Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

Simon returned the following morning, and every morning afterward for the next several weeks, and each morning he and Bloom met, their day began as the day before, with a new picture or two to view, adventures and farces, parlor intrigues, tales of romantic love and longing, some exciting, some ridiculous, some sublime and full of wonder. Simon’s long reach strode the length of the piano’s keys in search of rhythms and melodies to capture the spirit of the images moving before them. Over lunch in the dining room, Bloom’s brother often invited him to speak about how he passed his time on the estate, how it was he could bear the long silences and the isolation, but Bloom, who still didn’t know how to articulate the ways in which he took pleasure losing himself to the still waters of the reflecting pool, to the soft cushions of the library sofas, to the gardens and the trails, to the tower’s pavilion and aviary, to the temporal expanse of his studio atop the mesa, encouraged his brother to ignore the simplicity of his life, and instead to tell him more about the strange and beautiful people he had met in the exotic places he had visited, about the colorful and dangerous characters who populated his past. Day after day, Bloom listened to his brother speak at length, and as his brother’s presence, and the places he described, grew in dimension, Bloom continued to search for some commonality he and Simon shared beyond their physical resemblance, for some deeper root that anchored them together, a familial trait, a mannerism, a movement, some similar characteristic he had observed in their father, but the more he listened and the more his brother performed his rehearsed speeches, the more Bloom marveled at the fact that, while born from the same man’s seed, from two women whose outward appearances were indecipherably identical, there couldn’t be anyone in the world more unlike him or Jacob than Simon. From top to bottom, from his theatrical expressions to his calculated style of elocution, he was a man, it seemed, entirely of his own making, and Bloom was left to wonder if beyond the information his stories imparted, if belying the bounty of language he enjoyed the feel of in his mouth, Simon had yet to show Bloom his authentic self, the unadorned spirit that lived within him. Or was it possible that his existence was composed of, as he claimed on the day of their reunion, the disparate roles he played in life and on the stage? Perhaps he was merely a composite of invented personae. Or, Bloom wondered, was there more to him buried beneath the fragments, somewhere under the amalgam constituted by his own will? Or was it in that act of self-invention, in the absence of a mother and a father, that Simon and Jacob were alike? They, at the very least, retained this similarity.

  Bloom imagined if he’d had the opportunity to stand Simon and Jacob back to back, to bind them together, they would have formed a countervailing force in whose reversed polarity could be manifested the one attribute he was now convinced Jacob did pass on to Simon, and, for that matter, to Bloom: the invisible quality of being unknowable.

  For days, Simon filled the void created by Bloom’s reserve with amusing backstage dramas, of vaudeville routines gone wrong, of performances so good and so bad they resulted in small riots, until one day it occurred to Simon in the middle of a perfectly entertaining anecdote about a mezzo soprano who had accidentally fallen through a magician’s trapdoor that he should stop speaking altogether. Listen to me, he said to Bloom. Just listen to me. How I go on and on. You must forgive me, he said, and quieted, and after a minute or two of a perfectly restful stillness, he asked, and then insisted, that Bloom take charge of the day, which left Bloom feeling quite uncertain as to how to proceed. He eventually stood up, took Simon by the elbow, and led him to the sanctuary of the library, where he showed him the shelves on which he kept his favorite books, his Homer and Bulfinch, Pliny the Elder, the Brothers Grimm, his Poe, Hawthorne and Dickinson, Byron and Keats, Wordsworth, Cervantes, Chekhov, Melville, Flaubert, Dickens … and after summoning the courage to speak of their father, he directed Simon’s attention to Jacob’s optical devices, the blueprints of his inventions, the patents he filed when he was a younger man, the artifacts he inherited from Jonah Liebeskind. And when he saw in Simon’s open expression that he was receptive to learning something more about their father, he told Simon about Jacob’s apprenticeship with the master optician; described how the fastidious man lived at the altar of greatness and progress, and how he died at the moment he had outlived his relevance. He told Simon about their father’s brief meeting with Thomas Edison, about Edison’s humorous retort upon seeing the Rosenbloom Drive function for the first time. And when Simon laughed at the idea that his young father had outwitted the great man of the modern world, Bloom escorted him through the villa’s many rooms and up the tower stairs, where he introduced him to Elijah and ran him through his routine, all the way through to Open the door and we shall see … No, I need you here with me. They gazed through the telescope’s lens, over the basin to the sea, and Simon pivoted the eye to align with a clear path running through the groves, and said, In three weeks from tomorrow, they will all arrive at the same time, a convoy of trucks along the port road. If you look for us, he said, pointing over the scope’s hollow tube, you will see. And Bloom said in three weeks from tomorrow, he would seek them out.

