Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  What for?

  To make the land habitable. To build on it. To expand the city center outward by road and rail. All the way to the sea.

  Simon handed the map to Bloom so that he might study it more thoroughly, to take in the full extent of his brother’s vision, but Bloom couldn’t begin to imagine the outcome, nor could he fathom how in the world Simon would achieve it. The engineering. The machinery. The laborers. It seemed to him an endeavor on the order of a Chinese emperor, an Egyptian pharaoh, a Mayan god. He tried to recall the city center’s congested landscape, its architecture and industry, its tramways and public squares, and he tried to imagine it all superimposed onto the surface of the map, crowding the lens of his telescope, but the best he could do was to see a phantom image, a mirage on the edge of the desert shimmering in the heat and the wind.

  When Bloom didn’t respond, Simon said, The moment I looked out over the vistas of Mount Terminus, I saw what the land to the west should be. I saw how to make it habitable. How to populate an entire region of the Earth no one until now had ever thought to populate before. And I knew I was the one meant to shape it. I’ve spent enough time in the company of true artists to know, in my heart, Joseph, I’m not one of you. I’m a producer. That is the truth of it. As a businessman, understand? I, like you, have the potential to leave behind something great, something monumental. And what you see here? he said with his hand returning to the outline of Pacheta Lake, I know in my gut, will be the most important thing I ever do. The running of the studio, it’s been my trade, a vocation like any other, for which I’ll be admired for a while, and then forgotten, but this, this, Joseph, will leave a permanent mark on the land that will live long after you and I have both turned to dust. Surely, you can understand?

  Bloom nodded, if only to indicate he followed his brother’s reasoning, and recognized his conviction. He was able to comprehend Simon’s plans, but he wasn’t certain he understood the ambition that motivated him. Bloom had put little thought into what he would leave behind. He wasn’t certain he cared what he left behind. Nor was he certain that he appreciated his brother’s vision, as it stood in opposition to what he valued and cherished. He didn’t wish to set himself apart from his brother, so he didn’t express these thoughts out loud, but Simon was perceptive enough to see what weighed on Bloom’s mind.

  Simon lifted his hand and playfully tapped Bloom’s forehead with the tip of his finger. We obviously have a great deal more to learn about each other, he said. I have come to see one thing quite clearly, however.

  What’s that?

  How deeply attached you are to this place. I’m not blind. Simon repacked the map and placed it in his case. And when he had closed the clasps, he stood and said, No need to worry. We’ll ease you into it. Before you find yourself in the thick of it, the least I can do is prepare you to become better acquainted with the terrain of what’s to come.

  Before Bloom could ask how exactly Simon proposed to do this, Simon asked the question himself. Yes, he said, but how, exactly? Simon stared off through the window whose view crossed the canyon. He stood quietly, intently twisting one of the curls on his head, occasionally glancing back at Bloom with what appeared to be a solution, and each time he appeared to have plotted a course of action, he made a theatrical turn, puckered his lips, and shook his head dismissively. After two and then three comic dismissals, he made his final turn and said, with a gleam in his eye, And there you have it!

  There you have what?

  The very thing, of course! My man Gus, he’ll call on you tomorrow. He’ll explain everything then.

  Uncertain what arrangement he was agreeing to now, but trusting his brother well enough, and unable to help but feel appreciation for Simon’s effort to lighten the blow of this news, Bloom said, All right. Yes, why not.

  That’s the spirit!

  Bloom followed Simon out to his roadster, where his brother removed from the passenger’s seat the case that held the fine-looking camera they had used on their aeronautical journey. Simon handed Bloom the container, and said, You’ll be needing this. He then observed Bloom standing there with it in his arms, and, with brotherly affection, added, It suits you.

  Does it?

  It does. Simon nodded. He placed a hand on Bloom’s shoulder. In all seriousness, he said. Do exactly as Gus says and we’ll put you to work when I return.

