason the god is being so harsh to them at the end of the play is that in the last bit of the omitted section they refuse his offer, his gift—they can’t bear to renounce their love of Pentheus, can’t make themselves disown him, even though he’s dead.”

  Angelica was frowning, and looked as though she was ready to spit. “Dionysus wants to take grief, and then more of it—and he won’t wait for it to occur accidentally.” She visibly shivered. “We don’t want to deal with him face-to-face, visit him where he lives—if we’ve got to deal with him at all, we want to deal with his borders.”

  Pete was half-sitting against the desk, and he looked up at Angelica with raised eyebrows. “He takes in boarders?”

  Diana had sat down on the couch and was holding her distended belly. “It doesn’t sound like Dionysus will want to help us, does it?” she asked. “We want to do the opposite of renounce Scott.”

  “That’s why we need an intercessor, I reckon,” said Mavranos. He squinted at Cochran. “How did you get that mark on the back of your hand?”

  “I was—” Cochran began.

  “Jesus!” yelled Pete Sullivan suddenly, leaping away from the desk. “Angie! Get me the can of brake-parts cleaner!”

  Angelica had jumped when he shouted, and now she spoke angrily. “No. What is it, a wasp?”

  Kootie had scrambled down from the desk, so fast that his forgotten bouillabaisse bowl flew off too and hit the carpeted floor with an echoing clang and a spray of tepid fish broth.

  “Yes!” said Pete without looking away from the lamp. “Your goddamn moths are turning into wasps. Get me the goddamn brake-parts cleaner, this wasp’s as big as my head!”

  Angelica was just staring at him, and frowning impatiently. “It’s not that big.”

  “It is! Will you hurry!”

  “Well, it’s not as big as a normal person’s head.”

  “If a normal person comes in here we can check. Get me the goddamn brake-parts cleaner!”

  “I’ll get it,” said Kootie. Before stepping into the kitchen, the boy grinned nervously up at Cochran. “Best thing for killing bugs, brake-parts cleaner spray is.”

  “I bet,” said Cochran to his receding back. Absently he licked fish broth off his shaking fingers.

  Plumtree took Cochran’s other hand and led him away from the confusion, past Spider Joe’s corpse to the far end of the couch; then, while Pete and Angelica went on arguing about the wasp, Plumtree stepped quietly into the entry hall, pulling Cochran along after her.

  The wasp must have made a break for it, or else another one had manifested itself, for Cochran heard renewed banging and cursing from the office behind them; but Plumtree calmly used the noise as cover while she drew back the chain in the doorframe slot and pulled the heavy door open.

  The cold night air was potent with the briny smell of the wild sea as the two of them sprinted down the walk and across the lamplit asphalt to the corner of Ocean Boulevard; and when they had dashed through a gap in the surging headlights across the lanes of Ocean, Plumtree dragged Cochran around a parking lot to a set of iron stairs that led downward toward the beach sand. The majestic old liner Queen Mary was moored permanently as a hotel now at the Port of Long Beach peninsula a quarter-mile away across the dark harbor water, and her yellow lights glittered on the low waves like a windy lane of incandescent flowers.

  Plumtree’s blond hair was blowing around her face as she stepped off the last of the iron stairs onto the sand. “Untamed water,” she said, waving at the sea. “They won’t be able to sense us here, even if they’ve got time to look. Which they don’t. They’re crazy even to think of delaying long enough to bury the poor old buggy man.”

  Now that they were below the seaside cliffs, Cochran could see a couple of fires down the beach, a hundred yards or so to the south, and he wondered uneasily who might be sustaining them out here in the middle of this night. Faintly on the breeze he could hear drumming.

  “Uh,” he said, shivering, “where to?”

  “Frisco,” Plumtree said. “Why the Cliff House?”

  “It’s—” he said with a shrug, “—a nice place for breakfast. Tourist spot, good cover.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to figure out why the Cliff House had seemed such an obvious place for them all to reconnoiter. “I don’t know, Cody, it just came to me. It’s right by the ruins of the old Sutro Baths, and that’s a good area to talk, down on the plain among the ruins, right by the water, the untamed water, because you can see anybody coming a long way off; nobody could eavesdrop, and the wind and the sea would even fox a shotgun microphone; and—” He laughed self-consciously. “And on the cliffs of Sutro Heights Park, there used to be rows and rows of Grecian statues. They’re all buried in the park somewhere now. I guess I was thinking they’d be a, a protective influence. All the stone people, to distract attention from us.”

  He glanced to the side at her shadowed face, wondering if she would make fun of him, but she was just nodding. “Why did they bury ’em?”

  “It was during World War Two,” he said. “The government was afraid they’d draw the attention of Japanese submarines.”