  When they returned indoors, Bloom, feeling that much more at ease with his brother, returned Simon up the stairs to his mother’s gallery, where he sat him down on the chaise longue and explained to him what his mother’s paintings meant to him, how as a child he cast his eyes onto their horizons in search of sleep and the few memories he could recall of his mother sitting before the fires, and he explained what the landscapes represented to their father; and as their father had done for Bloom, he sat Simon down in the drawing room and displayed through the eye of the magic lantern, on the mandala of the Wheel of Life, on all the various devices he had introduced to Simon in the library, the miniature images Bloom’s mother had so carefully and masterfully crafted, the numerous ways in which she had been haunted by the ghosts of Simon’s mother; he allowed Simon to see the heavy burden, the madness, she carried within her until her heart, quite literally, broke. Do you see? Bloom asked as their father had once asked Bloom. Do you see how she suffered?

  Yes, said Simon. Yes, I see.

  On a late-afternoon walk to the top of Mount Terminus, Bloom recounted for Simon the year he was absent, the year during which the noise from the construction site resounded over the grounds of the estate, and he told him how their father suffered his shame as vigorously and unyieldingly as Bloom’s mother had suffered her lament. He lent his brother the flimsy copy of Death, Forlorn, which Bloom now carried with him in the inner pocket of his jacket, and when Simon had read it, Bloom escorted him to his studio, and there showed him the panels of finished drawings he had made for Jacob, showed him the multitude of sketches on which they were based, showed him the pages of Manuel Salazar’s journal from which their style was born, and he then returned his brother to the parlor, where Bloom proceeded to show him how, inspired by his mother’s miniatures and the lines of Salazar, he reduced the panels to fit onto the glass slides of the magic lantern. And upon seeing the last of these images projected onto the wall, Simon turned to Bloom and said, with his eyes squinting into the lamplight, I hadn’t realized.

  Realized what?

  That you’re a luftmensch. A true one, at that.

  A what?

  A dreamer. Always with his head in the clouds. The true luftmenschen is what Sam and I called the dreamers who could pull the clouds from the sky and bring them down to Earth for us lesser people to behold. You, brother, are a true luftmensch … And now I understand. Now I understand why it was that Jacob insisted I make a place for you. For the exchange of the land, for the rights to the water, he insisted I make a place for you at the studio. Now I understand why.

  But I don’t know the first thing about making pictures.

  No, said Simon. You know everything. Everything you need to know. It is all here, he said with a hush as he pointed the glowing embers of a cigarette toward the lantern and then to the wall. You were born for this. And do you want to know ho
w I know this to be true?

  How?

  Because, at this very moment, I envy you.

  You? Envy me? That’s … unlikely.

  No. Your eye, your lines, Joseph, they are enviable.

  Bloom shook his head at his brother.

  Trust me, said Simon as he shook his head back at Bloom, the envy I feel is the envy all middling artists will feel when they look at your work.

  Bloom continued to shake his head at this. You overestimate me.

  If anyone’s to be disappointed, said Simon, I’m afraid it’s going to be you. The majority of pictures we make are rough and crass. There are a few true artists in my stable, but, if you can bring pictures such as these to life, you’re going to make all of them look artless by comparison. You must believe me, Joseph: if you weren’t my brother, if our father hadn’t put these conditions on me, I would have sought you out all on my own. Understand? It’s rare I find such a gift. With a talent like yours, you can do anything you like in this business. Anything.