  Simon cranked the engine at the front of the automobile, and when its interior sounded its combustion, he took to the seat behind the wheel and said over the ruckus, Remember: three weeks! Twenty-one days from today! Watch for us on the port road! Three weeks! he called from the driver’s seat. Until then! Simon turned the roadster around now and sped off down the drive onto the winding road. When the noise from his brother was no longer audible, Bloom set the case his brother had handed him in the foyer and climbed to the top of the tower, where he set his eye onto the viewfinder of his telescope and surveyed the land all around him, watched the ocean breezes waft dust up from the fields and the roads and settle over the canopy of the groves, and he tried once again to see into the future, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t fathom it.

  * * *

  From behind his veil of sleep the following morning, Bloom heard a voice rich in timbre repeating his name. Joseph, it called. Joseph … It’s time to wake up, kid. When Bloom opened his eyes, he saw first the inlay of his bedroom’s coffered ceiling, and when he turned his head he was given a start, as standing beside him in silhouette was a man in a black mackintosh and bowler hat. Don’t be startled. It’s only me, Gus.

  Gus? said Bloom, recalling the name of Simon’s man.

  Yes. Gus.

  Why are you dressed like that?

  Gus looked himself over and looked back to Bloom with his heavy brows pinching the bridge of his prodigious nose, and asked as a child might, How else would I be dressed?

  The enormous figure bent down and folded over the blanket covering Bloom’s body. He lifted it off, and he walked around the bed, and when he set it in the lap of the armchair Roya had slept in during his period of convalescence after his father’s death, Bloom couldn’t help but notice the great pack of shoulder muscles shifting under the material of the coat. The young lady is waiting, said Gus.

  What young lady?

  Your character study. Simon told me to tell you: You’re to study the life within.

  I’m to do what?

  He wants to see what you can do with a living, breathing human being. She’s waiting for you in your studio.

  Bloom sat up and searched for Gus’s eyes under the brim of his hat.

  He said if you were to look at me the way you’re looking at me now, I was to say this … He pulled from his jacket pocket a piece of notepaper, and after he wiped his extravagant nostrils with the back of his hand, he read: You’re to become acquainted with her form and draw out what lives within. And then Simon said, if you still looked disorientated, like you look right now, I was to say, Let’s go. On your feet. But only more like this: Let’s go! On your feet! Only I don’t think I’m going to have to do that now, am I?

  No, Gus. That won’t be necessary.

  I’m glad for that. In spite of my appearance, I’m not the sort who enjoys making emphatic exclamations.

  No, said Bloom for the sake of agreement, of course not.

  Gus reached out to Bloom with his big paw and mussed his hair. You’re a smart kid, he said, then told him he’d be waiting for him out on the landing.

  After Bloom had washed and dressed, Gus escorted him into the courtyard and up to the dwelling atop the mesa. When they reached the door at the side of the building, Gus said, Remember. The inner life, not the outer beauty, is your concern. Simon says if you don’t capture the inner life, he’ll know. Like that, he said with a snap of his meaty fingers. He now opened the door and gave Bloom a little pat on the behind, which pushed him through the threshold. He then shut him in.

  Sitting on a stool in the light shafting through the studio skylights,
Bloom found a naked woman with a long braid of auburn hair hung on her shoulder. She sat nicely postured with her back to him, her skin appearing as if it had been treated with a golden-pink gouache. Bloom was reminded of the occasions he had seen this mix of soft color and texture from the tower’s pavilion moments before the sun set, when a marine haze, whose moisture appeared more flowery than airy, hung on the horizon, and he further recalled how on such rare evenings when the sun slowly ebbed below the distant line of the sea to form in a few instants celestial bouquets of violet blue and saffron orange, all his worldly concerns ebbed into the arresting vision ahead, and vanished.

  Hello, Bloom thought to say.

  He said I shouldn’t speak, said the woman. The sound of her voice was soothing and mild and Bloom tried to imagine from its tenor what her face might look like.

  He told her she didn’t need to speak to him if that was what she wanted.

  She said it was, and then she said nothing more.

  Forming a wide girth around his subject, Bloom gingerly placed the soles of his shoes on the planks of the floor, all the time observing along the way the cellolike curves of her back, the elongated tendons of her neck, the delicate bow of her left arm. When he reached the point in the studio where he could see her face and her chest in profile, he found she looked more like a girl than a woman. Although her cheeks were smooth, he could see pushing up through the taught skin a few white blemishes. Her jawline had yet to fully fill out, and to add to her youthful appearance, she had a petite nose and a full mouth, out of which poked at her lower lip a crooked bicuspid.

