A few folks seemed to know her, though she didn't recognize any of them.
"You! You!" they said, stabbing their fingers in her direction as she towed her own creaky little boat down the street, "You did this! You with the monkey!" (She had a monkey on her shoulder, complete with vest and red felt hat.) "Admit it! You did this!" She protested her innocence. Yes, she'd known the wave was coming. And yes, maybe she'd wasted time with her wandering when she should have been warning the world. But it wasn't her fault. She was just a victim of circumstance, like all of them. It wasn't "Testa? Wake up! Tesla? Listen to me.
Wake up, will you?"
She unglued her eyes to find Phoebe staring down at her, grinning from ear to ear.
"I know where he is. And I know how he got there." Testa sat up, shaking the last of the fleas from her head.
"Joe?"
"Of course Joe." Phoebe sat down on the edge of the sofa. She was trembling. "I was with him last night, Tesia."
"What are you talking about?"
"I thought it was a dream at first, but it wasn't. I know it wasn't. It's just as clear in my head now as it was when I was there."
"Where?"
"With Joe." "Yes, but where, Phoebe?"
"Oh. In Quiddity."
Tesla was ready to dismiss the whole thing as wishful thinking at first, but the more Phoebe told, the more she began to think there was truth here.
Raul concurred. Didn't I tell you? he murmured in Tesla's ear when Phoebe came to the part about the door on Harmon's Heights. Didn't I say there was something about the mountain?
"If there is a door up there... " she thought. It explains why this damn town's gone crazy.
"I have to go up there," Phoebe was saying. "Get through the door, so I can go find Joe." She grabbed hold of Tesla's hands. "You will help me, won't you? Say you will."
"Yes, but-2'
"I knew. I said the moment I woke this is why Tesla came into my life, because she's going to help me find Joe."
"Where was he when you left him?"
Phoebe's face fell. "He was in the sea."
"What about his boat?"
"It went on without him. I think... I think they must have thought he was dead. But he isn't dead. I know he isn't. If he was dead I wouldn't be feeling what I'm feeling now. My heart'd be empty, you know?"
Tesla looked at the woman's elation, and heard her faith, i@ and felt a pang of envy, that never in her life had love taken hold of her this way. Perhaps it was a lost cause, going in search of a man lost overboard in the dream-sea when it seemed the world was about to end, but she'd always had a taste for lost causes. And if she spent the last few hours of life trying to reunite these lovers, was that so petty an ambition?
"Did Joe tell you where the door was on the mountain?"
"Just somewhere near the top. But we'll find it. I know we'll find it."
It was less than half an hour later when Tesla and Phoebe stepped out into the sun, but Everville was already in high gear. Main Street was fairly swarming with people: bleacher builders, banner hangers, balloon inflaters, barricade raisers. And where there was labor, of course, there were people around to watch and remark upon it: coffee drinkers and doughnut dippers, advice givers and troubleshooters.
"We shouldn't have come this way," Phoebe said as they waited in a line of a dozen vehicles for a truckload of chairs to be unloaded.
"Calm down," Tesla said. "We've got a long day ahead of us. Let's just take things as they come."
"If only they knew what we know," Phoebe said, watching the people on the sidewalk.
"Oh they know," Tesla said.
"About Quiddity?" Phoebe replied incredulously. "I don't think they've got the slightest idea."
"Maybe it's bufied deep," Tesla said, studying the blithe faces as the passed. "But everybody gets to go to Quiddity y three times, remember."
"I got to steal a visit," Phoebe said proudly.
"You had help on the other side. Everybody else gets their glimpses, then forgets them. they just get on about their lives, thinking they're real."
"Did you do a lot of drugs?" Phoebe said. "I've had my moments," Tesla said. "Why?"
"Because some of the stuff you come out with-it doesn't make any sense to me." She looked across at Tesla. "Like what you just said, about people thinking they're real. they are. I'm real. You're real. Joe's real."
"How do you know?"
"That's a stupid question," Phoebe said.
"So give me a stupid answer."
"We do stuff. We make things happen. I'm not like... like-" she faltered, searching for some frame of reference, then pointed at one of the coffee sippers, who was sitting on the curb scanning the cartoon strips in the morning's Oregonian. "I'm not in the funny pages. Nobody invented me. I invented myself."
"Just remember that when we get to Quiddity." "Why?"
"Because I think a lot of things got invented there." "Go on."
"And where things are made, they can be unmade. So if something comes after you-"
"I'll tell it to go fuck itself," Phoebe said. "You're ]earnings" Tesia said.
Once they were off Main Street the traffic lightened up considerably, and disappeared completely once they reached the road that wove up the flank of Harmon's Heights. It didn't take them all that far. About a third of the way up the mountainside it came to an unceremonious halt, without so much as a sign or a banier to mark the place. "Damn," Phoebe said. "I thought it went further than this."
"Like all the way to the top?"
"Yeah."
"Looks like we've got quite a hike ahead of us," Tesia said, getting out of the car and staring up the forested slope.
"Are you up for it?"
"No."
"But we're here. We might as well give it a try." And with that, they began their ascent.
In Ws long life, Buddenbaum had met many individuals who had tired of the human parade. People who had gone to their death with a shrug, content that they no longer had to witness the same old dramas played out over and over again. He had never understood the response. Though the general shapes of human exchange were unchanging, the particulars of this personality or that made each new example fascinating in and of itself In his experience no two mothers ever educated their children with quite the same mingling of kisses and slaps. No two pairs of lovers ever trod quite the same path to the altar or to the grave.
In truth, he pitied the nay-sayers; the souls too stunted or too narcissistic to revel in the magnificent minutiae that the human drama had to offer. they were turning their backs on a show that divinities were not too proud to patronize and applaud. He'd heard them with these ears, many times.
Despite the fact that his body knitted together with extraordinary speed
(in a week his defenestration would be an embarrassing memory), he was still in very considerable discomfort. Later, perhaps, when the avatars had arrived and he was certain everything was in hand, he'd take a little laudanum. In the meanwhile, his chest hurt like the Devil and he had a distinct limp, which gained him some unwarranted attention as he made his way out in search of a decent breakfast. It would be inappropriate, he decided, to go to the diner, so he found a little coffee shop two blocks from his hotel and sat by the window to eat and watch.
He ordered not one but two breakfasts, and consumed the better part of both in preparation for the exertions and lastminute panics ahead. His eyes scarcely strayed to his plates as he emptied them. He was too busy watching the faces and hands of the passersby, looking for some sign of his employers. It was by no means certain they would come in human garb, of course. Sometimes (he never knew when) they would descend out of the clouds wreathed in light: the wheels of Ezekiel rolling into view. Twice they'd come in the form of animals, amused, he supposed, by the conceit of watching the drama from the perspective of wild beasts or lap dogs. The one way they had never come was as themselves, and after years of doing them service he'd given up hope of ever seeing their true faces. Perhaps they had none. Perhaps the plethora of faces they put on, and their appetite for vicarious experience, were evidence that they had neither lives nor flesh of their own.