  Bloom took a moment to consider this. He saw no mendacity in his brother’s face, not in his eyes, in the shape of his mouth. When he had convinced himself that what his brother had said to him was genuine, Bloom said with some lingering skepticism in his voice, Anything?

  Anything. Anything at all.

  * * *

  Before I left, said Simon the next day, I wanted you to see this. When you’re ready, when we’ve put some experience behind you, this is the man I want you to work with. This man, Gottlieb, is, I think, the man for you. As he did every morning for the past several weeks, Simon fed a reel into the projector and took his place at the piano, and as he began to play, Bloom watched a picture that matched the quality of the very first pictures Simon had run for him, and, maybe, even surpassed them. It was a living dream, artful and serene, yet funny and human. It relied on techniques he had thus far not seen in any of the other pictures Simon had shown him. This man, Gottlieb, transcended the cinematic rules of storytelling set down by—so far as Bloom knew—no one in particular. In a seemingly arbitrary manner, Gottlieb’s perspectives cut away from scenes to the natural world—to trees, to bodies of water, to open sky, a character’s fidgeting hands, a finger working out a wrinkle in a dress, to symbolic objects placed in the most unlikely places. He shifted camera angles to alter the frame of reference in such a subtle and seamless manner he enabled the viewer to see within, to reflect on, to reflect with, the subject before him. He made it possible for his audience to feel the echoes of what had already passed, to foreshadow—to anticipate—what was to come. With these invisible manipulations, with an illusionist’s sleight of hand, he inspired within his observer the type of spiritual dissociation Bloom had experienced only from reading the Romantic poets on his favorite shelf. In this last picture he watched with his brother during this period on Mount Terminus—Gottlieb’s The Magnetic Eye—Myron Bishop, a bitter curmudgeon, awakened one morning possessed by an eye charged with an unusual magnetism, one whose force worked in vexing opposition to Bishop’s truest desires. The people and objects he despised most, the magnetic eye attracted; the people and objects he most wanted to attract, it repelled. The cruelest of jokes, read the intertitle upon the revelation of the eye’s logic. To illuminate Bishop’s repulsion, Gottlieb introduced first the figure of a cantankerous old hag whom Bishop had seen in the distance and tried to avoid by crossing the street. Gottlieb cut away to Bishop’s fantasy about what cruel act he wanted to perpetrate on her, but the magnetic eye had other designs. When Bishop drew near to her, a Kewpie doll flew out a shop door and into Bishop’s hand, and, in its wake, the ugly old wretch lifted off the ground and followed. When her nose was only inches from his, and she saw what he held in his hand, she plucked the gift from Bishop’s fingers as she would a flower, observed the mawkish sentiment expressed on the Kewpie’s porcelain face, and then looked to Bishop with tearful eyes. The act of kindness softened her so, she smothered Bishop with unwanted kisses. Everywhere he went from thereon, Bishop found himself embracing the most wretched creatures—the infirm and impoverished, the town drunkard, an amputee, a forlorn dwarf, a widowed malcontent more malcontent than Bishop himself. Meanwhile, each time he tried to draw near the magnificent woman he adored, a bespectacled beauty whose white hair Gottlieb lit as if to appear on fire, the magnetic eye repelled her, in one instance by removing her spectacles from her face and catapulting them through the air into the hands of a handsome young gentleman, more well-to-do and free spirited than Bishop could ever dream of being. Gottlieb used proximity to the love interest to show Bishop’s spirit defeated. The camera, assuming Bishop’s point of view, pulled back farther and farther from the young woman, leaving him to observe her from a great distance away, and only from there was he able to see with what kindness and grace she embraced all the people he found so repulsive. From this distance, he came to understand it was this woman’s selfless qualities with which he longed to be acquainted, and from this distance, he began to model her example. Those he once felt most in opposition to, he now grabbed hold of freely. He expressed his affection for them, offered them his undivided attention. His face, once fallen and disturbed, transformed. With each act of kindness, it grew more attractive, appeared healthier, more sound, more alive, and soon he found that the poor wretches he now embraced with a full, compassionate heart were unable to enter his sphere. The magnetic eye wouldn’t allow it, as their company was now desired. The cruelest of jokes, the intertitle read again. Bishop stood alone, isolated and untouched, and as such, the world about him—brought to life by a sequence of Gottlieb cutaways—began to look glorious in all its aspects, at which point the polarity of the magnetism was neutralized by the unlikeliest hero. A mosquito flew into Bishop’s magnetic eye and pressed its proboscis into the dark center of its pupil.