  With each step, Bloom took none of the details composing her body and face for granted, as, other than in books and paintings and sculptures in and around the house, he had never seen a woman fully bared before him. He delighted in the way her small nose sloped at the same angle as her breasts, how the shape of her chin resembled the knobs of her knees, that the color of her lips was a shade darker than that of the broad rings of flesh circling her breasts. Her mouth was the same color as the crenellated flesh between her legs, which she opened for him with a coquette’s good humor.

  As if in search of sprites and nymphs, he studied with great fascination the sparkling triangle of auburn hair under the small bulge of her stomach. He followed beads of perspiration up from her navel to the notch at the base of her throat, where he paused before gazing for the first time into the powder-blue hydrangeas that were her eyes. It wasn’t until he reached this most fragile and intimate of places that he discovered what he was meant to be looking for, and with this discovery of the young woman’s inner beauty, the internal pressure one would expect the young Rosenbloom to feel at the sight of such lovely flowers began to mount.

  Having no illusions that his subject would miss the ascent of his mood, Bloom retreated a few steps to an armchair sitting beside the camera and tripod Gus had presumably set out. He sat down, and here, in this position, he pressed his hands into his lap, and waited. With a hapless grin, his face aglow, he focused his attention on the young woman’s feet. But here, too, he saw in the rise of her instep, in the delicacy of the tendons, a configuration of lines that reminded him of the curve of her hips and the shape of her face, and he returned in his mind to what beauty projected from her eyes. Wherever his thoughts turned now—to the shafts of light, to his birds in the tower, to the limbs of trees hung with fruit—he returned to what lived behind this woman’s eyes. When a good amount of time had passed, the young woman—as if she couldn’t bear witness to his mortification a moment longer, or perhaps because she had simply grown impatient with the stillness of the room—rolled her eyes to the skylight above, stepped down from the stool, and padded over the wooden planks. There she knelt down between Bloom’s knees, placed a finger to her lips, and nodded her head as if they were in agreement. The young Rosenbloom’s instinct was to protest, to protect the young woman’s integrity, to save her from herself, but with her mouth only inches from the zipper of his pants, with her weighty breasts pressing upon his inner thighs, with the musty aromas rising from under her arms and between her legs, with the expectation he might experience the same levity and release he had felt with Roya, his senses were too overwhelmed to do anything other than nod back his consent, and before he knew it, in a few swift motions, his subject, with whom he had shared less than a dozen words, had undone the fly of his trousers and had taken him into her mouth.

  This lush sensation was so unusual to him, he tried to push her away, but she acted possessed—or was at least very intent to do her good work—and not only did she manage to hold Bloom there, but she also overpowered him, outmaneuvered him. She thrust her head forward faster and faster until the young Rosenbloom gave in to her and arched his back, allowed himself to present to his full length, at which point, only then, she slowed, at which point, he, with one hand gripping her long braid and the other hand gripping her ear, gushed, and, to his great pleasure, felt the unique sensation of her nibbling away at him with her fang as she drank down every last drop of the very same substance that had landed in his navel so unceremoniously months before.

  * * *

  Now that the coil within Bloom had been unraveled, he was able to concentrate on what had been asked of him. The young woman daintily touched a finger to the corners of her mouth and returned to the stool, her braid coming undone, her lips spread in a mischievous grin, her eyes glowing as if electrified. Bloom wrapped around her shoulders his mother’s paisley shawl and he gathered the tripod and the motion picture camera whose lens he set back a small distance from her shoulder. Look away from me, he said to her. Look over your other shoulder, he commanded, and when I say so, slowly turn to me with your eyes shut. When your chin touches this shoulder, slowly open them, and look at me the way you’re looking at me right now.

  He focused the lens on the back of her head and began turning the camera’s crank.

  And begin, he said.

  And she began.

