These reports, numerous though they were, were not weird enough to keep Everville's story in the public eye. Once all the funerals were over, and the photographers had been up Harmon's Heights to see the summit
(which had been so thoroughly scoured by the authorities 4here was nothing left to photograph but the view); once the Bosley Cowhii suicide had been recounted, and the Owen ]3uddenbau sightings run, the tale of Everville ran out of fuel. By the end of September it was state, and a month lat it was the stuff of Halloween tales, or forgotten, I am born here and now, Testa had said to Kissoon as she' stood in the dwindling remains of Maeve O'Connell's houst and that had been the truth. The very ground which she' assumed would be her grave had proved to be a womb, an she'd risen from it remade. Little wonder then that the wee that followed resembled a second childhood, far strang than her first.
As she'd told D'Amour, she felt little sense of reve) tion. The gift that she'd inadvertently received, or-and s did not discount this possibility-unconsciously purvu had not given her any great insights into the structure of rea itY. Or if it had she was not yet resilient enough to open he self up to their presence. Even the minor miracle she'
worked in the whorehouse that night-allowing Harry to s with the eyes of the dead-now seemed foolhardy. Sh would not be tempted to 90 around bestowing such visio on people again; not until she was certain she had control what she was doing, and that certainty, she suspected, wou) he a long time coming. Her mind felt more closed down no than it had before her resurrection, as though she had instin tively narrowed her field Of vision when the prospect of in nite horizons loomed for fear her thoughts would take flig and she would lose her grip on who she was completely.
Now she was back in her old apartment in We Hollywood, where she had headed immediately after lea ing Everville, not because she'd ever felt ecstaticall happy there-she hadn't-but because she needed th comfort of the familiar. Many of the neighbors' faces ha changed, but the comedies and dramas that surrounded he were essentially the same after five years. Every Saturda night the pre-op transsexual in the apartment below would get maudlin and play torch songs until four in the momin at least twice a week the couple in the next building would have screaming matches ending in verbally explicit reconciliations; every day somebody's cat was sick on the stairs. It was less than glamorous, but it was home, and there in that cramped apartment with its cheap furniture and its cracked plaster walls she could pretend, at least for a time, that she was a normal woman living a normal life. Not perhaps the kind of normality Middle America would have recognized, but a reasonable approximation. She'd nurtured her hopes here and wasted time she could have used realizing them. She'd tended her wounded ego when a piece of work had been rejected. Tended it too when love had dealt her a blow. When she'd caught Claus cheating; when Jerry had left for Miami and never come back. Hard times, some of them. But the memories helped remind her of who she was, scars and all. Right now that was more important than the pleasures of self-deception.
Of course this was also the apartment where Mary Muralles had perished in the coils of Kissoon's Lix, and where she and Lucien-poor, guiltless Lucien-had talked about how people were vessels for the infinite. It was a phrase she had never forgotten. She might have thought it a kind of prophecy had she not believed what she'd told D'Amour: that the future always remained untold and thus untenable. Prophecy or no, the fact remained that she had become a kind of vessel for what had always been touted as an infinite power. Now she had it, she was determined not to be destroyed by it. She would learn to use the Art as Tesia Bombeck, or let it lie fallow inside her.
Once in a while during this period of restoration she would get a call from Harry in New York, checking in to see that all was well. He was sweetly considerate of her tender condition, and their exchanges were for the most part determinedly banal. they never quite stooped to talking politics, but he kept his side of the conversation light and general, waiting for her to deepen the exchange if she felt resilient enough. she seldom did. Most of the time they chatted about nothing in particular and left it at that. But as the weeks went by she started to feel more confident of her strength, and dared to talk, albeit tentatively, of what had happened in Everville, and its long-term consequences. Had he heard anything of the IL
whereabouts of the lad, for instance? Or of Kissoon? (Me answer to both these questions was no.) What about TommyRay, or Little Amy?
(Again, the answer was no.)
"Everybody's keeping their heads down's my guess,"
Harry said. "Licking their wounds. Waiting to see who moves first."
"You don't sound all that bothered," Tesia said.
"You know what? I think Maeve had it fight. She said to me: If you don't know what's ahead of you, why be scared of it? There's a lot of sense in that."
"There's also a lot of people gone, Harry, who had good reason to be scared,"
"I know. I'm not trying to pretend it's all sunshine and flowers. It isn't and I know it isn't. But I've spent so much of my life looking for the Enemy@'
"And now you've seen it."
"Now I've seen it."
"And it sounds like you're smiling."
"I am. Shit, I don't even know why, but I am, I'm smiling. You know, Grillo used to tell me I was being simpleminded about all this shit, and we kinda fell out about it, but I hope to God he's hearing me, because he was right, Tes. He was right."
The conversation more or less petered out there, but Harry's mention of Grillo started her thinking of him, and once she'd begun there was no stopping. Until now she'd actively feared the thought of dealing with her feelings for him, certain she risked her hard-won self-possession if she was drawn into those troubled waters. But caught off-guard like this, obliged to let the memories snoWhall or be mowed down trying to halt them, she surrendered herself, and after all her trepidation, it was not so bad. In fact it was rather comforting, bringing him to mind. He'd changed radically in the eight years she'd known him: lost most of his idealism and all of his certainties and gained an obsession in their place. But under his increasingly prickly exterior, the man she had first met@harming, childish, irascible-remained visible, at least to her. they had never been lovers, and once in a while she'd regretted the fact. But there had never been a man in her life so constant as Grillo, or in the end so unalloyed in his affections. Even in more recent times, when she'd been traveling, and sometimes months would go by without their speaking, it had never taken more than a sentence or two between them before they were talking as though minutes had passed since their last exchange. Recalling those long-distance conversations from truckstop diners and backroad gas stations, her thoughts turned to the labor that had consumed Grillo in the half-decade since Palomo Grove: the Reef. He had described it to her more than once as the work which he'd been put on the planet to perform, and though it demanded more energies and more patience than he had sometimes feared he was capable of supplying, he had kept faith with it, as far as she knew, to the end.
Now she wondered: was it still intact? Still gathering tales of unlikely phenomenon from across the Americas? And the more she wondered, the more the notion of seeing for herself this collection of things out-of-whack and out-ofseason intrigued her. She remembered Grillo giving her a couple of numbers to call if ever she wanted to access the system and leave her own messages, but she'd lost them. The only way to find out whether the Reef was still operational was to go to Omaha and see for herself She didn't want to fly. The idea of relinquishing control of life and limb to a man in a uniform had never appealed to her; and did so now less than ever. If she was to go, it would be on two wheels, like the old days.