(briefly) Tesia, coaxing forth the natural propensities of those it influenced, and creating in the process the two warring forces who had made Palomo Grove their battleground.
One was the Nuncio's maker, a mescaline-addicted visionary by the name of Fletcher, who had become a force for transcendence under the messenger's tutelage. The other was his patron, Randolph Jaffe, who had funded the discovery in the hope of attaining access to a condition of flesh and spirit that was tantamount to divinity. The Nuncio had done nothing to dull that ambition, but it had shaped from the Jaff a creature so consumed by his dreams of power that his spirit had atrophied. By the time he'd won the war with Fletcher (destroying the Grove in the process), and was ready to claim his prize, his psyche was too frail to bear the triumph. He had forfeited his reason in pursuit of godhood. Soon after, he'd forfeited his life. It was little wonder then, that Raul had protested so vigorously her desire to return to the Grove.
I hate California, he'd told her any number of times. If we never go back there it'll be too soon She hadn't fought with him over it. Though she had full control of her body, and could have driven West without his being able to do a thing to stop her, his presence had been comforting during the many terrible times that followed the demise of Palomo Grove, and given that she fully expected such times to come again, more terrible than ever. she wanted to keep relations sweet, The paradox of this, that her dubious sanity was preserved by one of the things that drove people crazy (voices in the head) was not lost on hei-. Nor did she forget that her tenant, who was usually scrupulous in respecting the boundaries between his thoughts and hers, suffered from crise,, of hi," own, at which times she became the comforter. She would wake sometimes to hear him sobbing in her head, bemoaning the fact that he had given up his body in the war, and would never again have an anatomy to call his own. She would soothe him then as best she could; tell him they would find some way to free him one of these days, and until then wasn't it better this way, because at least they had each other?
And it was. When she doubted all that she'd seen, he was there to say: It's true. When she feared the burden of all she'd come to comprehend he was there to say: We'll carry it together, till we can be done with it.
Ali! to be done with it. That was the trick. to find some way to off-load the revelation onto strong and trustworthy shoulders, and go her way back to the life she'd been living before she'd ever heard of Palomo Grove.
She'd been a screenwriter by trade, with the scar tissue to prove it, and though it was a long time since she'd sat down to write, her cinematic instinct remained acute. Even in the bad times, a week would not go by without her thinking: There's a scene here. The way that sky looks, the way those dogs are fighting, the way I'm sobbing-it could be the beginning of something wonderful and strange.
But of late it had come to seem that all she had was beginnings-always setting off on an unknown highway or opening a conversation with a stranger-and never getting to the second act. If the painful farce of her life to date was to have any resolution, then she was going to have to move the story on. And that could not happen, she knew, until she went back to the Grove and confronted its ghosts.
she would see synchronicity at work, and come to ieve that the timing of that journey was no accident. That idier her subconscious, or powers operating upon it in the dream-state, had so haunted her with memories of the Grove that her only hope of deliverance was to return that particular week in August, when so much else was waiting to happen.
Even Raul, who had so forcibly rejected the notion over the years, accepted the inevitability of the journey when she put it to him.
Let's get it over with, he said, though God knows what you think you're going to find there.
Now she knew. Here she was in the middle of what had once been Palomo Grove's mall, its geographical and emotional hub. People had come to meet here, to gossip, to fall in love, and (almost incidentally) to shop. Now all but a few of the stores were heaps of rubble, and those that were left standing were reduced to shells, the merchandise they'd housed smashed, looted or rotted away.
Tesla? Raul murmured in her head.
She answered him, as always, not with her tongue and lips, but with her mind. "What?"
We're not alone.
She looked around. She could see no signs of life, but that didn't mean anything. Raul was closer to his aninial roots than she; more alert to countless tiny signs her senses were receiving but that she no longer knew how to interpret. If he said they had company, they did.
"Where?" she thought.
Left of us, he replied. Over that mound of rubble.
She started towards it, orienting herself as she did so. The remains of the pet store lay off to her right, which meant that the heaps of plaster clotted steel and timbers in front of her was all that was left of the supermarket. She scrambled up over the debris, the sun bright against her face, but before she reached the top somebody appeared to block the way: a long-haired young man, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, with the greenest eyes she'd ever seen. "You're not allowed here," he said, his voice too soft to carry much authority.
"Oh, and you are?" Tesia said.
From the other side of the mound came a woman's voice. "Who is it, Lucien?"
Lucien directed the question at Tesla, "Who are you?"
By way of reply, Tesia started to climb again, until she could see the questioner on the other side. Only then did she say, "My name's Tesia Bombeck. Not that it's any of your business."
The woman was sitting on the ground, in a circle of incense-filled bowls, their smoke sickly sweet. At the sight of Tesla she started to rise, astonishment on her face.
"My God-" she said, glancing back at her second associate, an overweight middle-aged man, who was lounging in a battered chair. "Edward," she said. "Look who it is."
The man stared at Tesla with plain suspicion. "We heard you were dead," he remarked.
"Do I know you?" Tesla asked him.
The man shook his head.
"But I know you," the woman said, stepping out of the circle of smoke. Tesla was now halfway down the other side of the rubble, and close enough to see how frail and drawn this woman was. "I'm Kathleen Farrell," she said. "I used to live here in the Grove."
The name didn't ring a bell, but that was no surprise. Maybe it was having Raul using up some of her brain capacity for his own memories
(and maybe it was just old age) but names and faces slipped away all the time these days.
"What brought you back?" Tesla wanted to know.
"We were-"
She was interrupted by Edward, who now rose from his chair. "Kate," he cautioned. "Be careful."
"But she-"
"We can't trust anybody," he said. "Not even her."
"But she wouldn't even be here-" Kate said. She looked at Tesia. "Would you?" Back at Edward now. "She knows what's going on." Again, at Tesla. "You do, don't you?"
"Of course," Tesla lied. "Have you actually seen him?" said Lucien, approaching her from behind.
"Not-not in the last couple of months," Tesia replied, her mind racing. Who the hell were they talking about?
"But you have seen him?" Kate said.
"Yes," she replied. "Absolutely."
A smile appeared on Kate's weary face. "I @ew," she said. "Nobody doubts he's alive," Edward now said, his gaze still fixed upon Tesla.