  * * *

  In the days he waited for his brother’s return, the young Rosenbloom’s education in inner beauty continued in this way. Every morning, Gus appeared beside his bed to announce the arrival of a new subject, and with each new arrival, Bloom now walked to the studio on his own, eager to see what type of woman awaited him; as every one Gus brought to the estate varied in size and shape and had such different features and temperaments, Bloom’s ideas of physical and psychic beauty were constantly changing, and he began to understand the nature of his brother’s exercise. He became, in this brief time, a great admirer of women, of all women, whether they were classically beautiful in balance and symmetry, or enormously imbalanced, with urn-sized breasts that hung to oversized waists. All forms, he found, appealed to him. Ever since his first experience in the studio, he particularly appreciated women with imperfect teeth. He found himself particularly aroused by one woman whose front two were substantially gapped. Because of the duality he observed in the face of another woman on another day, he thought women with high cheekbones and high foreheads were much more becoming if included in the composition of their faces was a small overbite. In profile, he was left with the impression that the woman was awkward and shy, but when he walked around her and looked at her directly, she appeared appealingly predatory. Gus introduced him to women who had peculiarly exaggerated physiognomies. A woman with a thin face and an aquiline nose. A woman with a large mouth full of oversized teeth. A woman with a narrow torso and wide hips. A woman with rolls and folds of flesh that lapped over her God-given curves. And he discovered, when he rolled the film over in the camera, he was more intrigued by the faces of these women, especially the shapeliest of the lot. The women with strong thighs and muscular rumps, those with hefty bellies and breasts, with broad shoulders and thick wrists. These women, unlike the women undistinguished in their shapeliness, didn’t retreat to invisible and mysterious places in their minds. They didn’t deflect the cold gaze of the lens. Rather, as one would reflect outward onto the night sky, they appeare
d to be searching for meaning in its darkness. In a few frames of film, Bloom discovered, a shapely woman, uninhibited, could reveal in an instant the full essence of her character, and to this he was drawn in, so closely, he was compelled to turn away.

  * * *

  The women departed with Gus each morning at precisely eleven o’clock, and he would return just before two with a man who possessed an unusual talent. The object here, Gus said, is to capture the character behind the thrill of the event. He arrived first with a one-eyed Negro cowboy dressed in spurs and chaps. A scar like the tail of a rattlesnake curved down his cheek, ending near the opening of his ear. Like Gus, he wore a bowler hat, only his had two bullet holes on each side and had tucked into the band of its brim a mottled peacock feather. At his waist was a holster holding two six-shooters and in his right hand he held a rifle with a pewter finish. The sight of the man, who stood as tall and wide and as taciturn as Gus, frightened Bloom, until the cowboy walked into the grove and plucked from their respective trees an orange, then a lemon, an avocado, a plum. He handed them to Bloom and together they walked to the open field, some distance from the headland, and there the man pointed to the sky. Throw them all up, one after the next, real fast like, as high as you can, he said. Bloom looked to Gus and Gus said, Do as he says. Bloom readied himself and then, starting with the largest of the fruit, he threw them up in quick succession as hard as he could. Avocado. Orange. Lemon. Plum. As the avocado rose to its apex, the one-eyed cowboy drew each of his pistols and shot each piece of fruit out of the sky, the plum just as it started its descent. He then turned to Bloom and smiled, showing him where he’d lost his two front teeth. My wife smacked ’em right out o’ my head. He laughed when he saw Bloom innocently gazing through the gap into the back of his mouth. Bloom spent the afternoon filming the cowboy’s face in the afternoon light. Straight on. In profile. Close up, to take in the detail of his scar. He rolled film to capture the way he walked with his hands at rest on his pistol grips. From a distance he filmed him plucking fruit from trees. From up close he filmed his dark hand reaching up to grasp hold of a lemon. Lying on his back, he focused on the point in the sky where he could best capture the exploding fruit. At his side, he filmed the cowboy drawing his gun. From the front, from the back, from every angle he could think of to re-create that one moment in time, Bloom rolled and rolled the film in the magazine, until there was no more film to be rolled. And off went the one-eyed Negro cowboy sharpshooter with two missing teeth as the sun began to dip below the horizon.