  For the moment, Bishop was blinded—the screen faded to black, over the lens a shudder blinked to simulate Bishop’s frenetic lid—and when the camera lens moved from soft to sharp focus, he saw the glowing hair of the bespectacled woman, there she was, examining the eye that had caused him his troubles. With the corner of a kerchief, she wiped from his cheek a bloody tear left by the mosquito, then extended him a hand, lifted him to his feet, and off Bishop walked down the street with her until the camera’s iris closed around them.

  * * *

  Bloom thought it marvelous, and before his brother could solicit his opinion, he said so.

  As Simon stood before the projector and wound back the reel, he told Bloom that when he was ready, when Bloom had acquired the skills to be useful to Gottlieb, when he had matured a little more, Simon would do everything in his power to arrange for him to work as his assistant.

  For this Bloom thanked his brother.

  Simon removed Gottlieb’s reel and replaced it with another. When he had fed the leader into the machine and switched on the projector, he walked to Bloom’s side, took a seat on the sofa beside him, and together the brothers watched the picture Bloom had filmed on their aeronautical adventure over Mount Terminus. There, said Simon, the first of many pictures you’ll be responsible for. Bloom watched with the thrill of seeing his memory of that day re-created and projected onto the wall. He watched as the scope turned and constructed the panorama of the valley and the range, the basin and the sea. This print is for you, said Simon when the film had run through and all that remained on the wall was a square of light shining forth from the burning filament of the unobstructed bulb. Bloom watched his brother rewind the short reel and close up the metal canister in which it was housed. You must keep it safe, in a warm, dry place.

  I will.

  Be sure that you do, he said when he stepped forward and placed the container in Bloom’s hands, which felt warm to the touch. Before letting go, Simon added with a serious note, I mean it. It will be a memorial soon enough.

  How so?

  What I told you a few weeks ago, about the changes that are to come?

  Yes.

  I wasn’t on
ly speaking about the immediate changes on the studio lot. Simon waved his hand through the light. It cast a wave of a shadow across the wall. The fact of the matter is it won’t be long before the land all around us is changed forever. All of what you see today from the peak of Mount Terminus, you won’t recognize in the years to come.

  I don’t understand.

  Simon stood up and began walking about the room. Before I explain how and why, understand this: I won’t be deterred from my plans. They’re already set in motion. But, he said as he pulled back the curtains to let in the light, I thought, perhaps if I prepared you for what’s to come, the impact wouldn’t be as unsettling as it might have been otherwise. He walked to the case in which he carried his daily allotment of film canisters, reached into it, and pulled out a map. He returned to his seat beside Bloom, unpacked the map’s sections, and, with his eyes focused on the terrain, pointed to symbols and lines drawn over the topography of the region. Here, he said with his finger resting in the middle of Pacheta Lake’s outline, at the center of the source of his mother and father’s brief happiness together. I know you’re familiar with this place.

  Yes, said Bloom.

  Yes, said Simon. He pulled his chin to the knot of his tie, and said, Here. You see the line marked here? Simon ran his finger over a line of red ink running southwest from the lake to the northern edge of the valley to a red triangle near the canyon pass. I’ve made a deal with the county’s water authority to divert the lake water. Here, where the pass is, we’re going to build a dam for a reservoir. Simon’s finger now followed a tangential line west from the red triangle at the far reaches of the valley up along the ridge of the mountains leading to the basin on the opposite side of Mount Terminus. That water, it will flow through an outlet into the valley here, and through another outlet here, into the basin. Here, where for some years now, I’ve been buying up the property not owned by our father. Simon traced the red line until it stopped in the middle of the vast stretch of land leading to the sea. What I didn’t inherit from Jacob, what Jacob didn’t own, what I haven’t yet been able to acquire, I’m now in the process of purchasing.