It took all my strength to restrain anger—I wanted to yell at her, to revile her; but if I did the guards would return me to my cell, and I wanted to stay, to hear everything she had to say.
“Next,” she said, “consider the character of the Sublime Act. I believe Guillaume du Villon told you that it was ‘to ensure our continuance.’ Were those not his words?”
I nodded.
“For the sake of argument, let’s say that our continuation is simply the mechanism by which the Sublime Act is effected. Its character may well be something other than mere immortality. Why would a woman, a witch, wish to drag the same ninety-three souls forward in time, skipping like a stone across the centuries, causing the same event to be re-enacted over and over? What purpose could this painful form of immortality serve…if not vengeance? Do you see the correspondence, David? Why the subjects must be suitable? A crime, a terrible crime committed millennia ago, is redressed endlessly by conforming to a contemporary crime and thus achieves the most terrible of vengeances. The kind that never ends. An eternity of punishment. A hell that the object of vengeance creates for himself by enacting the laws of his nature. The Sublime Act. Sublime because the witch achieves sublimity through her creation. She is an artist, and vengeance is the canvas upon which she paints variations on a theme.”
“What crime,” I asked shakily, “could merit such a punishment?”
“Perhaps I’ve already told you. Perhaps someday I will tell you. Perhaps I’ll never tell you. So many questions, David. Were some or all of your acquaintances in the Martinique acting, or were they, like you, manipulated by science or witchery or both? Is Joan Martha, and will you ever have her again? Or is she just another person whom you have wronged and who hates you with sufficient passion to be my complicitor? Could she have a connection to that ancient and possibly fraudulent crime? You will never answer any of these questions…unless you create the Text. Then you may discover the truth, or you may not. The thing you must accept is that whoever I am—Amorise or Allison or both—I own you. I control you. I may testify in such a way that you will be set free, but I will still control you. I’ll continue to cause you pain. I’ve surrounded you with a circumstance you cannot escape. You may come to think that you can injure me, but you can’t. My wealth and power insulate me. I swear you will never be happy in this life or any other. Not until I decide enough is enough. If, that is, I ever do.”
She closed her purse and stood looking down at me. “There is one way out. But to take it you must go contrary to your nature. You can disobey me and not create the Text. Then I’ll testify that you murdered Carl McQuiddy, and you will die. That’s your choice, the only one I offer. To die now, or to create the Text and die after long years of suffering. What will you do, David…Francois? You can’t believe a thing I’ve told you, and yet you cannot disbelieve me. The stuff of your being has been transmuted from confidence to doubt. Logic is no longer a tool that will work for you.”
“I wouldn’t be here,” I said, “if I hadn’t killed McQuiddy. It was an accident. You couldn’t have predicted it.”
“You always kill, Francois,” she said. “A priest, a lawyer…Are not lawyers the true priests of our time? You’re drawn to detest such authority as they represent. If you hadn’t attacked McQuiddy, he would have attacked you. I own him as well.” She let out a trickle of laughter, a sound of sly delight. “So many questions. And the answers are all so insubstantial. What will you do?”
She walked away and my anger faded, as if my soul had been kindled brightly by her presence, and now, deprived of her torments, I had sunk back into a less vital state of being. At the door she turned and looked at me, and for an instant it seemed I was gazing through her eyes at a man diminished by harsh light and plastic into a kind of shabby exhibit. Then she was gone, leaving me at the bottom of the world. I perceived my life to be a tunnel with a round opening at the far end lit like a glowing zero.
I let the guard lead me back to my cell. For a long time I sat puzzling over the conversation. A hundred plans occurred to me, a hundred clever outcomes, but each one foundered and was dissolved in the nets of Amorise’s gauzy logic. Eventually a buzzer sounded, announcing lock-down. The gates of the cells slammed shut, the lights dimmed. Everything inside me seemed to dim. A man on the tier above began to sing, and someone threatened him with death unless he shut up. This initiated a chorus of shouted curses, screams, howls of pain. They seemed orchestrated into a perverse and chaotic opera, a terrible beauty, and I recalled a line from “The Testament” that read: “…only in horrid noises are there melodies…” I wondered what Villon had been thinking when he reached this point in the Act, what kind of man he had been before meeting Amorise. If, indeed, any of that had happened. For an instant, I felt a powerful assurance that the Act was a fraud, a mere device in the intricate design of Allison Villanueva’s vengeance; but then this sense of assurance dissolved in a flurry of doubt. It would never be clear. Only one kind of clarity was available to me now.
From beneath my pillow I removed the stub of a candle I’d bought from a trustee. I lit it, dripped wax onto the rail of my iron bunk and stood the stub upright in the congealing puddle I had made, and as I did I seemed briefly to see an ancient prison, begrimed stone walls weeping with dampness, a grating of black iron centering a door of age-stained wood, a moldy blanket and straw for bedding. I slipped a writing tablet from beneath my mattress, thin and smelly as an old man’s lust. I opened the tablet and set it upon my knee. It made no difference whether the woman who had done this to me was Allison or Amorise. Either version of reality provided the same sublime motivation. I felt words breaking off from the frozen cliffs of my soul and scattering like ice chips into plainspoken verse, the ironic speech of a failed heart. Then, in the midst of that modern medieval place, with the cries of the damned and the deranged and the condemned raining down about me, I began:
LIMBO
…limbo, limbo, limbo like me…
Traditional
The first week in September, Detroit started feeling like a bad fit to Shellane. It was as if the city had tightened around him, as if the streets of the drab working-class suburb that had afforded him anonymity for nearly two years had become irritated by the presence of a foreign body in their midst. There was no change he could point to, no sudden rash of hostile stares, no outbreak of snarling dogs, merely a sense that something had turned. A similar feeling had often come over him when he lived back east, and he had learned to recognize it for a portent of trouble; but he wasn’t sure he could trust it now. He suspected it might be a flashback of sorts, a mental spasm produced by boredom and spiritual disquiet. Nevertheless he chose to play it safe, checked into a motel and staked-out his apartment. When he noticed a Lincoln Town Car across the street from the apartment, he trained his binoculars on it. In the driver’s seat was a young man with short black hair and a pugilist’s flattened nose. Beside him sat an enormous, sour-looking man with bushy gray sideburns and a bald scalp, his face vaguely fishlike. Thick lips and popped eyes. Marty Gerbasi. Shellane had no doubt as to what had brought Gerbasi to Detroit. A half-hour later, after doing some banking, he picked up a green Toyota that had been purchased under a different name and kept parked in a downtown garage for the past twenty-nine months, and drove north toward the Upper Peninsula.