  “Sure,” she said absently as they trudged through the loose sand north, away from the fires. “Guy at the periscope sees a bunch of naked white guys standing on the cliffs in the middle of the night—‘This mussa be Flisco, Cap-tain-san!’ ”

  Cody’s crude witticism depressed Cochran, and he hoped Janis would be up again soon. “For this,” he said stiffly, “I think we could call my lawyer, and have him wire us some money. We could rent a car then—”

  “And leave a paper trail for Armentrout to follow,” she said, nodding again. “Fuck that noise, as the poet said. I’ll get us a car.”

  Armentrout had never stayed this late on the ward. The patients had all long since been put to bed, and the lights in the common rooms were dimmed; after the final clang of the door closing behind the last of the staff who would not be staying all night, the silence was whole, and tense—the occasional breathless, yipping scream, or raucous laugh, was a welcome collapse-to-one of the standing wave that seemed to fill all the rooms and corridors when the silence was unbroken.

  Armentrout was sitting in one of the upholstered chairs at the re-righted table in the TV lounge. The television screen overhead was an opaque dark green, and he knew that the view of the courtyard behind him was blocked by the two broad sheets of plywood that had been bolted over the window through which Cochran and Plumtree had escaped.

  The views, the extensions to the outside world, were truncated. The pay phone had stopped its incessant ringing, and he was afraid that if he were to get up and cross to it and lift the receiver, he wouldn’t even hear a dial tone.

  Every couple of minutes he slapped his pants pockets, and twice in the last couple of hours he had actually had to dig out his keys and look at them to reassure himself that he could leave this locked ward if he wanted to. So far he was resisting the impulse to try the key in the door; what if it should fail to fit the lock, and none of the nurses or staff admitted to knowing who he was? What if they made him take off his white coat and put on clothes from the boutique closet, and forced him to take some subsistence-pharmer dose of meds, and showed him a bed in one of the rooms and told him it was his? What if it was his? He had been a patient in a place like this, in Wichita, at the age of seventeen. …

  Atropine again for Richie. …

  The charge nurse had given him a bewildered look when he had burst into the demented ice-cream social, hours ago, wearing his awkward two-figure manikin appliance. He had mumbled something about it being a tool to reintegrate dissociatives—well, he could stick with that. He might try it on a dissociative sometime!

  But he had needed the masking effect of the contraption. Long John Beach had been dangerously preempted during that ice-cream-social bedlam, and Armen
trout had needed every masking measure he could put on, what with the god apparently right in here, breaking the place up with an earthquake and freeing inmates from their captivity.

  Armentrout rocked his head back to look up at the raw cracks in the ceiling.

  All at once he stood up, shuddering. His fully charged cellular telephone was a weight in his jacket pocket, but suddenly he couldn’t bear being in the TV lounge any longer. He waved at the night charge nurse through the station window as he hurried past.

  Plumtree and Cochran, Armentrout thought as he strode down the dark hall toward his closed office door. Why would the god have freed Cochran too?

  Armentrout wondered uneasily if he ought to have paid more attention to the deluded widower. How had the man come to have that ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand? Cochran hadn’t reported having any delusional episodes—or visitations—while he was here; Armentrout would have been alerted by anything like that; but was the dreary fellow more than just psychically sensitive, could he have some link with the god?

  Armentrout’s key unlocked his office door, but he was too distracted to be pleased by the little vindication. I should have had him on hard meds, he thought as he blundered across the linoleum floor and sat down at the desk; hell, I should have given him benzodiazepine and ECT! I lost more than I gained, working them out on Plumtree, even if my—even if no distant ghost got a fix on me.

  I got the taste of your blood now, and the smell of your jizz. In voodoo terms, that constitutes having your ID package. True, Armentrout thought now. But I do have a vial of your blood, Mr. Salvoy.

  He stared at the two-figure manikin appliance that was canted against the couch. With shirts, jackets, trousers, and shoes hung and hooked onto the aluminum poles, and the pair of clothing-store manikin heads stuck on the swiveling neck-posts, the thing did look like two blandly smiling men with their arms around the shoulders of an invisible third man in the middle; and when he strapped the framework onto his own shoulders, Armentrout would become the third man, the man in the middle. A lever in the chest of the left-hand dummy permitted him to work the mechanical outside arms, and one in the right-hand dummy let him swivel the heads this way and that. And he had cored out holes in the backs of the Styrofoam heads, under the Dynel wigs, and stuffed into the holes dozens of paper towels spotted with patients’ blood samples. The thing weighed about twenty pounds and was awkward to wear, and in public it drew far too much derisive attention, but on several occasions it had proven to be an effective multi-level psychic scrambler, a terrifically refractive and deflecting mask. Even some moron with a plain old gun, Armentrout thought, would be likely to hit the wrong head.