Lucien listened to the side of the argument he could hear with disbelief all over his face. She waited, leaving her tongue slack in her mouth.
"You snarled," she reminded Raul, "now you can damn well talk."
Before she'd finished the thought she felt her tongue start to flap and sounds emerged, crude at first, but quickly turning into syllables. Lucien watched and listened to this bizarre performance without moving a muscle. She suspected he thought he was in the presence of a lunatic, but she had no way of reassuring him until this was over.
"What she's just told you... " Raul began, Tesla's voice now in his possession, "is true. I'm the spirit of a man who... gave up my body to a great evil called Kissoon." She'd not expected him to offer Lucien a guide to body- hopping, but it ameliorated her fury somewhat to hear him do so. This was difficult territory for him to discuss, she knew. Kissoon and his persuasions were a bitter memory for them both, but how much more so for him, who had lost his very flesh to the shaman's tricks?
"She... did me a great... kindness," he went on hesitantly. "One which I will... always be thankful for." He licked her lips, back and forth a couple of times. His nervousness had made her mouth arid. "But ... this thing you do to me with men... " He shook her head, "It sickens me."
As Raul spoke, Lucien instinctively dropped his hand between his legs, covering his sex.
"I'm sure you mean to give her pleasure," Raul cautioned. "But her pleasure is my pain. Do you understand?"
Lucien said nothing.
"I want you to understand," he pressed. "I don't want you to think this is any failing on your part. It isn't. Truly it isn't."
At this juncture Lucien plucked his briefs off the floor and began to pull them on.
"I've said all I can say," Raul concluded. "I'll leave you two to-" Tesla leapt on his words before they were finished. "Lucien," she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Which of you is it now?" "It's me. Tesla." She got up from the bed, pulling the sheet around her as she did so, and squatted on the ground in front of him. He continued to dress as she spoke. "I know this is probably the strangest thing you've heard@' "You're right."
"What about Kate and Friederika?"
"I wasn't fucking with Kate. Or Friederika," he said, his voice tremulous. "Why didn't you tell me?" "I didn't think you needed to know."
"I'm making it with a guy-and you don't think I need to know?"
"Wait. Is that what this is about?" She got up from the floor, and stared down at him imperiously. "Where's your sense of adventure?"
"I guess I'm all out of it," he said, hauling on her patchwork jeans.
"You're leaving?"
"I'm leaving."
"And where will you go?"
"I don't know. I'll get a ride somewhere." "Look, at least stay the night. We don't have to do anything." She heard the desperation in her voice, and despised herself for it. What was this? One and a half fucks and suddenly she couldn't face sleeping alone? "Strike that remark," she said. "If you want to go find a ride, go find a ride. You're acting like an adolescent, but that's your problem."
With that she retired to the bathroom and showered, singing loudly enough to herself so that he knew she didn't care if he left or not.
Ten minutes later, when she emerged, he'd gone. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her skin still wet from the shower, and called Raul out from hiding.
"So... I guess it's just you and me." You're taking this better than I thought.
"If we survive the next few days," she said, "we're going to have to part. You realize that?"
I realize that.
There was a silence between them, while she wondered what it would be like living alone.
"By the way, was it really so terrible?"
Abominable.
"Well at least you know what you're missing," she said.
So strike me blind
"What?"
Tiresias, he said.
She was none the wiser. You don't know that story?
It was one of the paradoxes of their relationship that he, the sometime ape, had been educated in the great myths of the world by Fletcher, while she, the professional storyteller, had only the sketchiest knowledge of the subject.
"Tell me," she said, lying back on the bed.
Now?
"Well, you scared off my entertainment." She closed her eyes. "Go on," she said, "tell me."
He'd several times regaled her with his versions of classical tales, usually when she'd questioned some reference of his. The philanderings of Aphrodite; the voyages of Odysseus; the fall of Troy. But this story was so much more appropriate to their present situation than any he'd shared with her, and she slipped into sleep with images of the Theban seer Tiresias (who according to legend had known sex as both a man and a woman, and declaring the woman's pleasures ten times finer had been struck blind by a goddess, irritated that the secret was out) wandering through the wilds of the Americas in search of Tesla, until he found her in the rubble of Palomo Grove, where they made love, at last, with the ground cracking open around them.
At about the same time Tesia was falling asleep in a motel somewhere south of Salem, Oregon, Erwin was stirring from a strange slumber to find himself lying on the floor of his own living room. Somebody had lit a fire in the grate-he could see it flickering from the corner of his eye-and he was glad of the fact, because for some reason he was incredibly cold; colder than he could ever remember being in his life before.
He had to work hard to recall the return journey from the creek. He had not come alone; of that he was certain, Fletcher had come too. They'd waited until dusk, hadn't they? Waited in the ruins of the house until the first stars showed, and then wound their way through the least populated streets. Had he left the car down by the Masonic Hall? Presumably so. He vaguely remembered Fletcher saying that he despised engines, but that sounded so absurd Erwin dismissed it as delirium. What was there to hate in an engine?
He started to raise his head off the ground, but Lifting it an inch was enough to induce nausea, so he lay down again. The motion, however, brought a voice out of the shadows. Fletcher was here in the room with him.
"You're awake," he said.
"I think I must have the flu," Erwin replied. "I feel terrible."
"It'll pass," Fletcher replied. "Just lie still."
"I need some water. Maybe some aspirin. My head-2'
"Your needs are of no importance," Fletcher said. "they too will pass." A little irritated by this, Erwin rolled his head to one side to see if he could get a glimpse of Fletcher, but it was the remains of a chair his eyes found: one of a quartet of Colonial pieces which had cost him several thousand, now reduced to scrap wood. He let out a groan.
"What happened to my lovely furniture?"
"I fed the fire with it," Fletcher replied.
This was more than Erwin could take. Defying his giddiness, he sat up, only to discover that the other chairs had also gone for tinderwood, and that the rest of the roomwhich he had kept as meticulously as his files-was in total disarray. His prints gone from the walls, his collection of stuffed birds swept from the shelves.
"What happened?" he said. "Did somebody break in?"
"It was your doing, not mine," Fletcher replied.
"Out of the question." Erwin's gaze sought Fletcher as he spoke and found him sitting in the one chair that wasn't tinder, his back to Erwin. In front of him, the window. Beyond the window, darkness.
"Believe me, you're responsible," Fletcher said. "If you had just been a little more compliant."
"What are you talking about?" Erwin said. He was getting angry, which was in turn making his head thump.
"Just lie down," Fletcher said. "All of this will pass, by and by."
"Stop saying that," Erwin replied. "I want some explanations, damn it."